Novel ready-to-eat mango product using gellan gum as gelling agent: physico-chemical, microbial and sensory characteristics

Este trabalho foi efectuado com o apoio da Universidade de Lisboa, Instituto Superior de Agronomia com o Centro de Engenharia dos Biossistemas (CEER

m-SportGIS

Information technologies (ITs), and sports resources and services aid the potential to transform governmental organizations, and play an important role in contributing to sustainable communities development, respectively. Spatial data is a crucial source to support sports planning and management. Low-cost mobile geospatial tools bring productive and accurate data collection, and their use combining a handy and customized graphical user interface (GUI) (forms, mapping, media support) is still in an early stage. Recognizing the benefits — efficiency, effectiveness, proximity to citizens — that Mozambican Minister of Youth and Sports (MJD) can achieve with information resulted from the employment of a low-cost data collection platform, this project presents the development of a mobile mapping application (app) — m-SportGIS — under Open Source (OS) technologies and a customized evolutionary software methodology. The app development embraced the combination of mobile web technologies and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) (e.g. Sencha Touch (ST), Apache Cordova, OpenLayers) to deploy a native-to-the-device (Android operating system) product, taking advantage of device’s capabilities (e.g. File system, Geolocation, Camera). In addition to an integrated Web Map Service (WMS), was created a local and customized Tile Map Service (TMS) to serve up cached data, regarding the IT infrastructures limitations in several Mozambican regions. m-SportGIS is currently being exploited by Mozambican Government staff to inventory all kind of sports facilities, which resulted and stored data feeds a WebGIS platform to manage Mozambican sports resources.

Business concept design of an innovative product: Partnership between Nmusic and Rovio Entertainment Ltd.

Field Lab in Entrepreneurial Innovative Ventures

How can clusters help in the product type choice? The case of a specialized retail store

This work project (WP) is a study about a clustering strategy for Sport Zone. The general cluster study’s objective is to create groups such that within each group the individuals are similar to each other, but should be different among groups. The clusters creation is a mix of common sense, trial and error and some statistical supporting techniques. Our particular objective is to support category managers to better define the product type to be displayed in the stores’ shelves by doing store clusters. This research was carried out for Sport Zone, and comprises an objective definition, a literature review, the clustering activity itself, some factor analysis and a discriminant analysis to better frame our work. Together with this quantitative part, a survey addressed to category managers to better understand their key drivers, for choosing the type of product of each store, was carried out. Based in a non-random sample of 65 stores with data referring to 2013, the final result was the choice of 6 store clusters (Figure 1) which were individually characterized as the main outcome of this work. In what relates to our selected variables, all were important for the distinction between clusters, which proves the adequacy of their choice. The interpretation of the results gives category managers a tool to understand which products best fit the clustered stores. Furthermore, as a side finding thanks to the clusterization, a STP (Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning) was initiated, being this WP the first steps of a continuous process.

Product relatedness role on driving industrial policy success

This thesis aims to study how product relatedness to the current pattern of specialization influences the success of industrial policies in underdeveloped sectors. Drawing from Hausmann and Klinger (2006), this work extends the existing literature on the importance of proximity spillovers to explain economic development by focusing on underdeveloped sectors. We find that investment's success in an underdeveloped sector is more likely if it is highly related to the current pattern of specialization. However, heterogeneity amongst sectors is remarkable. Moreover, industrial policy cases are sometimes successful despite the bad odds provided by this criterion, suggesting further factors should be considered.

Incremental compilation and deployment for OutSystems Platform

OutSystems Platform is used to develop, deploy, and maintain enterprise web an mobile web applications. Applications are developed through a visual domain specific language, in an integrated development environment, and compiled to a standard stack of web technologies. In the platform’s core, there is a compiler and a deployment service that transform the visual model into a running web application. As applications grow, compilation and deployment times increase as well, impacting the developer’s productivity. In the previous model, a full application was the only compilation and deployment unit. When the developer published an application, even if he only changed a very small aspect of it, the application would be fully compiled and deployed. Our goal is to reduce compilation and deployment times for the most common use case, in which the developer performs small changes to an application before compiling and deploying it. We modified the OutSystems Platform to support a new incremental compilation and deployment model that reuses previous computations as much as possible in order to improve performance. In our approach, the full application is broken down into smaller compilation and deployment units, increasing what can be cached and reused. We also observed that this finer model would benefit from a parallel execution model. Hereby, we created a task driven Scheduler that executes compilation and deployment tasks in parallel. Our benchmarks show a substantial improvement of the compilation and deployment process times for the aforementioned development scenario.

Launching platforms for user-generated content

Field lab: Entrepreneurial and innovative ventures

Can a lemon based Sagres product attract consumers that don't drink beer?

The purpose of this project is to understand if the brand Sagres is damaging the product Sagres Radler. The beer market in Portugal was studied and focus groups were used to perceive the impact of the brand in the product. The mother brand is bringing the beer association into a product designed to engage people that don’t like beer. With the insights, a new proposal was drawn and tested. Although it was not possible to prove that the new concept is better for the population, there are strong indications that the brand isn’t enabling the achievement of the proposed target.

Structural transformation in the product space: Patterns and implications

Product fundamentals are essential in explaining heterogeneity in the product space. The scope for adapting and transferring capabilities into the production of different goods determines the speed and intensity of the structural transformation process and entails dissimilar development opportunities for nations. Future specialization patterns become then partly determined by the current network of products’ relatedness. Building on previous literature, this paper explicitly compares methodological concepts of product connectivity to conclude in favor of the density measure we propose combined with the Revealed Relatedness Index (RRI) approach presented by Freitas and Salvado (2011). Overall, RRI specifications displayed more consistent behavior when different time horizons are equated.

User-centric product derivation in software product lines

Software Product Line (SPL) engineering aims at achieving efficient development of software products in a specific domain. New products are obtained via a process which entails creating a new configuration specifying the desired product’s features. This configuration must necessarily conform to a variability model, that describes the scope of the SPL, or else it is not viable. To ensure this, configuration tools are used that do not allow invalid configurations to be expressed. A different concern, however, is making sure that a product addresses the stakeholders’ needs as best as possible. The stakeholders may not be experts on the domain, so they may have unrealistic expectations. Also, the scope of the SPL is determined not only by the domain but also by limitations of the development platforms. It is therefore possible that the desired set of features goes beyond what is possible to currently create with the SPL. This means that configuration tools should provide support not only for creating valid products, but also for improving satisfaction of user concerns. We address this goal by providing a user-centric configuration process that offers suggestions during the configuration process, based on the use of soft constraints, and identifying and explaining potential conflicts that may arise. Suggestions help mitigating stakeholder uncertainty and poor domain knowledge, by helping them address well known and desirable domain-related concerns. On the other hand, automated conflict identification and explanation helps the stakeholders to understand the trade-offs required for realizing their vision, allowing informed resolution of conflicts. Additionally, we propose a prototype-based approach to configuration, that addresses the order-dependency issues by allowing the complete (or partial) specification of the features in a single step. A subsequent resolution process will then identify possible repairs, or trade-offs, that may be required for viabilization.

Unilever food solutions new digital CRM platform- what is the combination of tools, processes and content that will help Unilever food solutions grow his business?

Unilever Food Solutions new digital CRM1 Platform - What is the combination of tools, processes and content that will help Unilever Food Solutions grow his business? Unilever Food Solutions (UFS) intend to create a new online platform to enable it to communicate with segments of the markets, which have previously been too difficult to reach. Specifically targeted at Chefs and other food professionals, the aim is to create an interactive website, which delivers value to its intended users by providing a variety of relevant content and functions, while simultaneously opening up a potential transactional channel to those same users.

Product quality judgments in a two-sequence cue environment

Previous research demonstrated that the sequence of informational cues and the level of distraction have an impact on the judgment of a product’s quality. This study investigates the influence of the force behind the processing of these cues, working memory (WM). The results indicate that without distraction, consumers with low and high WM capacity (WMC) equally base their product evaluation on the first sequential cue. In the presence of a distractor, however, low WM individuals are no longer able to recall the initial cue, and thus derive their product judgment from the final cue. Moreover, evidence of intercultural differences in the perception of product related cues, and their aptitude for signaling a favorable product quality is provided.

Chesney's: Growing through product expansion

Chesney’s: Growing Through Product Expansion The purpose of this work project is to have a better understanding about how to proceed when a company is challenged by new options to grow and thrive. It aims to decode the next direction of Chesney’s Ltd, a United Kingdom leading company in luxurious replicas of antique fireplaces, wood burning stoves and other architectural pieces. The work project relies on the concepts of strategy, innovation and design thinking in order to encourage dynamic activities within the company. Chesney’s continuously tries to improve and innovate and this work project will assess whether the possible options have strategic fit with the purpose of the company and consequently, create an introduction plan for the opportunity that shows higher probabilities of becoming successful.

The emergence of product certification systems as trade barriers

This paper addresses the growing difficulties automobile manufacturers face within their after sales business: an increasing number of trade obstacles set up by import countries discriminates against the foreign suppliers and impedes the international sales of genuine parts. The purpose of the study is to explore the emergence of trade restrictive product certification systems, which affect spare parts exports of automobile manufacturers. The methodology used includes review of the literature and an empirical study based on qualitative interviews with representatives of major stakeholders of the automotive after sales business. Relevant key drivers, which initiate the introduction of technical regulations in importing countries, are identified and analysed to evaluate their effect on the emerging trade policy. The analysis of the key drivers outlines that several interacting components, such as the global competitiveness of the country, macroeconomic and microeconomic factors, and certain country-specific variables induce trade restrictive product certification systems. The findings allow for an early detection of the emergence of product certification systems and provide a means to early recognise the risks and opportunities for the sales of automotive spare parts in the automakers’ target markets. This allows the manufacturers to react immediately and adapt in time to the upcoming changes.