Bad things happen to everyone all the time.  If they start happening regularly then something more fundamental is wrong.  For example, personal outages occur.  Personal operations are a highly complex arrangement of resources.  Any of the pieces can fail from time to time causing a major problem.  Nevertheless, when a major problem arises management needs to take to time to look for root causes of “crisis” outages.

Of particular interest is the search for something in the environment which has changed.  With computers there are always getting software patches and and upgrades which are applied to running systems.  Hopefully these have been tested, but maybe not in your environment.  Software suppliers can fix something that you though was a feature and bring your company to its knees.  I saw it happen to Master Card.

Taking the time to look for root causes after a crisis may just eliminate the next one.

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Filed under: Estates

The Magnolia farm in Sonoma, California is the town’s oldest East Side home and is a registered historical landmark. It has also been given a very modern rehabilitation that’s a world away from its classic exterior). The home was built in the 1890s and has been owned by members of the Hearst family among other great California families. The property has a four-bedroom main home as well as a one-bedroom guest home. There’s also a swimming pool, outdoor barbecue and a one acre lawn with room for croquet, bocce and horseshoes. The property is nearly ten acres total and includes magnolia, olive, fig and maple trees. An outdoor patio offers dining for eight. it is currently being used as a wine country rental that costs $12,000 a week (many more gorgeous photos are available at the home’s rental website). It is listed at $5.495 million.

Continue reading Magnolia Farm, Estate of the Day

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Hard times have hit a couple of big South Florida condo projects with two major condominium developers having filed for bankruptcy last week.. Strada 315 LLC, the developer of Fort Lauderdale’s Strada 315, filed Chapter 11 after selling 48 of its 117 units. The 21-floor condo tower was selling off condos for between $230,000 and $600,000.Regions Financial Corp., the largest bank based in Alabama, originally lent $34.5 million to the project. About $16 million was paid off as the condos were sold but Regions wouldn’t extend the loan. The developers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last week, saying they owe at least $50 million in debts to this bank and other lending partners. The company will continue operating as U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Miami court reorganizes its debts.

Beach Home Property LLC, which is connected to Beach House Designed by Richard Meier, at 9449 Collins Ave in Surfside filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Friday. The 101-unit condo was set to be built on the property of the Beach Home Hotel and would offer 101 condos at prices starting at around $1.5 million. The company owes its 20 largest unsecured creditors $4.6 million.

What’s the future of these two projects? At Strada there are sales contracts on 51 of the remaining 69 units, but it is expected that some of these won’t close due to the current grim conditions facing South Florida condominiums. The situation for the Beach House is even murkier. Apparently the project is way behind schedule and has according to a comprehensive article by Kevin Tomlinson of the South Beach Condo blog, been through several developers already. It’s a shame since the project, shown at left, is the first Meier project in the area and attracted a lot of attention when it was first announced.

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Huge construction is going on in downtown Pittsburgh. The downtown area which has long been in a say of slow decline is looking to be revitalized thanks to a couple of major projects especially the Piatt Place project. Piatt Place will be a redesign of the Lazarus department store building. Two upscale chain restaurants, McCormick and Schmick’s and the Capital Grille will anchor the building and the rest of the building will be turned into offices and condos. The residential units are new construction, built on a new slab on top of the roof. The condos start $330,000 to $1.5 million each and in an article on KDKA it has been reported that 40% of the units are under contract.

But in a nationwide market that is not, for the most part, favoring condos, there may be trouble ahead. For example at another high-end project in Pittsburgh, 151 First Side, owners have closed on more than half of the 83 units but a handful are already up for resale. At the Carlyle, a project that has currently a 6,000-square-foot penthouse listed at $2.195 million, half of the 60 units are under contract but many of those buyers are investors and the second phase of the project is on hold. It seems that the problem in Pittsburgh isn’t so much a condo glut of the type that has affected so many other cities, but instead is a question of changing people’s perceptions of life downtown and whether or not people are willing to pay these types of prices when for the same amount of money they could get a fairly huge home in the suburbs.

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By Rob Cottingham from Noise-to-Signal

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Getting Out the Small-Business Vote - Inc.com

Getting Out the Small-Business Vote Inc.com, Share This Share This No Comments » 21 02 2008 Blist: From Oracle to the social database? Posted by: in Small Business Filed under: Oracle Corp (ORCL), Small business One of the killer apps - in the software world - is the relational database. Yet, such things can be quite complex and costly, as seen with solutions from Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) and IBM (NYSE: IBM). But now we’re seeing consumer databases, which also leverage cool aspects of social media. Take blist, which announced that it has snagged $6.5 million in venture capital. The investors include: Frazier Technology Ventures and Morgenthaler Ventures. Gary Morgenthaler, who is a principal at Morgenthaler Ventures, has extensive experience in the database world. After all, he was the co-founder and CEO of Ingres and Illustra, which are two top databases. As for the blist system, it can have seemingly endless applications. You might want to use it for tracking a wedding list; or a group of favorite websites; or fantasy football stats; and so on. What’s more, you can share the information with other online friends or colleagues. More importantly, you don’t need to be a tech whiz to use it. As testament to this, there are more than 10,000 users so far. Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements. He also operates DealProfiles.com. Share This Share This No Comments »

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