Corrections or additions?
These articles by Barbara Fox and Peter J. Mladineo were published in
U.S. 1 Newspaper on September 9, 1998. All rights reserved.
New Dimensions in Meetings
For one Activities Inc. job, the client firm wanted
to thank 90 people and also make sure that the other workers would
see them being thanked. So Michael Young arranged to have the honored
90 picked up at work in limousines, taken to a mansion, and treated
like royalty, as if they were living in the mansion.
“Mansions can be a wonderful venue,” says Young. “I can
go into any hotel in this country and create my own mansion or the
Roaring ’20s. But basically I am stuck with a 1990s facility. If I
can find something from the ’20s that exists and just put accents
in — a $1,500 rental is better than $5,000 worth of props.”
Finding the right spot has always been a strong point for Activities
Inc., but now Young is spinning off the meeting business. Activities
Inc. will continue to do events, theme parties and team building,
plus destination management. In contrast, Meeting Dimensions can plan
anything from a single afternoon of teambuilding to a four-day
400-person
conference. It will be targeted to meeting and media production —
staging and multimedia production. In 1997 Young’s firm doubled, and
in the next 12 to 18 months he expects to double or triple in size.
The Young brothers, Michael and Bill, grew up working in their late
father’s restaurant, the noted Don Young’s, “flipping hamburgers
and seating the governor,” as he puts it. When they opened
Activities
Inc. they billed themselves as “restoring hospitality to the
hospitality
business. We were able to go in with a white collar look to IBM and
go back and put on a T shirt and deal with the dregs of the
business,”
says Young.
Bill works in sales and event management for the firm, and Michael
is president of both firms. A 1976 graduate of Middlesex County
College,
he has the CMP (certified meeting professional) designation.
Why two companies? “We did polling, asking people whether they
would call a firm named Activities Unlimited to produce a meeting
and the answer was no. And, with two companies, if there were a change
in the economy, we are not quite as vulnerable as we could have
been,”
says Young.
To get the right mansion, Young has been known to contact real estate
agencies to rent facilities that are on the market. But it is easier
to rent mansions already set up as high class catering halls. He cites
Glen Foerd Mansion and Pen Ryn, both in Bensalem, on the Delaware.
But natural beauty is still in demand, and he recommends county parks
because they have the necessities but are low cost. At the higher
end, Young recommends Grounds for Sculpture.
Don’t ask Young to take your firm to an ashram. “I don’t think
people in the northeast concern themselves as much as they perhaps
should with the spiritual side of things,” says Young. “Our
customers are 99 percent corporate, and they are not interested in
spiritual retreats.”
Meeting Dimensions, Box 150, Princeton 08542, andActivities Incorporated, 53 Pennington-Hopewell Road, Pennington08534. Michael D. Young, president. 609-466-4100; fax, 609-466-5414.E-mail: mdyoung@worldnet.att.net.Top Of PageIncubating VenturesB>Edward Rosen’s attempts to get venture capitalpumping through the veins of New Jersey technology start-ups may benearing a payoff. A man with a mission, Rosen started the ball rollingto generate some interest from New Jersey venture capitalists in earlystage companies.The payoff: an incubator showcase, which will be hosted by the VentureAssociation of New Jersey and the New Jersey Business IncubationNetworkon Tuesday, September 15, at 11:30 a.m. at the Governor Morris Hotelin Morristown. The event gives an opportunity to meet bothrepresentativesfrom the six New Jersey business incubators and 70 incubatorstart-ups.Also there will be a keynote on technology acquisition andcommercializationby Thomas Uhlman, president of Lucent Technologies’ newventuregroup. There will also be remarks by Jay Trien, president ofthe VANJ; Stash Lisowski, president of the New Jersey BusinessIncubation Network; Caren S. Franzini, executive director ofthe NJ Economic Development Authority; and five-minute presentationsby selected incubator companies. The exhibit stays open until 6 p.m.,and will be followed by a cocktail party at 6, and Cyberpub at 7s.The luncheon and keynote costs $55; the fair costs $15. Call ClaraStricchiola at 973-267-4200, extension 193, for more information.”I’m looking to help the technology innovator who has limitedresources, may have a great idea but doesn’t have the necessary moneyresources to really finish off the development of his prototype, gointo manufacturing, demo the unit, put out field tests — all thethings that occur before you get your first revenue,” says Rosen,who along with eight other sponsors, has sunk $3,000 of his own moneyinto this project. “Those are the people I would like to drawattention to in the state of New Jersey.”Corporate sponsors include Lucent Technologies, Brother International,Ernst & Young, Pitney, Hardin, Kipp & Szuch, McCarter & English, andLowenstein Sandler.Rosen, who founded two successful northern New Jersey technologycompaniesusing west coast venture capital, maintains that the one weak linkin New Jersey’s technology industry is its lack of venture capital.”If you go to Silicon Valley, those people have support. If yougo to Texas, Texas used to be a state that used to be an oil statethat turned itself around through technology. If you go toPennsylvaniathey have aggressive programs. I went to Israel and I saw a countrywith limited resources turn itself around economically by supportingits incubators. When you come to New Jersey, the first thing you meetare budget directors who are very proud that they never invested inventure capital.”Rosen, a Republican, tried to get Christie Whitman to appearat the showcase, but to no avail. “She says she’s interested inhigh-tech, but she’s really interested in helping large corporationsdevelop high-tech.”If this is so, then Christie might be interested in one of Rosen’schief allies in this event, the Lucent Technologies New VenturesGroup,a Lucent unit that funds Lucent technologies for eventual Lucentspinoffs.”For the most part, all our ventures start inside, around a coreBell Labs technology that doesn’t necessarily fit our existingbusinessunit structure,” says Ralph Faison, the new ventures groupvice president. “Think of my unit as an inside group launchingventures outside Lucent.”Faison admits that there is a dearth of start-up capital in thisstate.”There’s not a great deal of established infrastructure forventuringon the east coast for that matter, and I think that New Jersey standsout as an area that needs a good deal of help,” he says.Lucent Venture Partners, an affiliate funded by the technology giant,is a more traditional venture capital firm that uses Lucent moneyto fund outside ventures. “We try to cover all bases in thatway,”says Faison. “And frankly, the more venture capital activity thatgrows in New Jersey and the east coast the better for us.”Venture capitalists might also want to save this date: Sarnoff’sventuresgroup will be having a venture forum on Wednesday, October 28. Theexhibit will include photonics and high speed communicationtechnologies,display technologies (including seamless video walls), and high speed”cluster” computing. For more information about this event,call Ira Caesar at 609-734-2740.– Peter J. MladineoTop Of PageNJIT’s Fenster: Cutting EdgeNew Jersey may lag behind Silicon Valley in terms ofventure capital but in terms of healthcare, telecommunications,biotech,pharmaceuticals, and environmental technology, it may be definingthe cutting edge, says Saul K. Fenster, president of New JerseyInstitute of Technology.”Here is the place that has AT&T, Lucent, Bellcore, andSarnoff,”he says. “It’s a treasure trove and it has got the majorpharmaceuticalplayers in the world. That and some of the best access totransportationand one of the highest standards for living.”Fenster is a panelist at the New Jersey Technology Council’selectronicsindustry track on cutting edge technologies on Monday, September 14,4 p.m. at Sarnoff, 201 Washington Street. The moderator is JohnPatterson, a director at Sarnoff Corporation; plus JohnRiganati,director of Sarnoff’s communications and computing systems laboratory;Ron Hadani, of Ultrasound Technology; Michael Roe,presidentand CEO of NaviSys, and Bill Kroll, executive vice presidentof business development at NaviSys. Call 609-452-1010.”The important thrusts of New Jersey’s technology –telecommunication,health, environment, and IT — those are major thrusts of whatwe do here,” says Fenster. “A lot of what we do at NJIT iscomplementary to the national effort at economic development and thestatewide effort at economic development. We try very hard to becutting-edge,naturally, but we have a great emphasis on the applied, which canbe very sophisticated and esoteric.Fenster, a mechanical engineer who has a Ph.D from the Universityof Michigan, a master’s from Columbia University, and a bachelor’sdegree from the City College of New York, joined NJIT as presidentin 1978 after stints with Sperry Rand and an industrial consultingfirm. His exuberance for New Jersey’s native technologies isunparalleled.”If you wake me up in the middle of the night and this is whatI’m talking about,” he says.Fenster also mentions University Heights Science Park, a developmentthat NJIT is co-developing with other schools in the Newark area.On 50 acres in Newark adjacent or near to the NJIT campus, there aretwo buildings up currently, the Center for Biomaterials and MedicalDevice Research and the NJIT Enterprise Center, one of NJIT’s twotechnology incubators, headed by Stash Lisowski.”We’re doing a great deal of business development in thetechnologyarea,” says Fenster. “That again parallels the industrialbase of the state. Those areas will be software, medical diagnostic,and esoteric manufacturing. We have 44 businesses on campus. We’regoing to have 70 when we finish with the next buildings, but a lotof these are going to be in the health-related industries.”Here is a small sample of what’s brewing now at NJIT:Multi-lifecycle engineering. To be environmentallyfriendly,New Jersey manufacturers are realizing the benefits of designingreconfigurableor reusable products. “It’s the notion that if you’re amanufactureryou will have to take back your product after its usefulness andremanufactureit or take it apart,” says Fenster.An example is the flyash that power plants emit from theirsmokestacks.”Now we don’t allow the flyash to go into the air, we captureit,” says Fenster. “What you want to do is turn that flyashinto a useful material. What was an economic liability for a powerplant now becomes an economic good. What you had to pay to get ridof you can now sell. You can imagine that this multi-lifecycleengineeringis being applied to all industries in New Jersey. It will ultimatelysave a lot of money, because not only are you improving the bottomline because you’re using products more efficiently but you’re alsominimizing the economic cost of environmental degradation. And a largepart of those costs are litigation costs. If you start to thinkupstreamof all of these costs, it’s a real winner.”Environmental cleanup technologies. “Even though we’reheavily into pollution prevention, we have to understand that we havean enormous legacy of pollution in this state,” says Fenster.”We’re very much into developing new technology for cleaning upthe residue for past industrial mistakes.”Bio-medical informatics. This refers to a master’s anddoctoral program focussing on the storage, archiving, retrieval, andutilization of medical information covering everything from diagnosticinformation to medical imaging. “The difference betweeninformationand data is vast,” says Fenster. “We want to make maximumuse of available data.”Biomedical engineering. NJIT and the University ofMedicineand Dentistry have opened a Center for Biomaterials and Medical DeviceResearch, which does cutting-edge research on biomaterials. Thesecould be anything from artificial blood, artificial skin, prostheticdevices, or various cements that have to be used within the body.”New Jersey has got some of the heroic firms in the world ofmedicaldevices. Having the center is very much in alignment with the kindsof health-related corporations that we have in New Jersey.”Telecommunications. NJIT’s focus includes digitalcommunications,wireless communications, signal processing, and microelectronics(chips).Microelectro-mechanical Systems (MEMS). Related to chips,MEMS are basically infinitesimal machines that could be used to fitinside blood vessels, for example. “We’re not the only ones doingMEMS but that technology is also very, very important to the medicalindustry,” says Fenster.Membrane technology. Membranes can be used to separatetoxic from non-toxic substances, or for purifying blood. “Thereis a whole series of membrane technologies here at NJIT that haveapplications to the environmental industry but also to the medicalindustry.”While Fenster lives, eats, and breathes technology, he doesrecognize the deficiency in the venture capital market for start-upcompanies. Like Edward Rosen, the entrepreneur who organizedthe incubator showcase on September 15 (see above article), Fensterwarns that New Jersey cannot rest on its health technology laurels.”New Jersey is technologically robust and has a high standardof living and what it must do is sustain that,” he says. “Wecan’t just assume that it’s going to continue like that unless wehelp it to continue. We need to build more business incubators. Weneed to help the fledging firms out. We need to develop more companiesin New Jersey. We have to keep that employment machine working.”– Peter J. 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