Virtual fencing is a step closer towards becoming a commercial reality courtesy of a new partnership between Melbourne-based agri-tech startup Agersens and international agricultural company Gallagher.
Gallagher has taken an undisclosed stake in Agersens, which is commercialising groundbreaking patented technology developed by the CSIRO that enables farmers to ‘fence’, move, muster and monitor their livestock remotely.
Dairy Australia was recently awarded $2.6 million in Federal Government funding to lead a four-year industry testing program into Agersens’ virtual fencing system, eShepherd.
eShepherd works by enabling farmers to create a virtual fence via an app that communicates with a collar worn by each animal.
Animals are trained to respond to prompts provided by the collar, which can also collect and communicate data to help alert farmers to any health or production issues.
By automating the control of livestock grazing, virtual fencing has the potential to improve animal health and welfare, while increasing productivity and profitability by cutting labour, fencing and other input costs.
The managing director of Agersens Ian Reilly said partnership with Gallagher represented a significant step forward on eShepherd’s journey to market and welcomed Gallagher global marketing manager, Mark Harris, to Agersens board of directors.
“Gallagher’s commitment to Agersens creates new opportunities for both companies as we work together to realise the benefits of this exciting new technology, which has potential export markets in cattle-producing nations worldwide,” he said.
Gallagher, which has its headquarters in New Zealand, is a global leader in the innovation, manufacture and marketing of technology solutions for animal management, security solutions and fuel systems.
The AustralianFarmer
Palmerston North - A Massey University student has redeveloped the humble docking iron aiming to increase function, usability and minimise repetitive strain injuries.
Fourth year industrial design student, Nicole Austin felt there was an opportunity to improve some of the more conventional hand tools used by sheep farmers. “A lot of sheep farming is very traditional. I found that recent innovations in sheep farming tend to be highly technological and involve heavy investment. Little attention has been given to redevelop older tools that are seen commonly from farm to farm,” she says.
Image Docking irons are regarded as being faster and more humane than rubber rings with nearly 60 per cent of farmers using the tool to cut the tails off lambs.
Ms Austin surveyed 300 farmers about their use of docking irons and discovered that while they regarded the existing models as robust and functional, they also found them to be uncomfortable to use for extended periods. Feedback included the irons being too hot, too heavy and “there are bugger all options on the market.”
“The traditional iron is hard to hold, the grip span is huge and there is a high risk for repetitive strain injury,” Ms Austin says.
Design criteria included optimising usability and comfort, being effective in all weather conditions, docking the tail properly and cauterizing the wound effectively.
“The design had to be reliable, robust and familiar. I did a lot of testing and made 15-20 ergonomic prototypes. I aimed to use familiar characteristics of the previous model to provide a practical lamb detailing tool for New Zealand and the international agricultural sector.
"The main body is glass-reinforced injection moulded nylon which has strong impact resistance and will withstand high temperatures,” she says. “The grips are made from a co-injection moulded elastomer, which won’t conduct heat and means the device is much easier to hold over extended periods," she says.
The original docking iron is fuelled by LPG, however farmers reported the flame blows out on windy days and can be difficult to reignite. Ms Austin’s design, which is also LPG, is self-igniting. She has developed a double-chamber dampening shaft - a mechanism designed to shield the internal flame from the wind. The design offers a greater temperature consistency in the copper blade and is about 35 per cent lighter.
Ms Austin will be getting feedback about her design from farmers and would like to see her prototype developed for the market. “There is definitely an opportunity to redevelop this tool. I would love to work with engineers to make refinements and confirm the design. There’s still a bit more work to be done.”
On graduating, Ms Austin will be looking for a job and likes the idea of eventually designing functional, utilitarian products for the agriculture and forestry sector as part of a design team. “Being at Massey has fostered that team approach. I really enjoy it.”
Ms Austin’s docking iron will be on display at the annual Exposure exhibition at Massey’s College of Creative Arts in Wellington alongside more than 300 projects from final year students in a range of disciplines from fine arts and photography to visual communication, fashion, textile, spatial and industrial design.
Open daily from 5 -19 November, between 10 am and 4 pm, the Exposure exhibition is located in Fine Arts Block 2, The Engine Room Gallery and Te Ara Hihiko Block 12 on Massey’s Wellington campus (entrance C off Wallace St or E off Tasman St).
A Massey University release
Napier, Thurs 3 Nov 16 - Scales Corp has agreed to buy Hawke's Bay apple grower, packer and marketer Longview Group Holdings for $20.5 million, adding capacity to sell fruit into the fast-growing Asian market.
The Christchurch-based company's Mr Apple subsidiary will buy 100 percent of the Longview shares and 22 hectares surrounding a coolstore and packhouse, expanding Scales' total planted apple orchard by 85 ha, with a further 30 ha of bare land for development, it said in a statement. The deal will immediately lift earnings per share 4 percent in the 2017 financial year. Scales has previously forecast 2016 net profit to be between $29.6 million, or 21.1 cents per share, and $34.6 million, or 24.8 cents. Continue to full article on ShareChat
Chapman Tripp is pleased to announce the appointment of Tracey Epps as Trade Law Consultant. Tracey starts at the firm's Wellington office on 31 October 2016.
Tracey is one of New Zealand's leading international trade lawyers, with over 16 years' experience as an academic, advisor and negotiator; including seven years as a senior advisor in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFAT) Trade Law Unit. Tracey was Lead Legal Counsel for New Zealand in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations, and chaired the Legal and Institutional Working Group in those negotiations from 2013.
In addition to her work on the TPP and other free trade negotiations, Tracey has advised on all aspects of trade and investment law, including trade in goods and services, international disputes (the Australian apples dispute and various World Trade Organisation disputes in which New Zealand has been a third party) and most recently, the legal implications of Brexit for New Zealand's exporters.
In her role at Chapman Tripp, Tracey will work closely with the firm's international arbitration team, focusing on international trade and investment law. “I look forward to making the step into private practice with New Zealand's leading law firm. The international trade landscape has changed significantly for New Zealand businesses over the last decade with the negotiation of free trade agreements with some of our largest trading partners that build on benefits obtained under the World Trade Organisation agreements. I look forward to helping clients navigate this landscape and benefit from the commercial opportunities it affords"," Tracey said.
Chapman Tripp partner and international dispute resolution expert Daniel Kalderimis said:
"Some time ago, Chapman Tripp made a strategic decision to grow its international arbitration and trade law practice to respond to the increasing globalisation of business opportunities in and from New Zealand. We are excited about expanding our capacity with Tracey's unique and extensive experience. Tracey is a leader in her field and it is great to have her on board. She will enhance our ability to advise the public and private sectors on international legal issues and to resolve cross-border disputes."
Tracey holds a Masters of Laws and Doctor of Juridical Science from the University of Toronto. She teaches trade and investment law at the University of Otago and is an author and editor of several books, including International Trade and Health Protection: A Critical Assessment of the WTO's Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures and Technical Barriers to Trade Handbook.
Auckland, Nov 2, 2016 - Auckland's Harbour Bridge SkyPath cycling and walkway crossing gets resource consentChief Environment Judge Laurie Newhook approved SkyPath's consent in the Environment Court today. Auckland Council said in a statement this afternoon it "welcomed" the result. In July the council voted unanimously in favour of the project being built by HRL Morrison and Co's Public Infrastructure Partnership Fund - a private organisation.
If constructed as planned the SkyPath would be 1km long and 4m wide and would run from Westhaven Marina on the CBD side of the bridge to Northcote Point on the North Shore. It would have five viewing platforms, where the bridge would expand to 6m wide.
Labour Market Statistics: September 2016 quarter –
The unemployment rate fell to 4.9 percent in the September 2016 quarter (from a revised 5.0 percent in the previous quarter), Statistics New Zealand said today. This is the lowest unemployment rate since the December 2008 quarter. There were 3,000 fewer people unemployed than in the June 2016 quarter and 10,000 fewer over the year.
“The number of people employed in New Zealand was up 35,000, or 1.4 percent, in the September 2016 quarter,” labour and income statistics manager Mark Gordon said. “This strong growth in employment, coupled with fewer unemployed people, pushed the unemployment rate below 5.0 percent for the first time in nearly eight years.”
The working-age population increased by 24,000 people (0.7 percent) over the quarter, to reach 3,739,000.
“The increase in the number of people employed again exceeded population growth over the latest quarter. This resulted in the employment rate increasing 0.5 percentage points, so currently 66.7 percent of the working-age population is in some form of employment,” Mr Gordon said.
The rental, hiring, and real estate services industry had a significant increase in unadjusted employment over the quarter, with 5,000 more people employed. Significant increases for this industry occurred in the Auckland, Wellington, and Manawatu-Wanganui regions.
Questions Float about IPO ticket-clip -
The mooted litigation-funded class action against the Wynyard Group faces an immediate two-fold problem. This is exactly what entities are in the firing line of this proposed action, and how will any desired reparations be extracted from these entities?
Are we looking here, for example, at Britain’s Skipton Building Society? This financial services organisation is usually cited as controlling the Jade computer services organisation from which the Wynyard Group originated.
There are several problems here.One is that the Skipton Building Society–Jade organisation’s association with Wynyard Group is rather more tenuous than is widely supposed. For example, instead of seeding its new offspring with funding, the British organisation appropriated for itself a very large part of the original investment from the NZX flotation. The exact benefit of this to the fledgling offspring, the Wynyard Group and its shareholders has been complex to define and similarly with the labyrinthine ensuing cross-over obligations between the two companies.
If the Wynyard class action group has in its sights any other investors and/or promoters in Jade then there is the problem now of their being domiciled outside the Westminster jurisdiction. This especially applies to Jade investors in the United States.
In so many ways the Wynyard Group flotation represented New Zealand equities investors at their finest and most patriotic in their willingness to put their money behind the home team. You have to live in Christchurch to understand the intensity of this willingness to back the local side which Jade once was, and so, much more recently, was its Wynyard offshoot.
In the event Jade began in the desert, the Saudi Arabian one, where two New Zealand programmers were working as IT specialists for a Saudi distributor of United States earthmoving equipment. A problem in the 1970s that hit the engineering and construction equipment and stock holding business everywhere was the arrival of double digit inflation. The danger to engineering suppliers in this was selling parts and even full scale pieces of equipment at below their replacement cost.
It was now that the two programmers, with time on their hands, set out to solve this problem. They did so by devising a real time and online (ie instantaneous) system which meant that price increases from suppliers rippled out to all warehouse and outlet supply depots across the planet and as they occurred. This was a colossal breakthrough by any standard and became more so as the two programmers now proceeded to package it and market it
Burroughs, then a major force in world computing, ranking only just behind IBM, recognised the value of this discovery and in a remarkably short space time branded it as LINC (for logic and information network compiler) and put it in the very top shelf of their worldwide marketing. Our photograph shows Gil Simpson (at left) with his co-developer Peter Hoskin. In the middle is Robert Holmes the Burroughs top sider who oversaw the deal.
It was now that Jade made Christchurch in the 1980s one of the world hubs of network computing science. It really was a “centre of excellence.” The Linc compiler with its rapid implementation automated programming was the unique selling proposition, the secret. While the Linc project never actually became fourth generation (as was widely claimed for it) the product in that era got as close as any other system did to replicating the wave or multi-processing operation of the human brain.
All the rest followed. The Jade Stadium, Sir Gil Simpson Drive, and of course Sir Gil himself. Peter Hoskin, the co-developer, faded out of direct involvement and in recusing himself became the New Zealand version of those other early self-sidelined co-developers Paul Allen and Steve Wozniak.
Time moved on, and it was now that as so often in the IT sector, time from being an ally now manifested itself as a problem, especially at Burroughs, which by now had re-named itself Unisys. It was still a big-iron, mainframe manufacturer of centralised computers. It was now besieged by the personal computer manufacturers.
Even as Burroughs – Unisys became distracted, it was still able to use its muscle in its stronghold of mainframes to insert the Jade Linc system into the financial sector notably in the United Kingdom. It was now that started the supplier-client relationship of Jade with the Skipton Building Society.
Exactly why, and how Skipton became anchor investor in Jade remains largely unclear. There are though grounds for believing that Skipton needed to protect its own investment in its own Jade systems and did so by investing in the supporting supplier.
Even so, Jade was careful always to diversify its own market and took up a strong footprint in logistics, a natural growth sector deriving from its original inventory management expertise.
It was as part of this sector application diversification scheme that Jade sought out still newer fields in which to apply its compiler expertise. Law enforcement/risk management made sense.
Jade was by now encountering the problem of companies outside the United States to the effect that no matter how effective their products, no matter how much they tuned and re-tuned their underpinning quantum mechanics not to mention their marketing, they still seemed the poor relation to Silicon Valley. Especially in its ability to launch torrential new products on a marketplace that had become attuned, if not addicted to fast-rotating product issue frequency.
Canada’s Research in Motion with its Blackberry and Finland’s Nokia are two examples of seemingly invulnerable companies that succumbed to this kind of Silicon Valley rolling release.
Wynyard for example walked into this kind of Silicon Valley deep-pocket storm when it found itself confronted with sometime New Zealand resident and Tolkien buff Peter Thiel’s Palantir crime product.
Wynyard because of its Anglo-United States lineage had about it from the start an aura of the gilt edge. This halo was emphasised by its role as New Zealand’s first heavy-end departmental-capability IT main board listing. As is the IT custom everywhere the claims and forecasts made on its behalf contained a show-business extravagance and the executives seemed more photogenic than in other industries. The explanation for this multiplier is that if you win big in IT you win bigger than you do in other industries.
In the event, and as we can all see now, it was highly speculative and depended for its success on an early investment take up. One ideally in the form of a mainstream merger or acquisition that would have given Wynyard scale and the global distribution and sales and support channels that it always needed.
It does now all seems so unfair. Jade in its day took automated programming, meaning fast setup, further than any other technology outfit anywhere. It survived the 1987 bust, the dot com bubble, and the Great Financial Crisis.
But now its offshoot and which carries its pedigree is left to fade unfinished into the history of New Zealand ultra-advanced technology.
From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk - Wednesday 2 November 2016
A major focus for me personally has been to push a wider delivery of services outside of the Autodesk realm. A large amount of work has been based on the initial selling of Discovery days, where we get the opportunity to build a business case in the form of a return brief to our clients. These have been successful, with 90% of these engagement resulting in more services, and product purchasing. Content management continues to be the most common challenge faced by our clients, hence the introduction of Content Studio to the A2K repertoire. I foresee this addition being important to the services that we currently provide.Recently, there has been an interest in A2K providing services around training landscape architects in Revit. This experience has been unique, as landscape architects work and solve problems in a particular way. As opposed to mainstream architects, where Revit is more suited for vertical spaces.This is due to the increased demand for BIM, where all disciplines are now expected to be able to demonstrate model collaboration, including landscape architects. Traditionally Landscape architects communicate design intent with rich and colourful 2 dimensional mediums. However, 2 of the largest landscape architecture firms are beginning to learn and understand the value of data, and the superior impact that this level of information conveys within the built environment. I wonder, with everything being about data, what do we do with software like AutoCAD in the near future?In addition to BIM, more and more architects, engineers and builders are looking to share data in a more intelligent manner. A2k will soon be offering Drofus as a service, with a focus on training, and implementation to tell. Drofus is a database from the Norwegian Company, which controls large amounts of data throughout the full lifecycle of a project. It is an excellent platform for each of the different disciplines to collaborate on building design, and this platform will serve us well we continue to provide BIM consulting to our customers.Shortly I’ll be starting to package all the necessary infrastructure for A2k staff internally. There is a need to improve our sharing mechanisms, as well as validating the data that we currently own. The benefits of trying to package this information will hopefully allow any of our technical resources to access clean, consistent information related to a specific niche or customer type. Therefore, increasing our point of sale and potential resourcing options due to the nature of our customers’ reactivity.I believe that Drofus will become one of our core services next year as we look to move away from the external perception that we are an Autodesk reseller, and ideally, become more perceived as highly solutions focused organisation to the outside world.
United Kingdom 2 November 2016 - - RoboVent, the leading provider of clean air technologies for manufacturing, has announced it is expanding its operations to Europe in response to the increased need for clean air solutions.
Gary Keene, a 30-year veteran of the industrial ventilation and dust collection industry, will serve as the company’s technical director and lead the European team. RoboVent is expecting to add an additional 20-30 employees in Europe by 2019 in order to meet growing demand overseas.
“Expanding RoboVent’s operations to Europe is a direct result of the needs of our international clients,” said Jim Reid, managing director and co-founder, RoboVent. “We serve world-class manufacturers who seek to establish global standards. By having a local presence overseas, we will not only be able to better serve our current customers, but will also have a significant impact in the market as manufacturers increasingly look for solutions to air quality issues. Gary’s industry knowledge and vast experience in Europe is an asset to our team as well as to new and existing clients.”
RoboVent to open UK HQ
The company’s European headquarters will be based in the United Kingdom, with additional sales offices in Germany and Holland. RoboVent’s Extractor Fume Gun and FlexPro Hi-Vac System are available immediately with the full product line expected to be available in the coming months.
“RoboVent is a leader in the clean air industry that has continually demonstrated the ability to provide innovative filtration and ventilation solutions,” said Keene.
“Air pollutants pose serious threats to those working in manufacturing facilities. RoboVent’s commitment to a healthy working environment is admirable and I’m excited to bring that expertise to Europe.”
Robovent serves manufacturers of all types, especially when there are applications include welding, cutting and metalworking; dust collection and lubricant mist collection; and general ventilation. Robovent’s expertise in collecting, filtering and recycling contaminated air can be applied to almost any process in the manufacturing environment.
Epson New Zealand will showcase a range of projector and projection solutions at this year’s Facilities Integrate event, as the company looks to highlight professional installation solutions.The range on show are designed for business, education and staging.
The Facilities Integrate show is set to take place over two days on November 3 and 4, at the ASB Showgrounds in Greenlane, Auckland. The NZ trade exhibition is designed specifically for the facilities management and system integration industries.
Headlining this year's show will be a high brightness static image demonstration from the Epson’s EB-L1505UNL, the world's first-ever 12,000-lumen 3LCD laser light source projector. Epson's laser projectors are also the first to include inorganic 3LCD panels with a laser light source and an inorganic phosphor wheel.
Next is something Epson projectors are known for doing well – edge blending. At this year's Facilities Integrate show, this will be done with two Z-Series 10,000 lumen Full HD projectors combining individual images to create one seamless giant image.
Then comes an interactive education demonstration from the new EB-695Wi ultra-short-throw touch-enabled interactive projector.
Finally, demonstrating how bright an HD image using a UST lens can appear, will be the recently-launched 7,500 lumens EB-G7905U projector. According to Epson, part of the new G7000-Series, the EB-G7905U has been designed specifically to suit large venue meeting spaces. With new features including increased brightness and motorised lenses, the EB-G7905U delivers uncompromising image quality and low total cost of ownership with low cost replacement lamps. The EB-G7905U also features the world's first zero-offset ultra-short throw lens with 0.35 throw ratio, making it ideal for space constrained venues and digital signage applications.
A Biz Edge release
Palace of the Alhambra, Spain
By: Charles Nathaniel Worsley (1862-1923)
From the collection of Sir Heaton Rhodes
Oil on canvas - 118cm x 162cm
Valued $12,000 - $18,000
Offers invited over $9,000
Contact: Henry Newrick – (+64 ) 27 471 2242
Mount Egmont with Lake
By: John Philemon Backhouse (1845-1908)
Oil on Sea Shell - 13cm x 14cm
Valued $2,000-$3,000
Offers invited over $1,500
Contact: Henry Newrick – (+64 ) 27 471 2242