Category: Business/Technology

One of the most popular hangout spots on the UW-Madison campus will be getting a makeover.

Midwestern entrepreneurs and innovators are gathering in Madison for a 10-day event called the Forward Technology Festival.

The festival?s signature event – the Forward Technology Conference – will be held Wednesday at Memorial Union on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. Experts will discuss starting companies, acquiring customers, raising capital and other topics.

A bogus $100 bill was passed at a UW-Madison campus store late last month, with the bill accepted by a new clerk. The fraud was reported July 30 at Walgreens, 311 East Campus Mall, according to a news release from the Madison Police Department. The manager of the store found the counterfeit bill while counting money from the cash box.

During the M.B.A. gold rush of the past three decades, the Yale School of Management accomplished the unthinkable. As the number of prospective business-school candidates shot up to more than 750,000 a year and tuition payments cleared $100,000, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago and other schools hired star faculty members, built gleaming buildings, established themselves as global brands and brought in tens and sometimes hundreds of millions in profits to their universities each year. Meanwhile, Yale somehow lost money.

Successful entrepreneurs don?t usually start their businesses in college dorm rooms, but for the founders of JonnyPops, that was the only option.

Five business-savvy sophomores, four from St. Olaf College and one from the University of Wisconsin- Madison, founded JonnyPops in 2011. The company now has 20 employees and is serving gourmet popsicles in 25 locations across Minnesota.

Virent?s sugar-to-fuel chemical conversion technology could be a candidate for funding under the program. The 10-year-old firm?s technology is based on research findings at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

For the Wisconsin Institutes of Discovery in Madison, the company integrated more than a dozen other systems and created dashboards that will allow the University of Wisconsin-Madison?s biomedical and nanotechnology researchers to track the energy use of their own R&D work.

Dear Editor: Mayor Paul Soglin?s recent lamenting the terrible treatment of Madison by the state is classic crying the blues. In truth, like most capitals with major state universities, we secure a remarkable level of largesse and have been beneficiaries for years. This consistent input of funds, talent and buildings has enabled Madison to pursue one of the most flacid economic development programs extant. Nowhere is there the effort of Columbus, Ohio, or Austin, Texas. Or Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina or Berkeley, California.

Developer Robert Dunn is moving to get a building permit for his $98 million redevelopment of the Edgewater hotel and estimates the project will produce 700 construction jobs starting around October. Dunn expects the hotel will create 250 permanent jobs in addition to 100 to 150 indirect jobs in the area when it reopens in 2014. Steve Cover, the city’s director of Planning, Community and Economic Development, said land use approvals given in May 2010 are good through early 2013. Outside the last two requirements, “It appears it is basically ready to go,” he said. Dunn intends to break ground on UW-Madison’s homecoming weekend Oct. 26 and finish the project in the late spring of 2014.

Wesley Sparkman would like to say life for African-Americans in Madison has improved since he was pulled over by police for no reason other his Illinois license plates while attending the UW in the early 1990s. Unfortunately, Sparkman realizes much work needs to be done. He?s quick to quote statistics showing that nearly a third of black men under age 55 (and 47 percent of those ages 25-29) in Dane County are either in jail, on probation or under court supervision.

Developer Robert Dunn is forging ahead with a $98 million rebirth of the historic Edgewater hotel, but with no public financial assistance and a new investment by a group including philanthropists W. Jerome Frautschi and Pleasant Rowland. Dunn, resurrecting the most controversial, polarizing development project in years, intends to follow plans approved by the city two years ago and break ground this fall. Dunn intends to get a building permit, break ground for the Downtown and campus-area attraction on UW-Madison’s homecoming weekend Oct. 26, and finish the project in the late spring of 2014.

Tom Still, president of the Wisconsin Technology Council, estimated that at least half of Venture Investors? total portfolio involves companies with technologies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Michigan. The firm has offices in Madison and Ann Arbor, Mich.

Madison was ranked No. 1 by Kiplinger?s Personal Finance today (Wednesday) on a new list of the Top 5 best cities for young adults. The magazine said Madison was an ?educated, tech-savvy city? with many recent college graduates who help foster an ?entrepreneurial community? for start-up companies. Its intellectual capital also was bolstered by the presence of UW-Madison and other colleges, along with Epic Systems, a top health care software developer based in Verona.

Madison Media Institute is pleased to announce that Laura Mael has recently been appointed as the new director of career services. Laura is a lifelong resident of Madison and a UW-Madison alumni. Along with Laura, Megan Butler has also joined the Career Services team as career services associate.

Fights that broke out at bar time on University Avenue early Sunday morning were quelled by a police sergeant using pepper spray on the combatants. Madison police said the fights started up in a large crowd milling around bars in the 600 block of University Avenue. “The sergeant was monitoring the large crowd,” said police spokesman Joel DeSpain in a news release. “When the fights broke out, the sergeant hoped to keep the violence from escalating and was concerned weapons could become involved.”

Both the UW-System and high-tech manufacturing companies in Southern Wisconsin need to do a better job at promoting themselves. That was a common theme at recent panel at a UW-Madison conference on university-business partnerships. Mike Andrew, a global affairs director at Johnson Controls, said UW schools have ?an excellent reputation? for research. However, he still encounters people outside Wisconsin who believe ?if it?s worth happening, it?s only happening at MIT or Berkeley.?

After years of planning, city officials approved a plan Tuesday outlining what downtown Madison will look like in the next 20 years. The Downtown Plan concept began in 2008 but was introduced for the first time to Madison?s Common Council in November 2011. According to the plan?s text, it ?builds on a rich planning tradition to provide a dynamic framework for the next 20 years.?

Years in the making, a proposed Downtown Plan envisions a two-acre park built on fill in Lake Monona, a boardwalk from James Madison Park to UW-Madison?s Memorial Union, and higher buildings and denser development in the Mifflin neigborhood. The plan, which will influence how the Isthmus looks, feels and works for decades, identifies potential redevelopment sites that could accommodate up to $2.5 billion in new construction with more than 4,000 new dwelling units and an additional 4 million square feet of commercial space.

Eaton is part of a group of local companies in the power energy and controls sector that have formed the Wisconsin Energy Research Consortium to facilitate local R&D and workforce development efforts for such businesses located primarily in the greater Milwaukee area.

The consortium pairs the three engineering schools in Milwaukee as well as the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

It used to be that before people embarked on a trip to an unfamiliar place ? whether it was across the country or just across town ? they would haul out maps and chart their course. Today, a traveler is more likely to depend on a favorite website or a GPS device for directions. Founded in 1984 by Onno Brouwer, then director of the UW-Madison Cartography Lab, Mapping Specialists has about 20 employees and annual revenues of $1.7 million to $2 million.

Madison has been named among the country?s leading high-tech metro areas by a group affiliated with Richard Florida, a well-known economic competitiveness expert.

Madison has been ranked a leading high-tech hub nationally on a new list measuring economic competitiveness in the technology field. The Technology Index, created by economic researcher Richard Florida, ranked cities and metropolitan areas based on concentration of high-tech companies, patents per capita and average annual patent growth. Madison tied with Minneapolis-St. Paul for No. 17 on the top-20 list. Florida singled out Madison?s ?budding tech hub? around UW-Madison.

Two young Madison tech companies, Murfie and Vidmaker, got a big boost this spring when they were accepted into TechStars ? and one came back with a virtual pocketful of cash. TechStars is a prestigious, three-month accelerator program.