Neha Jain: http://newzealandaviationnews.blogspot.com/17

1. Obama To Meet Steve Jobs And Other Tech Leaders For Dinner In S.F.

President Obama will meet with Apple chief Steve Jobs and other high-tech leaders at a private dinner in San Francisco on Thursday night, according to reports.
Jobs was spotted earlier today leaving a cancer treatment center at Stanford University, but is apparently feeling well enough to have dinner with the prez. The event will take place at an unannounced private location.
Obama's last visit to the Bay Area was a $30,000-per-head fundraiser at the Palo Alto home of Google VP Marissa Mayer in October. He also met with Jobs for an hour in a hotel near the airport for that trip.
Other guests at the dinner will reportedly include Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Intel CEO Paul Otellini, and Cisco CEO Paul Chambers. Jeffrey Immelt, the former GE CEO whom Obama named as chairman of the new White House Council on Jobs and Competititveness last month, will also be there according to ABC News. Venture capitalists John Doerr and Steve Westly may also be on the list, says the San Francisco Chronicle.
The visit will be Obama's eighth official trip to California. He leaves Thursday night to visit an Intel plant in Oregon.

2. Jobs, Zuckerberg, Schmidt to Talk With Obama in California

Apple Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs, Facebook Inc. founder Mark Zuckerberg, and Google Inc. Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt are among the technology industry executives President Barack Obama will meet with today in the San Francisco area, according to a person familiar with the private session.

The president will discuss the U.S. economy and job creation with the executives as he promotes the $3.7 trillion budget he released this week that aims to keep up government funding for education and research.

The White House hasn’t released the names of those who will attend. The person familiar with the meeting spoke on condition of anonymity because the details haven’t been made public.

The person said that General Electric Co. CEO Jeffrey Immelt, who Obama picked to lead a White House council on competitiveness, also will be at the meeting.

“The focus of the discussion is innovation and job creation,” Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said yesterday. The executives attending “know a lot about private sector job growth,” he said.

“All the smart graduates today want to go to Google and Facebook instead of Wall Street,” said Senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat who co-founded a company that became Nextel Corp., now Sprint Nextel Corp. “Without innovation and a growing economy out in” Silicon Valley, “we’re not going to be competitive,” he said.

Growth Areas

Warner, who met Zuckerberg on Jan. 19 at Facebook’s Palo Alto, California, headquarters to discuss innovation and tax policy, said in an interview that the Internet and social networking have been one of the rare areas of growth in the U.S. economy during a decade without “a massive amount of innovation.”

Along with proposals to improve U.S. public education, Obama’s budget includes $18 billion to build up wireless networks for emergency workers, expand access to high-speed wireless service and supplement communications research.

The initiative fleshes out a pledge he made in the State of the Union address last month to make wireless high- speed Internet, or broadband, available to 98 percent of Americans within five years as a way to accelerate economic growth and job creation.

In that address, Obama cited technology companies as the heirs to the industries that made the U.S. the world’s biggest economy.

“We’re the nation that put cars in driveways and computers in offices; the nation of Edison and the Wright brothers; of Google and Facebook,” he said. “In America, innovation doesn’t just change our lives. It is how we make our living.”

Lower Taxes

Warner said the executives will likely ask Obama’s help in improving the business climate in the U.S. That would include lowering corporate taxes, shortening the patent approval process, helping new businesses get the capital they need to launch and expand, and shortening the Food and Drug Administration approval process, he said.

Tomorrow, Obama plans to carry his message of increased investments in education and innovation during a visit to Intel Corp.’s Hillsboro, Oregon campus, where he will tour the company’s semiconductor manufacturing facility with Intel Chief Executive Officer Paul Otellini.

Leave of Absence

Jobs announced a leave of absence from the most valuable technology company on Jan. 17, the third time the Apple co- founder has taken time away from the company since 2004 to deal with health problems. While Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook has assumed control of day-to-day operations, Apple’s board hasn’t said who will take over for Jobs if he can’t return. Apple is the maker of the iPhone and iPad devices and Macintosh personal computers.

Obama is meeting with executives from growing companies as he tries to make the point that innovation could help lower the nation’s 9 percent unemployment rate. Not only are the companies hiring, they can help people find jobs by helping to connect job seekers with employers, said Elizabeth Shaw, an analyst at Forrester Research, a technology and market research group.

“Everybody can identify with Facebook and Twitter, it is beyond buzzword at this point, everybody’s talking about it, every company’s trying to figure out how to get on it, how to reach their customers on it,” she said in an interview.

Facebook Hiring

Facebook, the world’s most-used social networking service, is hiring as it attracts more users and advertising revenue. It has grown to more than 2,000 employees from about 1,000 in August 2009, according to its website.

The company has more than 500 million users --compared with about 250 million in July 2009. Facebook, which isn’t publicly traded and doesn’t disclose financial information, may have more than doubled its revenue to about $2 billion last year, three people familiar with the matter said in December.

Google, which had 24,400 people at the end of 2010, hired more than 4,500 last year, making that year second only to 2007, when the company added more than 6,000. Google Inc., based in Mountain View, California, is fending off competition from Facebook which surpassed it as the most-visited website in the U.S. in 2010, according to New York-based Internet tracker Experian Hitwise.

Symbol

“Silicon Valley is a symbol of our competitive advantage in technology,” said Charlene Li, author of “Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead.” “A visit to Silicon Valley by any president is to focus on one of the core competitive advantages that the United States has: the fact that we are leaders.”

Social-networking companies, specifically Facebook, “do not stand still,” Li said, and in that way they provide an example to other companies and entrepreneurs. By meeting with technology executives, Obama is making the case that “change is hard but if we’re going to be successful look at these technology companies and how they embrace change,” he said.

Obama used social-networking more than any other candidate before him during his 2008 presidential campaign. One purpose of this trip could be to reinforce the message that “he does have a pulse, he’s not out of touch with things,” Shaw said. The White House uses Twitter, the White House blog, and Facebook to get the administration’s message out to a larger group.

Employees in the high-tech industry gave $8.5 million to Obama’s 2008 campaign, compared with $1.5 million for Republican nominee John McCain, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based research group. No 2008 candidate received more money than Obama from industry employees.

Microsoft Corp. employees and their families gave Obama $833,617 for his presidential campaign, his second biggest source of corporate cash next to Goldman Sachs Group employees, who gave $994,795. Google Inc. employees and their families were third, with $803,436 in donations.

Facebook, along with Google Inc. and Twitter Inc., also increasingly figures in U.S. foreign policy. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton vowed in remarks Feb. 15 that the U.S. will step up support for global Internet freedom, as citizens using social networking sites and other areas of the Internet to organize demonstrations spreading across the Mideast and North Africa.

To contact the reporters on this story: Kate Andersen Brower in Washington at Kandersen7@bloomberg.net

3. GSK trimming Triangle jobs

GlaxoSmithKline is eliminating an undisclosed number of jobs in Research Triangle Park as it prunes its work force to reflect reductions in research and development spending that it made last year.

The job cuts are in the company's Neurosciences Medicine Development Center, which is primarily based in RTP.

Fewer than 50 R&D positions are being cut across the U.S., and less than half of those are in RTP, said Melinda Stubbee, a company spokeswoman.

The majority of the cuts are occurring at various clinical trial sites in the U.S., but not at the company's R&D facilities in the Philadelphia area.

The company declined to give an exact number because it will depend on how many people are redeployed to other areas of the company.

London-based GSK employs about 4,000 people in RTP, where it has its U.S. headquarters. It also has employees in Zebulon, where it operates a manufacturing facility.

The company has been slashing costs and restructuring its business as generic rivals have hurt sales of its blockbuster drugs.

Between 2007 and 2010 the company cut about 22,000 jobs worldwide, but also added jobs in growth areas - emerging markets, consumer products and vaccines.

It now employs about 96,500 people.

In February 2010, the company announced that it was withdrawing from some areas of neurosciences research in order to focus on areas that it felt had more promise.

GSK also announced last year that it would drastically reduce its real estate footprint in the Triangle over the next 18 months as it relocates 1,000 employees to the company's Moore Drive campus in RTP.

GSK has reported losses in two of its last three quarters.

Its earnings have been hurt by a $3.4 billion charge to cover legal costs stemming from its controversial diabetes drug Avandia and a federal investigation into the company's sales and promotional practices.

GSK announced earlier this month that it plans to buy back as much as $3.23 billion worth of its shares. The company also promised to return to shareholders the proceeds from the planned sale of its slowest-selling consumer brands.

4. Lafayette lands plant, up to 200 jobs

A fast-moving chain of events has landed an economic development plum -- and the promise of new jobs and investment -- on the south side of Lafayette.

Nanshan America Co. Ltd., a Chicago-based firm with a parent company in China, announced Wednesday that it will build an aluminum extrusion plant on land in the Park 350 industrial park near Veterans Memorial Parkway and U.S. 52.

"We expect over 200 new jobs in the next two to three years," said Nanshan America president Lijun Du during an invitation-only announcement at Purdue University that attracted 250 people.

"We've been studying the U.S. market, the largest in the world, for years. To establish this facility in the Midwest, with the best equipment from Europe and America and an elite American management team and work force, will make us among the leaders in the global aluminum industry."

RELATED
Plant among those plucked from Asia trade mission fruit
Company's president has close Purdue, Lafayette ties
The new jobs at the facility, which will be named Nanshan America Advanced Aluminum Technologies, will pay an average of $15.27 an hour, plus benefits. WorkOne West Central Indiana and its REACH Center in Lafayette will provide recruiting, interviewing, candidate and position assessments.

Du, a 2004 Purdue graduate, initially met with Gov. Mitch Daniels in Shanghai during an Indiana trade mission to Asia last November. Those talks quickly escalated, public and private partners got involved on the local scene, and the result was Wednesday's announcement.

"This is one of the great and growing companies on this earth," Daniels said. "It's exactly the kind of growth every state wants. It's a great achievement for all of Indiana."

The plant will make aluminum extrusions that are used in the mass transportation, automotive, distribution, industrial and electrical industries. It also will make train-body material for the growing high-speed rail industry.

The company is not expected to be in direct competition with Alcoa Lafayette Operations, an existing hard-alloy extrusion plant that has about 700 employees.

"We're very pleased to welcome a new manufacturer in our community. We'll help them any way we can," said Alcoa human resource manager Pamela Whitton. "We make different alloys. The products are different. In Lafayette, we have such a good strong supportive community for manufacturing. We're pleased."

NEHA JAIN

International Airlines Training Expo