Category: Business/Technology

Courtenay Sheffield, a University of Wisconsin-Madison marketing student, is leading a Swiss Colony campaign to stop fruitcake abuse and instead promote fruitcake whenever possible. Swiss Colony has even set up a Web site, ilovefruitcake.com.

Students and anti-sweatshop activists celebrated University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor John Wiley’s embrace of much of their plan to reduce sweatshop labor.

But they said they would proceed carefully to make sure the university and its 150 clothing licensees proceed in good faith to help the workers who make UW logo apparel receive better pay and working conditions.

Henry Sanders Jr. is a free man again, so to speak.
After two years of seemingly nonstop work as vice president of the Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce, he stepped down earlier this month, just as the chamber prepares for its fight against the proposed paid sick-leave law.

The Manager’s Workshop, created in the mid-1990s by University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business professor Randall Dunham, is used by numerous business schools across North America.

Luther’s Blues may be reborn as a Latin dance club – with free salsa lessons on Saturdays – if brothers Javier and Martin Palacios can convince the city that their business plan is sound.

….The brothers say they have gotten positive feedback from meetings they’ve had with local officials. Javier Palacios joined the Dane County Tavern League in March to network and seek advice about the venture.

But two UW administrators who have influence with the alcohol license committee say they are taking a wait-and-see attitude. They both are concerned that the venue, no matter who runs it, is too large to operate in the middle of campus.

The University of Wisconsin has tied Harvard as the most common alma mater for top executives, according to Spencer Stuart, an executive search firm.

The Fitchburg Technology Campus has broken ground on a second building to house early-stage companies that will have Imago Scientific Instruments as its anchor tenant – the second local nanotechnology company to move onto the campus.

The fast-growing Imago Scientific â�� a UW-Madison spinoff company â��� has won national attention for a microscope that can provide 3-D images of samples down to the level of individual atoms.

There will be more space for young technology companies at the MGE Innovation Center at University Research Park. A $1 million remodeling project will add 20 suites to the center, at 510 Charmany Drive, in space being vacated by Epic Systems. The Innovation Center currently houses 34 companies and demand for incubator space continues to grow.

A search engine for presentations recorded and archived on Sonic’s technology, Mediasite.com debuted Thursday, featuring talks on a range of subjects. They include UW-Madison Medical School professor Dennis Maki discussing infectious diseases such as avian flu and former presidential candidate John Kerry speaking to a rally in Madison last year.

Colleges created a record number of start-up companies based on the inventions of their professors and students in the 2004 fiscal year, and they collected more than $1-billion in revenues from licenses on a host of new drugs, agricultural products, high-tech components, and other breakthrough technologies, according to a report released in November.

During Wednesday’s PSC meeting, Commissioner Mark Meyer praised MGE for keeping operational costs down. Almost all of the rate increase will go to pay for fuel and the new power plant on the UW-Madison campus.

American Family Mutual Insurance Co. has been hit with a nearly $3 million verdict in a case involving a former University of Colorado professor and UW-Madison graduate who was seriously injured in a car crash.

A jury in Boulder, Colo., granted the award to Dominic Peressini. It’s believed to be the largest bad-faith verdict ever against an auto insurer over lost wages in Colorado.

It’s nice to see the Republican-run state Legislature focusing on the economy with the same fervor it so often wastes on the divisive issues of “God, guns and gays.”
Sen. Ted Kanavas, R-Brookfield, along with top Republicans in both houses, last week unveiled a wide- ranging “Invest Wisconsin” plan that deserves close attention.

When Winslow Sargeant’s term ended at the National Science Foundation this year, he could have gone anywhere.

He chose Madison. And that says a lot, said John Neis, managing partner at Venture Investors LLC, where Sargeant is becoming the fifth partner.

Sargeant, who earned his doctorate in computer and electrical engineering at UW-Madison, is a Dot-Com Bubble survivor with a wealth of hard-earned entrepreneurial experience and a Rolodex bulging with prime contacts from three years with the NSF’s Small Business Innovation Research program.

When he moves to Madison from Washington, D.C., next May, Winslow Sargeant will become a big fish in a relatively small pond.

As a well-to-do African-American with a prestigious and influential position, the newest partner at Venture Investors LLC inevitably will be looked upon to take a leadership role in the community.

Dear Editor: Your article Friday on the massive pro-divestment-from-Israel outcry at the recent UW investment hearings gives exactly the same amount of space to the (very few) people with the (very bad) anti-divestment arguments as to the (very many) people with the (very good) pro-divestment arguments.

During the South Africa divestment campaign, when a huge crowd favored divestment and only a few opposed it, would The Capital Times have given equal space to the tiny pro-apartheid minority? If not, why is The Capital Times, a supposedly left-leaning paper, shilling for the tiny pro-Israeli-apartheid minority who attended the hearings?….

Kevin Barrett, coordinator, Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth, Madison

ââ?¬Â¢ Kudos to recent UW-Madison grad Anand Chhatpar, just named one of Business Week Online’s “25 Top Entrepreneurs under 25.” Chhatpar is founder and CEO of BrainReactions, an innovation consulting firm based here. He’s originally from Bombay, India, and came to Madison in fall 2001 to study chemical engineering.

The company that sped up pulls of draft beer at sports stadiums around the country with its Turbo Tap nozzle is bringing the technology to rec rooms across America.

“It brings the project back to our roots,” said inventor Matthew Younkle, the company’s president and chief technology officer, who came up with the idea with partner Kristofer Dressler when they were students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

A study that will be released by Milwaukee Women inc today suggests that women have made little or no progress in the executive suites and boardrooms of Wisconsin’s biggest companies in the last two years.

It was prepared by Van Do and Belinda Bao, both graduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison business school.

How do you get into the business of dairy farming?

That question has been asked for a hundred years. And I remember the answers given by my ag economics professor many decades ago when I was a freshman at the University of Wisconsin in the College of Agriculture.

….Craig Carncross, a 1999 UW-Madison dairy science graduate, made up his mind to become a dairy farmer and is doing it as part of a family corporation.

The Fitchburg Technology Campus has broken ground on a second building to house early stage companies that will have Imago Scientific Instruments as its anchor tenant – the second local nanotechnology company to move onto the campus.

As Wisconsin slides toward its worst year in a decade for attracting venture capital, the importance of the State Investment Board’s role in helping to fill the state’s venture void looms large.
The board, which manages more than $70 billion in government employee pension money and other state assets, started talking earlier this fall about increasing the amount it devotes to venture capital the money that bankrolls entrepreneurs as they build fledgling businesses.

In a novel attempt to retain educated professionals and support local entrepreneurship, the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire Foundation is launching an angel fund that will invest in companies that are founded by recent graduates and located in the Chippewa Valley.

Quotes Charles Hoslet, managing director of corporate relations at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

It’s a vexing problem for Wisconsin’s economy: Researchers at UW-Madison turn out top technology, in fields ranging from stem cells to electronics, but entrepreneurs often have trouble finding the money to take those innovations to market.

But a new effort to organize angels, wealthy investors in early-stage technology companies, is providing some answers to that conundrum, said Lorrie Keating Heinemann, the state’s top banking and securities regulator.

Wisconsin also should better market its human capital, which is highly educated and skilled, especially around UW-Madison.