GSA Technology Council

Fluor Corporation  announces it will hold a conference call to review results for its third quarter ended September 30, 2008. The public is invited to listen to the conference call on Thursday, November 6, at 5:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time with Alan Boeckmann, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Mike Steuert, Chief Financial Officer. Financial results will be released after the market closes.

Details 

What: Fluor’s 2008 third quarter earnings conference call
Date: Thursday, November 6, 2008
Time: 5:30 p.m. EST

How:  Via telephone: Domestic: 888-262-8942; International: 913-981-5547; Passcode: 4804796         Via the Internet: investor.fluor.com

Replay:  Via telephone: Domestic: 888-203-1112; International: 719-457-0820; Passcode: 4804796

The telephone replay will be available from 8:30 p.m. EST on November 6, 2008, through 8:30 p.m. EST on November 13, 2008. The Web replay will be accessible shortly after the call ends and will be available for 30 days following the call.

via Fluor

Yahoo! today announced that it has updated Yahoo! Calendar providing users with a greater social degree in sharing and keeping track of events.  Yahoo!’s updated calendar is built on the Zimbra platform and use iCal and CalDAV standards.  It will also allow interoperability with other calendar services including those from Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft, AOL and Google. Some of the key features of the calendar, as described by Yahoo!, are the following:

• Sharing: Layering functionality to make sharing events and keeping track of group activities easier
• Zoom: Calendar zoom capabilities make it easy to add and view new Calendar entries
• Photos: Integration with Flickr to add visual components to the Calendar and give it the feel of a classic wall calendar through public, Creative Commons designated photos
• Alerts: Reminder feature makes it simple to set email, IM or SMS reminders for important Calendar activities
• Drag and Drop: Drag and drop functionality makes it simple to move appointments to new times without refreshing the Web page
• “To Do” List: “To List” feature makes it easy to keep track of important chores and tasks

The new Yahoo! Calendar is currently available in beta release to any Yahoo! Mail users.

via Yahoo!

Google Inc. today announced that it will hold its quarterly conference call to discuss third quarter 2008 financial results on Thursday, October 16, 2008 at 1:30 p.m. Pacific Time (4:30 p.m. Eastern Time).

The live webcast of Google’s earnings conference call can be accessed at http://investor.google.com/webcast. The webcast version of the conference call will be available through the same link following the conference call.

via Google

ITT Corporation today announced that it has received a series of contracts through Fluor China, the contractor responsible for the engineering, procurement, consultation and project management of the Jiangxi LDK Solar Polysilicon Project in Xinyu City, China. LDK Solar Co., Ltd. is a leading manufacturer of multicrystalline solar wafers, which are the principal raw material used to produce solar cells. The contracts, with a total value of approximately $41 million, call for ITT to provide a wide range of products to enable production.

“China is a growing provider in the global polysilicon industry, and ITT is proud to aid in the development of this market through our strategic partnership here,” said Carter Chan, vice president of ITT China sales and service. “We pulled resources from all of our business units in Asia and North America to support Fluor and the client in their design, and in the end showed that we are the strongest partner.”

ITT will provide Fluor and LDK Solar with a number of Goulds brand ANSI, API, VIT and horizontal split pumps; Flygt brand submersible pumps and mixers; and Bell & Gosset brand valves, air separator and HVAC pumps. These products will play important roles in several applications, including the processing of cooling tower, wastewater treatment and the heating and air conditioning systems.

The LDK Solar polysilicon facility is under construction in Xinyu City, involving three Fluor offices located in Greenville, South Carolina, Shanghai, (China) and Manila (Philippines) for the technical design for different system. This new facility is near LDK’s existing solar wafer manufacturing plants and headquarters. Construction on the new facility began in August 2007 with an expected completion date in 2009. This world-class facility will have a total production capacity of 15,000 tons per year once it comes into operation.

via ITT

GE Energy today announced it has already received more than one gigawatt of commitments for its 2.5xl wind turbine over the next year and a half. That represents enough clean, wind-generated electricity to meet the needs of more than one million German households.

To meet the growing demands of Europe’s wind power industry, GE Energy also announced the evolution of its wind turbine manufacturing facility in Salzbergen, Germany. The Salzbergen site will allow GE Energy to focus additional resources on meeting the strong demand for wind energy in Europe.

Historically, Europe has been and continues to be one of the world’s strongest regions for wind energy development. According to the European Wind Energy Association, Europe’s installed wind capacity has increased almost six-fold since 2000 and GE expects strong growth to continue.

Recent orders for the 2.5xl include a contract to supply 12 of the machines for Wind Farm Serra in southern Italy, a project that will take that country a step closer to meeting its goal to become one of the leading producers of wind energy in Europe. This project will mark the debut of the GE 2.5xl technology in Italy.

“GE has invested more than $100 million in launching its 2.5xl wind technology, services and expanding its Salzbergen facility,” said Victor Abate, vice president-renewables for GE Energy. “As GE’s European Renewable Energy Center of Excellence, the Salzbergen site is the base for the serial production of the 2.5xl wind turbine—a high reliability machine specifically designed to meet the immediate requirements of Europe, where the lack of available land can constrain the size of projects.”

In addition to greater manufacturing capacity, the Salzbergen expansion will increase GE’s European training and service resources and has created more than 160 jobs. “The expansion further enhances our capability to provide reliable, timely support for our customers throughout Europe,” Abate noted. “It illustrates our commitment to be a leading supplier of renewable energy technologies for Europe, operating from a local base and developing local talent.”

“Across Europe, power producers increasingly are turning to cleaner, innovative ways to meet their energy needs,” said Ricardo Cordoba, president of GE Energy Western Europe and Northern Africa. “To meet this growing demand, GE continues to enhance our diverse portfolio of energy options, including wind, as illustrated by the expansion of the Salzbergen facility.”

via GE

Zimbra, a Yahoo! company and develper of open source, next-generation messaging and collaboration software, has announced the availability of a new open extension framework for Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) that enables two-way interoperability with leading collaboration platforms. Large enterprises and academic institutions can now easily integrate teams using Zimbra to work seamlessly with other departments that use different collaboration servers like Microsoft Exchange, exploring the benefits of Zimbra without having to make the decision to replace their current systems up front. This extends Zimbra’s history of openness and compatibility to a broader range of platforms, and builds on Yahoo!’s leadership in e-mail as a key starting point for users.

The first extension, built by Zimbra for the Microsoft Exchange 2003 platform, and now in beta, allows Zimbra users to access and share two-way free/busy information, schedules and global address book with colleagues whose data resides on Microsoft Exchange. The framework is also openly available for anyone in the Zimbra community to write an extension to other collaboration platforms such as IBM Lotus Domino, Novell GroupWise, or PeopleCube Meeting Maker.

“Interoperability with Exchange and other leading collaboration systems is a top request by many enterprises and academic institutions where mixed deployments are common,” said Satish Dharmaraj, Zimbra co-founder and Yahoo! vice president. “Zimbra’s recent growth with large organizations has been tremendous, with recent customer wins and deal expansions including Dai Nippon Publishing, Reliance Industries, H&R Block and Texas A&M University. This interoperability builds upon a long record of compatibility work by Zimbra and is one of the key needs for our largest customers.”

ZCS Interoperability for Exchange features:

• Free/busy and schedule interoperability: ZCS now has the ability to view free/busy calendar information in Exchange, allowing a Zimbra user to schedule a meeting with Exchange users as well as book resources like meeting rooms. Conversely Exchange users can also schedule ZCS users; in this regard, it is no different than working with another Exchange user.
• Integration with Active Directory: Integration with Active Directory provides a unified Global Address List (GAL) of both ZCS and Exchange users in the same deployment.
• Anytime, anywhere access: The feature works in all Zimbra clients, including Zimbra’s AJAX Web Client, Outlook via Zimbra Connector for Outlook, Zimbra Mobile supported devices including any BlackBerry or Windows Mobile based smartphones. Exchange users can use whatever client they use currently such as Outlook.
• Minimal IT support: ZCS Interoperability for Exchange doesn’t require any changes on the Exchange server; the service is completely managed in the Zimbra Administration Console.

“As a research facility, our researchers, scientists and administrative teams have varying needs of collaboration tools. We want to give each department and all of our users the flexibility of using the collaboration platform that works best for them, while avoiding the IT headache of a mixed environment,” said Brian Finley, IT Strategist, Argonne National Laboratory. “The Zimbra interoperability framework offers us a way to seamlessly integrate teams and users on various platforms while giving each department the freedom of choice to use any platform they desire.”

via Yahoo!

Fluor Corporation announced today that its Olefins II Kuwait (OL2K) petrochemicals project logged more than 35 million craft hours without a lost time safety incident effective from September 2007 through September 2008.

“This significant safety achievement can only be attributed to our entire project team’s absolute, uncompromising dedication to safe work practices daily,” said Ian Spears, Fluor’s site safety manager.

Fluor applies its “Zero Incident” program to every project in order to educate employees and all project workers to the importance of safe work practices.

Fluor is providing engineering, procurement and construction management services for the utilities and infrastructure and the polyethylene unit upgrade of the OL2K project, a major petrochemical project in Kuwait. This scope is in addition to the program management contract, which was awarded in 2004 to perform overall project management and front-end engineering services.

The development of the Olefins II complex is being overseen by a joint venture of the local Petrochemical Industries Company (PIC) and The Dow Chemical Company. Groundbreaking occurred in March 2005, with completion of the complex expected early 2009.

“It is the leadership, focus, vigilance, and ability to continue to look for improvements which form the foundation for this accomplishment,” said Bob Midgley, Fluor’s project director.

The more than $3 billion integrated petrochemical complex is located approximately 25 miles south of Kuwait City in Shuaiba. It includes the construction of an 850,000-tons-per-year cracker, a 600,000-tons-per-year ethylene glycol unit, a 450,000-tons-per-year ethyl benzene/styrene monomer unit and the expansion of an additional 225,000 tons-per-year of polyethylene capacity at the existing complex. The completed facility will more than double the capacity at the existing olefins complex.

via Fluor

Duke Energy has submitted the first part of an application for a federal energy loan guarantee to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) for its proposed William States Lee III Nuclear Station. This is another step in the process of keeping the new nuclear option available for customers.

“Filing this application with the DOE can lead to long-term benefits for our customers,” said Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers. “Loan guarantees allow utilities to lower capital costs for new nuclear construction, which ultimately leads to lower electricity prices for consumers.”

The federal government has decades of experience managing loan guarantee programs, which provide financing for support of critical U.S. infrastructure. The loan guarantee program supporting clean energy was established as part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. The program will follow defined procedures and practices that include rigorous reviews of all applications.

via Duke Energy

Fluor Corporation announced today that it was awarded a contract for engineering, procurement, construction and construction services (EPC) of about $1 billion for USEC’s American Centrifuge Plant in Piketon, Ohio. Fluor will book the revenue into backlog as the client releases task orders throughout the rest of 2008 and 2009.

Fluor performed front-end engineering and design and construction services for USEC from May 2004 to July 2007, with detailed design also underway on the project. A construction team has been mobilized to the site to perform preliminary construction support activities and to begin the demolition of some existing buildings. Employee staffing will peak in mid-2009 when about 800 workers are expected to be on site.

“We are extremely pleased to continue our work for USEC’s critical American Centrifuge Project,” said David Seaton, president of Fluor’s Energy & Chemicals business group. “This is an important project for both companies as well as for the future of U.S. nuclear energy,” he said. “We have had a long successful relationship with USEC and look forward to working with them toward the successful completion of this program.”

“This $1 billion engineering, procurement and construction contract with Fluor exemplifies the significant progress we continue to make on deploying the American Centrifuge Plant,” said Philip G. Sewell, USEC senior vice president, American Centrifuge and Russian HEU. “The American Centrifuge project is creating thousands of jobs at sites across the United States. This contract is expected to create approximately 1,000 new jobs, including 800 jobs at the Ohio site.”

Fluor’s work at the American Centrifuge Plant will assist USEC in providing dependable, long-term U.S.-owned nuclear fuel production capacity needed to support the country’s existing nuclear plants, as well as those expected to be built in the future.

On a separate program, Fluor is currently contracted with Toshiba for two new nuclear reactors planned for the South Texas Project (STP) Nuclear Generating Station in Bay City, Texas. The project is expected to be among some of the first nuclear generating units to be built in more than two decades.

“The valuable experience gained by our engineering and construction professionals who are designing and building the American Centrifuge plant, coupled with our STP nuclear work in southern Texas, positions Fluor with unique EPC qualifications for nuclear new-build projects,” said David Constable, president of Fluor’s Power business group.

USEC is currently the sole U.S.-based centrifuge technology supplier and therefore plays an important role in the nation’s energy and national security. Uranium enrichment is the process by which the concentration of the fissionable uranium isotope, U-235, is increased in order to make fuel for nuclear power generating units.

via Fluor

As part of the web giant’s celebration of its tenth birthday, Google is inviting anybody to contribute ideas that cold help better the world by helping as many people as possible.  Called Project 10^100 (10 to the 100th), Google has promised to contribute $10 million dollars to turn five of the best ideas into realities.  Google will first decide the 100 best submitted ideas and then let the public vote on which five should receive funding.   So put on your thinking caps and start turning out those world changing ideas.  The deadline for submittals is Oct. 20th 2008.

For more information or to submit an idea visit http://www.project10tothe100.com/