jueves, 28 de agosto de 2014

Redeveloping New York Factories Into Small Business Hubs (BusinessWeek)


Erected in 1919, the Standard Motor Products Building was bought by Acumen in 2008 for more than $40 million. Brooklyn Grange, an urban farm, grows tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, herbs, and chard on the 40,000-square-foot roof. Inside are other small businesses, including the Jim Henson Co.
Erected in 1919, the Standard Motor Products Building was bought by Acumen in 2008 for more than $40 million. Brooklyn Grange, an urban farm, grows tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, herbs, and chard on the 40,000-square-foot roof. Inside are other small businesses, including the Jim Henson Co.
When furniture designer Kristen Wentrcek moved her business into a shuttered Pfizer plant in Brooklyn, N.Y., she changed the light bulbs herself and used power tools to rip out a bank of metal pill cabinets. There were missing ceiling tiles, and a light flickered in the hallway. “It was like moving into a weird old library,” she says. “The bathrooms are clean, but the place isn’t super-refined.”
Wentrcek’s landlord, Acumen Capital Partners, specializes in bringing new life to old, offbeat commercial properties in New York City’s outer boroughs. The business was founded in 2007 by longtime Queens real estate developer Jeffrey Rosenblum and his business partner, Ashish Dua, who met 10 years ago while managing investments for real estate firm Time Equities.
Acumen bought the Pfizer plant, once used to make Viagra and Lipitor, for $26 million in 2011 after raising $10 million from private investors. The firm kept costs down by making minimal changes to the property—luring small-business owners such as Wentrcek with short-term leases, low rents, and permission to renovate the spaces as they pleased; tenants say everything from laboratories to janitor’s closets were fair game. Several local food manufacturers have leased space—drawn by its freight elevators and a massive cafeteria kitchen. Movie studios seeking industrial backdrops have rented unleased sections of the building, and parts of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 were filmed there. The result is a hodgepodge of small companies. In one area, the smell of brewing kombucha, a fermented tea that originated in East Asia, seeps into a hallway. In another, a team of Orthodox Jews runs a consumer electronics business.
Acumen is aiming for double-digit returns on the Pfizer building after at least five years of ownership. Rosenblum and Dua, both New York natives, are about to sell the firm’s first big investment. RXR Realty, an aggressive buyer of New York City offices after the financial crisis, is in contract to acquire a former Standard Motor Products manufacturing facility in Long Island City from Acumen for $110 million, about double what the firm paid for and invested in the property since it was acquired in 2008. The former factory built in 1919 houses the Jim Henson Co. and a commercial rooftop farm run by Brooklyn Grange. What Acumen is “doing is really the future of small manufacturing,” says Carlo Scissura, president of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, who was chief of staff to the Brooklyn borough president when Acumen closed the Pfizer deal.
“In some ways it’s a great opportunity, but it’s also a very expensive situation when the building itself isn’t covering that much”—Erin Zimmer
Rosenblum and Dua say they try to keep much of the existing structures intact because it’s less disruptive to neighbors and communities. They’re not, for example, razing old buildings to put up condos.
A few current and former tenants report that having Acumen as a landlord can be both a blessing and a curse. Rents at the Pfizer building started at about $15 per square foot in late 2011 and have risen to more than $20, according to Acumen. The increase threatens to displace some of the original tenants that signed shorter leases, some tenants say. Others have expressed concern about investing heavily in renovations and losing their investment should they be priced out of their spaces or forced to leave.
“You walk into a space that’s yours to build out. In some ways it’s a great opportunity, but it’s also a very expensive situation when the building itself isn’t covering that much,” says Erin Zimmer, a spokeswoman for Good Eggs, a San Francisco-based online delivery service for locally produced foods that has its New York office in the Pfizer building. The company will soon move into a warehouse in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn to accommodate growth. Zimmer says the space is a better deal with a longer lease. Wentrcek, the furniture designer, also plans to move out soon. She describes the Pfizer building as “a stepping stone type of rental space.” Acumen says the average short-term lease at the building is 12 months; it has offered leases as short as a month.
A standard commercial lease for a small business is five years, according to Sam Chandan, a real estate professor at the Wharton School. Industrial repurposing projects can also be risky for the landlord, he says. Some of the short leases in the Pfizer building are a sign of a high degree of churn—something property managers typically prefer to avoid, he says. Acumen says most of the Pfizer building leases are from two to five years.
Long before this sort of redevelopment became popular, Rosenblum spent 10 years repurposing spaces for Schuman Properties, one of Long Island City’s largest real estate owners at that time. In 1992 he turned a Queens Chevrolet dealership into a row of shops with a fitness center. He purchased a Long Island City-based silk factory in 2004 and broke it into units for lease to smaller commercial tenants.
Dua says the recent runup in property prices in New York has for the moment put an end to shopping for another outer borough property. The firm is considering buildings in Chicago and Philadelphia. “We love New York. We are both lifelong New Yorkers, but we’re just two guys competing against the biggest of the big,” Dua says. “We can only survive in New York when everyone else isn’t so bullish.”
The bottom line: Acumen Capital Partners, which redevelops industrial properties, is plotting a move outside New York
Zlomek is a reporter for Bloomberg News in New York.

miércoles, 27 de agosto de 2014

Burger King Looks to Ride Coffee Boom, Save on Taxes by Acquiring Tim Hortons (BusinessWeek)


Burger King Looks to Ride Coffee Boom, Save on Taxes by Acquiring Tim Hortons
Burger King (BKW) on Sunday night confirmed reports it is in talks to buy Canada’s largest coffee-and-doughnut chain Tim Hortons (THI). The new company would be headquartered in Canada, and the two chains would operate as separate brands.
Tim Hortons said in a press release that a key benefit of the combination would be the chance to take advantage of Burger King’s global presence to speed its growth in international markets. Tim Hortons has 3,630 outlets in Canada, 866 in the U.S., and 50 in other countries. Burger King is much larger, with 7,371 restaurants in the U.S. and Canada; 3,556 in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa; 1,583 in Latin America; and 1,298 in the Asia-Pacific region.
A benefit to Burger King would be a lower tax rate. Canada’s corporate tax rate is 26.5 percent, compared with 40 percent in the U.S., reported Bloomberg News. Burger King’s effective tax rate is about 27 percent. The practice of merging with foreign companies to reduce taxes has been criticized by President Obama.
“Sounds like more of a paper transaction with the goal of lower taxes,” says Darren Tristano, executive vice president at Technomic. “There is no indication that these two will find any new synergy beyond financial savings which has been Burger King’s intent for the last four years.”
Burger King’s finances have changed considerably since the company decided to sell almost all of its restaurants to franchisees a few years ago. Now all but 52 of its 13,808 restaurants worldwide are franchised. Franchise royalties and fees and property revenue now account for about 92 percent of Burger King’s sales, and that’s almost all profit. Thanks to its franchising model, Burger King’s overall gross profit margin was 88.9 percent last year; profit margin at its company-owned restaurants was 12.3 percent. Tim Hortons is also nearly all franchised, with only 18 company-owned locations, although its gross margin is lower.
If the deal goes through, the new company would be the world’s third-largest fast-food restaurant company, with about $22 billion in sales and more than 18,000 restaurants in 100 countries, according to Tim Hortons.

martes, 26 de agosto de 2014

How an algorithm detected the Ebola outbreak a week early, and what it could do next (TechRepublic)

By  August 26, 2014, 

HealthMap is a data mapping tool that detects and tracks diseases across the world. The system discovered the Ebola virus outbreak nine days before any health organization did. 
screen-shot-2014-08-25-at-9-35-13-am.png
Image: HealthMap
The Ebola outbreak has spread incredibly fast. It's a dangerous disease, not only because it is highly contagious and fatal, but it is also riddled with stigmas and myths, particularly in the African communities where it is proliferating.
An algorithm on HealthMap, an international mapping tool that detects and tracks diseases, found Ebola, called a "mystery hemorrhagic fever," just over a week before it spread, though the founders didn't initially realize the importance of what they discovered.
Eight people reported the mysterious disease in March. It caught the HealthMap team's attention, but they didn't call out a massive issue until it was confirmed as Ebola on March 22.
"That was concerning, but still oftentimes these events tend to be smaller in nature, and this is much more substantial than what we've seen in the past as far as the time it's [taken to] spread. It's unusual as far as what we've seen," said John Brownstein, co-founder of HealthMap and an epidemiologist.
The HealthMap team realized the situation was quite serious, so they created a dedicated HealthMap visualization: healthmap.org/ebola. The tool shows the full timeline of events, including locations, case counts (suspected, confirmed, deaths), and original source documentation.
There are few other places to find comprehensive, easy-to-understand details on the full scope and progression of the Ebola outbreak. Traffic to the HealthMap site has skyrocketed as citizens and professionals seek out clear information, said Clark Freifeld, co-founder of HealthMap.
Ebola hemorrhagic fever is a virus that first appeared in Africa in 1976. It is an extremely infectious disease, passed through bodily fluids. Typically, symptoms like fever, rash, vomiting, diarrhea, and stomach pain appear after eight to 10 days. There's no specific treatment or vaccine, and the fatality rate can be as high as 90%.
According to the World Health Organization, as of August 22, these are the stats of the Ebola outbreak in Africa, which emerged in March 2014.
  • Guinea: 607 cases, 406 deaths
  • Liberia: 1,082 cases, 624 deaths
  • Nigeria: 16 cases, 5 deaths
  • Sierra Leone: 910 cases, 392 deaths
There are also reported cases in Democratic Republic of the Congo, Europe, and in the US, though none have been confirmed. Two patients who contracted the disease in Africa were brought to the US for experimental treatment, but not much else has been done for the outbreak.
"The situation was something we were keeping close tabs on as it evolved at the time, but there was still a small number of initial cases, and Ebola outbreaks have been successfully contained in the past," said Freifeld. "The real concern arose when cases kept increasing this summer, especially given the high fatality rate of the strain (60%)."
Brownstein said the data they collect is a real time view of what's happening. The Ebola outbreak reminds him of what HealthMap showed when the H1N1 (swine flu) virus spread -- they had many reports from local news media early on, which were eventually confirmed. So this instance is not unfamiliar.
"[This instance with] Ebola is some of the most usage we've ever had at the site, and it's raising awareness for infectious disease," Brownstein said.
In addition to the structured information they capture about locations and case counts, HealthMap also captures narratives of case situations, such as patients leaving their containment areas, civil unrest, and other impacts of the outbreak.
"These factors are key for fully understanding the situation and how to address it," Freifeld said.
The web crawler on HealthMap collects information from hundreds of thousands of sources across the internet, based mostly on keyword searches for disease-related terms. Of course, it filters out things such as "outbreak of home runs" or "Justin Bieber fever." It sifts through RSS feeds and APIs and analyzes the text and geographic location of the information and removes the noise. The automated process is repeated every hour, 24 hours a day.
The algorithm is 90% accurate at filtering out the junk, Freifeld said, and it is continually improving through feedback from analysts. This is a machine-learning algorithm. It looks for example articles that have been categorized by HealthMap analysts and searches for patterns of how new articles match up with the history of relevant and irrelevant content.
The value of HealthMap, Brownstein said, was initially for disease surveillance, but it has moved onto something better.
"Getting case information and data of very specific epidemiology, of outbreaks, and fit that into disease models, where it might spread to, how bad it might be, then integrate it with climate data or transportation data, all of a sudden it's data you wouldn't necessarily have access to," Brownstein said.
And that, he added, is critical to furthering research.
"For me personally, it combines two passions of mine, computer science and public health. Our work gives us a chance to apply advanced artificial intelligence algorithms to problems that matter in global health," Freifeld said.
Freifeld had the idea for HealthMap as a way of organizing the large amounts of outbreak data that, he said, at the time were widely available on the internet but scattered and difficult to use.
Brownstein's background is in epidemiology, specifically infectious disease mapping, and he especially focuses on emerging diseases and how to use technology to map and track them.
The two started HealthMap in 2006 as a side project on nights and weekends outside of work. The website, which is a project out of the Boston Children's Hospital, then rapidly became a full-time project as it started to take off in fall 2006.
Since its conception, HealthMap has evolved in three main ways. First, it is continually incorporating more and more sources of data. It has expanded into 15 languages and uses social media sources, looking at drivers of disease such as attitudes towards vaccines and animal health. Second, we have greatly expanded how we categorize outbreaks. Disease and location are obviously key, but we are now looking at setting (e.g., hospital, military base), nature of the disease (e.g., antibiotic resistance), case counts, and location mapping. And third, they are consistently engaging more with users. HealthMap accepts reports from anyone via the web or mobile devices.
"We are seeing the role of the public as 'citizen epidemiologists' rather than just passive consumers of information," Freifeld said.
Part of the importance of HealthMap is its usefulness to epidemiologists and other experts, to engage them and have them report back to the team, but it's also to engage communities around the world. HealthMap has projects focused on that concept as well, Brownstein said.
"We're trying to build better tools to provide data and have them return information to fill out the map," he said.
The HealthMap team is continually expanding the list of data sources they tap into, including doing research on tapping into data from Wikipedia, Yelp, Twitter, mobile apps, and other internet sources, which can all provide early signals of disease activity.
"What's exciting about HealthMap is that we are capturing all this information and making it available and accessible," Freifeld said. "Our users include public health professionals, but actually the vast majority of users our users come from the general public. You don't need to be an expert to benefit from the service."
Lyndsey Gilpin is a Staff Writer for TechRepublic. She writes about the people behind some of tech's most creative innovations and in-depth features on innovation and sustainability.

lunes, 25 de agosto de 2014

This Stealth Attack Boat May Be Too Innovative for the Pentagon (BusinessWeek)

<p><em>Ghost</em></p>
Ghost

On the northern edge of the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Maine, past the security checkpoint and high-tech stations for refurbishing nuclear submarines, is a derelict warehouse that once doubled as a sawmill. Building 129’s corrugated metal exterior is rusted and overgrown with bursts of ivy. Broken glass in some of the windows has been replaced with clear plastic. Inside, it takes a moment to adjust to the cavernous silence and dim orange lighting, but one immediately senses the hulking presence of the hangar’s inhabitant: a vessel called Ghost.
Matte gray, with the chiseled angles of a Nighthawk stealth aircraft,Ghost doesn’t look like a boat. Its 38-foot main hull is designed to travel above the water’s surface, propped up by two narrow struts, both 12 feet long and razor-sharp at the front so they can cut through ocean debris. Underwater, each strut is attached to a 62-foot-long tube that contains a gas turbine engine. Hinges allow the struts to move up and down like wings. While parked, or traveling through shallow waters, they can be extended to the side. In deeper waters, at speeds of eight knots or higher, they can rotate downward to lift the hull into the air, eliminating the jarring impact of waves.
Four propellers positioned at the front of the tubes are powered by the two 2,000-horsepower engines. They pull the craft and, with the help of air funneling down through the struts, create a gas bubble around each tube—an effect known as supercavitation that can reduce drag by a factor of 900. In short, Ghost makes a bubble and flies through it.
“It’s such a smooth ride, you can sit there and drink your coffee going through six-foot swells,” says Gregory Sancoff on a recent trip to the hangar. A self-made millionaire who started a string of medical technology companies, he’s looking up at Ghost, grinning. This is his baby. Sancoff came up with its design, leased the ramshackle hangar, and built the vessel entirely on spec. His 18-person startup, Juliet Marine Systems, has invested $15 million in the project.

Ghost, Sancoff says, could be used as a kind of “attack helicopter of the sea”—conducting coastal defense and anti-terrorism missions and protecting massive naval vessels from swarm attacks by armed speedboats. Built from aluminum and stainless steel, the vessel is nonmagnetic and difficult to target using sonar. “We came up with the name Ghost because the boat is intended to have no radar signature at all,” says Sancoff. “With Ghost, you can get into denied-access ocean areas and loiter for 30 days with the fuel on board. You can listen to cell phone conversations, you can monitor what’s going on, you can launch operations and leave, and no one knows you’re there.” He adds, “That’s not something the government can do right now.”
Juliet Marine’s board includes an impressive roster of what Sancoff calls “type A personalities.” These include former New Hampshire Senator John Sununu Jr., recently retired four-star Admiral James Hogg, and retired Rear Admiral Jay Cohen, who served as Defense’s chief of naval research and under secretary for science and technology at the Department of Homeland Security. Also on board is Rear Admiral Thomas Richards, a grandfatherly retired commander of special warfare who oversaw all of the country’s Navy SEALs. “We expect to be breaking the speed record for SWATHs—Small Waterplane Area Twin Hulls—by the end of the season,” says Richards. “The Navy has nothing like this.”
With Juliet Marine nearly ready to launch speed tests and build additional, refined models, Sancoff hopes the Department of Defense will sign on and buy his boats for roughly $10 million apiece. Top government officials, including Admiral Michelle Howard, vice chief of naval operations, who led the 2009 Maersk Alabamahijacking rescue, have recently toured Ghost but declined to comment for this story.
Sancoff knows it won’t be an easy sell, despite his venerable board members. “I think DOD is very, very nervous about working with small startup companies,” he says. Especially when the technology is so unusual. Sancoff tells the story of a Navy SEAL who paid him a visit: “He said, ‘Sir, look at that picture behind your desk ofGhost. That’s not a boat. No one knows what you’re doing. They don’t get it.’ ” 

At 57, Sancoff has a full head of gray-brown hair and a faint New England accent. On the day of the hangar visit, he’s wearing blue loafers, jeans, and a short-sleeved white button-down patterned with tiny blue anchors. Ghost is Sancoff’s first attempt to build a weapons platform, but he’s never been shy about pursuing implausible ideas. “My whole philosophy in life has been this: I will only work on stuff where people will look at me and go, ‘Are you crazy?’ ” he says. “When I was very young I just said to myself, I’m not going to work on something someone else can do—why waste my time? I’m going to work on the hardest problem.”
After attending vocational-technical high school in Lawrence, Mass., Sancoff saved up money and skipped college to start a machine shop. Mainly, he devised and manufactured prototypes for various local companies, including microwave filters and syringe pumps. “Did I want to go to college? Kind of, but I also wanted to start a business immediately,” says Sancoff. At 24, he sold the shop and left Lawrence for San Diego. “Steve Jobs was worth probably $50 million, and he was the same age as me. I thought, if he can do it, I can do it—I mean, come on!”
In California, Sancoff got a job as a technical consultant for the video game company Sega. He next honed in on the medical device industry, inventing products including a computerized IV pump and a tool that allows surgeons to suture without a needle. (Resembling a gun, it grabs tissue, forces a thin filament through a tiny hole, and ties off a knot in one motion.) Over the next 20 years, he built and sold five companies—Block Design, Block Medical, River Medical, Ivac Medical, and Onux Medical—for a total of more than $500 million. Kevin Kinsella, founder of the La Jolla (Calif.)-based venture capital firm Avalon Ventures, whose investments include Zynga (ZNGA), the Broadway show Jersey Boys, and several technology and life sciences startups, met Sancoff during those early days. “He’s a guy that’ll take a stack of engineering magazines to read in bed, that sort of thing,” says Kinsella. “He’s got this great polymath engineering mind.”
After the death of his father, a decorated Army sergeant who served under General George Patton in World War II, Sancoff began contemplating ways to give back to his country. To him, that meant shifting his focus from medical devices to weaponry. In 2000, when suicide bombers in Yemen attacked the Navy’s USS Cole, Sancoff recalls, “I said, ‘Wait a minute: Some yahoo terrorists in a cheap little boat and $500 worth of explosives can kill 17 sailors on a billion-dollar ship?’ ” Not long afterward, he came across a 630-page U.S. Navy report on an exercise called Juliet, in which the Navy attacked a battle group with small, high-speed boats. By the end of the second day of simulated warfare, the U.S. had lost more than 20,000 servicemen. It seemed obvious that the Navy was in need of improved small craft.
Sancoff emerging from <em>Ghost</em>’s cockpit
Photograph by Guido VittiSancoff emerging from Ghost’s cockpit
As a teenager, Sancoff had spent several years helping a friend’s father fashion components for hydroplanes, a type of high-speed racing boat that skims across the surface of the water. Building off that knowledge, Sancoff began reading up on marine technology. To make a stable vessel that doesn’t shoot into the air, as surface-skimming hydroplanes are wont to do, the hull needed to be anchored to the water. But how can one move something through the water without creating debilitating drag? The answer: Supercavitation. Among other benefits, the phenomenon makes craft more fuel-efficient and more stable for shooting at targets. The Russian military, Sancoff learned, had built a supercavitating rocket-powered torpedo, which traveled at 200 knots, roughly four times as fast as American weapons. But the torpedo was difficult to steer. The problem, he realized, was that the propellers were pushing from the back, rather than pulling from the front. “If you push a pencil across a table, it’s very hard to keep it going straight,” Sancoff explains. “If you pull the pencil, it’s easy.”

Installing Ghost’s propellers in front solved not only the control problem but actually furthered the vessel’s supercavitation by helping to push water aside, making room for air coming from above the water. It also meant that the craft would potentially be more stable and have less drag than hydrofoils, which also have hulls that rise out above the water. “That was the eureka,” says Sancoff. “I immediately started designing the boat on my kitchen table with a pen and paper.”
 
 
After founding Juliet Marine, named for the disastrous Navy exercise, in 2007, Sancoff filed for more than a dozen patents for his technology and began building a full-scale plywood mockup of Ghost’s hull. He set up Juliet Marine’s headquarters in downtown Portsmouth, N.H., in a white three-story house from 1725, bordered by a white picket fence and garden beds filled with broken clamshells.

In the spring of 2009, Juliet Marine secured a rental agreement for the Naval base hangar. “It was full of junk when we got it—old wooden mockups of submarines and that sort of thing,” says Sancoff, who had only four employees at that point. Investing $5 million of his own money, he built the first full-scale prototype in two years with the help of contractors.
Ghost Protocol
A major challenge for Ghost is that the Navy’s policy is to buy only technologies in which it has announced interest. “It is not procedure to procure a system without established requirements,” says Commander Thurraya Kent, spokeswoman for the Navy’s research, development, and acquisitions arm. In the fall of 2009 the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) briefly expressed interest in funding the Ghost project, but Sancoff declined its request for a formal proposal because the agency required use rights to all of Juliet Marine’s patents. “I’m a startup company—this is how I’ll earn money, by owning the technology,” says Sancoff. Darpa declined to comment.
Over the years, Sancoff sent the Office of Naval Research images of his design. “They laughed at me; they thought I was crazy,” he says. “‘Those jet engines can’t run underwater in those tubes. That boat can never be stable. You can never supercavitate those hulls.’ Obviously I was discouraged.”
In October 2009, after about six months working in the hangar, Sancoff got a frantic call from his patent attorney. “He said, ‘I got something in the mail, I’ve never seen anything like it, and I’ve been practicing for 35 years,’ ” remembers Sancoff. The letter, from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, with a recommendation from the Office of Naval Research, turned out to be a secrecy order, forbidding Juliet Marine from filing its patents internationally or talking with anyone, including potential investors, about its technology. “They didn’t explain why. … They wouldn’t talk with my lawyer. They wouldn’t talk with me,” says Sancoff.
For two summers, Ghost’s trial runs were conducted only at night. “We were going out at like 3 a.m.,” says Joseph Curcio, a marine engineer who taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and designed robotic systems for the Navy before joining Juliet Marine in 2010 as vice president of research and development. “We’d have to cover the [propellers] with a blanket and move the boat in the dark. We weren’t allowed to let anyone take pictures.”
The secrecy orders were lifted after two years, also without explanation. That’s when Kinsella of Avalon Ventures heard about Ghost and joined the company’s board, investing $10 million. “We’ve never done a military application before,” he says, before pointing out that Sancoff has a strong track record as a serial entrepreneur. “I’ve always made money with this guy. He can squeeze a nickel until the buffalo pees.” 
 
 
Ghost failed to lift out of the water on its first dozen trial runs. Then, one day in 2011, with Sancoff and Curcio at the helm, Ghost emerged from the water. “We’d just gotten all the controls right,” says Curcio. “We were calling over to the chase boat, asking ‘Are we up? Are we up?’ and Tom [Richards] radioed over, like, ‘I can’t believe it, I can see, like, four feet under the hull.’” Euphoria ensued. “We’d had all these experts telling us … it’s going to nosedive and flip over,” says Sancoff. “And all of the sudden, it runs perfect. It’s not unstable at all.”

Not long afterward, Sancoff accidentally drove the craft into the rocks. “The Admiral was away on a business trip, so we got to blame him,” says Curcio. Admiral Richards generally captains the Ghost’s chase boat during trial runs. “We had no adult supervision,” adds Sancoff. “I was not happy with myself, to say the least.”
“We’d had all these experts telling us … it’s going to nosedive and flip over. And all of the sudden, it runs perfect. It’s not unstable at all”
That’s when Juliet Marine hired Cliff Byrd, a 6-foot-3 former Navy SEAL trained to drive anything from a dumptruck to a Mark V Special Operations Craft. Byrd, 36, had spent 12 years with the SEALs, traveling more than 220 days a year to hot spots around the world. Mild mannered, with a shaved head and an arm tattoo that reads Strength From Above, Byrd says he cannot talk about his missions but that he left the Navy to spend more time with his wife and two daughters after a helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan, killing some of his friends. Like so many of his colleagues, Byrd suffers from back pain and permanent injuries to his elbows, caused by the harsh impact of riding in small boats through rough seas.
“You’d think skydiving or all the other things we do, that you’d get injured from that, but actually it’s the boats that you take most of the beating on,” he says. “A lot of guys have back injuries, hips, ankles, knees, shoulders, you name it—any joint, just because of all the shock your body goes through.”
The smoothness of Ghost’s ride is perhaps the team’s greatest point of pride. “I was riding down to Newport, and we had up to 8- to 10-foot seas,” says Byrd. “We’re sitting in here joking about it and not actually feeling anything.” Sancoff slept for half the ride. “But the chase boat that came along with us pounded through the ocean so bad,” he says. “They were seasick, throwing up. When we got to Rhode Island, I said, ‘Let’s go and get a steak,’ right? They couldn’t even eat.” 
 
 
Roger Schaffer, a member of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, worked as a civilian contractor on Navy ship design for 42 years. He saw Juliet Marine give a presentation about Ghost earlier this year. “It’s difficult to come up with something new in a field like naval architecture, but they’ve managed to combine a number of features into an overall concept that looks quite attractive,” says Schaffer. “If the supercavitation technology of the Ghost proves successful, it will allow the Ghost to obtain significantly higher speed than hydrofoils or SWATHs have been able to achieve.” That said, Juliet Marine faces a tough battle. “Normally, innovative ship designs stem from funded research by the Navy at one of their labs,” says Schaffer. “[Juliet Marine] also has a problem with the institutional bias the Navy tends to have against small crafts like the Ghost.”

In the face of budget cuts, Defense officials have asked companies to fund more of their own research, which is why Juliet Marine personnel are surprised they haven’t garnered more interest. Juliet Marine hopes things will change if the craft breaks the commercial SWATH speed record of 31 knots. So far, Ghost’s top speed is 29 knots, but Curcio says 50 knots is within reach, roughly the speed of Mark V boats, a formerly popular mode of transport for Navy SEALs that was discontinued in 2012.
Seven U.S. allies, including Qatar, Israel, and Korea, have expressed interest inGhost, according to Sancoff. “A lot of countries adopt new technology much more rapidly than the U.S.,” he says. “Do I want to see this boat in the Persian Gulf with another flag on the back of it? Not necessarily. But if that’s what it takes to make this company successful, to supply boats to the U.S. Navy, then we’ll do it,” he says. The Wright Brothers, he adds, got a contract from France before the U.S. government. “They thought they were crazy, too,” says Sancoff. “It took years for the Wright brothers to convince [the government] that an airplane might be viable.
“Do I want to see this boat in the Persian Gulf with another flag on the back of it? Not necessarily. But if that’s what it takes to make this company successful … then we’ll do it”
The potential market for new naval vessels will reach about $46 billion in the next nine years, according to AMI International, a global defense market analysis firm. Juliet Marine says Ghost’s technology could also be adapted to build stable, superfast torpedoes or unmanned sea drones. Commercial possibilities include jet skis or craft for transporting workers to oil platforms. “These rich bankers who take helicopters from [Wall Street] to the Hamptons now, you know?” adds Kinsella. “If they don’t want to take a helicopter, the Ghost could take a bunch of people out there at high speed.” Juliet Marine is in talks withBarclays (BCS) about an initial public offering, and Kinsella says the startup isn’t opposed to an acquisition by a larger defense contractor. The startup plans to build two additional boats by the end of the year, which will be used for weapons testing and demonstrations.
With its patents now available to the public, Juliet Marine’s staff worries other countries and companies will steal its technology. “The Chinese are probably already starting to knock this off,” says Sancoff, adding that hackers attempt to break into his company’s computer systems hundreds of times each month. One day in 2009, he arrived at Building 129 to find the locks broken. He assumes whoever did it wanted to photograph the boat’s parts; the break-in remains unsolved, he says.
On a sunny morning in July, Ghost is tethered to a buoy off the Portsmouth shipyard in the Piscataqua River. Curcio and Byrd climb aboard through the back door, above which is emblazoned New Hampshire’s motto: Live Free or Die. They’ll be manning the ship for a trip down the river out into three-foot swells in the open ocean.
Up front, the cockpit is outfitted with large windshields fashioned from two-inch-thick glass. There are multiple screens displaying maps and Ghost’s various controls, but Byrd needs only the throttle and a four-inch joystick to steer the craft. As he turns on the engines and ventilation, the vessel sounds like an airplane lifting off. The back cabin, big enough to transport 16 people, is dimly lit. Seats clamped into the metal grid floor are outfitted with quick-release race car safety belts. There are no windows but for two round glass panes near the cabin floor, each with a diameter of about six inches. Through them, one sees the water gushing by—until the hull lifts up into the air. Then, against a blue backdrop of the ocean below, one sees only drops of spray against the portholes.
For a video on Ghost, go to: www.businessweek.com/ghost-boat
Winter is a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek in New York.


viernes, 22 de agosto de 2014

10 questions to ask when interviewing candidates

Finding the best person for a position requires more than just matching up skills with job requirements. These questions will help you determine how well a candidate can really meet your needs. 
Hero

1: What are two or three major trends affecting this industry and how do you see them affecting the profession?

This is a big picture question, and the trends the candidate identifies are less important than the candidate's ability to identify broad industry trends and articulate their impact

2: Tell me about a time you were asked to perform a task or project you didn't understand

This question is more appropriate for staff than leaders, but in both cases will help tease out how candidates act in unclear circumstances

3: Tell me about a time you were asked to do something you've never done before (new technology, different type of project, new industry, etc.)

This is similar to the previous question, but the crux of this one is whether candidates are self-starters who can rapidly adapt to a changing environment.

4: Do you get bored easily?

This is an interesting question, since the two extremes of possible answers may be "correct" depending on the role you're trying to fill

5: What types of activities would you expect and prefer this role to entail?

This is a subtle way of determining whether candidates understand the role they're applying for and whether their expectations match yours.

6: Where do you want your career to go and what skills would you like to learn and develop as our employee?

 If a candidate expects development opportunities you can't provide, you'll need to reconcile that concern or end up with an unhappy employee.

7: If you could make two or three changes at your former place of employment, what would they be?

Like question 1, the content of the answer is less important than the thought process that goes into the answer -- unless the best the candidate can come up with is something banal like, "My last employer should have bought better coffee."

8: Ask a case question

Provide an overview of a recent situation you or your company faced and test the candidate's ability to identify and articulate a solution on the fly. 

9: Ask a "tough employee" question
See if candidates ask relevant questions about the situation and observe their thought process in determining how to resolve the situation.

10: Ask about a hobby or interest (if it's mentioned on their résumé)

Rather than making small talk, you want to see if candidates are well-rounded individuals and get some feeling for their personality.



jueves, 21 de agosto de 2014

How Imitating Elvis Became an Industry (BusinessWeek)


Jay Zanier of Collingwood, Ont., performs onstage at the Ultimate Elvis Tribute Artist Contest in Memphis
Photograph by Stan Honda/AFP via Getty Images
Jay Zanier of Collingwood, Ont., performs onstage at the Ultimate Elvis Tribute Artist Contest in Memphis
Clarifies ownership of Elvis Presley Enterprises in eighth paragraph.
Ronny Craig has been performing as an Elvis Presley impersonator and promoting tribute concerts for two decades. From 2011 to 2013 he helped stage a contest in Memphis called King of the World, which sought to crown the world’s best Elvis impersonator—or tribute artist, as many prefer to be called. The contest didn’t turn much of a profit, and Craig and his partners shut the business down. “There are so many players trying to get a hand in the pie,” he says. “It’s Elvis wars.”

At least three competitions will crown a champion tribute artist at this year’s Elvis Week, the annual remembrance of Presley’s death, which concludes this weekend in Memphis. That includes the Ultimate, which boasts a $20,000 top prize, and Images of the King, which features separate divisions—the Early Years, the ’70s, and a category for Elvis-impersonating youth. The Elvis Entertainers Network World Championship, a spinoff of Craig’s old event, drew 35 performers and hundreds of paying guests to an airport hotel.
Why are there so many different shows crowning top tributes to the King? The mini-industry began in Memphis a decade after Presley’s death. It was the brainchild of Edward “Doc” Franklin, a veterinarian and nightclub owner who ministered to the animals Elvis and his wife, Priscilla, kept at the Graceland mansion.
In the summer of 1987 he figured there’d be a big crowd in Memphis for the 10th anniversary, so he took out an ad in USA Today promoting a tribute contest. “He was a man who could see things other people couldn’t,” says his widow, Jackie Myrick. Thirty Elvii—Myrick’s phrase for multiple Elvises—showed up at the Franklins’ nightclub, Bad Bob’s, for a contest called Images of Elvis.
The regular customers showed up for the shows, and so did the pilgrims. “We would have beer trucks parked in the parking lot, we were selling so many drinks,” says Myrick. Soon, promoters were staging tribute concerts in such places as La Crosse, Wisc., Lake George, N.Y., and, of course, Las Vegas.
Those early shows were often controversial. “The older generation of Elvis fans were so dogmatically faithful to the real Elvis that they saw Elvis impersonators almost as false prophets,” says John Paget, a documentary filmmaker who chronicled the subculture in the 2000 film Almost Elvis. Tribute artists weren’t fully sanctioned until 2007, when Elvis Presley Enterprises, the business arm of the musician’s estate, held its first Elvis Week contest, called the Ultimate.
“The Ultimate is like the Super Bowl,” says Paget, and the Franklins’ original contest was more akin to college basketball’s March Madness. “It was seven days long, the performance went from 5 p.m. to midnight, and then everyone moved into the hotel lobby for all-night karaoke. It was really a place for people who wanted to overdose on Elvis.”
Keeping track of all the Elvis contests can be dizzying. So is the recent history of Elvis Presley Enterprises. Presley’s daughter, Lisa Marie, sold a “major interest” of the company in 2005, according to the EPE website. That stake wound up in the portfolio of a company called Core Media Group, which also owned the rights to the reality TV series American Idol and Muhammed Ali’s brand. Core, which is owned by private equity group Apollo Global Management (APO), sold its stake in EPE to Authentic Brands Group and Joel Weinshanker, CEO of the National Entertainment Collectibles Association, last year.
EPE’s licensing business generated $32 million in 2012, according to the Associated Press. David Beckwith, a spokesman for EPE, declined to share more recent numbers. Some Elvis tribute contest promoters pay license fees for the right to use Presley’s license, but Craig says EPE hasn’t cracked down on unlicensed contests. That’s good for promoters, and good for the Elvii.
Clark is a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek covering small business and entrepreneurship.