February 2009

What's Up? Docs!
Though I pretend to be a doctor at parties (you’ll have to see last month’s column for more on this), my medical knowledge is scant. But that didn’t stop me from attending the Cleveland Clinic Medical Innovation Summit in November. No, I haven’t always been fascinated in the conference’s topic, urology and gynecology. (Hey, stop chuckling. This is a business magazine.) I went because health care isthe growth industry in the United States. We have an aging population eager t...

Stocked Market
W alking the floor at HGR Industrial Surplus is like taking the first step on a sci-fi landscape: It’s huge, foreign and more than a bit intimidating. Hulking, mint green industrial lathes are plastered with warning stickers that graphically depict all of the ways one can sever fingers, crush hands and otherwise be knocked about the head through misuse. Robotic arms are frozen in a mid-air salute, waiting for the next time they will be called into service. There are oscilloscopes, servo motors and...

Crew Cuts
Back in the late ’90s, when it was clear BP America was leaving Cleveland but had yet to actually go, Paul Meshanko would stop in for an occasional beer at a bar in Independence.    He didn’t work for BP, but many of the other patrons had survived rounds of BP layoffs and lived to complain about it — loudly.This is from people who are still employed, he recalls thinking at the time. As much as layoffs change the lives of those who lose their jobs, they also have the potential...

What's In A Name
ToadHammer Cami Noce, 42, & Tim Noce, 39 Software Developer Founded June 2008 Newbury, Ohio Kind of like a '70s metal band, right? When Tim Noce plays Rock Band with his 14-year-old daughter, Molly, they think of silly names for their groups, such as Windy Muffin and Geekhammer Blue. “We get goofy,” he says. He tapped that same spontaneity in thinking up the name for ToadHammer Software, the latest business venture launched by Tim and his wife, Cami. The company offers a Web-based system to ...

You 'Tude
Remember when “plastics” was the buzzword? A decade ago, that wave-of-the-future awe was transferred to the Web. Nothing is going to trump the Internet anytime soon, but the wonderment once associated with it has since given way to an embrace-it-or-suffer reality. Tony Weber, CEO of Cleveland’s Glazen Creative Studios, understands that. After learning that Web advertising is projected to top $4 billion by 2011, he wanted a bigger piece of the pie. In December, Glazen started producing ...

Character Building
Insipired by a video game, three Oberlin College students have developed a better way to learn how to write Chinese.

Diverse By Design
At a recent meeting on diversity issues, Michael Haught, vice president of human resources for the Northeast Ohio division of Time Warner Cable, struck up a conversation with a Case Western Reserve University graduate, who was also Asian-American. “He said to me, ‘I just don’t understand why diversity is such a big deal,’ ” recalls Haught. “I realized that he is part of a generation that has never had to deal with these issues. He expects that if he’s...

The Upside of Downsizing
Recently, Mike Cantor was working late into the evening doing something many employers haven’t been able to do in months: The COO and general counsel of Allegro Realty Advisors was interviewing a candidate for one of three positions that the corporate real estate firm plans to fill this year. “We’re focused on growth, but we’re not doing it blindly,” says Cantor. “We are being cautious in this economy. But we are also aware that our business is strong, and it’s ...

Character Building
Insipired by a video game, three Oberlin College students have developed a better way to learn how to write Chinese.