Kaai raises another $3.5M
Goleta-based Kaai has raised a $3.5 million series B round of financing from a group of investors that includes clean-tech investment firm Khosla Ventures, according to regulatory filings. The secretive start-up is working on an LED lighting technology developed by Steven DenBaars and Shuji Nakamura, two researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Nakamura Read More →
In honor of a business news leader
We’ll take a few words to honor Ray Shaw, a journalist and entrepreneur who died suddenly this month at age 75. Beginning in the late 1980s, Shaw led Charlotte, N.C.-based American City Business Journals, the nation’s foremost owner of weekly financial news publications. As a former Wall Street Journal reporter, Shaw rose through the ranks Read More →
Perils and promise for an ugly budget deal
As this newspaper was going to press, the California budget was little more than a thumbnail sketch produced for the media and the credit markets. Nonetheless, the compromise had the required impact — headlines for the press and a dramatic decline in the interest rate on Golden State bonds. Although the heavy lifting on the Read More →
Swimming against the tide
Venture capital investment is settling to pre-Internet-bubble levels but tri-county start-ups are holding their own, with a handful of start-ups keeping the deals flowing and the cash coming in. Nationally, the picture is ugly: Venture capital investments dropped 37 percent, from $8.3 billion to $5.3 billion, in the second quarter compared with the same period Read More →
Audit uncovers dirt on county trash business
As Santa Barbara County begins mulling who will get lucrative trash-hauling contracts in 2011, an audit of the county’s current providers showed that one of them underpaid the county nearly $20,000 and overcharged customers more than $177,000. County officials aren’t yet hinting whether the errors they found could mean a shake-up for the three companies Read More →
Radio Square developer faces foreclosure on Yanonali property
The company facing foreclosure on Radio Square in Santa Barbara is now battling litigation on a second project in the city. Laguna Hills-based DBN Development allegedly failed to repay a $5.5 million loan for the Yanonali Street property it purchased in 2006. The project’s lender, San Francisco-based United Commercial Bank, filed a lawsuit in Read More →
