News Briefs (Jan. 10, 2006)

Fritz Meyne was appointed North American sales manager for ACOL Technologies SA, a Geneva, Switzerland-based LED lighting company. Meyne was formerly vice president at Visual Identity Solutions, a Florida-based sign company. He has also worked at Fiberstars Inc. and Super Vision International Inc. and is active in various trade associations and a frequent seminar speaker and author of numerous technical articles. ACOL makes high-brightness LED products for use in solid-state lighting applications such as rail and road traffic signals, automotive lighting, digital signs and architectural lighting. It has research facilities in Moscow and sales offices there, in Taiwan, and in Sturbridge, Mass., and Taoyuan, Taiwan. . . . Cooke Optics, a Leicester, England-based manufacturer of optics and lenses for the motion picture industry, announced last week at the 2006 International Consumer Electronics Show that it has formed a business unit to investigate partnerships with consumer electronics companies in order to use its technology in digital camcorders. . . . Eastman Kodak Co.'s Graphic Communications Group (GCG) is establishing a new Greater China region as part of its growth strategy for China and Asia, Kodak said. Haixiang Shen will be chairman and executive director. The Greater China region will be headquartered in Beijing, and includes China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The region covering Australia, New Zealand, India, South Korea and Southeast Asia is now headquartered in Singapore, where Garron Helman is managing director. . . .McPherson Inc., a maker of spectroscopy instruments for the x-ray to infrared regions, recently delivered key components for a wide energy range monochromator beamline for ANKA, the synchrotron light source of the Soft X-ray Analytics Facility at Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe GmbH research and development lab in Karlsruhe, Germany. The system features apertures and precision slits that can withstand localized, high-heat loads and maintain their precise settings of 10 microns or better, McPherson said. Engineers and physicists from McPherson's' Chelmsford, Mass., facility traveled to Germany to lend a hand with installation and commissioning. This soft x-ray analytical beamline is slated to perform electron spectroscopy experiments including photoemission electron microscopy, photoemission spectroscopy, near-edge x-ray absorption and soft x-ray magnetic circular dichroism. The beamline works in the range 80 to 1400-eV, with possible future expansion to 15-eV, McPherson said.