Category: Business/Technology

A large stockholder is urging the board of TomoTherapy Inc. to consider selling the medical technology company or seek other alternatives to boost its stock price.

TomoTherapy, which was founded by two University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers, sells a device that uses imaging technology to increase the accuracy of radiation treatments.

The University of Wisconsin is marking Global Entrepreneurship Week this week.

University Square may be the most costly mixed-use project in city history, but hundreds of millions of dollars more are being spent by UW-Madison to develop the East Campus Gateway.
The more than $428 million project stretches from Regent Street to Lake Mendota and is part of a seven-block pedestrian mall first proposed as part of the 1908 master plan. UW-Madison officials hope the improvements will make East Campus Mall a campus centerpiece, much like Library Mall and Bascom Hill.

When the original MGE Innovation Center opened at University Research Park in 1989, Novagen was one of its first tenants.

The local startup had three employees, including co-founder Robert Mierendorf, and was a subsidiary of Pel-Freez, a Rogers, Ark., company that processes rabbit meat and manufactures biological products for scientific research.

Dropping out of college to make homemade beer didn’t look like a very good career move initially.

But Shane Welch, founder and brewmaster of Sixpoint Craft Ales, followed his passion, even though his parents were unenthusiastic about his plans to quit the University of Wisconsin-Madison to concentrate on brewing beer in the basement of his student apartment on Vilas Avenue.

….Sixpoint brews created by Welch and former college roommate Aaron Stumpf, 29, have become the toast of New York City.

Hooper’s employees also travel across the nation, working on wind-farm projects from New York to New Mexico. And its custom metal fabricators fashioned stainless-steel tubing and wires for the inner structure of a rippled glass waterfall sculpture created in 2006 by UW-Madison art professor Truman Lowe and installed in Indianapolis.

For an example of what does work, take a look at Dane County, where several hundred new businesses and thousands of new jobs have been created because of a hot entrepreneurial climate. Academic research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison is being turned into patents, licenses and business start-ups. The University Research Park, now 25 years old, is being doubled in size to raise the number of companies to 200 from 115 now.

MADISON, Wis. — Growers interested in selling vegetables at Wisconsin farmers markets can learn more about the business at a January workshop hosted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The Wisconsin School for Beginning Market Growers will run Jan. 16 to 18. It costs $275.

The school’s coordinator, John Hendrickson, said demand for fresh, locally grown vegetables has never been greater and many farmers markets are seeking vendors. Community-supported agriculture programs, in which families buy shares of farmers’ harvests, also are growing.

A wealthy financier who says he learned everything he needed to know about making money at the University of Chicago has given its business school a record-breaking $300 million donationâ??and a new name.

The gift from David Booth moves the school closer to competing top programs that have enjoyed greater endowments, but it still lags the leading Harvard Business School’s nearly $3 billion in funds.

Angel investing in Wisconsin will be dented by the global economic crisis, but not obliterated.

That’s the opinion of several investors attending the two-day Early Stage Symposium that finishes up today in Madison. Mentions the University Research Park’s 25th year.

HEC in Paris is increasing its links with US business schools through a partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Madison to develop and teach a real estate programme at HEC. Wisconsin School of Business is one of the leaders in the US in teaching real estate programmes.

Chancellor Biddy Martin spoke to Madison business leaders at a luncheon Monday to candidly address issues of affordability and funding facing the University of Wisconsin in the coming years.

MADISON — UW-Madison Chancellor Carolyn â??Biddyâ? Martin declared Monday that the university was a statewide economic driver that could do even more to foster small and big businesses alike during tough times.

Martin called the financial stress facing the state â??unprecedentedâ? but said that cutting the UW too much in the next budget would diminish the universityâ??s stature and harm economic development in the long term.

So you think you have a great idea for a business, but the extent of your plan is a few notes scribbled on the back of a fast-food bag.

Maybe you need someone with experience to guide you.

That’s the goal of a new group called MERLIN Mentors. MERLIN stands for Madison Entrepreneur Resource, Learning and Innovation Network, and it’s issuing a call for both mentors and would-be entrepreneurs.

It took 25 police officers to quell a disturbance and clear out the bar at the Madison Avenue Bar, 624 University Ave., according to police reports.

The initial officers were sent to the bar to assist a woman who was drunk and unconscious.

With the stock market fluctuating daily and many peopleâ??s portfolios shaken, the University of Wisconsin and other nonprofit organizations are concerned whether money will continue to pour in from private donors.

Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp will deliver the keynote address at the Wisconsin Bioenergy Initiative’s Bioenergy Summit on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus Thursday.

Krupp’s talk, which like the entire conference is free and open to the public, will cover current energy policy, as well as innovative ways to encourage companies to adopt environmentally conscious businesses practices.

The city has busted the Stadium Bar, the largest outdoor beer garden near Camp Randall Stadium, for staying open too late and operating its beer garden during more than just Badger football game days.

The Madison Plan Commission Monday night voted to hold a public hearing in December on the popular sports bar, at 1419 Monroe St., to assess its outdoor operations.

UW-Madison officials announced Monday they were reversing a decision to change the schedules of second-shift custodians after getting complaints from the workers.

The city of Madison has been trying to boost redevelopment of the South Park Street corridor for years, including pumping more than $10 million into the blighted Villager Mall. Now, a Chicago-based real estate developer is eyeing the former Bancroft Dairy site on the corner of Fish Hatchery Road and Park Street, with thoughts of a hotel to serve visitors to the UW-Madison campus and nearby hospitals.

The national credit squeeze is closely tied to local housing markets, said Eric Rosengren, president and chief executive of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

“I would say that in many parts of the country the fact that housing prices have gone down and real estate is softening has affected small banks as well as large banks,” he said in a phone interview.

Rosengren, who earned his master’s and doctorate degrees in economics at UW-Madison, was in Madison Thursday to speak to students.

Investor aversion to risk threatens to deepen the nation’s credit crunch and slow the economy, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston said Thursday.

Eric Rosengren said a “liquidity lock” in key credit markets “compounds problems created by a traditional credit crunch” by impeding even short-term financing for the most creditworthy firms.

“If it were to persist, this unwillingness to take credit risk, or to lend money other than overnight, could constrain creditworthy borrowers from undertaking worthwhile projects — and thus have implications for economic growth,” Mr. Rosengren said in a speech Thursday at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Agriculture is one of the biggest components of Wisconsin’s economy. From its farmers to the researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the state is a national leader. But this has always been an “unsung story,” said Roger Cliff, chief administrative officer at the Wisconsin Farm Bureau, a trade organization representing more than 20,000 state farmers.