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By Stephen Nellis / Monday, October 11th, 2010 / Features, Small Business / Comments Off on Guitar man: High-end instruments, made in Oxnard
The first things you notice when you meet Jean Larrivée, the founder of high-end guitar maker Jean Larrivée Guitars, aren’t the test instruments leaning against the wall of his office, the tool chest in the corner or the small bottles of wood stain that dot the windowsill. It’s the giant red banners bearing Cyrillic script, Read More →
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By Stephen Nellis / Monday, October 11th, 2010 / Technology, Top Stories / Comments Off on UTC takeover looms for Clipper Windpower
After rocky sales timing put Clipper Windpower in a cash crunch, its largest investor is in position to take control of the Carpinteria company just as its long-term prospects brighten. In December, multinational conglomerate United Technologies Corp. acquired a 49.5 percent stake in Clipper in a transaction that pumped $206 million in new capital into the Read More →
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By Pacific Coast Business Times Staff / Monday, October 11th, 2010 / Columns, Nonprofits, Real Estate / Comments Off on Nonprofit seizes opportunity to turn hassle into new facility
Question: The city wants to extend a road through your property, right through a corner where several key buildings are located. What do you do? (a) Put up a fight. (b) Sell the city the land, and use the proceeds as seed money to build a new facility on your remaining property. Santa Maria-based VTC Read More →
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By Henry Dubroff / Monday, October 11th, 2010 / Columns, Opinion / Comments Off on Southwest on South Coast: A LUV story
At Santa Barbara Municipal Airport these days, construction crews are making progress on a $60 million expansion. When it opens next spring, the airport will get a new, two-story terminal, waiting areas that actually have bathrooms and five gates served by jetways. Thirteen hundred miles away in Dallas, the nation’s most profitable airline is also in Read More →
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By Marlize van Romburgh / Monday, October 11th, 2010 / Top Stories / Comments Off on AOL’s $50M local news venture hits region
Internet giant AOL moved into the already-crowded tri-county media scene with the launch of its first Patch.com news website in the region on Sept 28. Moorpark Patch is one of about 150 community news-oriented websites that AOL plans to roll out in California over the next year, and the company has “significant” plans for the Read More →
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By Marlize van Romburgh / Monday, October 11th, 2010 / Small Business, Women Inc. / Comments Off on Dialing up success: Firestone leads Tempest Telecom to clear skies
Jessica Firestone has built a business by making sure that your e-mails, text messages and phone calls get where they’re supposed to be going, and fast. In five years, Firestone has grown Goleta-based Tempest Telecom Solutions from a four-person startup to a 100-employee firm with operations across the country. Tempest pulls in about $30 million Read More →
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By Stephen Nellis / Friday, October 8th, 2010 / Women Inc. / Comments Off on Lopker tells her story at CSUCI
Today, Pamela Lopker is the founder, president and chairman of the board of Santa Barbara-based QAD, a $220-million-a-year manufacturing software company with 1,300 employees. But back in the in the 1970s, Lopker, the daughter of a U.S. Navy engineer, was coding software at a defense subcontractor when she realized she had brighter career prospects. “As Read More →
