SolarWorld, a German company with a plant in Camarillo, unveiled a program Sept. 30 that could put solar panels on schools without charging the schools for any of the up-front costs. The move comes a few weeks after the Oxnard Union School District passed over SolarWorld and picked SunPower, a San Jose-based company, to put [...]
CSU Channel Islands will offer undergraduate classes in business through the Santa Barbara City College Campus, under an agreement that officials from both colleges signed during a Sept. 29 news conference. The program will begin in fall 2011 with up to 30 students, who will take one or two courses per 12-week term at SBCC, [...]
Santa Barbara County will get its first woman CEO when Chandra Wallar replaces Mike Brown on Nov. 1. Wallar comes from San Diego County, where she has been deputy chief administrative officer and general manager over the Land Use and Environment Group since 1999 — experience that will come in handy in Santa Barbara County, where [...]
Level Studios, the biggest all-digital marketing firm in the Tri-Counties and a major tech employer with 140 people in San Luis Obispo, has been acquired by a New Jersey firm. The acquisition by Princeton, N.J.-based Rosetta will put Level Studios — which works with clients as large as BlackBerry maker Research in Motion and as [...]
Michael Edell has gone from software to soap. He is hoping the touch that helped him expand and sell his firms to the likes of Microsoft and ADP will make GrabGreen, a Camarillo-based line of eco-friendly cleaning products, into a household name. Founded by Patricia Spencer, a mother who was concerned about the chemicals in [...]
International science icon and real estate mogul Fred Kavli is suing a much smaller competitor. In a lawsuit filed in Ventura County Superior Court in late August, Kavli alleges that a former employee of his Oxnard-based real estate firm Sunbelt Enterprises misappropriated trade secrets, breached fiduciary duties and is unfairly competing with him. Defendant David [...]
San Luis Obispo’s startups are growing up fast. Thirteen years ago, two San Luis Obispo high school students started their own company because they couldn’t find part-time jobs to fit their busy student-athlete schedules. That business, Meathead Movers, has since grown into a flourishing moving and storage empire that helps some 180 college students put [...]
It’s hard to find a better turnaround story than Power-One. The Camarillo-based company took a secondary product line from an Italian company it had purchased and bet the farm on a new line of business — producing devices called inverters that are crucial to regulating the power output of wind turbines and solar panel arrays. [...]
The South Coast apartment market has seen more than $77 million in property sales this year, according to commercial real estate brokers at Radius Group’s Santa Barbara County Real Estate and Economic Outlook on Sept. 16. The largest sale was the $37.4 million purchase of the Fontainebleu apartments in Isla Vista. Chicago-based Blue Vista Capital [...]
The Northern California company set to buy Goleta-based Occam Networks in a $171 million deal says it will keep the company’s engineering staff on the South Coast and in Fremont largely intact after the merger. “We will continue to have an operation and engineering in Santa Barbara,” said Geoff Burke, marketing director for the buyer, [...]
It’s all smiles and sauvignon in Happy Canyon’s vineyards
Towbes Group grabs Goleta with Groupon-like deals at retailers
Social-media IPOs could launch Golden State sustainability fund
Ventura County brokers hold out ’til 2013 for real recovery
Name changes and new faces at SLO and Oxnard law firms
From apartments to industrial spaces, deals close in the region