Archives for March 2014

A groundswell is building in Albuquerque that could turn Central Avenue from Downtown to Nob Hill into a bustling center for research, innovation and new businesses.
Much of it is bubbling up around the Innovate ABQ initiative and companion projects, which aim to establish a high-tech research district that starts in the heart of Downtown and emanates east and west along Central Avenue.

Albuquerque Mayor Richard J. Berry and his new Economic Development Department Director Gary Oppedahl stand together on the Civic Plaza in Downtown Albuquerque last week. (Jim Thompson/Albuquerque Journal)
But at its foundation is a novel economic development strategy – led by the city in cooperation with academic and business leaders – that squarely focuses on inspiring individual and private-sector innovation as the basis for growing Albuquerque’s economy, rather than continue its historical dependence on government investment.
The goal is to forge public-private partnerships and programs that help build entrepreneurial skills and know-how among Albuquerque’s workforce and investors, providing them with the technical assistance, business training and resource support needed to create homegrown companies that grow and thrive.
“For the first time in a long time, there is an urgency and bipartisan understanding that we must diversify our economy and not keep all our eggs in one basket with federal dependency,” Mayor Richard Berry said.
“We want to build an entrepreneurial spirit here from the bottom up, starting with youth in middle school and high school and spreading from there to include the entire community. We need to start thinking much more from the private-sector standpoint about how to create our own opportunities to grow.”
Division of duties
The city continues to work on luring new companies to Albuquerque from elsewhere – such as continuing efforts to convince Tesla Motors to establish a massive battery factory here that could bring some 6,500 jobs – and to retain existing companies in the state.

This is an aerial view from last year of Downtown Albuquerque, which appears to be home to the beginnings of a high-technology research district. (Jim Thompson/Albuquerque Journal)
But it’s largely leaving those efforts to the nonprofit Albuquerque Economic Development organization, which is under contract with the city to recruit businesses from other places.
That leaves the city’s Economic Development Department to concentrate more on workforce development and homegrown business creation, said Gary Oppedahl, Albuquerque’s new economic development director, who took office in early December.
“We want to build an environment here where entrepreneurs are enabled, facilitated and encouraged to create jobs,” said Oppedahl, who along with the mayor spoke to the Journal in an interview.
“We want to make Albuquerque the most entrepreneurial city in the country. Recruitment and retention of businesses remain important, but the third leg of the stool is ‘grow your own.’”
Berry chose Oppedahl to lead that effort because of his stellar reputation as a serial entrepreneur with 30 years of management and executive experience in creating and growing private companies.
Oppedahl spent more than a decade, from 1984-1996, as an engineering manager at Intel Corp., helping that company build its facilities in Albuquerque and Ireland.
Since then, he has held top executive positions in four high-tech startup companies in Albuquerque and the Silicon Valley in California. And in 2005, he started a local health-care company, TBAB Health Care Services, which today generates nearly $7 million in annual revenue.
Building partnerships
Oppedahl and the mayor are now building partnerships with local schools, the universities and private-sector organizations to provide hands-on training programs that inspire people to either start their own businesses or develop the skills they need to get good-paying jobs in today’s modern, tech-based economy. Through workforce development, the city can create the talent pool needed for businesses to grow here, Oppedahl said.
The latest initiatives include:

• An agreement with Central New Mexico Community College to open a new educational center in the Galeria building at First Plaza Downtown, where it will offer accelerated programs to rapidly train workers in skills needed by local businesses. It will provide special courses to help aspiring entrepreneurs launch companies, plus fully equipped labs for them to prototype and test new products and services.

• Mission Graduate, a communitywide effort spearheaded by United Way of Central New Mexico and supported by local businesses, to produce 60,000 higher-education graduates by 2020.

• My Life My Business, an entrepreneurial program for high-school students that began this year at Amy Biehl High School and will later spread to more schools. The program brings local entrepreneurs into the classroom to talk with students, and it offers them site visits to companies to inspire entrepreneurial passion among youth.

• Talent ABQ, an initiative to encourage skills-based hiring by businesses rather than selection based on educational degrees. The program offers free skills testing for workers at 26 centers around the city, followed by online training to improve their abilities in targeted areas.

The city is also developing a new “business accelerator” program to train and mentor entrepreneurs to turn great ideas into solid business plans.
Tech research district
The city’s efforts are directly connected to the broader strategy of building a high-tech research district Downtown that acts as a catalyst for innovation, startup development and expanding commercial activity.
That includes the Innovate ABQ initiative at Central and Broadway, plus other emerging projects connected to it, such as CNM’s new Downtown learning center and a new information technology incubator that private developers plan to open in April at the old Albuquerque High School complex.
“The concept started with Innovate ABQ, but like the ‘big bang theory,’ we’re creating the conditions for it to expand and explode up and down Central,” Oppedahl said.
The city has worked closely with UNM since fall 2012 to help develop the university’s Innovate ABQ initiative, but it’s now taking a leading role in building an “innovation network” that unites the public and private sectors around the broader development strategy, said UNM Chief Economic Development Officer Lisa Kuuttila.
“The city has embraced a long-term vision for economic development that should be applauded,” she said.
Greater Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Terri Cole said the planets finally are lining up for revitalizing Downtown and beyond.
“We have the right leadership at the right time and place to move this forward,” Cole told the Journal. “The pieces are all falling into place to make this successful.”
By: Kevin Robinson-Avila (Albuquerque Journal)
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RIO RANCHO – The city of Rio Rancho is waiting to hear how much it will have to pay after it lost a lawsuit over RR’s impact-fee moratorium in which Curb North was seeking $5.6 million in damages.
In a District Court non-jury trial earlier this month, Judge James Lawrence Sanchez of Valencia County found in favor of the plaintiff, Cabezon developer Curb North, city spokesman Peter Wells said.
The judge will decide the amount of damages in coming weeks.
“Legal fees and damages are not covered by the city’s insurance,” Wells said in an email. “These costs will have to come from the city’s general fund.”
Curb North sued the city in October 2012 after a majority of the governing body approved a two-year moratorium on 50 percent of residential impact fees and all of commercial impact fees. Impact fees are payments developers make to the city to offset system-level infrastructure improvements or expansions the city has to make to accommodate new development.
Curb North had put in more infrastructure than required for Cabezon, so the city issued it impact-fee credits. The developer could use those credits to avoid paying impact fees on future developments or sell to them other developers, which could, in turn, use the credits to avoid impact fees.
Curb North argued that the city was causing financial harm to the company by severely decreasing its opportunity to sell its impact-fee credits.
In an interview, outgoing Mayor Tom Swisstack said he and Curb North warned of lawsuits if the moratorium went forward, devaluing Curb North’s credits. Swisstack opposed the moratorium, but the city charter doesn’t allow him to vote at governing body meetings except in the case of a tie, which didn’t happen with the moratorium.
“I think this is a clear indication that what might be perceived as good economic development, if it has a negative impact on one of the larger developers in the area, that has to be taken into consideration before we consider extending this impact-fee moratorium again,” Swisstack said.
The city will be held accountable for any continuing devaluation of Curb North’s impact-fee credits, he added.
The moratorium expires this fall. After the judge’s final order on damages is issued, the city will decide whether to appeal.
By: Argen Duncan (Albuquerque Journal)
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From bendable smartphones to driverless cars, these 5 tech trends and upcoming technological advances will change your daily routine on the job.
This could be your future: You’re driving hands-free, taking your clients around for a day of showings. While you’re behind the wheel (remember, you’re not actually steering the car), you pull from your pocket a bendable smartphone or tablet and bring up a home’s specs. (Apps display the home’s energy use and maintenance status.) As you’re approaching a home, the lights in the house automatically turn on. Sound far-fetched? Well, brace yourself: Some of these capabilities are already here—or are coming soon. Here’s at peek at the latest tech from the 2014 International Consumer Electronics Show that should be on your radar.
Wearables
Wearable tech is a big buzzword right now, with the smartwatch business alone is expected to grow from 400,000 shipments this year to 35 million by 2017, according to market research firm Berg Insight. Watchmaker Pebble touts a $249 Pebble Steel smartwatch with leather or metal straps. It can connect to apps from iOS or Android devices for accessing e-mails, calendar alerts, news updates, social media accounts, and maps.
The technology may serve as a discreet way to keep an eye on your business. Real estate tech expert and author Chris Smith says that in order for smartwatches to catch on, they will need to have voice-control capability and connect to all your smartphone apps so that you don’t ever have to take out your phone.
Smarter Homes
A smartphone may become the key—literally—to showing a home. Several products are being developed with the goal of creating “connected homes,” which will allow for greater control and monitoring of home appliances and systems from a smartphone. The tech is getting more affordable and simpler to use, mostly through smartphone apps, and could make the connected homes more mainstream within the next decade, says Matt Rogers, cofounder of Nest, a home technology manufacturer recently purchased by Google.
The offerings for greater home connectivity are growing:
1. Energy-efficient “smart lightbulbs”: You can control these lightbulbs with your phone and program them with mood-light settings for relaxation and energy.
2. The ability to text appliances: Programs such as LG’s -HomeChat allow you to text your washer, for example, and ask it, “What are you doing?” You’ll receive a text response telling you where the washer is in the washing cycle.
3. Single integrated systems: These will allow you to connect appliances, thermostats, security systems, and more from one device. Lowe’s Iris Management System and Samsung’s Smart Home App are examples of these systems, and they also send alerts to your phone when an appliance is malfunctioning.
Drones
Real estate pros aren’t the only ones hankering to use drones professionally. Filmmakers, land surveyors, and farmers, among others, are waiting for the green light. But everyone may have to wait until next year when the Federal Aviation Administration releases rules addressing safety and privacy issues for commercial drone use, although a court has raised the question of whether it has the authority to enforce a ban until its rules are out. In the meantime, several companies at CES were debuting cost-effective advancements in drone technology.
View a slideshow of the latest mobile gear to leverage in your business.
For example, drone manufacturing company Parrot offered a sneak peek at its upcoming MiniDrone, which can be controlled by a smartphone or tablet to shoot photos and video while flying up to 160 feet high. It also has wheels to climb walls or move across ceilings. It is slated to debut later this year, and while the price has not yet been announced, it is expected to be cheaper than the company’s upgraded $300 A.R. Drone. Also, global drone manufacturer DJI’s Phantom 2 Vision, retailing for about $1,200, can snap 14-megapixel images and record high-definition video.
While NAR recommends that REALTORS® avoid using drones until the FAA issues rules on commercial drone use, as directed by Congress, next year, some practitioners are taking their chances. Brandon Doyle, a sales associate with Edina Realty in Maple Grove, Minn., has experimented with using DJI’s F550 drone since October 2012. He said drones will be particularly helpful for showing off high-acreage property. “It’s very difficult to show what 40 acres looks like in a photo, but with a drone, you can get a feel for the topography and where the boundaries are on a property,” he says.
Driverless Cars
Could texting while driving one day be safe? Automakers are racing to release the first publicly available self-driving car. Manufacturers such as Audi, General Motors, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, and BMW, among others, are testing the technology. According to officials with Bosch, a global automotive supplier, the company is about seven to 10 years away from having a fully automatic powered car on the roads.
The implications for real estate? Instead of chauffeuring clients to showings, the car will do it for you. That means you can focus on your client instead of the road. The cars use 360–degree sensors without human intervention for accelerating, braking, maneuvering turns, and parking. Driverless cars have been approved by lawmakers for experimentation in several states, such as California, Nevada, and Florida.
Flexible Phones
LG Electronics has created a smartphone that bends. The LG G Flex is the first smartphone with a flexible screen, and has just become available to AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile customers, starting at $600. (Wireless carriers offer a steep discount with a contract.) The G Flex features a 6-inch display and a slightly curved screen at the top and bottom. LG officials say the curved screen offers better sound, voice, and picture clarity. You can also bend it slightly without cracking the screen. Smartphone manufacturers as a whole are focusing on curvier devices. Samsung has launched its flexible Galaxy Round phone in South Korea, while Apple was granted a patent in 2013 for a curved display back, which has some tech forecasters predicting curvier, more bendable shapes for future Apple devices.
Smith says bendable glass helps protect devices from shattering. “We [practitioners] take out our devices from our pockets about 80 times a day and are always dropping our phones,” he says. “[Bendable glass] offers a way to keep the devices looking the way they were built as well as some protection.”
By: Melissa Dittmann Tracey (REALTORMag)
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