Corrections or additions?
This article by Barbara Fox was prepared for the September 17, 2003 edition of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights reserved.
Life in the Fast Lane
Freon used to be one of the country’s major disposal
problem, but laws were passed in 1992 to make it illegal to
intentionally
flush out chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) from a refrigerator, and now
everyone knows what to do.
Computer equipment is the current disposal dilemma. An estimated 215
million computers will be discarded over the next three years, each
containing from two to eight pounds of lead that will end up in the
waste stream — unless individuals and corporations recycle their
computers or have them cleansed of toxic materials before disposal.
For almost five years a struggling nonprofit, Trenton Materials
Exchange,
has been trying to recycle and cleanse Central New Jersey’s electronic
extras (see following story). Founded in 1998 by Carol Royal, the
nonprofit takes donations of electronic equipment, office furniture,
medical equipment, and building supplies and makes them available
to the public for only the handling fees. It had been self supporting,
in part thanks to a benevolent landlord, but under a new landlord,
the rent has been raised. The current co-directors, Geri LaPlaca and
Cheri Stewart, are hoping to get government funding and private grants
to get the money needed to make their move.
Meanwhile a much bigger company, a public firm called WindsorTech,
has opened at Lake Drive in Hightstown with a similar purpose —
equipment recycling and remarketing, as well as data security.
WindsorTech
does on a big scale part of what Trenton Materials Exchange does on
a small scale. Whereas Trenton Materials Exchange employs volunteers
to strip computers of data and programs before they are resold,
WindsorTech
does this on an assembly line.
Five partners chipped in a total of $900,000 to start WindsorTech,
among them the 41-year-old CEO Marc Sherman. His parents had a scrap
metals company in Trenton, and he went to the proverbial school of
hard knocks. He had worked for a company similar to WindsorTech, but
— in a situation similar to Greg Lazzaro’s and Stephen Cooper’s
(page 43) — the parent company closed it down. He established
the company in Hightstown to be near potential clients and to the
ports, and he commutes from Palm Beach.
The company’s very ambitious plans include taking over the field.
“We would love to roll up the industry,” says Robert Jackson,
vice president of investor relations. “like Waste Management
consolidated
the waste business in the 1990s. We think with the business model
we have, the infrastructure we have built, and our collective
experience
with mergers and acquisitions, we have a great chance of consolidating
the data security and environmental compliance industry.”
Last year Sherman and WindsorTech partner David Loppert engineered
a reverse buyout with a public firm, Delta States Oil. For weeks
Jackson
has been saying the SEC permission will come “any day now”
to trade on Nasdaq’s over the counter bulletin board. But Jackson
is still waiting. The marketmaker in this stock is going to be
Pennaluna,
an Idaho-based firm that has worked with Jackson on similar reverse
mergers.
Why does WindsorTech need to be a public company? Because it is
handling
such sensitive information. WindsorTech’s service is to scrub the
hard drives and provide an airtight environmental audit trail, so
that, down the road, corporations will not be held liable for what
happens to that computer. Being a public company, says CEO Sherman,
will add an extra shine to the impeccable reputation that Windsor
Tech needs.
WindsorTech’s audit report and certificate of disposition includes
function, condition, configuration, fair market value of sold or
donated
items, and whether sold to international market place whole or in
parts. Cost per computer, including keyboard, mouse, monitor, and
CPU: $11.50.
That’s not a lot of money, so for Windsor Tech to make money, it must
work at high volume. Eight computers on a pallet get loaded onto a
conveyor system, and cables are plugged into each parallel port. The
software kicks in and gathers data on the manufacturer, serial number
processor speed, memory available, network cards, CD-Rom, CD-rewrite,
and so in. That information is processed as a batch as pallets move
along and are put into racks for resale. “We have redundant record
keeping, with the data maintained at our facility and sent back to
the corporation,” says Jackson.
Equipment that doesn’t work and is broken down takes a different audit
trail. WindsorTech pays WasteManagement 45 cents a pound, or about
$10 per monitor, to separate out toxic materials and send them to
a special landfill.
Most of the computers are sold either whole or as parts to developing
nations, less tech savvy than the United States. WindsorTech either
gets a commission as the middleman or accepts the computers for
donation
to a charity.
“Fortune 500 companies are more concerned that the equipment is
free of any sensitive data and removed from service in a proper
fashion
from an environmental standpoint than about getting money back for
the computers,” says Jackson.
In the newest program, Charitable Technology Exchange, WindsorTech
takes donated PCs, cleanses them, and sells them. The donor gets the
tax benefit and the audit trail, and the charity gets the cash.
Most of WindsorTech’s personnel, including founding
partners Ed Cummings, Carl Saracino, and Mike Sheerr, had worked for
Intellisale, a remarketer of excess and off-lease computer equipment
in North Jersey, or its parent company, Palm Beach-based Applied
Digital
Solutions (ADS).
After ADS closed Intellisale down to focus on life sciences businesses
and digital tracking, Marc Sherman took six months off to assess what
went well and what did not go well, and he started fresh.
Intellisale had gotten into selling computers to retail clients on
the Internet, but Sherman chose to concentrate instead on data
security
and environmental compliance. He leased the warehouse on Lake Drive
in October, 2001, and now 15 to 20 of the 27 employees work there.
The remainder work from Florida.
At its peak the warehouse will be able to process 30,000 computers
a month, but its automated system came online only at the end of last
year, and it is working nowhere near capacity now. In fact,
WindsorTech
has just two corporate asset management contracts, one with Lockheed,
another with a northeast-based energy company.
Can one’s conscience be clear when old computers are made ready to
send to eastern Europe or Africa? Not quite. People there may not
care about green recycling.
It’s an “end of life” issue. “In the United States, we
probably began worrying about this only 10 years ago. and our
technology
was vastly advanced from what the developing nations have now,”
says Jackson. “The fine line we try to walk is between
safeguarding
the worldwide environment and allowing developing nations access to
the technology they would otherwise not be able to afford.”
— Barbara Fox
WindsorTech Inc., 70 Lake Drive, Hightstown 08520.Marc Sherman, CEO. 609-426-4666; fax, 609-426-4543.Www.windsortechinc.comTop Of PageNonProfit TMexTrenton Materials Exchange operates a year-roundcomputer/electronicdrop-off and refurbishing program. In conjunction with the MercerCounty Improvement Authority, it is collecting computers thisSaturday,September 20, at Bakers Basin. A similar collection last Saturdayin Princeton brought an unexpectedly large response — twotruckloads,totaling 20,000 pounds.Working computer systems are refurbished and distributed at no costto children, people with disabilities, and older adults of limitedmeans. Very dated and broken equipment is sent to a licensedde-manufacturerfor recycling in an environmentally appropriate, safe manner.The organization’s lease is supposed to expire on September 30, andit is looking for funds to move.Trenton Materials Exchange, 800 New York Avenue,Box 693, Trenton 08604-0693. Geri LaPlaca, co-director. 609-278-0033;fax, 609-278-4900. Www.tmex.orgTop Of PageOM SolutionsAfter almost four years in a corner store at PrincetonShopping Center, the site of the former Clancy Paul store, RadheyGupta moved his four-person computer business, OM Solutions, toResearchPark. The space is the same, 1,100 square feet, but the new spaceis more efficiently configured, and many of his customers are inResearchPark.OM Solutions is an authorized dealer for Dell, IBM, and HewlettPackardcomputers, Kingston memory, ViewSonic monitors, and SonicWallfirewalls.The advantage in ordering through the store rather than from theInternetis that OM Solution unpacks the box, checks your purchase to be sureit is working, and custom configures it. If you want Adobe and virusscanner on your harddrive, OM buys them and installs them.”We have more than 2,000 customers,” says Gupta, who is proudof the service he offers, “and we have lower overhead. We matchall big store prices, and we also do home setup and delivery.”OM sells printers, servers, scanners, fax machines, and PDS systemsand all supplies. It offers hourly and monthly service contracts,inhouse and onsite repair, data recovery, network installation,firewalls,and web design/hosting. One on one training costs $89 an hour.Gupta graduated from Delhi University, Class of 1977, and went toMonmouth College for a master’s in computer science. Until four yearsago he was an IBM project manager for software development in WestOrange, and he took over the computer store business, buying it fromClancy Paul and changing the name, when he was 43. His daughter isa recent graduate of New York University’s business program, and hisson is studying to be a biomedical engineer at Johns Hopkins.Gupta’s mantra: to have no hidden costs to surprise customers. AndOM is “green-minded.” When it replaces a customer’s computers,it offers to take the discards to be recycled at Trenton MaterialsExchange.OM Solutions, 415 Wall Street, Princeton 08540.Radhey Gupta, owner. 609-683-0060; fax, 609-683-0071. Home page:www.omsystemsolutions.comTop Of PageFrom Employee To EntrepreneurJust two years after Surendra Chaturvedi, right, movedfrom Kansas to Princeton to work at Orchid Biosciences, the companydownsized and he lost his job. So he started his own company, PrimesynLab Inc., and he moved to 515 square feet at Princeton Corporate Plazathis past spring.”Changing from being a scientist to being an entrepreneur —managing the lab, looking for the market, talking to the customers,bringing everything together — is a challenge,” Chaturvedisays.What helped was growing up in Mumbai, India, where his father hadreal estate and apparel manufacturing businesses. “I have abusinessgene in my blood,” he says. “And I have had business coursesin the past, so I know how to manage a project.”Thanks to the alternative program offered by the state unemploymentoffice, he has also been able to take courses in accounting andmarketingat Mercer County Community College. Available to unemployed peoplewho want to be entrepreneurs, these courses are an approvedalternativeto pounding the pavement.Chaturvedi graduated from Bombay University, Class of 1979, earnedhis PhD from the University of Oklahoma, and did post doc studiesat Northwestern with Robert Letsinger, known as “the father ofthe gene machine.” He worked at a contract chemical manufacturingcompany in Kansas and at Applied Biosystems in the Bay Area ofCalifornia,before coming to Orchid in 2000.His two-person company is a specialized lab to make difficult andunusual DNA for diagnostics and pharmaceutical companies. Among hisclients are Orchid Diagnostics in Stamford, Connecticut, and he isworking on a collaborative grant-funded project with a researcherat Cornell. His wife, Kalpana, works for Janssen Pharmaceuticals,and they have two children in the Princeton schools.Primesyn Lab Inc., 1 Deer Park Drive, PrincetonCorporate Plaza, Suite H, Monmouth Junction 08852. SurendraChaturvedi,owner. 877-774-6303; fax, 732-274-0907. Www.primesyn.com.Top Of PageContracts AwardedCody Eckert & Associates PA, 191 Clarksville Road,Princeton Junction 08550. 609-716-8500; fax, 609-716-8686.Cody Eckert designed the East Windsor Senior Centerthat will be dedicated on Sunday, September 21, at 2 p.m. on LanningBoulevard. Presbyterian Homes of New Jersey donated three acres onLanning Boulevard for the center, and the $1.8 million cost was paidfor by grants and donations. Uliano Construction did the building,and Warren Buonanno was the project architect. Eckert’s firm alsodesigned the county veterans’ home being constructed on the groundsof the Mercer County Geriatric Center.East Windsor’s new 10,825 square feet has a large multi-purpose roomwith a recessed stage and adjoining kitchen; it leads out to a deckwith table and chairs. Also included are rooms for computers, artsand crafts, games, reading, health screening, and a television lounge.”We’re known for our ability to use color in an analyticalway,”says Eckert. She points out that colors in each room were selectedfor their psychological effect, to enhance the activity.Much thought was given to how the multipurpose room would function.”Itis centrally located and has a good-size lobby so that large groupscan mill about on their way to various functions,” says Buonanno.”We used changes in ceiling heights to add interest to a one-storybuilding.The lighting feels soft and comfortable but provides high levels ofillumination for senior citizens who may have vision problems.”Church & Dwight Co. Inc. (CHD), 469 North HarrisonStreet, CN 5297, Princeton 08543-5297. Robert A. Davies III, chairmanand CEO. 609-683-5900; fax, 609-497-7177. Home page:www.armhammer.comChurch & Dwight will soon own more toothpaste. It has bought the oralcare brands of Unilever in the United States and Canada for $104millionin cash plus additional payments based on performance. Church &Dwight’sLakewood plant will manufacture the acquired toothpaste brands.Included in the sale are Pepsodent and Aim (positioned as”value”brands), and the Mentadent brand of toothpaste and toothbrushes(positionedas “serious” tooth care, plus exclusive licensing rights toClose-Up toothpaste. These brands brought $61 million for the firstsix months of the year. The deal is expected to close by the end ofthis year.The deal would triple the company’s unit sales and more than doubledollar sales within the U.S. oral care sector, says Robert A. Davies,CEO.Top Of PageNew in TownDrury Capital Inc., 47 Hulfish Street, Suite 346,Princeton 08542. 609-252-1230; fax, 609-252-1240.Drury Capital, an asset management firm, has established an officeat 47 Hulfish Street.Top Of PageCrosstown MovesWhite Hound Advertising, 234 Nassau Street,Princeton08542. Adam Ash, president. 609-921-0222; fax, 609-921-0292.White Hound Advertising has left its offices at 234 Nassau Street.Adam Ash, the agency’s president, says his shop is still in business,but declines to provide a new address.Top Of PageExpansionsLiberty Communications Network, 50 Millstone Road,Windsor Corporate Park, Suite 110, Cranbury 08512. Glenn Kapuscienski,general manager. 609-918-9400; fax, 609-918-9411. Home page:www.medicalcrossfire.comAdding to its current 4,446 square feet, Liberty CommunicationsNetworksigned a five-year lease for an additional 3,022 square feet atWindsorCorporate Park. The firm, a Cardinal Health Company, was representedby Thomas Romano of Buschman Partners, while Sab Russo and MattMalatichof CB Richard Ellis represented the owners, GMH Capital Partners.Top Of PageManagement MovesCytogen Corporation (CYTO), 650 College Road East,Suite 3100, CN 5308, Princeton 08543-5308. Michael Becker, presidentand CEO. 609-750-8200; fax, 609-452-2476. Home page:www.cytogen.comLast week Cytogen sold its right to collect royalties on a treatmentfor ovarian cancer to a British firm, Antisoma, for $500,000. Earlier,it appointed Christopher P. Schnittker as the new chief financialofficer, president, replacing Lawrence R. Hoffman, who resigned inDecember. Schnittker is a certified public accountant who mostrecentlyhad been CFO of Genaera (formerly Magainin Pharmaceuticals).Top Of PageDeathsTod Hamilton Herring, 77, on September 8. Retired as aprofessor at the College of New Jersey, he helped found the TrentonComputer Festival.Diane Lynn Cartwright 45, on September 10. She was anLPN and hospice nurse at Princeton Medical Center and a charge nurseat Applegarth Nursing Home.Wesley P. Townsend, 60, on September 6. A researchengineerwho helped develop the first touch screen, he worked at AT&T BellLabs and Lucent Technologies.Next StoryCorrections or additions?This page is published by PrincetonInfo.com— the web site for U.S. 1 Newspaper in Princeton, New Jersey.
