Correction

Corrections or additions?

This column was prepared for the March 7, 2001

edition of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights reserved.

Between the Lines

High tech companies proliferate so fast around here

that as soon as we publish the story of one, three more have popped

up. We get hot tips about new technology companies from every front.

Sometimes they come from our U.S. 1 delivery team: "Old company

moved out, new company here." Or a company in an incubator starts

to hatch. Or we get a tip from an investment banker.

One of those tips is responsible for the X-ray image that appears

on the cover of this issue. In this case a money man called, inviting

us to a meeting of potential investors at the Sarnoff Corporation.

"This company, Cares Built, is really hot," he told us. Well,

it was the end of a slow day, and Sarnoff is just five minutes away.

So we sent a reporter who was prepared to be unimpressed — but who

walked away very impressed.

This company, based in Keyport, New Jersey, may have the solution

to digital X-rays. You can imagine that sending X-rays over the

Internet

would be more convenient than schlepping them from one doctor to

another.

They could also save lives by allowing for instant consultations.

Until now, though, digital X-rays have been less clear than the

traditional

kind.

Now, says the management of Cares Built, its digital X-rays equal

the quality of the film X-rays, thanks to Sarnoff’s magnificent

imaging technology, the Microcam 40 CMOS Imager. And Cares Built

boasts that it has the exclusive license for Sarnoff’s chip. Great

story.

But though Sarnoff researchers are working here, this company

"lives"

in Keyport, and companies based in greater Princeton take priority

for us. So we kept putting the Cares Built story in the bottom of

the pile. Then, when we were looking for a X-rayed hand to illustrate

a story on workplace injuries, we remembered it again. Do they have

a website with X-rays on it? Yes. Would they let us use one of their

images? Yes.

No sooner had we hung up from getting this permission when another

call came through, this one from one of the biggest public relations

agencies in New York. How many high tech companies are there in

Princeton? We forward many reference questions to the libraries —

answering questions is their mission — but this young woman

sounded desperate, so we tried to help. "I’m on deadline for a

press release about a new client moving into the area," she

wailed. "I need to say Princeton is a hot bed of high tech."

We crunched a few numbers in our database and fed her the statistics

on technology companies, but that didn’t satisfy her. Finally we fed

her a sentence, something like "Technology start-ups in the

Princeton/Rutgers research corridor are fueled not only the academic

institutions but also by prestigious R&D engines such as the Sarnoff

Corporation." Bingo. We got a grateful thank you from the PR

woman.

Top Of Page
Correction

YOUR MENTION of the passing of Anthony F. LaPlaca Sr. states that

Mr. LaPlaca was the father of the "owner of Joe’s Mill Hill

Saloon." For your information, Mr. LaPlaca’s son, Joe, sold the

saloon to his long-time bartender, Dennis Clark, in May of 1999.

Jim Carlucci

Mill Hill, Trenton

Corrections or additions?

— the web site for U.S. 1 Newspaper in Princeton, New Jersey.