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ANAB Expands its International Recognition with the International Accreditation Forum

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NEW YORK, June 26, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — The ANSI National Accreditation Board (ANAB) has expanded its signatory status with the International Accreditation Forum (IAF) multilateral recognition arrangement (MLA) to level 3 main scope of ISO/IEC 17029, Conformity Assessment – General Principles And Requirements For Validation And Verification Bodies, as of March 20, 2024.

Accreditation is an important tool in the removal of technical barriers to trade and in promoting the international acceptance and recognition of goods and services. This is achieved through Multilateral Recognition Arrangements (MLAs) signed by accreditation bodies that have demonstrated their competence through rigorous peer evaluation. IAF is the global oversight body for conformity assessment accreditation bodies whose core function revolves around establishing a unified global framework for conformity assessment, aimed at minimizing risks for both businesses and consumers.

As global needs evolve and standards and systems of conformity assessment keep pace, the MLA systems require continual update. To this end, MLAs continue to be developed or expanded, with ANAB ensuring that its accreditation programs adhere to those updates. ISO/IEC 17029 was released in 2019 as a new standard for validation and verification for a variety of potential sector applications. The most prominent example of ISO/IEC 17029 has been in the validation and verification of environmental information, specifically with the use of ISO 14065, General Principles And Requirements For Bodies Validating And Verifying Environmental Information. ANAB operates an ISO 14065 program and has been a signatory for the IAF MLA for greenhouse gas since 2018.

While not new to validation and verification, the recent recognition demonstrates ANAB’s continued dedication to providing best-in-class accreditation of validation and verification bodies. Expanding this signatory status means that ANAB’s validation and verification accreditation program is recognized internationally as meeting the requirements of:

ISO/IEC 17029 to the validation and verification scope, along with the following sub-scopes associated with this:ISO 14065, Bodies validating and verifying environmental informationISO 14066, Competence requirements for teams validating and verifying environmental informationISO 14064-3, Specification with guidance for the verification and validation of greenhouse gas statementsInternational Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA)

ANAB undergoes periodic rigorous evaluation to maintain and expand its signatory status and commit to the IAF MLA. As part of this commitment, ANAB will maintain conformity with ISO/IEC 17011, Conformity assessment — Requirements for accreditation bodies accrediting conformity assessment bodies, and recognize the competence and impartiality of accreditation of conformity assessment bodies by all other members of the MLA. Through this recognition of other MLA accreditation bodies, ANAB is helping to maintain the conformity assessment infrastructure—reducing the need for multiple assessments and helping to facilitate international trade by encouraging regional and worldwide acceptance of valid certificates, registrations, and results issued by signatory accreditation bodies.

“ANAB is deeply committed to assuring the integrity of accredited validation and verification, and supporting our many stakeholders in the ongoing journey to build integrity in carbon and sustainability disclosure frameworks,” said Lori Gillespie, ANAB vice president of management systems, validation and verification, product certification. “The extension of the MLA to include ISO/IEC 17029 will bolster our efforts to add new programs under the MLA as we continue along this path in new areas of validation and verification.”

About ANAB

The ANSI National Accreditation Board (ANAB), a wholly owned subsidiary of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), is the largest multi-disciplinary ISO/IEC 17011 accreditation body in North America, with comprehensive signatory status across the multilateral recognition arrangements of the International Accreditation Forum (IAF) and International Laboratory Accreditation Cooperation (ILAC). The ANAB accreditation portfolio includes management systems certification bodies, calibration and testing labs, product certification bodies, personnel credentialing organizations, forensic test and calibration service providers, inspection bodies, police crime units, greenhouse gas validation and verification bodies, reference material producers, and proficiency test providers. For more information, visit www.anab.org.

About ANSI

The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) is a private non-profit organization whose mission is to enhance both the global competitiveness of U.S. business and the U.S. quality of life by promoting and facilitating voluntary consensus standards and conformity assessment systems, and safeguarding their integrity. Its membership is comprised of businesses, professional societies and trade associations, standards developers, government agencies, and consumer and labor organizations.

The Institute represents and serves the diverse interests of more than 270,000 companies and organizations and 30 million professionals worldwide. ANSI is the official U.S. representative to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and, via the U.S. National Committee, the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). For more information, visit www.ansi.org.

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SOURCE American National Standards Institute

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OceanBase Receives Honorable Mention for the Second Consecutive Year in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ Report

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December 26, 2024

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SINGAPORE, Dec. 26, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — OceanBase has once again been named as Honorable Mention in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud Database Management Systems (Cloud DBMS), marking the second consecutive year it has received this recognition.

OceanBase offers scalable distributed database for data-intensive transactional and real-time operational analytics workloads, with ultra-fast performance and high compatibility across major global cloud infrastructures, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud. Operating across more than 30 regions in Asia, Europe, and America, OceanBase has already served over 2,000 customers, such as SAIC Volkswagen, DiDi Global, vivo, Pop Mart, Haidilao, Kwai, Trip.com, GCash, DANA, and PalmPay.

Over the past year, OceanBase has made significant strides in the Southeast Asian market. In December 2024, Starpay, a leading financial technology company in the Philippines, announced a partnership with OceanBase to leverage its cutting-edge distributed database solutions.

OceanBase hosted the inaugural OceanBase INFINITY tech conference in Jakarta, Indonesia in June 2024. During the event, the company announced strategic partnerships with leading local resellers to better serve customers in the Indonesian market.

According to Gartner’s latest DBMS market data in the Magic Quadrant, “the overall database management system market grew by 13.4% in 2023, reaching $103.2 billion“, up from $91 billion in 2022. The DBMS segment remains one of the fastest-growing areas within the software market, alongside analytic platforms, networking software, and supply chain management software.

In May 2024, OceanBase was also recognized as an Asia/Pacific Customers’ Choice and also named a Strong Performer in the 2024 Gartner® Peer Insights™ Voice of the Customer for Cloud DBMS report.

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems, 18 December 2024

Gartner, Voice of the Customer for Cloud Database Management Systems, 24 May 2024

Gartner Peer Insights content consists of the opinions of individual end users based on their own experiences, and should not be construed as statements of fact, nor do they represent the views of Gartner or its affiliates. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in this content nor makes any warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this content, about its accuracy or completeness, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

GARTNER, MGAGIC QUADRANT and PEER INSIGHTS are registered trademarks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

About OceanBase

OceanBase is a distributed database launched in 2010. It provides strong data consistency, high availability, high performance, cost efficiency, elastic scalability, and compatibility with mainstream relational databases. It handles transactional, analytical, and AI workloads through a unified data engine, enabling mission-critical applications and real-time analytics.

To learn more, please visit: https://www.oceanbase.com/

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SOURCE OceanBase

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Matwings Technology Raised Series A Funding of Tens of Millions USD to Redefine Protein Design

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December 26, 2024

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‘Beyond Structure, Predicting Function’

SHANGHAI, Dec. 25, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Recently, Shanghai Matwings Technology Co., Ltd. (‘Matwings’), a global leader in AI-driven protein design, announced the successful completion of Series A funding rounds, raising tens of millions of USD, led by Qiming Venture Partners.

Matwings is pioneering a new frontier in protein engineering with its proprietary AI-based general protein design platform, AccelProtein™, which directly predicts protein functionality beyond the structural data. By predicting functionality, AccelProtein™ offers a new approach for acquiring high-functioning proteins.

AccelProtein™ is built on the Pro-PRIME model, a breakthrough developed by a collaborative team led by Professor Liang Hong at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. After years of research focused on data collection, curation, and optimization, the team developed the Pro-series – an AI framework for protein design. Their work, titled “A General Temperature-Guided Language Model to Design Proteins of Enhanced Stability and Activity” was recently published in Science Advances.

A featured case of AccelProtein™’s impact is the design of a specialized Glycosyltransferase enzyme, which is used in the production of EPS-G7, a core material for pancreatitis screening. Within just 4 months, Matwings increased the enzyme’s total glycosylation activity by 7 times, enhanced product specificity from 60% to 98%, and reduced hydrolytic activity by 33%. These improvements cut down the cost of EPS-G7 by 90%.

In another application, Matwings successfully engineered a super alkali-resistant affinity ligand (a nanobody) for affinity chromatography, improving alkali resistance by 3 folds, binding capacity over 100%, and heat stability by 8℃. This innovation saved millions of USD in CMC costs for a Matwings client. Additionally, scale-up production to 5000L has been successfully completed. Such advancement enables low-cost affinity chromatography purification a viable option for a wide range of biologics, bringing more cost-effective solutions for drug production.

Since 2021, Matwings has successfully delivered over 30 protein-engineering and enzyme-mining projects either proprietary (e.g., Enterokinase, Carboxypeptidase B, KEX2 Protease, Maltogenic Amylase, Subtilisin, Protein A, PETase, T7 RNA Polymerase, and phi29 DNA Polymerase) and co-developed with our stakeholders. These projects span across various applications, including drug innovation, in vitro diagnostics, nutrition and healthcare, food and beverage, and green energy.

About Matwings

Matwings, founded in 2021 by an elite team from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, is one of the earliest companies to focus on AI protein models.

Matwings is dedicated to moving beyond directed evolution methods to design and engineer functionally optimized proteins by leveraging a proprietary, pre-trained, AI-based general protein design platform with 780 million curated full-length protein sequence data, including nearly 500 million private data.

This cutting-edge technology platform, AccelProtein™, enables us to engineer proteins and uncover or de novo design novel proteins with significantly improved properties, including stability, activity, affinity, yield, etc.

To date, Matwings has successfully engineered more than 30 proteins either proprietary or co-developed with its stakeholders, and more than 40 ongoing projects across various applications in pharmaceutical industries and synthetic biology industries, e.g.  key enzymes and proteins for CMC, innovative Biologics, synthetic biology and more.

Matwings is actively seeking global partnerships to jointly develop and commercialize new products.

Contact Information:
Email: info@matwings.com
Website: https://www.matwings.com/en/ 
Tel: +86 158 2106 5410
Paper Link: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adr2641 

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SOURCE Matwings Technology

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Agoda Highlights Tokyo as Top Global New Year’s Eve Destination

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December 26, 2024

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SINGAPORE, Dec. 26, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Digital travel platform Agoda has announced Tokyo as the most popular destination for New Year’s Eve, based on accommodation searches. This marks a shift from last year when Taipei held the top spot. Following Tokyo, the list includes Bangkok, Taipei, Pattaya, and Osaka, showcasing a diverse range of preferences among travelers.

The data highlights a perpetual interest in Tokyo, a city known for its unique blend of tradition and modernity. Travelers are drawn to its vibrant celebrations, cultural experiences, and iconic landmarks. Bangkok and Taipei, too, continue to be favored destinations, offering rich cultural festivities and lively atmospheres. Pattaya and Osaka also make the list, appealing to those seeking beachside celebrations and culinary delights, respectively.

Agoda’s data reveals Tokyo’s prominence not only on a worldwide scale but also within Japan. Domestic accommodation searches have increased by 23%, with Tokyo leading as the preferred destination, followed by Osaka, Kyoto, Yokohama, and Okinawa Main Island. For Japanese traveling abroad, the destinations primarily considered are Taipei, Seoul, Bangkok, Pattaya, and Hong Kong.

Hiroto Ooka, Associate Vice President North Asia at Agoda said: “Tokyo’s rise to the top of Agoda’s New Year’s Eve destination list is a testament to the city’s global appeal. Whether you’re celebrating New Year’s Eve in Tokyo, Osaka, or anywhere else in the world, Agoda is ready to help you find the perfect spot to ring in the New Year.”

As travelers prepare for their New Year’s Eve plans, Agoda offers a comprehensive selection of over 4.5 million holiday properties, more than 130,000 flight routes, and over 300,000 activities, all available for seamless booking. Download the Agoda app for the latest deals or visit agoda.com/deals.

 

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SOURCE Agoda

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