OPENINGS

The nonprofit Family Garden has opened in a 3,200-square-foot space at 600 S. Airport Road, Suite B, in the Meadow View shopping center, Longmont. It offers services and classes for new parents. About a dozen instructors will lead classes in fitness, yoga, breastfeeding, childbirth preparation, parent education, infant massage, nutrition, baby sign language and more. Fees will be on a sliding scale, and free childbirth will be offered during many classes. Founder and executive director Debbie Lane is a certified doula and childbirth mentor. Information: 303-678-1144 or family-garden.org.

Spice of Life Catering's new "mini-restaurant" at the Rim Rock Café at Xilinx Inc. is the first in what owner David Rubin plans to be a 10-restaurant growth curve. The Boulder-based catering company recently started offering a subsidized, rotating lunch menu at Xilinx, a software company in Longmont. Rubin signed a three-year contract for an undisclosed amount to sell lunch items in the existing 3,000-square-foot "cafe" on the Xilinx campus, 1951 S. Fordham St.

Silhouette, a women's-apparel boutique, opened May 23 at 2015 10th St. in Boulder. Owned by Erin Carver, who came to Boulder from Anchorage, Alaska, the shop specializes in eco-friendly brands and designers.

HBurger LLC has expanded to Boulder, opening a new HBurgerCO gourmet hamburger restaurant on May 17 at 1710 Pearl St., and "urban taqueria" T/ACO (pronounced tee-ako) at 1175 Walnut St. The company has two HBurgerCO locations in the Denver area.


MOVES

Longmont-based Body & Face Aesthetics has moved from 943 Dannys Court to 1308 Vivian St. The new office opened May 29. The business specializes in clinical skin-care products, procedures and cosmetics.


BRIEFS

The practice facilities for the University of Colorado Buffaloes basketball and volleyball teams are LEED platinum certified, according to a release from the university in Boulder. The $11 million, facility adjacent to Coors Events Center received the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) designation from the U.S. Green Building Council. It is the first athletic building on the CU-Boulder campus to be LEED certified and the second platinum-rated facility in the Pac-12 Conference, according to CU. The money for the project came from private donations made to the athletic department. The practice facility is estimated to be 40 percent more energy efficient and 30 percent more water efficient than recent buildings of similar size and function, according to CU. PCL Constructors Inc. based in Edmonton, Alberta, which has its U.S. headquarters in Denver, was the primary contractor. Denver-based Sink Combs Dethlefs was the architect.

Biofuel company Sundrop Fuels Inc. is partnering with ThyssenKrupp Uhde Corp. to build a "green gasoline" plant in Alexandria, Louisiana, late this year. Dollar terms of the agreement were not disclosed between Longmont-based Sundrop and ThyssenKrupp, which is based in Germany but has an American engineering and contracting subsidiary Uhde Corp., based in Bridgeville, Pennsylvania. More than 70 engineers from the two companies are working together to design the Sundrop plant. The plant is expected to cost $450 million to $500 million to build and could employ 150 people.

Boulder-based architectural design firm Urban West Studio LLC completed three projects: William Mathews' studio and art gallery in Denver; the remodel of the Flatirons Theater on The Hill in Boulder; and the renovation of Lucky's Market in North Boulder in association with Jim Bray Architecture.

Broomfield-based Corgenix Medical Corp. (OTC BB: CONX), a developer and marketer of diagnostic test kits, has been issued an additional U.S. patent covering its AspirinWorks technology. The kit measures thromboxane metabolites in urine to evaluate aspirin effect in apparently healthy individuals. The composition-of-matter claims provide intellectual property coverage for the monoclonal antibody that recognizes thromboxane metabolites. Corgenix was issued a U.S. patent in 2010 related to AspirinWorks' ability to more accurately depict true levels of circulating thromboxane metabolites, chemicals that activate blood platelets and cause them to stick together.

Boulder-based Zeal Optics will be official sunglass sponsor for the 2012 Lyons Outdoor Games, to be held Friday, June 8, through Sunday, June 10 in Lyons. The celebration of mountain sports will include kayaking, biking, fly-fishing, four-legged running and dog events, along with numerous clinics and exhibitions put on by elite professional athletes.

The city of Boulder's sales- and use-tax collections dipped 0.8 percent in April, compared with the same month a year ago, according to the city finance department's latest report. Boulder collected $7,930,567 in April, compared with the $8,000,739 collected in April 2011. The collection in April represents sales made in March. Retail sales-tax receipts are up 0.9 percent for the month, compared with the same month last year.


CONTRACTS

The city of Boulder will pay Santa Monica-based Vision Internet Providers Inc. $24,805 to develop a new website. Boulder picked Vision Internet after a bidding process that led to nine website developers submitting proposals, including four submissions from companies in the Boulder-Denver area. The company has designed websites for more than 400 communities, according to its website. The deal does not include implementation, which means city staff will be responsible for moving all content over to the new site. The content-management system city staff will use to update the site has been developed by the city of Arvada.

The Public Works Authority of the nation of Qatar has appointed Broomfield-based MWH Global Inc. as management contractor for the five-year Qatar Drainage Asset Management Program, part of Qatar's National Vision 2030 infrastructure investments including highways, interchanges, railways, utilities and related services. MWH and its subcontractor, Scottish Water, will work to help enhance levels of drainage services provided to Qatar residents and businesses, managing operation and maintenance of all drainage assets including the wastewater treatment and collection systems, treated sewage effluent systems, stormwater and surface groundwater systems.


GRANTS

Three companies in the Boulder Valley will receive grants from the federal Department of Energy for projects on power generation from geothermal heat, emissions reduction and safety at nuclear power plants. Cool Energy Inc. and Ion Engineering LLC, both based in Boulder, and Sporian Microsystems Inc. in Lafayette, will receive $150,000 for each of their projects.


MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS

Boulder-based Next Giant Leap LLC has been acquired by competitor Mountain View, California-based Moon Express Inc., a company working on commercial and scientific missions to the moon. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. A spokesperson for Moon Express said the company acquired Next Giant Leap's intellectual property and assets. Moon Express will be revisiting the relationships forged by Next Giant Leap with each corporate partner independently, according to the spokesperson. Next Giant Leap created a lunar "hopper" that received a $1 million research and development grant from the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in February 2011. Next Giant Leap co-founders Mike Joyce and Todd Mosher will be invited to become advisers of Moon Express. They managed Next Giant Leap, a "virtual company," that consisted of a consortium of corporate partners in the aerospace industry including Sierra Nevada Corp., based in Sparks, Nevada, with an office in Louisville, and The Center for Space Entrepreneurship (eSpace) in Boulder.

Donelson Ciancio & Grant PC, with offices in Broomfield and Longmont, is combining with the Denver law firm Freidel Dykes PC, the law firms said June 1. The combined firm is called Donelson Ciancio & Grant. It will keep the offices in Broomfield, Longmont and Denver and will have 21 attorneys. Martin Freidel, founder of Freidel Dykes, will join Donelson Ciancio & Grant as a shareholder. The combined firm's offices are at 8001 Arista Place, Suite 400, Broomfield; 275 S. Main St., Suite 201, Longmont; and 1873 S. Bellaire St., Suite 610, Denver.

Data-storage manufacturer Seagate Technology plc (Nasdaq: STX), Longmont's largest private-sector employer, is buying a similar company in France, LaCie S.A. (Euronext: LAC). The acquisition will not affect Seagate's workforce in Longmont. The offer values LaCie at approximately $186 million in total equity value, including acquired net cash of about $65 million as of March 31. The transaction would add LaCie's line of consumer-storage solutions, network-attached storage solutions and software offerings to Seagate's array of mainstream consumer storage products. The transaction is subject to U.S. antitrust regulatory approval, as well as approval of the foreign investment by France's finance ministry. Seagate employs 1,200 people at its facility at 389 Disc Drive in Longmont.


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