Maddux Report - Tampa Bay's Business, Finance and Development Magazine

Dunedin Fish On The Net

The Dunedin Fish Co. has been around a long time in the Bay area, but this year, it can look forward to some of its customers ordering by computer. Dunedin Fish processes and distributes fresh fish to many restaurants across the state. Going high tech is a milestone, one that it reached thanks to a Tampa high tech company, Bayshore Solutions, which predicts more of the same as small companies reconsider their online market potentials.“We are definitely not a technology company,” says Steve Germann, operations manager at Dunedin Fish.

Tampa-based Bayshore Solutions supplied the fish distributor with a “solution,” a combination of software and hardware that will allow Dunedin Fish to take some orders over the Internet. It’s all part of bringing traditional companies into a new day and age, streamlining part of a process that has been hands-on since its beginning, at Dunedin Fish. Bayshore Solutions is considered an information technology company that has done similar jobs for some large clients for seven years. Its president, Kevin V. Hourigan, says that not only are smaller companies coming online with their business, but the entire Bay area is accepting high tech as a future. That bodes well for the work force, as well for the many companies such as Bayshore Solutions, Hourigan says. It points to a degree of success of some organizations that have been trying to bring the workforce in line with high tech directions, he says.

“Over the past seven years, we have been asked more than once why we headquartered a technology company such as ours in Tampa Bay, and not Boston, Austin or California,” Hourigan says. But Hourigan says he supports the efforts of the university system and development organizations in training the local work force. Today, finding workers fit to hire is easier than it was. And you can’t beat the general lower cost-of-living and the quality-of-life aspects, he adds.

Record Smashing at UCF
At University of Central Florida in Orlando, a laser scientist smashed the world record for laser data transmission by sending more than one trillion bits of data per second from a single device. The development paves the way for lasers to transmit information through telephone lines as fast as it travels within a computer, according to Peter Delfyett, professor of optics, electrical and computer engineering and physics.

The previous record for data transmission from one laser diode was 300 gigabits (or 300 billion bits of data) per second, set in 2000.

Liquidmetal In Your Knees
Liquidmetal Technologies in Tampa says it will enter the $2.4 billion new replacement market by helping to develop orthopedic implants and instruments along with DePuy
Orthopedics Inc. The pair of companies signed a multi-year agreement in December that calls for alloys made by Liquidmetal to be used in the manufacture of the medical
devices.

The alliance is likely to lead to better knee replacement parts, according to John Kang, Liquidmetal Technologies’ chief executive officer. By combining the high-quality material developed by Liquidmetal with the engineering and development expertise of
DePuy, the merger “can be a potent force in driving the creation of higher performance components and knee replacement devices. We look forward to working with them in this exciting and highly visible product area.”

The Corridor’s Medical Muscle
Florida has a high concentration of medical manufacturers, second only to California. The Sunshine State’s medical manufacturing cluster, which boasts higher-than-average annual salaries, in the past year has formed the Florida Medical Manufacturers Consortium (www.FlaMedMfg.org). Now it has clout.

The association, with a membership of 100 companies, provides clout with regard to access, advocacy and education. It meets every other month in locations around the state featuring speakers on current industry news and providing an opportunity for manufacturers to network and dialogue on issues. “We bring in speakers – key people in the Food & Drug Administration or other government personnel – who we might otherwise not have access to,” says Geary Havran, the consortium’s chairman. “We work with elected officials to make sure that state policies relating to the business climate, and health care in general, are the best they can possibly be. And we’re working with local economic development organizations to help grow our existing businesses and attract other companies in medical manufacturing or suppliers to those businesses. On a broader perspective, we want to use our base as a steppingstone into the future.”

Havran says the consortium is working with the University of South Florida and supports the state’s emergent technologies initiative. “We’re very excited about USF’s proposal for the Center of Excellence in Bioengineering Life Sciences. This will provide a facility where we can get together as an industry and interact with people in academia.”

Volusia Lures Med Tech
It’s pretty well known along the Florida High Tech Corridor that Tampa Bay leads in the number of medical technology firms located within its boundaries. Studies done by the University of South Florida show that medical manufacturers – medical device, pharmaceutical and biotech companies – provide more than 10,000 direct jobs and generate more than $2 billion a year in output, supporting more than 50,000 jobs and $5 billion a year in revenue in the seven-county region. And, the industry’s average annual wage here is $51,000 – 40 percent higher
than Florida’s average annual wage.

In recent years, Volusia County has made an effort to lure medtech companies. Led by the successes of local expansions such as Gambro Renal Products, Command Medical, andTyco/Healthcare/Kendall, medical products and related components manufacturing
is now on the rise in Volusia. With a workforce in excess of 175,000 workers, local manufacturing employment attracts nearly 13,000 technical and skilled individuals. This ratio of manufacturing workers is consistent with most healthy communities with the exception that upwards to 3,000 or nearly 25 percent of the technical and skilled workers are employed in the manufacturing of medical and medical related products.

This new focus on medical technologies has and continues to attract the interest of a growing number of small to medium-sized medical product companies seeking a cost effective and competitive location in Central Florida.

Rick Michael, director of the Volusia County Department of Economic Development, says Tyco/Healthcare/ Kendall’s recently completed a $93 million expansion in DeLand. The 500,000-square-foot Tyco plant is part of an $8.8 billion health care business for its parent corporation, a whopping increase from a mere $50 million in the early 1990s. In Volusia, the company’s key product is syringes for dental and veterinarian use. But it will also make other devices associated with syringes and blood collection.

More Longbows Coming
Longbow LLC of Orlando has won a contract worth more than $8.7 million from the U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Command in Redstone Arsenal, Ala. It calls for Longbow to make 96 more Longbow missiles. The contract is expected to be completed by September 2005.

Embry-Riddle Wins Award
An engineering physics senior design project team from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University was selected as one of three teams to win an aerospace design competition from NASA’s Langley Research Center. The other winning teams are from Princeton University and the University of California at Berkeley.

The Embry-Riddle project, called “Plasma Accelerated Reusable Transport System (PARTS),” is an unmanned cargo shuttle intended to ferry large payloads to and from Mars orbits, using a rocket known in aeronautical circles as variable specific impulse
magnetoplasma. The design of PARTS aims at balancing cost and minimizing transit
time for a payload of vehicles, satellites, and other
components.

The main objective of RASCAL is to encourage universities to develop aerospace
systems concepts and technologies to assist NASA in planning missions and achieving goals in science, exploration and commercialization. Embry-Riddle is considered the world’s largest, fully accredited university specializing in aviation and aerospace. It annually educates more than 25,000 students through the master’s level at campuses in Daytona Beach and Prescott, Ariz. The curriculum at Embry-Riddle covers the operation, engineering, research, manufacturing, marketing, and management of modern aircraft and the systems that support them. Tyco-Kendall manufacturing is on the rise in Volusia County.