Compendium Blogwareâ??s announcement today that it raised $1.6 million in private funding is another brick in
the wall as the Indianapolis area and the state continue their push to build a culture of entrepreneurship.
Investors are showing more interest…
The phrase “Let’s do lunch” has taken on a new meaning over the past five years in the Indiana life sciences community. Since 2003, a who’s who of the biotechnology, medical device, pharmaceutical and other fields have gathered at the downtown law offices of Barnes & Thornburg LLP to meet and eat at the Life Sciences Lunch Series. A collaborative effort of the law firm and the Indiana Health Industry Forum, the monthly event provides a networking and education platform…
Is Google making us stupid? No, but it’s contributing to the problem. It’s well-known that, although we shape our tools, we are in turn shaped by them. Look no further than the hollowed-out cities of the middle 20th century, when the automobile gave us the mobility to build bedroom suburbs. Mobility killed off neighborhood social clubs, eliminated multi-generational families living together, and stretched town infrastructure like roads and sewers to the breaking point. Sleepy outlying school systems suddenly had both…
In a “supersized” culture, where bigger is better, nanotechnology is redefining the meaning of slimming down. Today, all of our favorite songs fit on a business card-size machine instead of on hundreds of CDs. Loud, clunky medical equipment has been with sleek quiet machinery that produces results in seconds. And, scientists and engineers in various industries are working with the smallest particles to build some of the most complex structures. The term “nanotechnology” refers to materials and devices that function…
INDIANAPOLIS B sJOuRNAL 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.comChris Katterjohn VICE PRESIDENT/ SALES & OPERATIONS Greg Morris EDITORIAL Editor – Tom Harton Managing Editor – Greg Andrews Associate Editors – Andrea Muirragui Davis Tawn Parent Focus Editor – Jeff Newman Online…
Locally based Powerway Inc. is scrambling to shrink its work force and remake its business plan after the firm’s most lucrative
customer–the ailing automaker Chrysler LLC–said it will no longer use Powerway software or mandate its use among the company’s
hundreds of suppliers. Powerway laid off 14 employees and slashed salaries for many who remain after it learned of Chrysler’s
plans on June 6.
For the past 10-plus years, central Indiana has benefitted from growth in the distribution/logistics industry with hundreds of new jobs and millions of square feet of new facilities. We’ve seen massive facilities go up one right after another, often topping the square footage of our tallest downtown skyscrapers. In the past eight years alone, the square footage of central Indiana distribution centers has more than doubled from 20 million square feet to 51 million square feet. And we’re not just…
ANDERSON – Along Interstate 69, in a new industrial building with side-windows covered in paper to foil prying eyes, Altair Nanotechnologies is perfecting a ceramic oxide battery with three times the power of a conventional lithium battery. Up the road, Comfort Motion Technologies has written software to make a car’s power seat jiggle ever so subtly, to keep one’s back, butt and thighs comfortable on long drives. And everybody is keeping an eye on Pete Bitar, whose green laser device…
Congress is set to begin a debate on regulation designed to halt global warming. The question is whether and how we might limit greenhouse gases. Costs and benefits will be the central issue. So, despite what many would wish, this is primarily an economic debate. Below are the issues in a nutshell. There is strong scientific evidence that the Earth’s temperature is warming. Even so, there are a significant number of serious climate scientists who doubt this. And there is…
In 2000, gasoline cost 99 cents a gallon, you could barely give recyclable plastic away and the idea of manufacturers “going green” was a pioneering thought. Allegiant Global started that same year as Heritage Interactive Services, with one client and little market awareness of what industrial recycling and reuse initiatives meant. Heritage Interactive was started by principals of locally based Heritage Environmental Services, which was-and still is-involved in more traditional waste-disposal services. When one of Heritage Environmental’s clients, Michigan-based Lear…
The other morning I woke up feeling like the bottom of a garbage collector’s shoe. It must have been due to my wireless signal. Maybe I’m “allergic” to my WiFi, like some people in Santa Fe, N.M., say they are. Television station KOB had the story May 20. And yep, there are just three letters in the call sign. The station goes back to 1948. Apparently, so do the sensibilities of some of the residents of Santa Fe. A group…
State and local leaders are turning up the amp on the importance of higher education, but they’re also trying to tune students into the message that being college-educated doesn’t have to mean spending four years at a university. In recent weeks, both Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard and Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels have loudly proclaimed the state’s need for more workers with twoyear degrees. While government officials have long said the state needs a more educated work force to attract business,…
A new Web site developed locally and designed to attract youngsters to careers in the life sciences sector now shares something in common with the wildly popular Club Penguin site. The Indianapolis Private Industry Council, with assistance from locally based Creative Street Media Group, created BioWorksU.com. And while more educational and likely more appealing to a larger age group than Club Penguin, the two were among recent Webby Awards finalists. Called the “Oscars of the Internet” by The New York…
Indiana University and the city of Bloomington are at odds over how best to commercialize the university’s discoveries–or,
more specifically, where to commercialize them.
Mitch Roob oversees a state agency with a $6.5 billion budget and thousands of employees who deliver a range of services to
more than a million Hoosiers. And he’d be lost without his BlackBerry. He is just one of the many Indianapolis professionals
who use enhanced mobile devices, or smartphones, to keep tabs on their work and increase their productivity away from the
office.
If you’re a parent of a pre-teen, you’ll both understand and appreciate the following sentiment: I’m really sick of Radio Disney. This is why I normally listen to talk radio. But there are times when I can’t take any more of the right (Boortz, Beck, etc.) the left (NPR) or the egos (you know who you are.) That’s when I found Pandora and now that I’ve opened the box, I just can’t see going back. First, a little background. Way…
If you were to approach your boss about taking a prolonged leave of absence-say, for seven weeks-would he or she respond with understanding, or amusement? One particular boss, Matt Haab, founder of the south-side financial planning firm Veros Partners, was faced with that very decision. He chose to let wealth management adviser Charles Miller take his family on a lengthy trip to Honduras earlier this year. Miller, 46, joined Veros in 2004 and had been to the Central American country…
I’ve seen a lot of computer oddities in my career, but a piece of sushi sticking out of the computer case was admittedly a new one. And then there was the squid, the Lego block, and the strawberry. They were all flash drives from a Japanese company called SolidAlliance (www.solidalliance.com). You can go to its site, but don’t expect to read it unless you’re fluent in Kanji. “Flash drive” is just one name for the little devices you plug into…
For Dr. Tim Story, frustration was the mother of invention. The Carmel internist didn’t like the cost or complexity of the electronic medical record systems he had seen. So he created his own. And now he’s trying to sell it to other doctors. “I wanted an EMR that I could use, that I could understand,” said Story, 55, who also chairs the largest group of physicians at Clarian North Medical Center. Story is by no means alone. Hundreds of doctors…
A renewed interest in nuclear energy coming at the same time aging workers are leaving the industry has created the elements for a shortage of nuclear engineers. Nuclear energy as an electricity source is enjoying a resurgence nearly 30 years after a reactor meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania severely tarnished the industry’s image. Escalating oil prices and stiffening environmental regulations on coal-based systems are helping to spawn the rebirth of nuclear technology. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in…
