Strictly Business

Seneca casinos are seeking 300 new hires in the region.

Seneca Gaming Corp. will hold a job fair Thursday from 9 a.m to 7 p.m. at Seneca Niagara Casino and Hotel, 310 4th Street in Niagara Falls, in the hotel mezzanine.

New and experienced table games dealers are especially sought for the Niagara Falls casino, but there are a variety of positions available there and at Allegany and Buffalo Creek casinos.

Interviews will be conducted at the job fair, and a blackjack table will be available to test candidates' card-dealing ability.

---Samantha Maziarz Christmann

A National Science Foundation program that boosts efforts to commercialize scientific research is the subject of a lecture Wednesday at the University at Buffalo.

The lecture, "Moving Ideas from Laboratory to Market," will offer details on the foundation's Innovation-Corps program, which is meant to help translate basic research into commercial products and technology.

Richard Voyles, the I-Corps program director, will participate by video conference. The UB members of the panel will include Martin Casstevens, business formation and commercialization manager for the Office of Science, Technology Transfer, and Economic Outreach, or STOR; Vipin Chaudhary, a professor of computer science and engineering; and Brian Schultz, a graduate student in chemistry.

The lecture will be held from 4 to 5 p.m. Wednesday in UB's New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, 701 Ellicott St., Buffalo, on the second floor. Click here to register.

--- Stephen T. Watson

Yahoo is holding a job fair this week at the University at Buffalo to fill 125 call-center positions at its expanding campus in Niagara County.

The Internet giant in March announced plans to expand its data center that opened in 2010 in an industrial park in the Town of Lockport.

Yahoo initially said it plans to hire 115 new workers, on top of the 77 who work at the current data center, and spend $168 million to build the expanded facility, which also received an extensive set of public subsidies.

Yahoo has since raised the number of new positions to 125. The new employees starting as soon as next month will work in leased commercial space in Amherst until construction on the Lockport facility is completed in 12 to 18 months, said Mauricio Quibano, senior manager for global planning and sourcing for Yahoo Customer Experience.

Yahoo is seeking to hire 110 customer care agents and 15 managers, and job descriptions are available online.

The walk-in interviews run from 1 p.m. to 7 p.m. today through Friday in the Center for Tomorrow, located near the Maple Road entrance to the UB North Campus in Amherst, at the corner of Flint and Service Center roads.

Yahoo job applicants should bring a resume to the fair. They must have a bachelor's degree and have earned a grade point average of at least 3.2.

Yahoo reached out to UB a couple of weeks ago to seek assistance in filling the positions and the university also has contacted alumni online to advertise the available jobs, said Suzanne Chamberlain, a UB spokeswoman.

--- Stephen T. Watson

A Swedish startup has named the University at Buffalo Technology Incubator as the top life-sciences business incubator based at a university in the world.

The University Business Incubator Index, a company based in Stockholm that serves the incubator industry, studied 150 university incubators in 22 countries and measured their performance on 50 indicators.

While UB took top honors in the life sciences category, Rice University's Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship in Houston was named the best overall university incubator.

UB's Technology Incubator, located in the Baird Research Park on Sweet Home Road across from the North Campus, rated well for talent retention, post-incubation relationship and other factors, according to news releases from the index and UB.

The incubator rents office and laboratory space to entrepreneurs and startups and provides mentoring, training, grant-writing assistance and access to resources and expertise, according to the university.

It opened in 1988 and today has 13 tenants. More than 100 companies have gone through the incubator, and 84 percent of those graduates lasted for five or more years, UB reported. Its current tenants and surviving graduates employ 500 people and have annual revenues of $50 million.

Perhaps the best-known Technology Incubator tenant is ONY Inc., founded by Dr. Edmund A. Egan II and the late Bruce A. Holm, both UB scientists, to market Infasurf, a commercial surfactant-replacement that reduces the rate of respiratory failure in premature infants.

--- Stephen T. Watson

No, it's not your imagination.

Anyone walking or driving through downtown Buffalo near the waterfront might have rubbed their eyes to see if they were being misled Friday morning. But the sight that beheld them was quite real.

On the southeastern corner of the Webster Block, where the Sabres are building their HarborCenter project, stood the tallest bright yellow crane this city has seen in decades, if not ever.

At 236 feet off the ground, the canary yellow tower crane - being built with another giant crane -  dwarfs everything around it, and leaves no doubt of the height of the $172.2 million project conceived by the Sabres and owner Terry Pegula.

"You start realizing how big of a building this is, going into that lot," said Sabres spokesman Mike Gilbert.

"People in Buffalo aren’t used to seeing cranes in downtown. It’s going to be great for people coming down the 190 or at the waterfront to see this crane in the air. They’re going to know this project is for real and it’s moving forward."

The new crane -- one of two that will be erected, with the other one going up in the northern part of the block, will remain on site throughout the construction process, providing the height and reach to bring supplies up as the mammoth building takes shape. The cranes were brought in from Kansas and Tennessee.

"It makes it easier for accessibility, with the reach those cranes have," Gilbert said. "This is all part of what it costs to build a building of this magnitude."

 - Jonathan D. Epstein

A proposal to convert a four-unit apartment building on the West Side to a retail store with three apartments and to convert a multi-family apartment house into a rooming house on West Ferry are among 13 requests coming to the Buffalo Zoning Board of Appeals.

According to the agenda for the 2 p.m. meeting on Wednesday, June 19, the board will consider, among others:

*A planned new CVS Pharmacy at 392 Kenmore Ave., with "excessive fence height and sign size."

*A request by Mohammed Nobi to turn a 7,148-square-foot building with four apartment units at 321 Vermont St. into a three-unit property with a retail storefront.

*A request by Stan Brown to convert a 3,537-square-foot, blue-shingled three-story home at 402 West Ferry St., at Hoyt Street, into a "rooming house." 

*An outdoor patio for the Irish Center at 245 Abbott Road.

Entrepreneurs who want to get life-sciences and high-tech companies off the ground will have a chance to pitch their ideas to experts at the University at Buffalo's Pre-Seed Workshop this week and next.

The workshop takes place Wednesday, Thursday and June 20 at UB's Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences and the adjoining Roswell Park Center for Genetics and Pharmacology on Ellicott Street.

Ten workshop participants will get advice from business, financial and legal experts as they craft the kind of presentation they can make in the future to prospective investors and business partners.

On the final day, the participants will make their presentations to a group of investors in a low-stakes setting meant to provide the entrepreneurs with feedback on their ideas and performance.

According to UB, the participants include a new method of growing microalgae for the biofuel market and a method of evaluating clinicians performing robotic surgery.

--- Stephen T. Watson

The U.S. Small Business Administration in Buffalo is holding a session explaining the impact of the federal Affordable Care Act on small businesses, and registration for the Wednesday morning event is still open.

Thirty company representatives have signed up for the seminar, which will be held from 10 a.m. to noon at the SBA's local offices, 130 S. Elmwood Ave., Suite 423.

The new federal health care law has a number of provisions that will affect small businesses, and their employees, and the seminar is meant to address the questions employers have about the act.

Anyone interested in attending the seminar can register at the door or at http://events.sba.gov.

--- Stephen T. Watson

By Jonathan D. Epstein

The Buffalo Sabres will make a “major announcement” regarding their HARBORCenter project at Canalside on Thursday morning.
The team did not provide any details Wednesday evening, but scheduled a press conference for 11 a.m. at the First Niagara Center, with Chief Development Officer Cliff Benson.
The $170 million project by the Sabres and owner Terry Pegula involves construction of a multi-purpose facility, anchored by two giant ice rinks for community use and a 200-room, full-service hotel and a parking ramp with 850 spaces. It will be connected directly to the First Niagara Center, making it the only three-rink complex in the National Hockey League.
Construction work is already underway at the site, known as the Webster Block. However, officials have not yet identified what hotel chain will be represented in the facility.

By Stephen T. Watson

The University at Buffalo is teaming up with a major biotechnology corporation and a life-sciences startup company that grew out of research conducted at Roswell Park Cancer Institute to boost genetics-based clinical research on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus.

The partners announced Wednesday that Life Technologies –- which has a large media manufacturing facility on Grand Island –- is providing UB and Empire Genomics with advanced genome-sequencing equipment.

Empire Genomics will install the new equipment in lab space in its building on the edge of the medical campus, while UB has installed the technology in its New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences on the campus.

The sequencing technology will help UB researchers and Empire Genomics employees develop new diagnostic tests that –- eventually –- could lead to drugs targeted to individual patients, and the partnership is touted as a boon to efforts to build a life-sciences industry in Buffalo.

For more on the partnership, read Thursday's Buffalo News.