BRANSON, Mo., Mar. 2, 2021 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ — Nestled in the lakeside beauty of the Ozark Mountains, Branson, Missouri is one of America’s greatest family destinations. There’s always something new to discover here. Whether you prefer a lively attractions-and-entertainment scene or the natural beauty of the outdoors, Branson truly perks up in the spring. In Branson, the well-being of residents and visitors is our top priority. We’ve shared our current safety measures here so you can feel confident in traveling.

Just minutes away from the bright lights of Branson’s well-known theatres and live entertainment is an unexpectedly amazing outdoor destination. Boasting a trio of pristine lakes – Table Rock, Taneycomo and Bull Shoals – the Branson/Lakes Area is the perfect place for boating, fishing, sailing and more (especially when the water warms up a bit later this year). For those who prefer to explore on land, Dogwood Canyon Nature Park features 10,000 acres of rugged, unspoiled Ozarks landscape for walking, biking, horseback riding and tram tours. For a slower-paced outdoor experience, golf lovers are sure to enjoy the Branson/Lakes Area’s outstanding golf courses.

Along with Branson’s great outdoor offerings, here’s a snapshot of family-friendly Spring Break attractions throughout the destination:

Silver Dollar City
399 Silver Dollar City Parkway, Branson, MO 65616
This celebrated family-owned park with an 1880s theme opens for the season on March 17. Known for such innovative rides as Time Traveler, the world’s fastest, steepest and tallest complete-circuit spinning roller coaster, the legendary park is also home to award-winning food, top-of-the-line entertainment and an incredible team of 100 demonstrating craftsmen. Don’t miss the new Mystic River Falls, which debuted last year as the only water ride of its kind. The park shares how it’s maintaining a safe and healthy environment through a «play safe» commitment you can read about here.

Aquarium at the Boardwalk
2700 76 Country Blvd, Unit A, Branson, MO 65616
Visitors can observe more than 250 different animal species at the new Aquarium at the Boardwalk, including such sea creatures as seahorses, jellyfish, octopi, eels and sharks. In addition to an up-close view of approximately 7,200 individual sea animals, the Aquarium also features a 24-foot-high Kelp Forest climbing structure for kids, a 16-foot view of a coral reef and two mirrored art installations that help guests envision the sense of infinite ocean life.

WonderWorks
2835 W 76 Country Blvd, Branson, MO 65616
Dubbed «an amusement park for the mind,» WonderWorks is one of Branson’s newest indoor attractions in the destination’s Entertainment District. The building’s iconic exterior – with a massive upside-down columned porch – is just the beginning of this 48,000-square-foot experience where visitors can enjoy more than 100 hands-on exhibits. Displays feature American Innovation, Ozarks Area History and Geography, and a new Full STEAM Ahead exhibit, exploring such STEAM careers as becoming an astronaut.

Fritz’s Adventure
1425 W 76 Country Blvd, Branson, MO 65616
Founded by the parents of five boys as a place for families to be daring together, Fritz’s Adventure is an indoor adventure park dedicated to family fun and creating memories. Within its 80,000-square-foot space, Fritz’s offers explorable, climbable spaces for all ages. In addition to a multi-story ropes course, underground tunnels, a laser room, rappelling, giant treehouses and multi-story slides, Fritz’s has just introduced new attractions, including more than 300 feet of new tunnels, 32 new obstacles, 11 new ziplines, six new bridges and two new free falls. Fritz’s fan favorite Aerodium Outdoor Flying Adventure, a vertical wind tunnel skydiving simulation, will open for the season in May.

Branson Ferris Wheel
3345 W 76 Country Blvd, Branson, MO 65616
Riders of the 150-foot Branson Ferris Wheel, which was relocated from Chicago’s famous Navy Pier in 2016, enjoy a relaxing 15-minute scenic rotation offering beautiful views of the Ozark Mountains. The attraction’s 40 gondolas hold up to 240 riders, and the attraction lights up the night with 16,000 LED lights.

Runaway at Branson Mountain Adventure Park
935 State Highway 165, Branson, MO 65616
Home to the region’s first mountain coaster, the Runaway is a family-friendly thrill ride at Branson Mountain Adventure Park. It features more than 5,000 feet of track with speeds of up to 30 mph and the unique option for riders to choose their speed by way of a personal braking system.

Big Air Trampoline Park
3300 North Gretna Road, Branson, MO 65616

Featuring more than 57 fun attractions, including dodgeball, a mechanical bull, battle beam and more, Big Air Trampoline Park has something fun for everyone. The attraction also offers such premium attractions as a flight simulator and zip line.

About Branson, Missouri
Branson is a one-of-a-kind family vacation destination nestled in the lakeside beauty of the Ozark Mountains with dozens of live performance theatres; three pristine lakes; championship golf courses; an international award-winning theme park; family attractions and museums; a Historic Downtown district; shopping galore; a full range of dining options; and a host of hotels, motels, resorts, RV parks, campgrounds, sports venues, and meeting and convention facilities. Branson is located less than one day’s drive for a third of the United States’ population. It’s also accessible via flights to the Branson Airport (BKG) and nearby Springfield-Branson National Airport (SGF). Call 1-877-BRANSON for help planning your next vacation, sporting event, meeting, convention, or reunion. See more at http://www.explorebranson.com

Media Contact

Lynn Berry, Explore Branson, 417-243-2137, lberry@bransoncvb.com

SOURCE Explore Branson

LONDON, 02 March 2021 /PRNewswire Policy/ —

Government meets with industry players to develop a safe and sustainable plan to restart international travel.

The Secretary of State Grant Shapps has today (2 March 2021) chaired the first meeting of the new Global Travel Taskforce to set out a plan for restarting international travel in a safe and sustainable way.

Several government departments, industry bodies, transport operators and travel agencies met to discuss the work of the taskforce and how international travel can be re-opened safely.

This includes developing a new risk-based framework to facilitate international travel, using the suite of measures the government already has in place, such as testing and isolation, and the recommendations from the first Global Travel Taskforce last year.

They will also look at how existing measures, such as the government’s testing and isolation schemes, could be used to facilitate travel while managing the risk of imported cases and ‘variants of concern’.

It will also take place in parallel and be closely integrated with the review into COVID-status certification led by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.

The taskforce will provide a report to the Prime Minister on 12 April, which will be used to help government determine when and how to resume safe international travel no earlier than 17 May 2021.

The decision on when international travel can resume will be dependent on:

– the global and domestic epidemiological picture

– the prevalence and location of any ‘variants of concern’

– the progress of vaccine rollouts here and abroad

– what more the government has learned about the efficacy of vaccines on variants, and the impact on transmission, hospitalisation and deaths

All measures will be kept under review, and people should continue to follow national restrictions for England introduced on 6 January 2021, meaning everyone must stay at home unless travelling for a very limited set of reasons.

Secretary of State for Transport Grant Shapps said:

«The UK’s leading vaccine rollout has created a wave of optimism and, as a result, the Global Travel Taskforce is charged with exploring safe and secure ways to restart international travel when the time is right.

«By planning carefully considered steps, we will protect the excellent progress made through our vaccine and advanced testing programme, whilst ensuring we are ready to kick-start our travel sector when current travel restrictions can be lifted.

«We will not only consider the progress of our world-beating domestic vaccine programme but also need to review where destination countries have got to with both vaccine and testing capabilities.»

The government has already put in place a range of tough measures to minimise the risk of COVID-19 transmission at the border, including the:

– introduction of pre-departure testing for all international arrivals

– requirement for those travelling back to the UK from a ‘red list’ country to self-isolate in a government-approved facility for a period of 10 days while there is a heightened risk of transmission from these areas

All international arrivals must also take a COVID-19 test on both day 2 and day 8 of their self-isolation period – with genome sequencing included within the cost of the testing bundle.

Passengers arriving from ‘non-red list’ countries still have the option to pay for a private test and shorten their self-isolation period by up to half through Test to Release, on receipt of a negative COVID-19 result.

SOURCE UK Department for Transport

LONDON, 02 March 2021 /PRNewswire Policy/ —

Government meets with industry players to develop a safe and sustainable plan to restart international travel.

The Secretary of State Grant Shapps has today (2 March 2021) chaired the first meeting of the new Global Travel Taskforce to set out a plan for restarting international travel in a safe and sustainable way.

Several government departments, industry bodies, transport operators and travel agencies met to discuss the work of the taskforce and how international travel can be re-opened safely.

This includes developing a new risk-based framework to facilitate international travel, using the suite of measures the government already has in place, such as testing and isolation, and the recommendations from the first Global Travel Taskforce last year.

They will also look at how existing measures, such as the government’s testing and isolation schemes, could be used to facilitate travel while managing the risk of imported cases and ‘variants of concern’.

It will also take place in parallel and be closely integrated with the review into COVID-status certification led by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.

The taskforce will provide a report to the Prime Minister on 12 April, which will be used to help government determine when and how to resume safe international travel no earlier than 17 May 2021.

The decision on when international travel can resume will be dependent on:

– the global and domestic epidemiological picture

– the prevalence and location of any ‘variants of concern’

– the progress of vaccine rollouts here and abroad

– what more the government has learned about the efficacy of vaccines on variants, and the impact on transmission, hospitalisation and deaths

All measures will be kept under review, and people should continue to follow national restrictions for England introduced on 6 January 2021, meaning everyone must stay at home unless travelling for a very limited set of reasons.

Secretary of State for Transport Grant Shapps said:

«The UK’s leading vaccine rollout has created a wave of optimism and, as a result, the Global Travel Taskforce is charged with exploring safe and secure ways to restart international travel when the time is right.

«By planning carefully considered steps, we will protect the excellent progress made through our vaccine and advanced testing programme, whilst ensuring we are ready to kick-start our travel sector when current travel restrictions can be lifted.

«We will not only consider the progress of our world-beating domestic vaccine programme but also need to review where destination countries have got to with both vaccine and testing capabilities.»

The government has already put in place a range of tough measures to minimise the risk of COVID-19 transmission at the border, including the:

– introduction of pre-departure testing for all international arrivals

– requirement for those travelling back to the UK from a ‘red list’ country to self-isolate in a government-approved facility for a period of 10 days while there is a heightened risk of transmission from these areas

All international arrivals must also take a COVID-19 test on both day 2 and day 8 of their self-isolation period – with genome sequencing included within the cost of the testing bundle.

Passengers arriving from ‘non-red list’ countries still have the option to pay for a private test and shorten their self-isolation period by up to half through Test to Release, on receipt of a negative COVID-19 result.

SOURCE UK Department for Transport

Technology and mobility leaders like DENSO, Ford, and General Motors (GM) join forces with MOBI to co-create industry-wide blockchain-based standards that enable the secure exchange of data for a smarter mobility future

SINGAPORE, March 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — What if cars could communicate with each other to avoid imminent crashes and use shared data to prevent future accidents while preserving the drivers’ privacy? What if you could use one app with a single payment platform to securely coordinate and integrate all of your daily commute needs? What if navigation apps need your permission to track your mobility preferences, or better yet, pay you? Mobility is becoming increasingly connected and intelligent, which in turn creates a nearly infinite amount of valuable data that, if shared securely, could save lives and improve mobility ecosystems at every level. Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative (MOBI) members, such as DENSO, Ford, and GM, are among many that teamed up to create standards for permissioning, validating, and sharing data in automation networks for connected mobility.

The MOBI Connected Mobility Data Marketplace (CMDM) Working Group releases standards today to enable a marketplace that could securely commodify mobility data and ensure data privacy for mobility users. The CMDM Standards include core services, logical schemas, and sensor identity/ownership certificates. These three components will enable frictionless data sharing to establish communication and collaboration between the data silos of Mobility Service Providers, while maintaining high standards of data privacy and security for all users.

«This framework gives mobility providers valuable guidance on how we can all work together to make transportation safer, smarter and more efficient,» said Roger Berg, Vice President of North American Research and Development at DENSO. «Sharing data, securely and through common standards, can unlock a vast array of positive mobility outcomes, from accident reduction to privacy protection to improving traffic flow.»  

The Working Group is co-chaired by DENSO and GM, with support from Accenture, AMO Labs, Cognizant, Constellation Network, Continental, CPChain, DMX, Fifth9, Filament, Ford, IBM, NuCypher, Ocean Protocol, RouteOne, ShareRing, Swedish Blockchain Association, and Toyota Insurance Management Solutions (TIMS).

Trust in data, its provenance, and chain of custody are essential for value creation in business ecosystems. Centralized databases, of the type that currently assign identities and rights on the internet, provide an attractive target for malicious actors and make networks vulnerable to attack and fraud, exposing individual and business data. Blockchain emerged as a solution to these issues and is being adopted by ecosystems such as connected mobility in order to securely share data and protect users’ data privacy.

«For connected mobility data to be efficiently shared, there must be a functioning marketplace for discovery, permission, exchange, and pricing,» said MOBI Co-Founder and COO, Tram Vo. «The standards from the MOBI CMDM Working Group lay the foundation for a secure and viable market.»

Maximizing passenger safety and transportation efficiency requires that vehicle-to-anything (V2X) data be shared and processed locally in near real-time at the «edge» of the network. Edge computing has been a large focus for the distributed computing community, and MOBI believes that the widespread growth of connected and autonomous vehicles represents one of the most exciting and impactful opportunities for a data marketplace, providing speed, cost savings, and new revenue opportunities.

The Working Group explored practical use cases that center around vehicle data generation, ensuring data provenance, and securely sharing data with peers (such as other vehicles and infrastructure). These use cases include:

• V2X data exchange 
• Geo-location cross validation
• Multimodal trip planning through easy, interoperable, and secure sharing of data
• Coordination between autonomous vehicles, big data, and edge computing that would increase traffic safety and efficiency

CMDM Standards are the first step to ensure data privacy in data exchange and efficient data marketplaces for mobility ecosystems. The standards do not prescribe governance models, but instead prescribe functionalities that can be applied to many governance models in a decentralized marketplace. All MOBI Standards are intended to be GDPR compliant. We do not prescribe specific aspects of GDPR and other privacy regulations such as California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which are left up to the application developers. MOBI and its members hope that the CMDM standards, together with other MOBI standards for blockchain applications in mobility, will promote data privacy, reduce frictional inefficiencies, improve mobility services, and enable new business models.

About MOBI
MOBI is a nonprofit alliance of many of the world’s largest vehicle manufacturers, along with startups, NGOs, transit agencies, insurers, toll road providers, smart city leaders, and technology companies working to accelerate adoption and promote standards in blockchain, distributed ledgers, and related technologies.

MOBI is creating simple blockchain-based standards to identify vehicles, people, and businesses in order to securely exchange and monetize data, and pay for mobility services, with the goal of making transportation more efficient, affordable, greener, safer, and less congested.  MOBI itself is technology and ledger agnostic.  For additional information about joining MOBI, please reach out to Griffin Haskins (griffin@dlt.mobi) or visit www.dlt.mobi.

Media Contact:
Kelly Clark, MOBI Communications Manager
Email: Kelly@dlt.mobi | Twitter: @dltMOBI

SINGAPORE, March 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — What if cars could communicate with each other to avoid imminent crashes and use shared data to prevent future accidents while preserving the drivers’ privacy? What if you could use one app with a single payment platform to securely coordinate and integrate all of your daily commute needs? What if navigation apps need your permission to track your mobility preferences, or better yet, pay you? Mobility is becoming increasingly connected and intelligent, which in turn creates a nearly infinite amount of valuable data that, if shared securely, could save lives and improve mobility ecosystems at every level. Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative (MOBI) members, such as DENSO, Ford, and GM, are among many that teamed up to create standards for permissioning, validating, and sharing data in automation networks for connected mobility.

The MOBI Connected Mobility Data Marketplace (CMDM) Working Group releases standards today to enable a marketplace that could securely commodify mobility data and ensure data privacy for mobility users. The CMDM Standards include core services, logical schemas, and sensor identity/ownership certificates. These three components will enable frictionless data sharing to establish communication and collaboration between the data silos of Mobility Service Providers, while maintaining high standards of data privacy and security for all users.

«This framework gives mobility providers valuable guidance on how we can all work together to make transportation safer, smarter and more efficient,» said Roger Berg, Vice President of North American Research and Development at DENSO. «Sharing data, securely and through common standards, can unlock a vast array of positive mobility outcomes, from accident reduction to privacy protection to improving traffic flow.»  

The Working Group is co-chaired by DENSO and GM, with support from Accenture, AMO Labs, Cognizant, Constellation Network, Continental, CPChain, DMX, Fifth9, Filament, Ford, IBM, NuCypher, Ocean Protocol, RouteOne, ShareRing, Swedish Blockchain Association, and Toyota Insurance Management Solutions (TIMS).

Trust in data, its provenance, and chain of custody are essential for value creation in business ecosystems. Centralized databases, of the type that currently assign identities and rights on the internet, provide an attractive target for malicious actors and make networks vulnerable to attack and fraud, exposing individual and business data. Blockchain emerged as a solution to these issues and is being adopted by ecosystems such as connected mobility in order to securely share data and protect users’ data privacy.

«For connected mobility data to be efficiently shared, there must be a functioning marketplace for discovery, permission, exchange, and pricing,» said MOBI Co-Founder and COO, Tram Vo. «The standards from the MOBI CMDM Working Group lay the foundation for a secure and viable market.»

Maximizing passenger safety and transportation efficiency requires that vehicle-to-anything (V2X) data be shared and processed locally in near real-time at the «edge» of the network. Edge computing has been a large focus for the distributed computing community, and MOBI believes that the widespread growth of connected and autonomous vehicles represents one of the most exciting and impactful opportunities for a data marketplace, providing speed, cost savings, and new revenue opportunities.

The Working Group explored practical use cases that center around vehicle data generation, ensuring data provenance, and securely sharing data with peers (such as other vehicles and infrastructure). These use cases include:

• V2X data exchange 
• Geo-location cross validation
• Multimodal trip planning through easy, interoperable, and secure sharing of data
• Coordination between autonomous vehicles, big data, and edge computing that would increase traffic safety and efficiency

CMDM Standards are the first step to ensure data privacy in data exchange and efficient data marketplaces for mobility ecosystems. The standards do not prescribe governance models, but instead prescribe functionalities that can be applied to many governance models in a decentralized marketplace. All MOBI Standards are intended to be GDPR compliant. We do not prescribe specific aspects of GDPR and other privacy regulations such as California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which are left up to the application developers. MOBI and its members hope that the CMDM standards, together with other MOBI standards for blockchain applications in mobility, will promote data privacy, reduce frictional inefficiencies, improve mobility services, and enable new business models.

About MOBI
MOBI is a nonprofit alliance of many of the world’s largest vehicle manufacturers, along with startups, NGOs, transit agencies, insurers, toll road providers, smart city leaders, and technology companies working to accelerate adoption and promote standards in blockchain, distributed ledgers, and related technologies.

MOBI is creating simple blockchain-based standards to identify vehicles, people, and businesses in order to securely exchange and monetize data, and pay for mobility services, with the goal of making transportation more efficient, affordable, greener, safer, and less congested.  MOBI itself is technology and ledger agnostic.  For additional information about joining MOBI, please reach out to Griffin Haskins (griffin@dlt.mobi) or visit www.dlt.mobi.

Media Contact:
Kelly Clark, MOBI Communications Manager
Email: Kelly@dlt.mobi | Twitter: @dltMOBI

View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mobility-leaders-prioritize-data-management-protection-and-privacy-while-enabling-users-and-providers-to-exchange-and-monetize-their-most-valuable-digital-commodity-301238841.html

SOURCE MOBI