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Laid-off workers hired at Maine pulp plant
01:00 AM EDT on Friday, June 8, 2007
Two sets of modernized Monopoly game tokens, or “movers,” from Pawtucket-based Hasbro’s Here & Now Edition have been approved by NASA to fly aboard the space shuttle Atlantis, scheduled to lift off today. The space-bound tokens are miniature likenesses of items relevant in the “here and now,” including a Toyota Prius, a New Balance Shoe, a Labradoodle, a Motorola Razr cell phone, a laptop computer, some McDonald’s French fries and an airplane. With more than 79 percent of Houston’s vote, NASA’s Johnson Space Center was chosen as the most distinctive landmark in the city and was given an orange property space on the new game board. As a “token” of thanks to the thousands of people who voted for the Space Center, NASA elected to include the game movers on a space mission and acknowledge the pieces as “officially flown tokens” when the shuttle returns to Earth.
KVH Industries, of Middletown, has received a new contract from a Southeast Asian customer for the purchase of KVH’s TACNAV II fiber-optic gyro-based vehicle navigation systems and displays. The contract has a total value of about $2.3 million with shipments starting this year and extending through 2010. Due to contractual restrictions, additional details regarding the customer and vehicle platform have not been disclosed. The TACNAV II is a tactical navigation system for vehicles that combines Global Positioning System data with inputs from its fiber-optic gyro, optional digital compass and the vehicle’s odometer to provide unjammable, precision navigation, heading and pointing data for vehicle drivers, crews, and commanders.
West Warwick-based Star Move Alliance, an Arpin Group company, has entered into a strategic alliance with Smart Move, a company within Arpin Group’s network of approved service providers. The collaboration combines Star’s Personal Move Counseling services with Smart Move’s household goods containerization system using its specially designed Smart Vault. Under the terms of the alliance, a Star counselor arranges for packing, loading and unloading and works with Smart Move and other third-party companies on behalf of the customer. Smart Move guarantees secure delivery of the Smart Vault (a 272-cubic-foot weather-resistant container) on the date specified. Each vault is bar-coded and equipped with GPS tracking technology, which helps minimize risks of loss in transit and enables $10,000 per vault insurance coverage to be provided at no additional cost.
South Kingstown-based APC, a provider of critical power and cooling services for computers, has been named a 2007 CRN Channel Champion in the Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS)/ Data Center Power Management category. Sponsored by CMP Channel Group’s CRN magazine, the CRN Channel Champion award program, featured in the magazine’s May 7 issue, is now in its 17th year. The CRN Channel Champion study measures overall solution-provider perceptions of vendor products and services. The survey is the largest and broadest-based technology integrator market study in the industry and is used to evaluate vendors and their programs.
More than 100 members of The Golf Club of Cape Cod, a new private golf-only club designed by renowned course architect Rees Jones, celebrated the club’s official opening Sunday in Falmouth. The club may be the last privately developed golf course on Cape Cod due to limited space and strict land-use regulations. The Cape Cod Commission, the regional land-use planning and regulatory agency of Barnstable County, issued a certificate of occupancy for the golf course, allowing the facility to open. The club has also broken ground on its 25,000-square-foot clubhouse, sited on one of the highest points on Cape Cod, promising views of Buzzards Bay from the second level. The par 72, 7,047-yard course is the only one designed by Jones on Cape Cod.
Foster-Miller, a QinetiQ North America company based in Waltham, Mass., has completed the purchase of Pittsburgh-based robotics companies Automatika and Applied Perception. Foster-Miller is the largest provider of man-transportable robots to the Department of Defense and has delivered more than 1,000 TALON robots to help find and neutralize improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in Iraq and Afghanistan. Automatika and Applied Perception were both founded by faculty and graduates of Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute and Business School in Pittsburgh. Foster-Miller was founded more than 50 years ago by three graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The addition of these two companies introduces new robotics platforms and autonomous navigation systems to our robotics product line,” William Ribich, president and chief executive officer of Foster-Miller said. “With newly enhanced and diversified product offerings, I am confident that we will continue to grow our customer base in government and energy markets and continue our leadership in the military robotics industry.”
Cianbro Corp. plans to build a new manufacturing plant in Brewer, Maine, that will employ 500 or more workers at the site of the defunct Eastern Fine Paper mill that went out of business more than three years ago. Cianbro, a construction company based in Pittsfield, said the plant will be used to manufacture “modules” — prefabricated, self-standing building frames that customers will join together and finish off into completed buildings at other sites. Before the new facility can open, the site needs to be cleaned of hazardous waste — ash from decades of papermaking, asbestos and lead paint — and get state and federal permits. Still, company and city officials are confident the plant can be in production by April 1, 2008. Cianbro and South Brewer Redevelopment, a limited liability corporation that was created to own and operate the mill site, signed a memorandum of understanding last week toward a purchase-and-sale agreement for the former paper mill.
New Hampshire’s largest television station will share some of its content with Google and its video-sharing YouTube subsidiary, the station’s parent company announced Monday. New York-based Hearst-Argyle Television said WMUR and stations in Boston, Sacramento, Pittsburgh and Baltimore will begin posting local video content to individual dedicated channels on YouTube. WMUR’s YouTube Channel http://www.youtube.com/wmurtv will have news, weather, and entertainment videos as well as original, local television programming such as Chronicle. “This innovative deal with Google and YouTube fits perfectly within our overall digital strategy of distributing our content on all three screens — the TV, the PC and the mobile phone,” said Terry Mackin, executive vice president of Hearst-Argyle Television.
Red Shield Environmental, which has begun producing pulp at the former Georgia-Pacific mill in Old Town, Maine, has created another 130 jobs, bringing the total employment to 180 people, officials said Monday. The workers are among 450 employees who lost their jobs more than a year ago when the plant was closed, said Dick Arnold, plant manager. Maine Gov. John Baldacci was on hand for the official announcement that the plant had resumed pulp production, which will help support Red Shield’s eventual goal of producing ethanol at the site. Red Shield says it plans to produce 400 to 500 pounds of pulp a day, turning out 150,000 tons or more a year to be sold. Material from the pulping process will be utilized by an experimental ethanol production process created by the University of Maine that produces acetic acid as well as ethanol.
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