College Road East, Princeton 08540. Ivan Punchatz, partner-in-charge.

609-987-6800; fax, 609-520-0360. Www.bipc.com

08540. David J. Sorin, partner in charge. 609-750-7600; fax,

609-750-7700.

Top Of Page
Primedia Changes And Sells Building

Primedia Inc, a company with roots in the horse racing

business, has sold one of its Princeton-based companies, acquired

another company, sold its Lake Drive building, and drastically

reorganized

its new media group. Headquartered in New York, Primedia sold its

64,000-foot enclave at 10 Lake Drive in East Windsor in June to Neil

Laboratories, a drug maker that already has a 30,000 square-foot

building

at 55 Lake Drive.

A glimpse at the Primedia bloodlines: The race track bible, the Daily

Racing Form, used to be headquartered in Hightstown and owned by the

Annenbergs. It was sold to Rupert Murdoch’s organization, then to

K-III Directory Corporation, and K-III changed its name to Primedia.

Primedia sold the Daily Racing Form in 1998 and then sold Primedia

Information, a directory company, last fall.

The resulting new company, Commonwealth Business Media, has moved

to Windsor Corporate Park, the former Lockheed Martin plant on

Millstone

Road. Among its databases and directory publications are those for

transportation, rail, shipping, and classical music. Alan Glass, the

chairman of Commonwealth Business Media, had been the chief operating

officer at Primedia Information.

Windsor Corporate Park, Cranbury 08512. Alan Glass, CEO. 609-371-7700;

fax, 609-371-7879. Home page: www.cbizmedia.com

Top Of Page
Industry Click

Another entity of Primedia’s, IndustryClick, has also

moved out of Lake Drive into leased space, 20,000 square feet at

Princeton

Forrestal Village. Led by Tim Andrews, formerly of Dow Jones, it is

a business-to-business Internet operation with vertical online

communities

serving niche industries. Andrews had said he planned to staff up

to 200 people here, but at least 20 jobs have been lost as a result

of reorganization caused by the acquisition of Manhattan-based

About.Inc,

which owns special interest websites.

Primedia aimed to reduce expenses this year by $49 million as a result

of this merger. To the question of how many people actually work in

Forrestal Village, a spokesperson, Karen Garrison, Kansas-based

director

of corporate communications, says that there is "no clear crisp

answer."

After the reorganization, IndustryClick is known as Primedia’s New

Media Division and is part of Intertec, the Kansas City-based

technical

and trade publication and exhibitions company, says Garrison. Andrews,

who was not available for an interview, still reports to David Ferm,

president and CEO of Primedia’s business to business group, but his

group is now called the New Media Division.

Primedia bills itself as a targeted media company with sales of 1.7

billion in 2000; it owns more than 230 magazines, including New York,

Seventeen, American Demographics, American Baby, and Fly Fisherman.

With Intertec Publishing it has 100 publications, more than 30 trade

shows, and 450 books and directories. With the acquisition of

About.com

it gained more than 1,000 special interest websites. In the education

area it owns Channel One, an educational channel for schools, as well

as the 65-person Films for the Humanities & Sciences on Perrine Road

.

"Some people, because of the merger, are now working in New York

City," says Garrison. "We have been busy for 115 years and

continue to be busy today. All companies evolve as times change and

as businesses change."

Primedia sold its 64,000-foot building at 10 Lake Drive to Neil

Laboratories

in June for $2.75 million or about $42 per square foot. Doug Twyman

represented both owner and buyer through Newmark JGT and GVA Williams,

and Chris Helgesan of GVA Williams was also involved. For a Twin

Rivers

commercial property, which has mostly warehouses, this property has

an unusual amount of finished office space — about 65 percent.

The 64,000-foot building is situated on 20 acres.

Princeton

08540. Timothy Andrews. 609-571-4500. Www.industryclick.com

Another Primedia organization with a Princeton address

has expanded. This spring Films for the Humanities and Sciences

acquired

an educational materials firm in West Virginia, Cambridge Technology,

and staffed up from about 45 people in the winter to more than 100

people now. Owned by Primedia, Films for the Humanities and Sciences

has among its collections the science films of the WGBH collection,

Nova, and TV Ontario. The clients are schools, universities, health

care institutions, and business.

Perrine Road, Monmouth Junction, Box 2053, Princeton 08543-2053. Betsy

Sherer, CEO. 609-275-1400; fax, 609-275-3767. Www.films.com

Top Of Page
Sarnoff Spinoff Goes Public

A north Jersey-based Sarnoff spinoff, e-vue, will go

public by doing a reverse buyout. A small dotcom company is

"buying"

E-vue by issuing from 10 to 13 million shares of stock, effectively

tripling its stock outstanding. The stock will be worth from $7.1

to $9.2 million, but E-vue will control the firm. The dotcom,

clickNsettle.com,

is based in Great Neck, New York, and it has a website that helps

decide legal disputes. The agreement is expected to go through by

Labor Day.

E-vue takes advantage of Sarnoff’s many interactive multimedia

patents,

and it aims to be the leading branded technology leader in stream

rich media for the mass market. It develops, markets, and distributes

MPEG-4 compliant technologies for speedy network delivery and display

of still images and video with only low bandwidth.

"E-Vue has taken the lead in the MPEG-4 market, and they have

done a tremendous job bringing MPEG-4 to the masses," says Ed

Hansch, marketing vice president. "As a result of this imaging

ingenuity, more people will have enjoyable — and faster —

Web experiences." One feature of e-vue’s software: progressive

downloading and display of still images, so viewers first see the

whole picture in a smaller size or at low resolution, but then see

it build to full quality and size.

In late 1999 e-vue was Sarnoff’s 14th spin-off. Its president, Kenneth

Sun went to school in China at Nan Jing University, Class of 1983,

and earned his PhD in physics at State University of New York at

Buffalo.

He did computational protein chemistry and drug design for

pharmaceutical

companies until 1994 when he turned to the venture capital side of

the business and joined Global China Investments, a joint venture

between a Canadian government pension fund and a Hong Kong investment

fund. Then he worked with Princeton-based venture capitalist, Robert

Johnston, at Johnston Associates on Cherry Valley Road.

Seed stage investors include the Tisch family, John Levin, and Charles

Xue, a high-tech entrepreneur (U.S. 1, October 27, 1999). Xue

(pronounced

"shoo"), 46, went to the Chinese Academy in China and has

a graduate degree from Berkeley. With Peter Wang he founded a

UTStarCom,

a Lucent-like company based in China that had offices in Iselin and

San Francisco. Xue is board chairman.

08830. Kenneth Sun, president. 732-590-0102; fax, 732-452-9726. Home

page: www.e-vue.com

Top Of Page
From Victor Company to Just Victor

Victor Murray says his watershed moment came when he

was 17 years old and had to choose whether to move with his family

to Niagara Falls or stay with his grandparents in Pittsburgh to finish

his senior year in high school. Lots of people raised eyebrows over

his decision to move. But as Murray now says, "I realized you

have to step out of your comfort zone. My thought was, I’d best learn

how to get out and meet new people. That was probably a defining

moment

for me."

Every three to five years, he believes, "it’s good to do what

you do a little differently." His most recent change in direction

is closing the commercial real estate firm that he and his wife,

Lynne,

ran for 14 years. This also drew criticism. "A lot of people think

we have lived the American dream and that we have given up our

freedom,"

says Murray. "But it was time to do something different."

After shutting the doors at the Victor Group office on Alexander Road,

Murray is working for the Aegis Group, which has offices in

Philadelphia

and Trenton.

Through Aegis, he still works with his former clients, doing tenant

representation or as a consultant, but he is also responsible for

leasing 900,000 feet in Camden, Trenton, and Princeton, including

Arbor 600 on College Road, and 650 and 750 College Road, plus the

Aegis properties in Trenton — State Street Square and 28 West

State Street.

Victor Murray is an avid collector of mottos, and 18 years ago, when

his wife was pregnant with the son who is now a high school senior,

he made a plaque for the boy: "Life is an adventure to be lived,

not a problem to be solved."

Murray says his adventurous spirit came from his father, who developed

high rises in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, including 1600 Market

(which,

ironically, is the current address of Aegis). "He used to take

the blueprints home, and the ones he didn’t need he would give us

to crayon on. I was the one of the three brothers who asked, `What’s

on the other side?’"

After graduating from Penn State in 1976, Murray met his wife at

Provident

Bank. It was an era when "fraternizing," dating or even

marrying

within the bank, was frowned upon. "We still have the letter

saying

it was OK to get married and that we could keep our jobs," he

says.

Murray joined Oliver Realty in Pittsburgh, an employee-owned company

that he helped to grow from 30 to 200 people. The Aegis Group reminds

him of those halcyon days, he says. In 1983 he made another seemingly

unlikely decision: To move to Princeton to represent the Enerplex

buildings, two Prudential properties on Research Way that were hard

to rent at that time because they used alternative energy sources.

"People asked, why would you move your family to handle buildings

that were struggling?" he remembers, and quotes another one motto,

this one referencing the slag fires of the Pittsburgh steel mills:

The strongest deals are always forged from the hottest fires. "But

soon we had GE and Dow Jones in the buildings, and that kicked it

off. Prudential gave us the other seven buildings."

Fourteen years ago, a year after Oliver was bought by Grubb & Ellis,

Victor and his wife, Lynne, started their own company. They had

"next

to nothing, very little capital," but that helped them make

smarter

business decisions, he believes, than did companies with capital to

squander. "We had good years and bad years and great years and

so so years, but when your wife works with you, and she knows what

the books are, you can plan your lifestyle conservatively."

"People say that two people on their own can’t make it, but we

proved that isn’t necessarily true," says Murray, quoting the

axiom promulgated by the Disney managers, that "doing the

impossible

is kind of fun."

"I chose to do some of the larger ones and that was a risk, I

don’t deny that. We closed only a few deals a year." His largest

single lease was 400,000 feet for ETS at the Carnegie Center.

Now Murray is busy leasing Arbor 600, the 247,000 square foot College

Road building that was at one time Princeton’s "largest spec

building"

("on spec" meaning that the tenants have not been signed when

construction starts).

He thinks this market will be good for Trenton, where Aegis has some

of its prize properties. "It is a great city and a great

opportunity."

Using Merrill Lynch as an example, he commends that company for

spreading

its offices through various submarkets, so that as it funnels people

into its new development near Hopewell, no one market is hit hard.

"That was very thoughtful. But can you imagine what would it would

have meant to the future of the city, if Merrill Lynch had built its

new complex in Trenton?"

08540. Victor Murray, president.

Suite 112, Trenton 08608. James A. Kinzig, partner. 609-393-8457;

fax, 609-599-1782. Home page: www.aegispg.com.

Corrections or additions?

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