BIO-BIZ BRIEFING: Rep. Jared Polis (center) hears from biotech execs. To his right, in light-blue shirt, is Nobel Prize laureate and CU prof Tom Cech. (Reporter photos)

In a meeting in his Baseline Rd. office Aug. 24, Rep. Jared Polis, was reminded by area biotech officials that Boulder’s still a second-tier biotech center. An ongoing problem is that biotech startups still have a hard time luring top talent here from the industry’s two hotbeds, Silicon Valley and Boston.

The  reason for this difficulty is the high failure rate among biotech startups and the overall thin ranks of biotech firms here. Should a potential employee move his family here, it’s entirely likely his new company and its would-be wonderdrug won’t pan out (most don’t), leaving him jobless. The chance of finding another job locally, often in a highly specialized field of biotech, aren’t all that great, attendees told Polis. Thus, the talented group of “serial entrepreneurs” here may be good at conceiving new drug ideas, but they struggle with funding and staffing.

Cech and Polis share a lighter moment

In attendance were execs of leading biotech R&D firms that included Kestrel Labs, GlobeImmune, SomaLogic, Biodesix, Clovis Oncology, miRagen, OPX Biotechnologies and Apoplogic. Also present were officials of the CU-based Colorado Initiative in Molecular Biology (CIMB), led by director Leslie Leinwand. Another key local figure present was  Kyle Lefkoff, a partner in Boulder Ventures Ltd., a venture-capital firm that is widely acknowledged as the region’s only major funder of biotech startups (he also Board Chairman at Array Biopharma).

There was consensus that what could catapult Boulder County up the ranks of biotech R&D would be a “stable anchor tenant” or two — a firm or firms that could provide a foundation for others the way that IBM and StorageTek did in data storage,  and that ConocoPhillips may  in the “clean tech” arena. It had once seemed that Synergen might play that role, but that company’s fortunes instead faded in the mid-1990s (weakened, it was acquired by industry giant Amgen).

Another issue heavy on the minds of local biotech execs is the flow of federal funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF). There’s decent funding for initial research, but many companies then fail to find adequate funding for the expensive development phase that follows.

The Food & Drug Administration (FDA)’s approval process for new drugs was criticized for fast-tracking drugs in politically charged areas like HIV-AIDS and cancer while being slow to approve drugs in other areas such as cardiovascular disease. A second complaint was that the FDA appraisal process focuses too much on “health outcomes” rather than on championing projects due to their scientific excellence.

Another topic was the shaky quality of science education in our schools along with the related concern of surging competition in biotech R&D from China. There was hand-wringing over how to further enhance the University of Colorado’s role in biotech education.

The meeting concluded with a discussion of policy issues such as the length in years of biotech patents, the tax treatment of R&D firms’ net operating losses, the so-called therapeutic tax credit and future increases in capital gains tax rates.

Through it all, Polis seemed in command of the subject matter and supportive of the local industry. It’s an industry that could easily come to play a larger role in Boulder’s economy — especially with some well-timed help from a sympathetic Congressman.

Antonio Laudisio making paella on the patio

One word of advice: don’t randomly wander into restaurants downtown. We felt so bad when some visiting friends of ours wandered into, oh, I won’t say the name of the decidedly wrong downtown Mexican restaurant. When it comes to food, we and the spousal unit are fussy.

Here then are our restaurant recommendations, to keep you from making a horrible choice on your own (of which there are potentially many):

• Radex Bistro (formerly Full Belly) — Not downtown but in the Willow Springs strip mall at 28th and Iris. Reliably wonderful food with a French flair, and a place where you want to order about 10 things on the fairly short menu. Outdoor patio.
• Chy Thai — Boulder’s best Thai food, with the same Thai family running the place for years and the same cool, friendly servers. Also an obscure location, on the south side of Canyon a few doors west of 28th St., facing Ead’s News and around the corner from World Market.
• Laudisio — Genuine Italian in a big, big room in the newish 29th Street area, across from the Apple Store. Lots of fun, and the view from the patio on a summer night: ahhhhh.
• Bacco Trattoria — On North Broadway, a new place with reliably authentic Italian. Outdoor patio.

Ooo, you lucky tourists who read Boulder Reporter. You’ll be spared a great number of not-very-nice places. Beyond those four, our list of decent Boulder restaurants gets really iffy. Stick with these four.

Your comments?

And as for you, whether tourist or local, we’d love to hear your experiences at any of these four, your tales of other nice discoveries, or horror stories of wrong choices made. Comment form below (no registration necessary).

AVID: Audience gave Jeff Finkelstein of Customer Paradigm close attention for his tips on search engine optimization. (Reporter photo)

Oh sure. It’s easy to laugh now. But yesterday was grueling, trapped inside the Boulder Theatre for a day-long WordCamp Boulder, a geeky gathering of the WordPress faithful for five consecutive hour-long tutorials and a schmoozy social hour as the summer sun shone relentlessly outside.

Was it worth it to me, a WordPress user? Oh my yes, but then I’d only traveled two miles to get there. What, I wondered, were the afterthoughts of the eager young man I met who’d driven 11 hours to get here from Las Cruces, N.M.?

WordPress, for the uninitiated, provides the software underpinnings (geekspeak: “platform”) for publishing blogs, and is being increasingly used as a content management system (geekspeak acronym: CMS) for publishing all manners of websites. It’s powerful all right, especially with all the third-party predesigned formats (“themes”) and add-on tools (plug-ins”) available for it, many of them (like WordPress itself) for the price of (drum roll) free.

Powerful, yes. Easy to learn, alas, not terribly. Not if you want to do more than produce a garden-variety blog using default values for about a zillion different variables you might prefer to change. That’s where WordCamp and a bustling industry of people teaching and learning WordPress come in.

As for our cult gathering in Boulder, I thoroughly enjoyed the session with Boulder’s Mayor of the Internet Dave Taylor and Doyle Albee of Metzger Associates holding forth on how to create a community around your blog or website. Good stuff, especially their dissecting of the Daily Camera’s free-for-all commenting policy. And I took copious notes for the session, pictured above, with Jeff Finkelstein of Customer Paradigm in Ft. Collins, handing out tips about SEO (that acronym, for the hideously out of touch, stands for search engine optimization).

Additional sessions on “blogging for your business” and “do-it-yourself usability testing” were also densely loaded with very usable information for me as a web publisher and website strategy consultant. I pounded away on my iPad taking down gems of wisdom from the assembled experts.

Someone remarked that it kind of felt like going back to college, as we sallied forth from topic to topic, some of us moving as needed between the Boulder Theatre and two other nearby venues.

Last year’s WordCamp for the region had been in Denver. Congrats to those who made the bid and did the work to bring it to Boulder this year. I counted roughly 400 attendees, equally divided between professionals (web designers and developers who use WordPress for client sites) and users (people who blog on WordPress individually and those whose enterprises use it as a platform).

Did you attend? What did you think?

Are you a WordPress cult member? If you’d like a reasonably coherent copy of my notes from the sessions I attended, e-mail me at bobwells2 [at] me [dot] com.

Just an iPhone shot I felt like sharing. Don’t feel obliged to go there. I like it quiet. –B.W.

BRAIN TRUST: Panelists discussing Uni-Hill’s future included, from left, Rev. Ron Raschke, Molly Winter and Mike Boyer. Standing: Hillary Griffith. (Reporter photo)

Panelists at a PLAN Boulder County lunchtime meeting Friday, Oct. 14, all agreed that the University Hill commercial district — a pizza-slice wedge of businesses separating the University of Colorado campus from the Hill’s residential streets — is overdue for redevelopment.

Molly Winter, director of the University Hill Commercial Management Commission, said a group called the Hill Ownership Group had come up with seven big ideas for how to bring “catalytic change” to the Hill, ideas that would bring “a lttle more diversity of uses” to the Hill and make it “more open to the broader community.” The group, she added, doesn’t want the Hill to be a second Pearl Street Mall but rather something quite different.

Steven Walsh, architect and co-owner of The New Hill Company, a consultancy that advises people about development on the Hill, said the Hill needs a way to aggregate smaller properties into bigger ones so that serious redevelopment can occur. A study released by his last year recommended the use of “overlay zoning” to achieve this end, and also stressed the dire need for more parking if the Hill is to become a viable shopping and activity venue.

Mike Boyer, a Hill property owner and developer, said “higher-quality merchants” want to locate on the Hill, but won’t do so given the quality of the current buildings and the rents being charged. Current owners (“I don’t want to call them slum landlords,” he smiled) “have had their way with tenants for 35 years.” Picking up on Walsh’s point, he said: “We can redevelop all we want but without more parking the quality retailers won’t come.”

Rev. Ron Raschke, pastor of Grace Lutheran Church on 13th St. on the Hill, said a goal being promoted by Hill stakeholders is for the City to designate the Hill as a cultural district, “a place where the city and the university meet,” where events could be held that present the research and visionary ideas of CU intellectuals to a larger community. A group will be convening this summer to help make the cultural district happen, he said.

Bill Shrum, a Hill merchant and co-chair of the University Hill Commercial Management Commission, lamented the fact that the Hill, unlike downtown Boulder, is not thriving. Hill businesses, he said, pay high rents and get little for them. The City’s role has until now consisted of “nothing but study after study,” and it’s now time for action, he said.

In the ensuing discussion, led by moderator Eric Karnes, a consensus emerged that street-level parking is a poor use of the Hill’s scarce space, and that the Hill will definitely need underground parking. There was also a strong consensus that street redesigns are needed to allow easy access from Broadway to Hill parking. Everyone seemed in agreement that a general improvement district should be created in order to amass money to buy out existing landlords and assemble larger, developable land parcels.

Asked to comment to the group, Mayor Susan Osborne voiced excitement about the improvement-district idea and added that City funding might be available from three different budgets — energy, economic-vitality and the arts — to support Hill improvements.

Hillary Griffith, co-chair of the Hill management commission and creator of the successful “Hill Flea” outdoor market, voiced support for giving a role to Boulder’s entrepreneurs, artists, new media/tech devotees and “green” community leaders of all ages in planning the Hill’s future.

PLAN Boulder County hosts periodic meetings, both at the main library and at a downtown restaurant, where people seriously involved in city-planning issues talk shop, sometimes in excruciatingly technical detail. You can sign up for advisories about future meetings on the group’s website.
 

(FOR MORE INFORMATION: Read an account of the issue and of this meeting by Alan Boles in The Blue Line.)

OUCH! Organic asparagus at Whole Foods. A mere $6 a pound. Time to revolt — or move?

Not to be a nag but, hey American businesspeople, what’s up with the astounding prices we’re seeing for everyday things? By way of evidence to support my griping, I present here an illustrated, random assemblage of consumer items whose prices left me amazed in recent days.

Replacement knob for stove: $60

Now, certain cooks that I know are inevitably going to wear out those little knobs on top of the stove that control the gas burners, right? Well, over the years she has. But the last time I ordered one, the price had shot up to (counting mailing) a cool $60. For a little plastic knob. KitchenAid, and the third party to whom they’ve (all too characteristically) outsourced the provisioning of these knobs do have their nerve, don’t you think?

Whole Foods candy bar: $5

Then there’s that display of candy bars at Whole Foods — one of the myriad of “impulse items” positioned right by the checkout line so everyone has to go by them. Well, it’s actually more a checkout gauntlet, festooned on both sides now with rows and rows of impulse items. But, come on, folks. Has it come to this? Five dollars for a candy bar?

I was quietly stewing, and taking pictures, until now, when I’m finally moved to document my pain. What moved me into action was when I espied, again at Whole Foods, what has become of the price of asparagus. I do try to buy organic when I can, but $5.99 a pound for organic asparagus. Hmmmm…I think I’ll go with the conventional, at a mere $3.99 a pound, this time around. Time to switch to Safeway or Vitamin Cottage?

You will observed that, since the bottom of our economy’s little flirtation with Great Depression 2 in 2008, the price of Whole Foods stock has risen 500 percent.

Five-fold increase in Whole Foods stock. Glad someone's not suffering. (Source: Yahoo)

Changing grocery stores is one way to rebel, I s’pose. An even more radical idea has been percolating in my mind for a few years now: moving to Mexico, moving to Ecuador or moving to Panama.

I travel, to Mexico in particular, and I know that prices for many things in my favorite corner of Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, are much lower than here. Rather palatial homes in Merida are going for $200,000, nice ones for $100,000, and if you don’t believe me, check out of the listings at Tierra Yucatan. Merida has so much culture and class and beautiful architecture, and my friends who live there love it — except, perhaps, for about five months of the year when it gets really hot.

Ecuador and Panama: a more ambitious escape

Even more adventurous is the scenario in my mind about moving to Quito or Cuenca, Ecuador. Gorgeous furnished apartments in a city of many universities, Cuenca, go for $600-800 a month. Very nice condos for under $150,000. A four-course mid-day meal at an elegant restaurant — and you wouldn’t believe the produce in this verdant climate — goes for $1.50. At 8,000 feet, but on the equator, days are in the 70s and nights in the 50s, a climate that Kent Zimmerman, formerly of Boulder and now residing much of the year in Cuenca, describes as “Aspen in the summer, year-round.” Kent has a couple of blogs (one and two) where you can tune in on his enthusiasm for South America.

Another place is Panama. I’ve talked with Zach Daudert, he of Boulder’s People Productions and Boulder Digital Arts. He spends half his year there and loves the warmth, the beaches, the lifestyle and the prices.

It’s no wonder that a growing number of American boomers, as they move into their retirement years, also known as the fixed-income years, are seriously considering a move south. And not just considering. They’re flocking. An amazing number of them are writing blogs. Googling the blogs will give you a good sense of what it’s like to take this particular plunge. You have to be willing to learn Spanish and, yes, overlook poverty, stray dogs and some other not-so-nice things. In return, you’re in a beautiful New World. And maybe one where the capitalists aren’t going wild with ridiculous prices?

(Got some stories of your own to tell about eye-popping prices these days? Maybe it’d be therapeutic for both of us if you to share them in a comment, entered into the comment form below.)

A somewhat rewritten version of this story appeared on my blog on Huffington Post.

DARK MESSAGE: Writer-activist Bill McKibben before Boulder audience April 27 (Reporter photo)

Most mildly sentient Americans are reeling from the collection of calamities that confront us. But none, arguably, is basic and apocalyptic save one: climate change. Honorable mention should probably go to human greed. But climate change is about losing the whole game: human habitability of our planet.

Thus, he comes to our town, Bill McKibben, telling a Boulder audience what we’d darkly feared but hoped wasn’t so: that climate change is already upon us. It’s heralded by an arctic that is “melting like crazy”; it’s “happening in one system after another”; it comes at us with “deluges and downpours like we’ve never seen before.” And, his terrible summary: “It’s a different planet. … It’s as if we’d gotten into a spaceship and traveled to a different place.” And an equally terrible literary allusion, to the Bhagavad Gita’s passage, famously murmured by Robert Oppenheimer as he watched the first atomic bomb: “We are become as gods, destroyers of worlds.”

The writer as activist

Then, summarizing from his new book, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, McKibben spoke of the need for action, and of the action he’s taken, spending only 70 days out of the past year in his rural Vermont home, the rest of the time, traveling, speaking, joining environmental actions — ironically, he noted, “on the road nonstop, spewing carbon behind me.”

Most famously, McKibben’s recent activism has focused on the group 350.org that, in turn, has seized on the scientific finding that life as we know it is vaguely sustainable only if we can get the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere back down to 350 parts per million (it’s now at about 390 and rising at about 2.5 ppm per year, McKibben said). The scientific data and their implications are, for McKibben, “horrifying,” but “that number is what we decided to organize around,” in part because “Arabic numerals transcend linguistic boundaries.” On Oct. 24, 2009, demonstrations focusing on that 350 number were held in 5,200 cities in 181 countries (including Boulder, as was reported here). It was the largest organized political event in human history.

From Copenhagen to 10/10/10

Then there was Copenhagen, where the failure to aggressively act on climate change left McKibben feeling “some toxic combination of sad and angry.” But the more than 350 young people who’d accompanied him there said no, don’t give up, let’s go on. And they will, in Oct. 10, 2010 (that’s 10/10/10), when they’re organizing a “global work party” at which people worldwide will work on solar panels, bike paths, community gardens and more. These actions won’t surmount the challenge; but they may, he said, set an example to pressure politicians for legislation at all levels. The message to politicians: “If we can get to work, perhaps you can get to work also.” 10/10/10, in short, “is gonna be a beautiful day.”

But…

Bill McKibben, reminding the audience that he is a reporter, confessed that he’s possessed with “a compulsion to tell the truth” (as he has done for years, it should be noted, in his books and in his articles for The New Yorker). McKibben — not the activist but the truth-teller — acknowledged that “there’s no guarantee that this is gonna work. … We’ve raised the temperature one degree and there’s another in the pipeline.”

This brings us to the conclusion of our little tale of a speech, in an echo-y church in Boulder, Colorado, on April 27, 2010. There’s no guarantee that taking action will reverse things in time, he says, but we should try. And maybe 5 percent of the population know who Bill McKibben is. The media can jabber on about a lot of things — in the case of television and big-circulation magazines, usually the dumber the topic the better. Yet Bill McKibben’s name is not a household word. Given the grave finality of the message he’s bearing, shouldn’t it be?  
 

CLIMATE ACTION IS HOT! After environmental activist Bill McKibben’s April 27 talk, Amy Guinan (pictured) told crowd about an anti-coal protest held that afternoon at the Valmont Power Plant. McKibben had attended. (Reporter photo)

YOUTH BRIGADE: People at work in the Huffington Post newsroom.

As worshipful fans know, I’m a sometimes columnist for Huffington Post. You can see my assembled works at this page on HuffPo.

That’s why I was amused or amazed when I came across the picture above of my HuffPo “colleagues” at work in the HuffPo newsroom in New York City. Amused, I say, because I noticed that the average age in this room is about one-third of mine. Hmmmm….

This talk sizzled. Dave Taylor, one of Boulder’s most widely read bloggers and a regular teacher at Boulder Digital Arts, gave a talk on “10 Easy Tips for Driving Traffic to Your Site” at BDA’s Open House for their lovely new home on Range St. Saturday, April 24.

It was damn good advice for anyone running a blog, a webzine or even an enterprise website — delivered with Taylor’s usual fast pacing, wit and widsom. Here are his 10 tips, followed by a link to a streamable or downloadable MP3 audio of the talk. We think that slides from the talk are forthcoming, to be posted here, too.

Taylor’s 10 tips — backward, Letterman-style

10. Make use of keywords
9. Create controversy
8. Cover local events
7. Create emumerated lists
6. Create Meetups and meetings
5. Create a blog or, better, contribute to an existing blog
4. Create great titles
3. Submit content to article directories
2. Optimize your site for the search engines
1. Participate in your market

To sum it all up, said Taylor: “Understand your customer and meet their needs.” A recurring theme of his talk was that website creators need to deliver the goods — the information that’s needed by the people they hope to do business with.

Taylor’s BDA classes are just a few among hundreds offered at what has become Boulder’s headquarters for pithy, professionally useful and affordable training for everything related to graphic arts and the Internet (see upcoming classes). The two proud creators of burgeoning BDA, Bruce Borowsky and Zach Daudert, were on hand at Saturday’s Open House.

When not publishing his blogs, Taylor runs a web strategy consulting business, Intuitive Systems, and also consults through Metzger Associates.

Slides from talk

Here are the slides from Dave’s talk in PDF format, available for you to download.

Audio of talk

Dave Taylor’s tips for boosting your website (MP3, 28 min 21 sec)
(Click to play, right-click to download)

One of Dave Taylor’s slides addresses how to get involved with social media to promote your website.

IPAD OWNERS TO THE STAGE! Group photo of members of Colorado Macintosh Users Group who’d bought iPads as of Thursday meeting. In middle, in the hat, is famed reporter about all things Apple, Andy Ihnatko. (Reporter photo)

The geeks were out en masse showing off their finger-smudged, er, shiny new iPads at the Thursday, April 8, meeting of the Colorado Macintosh Users Group (COMUG) at NCAR.

The headline speaker for the evening, sporting his trademark leather hat, was Andy Ihnatko, a legendary figure among Apple cognoscenti, tech columnist for the Chicago Sun Times, and faithful annual attendee at the Conference on World Affairs at CU and the neatly coinciding COMUG meeting (links to all 10,000 words of Andy’s iPad coverage on this Sun-Times web page).

In an hour-long talk and Q&A, Ihnatko enthused over the iPad as “the first really new computer” that he’s encountered in a long tech-writing career. He loves the usability of the on-screen keyboard, he marveled at the sound quality of the built-in speakers, and he can’t believe the battery life. And the versatility of the device: “It is a Rorschach Test. It is silly putty. It is whatever you need it to be.”

COMUG meetings, a place for rarefied information exchange and cult-like worship of everything Apple, occur the second Thursday of every month up the hill at NCAR. In this subculture, the appelation of “geek” is acknowledged with pride. The prospect of Ihatko’s annual visit — plus a chance for group-worship of the new iPad — drew about 80 to Thursday night’s meeting.

Driving up to NCAR (and maybe spending a bit of time outside beforehand) is a spectacular scenic pleasure, especially in the summer. Getting there by bicycle would be invigorating and nice for the planet. Dress code is propeller heads optional.

For those trapped at home, the meetings can be viewed live by video webcast from the COMUG website. You can also subscribe to a video podcast of meetings by typing “COMUG” into the iTunes Store on iTunes. Even (gasp!) on a PC.

PLUS: See a cooler group picture taken with a fisheye lens on Flicker