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Hydro Ottawa invites customers to shape Ottawa’s energy future together

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OTTAWA, ON, Sept. 16, 2024 /CNW/ – Hydro Ottawa is inviting its customers to play a key role in shaping the future of Ottawa’s energy landscape. The utility has launched a public engagement survey to gather feedback on its 2026-2030 investment plan, which will guide how Hydro Ottawa prepares its electrical grid for the challenges and opportunities ahead.

As Canada transitions towards a net-zero future by 2050, the demand for electricity will grow significantly. More and more customers are switching to electric vehicles, installing solar panels, and adopting other clean energy technologies. This shift towards sustainability, coupled with our region’s growth and the increasing frequency of severe weather events, requires a grid that is not only sustainable and efficient, but also resilient.

Hydro Ottawa’s 2026-2030 investment plan has been developed to ensure that the electrical grid can meet these evolving needs. This means investing in new infrastructure to accommodate increased demand, upgrading aging equipment, and strengthening the grid’s resilience against both physical and cyber threats.

Residents are encouraged to complete the survey by October 4, 2024. Anyone interested in learning more about Hydro Ottawa’s 2026-2030 investment plan and completing the survey can do so at hydroottawa.com/ourfuture.

Quick facts

Hydro Ottawa has launched a public engagement survey seeking feedback on its 2026-2030 investment planThe survey is open from September 16, 2024October 4, 2024Customers will receive an email providing a link to the surveySignificant investment in Hydro Ottawa’s distribution systems are required in order to meet the growing demand for electricityOur four priority investment areas are growth and electrification, replacing and upkeeping aging infrastructure, modernizing our grid, and increasing grid resilienceElectrical grids across Canada will need to at least double current capacity in order to meet the projected demand in 2050This includes boosting the capacity of key assets such as substations, transformers, and overhead/underground linesAround 25 per cent of Hydro Ottawa’s assets have reached the end of their expected service life. Another 15 per cent will reach this point within the next decade.Hydro Ottawa is focusing its asset investment and maintenance programs on reducing these numbers; ultimately reducing the risk of asset failure

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“We are committed to building a sustainable energy future for Ottawa, and we know that our customers are a vital part of this journey. We encourage all of our customers to participate in this survey and share their thoughts on how we can best prepare for the future. Their insights will be invaluable as we develop our investment plan.”

–       Bryce Conrad, President and Chief Executive Officer

About Hydro Ottawa Limited

Hydro Ottawa Limited, a subsidiary of Hydro Ottawa Holding Inc., delivers electricity to approximately 364,000 homes and businesses in the City of Ottawa and the Village of Casselman. For more than a century, Hydro Ottawa has supplied its customers with clean, safe and reliable power to help build a vibrant and sustainable national capital region. As a leading partner in a smart energy future, Hydro Ottawa proudly contributes to the well-being of the community it serves through its integration of innovative and sustainable business practices, corporate citizenship initiatives, and offering best-in-class customer service.

SOURCE Hydro Ottawa

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Driive Raises Pre-Seed Round to Build the AI Scheduling Platform for Home Service Trades

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Lincoln-based Driive closes pre-seed funding from Nebraska Angels, Nelnet, Move Venture Capital, and CompanyCam founder Luke Hansen to scale Dot, its AI booking agent for HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, and other home service contractors.

LINCOLN, Neb., May 11, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Driive, the AI-native booking and scheduling platform built for the home service trades, today announced the close of its pre-seed funding round. The round includes investment from Nebraska Angels, Nelnet, Move Venture Capital, and Luke Hansen, founder and CEO of CompanyCam.

Driive is building the scheduling layer for the trillion-dollar U.S. home services industry. Roughly half of all inbound leads to home service contractors arrive after 5pm or on weekends, when most contractors are off the phones. According to industry research, 78% of homeowners hire the first contractor who responds. Contractors spend billions every year on lead generation, then lose those leads to voicemail.

Driive’s platform answers inbound calls, texts, and emails 24/7, qualifies the homeowner, checks technician availability against real drive time, and books the appointment in real time. The product is called Dot.

“This category has been waiting for someone to take it seriously,” said Quinn Small, Founder and CEO of Driive. “The trades are the largest sector of the economy still running on missed calls and sticky notes. Driive is the system of record for how a job actually gets booked.”

“Scheduling is a huge need in the industry, and I believe in this team to solve it,” said Luke Hansen, founder and CEO of CompanyCam.

“So impressed with the early momentum that Quinn Small has established with Driive, and excited to see what he accomplishes as he expands his team and brings on more customers,” said Charlie Cuddy of Move Venture Capital.

Early customers point to drive-time scheduling as the differentiator. “Finally. Someone gets it, and then built it. This tool has reduced the miles and dead time, increased the appointments we can do daily, and gets a higher book rate when our customers can book on their terms,” said Cody Stephens, Owner of a generator sales and installation company.

Funds will accelerate Driive’s engineering hires, the go-to-market motion through its partnership with CompanyCam, and the rollout of Dot.

About Driive

Driive is the AI booking and scheduling platform built for home service trades, including HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, pest control, and windows. Learn more at getdriive.com.

 

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SOURCE Driive Inc.

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Smith+Nephew Establishes Unified Quality Foundation Worldwide with Veeva Quality Cloud

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Quality transformation drives compliance and operational efficiency

PLEASANTON, Calif., May 11, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Veeva Systems (NYSE: VEEV) today announced that Smith+Nephew is unifying quality management with Veeva Quality Cloud. The global medical technology company is building a strategic foundation to drive its quality transformation.

“As an integrated quality ecosystem, Veeva Quality Cloud will be central to maintaining our strong compliance profile with global health authorities,” said Michelle Blevins, vice president, quality systems and regulatory compliance at Smith+Nephew. “A unified technology platform improves collaboration across our internal teams and with external partners while enabling automation and data analytics for faster decision-making.”

Smith+Nephew will leverage Veeva QualityDocs as a single source to manage quality controlled content and Veeva QMS to centralize processes, align operations globally, and collaborate efficiently. The company will also use Veeva Training to streamline access to more than 500,000 annual trainings, ensuring job and audit readiness.

“We’re proud to support Smith+Nephew to reach more patients and execute efficiently by delivering scalable, end-to-end quality management with Veeva Quality Cloud,” said Vishaka Rajaram, senior director of quality strategy at Veeva MedTech. “Quality transformation will help fuel growth and advance innovation at Smith+Nephew.”

Veeva Quality Cloud for MedTech unifies quality processes, streamlines compliance, and drives collaboration to reduce cycle time and maximize efficiency.

About Veeva MedTech
Veeva MedTech helps medical device and diagnostics companies streamline the complete product development and commercialization lifecycles to deliver products to patients with greater speed and efficiency. Veeva MedTech’s offering includes applications that advance clinical, regulatory, quality, commercial, and medical operations. For more information, visit veeva.com/medtech/.

About Veeva Systems
Veeva delivers the industry cloud for life sciences with software, AI, data, and consulting. Committed to innovation, product excellence, and customer success, Veeva serves more than 1,500 customers, ranging from the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies to emerging biotechs. As a Public Benefit Corporation, Veeva is committed to balancing the interests of all stakeholders, including customers, employees, shareholders, and the industries it serves. For more information, visit veeva.com.

Veeva Forward-Looking Statements
This release contains forward-looking statements regarding Veeva’s products and services and the expected results or benefits from use of our products and services. These statements are based on our current expectations. Actual results could differ materially from those provided in this release and we have no obligation to update such statements. There are numerous risks that have the potential to negatively impact our results, including the risks and uncertainties disclosed in our filing on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2026, which you can find here (a summary of risks which may impact our business can be found on pages 13 and 14), and in our subsequent SEC filings, which you can access at sec.gov.

Contact:
Elizabeth McGrane
Veeva Systems
elizabeth.mcgrane@veeva.com 

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/smithnephew-establishes-unified-quality-foundation-worldwide-with-veeva-quality-cloud-302767656.html

SOURCE Veeva Systems

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Fresha Unveils AI-Powered Intelligent Scheduling for the Beauty and Wellness Industry, Unlocking Unrealized Revenue and Growth for Selfcare Businesses

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LONDON, May 11, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Fresha, the world’s leading AI-powered platform for beauty and wellness businesses, has unveiled a major expansion of its intelligent scheduling infrastructure, introducing a new generation of AI-driven scheduling capabilities designed to help businesses optimize availability, automate operational workflows, maximize utilization, and increase revenue in real time.

These AI-powered capabilities represent another major step in Fresha’s broader 2026 vision to transform scheduling from a static calendar system into a fully adaptive operational infrastructure purpose-built for the complexity of modern beauty and wellness businesses, whether single-chair spaces or multi-location enterprises. While most traditional booking platforms continue operating around rigid appointment grids, Fresha’s intelligent scheduling system continuously works behind the scenes to optimize staffing, availability, resources, appointment flow, processing time, pricing, client preferences, and booking conversion dynamically in real time.

“Scheduling in beauty and wellness is far more complex than simply managing time slots,” said Michaela Peicheva, Senior Product Manager at Fresha. “Appointments often involve professionals, treatment rooms, equipment, setup time, cleaning workflows, processing time, utilization, pricing logic, and highly personalized client preferences simultaneously. Fresha’s intelligent scheduling infrastructure has been designed to understand all of those moving parts dynamically, helping businesses operate more efficiently while unlocking more revenue opportunities automatically in the background.”

At the center of Fresha’s latest scheduling innovation is Dynamic Reassignment, a new scheduling capability that automatically redistributes and reshuffles flexible appointments between suitable team members in real time. This means if a client wants to book a specific professional, but that slot is occupied by someone who did not request anyone in particular, Fresha can intelligently move the flexible booking to another suitable team member, instantly freeing the slot for the incoming appointment and helping businesses capture bookings that would otherwise be lost.

Traditionally, accommodating these requests required front desk teams to manually monitor calendars, reshuffle appointments, contact clients, and search for alternative availability themselves, creating operational friction and often resulting in missed bookings altogether. With Dynamic Reassignment, Fresha can now automatically and seamlessly redistribute flexible appointments without disrupting the client experience. When a client attempts to book a high-demand professional at a time that appears unavailable, Fresha automatically evaluates whether the conflicting appointment is eligible for reassignment. If the existing booking was made without a preferred professional selected, the platform can quietly reassign that appointment to another suitable team member while ensuring the reassigned client still receives the same service at the same time.

Importantly, client preferences always remain protected, meaning appointments are never reassigned when a client specifically chooses a professional. Businesses also remain fully in control of how Dynamic Reassignment operates, including how far in advance appointments are eligible for reassignment and which booking types can participate, including online bookings, staff-created appointments, or both.

Already live globally across Fresha accounts for online bookings, Dynamic Reassignment has already demonstrated significant operational and commercial impact at scale. Early results show the feature can help businesses recover up to 11% of otherwise lost booking demand by intelligently redistributing flexible appointments in real time, helping maximize utilization and unlock additional revenue automatically in the background.

Unlike generic scheduling software, Fresha’s scheduling architecture has been built specifically around the operational realities of beauty and wellness businesses, where appointments often involve more than just simple time slots. Hair salons may require processing time between color services and finishing appointments, clinics often need preparation and sanitation time before and after treatments, while spas and wellness businesses must coordinate therapists, treatment rooms, massage beds, specialist equipment, and complex service journeys simultaneously.

Fresha helps businesses intelligently manage this complexity through highly customizable scheduling logic, allowing partners to configure intelligent processing time, automated setup and cleaning buffers, resource allocation, dynamic availability, and appointment workflows tailored to their specific services, operational models, and client experience requirements. Scheduling can be customized around service type, treatment complexity, staffing structures, room usage, and operational workflows, creating appointment systems that reflect how services are actually delivered in the real world rather than forcing businesses into rigid calendar structures.

Fresha’s scheduling ecosystem also extends beyond professionals themselves through Resources, an infrastructure layer designed to manage physical spaces such as gyms and spas that handle equipment independently from employee calendars. Businesses can assign appointments directly to treatment rooms, tanning beds, infrared saunas, float suites, massage beds, or specialist equipment without unnecessarily occupying time within a staff member’s calendar when employee presence is not required. This allows businesses to maximize both physical capacity and staff utilization simultaneously, while more advanced workflows, such as couples massages, shared clinical equipment, room turnaround timing, treatment setup requirements, and servicing windows, can all be coordinated dynamically within the scheduling flow itself.

Layered on top of this infrastructure is Fresha’s intelligent pricing system, allowing businesses to optimize demand dynamically around real-time booking behavior. Businesses can implement off-peak pricing to incentivize quieter periods, apply last-minute pricing strategies to fill unused availability, and configure customized pricing logic tailored around specific operational or commercial goals. Combined with intelligent processing time, automated block time, resource coordination, and client preference intelligence, Fresha’s scheduling ecosystem continuously works behind the scenes to maximize booking conversion, optimize utilization, reduce abandoned bookings, and unlock greater revenue opportunities that traditional scheduling systems leave behind.

“Beauty and wellness businesses operate with an extraordinary level of operational complexity compared to most industries,” said Marcin Dąbrowski, Deputy Chief Product Officer at Fresha. “What makes Fresha unique is that we are not simply building booking software; we are building intelligent infrastructure that understands how these businesses actually function. Our scheduling system continuously adapts around demand, availability, resources, pricing, processing time, and client behavior in real time, helping businesses unlock efficiencies and revenue opportunities that static calendars simply cannot identify on their own.”

Fresha’s intelligent scheduling system continuously works behind the scenes to optimize appointment availability, redistribute flexible bookings automatically, coordinate treatment spaces and resources independently from staff calendars, manage processing and preparation time dynamically, personalize schedules around client preferences, adapt pricing around demand, reduce abandoned bookings, and maximize utilization across teams and locations in real time.

For enterprise and multi-location businesses, the impact becomes even more significant. Large salon groups, clinic networks, franchise operators, and spa brands manage enormous booking volumes every day, making manual calendar optimization nearly impossible at scale. Fresha’s intelligent scheduling infrastructure enables enterprise businesses to automate highly complex operational workflows across professionals, treatment rooms, resources, pricing structures, locations, and appointment logic simultaneously in real time.

Even small improvements in utilization or booking conversion can generate substantial commercial impact at enterprise scale. By continuously optimizing schedules behind the scenes, Fresha helps businesses transform operational efficiency into measurable revenue growth without increasing staffing or administrative overhead.

This suite of intelligent scheduling tools further reinforces Fresha’s position as the global leader in AI-powered scheduling and business automation for beauty and wellness businesses. As client expectations evolve and operational complexity continues increasing across the industry, Fresha continues building technology that actively works behind the scenes on behalf of businesses, helping them optimize operations, capture more revenue, improve utilization, and deliver better booking experiences automatically.

Rather than functioning as passive booking systems, calendars are becoming intelligent operational engines that continuously adapt around availability, demand, resources, and revenue automatically in real time. Fresha is building that future for beauty and wellness.

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