Daniel Vilione was frantically at work.
Vilione runs coffeehouse.com, a Web site that sells specialty coffee. On a recent afternoon, he was sorting through thousands of brochures that needed to be mailed.
The company president had to hurry. He had class in two hours.
“The region comes first.”
That was the message – and the secret to success – relayed to us by the Metro Denver Economic Development Corp., a non-profit affiliate of the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce that includes about 60 communities in seven counties.
An opinion column by Julia Taylor, president of the Greater Milwaukee Committee, and Jennifer Alexander, president of the Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce.
The Greater Madison Convention & Visitors Bureau is banking on Madison’s intellectual capital and reputation as a “top city” as part of a campaign to attract more tourists, meetings and convention business.
Both the bureau and the University of Wisconsin-Madison are capitalizing on the city’s national rankings, prominent industry leaders and renowned facilities and entertainment venues.
A UW-Madison graduate has started a company that aims to help would-be college graduates market themselves for a job.
Bob Klein’s First Job, which is based in the Chicago area, is holding a workshop on Sunday from noon-5 p.m. at the Pyle Center on campus. The cost is $75 for UW Ad Club members, $95 for other students.
Gov. Jim Doyle plans to lead a delegation of more than 150 Wisconsin industry leaders to Chicago for BIO 2006, the world’s largest biotechnology conference, on April 9-12.
Doyle will join leading Wisconsin stem cell researchers Dr. James Thomson and Dr. Gabriela Cezar, as well as Wisconsin life science executives, economic developers, state government officials, lawyers, venture capitalists, researchers, technology licensing representatives and higher education professionals to promote Wisconsin’s life science resources.
Klinger was one of the speakers at the Fusion 2006 conference at the Fluno Center on the UW-Madison campus. About 250 people attended the event, which focused on emerging information technology trends.
….The City Council Tuesday night is expected to approve the Wingra Creek Market Study, a comprehensive plan for a 64-acre triangular-shaped area on the city’s south side.
Over two years in the making, the plan aims at maintaining Park Street as a commercial and business area with Fish Hatchery Road remaining more of a residential corridor. It also calls for increasing housing densities on the south side to make light rail or other public transit a viable option. Park Street from the Beltline to the University of Wisconsin campus has been identified as a possible route for the city’s first trolley line.
UW-Madison senior Jamie Schneider will never again forget a friend’s birthday.
And with one click of the mouse, she can look up the cute guy in her communication arts class to see if he is “single,” “in a relationship” or if “it’s complicated.” She can reconnect with friends from high school, or even her childhood best friend who moved away.
She can do all this and more thanks to Facebook, an online social-networking phenomenon allowing college students everywhere to make new friends and keep the old ones.
Anti-sweatshop activists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison say the administration is moving too slowly to improve working conditions for those who make UW logo clothing.
About 65 activists briefly occupied Chancellor John Wiley’s office Wednesday.
Rural Dane County residents might feel that the heavily developed Beltline is an ideal corridor for a proposed transmission line that would be the largest in the county. But others say the Beltline is no place for the 345-kilovolt line planned by the American Transmission Co.
“We are taking a very firm stand against a transmission line running along the Beltline in front of the Arboretum,” said Kevin McSweeny, executive director of the University of Wisconsin Arboretum. “If it is in fact chosen as a route, we will insist that the line be buried such that our viewscape is not contaminated.”
The American Transmission Co. will give a presentation Wednesday night to explain how the University of Wisconsin Arboretum could become part of a corridor for a high-voltage transmission line.
It was a time in her life when the right side of her brain needed to come into play.
Muriel Simms, a longtime educator in Madison, was working on her doctorate in 2000 — 25 years after receiving her master’s in curriculum and instruction at the UW — when she decided to stir creative juices.
“My mother had just died, too, and I was very close to her, so this was a real intense, emotional period in my life,” Simms recalls.
To relieve stress, she took some art classes and eventually created a line of greeting cards with an African-American focus.
March Madness isn’t just for basketball fans anymore.
Turns out it might be good for damage control for colleges, too.
During next month’s NCAA tournament, a series of ads touting the benefits of higher education for individuals and society will be aired by a national alliance of colleges. It will be a first-of-its-kind campaign aimed at turning around negative feelings about the high cost of college and other problems identified in a recent national public survey.
The “Moovada” has everything that most sport utility vehicles owners would want – good gas mileage, low pollution and decent performance.
You won’t find the vehicle on car lots yet. Rather, it’s the name given to a souped-up Chevrolet Equinox by a team of University of Wisconsin-Madison engineering students – their entry in a nationwide contest to build a more fuel- efficient car.
On Thursday, the students received a boost when automotive parts supplier Johnson Controls Inc. presented them with a turbocharged hybrid battery system to use in the crossover SUV.
Wisconsin residents think the University of Wisconsin System is overpriced, overstaffed and out of step with ordinary people, according to a survey by a Madison firm that is the first of its kind in nearly a decade.
More than 70% of those polled said they thought “UW campuses spend too much money on things they don’t need instead of… educating students.”
Wood Communications Group conducted the survey quietly last fall as a first step toward building support for the UW System in the business community. The firm has used the results to rally university and business leaders ever since, saying that more needs to be done to improve the system’s public image. But in recent weeks, the survey might have backfired. Word of it has spread to critics of the UW System, who view it as justification for attacks.
With 500 new stores planned in the next five years, Kohl’s Corp. needs that many new managers, and twice as many assistants.
Those are just a few of the jobs that the fast-growing department store chain will create in the coming years, President Kevin Mansell told students in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s retail program, part of the School of Human Ecology.
The University of Wisconsin campus will see some significant changes over the next couple of decades, assuming their new master plan is as successful as the last one.
When you walk into one of Madison’s many young biotechnology companies, sometimes what you don’t see is as significant as what you do see.
NimbleGen Systems may be an example of that.
There is no fancy new building. NimbleGen, at 1 Science Court, is on the older side of University Research Park (east of Whitney Way). The do-it-yourself “front lobby” – more like an office-sized dent in the wall – consists of a few chairs and a small table with a phone on it, from which visitors ring up the employees they’re seeking.
Although University of Wisconsin-Madison alum Tom Rosenberg set his upcoming film “The Last Kiss” in Madison, only a few exterior scenes were shot around town.
Most of the movie was filmed in Montreal, where the economics are much more favorable, said Rosenberg, chief executive officer and producer for Lakeshore Entertainment, the company behind last year’s best picture Oscar winner, “Million Dollar Baby.”
The University of Wisconsin is competitive in pretty much everything. Our academics, athletic teams and even our party habits are ranked nationally. It�s about time our campus begins to compete with other universities nationwide in yet another category: campus development.
We lack adequate dorm space for incoming students, apartment space for older students, retail stores that make life more convenient for students, parking, reliable transportation and a centrally located health center. With class sizes growing each year, UW has no choice but to develop the campus and the surrounding areas to not only cater to the studentsââ?¬â?¢ wishes but also make UW a more aesthetically pleasing place ââ?¬â? or simply one that looks like it has finally left the 1970s behind.
This year, about 1,000 low-income workers – primarily in Milwaukee and Madison – will receive tax preparation assistance from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center on Business and Poverty. John Hoffmire, the director of the center, was interviewed via e-mail by the Journal Sentinel’s Mark Maley.
A NUMBER of readers have been in touch wondering about the huge pile of dirt and other strange configurations on the Odana Hills golf course that are easily visible while driving by the course on the Beltline.
….What is being constructed at Odana, underground between the sixth and eighth holes, is a large storm water infiltration facility in the Lake Wingra watershed.
It’s part of a deal struck among the city, state and Madison Gas & Electric that includes the new MGE West Campus co-generation plant, which will draw water from Lake Mendota. In return, MGE is providing the facility under Odana, which will filter storm water retained in the large Odana pond to the left of the 15th fairway and then pump the clean water into the soil, where it will infiltrate to the water table, eventually making its way toward Lake Wingra.
A Michigan company that is developing a psoriasis treatment based on licensed technology developed by UW-Madison Professor Hector DeLuca has filed for an initial public offering of stock.
….DeLuca, chairman of the UW Department of Biochemistry, is the world’s leading expert on the metabolism and mechanism of vitamin D with more than 150 active patents in the U.S. and more than 1,200 patents outside the U.S.
So, I say “Madison,” and your first thought is . . .
Romantic? Maybe: USA Weekend calls it a top romantic destination, for some reason.
Corrupt? Sure, that’s top-of-mind. Weedstock? Legendary for puffery, to be sure.
But entrepreneurial? The People’s Republic of Madison, entrepreneurial?
Yes, argue some people close to Wisconsin’s growing biotech industry: The reason research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has led to a slew of new companies is that the university and the community are congenial to entrepreneurs. The rest of Wisconsin can take a lesson from that.
Entrepreneurial? The People’s Republic of Madison, entrepreneurial?
Yes, argue some people close to Wisconsin’s growing biotech industry: The reason research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has led to a slew of new companies is that the university and the community are congenial to entrepreneurs. The rest of Wisconsin can take a lesson from that.
“Our policies,” says Phil Sobocinski, assistant director of the UW Office of Corporate Relations, “are all entrepreneur-friendly.”
The demand for new MBAs is expected to be at the highest level since the Internet bubble burst a half-decade ago, according to college career counselors and recruiters.
But UW-Madison Business School Dean Michael Knetter said talk of fiscal misery might be overwrought.
Our savings, he said, are tied up in homes and other assets that are increasing in value.
The Commerce Department focused on cash flow, Knetter said. “Using that method, you look at how much income is earned in a year and how much is not spent,” he said. “But it’s not the whole story.”
About 1,000 low-income workers in Wisconsin will get free help filling out their tax returns along with a dose of financial education to help stretch their paychecks even further, thanks to the UW-Madison Center on Business and Poverty.
Wisconsinââ?¬â?¢s academic and commercial biotech community plans to pull out the stops for BIO 2006, which will run from April 9-12 in Chicago. The budget to showcase the Badger Stateââ?¬â?¢s biotechnology prowess has risen to nearly $270,000 this year ââ?¬â?? nearly three times what was spent last year at BIO 2005 in Philadelphia.
ââ?¬Å?This is the perfect opportunity to tell our story and make connections,ââ?¬Â said Charlie Hoslet, managing director of the UW-Madison Office of Corporate Relations.
Wisconsin must focus on continued modernization of its manufacturing and agricultural industries, while also working to develop emerging industries, such as bio-medical research, to keep the state’s economy competitive, Gov. Jim Doyle said at a conference Thursday.
Those emerging industries that need continued investment include stem cell research, said Doyle, speaking to about 300 economic development officials and business people at the Governor’s Conference on Economic Development. The conference, organized by the Wisconsin Economic Development Association, met at Madison’s Monona Terrace convention center.
….Many independent businesses along this stretch have moved or closed to make way for a new development by The Mullins Group, which owns much of the property. Others will soon relocate. They include Etes Vous Prets coffee at 518 Highland Ave. this spring and, eventually, Lulu’s restaurant, which has been at 2524 University Ave. for over 21 years.
The University of Wisconsin administration is expected to cancel the e-Projects in Community Service program, a service-learning course offered at UW, after the end of this semester.
The program has seen its numbers steadily rise since its inception in fall of 2000, as 116 out of 120 spots have been filled for this semester.
The state’s troubled computer systems continue to be a source of debate and worry, as officials call for audits, hear testimony and bring in an outside overseer for the awarding of yet another software contract.
The leaders of the Joint Legislative Audit Committee have called for an overall audit on the state’s information technology system contracts, after repeated expensive systems failures.
The Republican legislators who find great sport in bashing the University of Wisconsin ought to take a look at a column in this month’s Inc. magazine, one of the nation’s leading business journals.
The Steve Nashes, Ron Kreibichs and Robert Cowleses of the world might be interested in knowing that the UW does a remarkable job translating its research and patents into business development and job creation, something that’s usually near and dear to a Republican’s heart. But they’d rather punish the school over social and personnel policies that don’t fit their own prejudices.
MILWAUKEE (AP) – Sheldon B. Lubar, founder and chairman of the Milwaukee-based investment company Lubar & Co., says he is donating $10 million to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee business school.
The money will be used to fund new professorships and provide scholarships to business students as the university seeks to play a greater role in the regional economy.
Did the Irish read the Wisconsin Blue Ribbon Report on Jobs for the 21st Century, published back in 1997?
The strategic blueprint laid out almost a decade ago sounds like a carbon copy of the strategy that has propelled Ireland to the top of the prosperity pyramid in Europe.
The Irish have been focused. They have beefed up investments in universities. We have been going the other way, except for the BioStar initiative at UW-Madison.
THE DAY before Jennifer Connor was officially going to enter the mustard business, her partner put her in a pickle.
At the time – 2004 – Connor was in Chicago, back from Hollywood, looking to buy a mustard line named for a longtime Madison retail clothier.
….Connor was a UW-Madison freshman eating a cheeseburger at Stillwater’s on State Street when she had her first heavenly bite of Rendall’s mustard. Talking to Connor, you soon learn she does not suffer from an enthusiasm deficit – especially when it comes to Rendall’s mustard.
Net farm income in 2005 in Wisconsin was an estimated $1.6 billion, after hitting a record $1.9 billion in 2004, when prices were stronger for nearly all farm products, according to the annual Status of Wisconsin Agriculture report from the UW-Madison College of Agricultural Life Sciences.
Stratatech, a Madison company that’s been developing skin tissue to heal wounds, will expand its research into another arena with the help of a new federal grant.
Madison-based Stratatech Corp. has received a new federal grant that enables it to expand into cancer research.
Stratatech has received several federal grants for its work in developing human skin substitutes for burn victims and chronic wounds such as diabetic and pressure ulcers.
….Stratatech, a UW-Madison spin-off established in 2000, has 27 employees at its offices in the MGE Innovation Center in University Research Park.
How do you stop a herd of rampaging elephants?
A group of University of Wisconsin-Madison business students recently learned that the answer lies in learning to think from a different point of view.
A group of 10 master’s of business administration students visited the impoverished African nation of Malawi in early January. The journey was one of several trips abroad the MBA program has been adding in an effort to give their students a more worldly outlook.
Starting a business is a big risk, said UW-Madison finance professor Jim Seward, and small businesses don’t have access to the range of stocks, bonds and lending that larger companies can use.
“A lot of the success of the American economy is making sure that funds flow to those sorts of businesses so that they get a chance to commercialize their discoveries,” said Seward, director of the Nicholas Center for Applied Corporate Finance. “It’s a great thing.”
Mithridion Inc., a start-up pharmaceutical firm near Madison, announced Wednesday that it scored a $1.6 million investment to help develop drugs that stop or slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease.
The firm was founded in 2004 and grew out of research on mice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Pharmacy. It will use the funds to expand its laboratories, hire scientists and develop Alzheimer’s-inhibiting drugs. Its investors are Rosetta Partners LLC, a private equity consortium in suburban Chicago, and Leazer’s Wisconsin Investment Partners.
If current trends continue, by 2010 more than 90% of the world’s scientists and engineers will live in Asia, warns the Business Roundtable, which represents the nation’s leading companies. Failing to reverse that trend will result in a ââ?¬Å?slow witheringââ?¬Â of U.S. economic might, the group warns. Strong stuff. And that’s just the beginning of the complaints from the business community.
A Fitchburg company that aims to develop drugs to treat Alzheimer’s disease today announced it has attracted funding that it will use to establish labs, hire scientists and develop drug candidates.
Mithridion Inc. said it has received the first portion of an anticipated $1.6 million in angel funding, with the remainder expected over the next few months.
….Mithridion’s technology was developed at the UW-Madison School of Pharmacy by Jeffrey A. Johnson, an associate professor, and Thor D. Stein, a researcher.
The London-based Financial Times has ranked UW-Madison’s MBA program the 51st best in the U.S., after it was unranked last year.
The Financial Times’ ranking methodology includes data provided by the school and a survey of students enrolled in the program from 2000-2002 and is based on alumni career development and salary purchasing power, diversity and research capabilities
The UW MBA program has been changed considerably in the three plus years since the class surveyed for this ranking graduated. The new specialized MBA program prepares students to launch careers in highly focused areas.
Dear Editor: A recent article in The Capital Times (Jan. 16) highlights important links between Mexico and the dairy farmers of Wisconsin and other states. Your readers may like to know what their university is doing to maximize the benefits of these links….
Kenneth H. Shapiro
Associate dean and professor
College of Agricultural and Life Sciences
UW-Madison
Wisconsin earned a gold star in the latest rankings from the Corporation for Enterprise Development, landing on its honor roll after being graded in 68 measures of economic vitality and quality of life.
Economist David J. Ward aid the investment measures should improve as networks of angel investors and venture capitalists expand. He also said the state is getting better in transferring ideas from the university laboratory to businesses, where the rankings placed the state 36th.
Think of Madison’s State Street. Or Monroe Street. Or Willy Street. A distinct character comes to mind in a split second.
Now think of Regent Street, another renowned Madison thoroughfare – the stretch bracketed by Camp Randall and the Kohl Center and visited by tens of thousands of Badger fans every year.
Public universities in the United States may be at a turning point, write Katharine C. Lyall and Kathleen R. Sell in The True Genius of America at Risk: Are We Losing Our Public Universities to De Facto Privatization? (Praeger). The new book comes at a time that many leading public universities are conducting billion-dollar fund raising campaigns while finding it difficult to match their states� ambitions with legislative appropriations.
Opponents of legislation that would let phone companies avoid local franchising when they offer TV services in Wisconsin gathered today to bring attention to the issue.
Bills that would let phone companies franchise on a state or federal level have been introduced in Congress and several states, but not yet in Wisconsin, where time is running out on the 2006 legislative session, which ends in March.
However, “We’re expecting one,” said Barry Orton, a UW-Madison professor of telecommunications who advises many communities in their dealings with cable companies.
The relationship between doctors and medical suppliers is often tainted by money, said ethicists from around the region.
A New York Times report this week noted that a University of Wisconsin surgeon received $400,000 per year for consulting with a medical device company.
Also this week, the Journal of the American Medical Association published an article pointing to health industry practices that create conflicts of interest. The authors called for more stringent regulation of small gifts, drug samples, and payments for speeches, research contracts, and attending seminars.
Norman Fost, a UW-Madison professor of bioethics, said the case highlighted in the New York Times might make one think such an arrangement is unusual.
A University of Wisconsin-Madison panel told a high-profile back surgeon in 1998 to drastically scale back a $400,000-per-year consulting arrangement with a medical device designer, a Graduate School official said.
But the arrangement continued for about six years before the panel told him in 2004 to make the change.
The New York Times reported on Tuesday that Medtronic, a Minnesota company that makes spinal implant equipment, had an arrangement with Dr. Thomas Zdeblick, chairman of the department of orthopedics at UW Hospital. The 10-year deal included $400,000 in pay for two days of consulting work every three months, the Times reported.
A first-ever effort to make electricity from hydrogen is generating power in Madison, using a sophisticated chemical process with a little help from a four-cylinder Ford engine.
The renewable energy system, developed by Virent Energy Systems, a Madison-based energy start-up, began sending electricity to the power grid in late December, said Virent Chief Executive Eric Apfelbach.
Virent is a start-up firm founded by Randy Cortright after he and other scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison invented a chemical process for converting the sugar contained in corn plants into hydrogen.
Wisconsin boasts the fourth most equal distribution of family income in the country, but it’s still seeing wider disparity between the rich and the poor – and the middle, according to research released Thursday.
The wealthiest fifth of Wisconsin families had a 48.2% income boost in the last two decades, compared with a 14.3% increase for the poorest fifth and a 23.4% raise for the middle, according to a report from the Wisconsin Council on Children & Families and the Center on Wisconsin Strategy, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The gap between rich and poor in Wisconsin is widening while income growth for all state residents continues to lag the rest of the nation.
A report released today by the Center on Wisconsin Strategy and the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families showed that real incomes for the upper fifth of families in the state have grown 48 percent to $110,653 since the early 1980s. That compares to a 59 percent increase nationally over the same 20-year period.
But at the other end of the spectrum, the bottom fifth of Wisconsin families experienced just a 14 percent income growth over the past two decades. That compares to a 19 percent increase nationally.
….The Center on Wisconsin Strategy is a research and policy institute based at UW-Madison dedicated to improving economic performance and living standards in the state.
Wisconsin is one of five emerging biotech hot spots to be detailed today by e-mail newsletter FierceBiotech, according to a Forbes.com story Tuesday.
A federal grand jury indicted a Doyle administration employee Tuesday on two felony counts for her role in awarding a travel contract to a company whose executives donated $20,000 to the governor, saying she wanted to “cause political advantage for her supervisors.”
The indictment alleges Georgia Thompson, who was hired in the previous Republican administration and serves as chief of the Department of Administration’s procurement bureau, was also trying to help her own job security.
But the indictment does not mention anyone else, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office cautioned in a release that the indictment applies only to Thompson and does not allege wrongdoing by any others.
MADISON – Wisconsin’s second-largest newspaper is letting readers help decide what to put on the front page.
Growth in high-tech exports is happening faster in Wisconsin than in other Midwestern states, a report tracking the state’s economic progress says.
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Of Wisconsin’s $12.7 billion in total exports in 2004, about $2.6 billion, or nearly 21%, were high-tech products and services, according to the report “Business, Finance & Entrepreneurship in Wisconsin: Shaping the New Wisconsin Economy
