Category: Business/Technology

Bryan Renk grew up with a family seed business, directed licensing activities at one of the worldâ??s biggest academic technology transfer organizations and has overseen a company that makes feed additives with chicken antibodies. Now heâ??s been tapped to grow the organization that represents the stateâ??s biotechnology industry.

Renk, former licensing director at WARF, was named Friday as the executive director of BioForward, which has about 250 member companies, about half of which are biotech firms.

Bryan Renk, a former licensing director at the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, has been named executive director of BioForward, a Madison-based biotechnology industry association.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the agency safeguarding American innovation, is impeding the nationâ??s economic recovery with its unprecedented delays and hurdles in issuing patents, said U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke.

Toni Gunnison of Mount Horeb was incredulous when she learned she was the United Statesâ?? winner in Ben & Jerryâ??s international ice cream flavor contest.

“My first thought was, â??It canâ??t possibly be true.â?? I â??ve never won anything in my life,” Gunnison said.

(Gunnison is a marketing manager at the University of Wisconsin Press)

Unemployed University of Wisconsin-Madison graduates now have a new tool to find job opportunities.

The Wisconsin Alumni Association said on Wednesday that graduates can sign up to receive alerts for job openings through the Badger Career Network.

The network connects employers with 350,000 UW-Madison alumni. The service is available to Wisconsin employers and is expected to expand to companies around the country.

Issued in 1995, U.S. Patent No. 5,443,036 is titled â??Method of Exercising a Cat.â? If you move the light from a laser pointer around on the floor, it says, your cat will chase it.Thatâ??s right â?? itâ??s patented.

Yet when medical professor Janet Mertz applied for a patent on a new diagnostic test for breast cancer in 2002, she waited five years for a ruling â?? and was rejected. The hormone-based test, developed and refined for more than a dozen years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was deemed too obvious to merit patent protection.

Just such a delay doomed MatriLab Inc., a Milwaukee biotech company formed to commercialize a wound-healing gel based on technology licensed from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Backed initially by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, which works to commercialize UW technologies, MatriLab won the governorâ??s business plan contest in 2006. It went belly up in 2007, five years after a patent application was filed for the gel, because no new investors would come aboard as the application languished.

MADISON, Wis. — (BUSINESS WIRE) — Capitol Lakes®, downtown Madisonâ??s only retirement community (www.retirement.org/madison), announced today that it has formed a partnership with Wisconsin Alumni Association (WAA) from the University of Wisconsinâ??Madison.

This is the first time that these two parties have joined forces, and it begins a long-term relationship that will serve seniors for generations to come. Together, they will expand their already extensive lifelong learning programs in downtown Madison and provide special benefits to UW alumni age 55 and above.

â??WAA has searched for and found an ideal partner in Capitol Lakes,â? says Bruce Beckman, Marketing Director for Capitol Lakes. â??Our comprehensive community offers the lifestyle and retirement options UW grads deserve in a cultural, downtown location. We look forward to inviting alumni to reexperience Madison and consider it as their retirement destination.â?

Wisconsinâ??s agricultural industry has both high points and low points, according to a new UW-Extension report.

Farming currently generates more than $59-billion in economic activity, and employs several hundred thousand residents. That finding delights Steve Deller, a UW-Madison professor of agricultural economics and one of the reportâ??s authors. He says taking on niche markets and expanding beyond dairy has really helped Wisconsinâ??s farm industry.

A branch of US Bank near the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus was robbed Thursday morning by a thief who apparently fled the scene riding on a bicycle, Madison police reported.

Police said the robbery took place at about 9:40 a.m. at the bank at 389 East Campus Mall.

SAN FRANCISCO — Yahoo Inc. invested billions of dollars in its Internet search engine during the past six years before realizing it made more sense to entrust the job to an outsider — hearkening back to a conclusion the company’s co-founders reached shortly after they started their Web directory in the mid-1990s.

Quoted: Yahoo CEO and UW-Madison alumna Carol Bartz

“Yahoo’s 10-year deal with Microsoft to battle Google for online search customers and ad sales is the boldest initiative Carol Bartz has made since she became Yahoo’s CEO in January.”

That’s the lead on a USA Today story on Bartz, a University of Wisconsin-Madison grad who has risen to the top of the business world.

The $1.2 billion UW credit union stands to pick up a significant number of new student members after it inked a deal that will allow University of Wisconsin students to use their identification cards at the CU’s ATMs.

The deal includes the credit union opening and renting the space for a branch in a new student union building and contributing to the new building’s construction. The new ID/ATM cards will allow students to access university buildings, pay for their meals in their dorm cafeterias, get cash from the ATM and make purchases at point of sale terminals with their personal identification number, according to Lisa Girdharry, UW’s director of marketing.

Douglas Fevens is the first to admit he has little chance of altering the business practices of Internet giant Google.

This isn’t a David vs. Goliath kind of mismatch. Think more gnat vs. oncoming Mack truck.

“I realize I can’t do a whole lot, but I’m not going to just sit here and do nothing, either. I’m going to make my voice heard,” said Fevens.

In particular, Fevens is not a fan of the Google library project, an effort initiated in December 2004 to digitize and index the world’s texts so people can view resources that they generally wouldn’t be able to track down in other ways.

Want to start a business? You don’t have to go far. Entrepreneur magazine lists Madison as one of the Top Ten best places to do it.

Editors called Madison “The Diversifier” for expanding what used to be a three-legged milking stool of state government, the University of Wisconsin and agriculture.

A new study of University of Wisconsin-Madison start-ups shows more than 250 companies have been launched by the school’s faculty, staff and students since 1950.

More than 250 businesses have been founded by UW-Madison faculty, students and staff since 1950, according to a new campus census project.

Project directors Anne Miner and John Surdyk say the list is incomplete and they are seeking suggestions of other firms that have sprung from the university.

Four employees of a consulting firm billed more than $200,000 apiece in five months for work on a University of Wisconsin System information technology project, according to a review by The Associated Press.

Another 10 employees of Chicago-based Huron Consulting Group charged at least $100,000 during that time for services on the project to install a new payroll system, which is behind schedule and over its planning budget.

MADISON, Wis. — Nitty Gritty owner Marsh Shapiro has sold 400,000 hamburgers and been in business in downtown Madison for 40 years.

So, he said he thinks it’s time to move on, a decision that has prompted him to list his popular restaurant near the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus for sale.

The incubator would tap into Kenosha’s proximity to such major Chicago-area firms as pharmaceutical maker Abbott Laboratories Inc.; area universities, including University of Wisconsin-Madison and UW-Parkside, and local medical device makers, such as Bradshaw Medical Inc.

A large Badger-themed sports bar and full-service restaurant is being planned for University Square, taking a space that has been vacant since the $190 million mixed-use project opened last year.

Scott Acker, who owns Quaker Steak & Lube in Middleton, is teaming with University Square developer Greg Rice on the sports bar, which wouldn’t open until sometime in 2010. A liquor license application has been filed with the city.

Considering the view from the 13th floor’s sun-splashed party deck, you can see why developers of a new apartment tower at North Mills and West Johnson streets had the nerve to dub it “Grand Central.”

“We’re in the dead center of campus,” says John Leja, pointing out landmarks during a tour of the more than $20 million apartment project last week. “There’s the chemistry building and the education building, and there’s where the new Union South will go.”

Scheduled to open in August and with all but a handful of the 155 units rented, Grand Central is the most expensive residential development launched in Dane County in the past two years.

A new electrical transmission line will be built across Dane County.

The three-member Wisconsin Public Service Commission voted unanimously today to approve a proposal by American Transmission Co. to erect a 345-kilovolt line that will extend from west of Middleton to the countyâ??s eastern edge.

The plan will follow a route along the Beltline and none of it will be built underground.

The United States is in the midst of its deepest economic downturn since World War II, but unlike the recession of the early 1980s, there is a clear avenue to recovery: technology.

That is the outlook of Michael Knetter, dean of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business, who will be among the featured speakers during a regional business summit Thursday in Wausau.

It will be the end of 2009 before the nation starts to pull out of its recession, and even then, it will take several years for a robust recovery to set in, renowned economist Nouriel Roubini said Monday.

Roubini, named to Time magazineâ??s list of the worldâ??s 100 most influential people and one of the first economists to forecast the current global economic crisis, disagrees with optimists who say the recession should be over this month, followed by rapid economic growth.

Three Wisconsin natives now run their high-tech firm out of Chicago. But if they win a statewide business plan competition, they will be coming home.

The former University of Wisconsin-Madison classmates have pledged to move Flex Lighting if they beat out 11 other finalists to win the top prize in the 2009 Wisconsin Governor’s Business Plan contest.

“Hopefully, this Wisconsin business plan competition allows us to get back into Wisconsin,” said Mike Casper, Flex’s co-founder and president.

The city of Madison is poised to add another hoop for developers to jump through when considering new projects: how many car trips will be generated.

A resolution working its way through City Hall sets a goal of reducing the total amount of vehicle miles traveled here 25 percent by 2020. That could make it harder to build homes, offices or stores on the urban fringe where cars are the sole means of transportation.