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Posted by: Salvatore J. Zambri, founding partner
Bloomberg News reports that according to “company timelines” submitted to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), Toyota “knew about flaws that could cause unintended acceleration more than 3 1/2 years before it recalled cars and trucks to fix the defects.” The report points out that the auto manufacturer learned that “floor mats could entrap accelerator pedals as early as Feb. 7, 2006, and that pedals could stick five months later” in July 2006. The timelines confirm an alarmingly slow response to the problems that ultimately led to the recall of more than 8 million vehicles worldwide.
This development is very concerning, as it suggests that Toyota put profits over safety. Based upon some recent advertisements and public statements, Toyota seems to what to convince us that it is a caring company that produces safe products. How they move foreard as a company will determine their sincerity.
contact me with questions/thoughts
About the author:
Mr. Zambri is a Past-President of the Trial Lawyers Association of Metropolitan Washington, D.C. and has been rated by Washingtonian magazine as a “Big Gun” and among the “top 1%” of all lawyers in the Washington metropolitan area. The magazine also describes him as “one of Washington’s best–most honest and effective lawyers” who specializes in personal injury matters, including serious truck and car collisions. Mr. Zambri has also been repeatedly named a “Super Lawyer” by Law and Politics magazine–a national publication that honors the top lawyers in America.
Mr. Zambri is regularly asked to give presentations to lawyers and businesses regarding product defects, automobile accident litigation, and safety improvements.
Mr. Zambri has authored an article regarding how automobile collision cases are evaluated. To read it, please click here.
To read an article published by one of Mr. Zambri’s clients, who was injured in a tragic automobile collision, please click here.
Many Americans are killed or critically injured each year in vehicular collisions. If you want more information about your legal rights, please email Mr. Zambri at [email protected] or call him at 202-822-1899.


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Christmas: Hottest gifts for children this year are largely tech-driven
Issued by Corporate Image on behalf of Pick n Pay - Dec 9th 2014, 12:57
Technology is the name of the game this year when it comes to Christmas gifts for Children.
This is according to Mark Wood, General Manager General Merchandise Division Buying Division at Pick n Pay, who says, similar to last year, the retailer is expecting sales of traditional toys to be flat this year as children migrate towards digital products.
“We are seeing again this year that the digital category of toy is growing at an exceptional rate. This is a continuing trend from last year but it seems to be growing at an even quicker rate this year and is likely to continue for some time,” he says.
In terms of individual brands that will be in high-demand this year, Woods predicts that the Leapfrog range of products, Nerf and Mattel brands are most likely to fly off the shelves this year. Other premium toy products like Furby, which also featured as a hot seller last year, and the Tekno range of toys are also like to be hot sellers in the festive season rush this year, says Wood.
Meanwhile, Wood says children’s educational ranges are still growing in popularity, particularly among the younger age groups and with particular focus on children’s laptops and electronic learning boards.
“And we cannot ignore the Loom bands that have taken the world by storm. These are on the top of the wish list of almost every child who does not already have one and we are expecting good sales in this line as well as it is a great Christmas gift,” say Wood.
Wood says another item expected to do very well this year is Robo Fish as well as Robo Mermaid, which is exclusive to Pick n Pay; as well as sports bikes and Disney Junior products.
Interestingly, Wood says while DVDs as a category is definitely in a downturn, sales of children’s DVD’s are expected to increase this year – in a continuum of last year’s trend in this category. “This is mainly due to the good-value special we have on children’s DVDs which offer 2 for one deals and other discounts,” says Wood.
These specials enable parents to build a library of DVD material to keep at home and do not have to rely on television channels to show age-appropriate material.
“Many parents do not want their young children to watch some of the shows that are aired on television but it is very difficult to control this with such a wide range of television channels available and with children being so tech-savvy these days. Therefore, by being able to be selective in terms of the DVDs that are kept at home, parents are able to reclaim some of the control,” explains Wood. Click here for more information on Pick n Pay
Since 2003, Pick n Pay School Club has devoted its time searching for young heroes in primary schools across South Africa through its Hero Awards initiative. Pick n Pay Hero Awards encourage youngsters to do good, help their friends and strive for excellence.
The 2015 Stellenbosch Wine Festival presented by Pick n Pay has shown exciting growth across the various platforms.
We can all use a little extra boost in the run-up to the holiday season, and Pick n Pay’s smart shopper reward card has just the way to help you stretch the festive fun a little further.
After opening its first store in Zambia in 2010, Pick n Pay will open its ninth store in Chingola today.
TymeBank nearly at 500,000 clients, ARC Investments says
10/06/2019 - 15:15
TymeBank is on track to have 500,000 clients within the next three weeks, according to parent company African Rainbow Capital Investments (ARC Investments).
Pick n Pay's Richard Brasher earned R32m in year to March
10/06/2019 - 13:09
Pick n Pay CEO Richard Brasher, the former head of Tesco in the UK who is credited with turning around the SA grocery retailer since joining in 2013, was paid R32m for the group’s 2019 financial year.
Pick n Pay commits to monthly beach clean-ups
06/06/2019 - 11:50
Pick n Pay has launched monthly People n Planet Beach Clean-Ups which will see the retailer partner with local organisations across the country to drive public awareness for plastic waste and action for responsible disposal.
Pick n Pay reduces its energy intensity by well over a third
05/06/2019 - 15:47
Since 2008 Pick n Pay has reduced its energy intensity per square metre by 36.9% through both improvements in technology and behavioural change. The group has also expanded its solar installations.
More grocery stores in malls on the cards
03/06/2019 - 16:08
The Competition Commission said that it wants Pick n Pay, Woolworths, Spar, and Shoprite to stop enforcing exclusivity clauses in shopping malls they do business to allow for more competition.

domain: news


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Revolut Could Garner $10bn Valuation From New Funding Drive
Revolut, one of the top neobanks in the UK, is planning a new funding drive scheduled for Q3, which hopes to raise its valuation to $10bn. Revolut’s founders, Nikolay Storonsky and Vlad Yatsenko, are seeking a collaboration with a US-based fintech investment bank, FT Partners, who will consult with them on the best strategy and organization for the upcoming drive.
Revolut’s founders could become multi-billionaires as a result of this funding drive. Their investors anticipate the possibilities for a speculative figure of $15bn, with $10bn being on the low end, despite the fact that the process hasn’t even begun yet.
UK Fintech Week
The upcoming UK Fintech Week features a speech by UK chancellor Rishi Sunak that will deliver much encouragement for fintech startups. This news ties into the theme for economic growth and change within the UK fintech market.
Revolut, a large company that employs 2,200 people, has had its share of problems, such as losing some of its executives and experiencing compliance issues. However, this round of funding and the anticipated valuation indicates that they have overcome the problems of the past and have a bright future ahead.
Despite the digital banking giant’s popularity, it did experience a huge loss due to the pandemic in August 2020 of £106.5m. There was an increase in customers and a revenue boost during the initial lockdown phase, and in November, it was able to break even for the first time in 2 years.
Growth of Revolut
Revolut was launched in July 2015, and now has over 15 million customers. Although it is based in the UK, Revolut is available in other countries, such as Ireland, Switzerland, Singapore, Australia, Canada, and the United States. Revolut’s last funding drive in January 2020 resulted in $500m in capital being raised and covered 35 countries. They continue to grow and grow.
The company is also in the process of applying for a UK banking license. While the company does not need immediate capital, the increased funding will help cover a larger expansion, allowing it to reach the position of a global bank worth approximately £250m.
Revolut is quickly becoming one of the UK’s most valuable fintech companies. However, it still has some way to go to catch up with Klarna, a Swedish fintech group, which holds the number one spot worth a staggering £31bn.
Despite the additional funding, Revolut won’t be launching an IPO until it at least hits a valuation of $20bn, Nikolay Storonsky says. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.
This latest round of funding may prove to be just what Revolut needs to become a one-stop shop as a financial institution. Currently offering money transfers and exchanges, overseas medical insurance, ATM withdrawals, access to cryptocurrencies, and 150 available currencies at the interbank exchange rate, and a banking license for UK deposits – the company looks certain to continue to attract more investors, raising its value even more in the years to come.


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BENTONVILLE, Ark. — Walmart officials said work on a new corporate campus is set to begin here in July. Walmart expects to relocate employees in stages, beginning next year and ending around 2024, when work on the company’s “dream home” is completed. First up is demolition, infrastructure and utility construction at the 350-acre site, which
BENTONVILLE, Ark. — Walmart on Thursday reported first quarter net income of $3.84 billion as revenue rose 1% to $123.9 billion. U.S. same-store sales increased 3.4% in the 13 weeks ended April 30. That was the best performance by that metric in nine years, the company said. Net sales in the United States increased 3.3%.
BENTONVILLE, Ark. — Walmart will begin offering free next-day delivery in select markets this week, with more markets to be added later this year. The move will raise the stakes in its battle with online retailer Amazon.com, which said earlier this month that next-day shipping will soon become standard for members of its Prime membership
BENTONVILLE, Ark. — Building on its commitment to save customers time and money, Walmart in a number of states recently unveiled store opening and remodeling plans, including innovative features that will support e-commerce growth. Walmart expects to spend an estimated $145 million this year in California through the opening and remodeling of 21 stores, as
BENTONVILLE, Ark. — Walmart said Wednesday that it will offer reusable shopping bags at the checkout counters of all its U.S. stores as part of its campaign to cut down on plastic waste. The company will introduce 10 new designs of reusable totes, which will be available for purchase for 98 cents apiece at the
BENTONVILLE, Ark. — Walmart on Tuesday invited companies with American-made products to pitch them at its sixth annual Made in the USA Open Call event, scheduled for June 18 and 19. The retail giant urged interested suppliers to apply by April 30 at Walmart-jump.com for a chance to get face-to-face pitch meeting with a Walmart buyer
BENTONVILLE, Ark. — Walmart chief technology officer Jeremy King is leaving the company later this month, according to an internal company memo. While the company seeks a successor, Walmart Labs senior vice president of customer technology Fiona Tan will take on an elevated role, serving as liaison between the company’s technology and other leadership functions.
BENTONVILLE, Ark. — Walmart is eliminating the “people greeter” position at its stores and replacing it with a “customer host” role with such additional duties as handling customer refunds, scanning receipts and checking shopping carts. The change raised concerns that many greeters with disabilities would lose their jobs. Customer hosts need to be able to
BENTONVILLE, Ark. — Walmart used its annual supplier forum here to set new goals for plastic waste reduction, and asked its suppliers to help it hit the targets. The company on Tuesday said the changes are expected to impact more than 30,000 items sold in its stores and online. Walmart noted that the new commitments
LOS ANGELES — Hello Bello, a collection of plant-derived baby necessities, was rolled out Monday exclusively at Walmart stores nationwide, on Walmart.com and HelloBello.com. Founded by actors and parents Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard, along with Sean Kane (co-chief executive officer), Jay McGraw (co-chief executive officer) and Jennifer Pullen (chief financial officer and chief operating officer), Hello
BENTONVILLE, Ark. — Walmart on Tuesday reported strong profit and revenue figures for the holiday quarter, citing strength across a range of product categories and a 43% surge in digital sales. Revenue was up 1.9% to $138.8 billion in the fiscal fourth quarter. Excluding currency fluctuations, year-on-year revenue growth was 4.2%. Walmart U.S. posted its
LAKE SUCCESS, N.Y. — Shoppers rate supermarkets highest in quality and variety compared with discounter rivals such as Aldi and Walmart. But the discounters score highest in terms of shopper perceptions of value. These and other ratings come courtesy of the “2019 U.S. Supermarket Experience Study,” released this week by the Retail Feedback Group, which


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For several years, the second-hand and resale market between individuals has exploded throughout the world, and particularly in France.
A trend set to develop?
To find out, we went to a DeLorean in 2050 where, that's it, the second hand has become a reflex.
Good news for the planet, even if some nostalgic for the new regret the time before.
September 23, 2050. For his 18th birthday, Dylan Miran, the eldest of the family, unboxes, moved, his birthday present: a pair of new shoes, the flashy white Adidas-3000.
"Your feet are no longer likely to grow," smiles his father, Fabien, just as moved.
You are an adult now, you deserve shoes of this standing.
This is the first time that Dylan's toes will know shoes never worn by anyone other than him.
Because in 2050, the second-hand market has established itself, to the point of representing as many sales as the new market.
Already, thirty years earlier, the second hand was booming, with a 12% increase in global turnover per year, according to a study carried out by the Boston Consulting Group and Vestiaire Collective.
Seven out of 10 French people bought second-hand clothes, and Vinted was, in 2021, the second favorite e-commerce site in the country.
Explosion of demand
“In 2050, the second hand will be a necessity, predicted Dominique Desjeux, an anthropologist specializing in consumption at the time*.
Not only does ecological sobriety require fewer new purchases from 2022, but the global middle class is exploding, especially in China and India.
And the offer will not be able to follow if it is based only on new products, unless we overexploit natural resources even more”.
Not really an expert in demography or macroeconomics, our friend Fabien Miran can only observe: “Supply has dried up compared to demand, and new products leave in a few days with each release.
In my childhood, Westerners were the only ones to snap up new products.
Now, everywhere in the globe, the credit card comes out.
Unearthing new has become a real business, testifies the father of the family: "I bought Adidas because you are 18 only once in your life, but you had to pay a high price, and I had to reserve the product several months in advance, by connecting to the online store six hours before the launch of the presale.
From now on, any new product looks like a limited edition of the time as there are potential buyers.
Purchasing power, again and again
Because beyond ecological awareness and the scarcity of raw materials, the second-hand boom is also explained by the lower cost of products already in use.
“Purchasing power has always been the main reason for the success of second-hand,” confirms Dominique Desjeux.
Cécile Désaunay, director of studies at Futuribles in 2022*, dates the revival of the second-hand market to the economic crisis of 2008: “With each crisis, the second hand increases.
This is why in 2022, all the conditions were met for the market to skyrocket again: energy crisis, economic crisis, ecological crisis…”
The Milan family doesn't really have a choice: impossible to pay 600 euros for each pair of shoes, you have to go through the occasion.
All is not perfect, of course: the washing machine, also used, pukes the laundry more than it washes it.
“We were perhaps a bit ambitious in taking a 2015 machine. A new one would never have done that.
But there are a lot of advantages on occasion, defends the mother, Noémie.
Look at my dress: it was customized by its previous owner, with hems here and there.
Each object becomes unique.
I was also able to find the coffee maker that my family had during my childhood!
» Cécile Désaunay agrees: « The second hand allows a much broader and vintage offer, acclaimed by consumers.
The objects are older, or cannot be found in stores,
which gives an unprecedented range of products.
Far from being despised, the second-hand market has become socially valued.
Several lives and possibility of resale
An enthusiasm shared by Dylan, who gets on his bike to show his new sneakers to his friends.
“We bought this bike in Amsterdam.
It has already rolled thousands of times before I took it, I find it cool an object that has a passive and several lives”.
And who is called to have others.
“Later, I would have an electric car.
Used, of course.
And as my bike will be less useful to me, I might as well make a few pennies with it, ”plans the young boy, fed up with buying and reselling.
The same goes for his shoes.
"I'm not fooled by their prices, reassures Fabien.
In three years, Dylan will be able to draw another 300 euros.
And inevitably, it increases the amount to be spent to have them.
This practice was already widespread in 2022, especially for cars, recalls Philippe Moati, co-founder of the Consumer Observatory*: “Some brands were known for their good resale capacity on occasion, such as BMWs, for example.
The price of a new vehicle was therefore more expensive, since it included the possibility of reselling it at a good price.
Sites listed the models most likely to be bought at a high price on occasion”.
Already then, in 2020, Europeans had bought three times as many used cars as new cars.
And how not to mention the case of smartphones?
One in five French people had already sold one in 2022. So in 2050, we sell second-hand second-hand second-hand m… In short, you get the idea.
The Iphone 30 bought 2,300 euros used by Fabien will still be worth 1,500 euros on resale.
The reappropriation of brands
And now, it is the brands themselves who manage the resale of their products.
Forget Vinted and others, neglected due to too many scams and the poor quality of certain products.
“Major brands are getting more and more into second-hand goods,” noted Philippe Moati thirty years ago.
It's too big a trend for them to ignore.
The deal is simple: the consumer brings back his object for a certain amount, and the store is responsible for reselling it.
With objects requiring an increasingly long lifespan, in order to serve several users over time, the brands have thus reviewed their specifications.
No more clothes whose fabric withers after five washes, the laptop HS in two years or the car that skates severely after 100,000 kilometers.
Philippe Moati already imagined it: "With the rise of the second hand, it is possible that we will see in the future (today, therefore, in 2050) the manufacture of new objects much more qualitative and resistant" .
What also show white paw in terms of sobriety and redeem an ecological image.
Far from the first smartphones, Fabien's Iphone 30 is guaranteed for twenty years.
The new, is it still hype?
The bike that Dylan rides is also a good example: it dates back to 2015, and shared the trips of an Argentinian, a Japanese and a Dutchman before belonging to the son Miran.
Hence the joke - common among parents - that Fabien can't help but make: “These days, real old age is when you're not as young as the objects you use.
After pedaling like a madman to join his friends, Dylan is bitter.
Far from being amazed by his flashy white Adidas 3000s, his friends sharply criticized him: “Why did you buy a new piece of clothing, aren't you well?
“, “Have you thought about the planet?
“, “How are you, the billionaire?
asks the pack.
A behavior imagined by Vincent Chabault, sociologist of distribution and the consumer society*: "The only way to see the second hand impose itself as the dominant market is a clear evolution of our value system, the only way for an ecological transition of consumption.
The new would therefore be discredited, stigmatized, seen as purely materialistic and harmful to the environment.
But of course, even in this new world of 2050, the new has its place and its advantages: "To feed the second hand, you necessarily need the first hand at some point", recalls, in evidence, the sociologist.
A necessity in which Fabien believes, when he is stuck in traffic jams to pick up his son in tears: “We are in 2050 and we still haven't invented the flying car!
That's the problem when all you do is buy old things: innovation is dead, all you do is recycle.
“What console Dylan a little and make him love his beautiful sneakers again.
Science fiction: We tested for you the holidays totally on reservation in 2050
Science fiction: We tested the summer holidays in 2050, in search of freshness in northern Europe
* As you will have understood, these experts were interviewed in 2022 as part of this paper.


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On the 26th of January 2019 an ultra-high profile Expo will take place at the Expo Center Sharja (Concord Tower) for 2 days at the Expo is based on thematic concepts fostering the future economy. The summit not only provide a platform to showcase innovative investment opportunities, but also shares the knowledge & experiences through the partners from across the globe.
The product "Wixi-Pods" is a state of the art wireless ear pods that can be connected via Bluetooth in a few seconds with any device accepting Bluetooth technology. The new technology of wireless headsets is here. You can now answer a phone call with almost no delay comparing to other wireless devices in the market.
We are so excited to announce that our Wixlar CEO is in collaboration with the organizers of the GBF Blockchain Summit in Dubai, and the organizers decided to give an invitation to all the Wixlar Community to enter the event for Free. All is needed to be done is to show the Invitation picture that is shown here. Global Blockchain Foundation [GBF] is an international Non-Profit social enterprise established with a global vision to build a sustainable blockchain community through international cooperation.
The World Digital Asset and Blockchian Congress organized by the DAIBC group, will take place in Dubai for 2 days summit, 16th and 17th of January 2019. Dubai turned to Blockchain technology in trying to encourage global investors and entrepreneurs. According to Khaleej Times, the UAE Government announced that over 50% of federal transactions would be powered by Blockchain technology by 2021.


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Around the same time that everyone was freaking out about Sabra recalling 30,000 cases of its Classic Hummus due to possible listeria contamination, Blue Bell Creameries also issued recalls for over 25 of its ice cream products due to additional listeria fears.
Unfortunately for everyone, the news gets worse: Blue Bell just issued a worldwide recall on ALL of its products due to listeria contamination fears.
Blue Bell CEO and President Paul Kruse issued an official statement about the expanded recall, in which he said:
“We’re committed to doing the 100 percent right thing, and the best way to do that is to take all of our products off the market until we are confident that they are all safe. At every step, we have made decisions in the best interest of our customers based on the evidence we had available at the time. We have brought in one of the world’s most respected food safety microbiologists to inspect our plants and systems to help us get to the bottom of this issue.
Through further internal testing, we learned today that Listeria monocytogenes was found in an additional half gallon of ice cream in our Brenham facility. While we initially believed this situation was isolated to one machine in one room, we now know that was wrong. We need to know more to be completely confident that our products are safe for our customers.”
Back in March, the initial limited recall occurred after Blue Bell products were linked to three deaths in Kansas. The LA Times reports that this newly-expanded recall came about due to “an enhanced sampling program” that revealed chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream produced on March 17th and March 27th also contained the deadly bacteria. Multiple positive tests for bacteria on multiple lines and at multiple plants sounds like a great reason to investigate to us.
As it turns out, the Blue Bell listeria outbreak dates to 2010, according to the Centers for Disease Control. CNN reports, “The agency connected patients from 2010-2015 to the current outbreak through comparisons to a database of bacteria DNA.” The news outlet spoke to a deputy director at the CDC, who said that there may be more cases of people sickened by listeria than the CDC knows about. “The ‘rough estimate’ is one more case exists for every case the CDC hears about,” according to the CDC. If that estimate is correct, it means around six people have died from listeria in Blue Bell and approximately 20 people have fallen sick. Those numbers are not small.
Blue Bell currently distributes products to retail and food service accounts all over the country and internationally. While you can’t find Blue Bell ice cream in retail stores in California, the LA Times reports that Outback Steakhouse restaurants throughout the country often use Blue Bell ice cream for their desserts. However, the chain told its franchises to switch to a different brand after the first listeria outbreak. One store manager told the LA Times that they hadn’t used Blue Bell products in about a month.
It’s been a bad month for food safety scares. Between these two listeria outbreaks in popular foods, last week’s 1,920 pound Beech-Nut baby food recall due to broken glass, and breaking news of an avian flu outbreak that will result in 5.3 million laying hens at an Iowa egg facility having to be destroyed, it’s enough to make anyone resort to drinking booze out of a fake baby strapped to your chest.
[via the LA Times]


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According to a thorough study by Joanna Stern and Nicole Nguyen in today’s Wall Street Journal, criminals have been found to spy on a victim’s iPhone password before snatching the phone in order to access the victim’s information and money.
All of the individuals who were interviewed stated that when they went out and about at bars as well as other public areas at night, their iPhones were taken.
Some witnesses claimed that people took their iPhones from their palms, whereas others claimed that they were physically abused and intimidated. The article contains precise examples of these events.
Although if Face Recognition or Fingerprint Scanner are turned on, a criminal with access to the victim’s iPhone’s password can quickly reset the victim’s Apple ID passcode through the App settings.
The thief then can deactivate Find My iPhone on the targeted system, prohibiting the owner from tracing its position or remotely deleting it via iCloud. Further to isolate the victim, the thief can erase other Apple phones from the account.
To stop a victim from obtaining their Apple ID restored, the thief also can alter the contact data and set up a restore point.
The issue is worsened by the fact that a person who knows the password to an iPhone can use Apple Pay, transfer Apple Cash, and access financial apps by using credentials saved in the iCloud Keychain.
Even if Face Recognition or Fingerprint Scanners are switched on for the iPhone, thieves can easily escape these security precautions and are then provided with the choice to enter the phone’s password.
The research states that in a few instances, attackers were able to access an Apple Card by discovering the victim’s final four Social Security numbers in photos kept in Google Drive or Photos apps.
The thief could further cause chaos by getting access to certain other passwords kept in iCloud Keychain since they may allow them entry to personal emails and other sensitive data. Overall, based on the research, thieves can “steal your entire digital life.”
Stern proposed in a tweet that Apple improve iOS security and offer additional ways to retrieve an Apple ID account.
In response to the report, an Apple spokesperson said “security researchers agree that iPhone is the most secure consumer mobile device, and we work tirelessly every day to protect all our users from new and emerging threats.”
“We sympathize with users who have had this experience and we take all attacks on our users very seriously, no matter how rare,” the spokesperson added.
“We will continue to advance the protections to help keep user accounts secure.” Apple did not provide any specific details about any next steps it might take to increase security.
In a tweet, Stern recommended that Apple add extra protections to iOS and introduce additional Apple ID account recovery options.
How to Stay Protected:
Stern instructed users to change from a four-digit password to an alphanumeric one on Twitter as it would be harder for criminals to eavesdrop. You can do this by choosing Face ID & Security code Edit Passcode in the App settings.
To avoid password theft, iPhone owners should enable Face Unlock or Fingerprint Sensor as frequently as possible while out in public. Individuals can place their hands over device screens to hide password input when typing the password is required.
Consider using a password manager like 1Password, which does not need the phone’s password, to save the password for a bank account.


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What do San Francisco and Wal-Mart have in common? A commitment to zero waste. The company joins a number of cities, including SF and Berkeley, around the state, country and world who are embracing a zero waste goal. The idea of zero waste is that idea of being able to create, use and recycling products without having to throw anything away. This long term goal by Wal-Mart is part of their "march towards sustainability" in hopes to reduce its solid waste in U.S. stores by 25 percent. Marc Gunther of Fortune Magazine reports on CNNMoney.com.
Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott has set a long-term goal of zero waste as part of the giant retailer's march towards sustainability. Over the next two years, Wal-Mart wants to reduce solid waste from its U.S. stores by 25 percent.
Scott's reasoning is simple: "If we had to throw it away, we had to buy it first. So we pay twice, once to get it, once to take it away." To Wal-Mart, less waste means lower costs.
The company's efforts have begun to bear fruit -- in part by actually recycling fruit.
What You can Do
- Read more about zero waste.
- Learn how to can make your life more zero waste friendly in CAW's Living Green.


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The lights are on
Both Microsoft and Sony still believe that their respective consoles have plenty of life left in them, but that doesn't mean they aren't actively planning for the future.
Develop has a report from a source that says that work on "several" PS4 projects has begun at unspecified Sony first-party studios. These aren't games yet, per se, because their concepts haven't been green-lit for full production. Particularly because the PS4's tech specs, etc. haven't been decided yet.
Develop has also heard from various sources that Microsoft plans to bring out the Xbox 360's successor, the so-called Xbox Next, in late 2013. The system would be fully debuted at the E3 convention that same year.
From everything we've heard on our end, these timetables seem very reasonable.
Email the author Matthew Kato, or follow on Twitter, and Game Informer.


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WASHINGTON—The federal government sent the first batch of $1,400 per-person direct deposits on Friday, a day after President Biden signed a law authorizing the third round of direct aid to households in the year since the coronavirus pandemic began.
Payments began reaching some bank accounts Friday, according to Current, a banking app that said it had started crediting thousands of customers’ accounts shortly after 11 a.m. Chime, another app, said Friday on Twitter it had put $600 million into accounts already.
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CJ Shortlisted for 12 Performance Marketing Awards in 2021
May 27, 2021
CJ has been shortlisted for 12 Performance Marketing Awards (PMAs) in 2021. The UK-based awards celebrate excellence within performance marketing.
Alongside key advertiser partners Sainsbury's Group, Domino's, AT&T, The North Face, Dell, Great Little Trading Company, Acorn TV, and Bose, CJ’s partnership with Cardlytics, Student Beans, and RevLifter have been commended in the shortlist.
“CJ being shortlisted for 11 Performance Marketing Awards is a result of our focus on innovation and evolution within the performance marketing industry,” explains Jules Bazley, Regional Vice President at CJ. “It has clearly been a period that the majority of us would like to put behind us, and I'm proud that CJ and our clients—advertisers, publishers, and agencies—have retained the future-focus throughout that has continued to drive performance.
"Covid-aside, the industry is evolving fast. Tracking cookies, for example, no longer provide complete, reliable, and necessary tracking coverage, while it's clear that consumer sensitivity surrounding privacy will continue to grow. Given the urgency of these pressures on the entirety of the performance marketing industry and beyond, at CJ we embarked on a tracking integrity initiative to help steer our clients and industry peers towards a future where performance partnership investments, and returns, are protected from current headwinds.
"Our tracking integrity initiative is just one example of CJ innovating and leading the industry forward. We have a lot in store for the next 12-months and beyond as hopefully, the world recovers from the pandemic, and these innovations are all underpinned by the incredible skill sets and knowledge that our teams have continued to put to use for the advertisers, publishers, and agencies that are on our network. Given the experience we've all had over the past 15-months, CJ featuring so strongly on this shortlist is a big testament to that and a huge reflection on the strong collaboration between CJ's teams and those of our clients."


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Massive Austin employer predicts permanent shift to work-from-home for most workers
Close to one-third of the employees at Round Rock-based Dell Technologies Inc., the second largest corporate employer in the Austin area, were already working remotely before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Now, Dell is poised to enlarge its permanent work-from-home workforce.
During a May 12 webinar, Michael Dell, founder, chairman, and CEO of his namesake company, “guaranteed” that a larger share of Dell Technologies’ workforce will work from home after the coronavirus outbreak subsides. The company employs about 13,000 people in the Austin area.
The CEO didn’t assign a percentage to the higher share of telecommuters envisioned by his company. Dell’s declaration was reported by the CRN tech news website.
The Associated Press quoted Jen Felch, Dell’s chief digital officer, as saying she expects more than 50 percent of the company’s 165,000 full-time employees around the world to be working from home after the pandemic lets up. That compares with 30 percent before the outbreak. During the current lockdown, more than 90 percent of Dell’s full-time employees are working from home.
“I think if you were skeptical about work from home, you probably aren’t now,” Dell said during the webinar, hosted by New York City-based Presidio Technology Partners LLC. “And I think we’ve all learned a lot in the last few months here. I think that will flow through and create opportunities.”
And Dell isn't alone. On May 12, tech giant Twitter announced that all of its workforce can choose whether to come back into the office when they reopen. If not, those employees may continue working from home forever.
FlexJobs, a website that promotes remote jobs, put Dell at No. 19 on its annual list of the top 100 remote-friendly companies. Dell has appeared on the list since 2014, “showing a sustained commitment to including remote work in their standard business practices,” FlexJobs says.
In January, Overheard on Conference Calls, a source of workplace reviews, advice, and insights, ranked Austin third on its list of the best U.S. cities for remote workers. Ranking factors included WiFi speeds, coworking spaces, and cost of living.
Before the pandemic, eight percent of the Austin-area workforce was telecommuting. A report from the National Bureau of Economic Research estimates 37 percent of U.S. jobs can be done entirely from home, with Austin tied for third place among U.S. metro areas with jobs allowing that capability (46 percent).
For the workforce at large, Dell believes remote work in Austin and elsewhere will become “a more permanent feature of the workplace.”
A survey by Dell rival IBM Corp., another major employer in Austin, shows many Americans are open to that “more permanent feature.” Nearly 40 percent of the adults surveyed think their employer should provide remote work options once operations return to normal, and 54 percent would like telework to become their primary way of working.
During the pandemic, more than half of American workers have had the opportunity to work from home.
In the webinar, Dell said a spillover benefit of the coronavirus-propelled shift to working from home is a big reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, since most of those emissions come from cars, CRN reported. Dell called that “a big silver lining.”


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The big picture: After being faced with fierce regulatory pushback and losing several backers, the Libra Association is exploring options to speed up the approval process. It may even reverse its course and launch several fiat-pegged cryptocurrencies instead of a singular digital token tied to multiple global currencies like it originally planned. That said, it looks like Libra could miss the planned launch date of June 2020.
Between the privacy scandals and antitrust scrutiny, Facebook is having a hard time convincing regulators that its Libra cryptocurrency is an idea worth putting into practice. Recently, several important backers of the project officially abandoned it, and others are planning their way out as well.
The Libra Association was founded to smooth out the regulatory approval process, but the widespread criticism around Facebook’s practices has posed a significant roadblock in the US, where the Trump administration considers Libra a problematic proposition. On the other side of the ocean, France has vowed to do everything in its power to block Libra in Europe, as it threatens the governments’ sovereignty over monetary policy – a sentiment echoed by Germany.
However, it appears that Facebook is open to alternative approaches if it means regulators will become more receptive. David Marcus, who is the head of the Libra project, said during a banking seminar that the group is even considering the idea of launching a series of stablecoins based on international currencies as opposed to a single, synthetic digital token that would be pegged on multiple currencies (50 percent US dollar, 18 percent euro, 14 percent Japanese yen, 11 percent British pound, and 7 percent Singapore dollar).
It’s worth noting the remaining members of the Libra Association would prefer not to go that route, but they don’t have many other options if they wish to speed up the approval process. This comes after regulators expressed concerns that Libra could disrupt the global financial system or facilitate money laundering and terrorism. They’re also worried that given Facebook’s privacy missteps, the initiative could turn into a new privacy nightmare for users.
Group of 20 financial overseers told Reuters that Facebook won’t be able to launch Libra until it can meet strict regulations. Marcus believes the cryptocurrency is still on track for the originally planned launch date, but that looks increasingly unlikely as we inch closer to it. Major payment firms like PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe have already dropped their support for Libra, which is not a good sign for a project with global ambitions.


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Amazon launches music streaming service in the UK.
As if the Amazon Prime package wasn’t tempting enough, Amazon have now launched a music streaming service that will be available to Its UK customers.
You can sign up to Amazon Prime for an annual subscription of £79, and for the price you get a range of services including on-demand video streaming, free next day delivery from Amazon’s online store and a kindle lending library.
The new prime music will give prime customers access to more than one million songs and around 500 specially created playlists. Prime music customers will also have access to the CD’s or MP3s they have bought at Amazon’s store.
Amazon said the US launch of Prime Music last year had been “incredibly successful”.
Amazon say: ‘If you were to take a lot of the other better-known streaming services out there like Rdio, Rhapsody, Deezer, Tidal and Google Play All Access, we have more active users in any given month than all those ones have combined. The only thing we can say with certainty is that we’re going to see the way people to listen to music change. Being the one place where you can make all those choices in the same place, you can buy CDs and vinyl, you can buy downloads or you can stream – I think that’s the best place to be right now.’
CLICK HERE to find out more about Prime Music!
CLICK HERE to sign up for a free 30-day trial for Amazon Prime.


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PRINCETON, NJ -- The election of Barack Obama as the next U.S. president has been accompanied by a significant increase in optimism about the economy among Democrats and independents, even while Republicans have become somewhat more negative.
Gallup Poll Daily tracking of Americans' economic outlook clearly demonstrates how economic perceptions are bound up with politics. Republicans had been much more positive about the direction of the economy than were either independents or Democrats in September, and, to a slightly lesser degree, from October through Election Day, Nov. 4. This relative difference in optimism reflects a normal pattern by which those who identify with the party in the White House are generally more positive than those who are "on the outs."
But views on the direction of the economy shifted virtually overnight in the days after the election.
Republicans' views didn't change a lot, shifting slightly more toward the negative. But independents and Democrats' views shifted significantly in a positive direction. Independents' net optimism (the percentage saying the economy is "getting better" minus the percentage saying it is "getting worse") improved from -74 for Oct. 1 through Nov. 4 to -54 in the five days after the election (Nov. 5-9), while Democrats' net optimism improved even more dramatically, from -82 prior to the election to -52 in the days afterward.
These changes are, of course, relative. A majority of independents and Democrats did not suddenly become convinced that the economy was getting better. But the percentage "getting better" among Democrats jumped from 6% and 8% in September and October, respectively, to 21% in the days after the election, while the percentage saying the economy was getting worse dropped from 91% and 90%, respectively, to 73%. Independents saw a similar, though less dramatic, change.
Looked at differently, while Republicans were more positive about the economy than were independents and Democrats during September and from Oct. 1 through the election, in the days after the election, the last two groups have suddenly become the more optimistic.
(Of interest is that there has been little significant change in the three partisan groups' perceptions of current economic conditions -- as opposed to changes in perceptions of the direction of the economy, as discussed above. The election of Obama, in other words, has had much less effect on views of where the economy stands today.)
The uptick in positive views on the direction of the economy among independents and Democrats has moved average consumer confidence in this country to a somewhat more positive level since the Nov. 4 election. Net optimism across the American population was -69 in September and -72 from Oct. 1 to Nov. 4, but is now down to a somewhat less negative -56.
This finding underscores the degree to which consumer confidence can depend on intangibles rather than on consumers' hard-nosed assessments of real economic data. Obama's election and the pending arrival of a Democrat in the White House have already caused a mild shift toward the positive in consumer confidence.
There are two things to watch going forward. One, will this uptick in consumer confidence be short-lived, or can Obama sustain the more positive outlook as he makes appointments and outlines his economic plans between now and Jan. 20? Second, will this increase in consumer confidence translate into actual behavior and will consumers begin to spend more, particularly in the all-important Christmas shopping season? Gallup will be monitoring and reporting on these questions over the next few weeks and months.
Results are based on telephone interviews with national adults, aged 18 and older, conducted as part of Gallup Poll Daily tracking, including 15,342 interviews conducted in September 2008; 17,585 interviews conducted between Oct. 1 and Nov. 4, 2008; and 2,530 interviews conducted Nov. 5-9, 2008. For results based on the sample of national adults interviewed in September and from Oct. 1-Nov. 4, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±1 percentage point. For results based on the sample of national adults interviewed Nov. 5-9, the maximum margin of sampling error is ±2 percentage points.
Interviews are conducted with respondents on land-line telephones (for respondents with a land-line telephone) and cellular phones (for respondents who are cell-phone only).
In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.


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Mani Brothers Real Estate Group | October 2, 2019
West Hollywood, CA — October 2, 2019 — Location! Location! Location! Mani Brothers Real Estate Group announces today the purchase of Travaasa Hāna, the beautiful 72-acre oceanfront resort boasting 75 private bungalows situated on Maui’s east coast, marking it the newest addition to the group’s expanding portfolio of luxury and lifestyle hospitality brands. “As we get to know the community of Hāna and the team at the hotel, we will continue to offer the authentic, upscale Hawaiian experience that Travaasa is known for,” said Gregory Day, President of Hospitality at Mani Brothers Real Estate Group. “The dedicated service vis...
Why Hotels Are Focused on All-Inclusive Resorts
Thinking of Switching Your Hotel’s PMS? The Grass Isn’t Always Greener and Here’s the How, When, What, Who, and Why
Agilysys to Host Inspire 2022 in Las Vegas Feb. 28-Mar. 2, 2022, With Inspiration4 Mission Commander Jared Isaacman as Keynote Speaker
Anna Maria Beach Resort Deploys BeyondTV by HIS for the Industry’s Latest Capabilities in Achieving Ultimate Guestroom Entertainment Personalization
As the first news aggregate for the hotel industry, Hotel-Online is the industry’s must-read daily news source for everything hotel curated for busy professionals. Sign up today for industry news delivered to your inbox.


text: Blu's unlocked Android phones are back on Amazon after a "false alarm," the company told Engadget. The online retail titan pulled down all Blu models from its website a couple of days ago. It cited "security concerns" after security firm Kryptowire reported that the manufacturer is still collecting user data and sending it to a server in China. Blu admitted last year that the third-party software it used to push software updates collected unauthorized messages, call logs and contacts. However, it refuted the new report that its phones still collect sensitive information.


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Despite considerable progress in the last few years, forced labor remains a problem in many industries. And the garment and apparel sector is no exception. TriplePundit sat down with Kilian Moote of KnowTheChain.org to find out more about why forced labor persists in the industry and what can be done.
This category is about corporate social responsibility (CSR), a form of corporate self-regulation integrated into a business model. The goal of CSR is to embrace responsibility for the company’s actions and encourage a positive impact through its activities on the environment, consumers, employees, communities, stakeholders and all other members of the public sphere.
McDonald’s caught heat for its decision to once again source beef from some Amazon-based ranches in Brazil. The reversal, coming 27 years after the fast food giant said no to Amazon beef, deserves a closer look.
The $1.5 billion Massachusetts-based travel company, which was one of the first adopters of user-generated content, plans to pull tickets for hundreds of animal attractions from its site.
Over the last 20 years, sustainability standards have been used successfully across many industries. But now comes the hard part. All sustainability tools, including certification, need to engage late adopters, says Lara Koritzke of ISEAL Alliance.
An up-to-date and top-tier communications strategy is absolutely crucial for the success of your cause marketing campaign. The folks at @Pay compiled five tips to help you reach that level.
Levi’s plans to expand its worker well-being initiatives to factories across its entire supply chain, reaching 300,000 workers by 2025. The apparel giant says it hopes to inspire other brands within the global garment industry to follow suit.
Ben & Jerry’s latest cause is full alignment with the Black Lives Matter movement, notwithstanding the calls for a boycott due to what opponents say is a “dangerous” campaign.
As baby boomer business owners retire and want to sell, there is a unique opportunity for a massive transition of privately-held companies to employee ownership, said Marjorie Kelly, senior fellow and executive vice president of the Democracy Collaborative.
Last week, six large companies announced they would work together to educate consumers about paper and wood products certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. But is this campaign really about impact or public relations?
What responsibility do the world’s fossil fuel giants bear for climate change? And what role should they play now, given that the Paris climate accord has committed nearly 200 nations to move to a low-carbon future? The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) recently compiled a scorecard to help answer these questions.
Earlier this year, two mobile telephone systems launched in Bangladesh that now allow workers to anonymously report signs of human trafficking, delayed wages and child labor. They did, and the results are unsettling.
On Monday, the Swiss Coalition for Corporate Justice delivered a petition with 120,000 signatures to the federal government that supports a constitutional amendment requiring companies to be as compliant on human rights and environmental matters abroad as they would be at home.


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10 Crazy Truths About Facebook’s New Currency Announcement
Facebook announced a big plan Tuesday: it’s launching a cryptocurrency called Libra. The idea has been hinted at for some time, and it reportedly has its origins in a brainstorm on a beach in the Dominican Republic.
Here’s Facebook’s summary in two sentences:
“Libra is a global, digitally native, reserve-backed cryptocurrency built on the foundation of blockchain technology. People will be able to send, receive, spend, and secure their money, enabling a more inclusive global financial system.”
Unpack that, and combine it with the other news that rolled out in the last 24 hours about Facebook’s planned offering, and I think there are at least 10 reasons why this whole thing falls into the category of “just so crazy, it might work.”
1. It just might work — because of Facebook.
Facebook has 2.3 billion users around the world, all of whom will ultimately face inducements to engage with — and trust — Libra. That means that almost whatever else happens with Libra, the sheer scale of the potential user base means it’s probably the effort most likely to succeed at making digital currency a broadly accepted thing in the West.
2. It just might work — in spite of Facebook.
That said, public trust in Facebook has nosedived over the last 18 months. So, to start, Facebook is trying to get around this by announcing that the cryptocurrency will be overseen indirectly — by a subsidiary called Calibra, instead of by Facebok itself — and that Facebook will control only one of the board seats overseeing it.
3. It’s backed by real assets.
Libra is reportedly going ot be backed by real assets: a “basket of currencies” that should remove some of the volatility for which bitcoin and other crypto is known from the picture. (Last month, the WSJ noted FB was been working on a “stablecoin” backed by government currencies,” and this seems to be a key point.)
4. It has big supporters.
Out of the gate, Facebook announced it’s working on Libra with big financial players like Mastercard, Paypal, Spotify, Andreessen Horowitz, and Uber. In fact, what’s surprising to me is that Facebook positions this at all as its own offering, versus saying that is’ just something it’s doing along with a coterie of fellow corporate partners.
5. It’s designed to help the unbanked.
At the outset, when it launches for real next year supposedly, one of the first targets will be the millions of people who live in places with less-than-stable banking systems. In short, if your local national government can’t provide a stable currency, Facebook will.
6. It’s also big for immigrants.
There are millions of immigrants around the world who send money to family in their home countries each month. The transaction costs on these transfers add up to $25 billion a year, according to Facebook.
7. Users could get paid.
I don’t see this idea in the documents Facebook revealed Tuesday, but there’s been speculation that consumers could earn Facebook’s cybercoin by doing things like engaging with Facebook ads.
8. Merchants will get paid.
Talk about cyclical, but the other side of this is that Facebook is considering letting users then “click ads to buy a product and pay with Facebook tokens, which the retailer could then recycle to pay for more ads,” the WSJ reported recently.
9. There are big privacy issues.
It’s not just a matter of trusting Facebook to keep information private and secure. It’s a matter of trusting really any giant, public company that answers first to shareholders when it comes to currency.
10. There’s a good chance your business will have to accept it.
If this starts to gain any kind of critical mass, that businesses of all sizes will start to accept it for payment. Just as vendors are basically forced to accept credit cards now, businesses like yours might not have any choice to accept Libra as payment.
In fact, if this works, Facebook could become the first tech company to transcend the corporate world, and take over functions that previously only governments could hope to handle. Against all odds, crypto might one day be the single thing for which Facebook is best remembered.
Article written by: Bill Murphy Jr.


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The race to claim space on another new Internet top-level domain is heating up.
On Wednesday, overseers of the soon-to-to-be-launched Web suffix dot-info opened the domain to companies hoping to extend their brand names into a new branch of cyberspace.
Between now and Aug. 27, anyone who owns a registered trademark can pay to reserve a dot-info domain through an exclusive procedure intended to prevent new Web addresses from falling prey to cybersquatters.
But for those who don't act fast, dot-info administrators say chances of getting a sought-after site may be slim. That's because trademark owners who file within the next week will have the first shot at staking a legal claim to a new Web address.
"We expect a lot of names to actually be claimed in the first week," said Roland LaPlante, chief marketing officer for Afilias, a consortium of 18 individual registrars that is running the dot-info domain.
Over the next month, Afilias expects to receive close to half a million registrations from trademark owners, with the largest influx coming in the next seven days.
Once those are processed, Afilias will open up registration of dot-info domains to the general public. It plans to take the domain live on Sept. 19.
If all goes according to schedule, dot-info will be the first of seven new domains authorized last year by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to be up and running. The next one – dot-biz – is set go live Oct. 1. The other five – dot-name, dot-pro, dot-aero, dot-museum and dot-coop – have not set launch dates yet.
Of the seven ICANN-approved domains, dot-info is unique in that it is the only one intended for anyone to use. All of the other domains were created for a particular type of user or purpose. (Dot-biz, for example, is meant for business use, dot-pro for professionals, dot-museum for museums and so on.)
Although there are no restrictions on what a dot-info site may be used for, Afilias is pitching the domain as better suited for so-called informational sites than for commercial ones. LaPlante uses the example of a pharmaceutical company that is registering dot-info addresses for each of its drugs, and using the sites to provide information about their use and side effects.
Even so, there's no guarantee that a dot-info site will in fact be informative. There's also nothing stopping a company from simply taking the same information that's on its existing dot-com or dot-net site and copying it onto a dot-info extension.
There's also no guarantee that dot-info will live up to another one of its creators' greatest hopes: to be a bit more international than the dot-com suffix. One of the chief criticisms of the dot-com domain is that it is dominated by sites in the United States, since the United States had a large population of Internet users before most other countries.
"A lot of areas of the world never really had a fair crack at dot-com, so it stands to reason that they would want a crack at new domains," said Shonna Keogan, spokeswoman for Register.com, one of 37 registrars authorized by Afilias to accept applications for dot-info addresses.
Keogan said there's no early indication that registrants for the new domains are "more international" than the rest of their clientele. However, she believes this could change when the domains go live.
After all, someone will have to pay for all those new domains on sale. LaPlante said Afilias expects to register about 3 million dot-info websites within the next year.
But as early requests for new domains pour in, many domain-name policy wonks remain critical of the manner in which Afilias is carrying out the dot-info rollout.
A particular lightning bolt for debate among the domain name crowd is the "Sunrise Period," the procedure Afilias is using to give trademark owners first rights to claim a domain.
As part of the month-long Sunrise Period, which starts Wednesday, registrants can file domain-name applications for names exactly matching any national trademark owned since before last October.
When more than one applicant has a trademark claim for the same domain (say for something like "United.info"), Afilias plans to pick a winner randomly, starting with those who filed in the first week of the Sunrise Period. If someone thinks the chosen registrant doesn't have a valid trademark, they can pay to challenge them through an arbitration proceeding.
Domain requests from those without trademarks don't get processed until September, which critics say is problematic.
"Sunrise is not complicated, but it certainly seems unfair," said Ellen Rony, co-author of The Domain Name Handbook, who questions the idea of giving owners of trademarks exclusive registration privileges.
Rony said she might be less critical if the process was reserved for trademarks that are essentially made-up words. The problem, however, is dealing with trademarks like "Apple" or "Windows", which aren't just corporate monikers.
"Many trademarks were common dictionary words long before they were given new meaning in commerce," she said.


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Pakistani Twitter users are curious over the country’s first Islamic mattress which is introduced by a company on its website. They are wondering about the features that make a mattress Islamic and appealing for the probably Muslim customers since they seem to be the target customers for this exclusive product.
The mattress is making people raise so many questions; Like what makes it appropriate for the muslim users, whether doing un-Islamic things on it is allowed or not, what if a non-muslim wants to avail this?
Features of the Islamic Mattress
The logic behind this another addition to a Muslim lifestyle product is also interesting. The company claims that mattress is for those who sleep on their back or on their right side which is also a way of sleeping that Islam has taught. The statement also narrates the health benefit of the Islamic sleeping style. Due to this way of sleeping there is no pressure on the heart due to the stomach and intestines so it can properly perform its functions.
The explanation doesn’t seem satisfactory enough. The Islamic mattress might be comfortable and supportive for people with different body types but it is beyond comprehensible how a mattress can exclusively support the people sleeping on their back and right side; those who have manufactured this can better provide answers.
What Is So Complicated about This Mattress
Well, the debate surrounding this daily use product has expanded different spheres. People are asking if this Islamic mattress is for all Muslims from sects like Deobandi, Shia, Brelivi, etc. or for specific sects; since the different schools of thought in Islam don’t seem to agree on one way.
Using the Name of Islam to Sell a Product?
There is no lack of Shariah-compliant goods and services in markets; these include daily use commodities to financial products. So, there are chances that companies may sell products in the name of Islam to cash on Muslim customers.
As some social media users think that exploitation of religion for the promotion of businesses and services is not a new thing.
Folks on social media have a say on any subject according to what they feel. As far as the performance of the mattress is concerned then only those who have used it by sleeping on their backs and right sides can tell better. The worrisome thing is what if users hesitate from giving negative reviews despite a bad experience only because the mattress has pre-fix ‘Islamic’ attached to it?


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APUS Group, the world’s fastest growing mobile internet services today announced their plans to foray into India by setting up an operations centre, Global R&D centre and a technical support centre in the country. The initiative is expected to create around 350-500 jobs in the next three years. The Indian centres will be at the forefront of the R&D and Technical support operations for the APUS Group globally.
APUS has over 25 million users in India and believes the move will help achieve the target of growing the user base to 80 million in India in the next 12 months. Currently, more than 90% of APUS launcher users are overseas, and the app is available in 25 different languages. The developer is also looking at providing more localized service and experience to Indian users and augment India specific content to appeal the target audience.
Speaking on the India strategy, Mr Li Tao, Founder & CEO APUS Group said, “As an emerging country, India’s market potential is great, adding that smartphone usage increasing rapidly with only 10 percent of Indian population using them. We had similar situation in China three to five years ago. India represents a crucial market for us and we are confident that our initiatives will only strengthen our relationship with the country. We aim to have 80 million APUS users in India by end of 2016. We are looking to make India our anchor centre for Asia and further strengthen our presence as we evaluate more partnership opportunities with Indian firms.”
APUS user system is the world’s third largest smartphone system; and it is the smallest, fastest, simplest user system in the world, include user interface, system management, communication and social management, information management, application management, etc. Company’s mission is to streamline the Android user experience, and giving any device a sleek and beautiful interface and ensuring a quality performance.
Founded in June 2014 by APUS Group CEO Li Tao, who has 16 years’ experience in the China Internet market, APUS Group’s mission is to deliver the world’s most intuitive user experience to Android smartphone users worldwide. A top 10 developer on Google Play, APUS Group develops critical system apps that collectively embody the APUS User System, the world’s fastest, smallest, most simple user system for Android users, including APUS Launcher, APUS Search, APUS Browser, APUS Headlines, APUS Discovery, APUS Know and APUS Message Center. The APUS User System totals 250 million Android users worldwide.
Learn more about APUS Group at https://apusapps.com.


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MILAN – The British Coffee Association has announced that it will be holding a free deep-dive webinar entitled ‘Mobilising science for the long-term future of coffee – who will tackle coffee’s equivalent of COVID?’. The webinar, which is free to attend, will take place at 1pm GMT on Thursday 21st January, with insights being led by guest speaker Jennifer “Vern” Long, CEO of World Coffee Research.
Coffee companies depend on farmers in primarily low- and middle-income countries to produce consistent, quality coffee.
Farmers, in turn, depend on the research capacity of public research institutes in their countries to generate new technologies to combat a myriad of on-going challenges, notably pests, disease, and climate change.
While the world mobilised science to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic and benefited from strong scientific research capacity to bring us a vaccine faster than any time in history, agricultural research capacity in low and middle income countries is simply not adequately resourced for the current challenges–much less the kind of pandemic that ended the Sri Lankan coffee industry in the 1880s.
If the industry wants to continue procuring coffee and meet growing consumer demand, who is going to produce that technology? What is the industry’s role in this? If the industry doesn’t find the solution, who will?
You can register to attend the webinar of The British Coffee Association here.
A full Questions and Answers session will follow the presentation.


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Article By: Kebadiretse Rasekhutla
Botswana has secured a lucrative deal to export beef to China.
This development comes closely on the heels of the country's first-ever beef shipment to the United Arab Emirates, further diversifying its export portfolio.
Assistant Minister of Agriculture Molebatsi Molebatsi announced the closed deal at the ministry's Training Symposium, revealing that a contract signing ceremony will soon take place, officially opening access to the Chinese market.
The agreement is expected to be a game-changer for the Botswana economy.
Meanwhile, President Mokgweetsi Masisi attributed the rising demand for Botswana beef in new export markets to the country's unwavering commitment to quality and sustainability.
According to Botswana Meat Commission's (BMC) Public Relations Manager, Shadi Linchwe, the recent successes in securing export deals with China and the UAE highlight the effectiveness of the BMC Meriting Strategy 2022-2025.


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Jaguar Land Rover hires PR firm to boost ‘British’ statusNovember 8th, 2008 - 12:42 pm ICT by IANS
London, Nov 8 (IANS) The Tata Group owned Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) is hiring a prominent British public relations firm to boost its corporate credentials.The agency, Portland PR, has initially been hired till next spring. It will focus on issues surrounding the recent change of ownership to the Tatas, the company’s investment in green technology and its strategy to get through the economic downturn.
Poprtland’s hiring coincides with the Indian company’s plan to regain Jaguar’s “iconic British brand” status.
JLR wants to position itself as a “blue-chip British corporate”, on a par with retailer Marks & Spencer.
The company’s communications and public affairs director Simon Warr told PR Week, the leading British weekly magazine for public relations practitioners: “We’re the largest car company in Britain and so are a major corporate player. We need to start mixing with other British major corporates. We should be up there with Marks & Spencer.”
He said that the firm had traditionally enjoyed a good relationship with motoring correspondents, but that its presence on the business pages was limited.
The drive to raise its corporate profile comes at a tough time for auto manufacturers. British car sales have fallen heavily in recent months, with Land Rover particularly hard hit and further job cuts expected at the firm.
JLR is also understood to be seeking a specialist public affairs agency, as previous agency Lexington Communications will continue to be used by the firm’s former owner Ford.


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The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said Automated Teller Machine (ATM) from selected banks across the country recorded transactions valued at N39.15 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2018.
The bureau stated this in its “Selected Banking Sector Data for Fourth Quarter, 2018”, posted on its website on Wednesday.
It said that the amount was derived from 616,528,697 transactions recorded as data on “Electronic Payment Channels in the Nigeria Banking Sector” during the period.
The bureau added that NIBSS Instant Payments (NIP) transactions dominated the volume of transactions recorded in the quarter.
According to the report, 228, 209, 423 NIP transactions valued at N23.57 trillion were recorded in the quarter under review.
In terms of credit to private sector by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) during the period, the report said the total value of credit allocated by the bank was N15.13 trillion.
It said Oil and Gas and Manufacturing sectors got credit allocation of N3.55 trillion and N2.23 trillion to record the highest allocation in the quarter.
The report also stated that the number of staff in the banking sector increased by 1.80 per cent quarter-on-quarter, from 102,821 in the third quarter to 104,669 in the period.
Email us @ info[at]nigerians.news


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MithunJan 16, 2014 09:41:59 IST
While 6 inches for Samsung (the Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3), Sony (the Z Ultra), HTC (the HTC One Max) and others may be still considered a smartphone or that ugly portmanteau, 'phablet'. For HP it seems a smart calling device at 6 inches or more is, thankfully, still a tablet, even if it is a cringeworthy 'Voice Tablet'.
But everything is downhill after that.
The California based tech giant's latest foray into the segment that it abandoned in 2011 is a 6-inch and a 7-inch tablet with calling capabilities.
But here's the zinger, these tablets are being released first in India and are designed to cater to this market. HP has bet on India reviving its smartphone fortunes and claims to have done a numbers of surveys and market studies over the last year that have led it to believe that India is the perfect market for its monster twins.
Well, that isn't too surprising as India's love for monstrously huge smartphones is well documented. According to IDC, 'phablets' made up 30 percent of all smartphone shipments in India in the 2nd quarter of 2013.
While a Freudian analysis of the country's fixation with Godzilla sized phones is still to surface, it can be assumed, for now, that a 'phablet' is looked upon as a bargain buy, filling in the need for both a phone and a tablet. This theory could be supported empirically by the other dual-purpose household electronics that have sold like gangbusters in India in the past, the two-in-one and the VCR.
An irony that HP will have to confront though is that 'phablets' in India have been eating into the tablet market. Of course, here when one says tablet, one refers to only those that have no voice calling capability. So despite the company's attempt to brand them as tablets HP's twin towers could theoretically sneak past the tablet-phablet divide into the consumers rather large pockets.
Coming back to the devices, the two tablets called Slate VoiceTabs, that will make anyone holding them up against their head look like an idiot, run on Android and are powered by the now ho-hum quad-core processor.
You can also expect 16 GB of onboard storage which can be expanded to 32 GB, two cameras (front and back) and the other run-of-the-mill features on these devices.
It is also reported that these baby ogres will not have a full HD screen, which is a pity, but a small 'yay' for battery savings.
Having said that it can be assumed, from what has been revealed so far, that there will be nothing overtly cool or funky about these devices and with no WebOS novelty in terms of software the Slate VoiceTabs may struggle to be heard in a crowd that already has Samsung, Asus, Sony, Micromax and many others clamouring for the consumer's attention and with significantly better specs at their disposal.
So, although they didn't get a stick to a gunfight, we'd rather bet our money on the English soldiers winning off the last ball in Lagaan than on HP getting a noticeable market share with these devices.
Find latest and upcoming tech gadgets online on Tech2 Gadgets. Get technology news, gadgets reviews & ratings. Popular gadgets including laptop, tablet and mobile specifications, features, prices, comparison.


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President Joe Biden has been denounced by the Job Creators Network on yet another big Times Square billboard, where thousands of onlookers can see the president enjoying ice cream next to statistics revealing the household grocery budget-busting increase in prices for eggs, milk, and sugar.
The billboard reads, “HERE’S THE SCOOP: Bidenflation is a recipe for disaster.”. “C’mon Joe, the numbers don’t lie.”
View this post on Instagram
The billboard emphasizes the two main concerns on voters’ minds: inflation and the economy, with just three weeks until the midterm elections.
In a Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted last week, a staggering 93% of registered voters responded that rising inflation and the weak economy are their top two concerns.
INFLATION NATION: 93% of registered voters are concerned about soaring inflation and the poor economy with the midterm election less than three weeks away. https://t.co/cdwdvSPZdz
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) October 21, 2022
“The Biden administration is delusional when it comes to the economy. For him to claim the US economy is ‘strong as hell’ is a slap in the face to every family struggling to keep food on the table while inflation eats up an increasing amount of their income.” said Alfredo Ortiz, president and chief executive officer of JCN.
“I’m sure the small business owner who scooped that ice-cream cone could have given him an earful about their struggles with supply chains and inflation. Bidenflation is giving this economy a painful ice cream headache.”


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Nothing's in my cart
5 minutes read
HTC Vive PRO HMD will ship on April 5th and come with six-month Viveport Subscription
HTC Vive™ today announced that the HTC Vive Pro™ Head Mounted Display (HMD) will be available for $799 with global pre-orders starting now. The company also announced a $100 price reduction for the current Vive full kit, bringing it down to $499. All Vive Pro HMDs purchased by June 3rd, which will begin shipping on April 5th, will come with a free six-month trial to Viveport Subscription, where consumers can choose up to 5 titles per month from the more than 400 titles available.
“With the Vive Pro we are delivering the best quality display and visual experience to the most discerning VR enthusiasts. Our goal has always been to offer the most premium VR platform available and to drive adoption for VR,” said Daniel O’Brien, HTC Vive General Manager, US. “By lowering the price of the current Vive, we are making VR more accessible while expanding the potential market for developers. Whether you’re a VR enthusiast or new to the platform, there’s never been a better time to join the most complete VR platform available.”
Vive Pro HMD pre-orders begin today on Vive.com and other Vive retailers with units shipping globally on April 5th. Current Vive owners can upgrade their headset to Vive Pro for the best display, audio, and comfort in the industry. The Vive Pro comes with dual-OLED displays, making for a crisper image resolution of 2880 x 1600 combined, a 78% increase in resolution over the current Vive HMD. In addition to visuals, Vive Pro also features integrated, high-performance headphones with a built-in amplifier that creates a heightened sense of presence and sound through noise cancellation capabilities. These improved graphics and audio allow for users to experience VR with enhanced clarity, making it the most realistic and immersive VR experience on the market today.
In addition, the Vive Pro has been rebuilt to maximize comfort for the most demanding VR users. The Vive Pro features a redesigned head-strap that balances the weight of the headset more evenly and features easy simple adjustment buttons for Vive users with glasses.
The Vive Pro works with both SteamVR Tracking 1.0 and 2.0, meaning existing Vive customers can upgrade the headset only and continue to use current generation controllers and base stations.
With more than 3,000 titles available, Vive continues to be the platform of choice for developers and consumers alike. Operating in over 60 countries, HTC’s content platform Viveport brings premium experiences in entertainment, education, arcade, arts & culture, and enterprise to a global audience. In addition, Viveport Subscription allows consumers to choose from over 400 pieces of content from a highly-curated offering, giving consumers the opportunity to discover the best VR content available.
Vive Pro purchases made before June 3rd come with a free six-month trial of Viveport Subscription where owners will get the chance to play 30 titles with their new HMD. Pro purchases made after the first 60 days of orders will come with a free two-month trial. The price of Viveport Subscription will increase to $8.99 on March 22nd. Current Subscribers and those who sign up before the increase takes effect will be locked in at the $6.99 price point through at least the end of the year.


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You’ve heard the news: Uber’s flying cars could arrive by 2020. How about electric aeroplanes, drones that can transport people, or the return of supersonic jets? This might seem like something straight out of science fiction but the future of air travel that we’ve all dreamed about is closer than you might think.
Using Quid, we analysed what people are publishing online about the future of air travel and below is a summary of what we found.
The network above contains 3,521 news and blogs articles about aeroplane startups. Each node represents an article or blog, while the coloured clusters signify unique themes. Links between each node represent semantic similarity between the articles. The stronger the similarity, the closer they get pulled in together.
Five topics stood out, mainly because they generated significant news volume but also because these specific topics are a dramatic departure from aeroplane travel as we know it today. The topics include supersonic flight, vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) technology, electric aeroplanes, drones, and transformative technology. In the image below, you can see where each topic is located and how they clustered together in different quadrants on the network.
The “supersonic” cluster makes up 4.4% of the network, where the main focus is on companies developing a faster, more cost-efficient version of the Concorde jet. In this cluster, Wonderful Engineering explains that typical aeroplanes cruise the skies at around 570 mph and must avoid faster speeds since the associated high temperatures can strip off layers of material from metal.
A new type of protective ceramic coating called reactive melt infiltration was recently invented by a research team at The University of Manchester, which has opened the doors for startups to begin development.
With this new technology, the return of supersonic airlines is a reality. But which companies are leading the charge in this space? To get a better understanding, we switched over to a bar chart view filtered by company mentions.
We found that Boom Technology, a Denver startup who is aiming to create a 55 passenger civilian supersonic transport aircraft has the most mentions. Virgin Galactic has the second most mentions and we learned that Richard Branson is buying the first 10 Boom Jets with the goal of using them to commercially fly from New York to London in under 3 hours at prices that beat current business class rates.
Other companies with a high number of article mentions include Spike Aerospace, another player in the supersonic business jet market; and Stratasys, a company that Boom partnered with to use a 3D printing technology, known as fused deposition modelling, for production grade aircraft parts.
We then looked at companies focused on vertical take-off and landing technology.
A number of articles discussed helicopter prototypes that use VTOL technology- potentially foreshadowing a new era of public transportation. Uber Elevate, which has its own cluster, is based on a white paper that Uber published outlining a proposal for commercialising VTOL public air transportation. The company is not planning to build its concept but instead is trying to organise and promote development from other startups. Their goal is to have flying cars in circulation by the year 2020.
Uber isn’t the only one interested in this technology. Google co-founder Larry Page has reportedly spent $100 million on flying-car startups, including Zee.Aero, whose flying car was reportedly spotted in Hollister in October. Zee.Aero is a division of Kitty Hawk – an electric flying vehicle that is designed to fly and land over water. Kitty Hawk has announced plans to start sales within the year.
Other noteworthy companies involved in VTOL include:
• German-based Lilium Jet, which has successfully test-flown the world’s first electric VTOL two-seater jet. The company just raised $90 million and is developing a five-seater to be used by ride-hailing services.
• Airbus is also developing two vehicles: a single-person VTOL under its Silicon Valley arm A³, as part of its Project Vahana, and a flying taxi system called CityAirbus, which is a helicopter hybrid and would resemble a small drone.
• Slovakia-based AeroMobil unveiled its latest model flying car at an auto show in Monaco and started accepting pre-orders. It will start shipping in 2020 for around $1 million.
• Terrafugia made its first public test flight of a two-seater car-aeroplane hybrid at the Experimental Aircraft Association’s annual AirVenture convention in Wisconsin in 2013.
• XTI Aircraft recently announced that it has sold 60 pre-orders of its new six-seater VTOL aircraft, the TriFan 600. The company claims the hybrid aircraft will make helicopters obsolete by reaching speeds of 345 mph and a range of up 1,200 miles. It plans to be in full production by 2020.
Electric commercial aircraft
We found 217 articles concerning electric airline startups and major financial backing announcements in the space. Estimates say that this new type of aviation will cut travel times by 40% and fares by up to 80%.
Two companies in this space stood out with the most mentions. The Mountain View, California startup, Wright Electric, is a company working on building 150-seat electric planes designed for faster and more efficient travel. It has designed its plane to have modular battery packs for quick swap, using the same cargo container that is in a regular aeroplane. The low-cost airline EasyJet has expressed interested in making the plane its fifth private jet.
The other is the Boeing and JetBlue-backed Zunum Aero startup, which is working on developing the first hybrid electric commercial passenger aircraft to fuel a regional travel revival. Zunum Aero is developing 10 to 50-seat aircraft with the hopes of bringing “a new golden era” of fast and affordable electric travel.
Its chief executive, Ashish Kumar, says: “The idea is to create aircraft that fit in dormant routes. These are routes that have fallen into disuse due to trends that favour larger aircraft serving bigger airports. Currently, only 2% of the US’s more than 5,000 airports account for 96% of air traffic; an indication that the bigger airports are crowded, making service at the smaller ones costly, if it even exists.”
Drones were another big part of the conversation, comprising three clusters accounting for around 9% of the network. We recently looked at how drones are evolving through our company’s dataset. We found new product developments, go-to market strategies, and uncovered that there are more to drones than just the consumer models we hear about. While we touched upon this last part in our previous analysis, in this network we found several companies, concepts, and strategies adapting drones for other purposes.
• Iris Automation raised $1.5 million in Series-A funding to develop collision avoidance systems for drones.
• Airobotics, a startup building autonomous drones for the enterprise sector, just received $32.5m in funding to expand business into defence and homeland security.
Airbus is not only involved with VTOL, it recently announced its commercial drone service startup Aerial, which aims to bring aerospace engineering, satellite imagery and drone services together to target industries including agriculture, infrastructure, energy, and more.
Among others is Zipline, a California-based startup that uses drones to deliver medical equipment. Understanding that more than two billion people lack adequate access to essential medical products, the company has based its service around a small robot aeroplane that can carry the desired goods, conquering challenging terrains and gaps in infrastructure. Its fixed-wing design can fly further, faster, and in more inclement weather conditions than a quadcopter.
Go Unmanned is offering the ability to capture 3D models of worksites through the use of drones. Dr James Robbins, professor and ornamental crop specialist at the University of Arkansas, says: “This 3D model can be used as a sales tool (proof of concept), for materials management when determining quantity of materials needed to build hills or contours in the land, create rock walls or envision installation of different trees, bushes, flowers and other landscape elements.”
SkySkopes is now the first North Dakotan unmanned aircraft systems company to receive permission from the Federal Aviation Administration to fly at night under the agency’s recently implemented unmanned aircraft system rules. They are in cooperation with Xcel Energy as part of a research project that is exploring the use of drones to assess storm damage.
Amazon is, of course, mentioned for its recent demonstration of Amazon Prime Air delivery. Google Alphabet has also started testing an early version of a technology for managing unmanned drone delivery systems.
As the regulatory system starts to fall into place (of note, California recently banned marijuana delivery by drones), it seems that drone delivery methods will be commercialised in the near future, especially with these two massive corporations leading the charge.
Technology transforming airline travel
In the lower quadrant of the network, we can see a focus on technology with clusters like Machine Learning, Energy, and Displays and Manuals. These clusters are focused on implementing new programming, reducing costs, creating thinner and more durable materials, and improving energy consumption though advances in batteries.


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A Gatineau medical marijuana producer says its processed products have been certified as kosher, just in time for one of the High Holidays on the Jewish calendar.
Percentage of international delegates to downtown convention facility on the rise thanks to aggressive marketing efforts with Ottawa Tourism, CEO says
OBJ columnist Bruce Firestone recently sat down with the man he believes will have a bigger impact on the city’s future growth than anyone else: Ottawa’s new GM of planning and economic development…
M. Sullivan & Son, NAV Canada among those winning government work in the week of Aug. 28 - Sept. 3
Peter Herrndorf, the man credited with transforming Ottawa’s National Arts Centre both physically and artistically, will step down from his role as president and CEO next year.
Marketing your business can feel like a full-time job – a Constant Contact survey reports that small-business owners spend over 20 hours a week in that one area.
Cleanup of Inspiration Village, which has been up in the ByWard Market for about four months, is nearly complete, and not every businesses owner in the area agrees this attraction really was a bene
Mike Wilson, a Leafs superfan whose basement was filled with more than 1,700 collectibles, has sold most of his massive collection to the Canadian Museum of History in Ottawa.
Most entrepreneurs use email and an electronic calendar to stay organized.
Since migrating north from the United States about a decade ago, Black Friday has become hugely popular with Canadian shoppers.