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Product gives Thomson better hand: New micro-camcorder boosts prospects for unit French parent wants to deal

Thomson’s latest product is a lot like the French company’s presence in Carmel, these days. Small, and getting ever smaller. With half the number of employees it had in the late-1990s, Thomson’s Americas unit here is about to be downsized yet again from its current 900-some jobs-but not before enjoying a bit of a surprise hit in a palm-size, under-$130 camcorder. The success of the Small Wonder camera-and a slicker new version due out this fall-could help frame the future…

BEHIND THE NEWS GREG ANDREWS gandrews@ibj.com: With Finish Line stumbling, analysts weigh sale, LBO

Finish Line Inc.’s fortunes have dimmed so dramatically in recent months that analysts are raising a range of ideas that once seemed farfetched to boost the slumping stock. Among them: taking the company private through a leveraged buyout, or selling it to a larger retailer. The athletic-shoe industry is abuzz that an LBO for Finish Line’s struggling rival, New York-based Foot Locker Inc., is already afoot. That company last month hired a financial adviser, just weeks after Women’s Wear Daily…

Local gallery’s goal is to make Picasso more ‘affordable’: Prints from Modern Masters can fetch up to $30,000

Chris Mallon carefully removed a protective cover to unveil an original print of the Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup label famously depicted by artist Andy Warhol. The piece, known as a silk-screen print, is available at Mallon’s Editions Limited Gallery of Fine Art in Broad Ripple, unframed, for a mere $23,000. So is Marc Chagall’s “Violinist With A Rooster” lithograph that sells for $14,200. While the prices might seem excessive to some, they’re quite affordable when compared to actual paintings done…

New Ambassadair owner drops dues, brings back charters

The new owner of Ambassadair travel club has eliminated membership fees and will add a flurry of charter flights in January under a plan to revive an Indianapolis institution that shuttled thousands of Hoosiers around the globe for 34 years.

Museums trip out over loyal donors: Cultural organizations are offering travel opportunities to generous patrons to inform them, gain more support

With a new director in place and a $74 million renovation and expansion complete, the next step for the Indianapolis Museum of Art is courting donors to financially back the enlarged operations. Those who pledge at least $2,500 to the IMA are invited to accompany, at their own expense, IMA Director Maxwell Anderson and his wife on a cruise in the fall of 2007 to Spain, France and Italy. The excursion coincides with the opening next year of the museum’s…

Cummins learned lessons after getting battered by recession

Little more than six months after Theodore M. “Tim” Solso took the CEO reins at Columbus, Ind.-based Cummins Inc. from James Henderson in January 2000, Cummins was slammed by “the deepest and longest recession in the history of the company.” Those days are ancient history.

ECONOMIC ANALYSIS: Productivity is going up, but what’s the cause?

It’s all quite clear as economists draw it up on their blackboards. Growth in productivity-defined as the output produced per person-hour of labor-is what ultimately allows us all to enjoy a higher standard of living. When we collectively produce more, we earn more. Or, to put it another way, we can afford to pay ourselves more without provoking inflation. And since the midpoint of the last decade, the measures of economy-wide productivity produced by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics…

NOTIONS: Five years after 9/11, will we let freedom ring?

On the first anniversary of 9/11, I knew just how Americans should mark the occasion. “Hang ten. Hang it up. Hang out. Paint a portrait. Paint the town. Watch your weight. Let it be. Say hey. Strike back. Roll a strike. Spare a dime. Rock the boat. Do time. Take a shot. Do your best. Give back. Give a damn. Turn a cheek. Heal the sick. Feed the poor. Hold hands. Make love. Love life. Hug kids. Wave flags. Play…

EYE ON THE PIE: Property taxes: Indiana’s soap opera

Hoosier propertytax laws are so bad, they should be totally revised, but not discarded. As it stands, there is little economic sense in how those laws are written or applied. We have homeowners ranked against renters, plus residential, commercial, industrial and agricultural interests are in perpetual conflict. The only beneficiaries of this ceaseless conflict are the party automatons in the General Assembly. Let’s consider the simplest case. Mr. Gold lives in a house with an assessed value of $150,000. Mr….

Fox Sports Midwest rebrands, unveils new plan: Local broadcasters will feel heat if strategy works

Fox Sports Midwest-which is in the process of rebranding to Fox Sports Indiana in this market-is serving notice it intends to be the television network of choice when it comes to local sports. Shortly after wrestling part of the Indiana Pacers broadcast rights from WTTV-TV Channel 4, officials for St. Louis-based Fox Sports Midwest unveiled a plan that entails significant upgrades to its local sports programming, including adding professional, collegiate and high school sports of all sorts as well as…

masthead:

E S TA B L I S H E D 1 9 8 0 L O C A L LY OW N E D 41 E. WASHINGTON STREET, SUITE 200 INDIANAPOLIS, IN 46204-3592 317-634-6200 Fax: 317-263-5060 Editorial Fax: 317-263-5406 E-mail address: info-ibj@ibj.comWeb site address: www.ibj.com PRESIDENT AND PUBLISHER Chris Katterjohn VICE PRESIDENT/ SALES & OPERATIONS Greg Morris EDITORIAL Editor – Tom Harton Managing Editor – Greg Andrews Associate Editor – Tawn Parent Focus Editor – Jeff Newman Enterprise Editor – Andrea…

Mayor says condo plan for arena site needs more retail

When Mayor Bart Peterson announced Aug. 31 that the efforts of a partnership to build condominium towers on the former Market Square Arena site had failed, he gave his administration 60 days to put together another deal. Peterson’s vision: Hold onto the concept of a residential tower, but add “significantly more retail.”

PAN founder focuses on another IT venture: BubbleUp aims to standardize musicians’ Web sites

It didn’t take David Pfenninger long to get back into the game. Just months after selling Carmel-based Internet-test provider Performance Assessment Network Inc. in April for $75 million to St. Louis-based TALX Corp., Pfenninger is betting on another Internet venture: an online music marketing and management startup called BubbleUp. Pfenninger initially remained part of PAN’s local management team after the acquisition, but stepped down this summer, retaining a role as a consultant. “I thought it was time to make a…

BRIAN WILLIAMS Commentary: Downtown needs a grand, artful facility

On Sept. 1, 45 competitors from nearly 20 countries arrived for the seventh quadrennial International Violin Competition of Indianapolis. Through the middle of September at venues around the city, these talented men and women will compete for one of the richest artistic prizes in the world. In a few short months, the American Pianists Association will undertake its biennial competition for the Cole Porter Jazz Fellowship. Again, a cadre of some of the instrument’s most accomplished American performers will come…

BULLS & BEARS: A study in how options can erode shareholder value

Business schools use case studies to teach students realworld business decision-making. Likewise, investors can study the historical Securities and Exchange Commission filings of public companies, see how past business decisions played out in the stock market, and perhaps learn a few lessons. I came across an interesting case the other day, a small company called Intervideo Inc. that had just announced it was being acquired. The more I looked at the Fremont, Calif.-based company, the more it struck me as…

SPORTS: Are security searches all we retained from 9/11?

I pulled up the column I wrote five years ago this week. It was published five days after 9/11. This is how it began: “When you have a tragedy of such immense proportions as the one visited on America last week, it renders the world of sport to the status of the trivial, the trite, the absolutely, totally inconsequential.” But I also expressed the belief that it would be sport that would aid us in our recovery. “Yet as meaningless…

Home builders facing tougher-than-expected downturn: Local building permits down 18 percent from last year

Alan Goldsticker, president of Ryland Homes of Indiana, said builders have a mound, not a mountain, confronting them. The walls might not be caving in on the Indianapolis housing market, but the current softening in home building is expected to continue for months. That’s the prospectus from Steve Lains, CEO of the Builders Association of Greater Indianapolis. While the outlook is not as bad as it could be, it is worse than most experts expected entering 2006. BAGI predicted then…

RETURN ON TECHNOLOGY: Laptop deal-breaker depends on reliability

I’ve been scanning laptop buyer’s guides lately, and I have to say that many magazine test labs seem utterly out of touch with business users. They extol the big screens, fast multimedia and other capabilities business users just don’t care about. They act as if weight is a big factor for those of us who have to cart our hightech symbiotes around with us, but laptops long ago dropped below that critical barrier. Hewlett-Packard had a little notebook unit in…

Firm sees opportunity where banks see risk: Oak Street has big hopes for insurance agency loans

Bankers like to see plenty of collateral when they underwrite loans. Insurance agents don’t have many hard assets to show them. Free toasters won’t smooth over this credit dilemma. But the leaders of the Carmel-based Oak Street companies boast they can. And they’re poised to capitalize with a fast-growing specialty lending firm. “The first line of our vision statement says we’ll build a long-term sustainable financial-services firm,” said Oak Street Chairman Steven Alonso. “It’s our strategy to diversify.” Founded in…