After an almost half-year feasibility study, America’s Postal Service (USPS) announced new plans to combine and close 223 Area Mail Processing plants in America, including California, New York and other states. The new plans will close 14 mail processing centers in California, 12 units in New York and 9 plants in Illinois. These new plans will be affecting 35,000 jobs.
The latest setbacks that hit America’s largest postal service were due to several reasons. According to the press release, USPS cited a financial crisis that started in the late 2007, more people use e-mails and Internet to communicate, and its continuing obligation with retirement benefits.
The Area Mail Processing plants closing could help USPS to save over $2 billion for the next three years. USPS is on track to reduce its operating costs of about $20 billion by 2015.
A committee of experts managed by America’s regulators or the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) voted 20-2 to let Vivus Inc to market the next generation of weight-loss capsule called Qnexa. Qnexa is a capsule to be taken once-a-day. The biopharmaceutical company is located in the technology hub of Silicon Valley's Mountain View.
The controlled-release pill for treating obesity is a combination of two types of drugs. First, a drug called stimulant phentermine which is used to help lowering appetite on patient. Second, another drug called topiramate which is used to escalate of feeling full in the patient's tummy.
The Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-based company, Comcast, the largest cable operator in America announced a new service called Xfinity Streampix. The new service will be available only to its subscribers and will cost extra $4.99 per month, compared to Netflix and Hulu Plus which charge $7.99 for video streaming service. Comcast also has signed a deal with Verizon, the largest wireless provider in America.
Xfinity Streampix service will give its subscribers access to past seasons of TV shows, popular kids TV and box office movies, mostly from NBC TV and Universal Studio as the Comcast is now the largest shareholder of NBCUniversal Company. Popular TV shows include 30 Rock, Grey’s Anatomy, Lost and The Office.
According to the Comcast blog post, the new service of streaming TV shows and movies will soon be integrated into other mobile devices and home entertainment services including Microsoft Xbox 360 and Google Android-powered mobile devices.
One of the setbacks of the latest announcement by a giant cable operator is that the company does not own the domain name Streampix.com. As per WHOIS data, the domain has been registered since 2003 and is currently owned by a Canadian-based company that provides video software service.
Starting the 2012 Valentine’s Day on February 14, California youngsters ages 12 to 19 can visit a website TeenSource.org and asked for free condoms to be delivered to their home mailings. For now, only residents of Kern County, Alameda, Sacramento, San Joaquin and San Francisco, are eligible to get the free condoms. While residents in other counties such as Los Angeles, who need free condoms, are urged to visit TeenSource.org and search for local clinics in their area and pick those condoms for free.
The latest project to helping California teens to reduce the rate of STD transmission is a partnership between California Family Health Council and the Department of Public Health’s STD Control Branch. The team work between the two agencies is called the Condom Access Project (CAP). The main reason of the project is to reduce young pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. The project will also be helping teens who are in economy hardship to pay for condoms.
Mobile gaming fans around the world cannot wait any longer as the maker of Angry Birds has just announced a new series of the popular mobile game dubbed as “Angry Birds Space.” On the new game, Rovio will partner will two top agencies, NASA and National Geographic. There is no official announcement regarding the partnership and sharing opportunities.
In order catch up with the entertainment industry, the upcoming release will copy some distribution techniques from Hollywood powerhouse such as Disney. Rovio marketing team is planning to launch “Angry Birds Space” thru mobile download, Facebook, and electronic stores.
As Rovio is launching the space-related theme games, Zynga could follow the Angry Birds maker’s foot-step by launching their future games which may be called “CosmoVille” in conjunction with its current popular titles such as “CityVille,” “CastleVille,” and others.
The original Angry Birds game was made popular thru Apple’s iTunes store a couple years ago, as many gamers download the game for their iPhones, iPads, and iPods. Today, there are over 700 million copy of Angry Birds have been downloaded by its fans worldwide.
Click here to watch the trailer video via YouTube.
Just being introduced into America market three months ago by Johnson & Johnson Company, a redesigned bottle containing liquid infant Tylenol has causing problems to parents and caregivers. The new design supposedly to create better safety improvement to help parents to measure the amount of doses for infants. However, a large number of parents and caregivers have criticized that they had found flaws on the new redesigned bottle. The new design cover on the top of the bottles had malfunctioned and did not work properly when hookup with a plastic syringe.
The redesign flaws is heightening more setbacks for the Tylenol maker in America, as Johnson & Johnson’s McNeil Consumer Healthcare unit is now recalling 574,000 bottles of grape-flavored liquid infant Tylenol from pharmacies and stores around America.
The world’s largest software company introduced a new logo for Windows 8 operating system. The new logo taps design principles and characteristics of Metro style. The new logo with four squares looks very digital than older logos. The most popular Windows OS was introduced in 1995 which also known as version 4.0. Later the 2001’s XP version was also a big hit. The current OS in the market is Windows 7 which was released for consumer in late October 2009.
As per a blog post written by Microsoft’s Sam Moreau, a Principal Director of User Experience for Windows, the Redmond-based company hired a design company Pentagram to work on the new logo. Pentagram has multiple locations including in London, New York, Berlin and Austin. Pentagram had designed many logos for top brands including Saks Fifth Avenue, Tiffany & Co., Benetton, Lands' End, and others.
Windows 8 OS for "Consumer Preview" version will be released for public on the special leap year day on Wednesday, February 29, 2012, during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.
Microsoft’s MSN launched an all-in-one portal which includes search, news, local and social networking on Thursday morning, Feb 16. The new social media aggregator is known as msnNOW. The new site aggregates breaking news trends and hottest topics from Facebook, Twitter, and variety of sources such as BreakingNews.com. All breaking trends and topics are generated in real-time. In order to compete with the mainstream media, msnNOW’s human editors and team of experts will also provide more juices and pick the top stories and topics.
With 520 million visitors per month worldwide, the concept of all in one portal will be helping Microsoft’s Internet properties such as Bing search engine to grab more users. Data from comScore showed that Bing was the number two search engine in America in January 2012. MSN portal is now accessed in 48 markets and serving 27 languages around the world.
Since June 27, 2003, America’s consumers can submit their phone numbers to “Do Not Call” lists to stop prerecorded calls from telemarketers, especially during dinner times. This week, a stricter rules Do Not Call version 2.0 was approved by America’s communications regulators or the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
Regulators voted to stop telemarketers from auto-calling consumers without a written consent. In the latest ruling, FCC also warned telemarketers to get consumers’ written to opt-in to receive autodialed or prerecorded calls. Most of those telemarketing calls were from mortgage companies, cars and health insurance companies, cable TV, and wireless phone companies.
Regulators also made several exceptions for utilizing autodialed calls, among those calls made by charities, political campaigns, school updates, and pharmacies prescription refill.
A new study led by Hazrije Mustafic, MD, MPH, of the University of Paris Descartes, found air pollution could be causing heart attack. Big cities such as Los Angeles are prone to polluted air including carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, and sulfur dioxide. In most of industrialized countries, heart disease is the number one cause of death. Researchers also warned that spending just one week in a location with high levels of air pollution could increase the risk of heart attack. The study is being published by the Journal of the American Medical Association for February 2012 issue.
