After two years in the lurch, Madhatters finally has a new home.
The popular campus bar at 3 University Square closed in June 2006 with the redevelopment of University Square mall. Ted Gervasi, who has owned the establishment for 20 years, plans to reopen it at 328 W. Gorham St., before UW-Madison students come back in the fall.
The license was approved last month by the Alcohol License Review Committee and was adopted without discussion by the City Council Tuesday night.
Bob Sieger will have to wait two more weeks to begin demolishing his building at 1501 Monroe St. after the Madison City Council voted Tuesday to send his permit back to the Plan Commission for further review.
Sieger has been planning to alter the property, near Camp Randall, for more than three years but has run across numerous complaints from nearby neighborhood associations about the plans, which have included a mixed retail and housing unit as well as a five-story hotel. The building at the corner of Monroe and Regent streets is currently a multi-business structure.
Quoted: Gary Green, director of the Center for Community and Economic Development at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Mentions a report released in March from the Center on Wisconsin Strategy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. That study says that “many skills of the greener future are closely related to the skills of today.”
As manager of Madison’s longest-operating Chevrolet dealer, Tom Thorstad has toured the General Motors plant in Janesville many times and remembers well the friendly faces of those working on the assembly line.
“It’s hard work standing there all day, but they took a lot of pride in what they did,” he said. “I was always impressed how they took the time to look up and wave at you.”
So Thorstad was obviously saddened Tuesday when he got the news that General Motors was closing four truck and SUV plants, including its iconic manufacturing facility in Janesville, which first which opened in 1919. Some 2,600 workers there are expected to lose their jobs over the next two years as the plant is shuttered.
Quoted: Laura Dresser, a researcher with the UW-Madison Center on Wisconsin Strategy
The University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health received a grade of D in the American Medical Student Association’s PharmFree Scorecard released Tuesday.
The scorecard said most U.S. medical schools are failing to address conflicts of interest caused by pharmaceutical industry marketing. Only 21 of 150 medical schools surveyed by the AMSA have strong policies (those graded A or B), according to the scorecard.
Madison-based stem cell company Stemina Biomarkers Discovery Inc. has learned it will receive a $150,000 Phase I grant from the National Cancer Institute through the federal government’s Small Business Innovation Research grant program, the Wisconsin Technology Council said in a news release Friday.
Stemina, founded in late 2006 by chief executive officer Beth Donley and UW-Madison stem cell scientist Gabriella Cezar, is aiming to use human embryonic stem cells to help determine whether new drug candidates will cause birth defects in humans. So-called “biomarker” research can also test drug toxicity in other ways.
Graphene Solutions is a 3-month-old company with a patent-pending technology that dissolves carbon nanotubes, graphene nanosheets and other materials so they can be purified and spread in a layer one atom thick.
That could pave the way for electronic components, like computer chips, that are dramatically smaller with much greater capacity.
“If you can very easily, reproducibly lay out a one-atom-thick layer of carbon, this is the new silicon,” said Carl Gulbrandsen, managing director of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, or WARF, which helped the company get started. WARF is the patenting and licensing arm for the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Dear Editor: Over the last few years I have had the opportunity to work at a bar on campus. I have witnessed the Madison Police Department at work. On a normal weekend there will be six to eight officers patrolling the bars for underage drinkers. On at least one occasion I witnessed them in an undercover sting operation with plainclothed officers waiting to ID suspected underage drinkers. Typically these officers will only find one or two people who are not of age.
The problem I am baffled by is that at a time where there are two unsolved murders, the department has decided that instead of focusing on problem areas they would rather find those two 20-year-olds with fake IDs.
Dear Editor: I’m responding to Mike Ivey’s May 21 story “Camp Randall hotel on hold again?”
As a former Vilas neighborhood resident, I opposed Bob Sieger’s original Fieldhouse Station condominiums proposal. I saw a poorly planned project with major retail and traffic details left unaddressed. Pitched as a hundred-year building, the all-glass structure would have looked out of place in the near term and faded and run down 30 years from today. Little mention was made of mixed use other than some occasionally open party bar (as if Madison doesn’t already have enough of those) and possible second-floor office space.
Now that school is almost done many are finding it a little difficult to enter the workforce.
“The biggest frustration is going there seeing ‘Oh there’s a job open’ and someone says ‘Well not really we forgot to take a sign down’ or ‘We forgot to remove that listing,” says UW senior, Jason Smathers.
Chuck Oehler is preparing his PowerPoint and pamphlets, getting ready to show off his company, Primorigen Biosciences, to the world.
Primorigen is one of the Wisconsin companies chosen to make a presentation at BIO, the international biotechnology convention being held in San Diego June 17-20.
With an expected attendance of 20,000 from the global bioscience industry, BIO is a chance for Primorigen and hundreds of other biotech companies to see and be seen.
Madison: A Madison developer says an city council member has a personal vendetta against him and his hotel plan across from Camp Randall.
But the council member says she’s just looking out for her constituents.
t seemed that after years of proposals, a Madison developer finally won city approval to put up a hotel near Camp Randall.
But now, the neighborhood’s city alderwoman has filed a last-minute appeal.This development is leading some area residents and business owners wondering whether it’s all legitimate scrutiny or neighborhood overkill.
UW Madison’s biggest building boom in forty years is in full stride, and that means it’s going to be a busy summer and early fall on the sprawling, 935 acre campus. “We’ll be starting and finishing about eight or ten new projects on campus,” says Alan Fish, associate vice chancellor for facilities.
The State Journal’s front page article on student commencement campaigns on May 17 implicitly raised questions about the appropriateness of such campaigns at a public university – particularly within a unit that has raised undergraduate tuition by $1,000 and received an $85 million gift within the past year.
How dare we even broach the topic of “giving back” with students? Are we like the hiker climbing a mountain just because it is there? Or is there something more important about the journey?
Pharmaceutical companies and even some high-tech companies such as General Electric are pushing back – countering that some of the changes their opponents want could reduce protections for patent-holders by limiting the damages innovators could seek from copycats.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, which patents the discoveries of University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers, has some of those same concerns.
If the Madison area has earned a reputation as a biotechnology hot spot, one huge reason is Promega Corp.
“For people in Madison, it’s the granddaddy of biotechnology,” said Carl Gulbrandsen, managing director of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF).
Quoted: Barry Gerhart, the Bruce R. Ellig professor of pay and organizational effectiveness at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business.
Summer jobs are a great opportunity for students, whether they’re a chance to test drive a career or to simply fatten their wallets. And many opportunities may be available.
“If there is a student who wants to work, there are jobs out there â?? that’s the bottom line,” said Tim Putzier, administrator of the UW-Madison Student Job Center.
To some people, entrepreneurship is a dirty word.
“I used to have a piece of paper on entrepreneurship and on one side it said ‘greed’ and ‘exploitation’ and on and on,” said Anne Miner, a professor of management and human resources at UW-Madison’s School of Business. But the other side, she said, had terms like “‘creativity’ and ‘new forms of values’ and ‘self reliance’ and ‘autonomy’ and ‘taking responsibility.'”
Being entrepreneurial is not all about making money or knowing how to develop a business plan, added Miner, who also is the director of the cross-campus Initiative for Studies in Technology Entrepreneurship. It’s also about looking for creativity and innovation in one’s personal life and across a wide range of disciplines, she said.
And that is the underlying philosophy behind UW-Madison’s newest residential learning community.
The way architect Bob Sieger sees it, there are a half-dozen residents in the Vilas neighborhood who won’t be happy until the Badgers stop playing football entirely at Camp Randall Stadium.
Sieger has been trying for the past three years to redevelop his property at the corner of Regent and Monroe streets, right across from Wisconsin’s largest sports arena….
Climate skeptics, take 3
Turns out there are two lists of global climate change skeptics being circulated by the Heartland Institute, and both contain people who say their names were wrongly included. (See Business Beat from April 30, May 14.)
In fact, the UW has now written a letter to Chicago-based Heartland on behalf of five scientists who want their names removed, including John Kutzbach, the former head of the UW Center for Climate Research.
Produce doesn’t get more local than when it is grown on the roof of the supermarket where it will be sold.
Keith Agoada and Troy Vosseller, business students at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, developed that prize-winning idea for the university’s annual G. Steven Burrill Business Plan Competition last month. First place earned them $10,000 to invest in their business model, which they call Sky Vegetables.
Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle today told members of the Wisconsin Hospital Association that he plans again to propose a hospital tax that could bring hundreds of millions of federal dollars to state hospitals and provide the government with $125 million to help it through trying economic times.
“We’ll be putting forth a new budget next January for the next two years, and when we do we’ll be working to make sure that that federal money is coming into the state of Wisconsin and we are working in a way to be able to raise the reimbursement rate that you have needed,” he said.
A developer that claims it lost a major building contract for political reasons cannot sue Gov. Jim Doyle’s administration for damages.
The District 4 Court of Appeals has upheld a judge’s dismissal of the lawsuit by Prism, which was a bidder on a $68 million construction project at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Lindsay Midtbo, a UW-Madison senior, is looking for a job â?? but not in Wisconsin.
“I was born here, I’ve been here forever,” Midtbo, a Milwaukee native, said. “I want something new and different.”
Midtbo, an economics major who graduates this month, is hoping for a job in Chicago. The city offers more financial services jobs and a change of pace, she said.
Midtbo isn’t alone in wanting to leave the state. Each year, about half of UW-Madison’s recent graduates leave Wisconsin for Illinois, Minnesota and other states.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation wants Madison to significantly cut a $600,000 bond closing fee on a $150 million campus project, saying it is a nonprofit entity doing a project in the public interest.
The city ‘s Community Development Authority now must decide whether to charge the full fee and use it for city revitalization efforts or cut the fee and reduce costs for WARF ‘s much-anticipated Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation wants Madison to significantly cut a $600,000 bond closing fee on a $150 million campus project, saying it is a nonprofit entity doing a project in the public interest.
A California biotech company that had expressed frustration over Wisconsin’s stem-cell patents has signed a licensing agreement for stem-cell technologies with the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
“We were able to work out our differences,” said Joydeep Goswami, vice president for stem cells and regenerative medicine at Invitrogen Corp. of Carlsbad, Calif.
Invitrogen, which announced the agreement Thursday, is one of the largest of 25 companies that have signed 30 licensing agreements for stem cells with WARF, said licensing manager Andy DeTienne.
Imagine a grocery store in Wisconsin that doesn’t get its produce from warmer states hundreds of miles away.
Instead, fruits and vegetables are grown right on the supermarket’s rooftop, making the produce as fresh as possible for consumers.
In the past year, five chancellors within the University of Wisconsin System announced their intentions to step down.
If Ald. Michael Schumacher has his way, anyone with a drunken driving violation would be barred from getting a bartender’s license for a five-year period.
Schumacher, who will likely unveil his proposal to the Madison City Council at its May 20 meeting, says “it’s a privilege to have a license, not a right.”
Microsoft and Google. Two names that any up-and-coming market in the country would be happy to welcome. And now Madison can do so, thanks to the nation’s second-biggest research university.
Neither tech giant is creating a lot of jobs in Wisconsin’s capital city yet, but the fact that both want to be near the University of Wisconsin-Madison speaks well for what UW-Madison is doing for the economy in south-central Wisconsin.
Downtown tavern owners weren’t popping champagne bottles but were “very, very happy” about the Wisconsin Supreme Court finding their voluntarily ban on weekend drink specials didn’t violate anti-trust law.
“We were very concerned (about losing) because you never know what will happen,” said Bruce Meier, whose family has owned the Kollege Klub for 55 years.
Twenty-four bars have spent in excess of $500,000 in legal fees to defend a class-action suit filed in Dane County Circuit Court in 2004 on behalf of University of Wisconsin students, said Scott Stenger, spokesman for the Wisconsin Tavern League.
The fifth time was the charm for Madison architect Bob Sieger in his efforts to redevelop the corner of Regent and Monroe streets.
The Madison Plan Commission late Monday night approved a demolition permit to allow Sieger to raze his existing retail and office building across from Camp Randall Stadium. That clears the way for him to build a four-story, 48-room boutique hotel at the site.
he Student Labor Action Coalition sent Chancellor John Wiley an open letter of protest and a mock final exam Sunday, encouraging him to take further action for apparel workers in El Salvador.
Construction officially began Friday on the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, the public-private partnership that will house much of UW-Madisonâ??s future interdisciplinary research.
Gov. Jim Doyle, members of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and UW-Madison Alumni John and Tashia Morgridge welcomed community members during a groundbreaking ceremony Friday at the building site on the 1300 block of University Avenue.
As the University of Wisconsin continues to be ranked one of the universities with the lowest chancellor salaries within its peer class, the topic of subsidized stipends from donors has increasingly become a relevant topic for the Board of Regents.
Corporate and public sector representatives broke ground Friday for the new Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery on University Avenue.
A team from the University of Wisconsin-Madison won this year’s University Real Estate Challenge, a competition that challenges college students to analyze and develop projects.
The contest is sponsored by the Minnesota chapter of the National Association of Industrial and Office Properties (NAIOP). The competition allows students to get real-world experience by preparing feasibility studies on potential projects. At the same time, NAIOP members, who evaluate the students’ work, can get a look at prospective employees.
In Wisconsin, the availability of larger pools of private equity money and experienced executives have combined with the wealth of life sciences research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to create a breeding ground for drug development companies.
The Student Labor Action Coalition is once again pressuring UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley to end the university’s exclusive contract with adidas for athletic apparel.
The long-running dispute stems from treatment of former workers at the Hermosa factory in El Salvador, which closed in 2005 while owing 260 workers about $825,000 in back pay and severance funds. Sixty-three workers who were union members protested and were blacklisted and labeled as troublemakers, the students say.
There are also allegations that the owner of the Hermosa factory, which had made clothing for adidas, embezzled some employee funds.
“With four months left in his tenure as chancellor, Wiley has one last chance to redeem himself by taking decisive action in support of workers by cutting the UW’s exclusive contract with adidas. If he doesn’t act, students will forever remember him as the Sweatshop Chancellor who sold out UW-Madison to corporate interests,” said coalition member Phoebe Taurick.
For the second time, the Wisconsin Public Service Commission has deemed American Transmission Co.’s application to build the Rockdale-west Middleton power line incomplete.
PSC Division Administrator Robert Norcross mainly sought additional cost and environmental impact information on ATC’s proposed Beltline route for the 345-kilovolt line, in a letter sent Wednesday to the company.
The PSC determined in November that the application ATC submitted in October was incomplete. The PSC gave ATC more than 100 questions to answer, said ATC spokesperson Sarah Justus.
Tissue Regeneration Systems Inc., a medical device company developing bioactive implants for bone and soft tissue regeneration, on Thursday announced the close of a $2 million round of financing led by Madison-based Venture Investors and joined by the founders of TRS.
The company is a spin-out of the universities of Michigan and Wisconsin, where TRS’ core proprietary technologies were developed over the past decade, and from which TRS has an exclusive option to commercialize.
Retractable walls. No corridors. A restaurant for brain-storming.
Those are some of the quasi-futuristic features of the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, the $150 million, public-private research complex. The official ground-breaking is today.
UW-Madison spinoff company TomoTherapy could have a new, more powerful type of radiation machine on the market for treating cancer within four years.
Weighing in at $62 million, you would think that being the one of the world’s largest student-run portfolios sets the University of Wisconsin’s Applied Security Analysis Program (ASAP) apart from its peers. But ask its student managers what makes their program worth talking about, and size isn’t the first thing that springs to mind. Here’s a look at what does.
Michael Knetter, the UW-Madison Business School dean, today ridiculed Sen. John McCainâ??s proposed summer gas tax holiday as â??political pandering.â?
Speaking at a global economics conference at the Fluno Center, Knetter said McCainâ??s proposal to suspend the 18.4-cent tax on gasoline (and the 24.4-cent levy on diesel fuel) from Memorial Day until Labor Day is flawed.
When Brown Shoe announced it was locating its new headquarters in St. Louis, not Madison — and closing its Famous Footwear offices here — one reason cited was some $43 million in economic development incentives from the state of Missouri.
Wisconsin officials had also attempted to lure Brown Shoe, offering up free land and other perks if it would build its new headquarters here. Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz and Chamber of Commerce President Jennifer Alexander even flew to St. Louis to give the pitch.
But rather than spending limited resources fighting each other for new jobs, Midwestern states must work together if they hope to compete in the new world economy, development experts say.
Quoted: Dean of International Studies Gilles Bousquet
After seven trouble-free months, the owners of the Majestic Theatre are looking to get the restrictions against their liquor license lifted or relaxed.
As it stands, the theater has to close half an hour before bar time. That means weeknight closing time can be no later than 1:30 a.m., and weekend closing time can be no later than 2 a.m. Its capacity can be no more than 600 for ticketed events and 350 for non-ticketed events, and non-ticketed events are limited to the venue’s first floor only. Also, alcohol can be served no earlier than one hour prior to the beginning of an event.
“We’ve obviously proven ourselves to be who we said we were going to be at the outset,” said Scott Leslie, who owns the business with partner Matt Gerding. “We’re very proud of the operation that we run.”
The college campus, it turns out, can be an ideal incubator for hatching small businesses.
Naninaâ??s Gourmet Sauce, a pasta sauce company based in Belleville, N.J., was started, for instance, in 2005 by students taking an entrepreneurship course at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, N.J. Naninaâ??s products are now sold in nearly 400 supermarkets and gourmet shops in New Jersey and Manhattan, and the companyâ??s director of operations is 23-year-old Nick Massari, a student in that class.
The Kauffman Foundation is spending $50 million to finance such programs at 19 universities, including Arizona State, Oberlin, the University of Wisconsin and the University of Rochester.
The 100-hour Wiscontrepreneur Challenge winners received their prizes today after devoting last weekend to creating a new and useful product from cast-off materials.
Nearly 50 students participated in the challenge to create something of value from their selection of $10 worth of materials from SWAP (Surplus With A Purpose). This is the second year of the contest, run by the Office of Corporate Relations with a grant from the Kauffman Foundation and sponsored by Venture Investors. Three winners each won $300 for their creativity, entrepreneurship and ability to create under time pressure.
The most creative prize went to fine arts major Matthew Manske from Slinger, Wis., for his creation of the “i Pedal,” a device designed to help power hand-held devices, such as an iPod, by using the energy from a spinning bike wheel.
It was billed as a $100 million “urban village,” a project to energize the entire east side.
Union Corners promised to transform the site of a contaminated battery factory three miles from the Capitol into a mix of condominiums, offices and retail shops. There was talk of shady green public plazas, bubbling water features, even a light rail transit stop.
But today the 15-acre site is a tangle of empty lots, broken concrete and piles of gravel along one of the city’s busiest corridors. The only things standing are three mature oak trees where employees of Rayovac once enjoyed their lunch breaks before the aging brick factory on Winnebago Street was shuttered by new corporate owners five years ago.
Quoted: Colleen Dunlavy, economic historian at the UW-Madison.
Eric Apfelbach is happy to talk about the promise of using plant sugars to produce synthetic gasoline. But anyone wanting to take a tour of Virent Energy Systems, his Madison-based company, must first sign a confidentiality agreement pledging not to reveal any trade secrets.
The request is not necessarily unusual in the world of biotechnology, but rather reflects the fierce competition among companies working to find an alternative to carbon-based coal and oil that also avoids the downsides of corn-based ethanol.
….The search for a new biofuel is in its third iteration, says Timothy Donohue, a professor of bacteriology and the lead scientist at the UW-Madison-based Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center.
For months, Karley Gifford says she put up with annoyances at her Madison apartment â?? water-stained ceiling tiles, peeling paint, ripped linoleum.
But it was two burglaries in three days that broke her, she said. Gifford, 20, a UW-Madison sophomore, claims her landlord failed to fix a broken door pane for more than two months, giving burglars an easy way to reach in and unlock the door.
A Monday report by the American Association of University Professors found UW faculty salaries are trailing national rates.
Madison’s profile in the high-tech world just received its second boost of good news in less than a week.
The Capital Times confirmed that Internet giant Google has set up an engineering office downtown to focus on hardware and software systems design.
“I think Google coming to Madison, a big part of that is because we have a strong (computer sciences and electrical computer engineering) program and we have good students here,” said Parmesh Ramanathan, chair of the electrical and computer engineering department at UW-Madison. “I think this is a real positive for both the university and for Madison.”
On the heels of technology mogul Microsoft establishing a research lab in Madison, a second Fortune 100 company will establish itself around the state Capitol next fall.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Union South will be demolished next year. What should replace it?
Initial planning concludes soon. Because I’ve written on campus history, architecture and planning, Union officials have asked me to sit in on design sessions.
Jerry O’Brien’s mission, as executive director of the Center for Retailing Excellence at UW-Madison, is to promote careers in retail to students, many of whom have years of experience in the industry, but at entry-level positions flipping hamburgers, selling clothes or stocking shelves.
