Blue Real Estate, a California firm that made a bundle selling West Coast office buildings at the market’s peak, has been
buying up local buildings and trying to learn the Indianapolis market.
Charter Homes recruited and paid buyers to take out inflated mortgages on dozens of central Indiana homes it built, promising to manage the properties as rentals and make payments for the owners, current and former Charter business partners say.
A person’s DNA may someday determine how doctors diagnose illness and prescribe affordable treatment. That same genetic makeup also might help doctors determine whether a person suffering from cancer might be predisposed to respond or not respond to chemotherapy or another type of innovative or experimental treatment. That future picture of health care delivery, however, is missing a key piece. It doesn’t address what those advancements might mean for health insurance and other related questions about medical coverage. Our current…
Emboldened by the deal he signed to put his company’s name on the Indianapolis Colts’ new home, Forrest Lucas has launched
an arsenal of creative-some would say unorthodox-initiatives to fortify his growing company. Many of them are designed to
help Lucas Oil Products Inc. go head to head with the oil industry’s biggest players.
Several industry surveys predict health insurance expenses will rise at a slower pace in 2009 than in previous years. Many employers, however, are passing the added burden on to workers. Raising deductibles, copayments or out-of-pocket spending limits are the most common ways companies plan to reduce their increases. The trend of passing more of the responsibility to employees has escalated the past five years, giving rise to cheaper alternatives such as consumer-directed health plans. “The tie that binds is that…
Gibson Insurance Group is the latest benefits broker to get more serious about wellness. The South Bend-based firm, which has an office in Indianapolis, has hired a dedicated wellness director to help its clients refine and assess their wellness programs for workers. Nicole Fallowfield, the former vice president of sales for Principal Wellness Co. in Indianapolis, will work out of Gibson’s downtown Indianapolis office but serve Gibson’s clients throughout Indiana. By hiring Fallowfield, Gibson joins a budding trend among brokers…
When thieves made off with a piece of construction equipment from a west-side job site last month, they were in for a surprise. Little did they know that it contained a GPS tracking device developed by Earthwave Technologies in Broad Ripple. The system traced the skid-steer loader’s exact route to a rural Bedford residence, enabling police to recover it within days of the heist. “I called the sheriff’s department down there and, sure enough, it was right in the barn,”…
Indiana Attorney General Steve Carter has filed a lawsuit in Steuben County Court against Countrywide Home Loans Inc., alleging that the nation’s largest mortgage lender engaged in deceptive practices that led borrowers to obtain costly and potentially risky loans. He joins attorneys general from four other states in taking action against Calabasas, Calif.-based Countrywide this […]
When Eli Lilly and Co. announced Aug. 6 that it would more than double the amount of research and development work it outsources to Covance Inc., Dr. Alfonso Alanis got nervous. The CEO of contract researcher Anaclim LLC worried that more work for Covance would mean less work for local firms that provide drug development services to Lilly. Executives at other local firms, who asked not to be named because of confidentiality agreements with Lilly, also have fretted that their…
Continental Enterprises, an intellectual property consulting firm, launched a service this summer to help area high schools register their logos, names and mascots as trademarks and establish licensing programs, assuring that schools will get a cut of all merchandise sales bearing their mark. This month, North Central High School, one of the state’s largest, signed with Continental, and six to eight more schools are expected to follow suit within 60 days.
A California dry cleaning company whose own financial viability is in doubt has submitted the high bid in U.S. District Bankruptcy Court in Delaware to buy 23 Tuchman Cleaners stores in the Indianapolis area. Newport Beach-based US Dry Cleaning Corp. reported a negative cash flow of $4.8 million in the nine months ended June 30 […]
The future of medicine is personal. That’s been the mantra of the pharmaceutical industry for the last decade-since the human genome was sequenced for the first time. But before Eli Lilly and Co. and its peers can develop and sell drugs that treat only patients with a specific gene, it needs sophisticated devices to test if a patient has that gene. And those devices need sophisticated software to make them run. That’s where The RND Group Inc. comes in. The…
A spate of lawsuits involving the state’s largest medical-device makers underscores the fiercely competitive nature of the life sciences sector, particularly when the billion-dollar companies need to protect trade secrets. Warsaw orthopedics manufacturer Biomet Inc., Indiana’s fourth-largest private company, is at the center of much of the messy litigation, which stems from a former sales representative’s move to rival Zimmer Holdings Inc., also based in Warsaw. In two unrelated lawsuits, Biomet sued in July 2007 the Kentucky sales rep and…
In the midst of a down economy and tepid interest in tennis, the only problem the Indianapolis Racquet Club Pro Shop has is where to expand next. Pushed by double-digit-percentage sales growth in nine of the last 12 years, the IRC Pro Shop has expanded from a 750-square-foot shoebox to become an industry giant in the specialty tennis category. Most tennis club pro shops are breakeven operations, but IRC officials said they have seen profit grow each of the last…
HENDRICKS COUNTY Motorcycle team expanding in Brownsburg-again In 2004, Indiana convinced Vance & Hines Motorsports Inc. to move its motorcycle racing team from California to Brownsburg. The National Hot Rod Association Pro Stock team moved into an 18,000-square-foot facility whose central location made traveling to races easier and made it more convenient to return to […]
New York Yankees first baseman Lou Gehrig died in 1941 of a disease that came to bear his name. Six years later, second baseman
Jackie Robinson famously broke through baseball’s color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers, earning the league minimum $5,000.
He died in 1972. Mark Roesler believes the best earning years still lie ahead for both legendary players, as well as many
others like them. But first he must untangle their image rights in federal court in Indianapolis.
Construction of Pan Am Plaza in the mid-1980s was a major step in the evolution of Indianapolis into a sports town worthy
of hosting a Super Bowl. But the office building, parking garage, skating rinks and public gathering place came up short over
the years in other ways for both taxpayers and developer, the Indiana Sports Corp.
Andrea Walker is a chemist with management aspirations. But instead of signing up for a traditional MBA program, the team manager at Indianapolis-based AIT Laboratories will enroll this year in a slimmed-down business program that focuses on the life sciences. The program, called the Kelley Executive Certificate in the Business of Life Sciences, is a new creation of Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business. The program will conduct most of its classes online over a one-year period. The courses will…
Curt Simic has spent 31 years as a student and in various positions at Indiana University. That’s nearly half his life devoted to the Bloomington campus. So it’s no surprise that Simic, 66, views his retirement as president of the IU Foundation-his most recent post and one he’s held the past 20 years-with mixed emotions. While he’s looking forward to having time to go bike riding-as a student in the early 1960s, Simic competed in the school’s Little 500 Bicycle…
By conducting market research for some of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, locally based G&S Research Inc. has grown into a $10 million firm. But founders have even higher expectations for their G&S Discovery division, which was formed two years ago. Its flagship product, Navigrant, provides a database of government grant awards for national biomedical research. The total market worldwide for life sciences research is estimated at $45 billion. Navigrant has compiled information on 450,000 awards from 60…
