Ron Gallagher

Officially, no one could lose at the Carolina Challenge’s Launch Party, but an idea called YardSprout walked off $1,000 closer to being a winner than 46 other start-up ideas did on Thursday night. YardSprout was one of 48 venture ideas that teams were trying to sell to volunteer judges at the first Pitch Party held to drum up excitement for the annual Carolina Challenge run by the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School. Kenan-Flagler grad student Mia Farber, YardSprout’s vice president of business development, said the idea to bring together 30 million...

Raleigh-Durham is solidly in the pack of U.S. office markets benefiting from atypical growth in the high-tech services portion of the economy, according to a new report from an international real estate consulting company. In its first report on how high-tech office-based business, as opposed to manufacturing, is faring, Jones Lang LaSalle included venture capital, job growth and economic indicators along with data on office rents and vacancies in established and emerging high-tech centers around the nation. Office use overall makes up more than a fifth of U.S. employment, and high-tech office workers are only 1.7 percent, but high-tech...

The immense possibilities of regenerative medicine and the less immense but still substantive challenges to getting treatments to market led off a series of reports Thursday at Nagoya University’s second NU Tech conference on commercializing research going on at university campuses. In the progression from academic laboratories to startup companies to development-stage companies to major pharmaceutical makers, each group perceives its own challenges as the largest obstacle, said Tim Bertram, chief scientific officer and acting CEO of Tengion, Inc., which is working on growing human tissue for treating damaged organs. The potential markets for regenerative therapies for kidney disease,...

Business in China can move very fast, but American companies that want to enter markets in the world’s most populous nation must understand that it moves according to its own cultural patterns and must adapt to those, according to two China veterans who spoke Tuesday evening to the North Carolina Chinese Business Association. “If you do good work and don’t act like a big, dumb, American jerk,” a good reputation spreads very quickly through industry in China and relations are much easier, Chris James, Cree (Nasdaq: CREE) vice president of strategy and business development, told the audience of about...

Editor’s note: Local Tech Wire will be featuring this week a number of reports gathered at its Executive Exchange event featuring Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. Entrepreneurship was on vivid display, and LTW will be reporting the details. Stay tuned. By RON GALLAGHER, special to Local Tech Wire DURHAM, N.C.  – What phone is in your pocket right now? Billionaire tech entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban was on a discussion panel at on Thursday when moderator Mitch Mumma of Intersouth Partners switch from philosophical questions to a quick quiz: What phone’s in your pocket right now, questions...