Connect with us

Technology

ISA announces first ever International Solar Festival 2024

Published

on

Scheduled to be held in New Delhi on September 5-6, 2024International Solar Festival 2024 to convene businesses, academia, youth and community leaders and other stakeholders to share knowledge, foster innovation, and build international cooperation towards building a solar-powered future. To create conducive conditions for impactful global partnerships to accelerate the solar-led energy transition

NEW DELHI, June 26, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — The International Solar Alliance (ISA) will host the first International Solar Festival in New Delhi on September 5-6, 2024, said Dr Ajay Mathur, Director General, ISA, at a distinguished gathering in the city, in the presence of Shri Bhupinder Singh Bhalla, Hon’ble Secretary, Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE); Ms Saina Nehwal, Former World Number 1 Badminton Player, Olympian, and Padma Bhushan Awardee; and Ms Arushi Sana, Official Youth Ambassador, COP28 UAE.

The event was attended by representatives from the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy; and the diplomatic Missions of the ISA member countries, including Dominican Republic, the Syrian Arab Republic, Argentina, Israel, Uruguay, Denmark, Chile, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, El Salvador, Republic of Guinea, Republic of Fiji, Bhutan, South Sudan, Spain, Senegal, Cuba, Ethiopia, and Costa Rica, among others.

The International Solar Alliance is an international organization that works with governments to improve energy access and security worldwide and promotes solar power as a sustainable pathway to transition to a carbon-neutral future.

Addressing the delegates, Shri Bhupinder Singh Bhalla, Hon’ble Secretary, Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE), said, “As a global climate leader, India champions pragmatic, affordable and sustainable solutions that help nations meet their developmental needs. The International Solar Alliance catalyzes this vision by creating an ecosystem of support to solarize underserved communities across the globe. As a founding member of the ISA, we stand ready to support the Global South, ensuring an inclusive path to a sustainable future for all nations. The upcoming International Solar Festival in September will accelerate the global transition to equitable, accessible clean energy. Together, through shared knowledge and collective action, the festival will take ahead our ambition to achieve a future where clean energy is accessible to all.”

Dr Ajay Mathur, Director General, International Solar Alliance, said, “While the urgency of climate action has never been greater, the opportunity has also never been more profound. Solar energy is reaching and transforming the world’s underserved communities, creating new jobs, stimulating local economies, fostering innovation, and reducing emissions. The International Solar Festival 2024 will highlight and celebrate the transformative power of solar energy and its role in powering new opportunities across the globe, leading the way to universal energy access and advancing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Through our framework of partnership and purpose that ties together businesses, colleges, youth, women, and communities, we will unlock the full potential of solar energy, drive significant investments, and pave the way for a sustainable and vibrant future.”

Also in attendance were representatives from multilateral agencies, including the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP); private sector companies including Accenture and TATA Capital; industry bodies such as the National Solar Energy Federation of India; climate think-tanks including The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), the Alliance for an Energy Efficient Economy (AEEE), the Center for Study of Science, Technology and Policy (CSTEP), and the Center for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP), and Development Alternatives, among others.

Dr Mathur, along with Ms Saina Nehwal and Ms Arushi Sana, unveiled the festival’s logo and a short curtain raiser film, before commencing a discussion on the theme of ‘Building a Solar Future Together’. 

Speaking on gender inclusivity and community building for sustainable development, Ms Saina Nehwal said, “The solar energy transition must engage, involve and empower women to build stronger, more resilient communities and ensure the benefits of clean energy reach everyone. As we prepare for a challenging climate future, we need to consider the long-term impact on rural women everywhere. We must also make clean energy a topic of conversation among our youth, inspiring responsible choices for generations to come.”

Ms Arushi Sana said, “By educating youth on how to drive the solar energy transition through innovation, advocacy, and entrepreneurship, we can unlock their tremendous potential. This is what the International Solar Festival, with its vision of collaboration and partnership between youth-led initiatives, academia, industry, community, and policy, aims to achieve. Together, we can co-create a future that is good for planet, people, and prosperity.”

At the International Solar Festival, these four core themes – the role of youth, communities, women, and the private sector – will unite stakeholders from around the globe. Businesses, academia, youth and community leaders, among others, will share knowledge, foster innovation, and build international cooperation towards building a solar-powered future. By bringing together diverse stakeholders, the festival will strengthen support for innovative financing, technology deployment, capacity building, and technical assistance. It will create conducive conditions for impactful global partnerships and accelerate the transition towards a sustainable, solar-powered future.

The festival will include:

Participation of ISA member countries and their leadersKeynote sessions featuring global climate leadersPlenary and technical sessions helmed by industry and global leadersCEO Caucus Roundtable to explore innovative financial and technological levers to accelerate solar adoptionInnovation Showcase featuring pioneering solutions and entrepreneurs who are at the forefront of transforming the energy sectorExhibition booths and pavilions hosting organizations from across the solar and allied sectorsInteraction and engagement with community groups, youth organizations and policymakersActivity Zone featuring cultural performances by renowned artists

About the International Solar Alliance

The International Solar Alliance (ISA) is a global intergovernmental organization dedicated to advancing solar power adoption for a carbon-neutral future. ISA’s mission is to unlock investments in solar while reducing the cost of technology and its financing. Serving as a platform for international cooperation, ISA assists member countries in solar deployment across various sectors through policy enactment, standardization, and investment mobilization. Through innovative business models, policy advisory, and financial risk reduction, ISA promotes affordable solar solutions and facilitates access to solar training, data and insights for solar engineers and energy policymakers. ISA is one of the first multilateral intergovernmental organization to be headquartered in India and is collaborating with multilateral organizations, public and private sectors, and civil society to deploy cost-effective and transformational solar solutions, particularly in Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and Small Island Developing States (SIDS).

Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2448467/Dr_Bhupinder_with_attendees.jpg
Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2448468/Dr_Ajay_Mathur_and_Saina_Nehwal.jpg
Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2448469/Panel_discussion_at_the_ISA.jpg

 

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/in/news-releases/isa-announces-first-ever-international-solar-festival-2024-302182959.html

Continue Reading

Technology

Cboe Clear U.S. Receives SEC Approval to Expand Clearing Capabilities

Published

on

By

SEC registration enables Cboe Clear U.S. to clear binary securities options alongside futures, positioning it to support innovation across the market

CHICAGO, Oct. 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Cboe Global Markets, Inc. (Cboe: CBOE), a leading global markets operator and pioneer in equity and index derivatives, today announced that Cboe Clear U.S., LLC (CCUS) has received temporary registration from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to operate as a Covered Clearing Agency.

The registration expands CCUS’s clearing capabilities beyond its existing authorities as a Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)-registered Derivatives Clearing Organization (DCO) to clear securities products in addition to futures and swaps products. Together with recent enhancements to its regulatory framework and product scope, the milestone positions CCUS to support innovation and emerging opportunities across a broad range of assets and markets.

CCUS will initially use its SEC registration to clear Cboe’s binary securities options tied to specified corporate key performance indicators (KPIs), which are planned to list on Cboe Options Exchange and be available on Robinhood in the fourth-quarter 2026. CCUS also recently received CFTC approval to clear margined futures broadly and continues to clear digital asset derivatives under its DCO designation.

“Clearing plays a critical role in bringing innovation to market,” said Dale Michaels, Head of Cboe Clear U.S. “These expanded capabilities position Cboe Clear U.S. to become an innovation lane to support new products and meet evolving customer needs, while maintaining the rigorous risk management standards that are fundamental to our business.”

These efforts complement Cboe’s longstanding partnership with The Options Clearing Corporation (OCC)® and Cboe’s continued commitment to supporting the established clearing infrastructure for traditional equity options.

The development builds on the growth of Cboe’s established European clearing business, where Cboe Clear Europe has become the leading pan-European equities central counterparty, while expanding into new services such as securities financing transaction clearing. Together, these advances demonstrate Cboe’s ability to extend its clearing capabilities across markets and asset classes.

To support its own future growth, CCUS has strengthened its infrastructure over the past year, including electing in June to become a Subpart C DCO. In doing so, CCUS is voluntarily adopting the enhanced standards the CFTC applies to systemically important DCOs for financial resources, risk management and operational resilience, aligning with those applied to leading global clearing organizations.

About Cboe Global Markets

Cboe Global Markets (Cboe: CBOE) is a leading global markets operator with a long history of innovation in equity and index derivatives. Since launching the world’s first listed options exchange in 1973, Cboe has pioneered landmark products, including the introduction of S&P 500® index options and the creation of the VIX® Index, the world’s leading gauge of market volatility, reshaping how investors manage risk and access opportunity. Today, Cboe operates derivatives, equities, and FX markets, providing trading, clearing, and investment solutions for customers worldwide. To learn more, visit www.cboe.com.

Cboe Media Contacts

 

Cboe Analyst Contact

 

Angela Tu

+1-646-856-8734

atu@cboe.com

Tim Cave

+44 (0) 7593-506-719

tcave@cboe.com

Kenneth Hill, CFA

+1-312-786-7559

khill@cboe.com

CBOE-C
CBOE-OE

Cboe®, Cboe Global Markets®, and VIX ® are registered trademarks or service marks of Cboe Exchange, Inc and S&P 500® is a registered trademark of Standard & Poor’s Financial Services LLC. All other trademarks and service marks are the property of their respective owners. 

Cautionary Statements Regarding Forward-Looking Information

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. You can identify these statements by forward-looking words such as “may,” “might,” “should,” “expect,” “plan,” “anticipate,” “believe,” “estimate,” “predict,” “potential” or “continue,” and the negative of these terms and other comparable terminology. All statements that reflect our expectations, assumptions or projections about the future other than statements of historical fact are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements, which are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and assumptions about us, may include projections of our future financial performance based on our growth strategies and anticipated trends in our business. These statements are only predictions based on our current expectations and projections about future events. There are important factors that could cause our actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements to differ materially from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements.

We operate in a very competitive and rapidly changing environment. New risks and uncertainties emerge from time to time, and it is not possible to predict all risks and uncertainties, nor can we assess the impact of all factors on our business or the extent to which any factor, or combination of factors, may cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statements.

Some factors that could cause actual results to differ include: the loss of our right to exclusively list and trade certain index options and futures products; economic, political and market conditions; compliance with legal and regulatory obligations; price and new products and services competition and consolidation in our industry; decreases in trading or clearing volumes, market data fees or a shift in the mix of products traded on our exchanges; legislative or regulatory changes or changes in tax regimes; our ability to protect our systems and communication networks from security vulnerabilities and breaches; our ability to attract and retain skilled management and other personnel; increasing competition by foreign and domestic entities; our business and operational dependence on and exposure to risk from third parties; factors that impact the quality and integrity of our and other applicable indices; our ability to manage our global operations, growth, and strategic acquisitions, wind downs, divestitures, or alliances effectively; increases in the cost of the products and services we use; our ability to operate our business without violating the intellectual property rights of others and the costs associated with protecting our intellectual property rights; our ability to minimize the risks, including our credit, liquidity, market, investment, counterparty, and default risks, associated with operating our  clearinghouses; our ability to accommodate trading and clearing volume and transaction traffic, including significant increases, without failure or degradation of performance of our systems; misconduct by those who use our markets or our products or for whom we clear transactions; challenges to our use of open source software code; our ability to meet our compliance obligations, including managing our business interests and our regulatory responsibilities; the loss of key customers or a significant reduction in trading or clearing volumes by key customers; damage to our reputation; the ability of our compliance and risk management methods to effectively monitor and manage our risks; restrictions imposed by our debt obligations and our ability to make payments on or refinance our debt obligations; our ability to maintain an investment grade credit rating; impairment of our goodwill, long-lived assets, investments or intangible assets; the accuracy of our estimates and expectations; and litigation risks and other liabilities. More detailed information about factors that may affect our actual results to differ may be found in our filings with the SEC, including in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025 and other filings made from time to time with the SEC.

We do not undertake, and we expressly disclaim, any duty to update any forward-looking statement whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date hereof.

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cboe-clear-us-receives-sec-approval-to-expand-clearing-capabilities-302918297.html

SOURCE Cboe Global Markets, Inc.

Continue Reading

Technology

Hears Everything, Uploads Nothing: VoxNexus Launches Android’s First Low-Power On-Device Always-On Voice Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Published

on

By

VoxNexus’ new on-device ambient listening solution runs for 12 hours on 2.49% of a phone’s battery and never sends audio to the cloud

MADRID, Oct. 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — VoxNexus (www.VoxNexus.ai) released VoxEdge, an on-device voice stack that brings speech recognition, translation and speech synthesis to affordable Android devices, entirely offline. VoxEdge supports speech recognition in 36 languages, translation in 103 languages, and speech synthesis in 45 languages—all running with no connection, no data bundle, and no cloud token bills.

AI should work for everyone, not just for speakers of a handful of mainstream languages. Yet across much of Africa, voice AI has been held back by scarce training data and the lack of targeted fine-tuning. Everyday speech also includes code-switching and dialect variation, while cloud-based inference costs can make deployment at scale expensive. 

VoxNexus’s solutions run entirely on device, and every query is free once the model is installed on the device. Its speech recognition model has as few as 65 million parameters and achieves a lower word error rate than open-source models nearly ten times its size.

“Under-resource languages aren’t small languages. Hundreds of millions of people speak them. Until now, AI models just haven’t learned them yet,” said Charles Shi, CEO of VoxNexus.

VoxNexus also launched VoxSense, an on-device ambient listening solution that uses only 162 mAh for 12 hours of continuous listening, around 2.5% of a 6,500 mAh phone battery. By keeping all processing on device, VoxSense makes always-on listening practical without draining the battery and without sending any audio to the cloud. Developers and device makers can easily integrate it through a license and a simple SDK. Developers can request a free trial here: www.VoxNexus.ai.

VoxSense and VoxEdge were unveiled at the MediaTek Dimensity 9600 launch in Madrid on October 19.

Distributed by APO Group on behalf of VoxNexus AI. 

About VoxNexus:
VoxNexus builds AI that hears and speaks — for everyone, everywhere, all the time. Its audio intelligence runs entirely on-device, delivering low latency, built-in privacy, and zero token cost across any device with a chip. VoxNexus is headquartered in Singapore. Website: www.VoxNexus.ai. Contact: public@voxnexus.ai  

VoxNexus demonstrates live on-device speech recognition at the MediaTek Dimensity 9600 launch in Madrid on Oct. 19, 2026. Spanish and English conversations were transcribed in real time on the phone, with no cloud connection. (Photo: VoxNexus) 

Speaks Your Language, No Internet Needed: VoxNexus Brings On-Device Voice Artificial Intelligence (AI) in 100+ Languages to Affordable Android Devices

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hears-everything-uploads-nothing-voxnexus-launches-androids-first-low-power-on-device-always-on-voice-artificial-intelligence-ai-302918304.html

SOURCE VoxNexus AI

Continue Reading

Technology

team.blue extends €1.1 billion of its Term Loan B to 2032 in the largest software Euro term loan issuance in the last 12 months

Published

on

By

GHENT, Belgium, Oct. 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — team.blue, a leading pan-European provider of digital solutions for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) backed by Hg, CPP Investments and Sofina, today announces the successful pricing of an amendment and maturity extension for €1.1 billion of its existing €1.35 billion Term Loan B. The transaction priced on 22 October 2026, with the refinanced tranche extended from September 2029 to July 2032, reinforcing the Company’s prudent capital structure approach.

Strong demand from a broad group of institutional investors enabled team.blue to upsize the transaction twice in-market, taking the final deal size to €1.1 billion from a minimum initial launch size of €500 million, despite recent credit market volatility. Pro forma for the transaction, c.90% of team.blue’s term debt now matures in 2032.

The transaction comes at a time of significant momentum for team.blue, with continued double-digit revenue growth and strong cash generation supporting its deleveraging trajectory. Its products help Europe’s SMBs get online, get customers, get paid and stay compliant, and AI-enabled products are increasingly driving new customer growth. team.blue continues to innovate across its portfolio, from smarter tools within its brands to secure European cloud hosting built for customers’ growing AI workloads. Its category-leading SaaS brands are also integrating with leading AI assistants, bringing team.blue’s products to customers wherever they work.

Transaction highlights

The largest software Euro term loan issuance in the last 12 months€1.1 billion Term Loan B, borrowed by team.blue Finco S.à r.l., maturing July 2032Priced at E + 425bps with a 0% floor and an OID of 98.5Upsized twice from an initial €500 million, reflecting a heavily oversubscribed order bookCorporate and facility ratings of B3 (Moody’s) and B (S&P), both with stable outlooksBofA acted as Global Coordinator and Left Lead Physical Bookrunner, alongside Barclays. ABN AMRO, BNP Paribas, Citi, ING and J.P. Morgan acted as Bookrunners

Jonathan Thackray, Chief Financial Officer of team.blue, said:
“We set out to extend €500 million of our Term Loan B, and the depth of support from our institutional investor base allowed us to go much further. This reflects confidence in team.blue’s highly recurring, cash-generative model and our position as a leading digital partner for Europe’s SMBs. It gives us the flexibility to keep innovating and investing in the digital and AI-enabled tools our customers rely on.”

About team.blue
team.blue is the pan-European digital partner for small and medium businesses, serving more than 3.5 million customers in 24 countries. From web hosting, domains, email and cloud and AI infrastructure to e-commerce, engagement, payments and compliance tools, team.blue helps SMBs get online, get customers, get paid and stay compliant. Supported by more than 4,000 employees, team.blue’s vision is to make online business success simpler, with artificial intelligence at every step. 

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/teamblue-extends-1-1-billion-of-its-term-loan-b-to-2032-in-the-largest-software-euro-term-loan-issuance-in-the-last-12-months-302918306.html

Continue Reading

Trending