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Top Stories: Feb. 22, 2010Roller Girls Fight for Rink; VR Conference in Santa Clara; Yelp Says No to Google;by Danny Wool on Feb 22, 2010More Bad News for Mineta There's some bad news for Mineta International Airport. Frontier Airlines has announced that it will pull its flights from the airport as of March 14. Instead, the airline will add flights to its SFO, Santa Barbara, and Long Beach routes. Frontier offered two flights to Denver daily. Although Frontier only accounts for 1 percent of all flights at Mineta and 2 percent of boardings, it will cost the airport $2 million, a costly sum during a recession, especially when the airport is in the middle of a $1.3 billion modernization project. According to Mineta spokesman David Vossbrink, "These days every percentage counts." Read More at NBC Bay Area. Housing Project Opponents on Wheels Charities Housing has as its mission "to develop, preserve, and manage high quality affordable housing for low-income individuals and their families." While most San Jose residents agree that this is a worthwhile goal, it comes with one caveat: "Not in my neighborhood." A new project by the group is coming under fire by the Silicon Valley Roller Girls, a local roller derby team. San Jose Skate in Blossom Valley, where the team plays, is scheduled to be sold to Charity House and demolished to make room for the 150 studio apartments. The Roller Girls won't have it. "While we support the mission of Charities Housing," the team says on their website, "we feel there are other opportunities to develop that would not involve tearing down this cherished San Jose institution." They are likely to find some powerful allies. Local residents are concerned that introducing low-income housing to their neighborhood will lead to an increase in "drugs, alcohol, and gangs." Deborah Torrens, president of the local neighborhood association, complains that "You don't see a lot of family activity here," while the Roller Girls refer to the rink on their website as a "child-oriented venue." It therefore appears that neighbors feel that roller derby is the way to accommodate families, rather than actually bringing in young families. Read More at Wallet Pop Read More at the Mercury News. Real Conference to Discuss Virtual Conferences Over a thousand virtual reality specialists will be meeting in Santa Clara today and tomorrow to discuss how new technologies can bring people together without the need for expensive travel. The Virtual Edge Summit will explore the benefits of virtual conferencing as an efficient way for companies to save both time and money. As to be expected from a summit on virtual conferencing, many more participants will be joining virtual sessions, many intended to showcase the newest advances in 3D virtual technology. Read More at KLIV. Read More at Virtual-Edge.com. Yelp Decides to Take It Slow Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman explains why his company rebuffed a $550 million takeover offer from Google, while accepting $25 million from Elevation Partners, the Menlo Park VC firm whose partners include rock star Bono. The money, he says, allows the company to, "grow the way we want and work on the things we say we’re going to work on. Right now I don’t want to spar with investors for two weeks after every quarter." Yelp also decided that it will not be taking the company public this year, though it has not ruled out an IPO in 2011. Yelp has already raised a total of $56 million, with funding coming from DAG Ventures, Benchmark Capital, and Bessemer. Its website, which allows users to rate and comment on local businesses, is already active in 40 states and has an estimated 9 million users. Read More at the Business Journal. San Jose to Get California's First buybuyBABY Outlet Looking for a car seat or a crib? South Bay residents will soon be able to find all their baby needs at buybuyBABY, a national chain of baby goods merchandisers with 28 stores in 14 states. The new store, which will replace the BestBuy in Almaden Plaza, is the first in California. The chain is affiliated with Bed, Bath, and Beyond. Read More at the Business Journal. Biotech Lawyer Killed in Small Plane Crash A Piper aircraft belonging to Albert P. Halluin crashed on Friday night right outside Yosemite National Park. Halluin, 70, and a passenger, his fiancée Judy Perchonock, 60, were both killed in the crash. Halluin was one of the country's leading biotechnology patent lawyers, according to the website of his firm Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich, & Rosati. Much of his work focused on stem cell research and DNA chips. He was also a biotech inventor, and held nine patents, which were being developed by his firm Halzyme Technologies of Redwood City. The crash comes just two days after Tesla Motors lost 3 of its employees in a similar aerial mishap. Both aircraft took off from the Peninsula area despite poor weather conditions. Read More at The Mercury News. It's a Dog Eat Dog Park Though just about no one in San Jose has a problem with people taking their dogs to the park, an increasingly vocal group of residents is upset that dog owners are letting their dogs run free, despite ordinances requiring that they be leashed. According to some residents, the cash strapped city does not have the funds to monitor dog owners in the parks and to enforce its leashing rules. The city admits that this is a problem: "We lost some staff in the last budget cycle, including an animal control officer," says the Deputy Director of Animal Care and Services Jon Cicirelli. But that's just part of the problem. Only one out of every nine dogs and cats in the city is properly licensed, costing the city millions of dollars in revenue that would otherwise go to animal programs. Animal Services is currently received $4.3 million in subsidies from the city, while some 360,000 pets are unlicensed: licenses for cats are $10 and for dogs they are $20. Considering how cash-strapped the city now is, it may be worth its while to enforce the existing licensing rules. Read More at the Mercury News. by Danny Wool on Feb 22, 2010 |
 Frontier Airlines has eliminated its two daily flights between San Jose and Denver. |
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