New digital signs announcing bus arrival times will be installed at Logan International Airport this fall as part of the airport’s attempts to encourage passengers to use high-occupancy vehicles. The Massachusetts Port Authority on Thursday approved a partial $4 million budget for signs announcing buses that will take passengers to the Blue Line MBTA station, Logan Express satellite parking lots, and the new rental car facility opening in the fall. Signs showing arrival times for the Silver Line were installed last year. The $4 million will also cover signs directing passengers to high-occupancy ground transportation at all four terminals to better accommodate these vehicles. Massport has been promoting high-occupancy vehicle usage to help deal with the parking crunch at the airport, where lots could exceed capacity 40 days this year. Wegmans, a New York-based supermarket chain, is delaying the opening of a store planned for the Chestnut Hill neighborhood of Newton from the fall to the spring of 2014, a spokeswoman for the chain said Thursday. Construction delays and the juggling of other projects are the reasons for the delay, said the spokeswoman, Jo Natale. Family-owned Wegmans currently operates 81 stores in six states and is opening new stores at a rate of two or three a year, Natale said. Fall openings are planned for a new store in suburban Washington, D.C., and another in suburban Philadelphia. Plans for opening a Wegmans in Newton were first disclosed in late 2011, a few months after the chain opened its first (and still only) Massachusetts store in Northborough. Walmart, the giant retail chain, held a ceremony earlier this week to mark the installation of a new solar array system at its Walpole store. Eight of the 50 Walmarts in Massachusetts now have such systems, a company spokesman said. The other local Walmarts with solar arrays are in Springfield, Ware, Lunenberg, Northbridge, Halifax, Abington, and Tewksbury, he said. Collectively, the installations at those eight Walmarts are projected to provide 2.8 million kilowatt hours of energy annually, saving about 1,484 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually – roughly the equivalent of taking 309 cars off the road, Walmart said. The eight Massachusetts array were installed by Greenskies Renewable Energy LLC of Connecticut. The inverter for the solar PV array is from Massachusetts-based Solectria Renewables. A Boston development team filed plans Thursday to build two, 400-foot towers in front of the TD Garden with 300,000 square feet of stores and restaurants, 500 residences, office space and a 200-room hotel. The top prize of the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition was awarded to 3dim, a startup whose 3D sensing technology allows users to control the latest generation of smartphones through gestures, MIT said Thursday. In choosing 3dim for the Robert P. Goldberg $100,000 grand prize, judges looked at proposals from seven finalists winnowed from a field of 215 applicants. 3dim cofounder Andrea Colaço offered this description of the start-up’s technology: “The need for specialized hardware and high power has, to date, prevented 3D gesture capture in mobile devices, leaving users to poke at their small screens. Unlike existing 3D sensing methods which require high power illumination, sophisticated sensors, and complex processing, the 3dim solution exploits the compressibility of 3D signals to reduce power, cost, and complexity of 3D acquisition.” Dynamics Research Corp., an Andover company that provides technology and management consulting services to government agencies, said Thursday that a subsidiary has been awarded a federal contract extension from the US Department of Veterans Affairs. The company, which refers to itself as DRC, won a contract from the Department of Veterans Affairs in 2010, and now the department has decided to extend that contract through next year, DRC said. Over a five-year period, that arrangement could have a total contract value to DRC of $125.5 million. The contract covers work DRC is doing on behalf of the department’s Veterans Relationship Management program, which is a multi-year initiative for delivering fast, accurate, and easily accessible health care information and benefits to veterans, service members, and eligible beneficiaries The Massachusetts unemployment rate remained unchanged at 6.4 percent in April, but the state’s economy shed 1,400 jobs, the Massachusetts Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development reported Thursday. April was the third consecutive month that the Massachusetts economy has lost jobs, and April numbers add to evidence that the state economy is slowing after a period of strong growth. The current national unemployment rate is 7.5 percent. April’s job losses in Massachusetts were spread across a variety of sectors. Leisure and hospitality, financial services, construction, and government were among the sectors of the Bay State economy that lost jobs last month. | | |
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