We have recently had some press regarding Fusion and part of how it came to be, so we’ve added a new Press section to the website with video and links to articles as they appear. We hope you’ll take a look.

A little over two years ago we realized the great need for an open, standardized way of moving data around in the beef industry. At the time, if a cow/calf producer wanted to send data about his calves with them to the feedlot it probably had to be done on paper. Very few software systems in the industry could communicate with each other, yet the need to do so was growing and is becoming critical right now.

Many other industries have standards, often open standards, that allow them to do things more efficiently and effectively. We determined that the beef industry could benefit from such a standard and proceeded to draft a preliminary document to that affect. Our hope was to find like-minded people in the industry who would help form a working group to develop and maintain the standard. Although we talked to many people from various sectors in the industry and on both sides of the border, we were not able to really get anything concrete started.

All that changed a couple of weeks ago during a conference call with quite a few people to discuss this. All committed to help develop the standard, either on the technical side or in pushing for awareness and adoption throughout the industry. The standard will be named Beef Open Standard or BOS for short.

We are pleased to be part of this initiative and pledge our support to the development and use of BOS. We encourage you to learn more by visiting the BOS website. We also invite you to participate in this effort, either in the actual development or by spreading awareness of the project.

By Cannon Smith
We are happy to announce a new product—Symmetry. If you have ever wished you could age verify animals in real time or if you have ever had your internet quit working while you were trying to age verify animals, Symmetry could be for you. This new product runs on your computer and gathers new information from the CCIA database every night, keeping itself synced with the birth date, breed, and Express Verified information in the CCIA database.

Other software applications can then communicate directly with Symmetry instead of the CCIA to request this information for animals. Of course, Fusion works with Symmetry, and we encourage other software developers who have the need to integrate their products with Symmetry as well.

If this is something that you might be interested in, feel free to give us a call. You can also download the documentation here.

We are excited about this new product as it fills a need that many of our customers have expressed they have. Please note that we have a special introductory price for you if you are currently using Fusion. Contact us for details.

(Symmetry is available for Mac OS X, Windows XP, and Windows Vista.)

We are happy to announce that the latest version of Fusion is now compatible with Windows Vista and Mac OS X.

By Cannon Smith
We have a logo for our company now. Here is what it looks like:



We feel that an important message we want to get across to our customers is that when they use Fusion they have complete ownership and control of their data. In fact, we never have access to our customer's data unless they ask us to look at a file for support reasons.