Adding detail to an announcement from earlier this week, the Deshpande Foundation and a coalition of colleges and non-profit groups said today that a planned entrepreneurship center based at the University of Massachusetts Lowell will be called the Merrimack Valley Sandbox, and that it will be funded with $5 million from the Deshpande Foundation over […]
NetProspex Inc. has raised $5.5 million in a Series B round led by Edison Venture Fund. Some of the angel investors who backed the Waltham B2B lead-generation company in its 2009, $2 million Series A returned to participate in the second round of equity financing, which brings Netprospex’ total investment to $7.5 million, to date. […]
Google’s rumored $6 billion acquisition of Chicago online discount service Groupon would send shockwaves through the high-tech and bargain Web site industries, experts say. That price tag is extraordinary for a company founded in 2008, said Michael Greeley, general partner at Flybridge Capital Partners. The top 15 tech companies – including Google, Cisco, Microsoft and […]
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Commercial real estate vacancy rates have already peaked or will soon top out, though rents are likely to continue to fall, a realtors group said on Monday. The National Association of Realtors said it expects the vacancy rate for office space to rise a tick to 16.7 percent this quarter and gradually […]
LISBON — Sara Vale Lima, sales manager at Eical, a Portuguese textile company, feels suffocated by the euro. The common currency once meant flush banks and easy credit, but these days it has laid bare a cold reality: Portugal shares the high wages and prices of richer northern European neighbors, but not their competitiveness. Multimedia […]
SmartCells Inc., a Beverly diabetes drug developer, is to be acquired by Merck & Co. Inc. for a total of about $500 million, according to a news release today. The transaction will bring SmartCells’ outstanding stock to Merck, while SmartCell shareholders will be given an upfront cash payment, plus potential development and regulatory milestone payments. […]
Boston University trustee Bahaa Hariri has pledged $15 million to build an institute that will focus on research and initiatives that use computation for interdisciplinary applications, according to a report in BU Today. Faculty at the Bahaa Hariri Institute for Computational Science and Engineering will focus on applying computation to four main application-based clusters, including […]
BOSTON – Sanofi Pasteur has entered into a long-term lease extension with Thirty-Eight Sidney Street Limited Partnership, a partnership between Forest City Enterprises and M.I.T., for 53,401 square feet at 38 Sidney Street, located in University Park at MIT in Cambridge, Mass. Sanofi Pasteur will continue to occupy the top two floors of the five-story, 122,000-square-foot […]
Solar technology developer 1366 Technologies Inc. plans to build its first commercial manufacturing plant in Massachusetts and expects to break ground by next fall, the company’s CEO, Frank van Mierlo, said. The Lexington-based company, founded in 2007, says it has rapidly developed a revolutionary new process for producing crystalline silicon wafers. The wafers, used to […]
NEW YORK – Americans’ confidence in the economy rose to a five-month high in November, showing increased optimism for the first half of next year. The report offered some comfort to the nation’s retailers during the holiday shopping season, but shoppers still remain downbeat as they grapple with a high unemployment rate. Moreover, the latest […]
