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was as much about consolidation and cost saving as it wasabouyt Georgia’s $60 million incentive package, its demographics, infrastructurwe and skilled workforce. The relocation will save the Fortune 500company “tens of millions of dollars” over the next NCR chief Bill Nuti told Atlanta Businesx Chronicle on Tuesday. NCR’s decision to locat e in Georgia, will bring more than 2,100o jobs including nearly 900 to a manufacturing operationin Columbus. That facility, will be NCR’s firsty manufacturing plant in the United States since the NCR is consolidating corporate jobs from not just but from severalother U.S.
locations, Nuti said, declining to disclosr the cities. NCR will continuw to employ less than 50in Dayton, wherre it will maintain a data center and salews and service operations. Atlanta’s academic institutions also helpexd win the NCR The company views schools like as a potential laborf pool and a partner for joint innovationand development. The region’as relatively robust economy, its supply chain logistics infrastructuree andcorporate base, also helped win NCR “We looked at all of these factorx and Georgia scored amongst the highest of all states,” Nuti Atlanta also got a littlre help from the economically depressed Midwest.
“Recruitment has been difficultyin Ohio,” Nuti said. NCR’s move to the Southeast was also prompteby consolidation. “At the end of the day we reall were a company that waswidely dispersed.” Nuti Since NCR’s 1997 spin-off from AT&T, “the company was everywhered and nowhere.” The company needed to consolidate into a singl e campus to improve collaboration and productivity, he NCR’s executive offices, however, will remain in Nuti confirmed. “That center surrounds our largest and most major customeres in the world in the banking he said. “That’s where we host many of our customera in the financialservices base.
”
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The index, part of the , measures performance of the small-capo segment of U.S. equities, accordin to the index’s Web site. It includes abouy 2,000 of the smallest securities based on a combination of theit market cap and currentindex membership. The indez is intended to provide anunbiased small-cap barometer and is reconstituted annually to ensurer that larger stocks don’t distort the performancre and characteristics of small-cap stocks in the index. “Membership in the Russell indexes represents another milestone in theAIPC story,” Americajn Italian Pasta CEO Jack Kelly said in a Tuesday “It recognizes the significant jump in Americanj Italian Pasta Co.
’s market capitalization over the past The listing also provides anotherd level of market visibility for the Membership in the small-cap Russell 2000 Index automatically includex membership in the larger Russell 3000 and Globapl indexes. Kansas City-based American Italian Pastaw (Nasdaq: AIPC) reported that second-quarter earningxs were nearly triple those from the same perioed last year and that revenue rose 16 In roughly thepast year, AIPC has settled lingering problemzs stemming from a scheme by former executivese to make the company’ss financial reports look good even as sales fell.
The scheme had fallenj apart inAugust 2005, drawing lawsuits, pummeling the stock price and requirinbg the company to refile financial statements. American Italian Pastza is the largest producer of dry pasta inNortj America. The company has about 650 employees and plante inExcelsior Springs; Columbia, S.C.; Tolleson, and Verolanuova, Italy.
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Nationally, home prices are down 13 percenty from this timelast year, of Colorado reported. But the rate at whicgh those prices are falling has started to leveooff and, in thre of four regions across the country, posted eithert stable or positive gains in Only in the South did prices continuew to fall in April, down about .3 percent from Aprilk 2008, brought down by still-struggling markets includinhg several Florida communities.
“It’s too soon to call this a turn in thehousin market, particularly given all the political and regulatory Integrated Asset Services CEO Dave McCarthy said in a “I think that we’rew still in for some difficult spells ahead, but we are seeinh a certain kind of pricing equilibriun in several important markets. That’s encouraging for the long term.” In Baltimor City, home prices increaser 3.5 percent from March to according tothe report. Prices are stillo down about 12 percent when compared toApril 2008. • Home priced climbed by .8 percent from March to April in AnneArundell County, but are still down 5.
6 percent from Apri l 2008; • Prices fell 1 percent in Baltimord County in the past month and are down 2.3 percen from April 2008; • Harford County’s home prices held steady in the past month, but are still down 3.5 perceng from last year; • Prices fell .3 perceng in Howard County, and are down about .1 percent from Aprilo 2008. The median sold price for a home sold in Greate Baltimore fellto $234,950 in down 2.1 percent from according to Metropolitan Regional Informatiojn Systems Inc. of Rockville. That comparees to a 10 percent drop fromApril 2008, when home pricea stood at about $262,000.

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Synovus makes sure that the Soutbh can go about its Founded in 1885 and headquarteredin GA, Synovus Financial Corp. SNV) holds about 40 banks in the US The company offersdeposit accounts, loansa credit cards, insurance, and asset management to consumersa and businesses. It has over 350 locations in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee. The companu has annual revenue ofabouty $1.5 billion and employs about 112,691 people. In April200t the company acquired Naples-based Banking Corporation of Florida, the parent compang of First Florida Bank. In Marchg 2006 the company acquiredRiverside Inc.
, the parent company of Marietta, Georgia-based Riverside Concurrently, Riverside Bank merged into Bank of Nortnh Georgia, an affiliate of Synovus headquarteredd in Alpharetta, Georgia, to form one bank undet the Bank of North Georgia name. FORTUNE magazine named Synovus one of AThe 100 Best Companies toWork For’ in and has recognized Synovu s in its Hall of Fame for consecutiv appearances on the list since its inceptionm in 1998. In 2005, Synovus also appeared on AAmerica’sd Most Admired Companies’ list.

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After a six-month period that has seen the industry take hits to its publicf perception andbottom line, they say a return of consume r confidence and lower fuel pricex point toward a blue sky ahead. “If you’re comparin g it to a year ago, we’ve seen a decline,” says Mid West Corporat e Aviation CEOMarvin Autry. “(But) things are starting to levep out.” Autry estimates his businesws at is down by 15 percent sincr this timelast year. Fuel sales at Jabars in March weredown 16.87 percent compared to a year ago. fuel sales went from 61,769 gallons in February to 66,184 gallona in March. Fuel usage has dropped at the .
Even so, officialx there also are seeing signs of a Melissa McCoy, spokesperson for the Salinaq Airport Authority, says March’s fuel total of 182,205r gallons was the lowest level seen sincer the early 90s. But the number of totakl operations in the first quarterwere 16,842. That’x a 1.2 percent declinr from last year, but, she says, it’s a sign thingss are leveling off. T.W. Anderson, manager of the , has 114 aircraff based at his airport. Although his hangarsz remain full, he says he has seen a drop in the numbeer of aircraft stoppingto refuel.
But with springy in the air and theweather clearing, Andersonm says more people are returnin g to flying their piston-driven planes. Thosed airplanes burn AVgas, and Anderson says sales increased 5 percentin “I think what we’re seeingb is more people, now that they have a bettee handle on the economy, are going back to He has seen a drop in jet fuel saleds though, which he says are down 20 percent from this time last crews aren’t flying through Newton as they used to. Anderso n says of the 30 business jets used on the circui to fly support teams to and from Newton typically sees 6 to 10a season, stopping through between coasts.
But he says as more crew s fly commercial tocut costs, just one of the NASCAf jets has stopped there. The cost of fuel has droppedr dramatically in thepast year. In Newton, AVgas has fallenn from $4.88 a gallon at this time last to $4.02. At Jabara, prices are down to $4.39 a Similar drops in jet fuel prices could begin spurring more business jet usageas well. Accordingh to the , the average price of jet fuel ­— $58.40 a barrell as of May 1 ­— is down 58.7 percenft from this time a year ago. For lower prices mean more incentiveto fly, whetherr for business or for fun.
And althoughy he thinks traffic levels will reboundby 2010, levelingt off now means the ascent back to thosee levels is coming. “I thinm things have hit a bottom,” he says. “I thini people are starting to have more confidence inthe
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percent increase in health care premiums Wednesdayy for its membersin 2010, Basic healtyh maintenance organization rates will rise an average of 3.4 percent next year, down from almost 6.6 percent in 2009. Basic preferredd provider organization rates will increase anaverage 3.3 while the pension fund’zs association plans for highway patrol, correctional and peace officere will rise 1 percen . Medicare members will see an averagee increaseof 1.1 percent.
“These rates were the result of betted health care practices by our members and hard work by our boarxand staff,” CalPERS board president Rob Feckner said in a press “This is good news for our members who are facing pay cuts and difficulrt economic times.” Basic HMO rates for area CalPER S run from a low of 0.32 percentt for Blue Shield Net Value to a high of 4.9 percentt for Kaiser. The Kaiser rates were achieved by aligning them with the Blue Shielxbenefit design. Kaiser will eliminate chiropracticcbenefits (which are not provided by Kaisetr directly) and the plan will increase copaymentxs for a 100-day suppluy of prescription drugs.
Rates are based on severalk factors, including a group’s use of healthn care services andbenefit package, said Kathleenm McKenna, Kaiser’s executive director for public policy legal and government relations. “Our 2010 rate reflects our partnership with CalPERS to work togetherf on new preventive care programs to try to reduce its costds andthe group’s utilization trends and benefit she said in an e-mail.

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Those odds may seem low, but they’re actuallt high since double-dip recessionw are rare and the U.S. econom grows 95 percent of the time, said the chamber’ s Marty Regalia. He predicteed that the current economic downturn will end arounr September but that the unemployment rate will remaimn high through the first half ofnext year. Investment won’t snap back as quicklgy as it usually does aftera recession, Regalia Inflation, however, looms as a potentiao problem because of the federalp government’s huge budget deficits and the massivs amount of dollars pumped into the economhy by the , he If this stimulus is not unwound once the economy begins to recover, higher interest rates could chokew off improvement in the housing market and busineszs investment, he said.
“The economy has got to be runninyg on its own by the middle of next Regalia said. Almost every major inflationary periodin U.S. history was preceded by heavy debt levels, he noted. The chancess of a double-dip recessiohn will be lower if Ben Bernanke is reappointed chairman of theFederal Reserve, Regaliza said. If President Obama appointxs hiseconomic adviser, Larryu Summers, to chair the Fed, that would signap the monetary spigot would remaimn open for a longer time, he said. A coalescin of the Fed and the Obama administrationis “noy something the markets want to Regalia said.
Obama has declined to say whethere he willreappoint Bernanke, whosew term ends in Meanwhile, more than half of small business owners expect the recession to last at leasy another two years, according to a survey of Intuitf Payroll customers. But 61 percent expectg their own business to grow in the next12 “Small business owners are bullish on theif own abilities but bearishy on the factors they can’t said Cameron Schmidt, director of marketingt for . “Even in the gloomies t economy, there are opportunities to seize.
” A separate survey of smallp business owners by found that 57 percent thought the economgy wasgetting worse, while 26 percent thoughtg the economy was improving. More than half planner to decrease spending on business development in the next six onthe U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Web
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During a stint working with proteins in an immunolog laboratory at theNew York-based , his attentionj consistently veered toward applyinf those proteins toward cancer cells. “Everybody else was working on infectiousdiseaswe (research), and I decided I wanted to pursue the researcyh of cancer,” Chesney recalled. “My boss lookefd at me like I was a His persistencepaid off. Chesney’s cancer-related researchh resulted in speaking including trips to Louisville in 2001and 2002. It also was in 2002 that he joineddthe , working mainlhy as a researcher and doing some clinica work at the . He became a full-time universityg faculty memberin 2003.
Among Chesney’s current researchg projects is one that he believes coul d transform cancer from a terminall illness into atreatable one. “If we can blocki tumors from growing, we can turn cancer into a chronidc disease not unlike high blood he said. Cancer is caused by mutationds in proteinsthat “signal” cancer cells to survive and Chesney explained. “We want to block those As lead researcher onthe 4-year-old project, Chesney and other researchers screened 14 millionm compounds in an effor to find one that achieved the goal of blockingy the signals, thus preventing tumo growth.
The group found one, and it sincre has developed an anti-cancer drug that has proven effectiveein mice. Chesney believes the drug also could be effective in humans and could be takemn inoral form. “We think this is sort of like hittinvg a cancer cell with a sledgehammer without hitting thenormal cells,” he A provisional patent for the drug is in submission, Chesney which gives the researchers one year to gather more data and submi t a final patent. The provisional patent allows the researchers to publish theif findings and protectsthe discovery. Currently, U of L’es Office of Technology Transfef is seeking to license the Chesney said.
University officials expectt to have a licensing partner in place withi nsix months. One potential licensing partneris Louis­ville-basedx Advanced Cancer Therapeutics LLC, which works closely with U of L’se James Graham Brown Cancerr Center to help expedite the proces of getting cancer treatments to market. But Chesney said the schoopl also could license the drug to a larger pharmaceutical orbiotechb company, such as or Larger companies couldf provide more funding to carry the drug through phase one clinicap trials, which Chesney expects will cost between $2 milliob and $3 million.
Chesney and three other researchers who helped generat e thepatent — John Trent, Brian Clem and Suchetaz Telang — would share in any patent royalties if the drug is Since 2002, Chesney’s lab has received $4.5 milliomn in grant funding for various projects, including the developmeng of this anti-cancer drug. Its funding sources have included the Kentucky Lung CancerResearcuh Program, a fund created using tobacc settlement money, and the . Chesney said progresa in medical discoveries has resulted in the decreasinvg prevalence ofsome diseases. But canced is not one of them, and that is why Chesnehy has made ithis focus.
“Thre death rates (for cancer) have barely budged over the last four Chesney said. “It’s the biggestf problem in Westernmedicine today.”
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Council Chairman Vincent Gray, D-at large, proposed a cap in July afterf repeated warnings fromthe city’s chief financial officer, Natwar Gandhi, that the percentaged of the city’s revenue committed to makingv bond payments could be 11.8 percent in 2010, just short of his recommended limit of 12 percent. The current legislative limit, imposed by Congress, is 17 Gray’s bill, which would establish the 12 percent capas law, couls come up for a vote before the full councill this fall. The message was enforced when Gandh iprojected Sept. 24 that the city will take in $131 milliohn less than he expected in loca l revenue for the fiscal yearbeginning Oct. 1.
Two days befored Gandhi’s projection, several business leaders — Barbarza Lang, president of the , Emily Durso, president and chief executive officerd ofthe , and Gerruy Widdicombe, director of economic developmentf for the Downtown Business Improvement District — told the counciol they support Gray’s cap as long as it wouldx not disrupt projects already in the works, such as a convention centeer headquarters hotel, a new Southwest waterfront and a revamped Skylancd Shopping Center. Once those projects go the District “is goin to have to make some tough decisions in terms of Lang said.
One importanft issue is whether tax incremenft financing and other economic development debt woulrd count towardthe cap. Gray does not include it, to the likingf of Councilman Jack Evans, D-Warcd 2, who chairs the finance committee, Neil Albert, the deputy mayor for economic development, and Widdicombe, who say including TIF debt under the cap could cause the city to miss out onprimse development. Gandhi, however, would includer all debt underthe cap, testifying that “rating agencies evaluate the burden from all tax-supported not just [general obligation] bonds.
” Councilman David I-at large, backed that suggestion but excoriatedd the CFO for overestimating Nationals Park revenuew and said the city should use its debt for libraries and schools or risk overruns.
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Alternative energy ventures — from wind and tidal power to cellulosicethanol — are expected to be an increasinglu important part of the Bay Area economy, much like the Internet and biotech have shaped dominant positions over the past 30 But as the Chinese governmenrt tries to reduce the country's reliance on dirty coal and expensive oil, it too is placingb the equivalent of billions of dollars into alternative energy projects. What's venture capitalists and other investors are placing betson China's alternative energy boom with IPOs and build-out cash heavilyh focused on solar panel makers.
"It's absolutely an said John Balbach, managing partner at , a Michiga n organization that includesventuree capitalists, investment banks and cleantecn companies. "The pace of China'ds economic development and pace and scals to overhaul its infrastructure is one of the largesr marketopportunities today." Indeed, the cleantechh sector represented roughly 11 percent of the total venturw capital dollars spent in China in 2007, said Balbach, who is basedx in San Francisco. That is drive n in part by Beijing's goal of renewable energy meetingg 15 percent ofthe country's energy use by 2020.
cleantech investments in North America in 2007 climbed 38 percentt from theyear before, to $3.95 The year before, more than a quarter of the $2.9 billion in VC cleantech investments were made in Bay Area Those figures show the strength of up-and-cominvg companies in the United States, particularlgy the Bay Area, which Balbach said is the leading cleantecgh center in the world. And China's growtyh means those companies can be players globally as wellas "Whether companies are in San Francisco, Seattle, Londo or Germany, China promises to be a significant Balbach said.
China's interest in cleantech, both as a consume and a producer, is motivated as much or more by long-tern implications for its economy as it is by environmental The country's coal-heavy energy appetite has long-term negative healty consequences and is eating away at GDP growth, Balbacy said. And then there's the escalating price of oil. "They'r e quite eager to find Balbach said.
But China remains sensitive to criticisk that its economic growth has been at the cost of its environmentg and that projects like the massiver Three Gorges Dam have been pursued without regar for their environmental and cultural A government-run newspaper, for example, once blamedc Western consumerism for Chinese furniturse makers' stripping of Rain Forest resources. Balbach said, Chinese pension funds are now allowef to invest inthe country's cleantech explosion. That has create d a huge indigenous source of capital on top of cash fromforeighn investors. At least six Chinese solar energy-relateds companies have corralled morethan $1.4 billion througj U.S.
IPOs in the past 14 months, oftenm with American investment banks like Morgan Stanleuyas underwriters. One of thosde companies, , won a further $118 million in a venture capitakl roundlast year. That was easily the biggest venturr capital round in Chinese cleantecg during the first nine months ofthe year, accordingy to Thomson Financial and the . But Balbach said cleantecu is more of a global game than techor biotech, and America VCs are increasingly interested in globall plays, including those in China. Yet for all the impressive numbers, China is far from the globall cleantech leader as faras innovation.
When it comex to moving new technologiesfrom "labs to largecaps" — as Balbachh puts it — the undisputed leader is the Bay Area. "Ift was the market, the attitude of the average citizej inSan Francisco," Roger Efird, president of , told the San Francisco Business Times last year about why the subsidiary of is settiny up its North American headquarters here. "I don'rt know why anybody in our businesse would not locate themselves inSan Francisco. It' perfect." Suntech, which recorded a $396 million IPO in late is led byZhengrong Shi.
At the same time Suntech is settingh up shop in theBay Area, local playerx are helping to create a cleantech backbone in China.For example, Harrison Fraker, dean of the Colleg e of Environmental at the , is helpinh to set up neighborhoods of 5,000 to 10,000 unitws in Chinese cities with independent systema for energy and other services. With energ y storage and other issued becoming more critical over the nextfive years, Bay Area companies could make huge inroads in China as well as other spotw globally.
The Bay Area has a stak in just about every alternative energ ysegment — from biomass and hydrogen fuel s to electrochemical technology and solar, wind and nuclear energy — accordingb to a report last summer from the Bay Area Science and Innovatiom Consortium. "If you look at the element s (of becoming the center of an industry) — accesxs to world-class research, a strong, flexible and risk-takinbg financial community, an entrepreneurial expertise — what makes the Bay Area differenf is the cultural acceptance that allows for a free movementof ideas," Balbacbh said.
China's competitive advantage, on the other hand, is its low laborf cost and manufacturing capacity, Balbach said. "Iy would be difficult for the Bay Area to ever compet onthat front."
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