News Briefs

For electric vehicle owners in British Columbia, Tim Hortons is now fueling road trips in more ways than one.  The company has announced the expansion of its electric vehicle charging station pilot launched earlier this year in Oakville, Ontario, by unveiling six new charging stations at restaurants throughout  British Columbia.

Tim Hortons announced the pilot in February in an effort to study the technology, its usage and opportunities.

"We have been thrilled with the results of the pilot so far.  Usage of the charging station in Oakville has surpassed our expectations and we received many calls with requests to expand the pilot," said Paulo Ferreira, Senior Director, International Strategic Restaurant Design and Building Standards, Tim Hortons. "With more than 3,300 eligible restaurants across the country, we continue to look for opportunities to expand the pilot and contribute to the EV infrastructure."

The BC expansion, supported by the Province of BC's Community Charging Infrastructure Fund and Koben Systems Inc. (KSI), placed charging stations strategically in Nanaimo, Langford, North Vancouver, Burnaby, Abbotsford and Coquitlam to create paths within the province, allowing guests to travel from restaurant to restaurant strictly on electric power.

Tim Hortons offers charging stations as a courtesy to guests at six locations.  As of March 31st, 2013, Tim Hortons had 4,288 system-wide restaurants, including 3,453 in Canada, 808 in the United States and 27 in the Gulf Cooperation Council. 

Darden Restaurants, Inc. has completed its acquisition of Ruth's Hospitality Group, Inc. The Ruth's Chris Steak House brand now joins and complements Darden's portfolio of differentiated brands that include Olive Garden, LongHorn Steakhouse, Yard House, Cheddar's Scratch Kitchen, The Capital Grille, Seasons 52, Eddie V's and Bahama Breeze.

Ruth's Chris features signature USDA Prime steaks served sizzling on 500-degree plates, New Orleans-inspired sides and an award-winning wine list. Ruth's Chris has 155 locations around the globe, including 81 company-owned or company-operated restaurants and 74 franchised restaurants.

Darden's tender offer for all of the issued and outstanding shares of Ruth's common stock at a price of $21.50 per share, without interest, net to the seller in cash, less any applicable withholding taxes, expired as scheduled at one minute after 11:59 p.m., New York City time, on June 13, 2023, and was not extended.

The acquisition was completed on June 14, 2023.

In connection with the completion of the merger, Ruth's common stock ceased trading on Nasdaq.

Lenovo announced it has reached record annual AI infrastructure revenue of over US$2 billion and unveiled the next phase of its growth strategy, with an additional US$1 billion investment over three years to accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) deployment for businesses around the world. Fueled by increased global digitalization and demand for IT infrastructure upgrades, Lenovo is simplifying the often-complex implementation of new AI capabilities by delivering AI to the source of data and harnessing its vast network of best-in-class partners to build next-generation turnkey solutions that enable computing intelligence directly at the edge. The investment will further expand the company’s industry-leading AI-ready portfolio of smart devices, infrastructure solutions and services to help accelerate innovation, enabling the use of generative AI and delivering cognitive decisions at scale throughout remote locations across financial, manufacturing, healthcare, retail and smart city applications. 

As part of the additional investment, Lenovo is committing US$100 million to grow the Lenovo AI Innovators program, which has delivered a record 150+ cutting edge AI solutions created with 45 leading ISV partners in the program’s first year. Leveraging the AI Innovators end-to-end ecosystem, the new solutions are bringing AI from the lab to scale and enabling the dramatic technology shifts underway within high-growth sectors. With the new solutions, customers can more rapidly deploy and leverage cutting-edge AI capabilities, like generative AI, computer vision, voice AI and virtual assistants.

“Building on our more than 150 AI solutions, this pivotal investment further expands the development of AI-ready infrastructure solutions that will help customers overcome deployment complexities and more easily implement AI to deliver transformative services and products to the market,” said Kirk Skaugen, President of Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group. “As we continue our path to become the world’s largest end-to-end infrastructure solutions providers, Lenovo is committed to being the most trusted partner and empowering our customers’ intelligent transformation by bringing AI to the source of their data, at the edge.” 

Enabling AI Discovery and Accelerating Adoption

AI is driving a new wave of opportunities for businesses, but many companies face implementation challenges due to resource limitations and infrastructure complexities, stalling its rollout. The Lenovo AI Innovators program includes an ecosystem of best-in-class software partners collaborating with Lenovo to provide customers with tailored, proven and ready-to-deploy AI solutions for their end-to-end operations, including computer vision, audio recognition, prediction, security, and virtual assistants for every industry. 

Across its solutions, Lenovo is helping customers harness the value of their data, deploying purpose-built, AI solutions to transform their business with more predictable outcomes. As the retail, food service and hospitality industries adapt to the post-pandemic era, businesses are reimagining front-end and back-end operations to enable improved customer service, mitigate waste and address shifts in the labor market. Lenovo is partnering with DeepBrain AI to offer an end-to-end solution for generative AI virtual assistants that can be paired with powerful large language models (LLMs) to deliver 24/7 automated concierge service in hospitality and retail settings. With Lenovo and Vistry, quick service restaurants around the globe use computer vision to automate cook times and help predict supply quantities to prevent food waste, ensuring quality standards while helping improve customer retention and profitability. 

As manufacturing operations around the globe seek digitalization to drive future growth and differentiation amidst economic disruptions, innovative AI solutions from Lenovo and Guise help industrial customers reduce unplanned downtime with up to 14 days of advanced prediction, as well as understand customer behavior and optimize processes with computer vision, predictive maintenance, and anomaly detection on the production line. 

Lenovo is also delivering its AI  solutions via TruScale Infrastructure as a Service for ultimate flexibility as the company continues its service-led transformation. AI Innovators partner, Al Hathboor Bikal.ai and Lenovo are pioneering the service-based rollout of an AI-enabled data center at Sharjah Research Technology and Innovation Park (SRTIP) in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Leveraging Lenovo TruScale HPC and AI as a service, the collaboration is providing public and private organizations with the ability to access AI capabilities to support citizen safety and security through digital transformation projects across education, R&D, retail, oil & gas sectors. The AI-enabled data center’s computing resources will also help organizations bring the benefits of advanced AI features, like GPT-3 to their own operations. Designed to align with the UAE Net Zero 2050 policy, the data center is the first in the region to use industry-leading Lenovo Neptune™ direct water-cooling to deliver enhanced performance and efficiency while lowering power consumption. 

“Al Hathboor sees this collaboration as a way to give the UAE a technological advantage to the innovation ecosystem, create jobs and opportunities for our youth and develop tech for solving regional and global challenges. Lenovo, NVIDIA and Intel with SRTIP gives us a joint capability in tech transfer and we look forward to working with our universities, businesses, and government,” said Mohammed Al Hathboor, Management Committee Member of Al Hathboor Bikal.ai. 

The new Lenovo AI Discover Center of Excellence provides access to Lenovo data scientists, AI architects and engineers to help explore, deploy and scale AI solutions. The service also guides customers to the most appropriate software partners, AI-optimized infrastructure and responsible AI guidance through the Lenovo Responsible AI Committee. As companies learn to deploy AI, the committee helps customers with their approach to designing, deploying, and using AI ethically, helping organizations understand and address privacy, fair usage, diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility considerations. 

Bringing AI to Your Data

As the amount of worldwide data grows exponentially, next-generation infrastructure technologies that deliver data center-like computing to the edge are critical to empowering AI for improved emergency response, public safety, accessibility, tourism and retail experiences. With more enterprise data being processed outside of the data center, Lenovo is committed to supporting AI workloads everywhere, ensuring purpose-built performance for remote settings. 

Today, Lenovo extends its comprehensive portfolio of AI-ready infrastructure to over 70 products, with new AI-optimized edge-to-cloud server platforms that help address any AI workload. With emerging innovations like LLM and the continuous expansion of computer vision deployments, more processing power is needed where the data is being generated to run real-time inferencing at the edge. 

The new Lenovo ThinkEdge SE360 V2 is the latest purpose-built edge server that delivers more power to enable AI solutions ranging from computer vision, voice AI and generative AI. Whether for a store, factory or office, the new server provides extended accelerated computing supportive of Intel Data Center GPU Flex Series, the NVIDIA L4 Tensor Core GPU, the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform and Qualcomm® Cloud AI 100 platforms to enable intense workloads at the source of data creation. The ThinkEdge SE360 V2 delivers the highest GPU density in the smallest form factor available and is at least twice as quiet compared to competitive products, allowing edge AI to be deployed in the most remote and rugged sites. 

The new range of AI-ready edge solutions also includes the Lenovo ThinkEdge SE350 V2 for hybrid cloud and modern HCI deployments, offering twice the storage capacity and leveraging the Intel Xeon® D processor to help customers run AI while easily consolidating workloads, data backup, collaboration and content delivery in the smallest form factor on the market. 

In the data center, the new Lenovo ThinkSystem SR675 V3 is the most versatile, accelerated computing platform on the market and purpose-built for AI with three server configurations in one, including support for NVIDIA HGX 4-GPU systems, or 4-DW PCle GPU or 8-DW PCle GPU servers in a compact 3U footprint. As fully simulated digital replicas of entire buildings, factories, distribution centers, retail stores or cities, digital twins are combined with AI to generate improved business processes and design outcomes. Lenovo is collaborating with NVIDIA on its latest NVIDIA OVX system for building and operating virtual worlds, delivering powerful performance for Omniverse Enterprise workloads in the data center. The ThinkSystem SR675 V3, based on the OVX architecture, features up to eight NVIDIA L40 GPUs to maximize performance and deliver the most advanced ray tracing with RTX-accelerated graphics and AI capabilities in a robust and scalable platform, allowing customers to explore and unlock the full potential of digital twins for businesses of all sizes. 

Beyond infrastructure, Lenovo is implementing AI from the pocket to the cloud, with cutting-edge smart devices and solutions, that ensure data science is accessible across all industries in the new hybrid and remote work era. For improved collaboration, new Lenovo ThinkPad commercial laptops include a new Lenovo View application, offering AI-enabled computer vision technology for enhanced video image quality and tools. Lenovo ThinkReality XR solutions help users access immersive simulations, while purpose-built Lenovo ThinkStation and ThinkPad P Series Data Science workstations deliver the high-performance necessary for mission-critical AI model development, data prep and training tasks.

With its AI-ready servers, cutting-edge smart devices and ecosystem of leading ISVs, Lenovo will bring pre-validated, performance optimized AI solutions to the source of customer data, even in the most unique edge settings. Together, these advancements serve to simplify the rollout of AI, making it accessible to organizations of all sizes and enabling transformative intelligence across all industries.

Visit https://lenovo.com/nextlevelAI to learn more.

Actility, Abeeway, and Combain are thrilled to announce their strategic collaboration, marking a new era of AI-powered indoor location solutions. This groundbreaking partnership brings together the expertise of three industry leaders in IoT connectivity, geolocation services, and advanced positioning technology to revolutionize indoor navigation.

The partnership between Actility, Abeeway, and Combain will focus on creating a comprehensive solution for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth-based indoor geo-location. By combining their respective technologies, the companies aim to deliver a cutting-edge indoor positioning system that leverages AI algorithms and deep learning techniques.

Combain leverages AI to train an artificial neural network using ground-truth geolocations Wi-Fi and Bluetooth MAC addresses and signal strength. This innovative approach surpasses traditional trilateration methods delivering a remarkable reduction in median error.

Indoor geolocation services for LoRaWAN devices will be a key area of focus for this partnership. The collaboration will drive cross-promotion and lead generation for both businesses, opening new opportunities in the rapidly growing market of indoor positioning solutions:

• Actility, a global leader in IoT connectivity solutions, will contribute its extensive experience in network infrastructure and cloud-based services.
• Abeeway, a subsidiary of Actility, brings its expertise in geolocation technologies, including Low-power GPS, GPS, Wi-Fi sniffing, and Bluetooth Low Energy Beaconing.
• Combain, renowned for its advanced positioning technology and vast database of cell IDs and Wi-Fi/BLE positions, will provide its AI-powered indoor location solution.

This partnership comes at a time when the demand for AI-powered indoor location services is at an all-time high. As businesses strive to provide seamless navigation experiences and personalized services to their customers, Actility and Combain  are poised to meet these evolving needs with their combined expertise, innovative technologies, and market reach. 

QSR Automations  and SmartBar USA, creator of Smartender automated cocktail dispenser, have formed a partnership. 

Diners today are more discerning than ever. They want a broad selection of menu items, served efficiently, and won’t compromise on quality. These demands can put a strain on waitstaff, who may be facing other challenges as the labor shortage continues to plague restaurants. Leveraging technology is the best way to provide a positive dining experience for guests, and help servers stay calm, cool and collected. ConnectSmart  --------- and SmartBar are one such winning combination. 

• 71% say the ability to integrate with other systems is driving their POS purchase decisions, according to HT’s2 2023 POS Software Trends Report.

QSR Automations' ConnectSmart  platform offers myriad custom solutions that create calmer kitchens and a better dining experience for guests, including improved order accuracy, back-of-house efficiencies, timed deployment and much more. Similarly, the Smartender automated cocktail dispenser automatically executes even the most complicated cocktail recipes with accuracy to 1/16th of an ounce, with pouring speeds of under four seconds per cocktail.  

When an order is placed at an ordering station it is received in the back-of-house by ConnectSmart Kitchen, which then routes the cocktail or wine order to Smartender for nearly instantaneous order fulfillment. The result is greater consistency across orders, and less reliance on human labor, while diners enjoy quick, accurate service. 

The integration between ConnectSmart and SmartBar is just one example of how QSR Automations work with other technology companies to offer restaurant operators customer solutions to meet their unique needs. And because ConnectSmart integrates seamlessly with more than 70 other POS systems, operators can upgrade without needing to replace their entire tech stack.  

Teriyaki Madness (TMAD), the fast casual concept with 125 locations, is looking to partner with seasoned hoteliers in key markets.

Rahul Patel, a Teriyaki Madness franchisee in Dayton, Ohio, and hotelier, dishes on his experience: "I wanted to diversify my portfolio. ...TMAD stood out to me because it is a simple concept that is growing with healthier food and good portions." 

• Hotel Debuts Pizzeria Uno Franchise

Another successful hotelier and Teriyaki Madness franchisee, Darshak Patel of Sioux Falls, S.D., says: “The food is a different concept, it is what the people want, fresh and healthy. From top to bottom, everyone at the corporate office treats me like an equal. Having had no prior restaurant experience, it was important to me to know I will be supported fully. Teriyaki Madness has done that to the fullest.” 

An average of 3-6 employees needed per shift and a total of 12-20 employees typically on payroll are typically needed.

In the first quarter, Teriyaki Madness opened shops in New York City; Cypress, Texas; Fort Collins, Colo/; and Longview, Texas; and signed deals for a total of 17 new shops.

Existing shops (open for 12 or more months) also saw a notable 3.97% increase in AUVs (Average Unit Volume) Q1 YOY, plus 2.2% increase in SSS (Same Store Sales) Q1 YOY. 

Looking to the remainder of the year, the brand is targeting the greater San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, and Dallas areas, as well as northern New Jersey up through Massachusetts and of course open nationwide. 

Interested hoteliers can visit: www.franchise.teriyakimadness.com.