CEO Club chief surprises members with retirement news

Peter Rollins, founder and president of Boston College's Chief Executives' Club of Boston, announced his retirement yesterday after 21 years leading the club.

"It's been enjoyable," Rollins, 69, told the Herald yesterday. "I love the program. It will go on."

A successor to run the program has not been named, said Rollins, a beloved host who surprised event-goers yesterday with the announcement and received a standing ovation.

The Chief Executives' Club of Boston invites the region's most powerful business leaders — chairmen, presidents and managing partners — to several luncheon forums each year at the Boston Harbor Hotel's Wharf Room. Each luncheon features a prominent CEO keynote speaker from outside the region who is introduced by a Hub corporate leader and addresses important issues affecting both business and the economy.

Recent speakers have included Honeywell International CEO David Cote and Aflac Inc. CEO Daniel Amos.

Ranked as one of the top executive forums in the world and viewed by many as the best business lunch in Boston, Rollins' program operates in association with Boston College's Carroll School of Management.

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DreamWorks buying AwesomenessTV for about $33M

GLENDALE, Calif. — DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc. is buying AwesomenessTV, a YouTube teen network, for about $33 million in cash as it looks to tap into the popularity of online content.

DreamWorks said Wednesday that AwesomenessTV founder and CEO Brian Robbins will continue to direct growth at that company while also developing a DreamWorks branded digital family channel.

The deal includes the possibility of additional cash payments of up to $117 million if certain earnings targets are reached in 2014 and 2015.

The deal is expected to close this month.

AwesomenessTV features talk shows, scripted and reality programs and sketch comedy. The company has released a movie with AMC Theaters and expects to have a television show on Nickelodeon.

Its network of more than 57,000 YouTube channels has 14.4 million subscribers. The more than 1 million videos on the network have been seen 809 million times.

"We want to let Brian do what Brian's been doing," DreamWorks CEO Jeffery Katzenberg said Wednesday night at a YouTube presentation to advertisers in New York. "We also have talked about what we think are going to be some additional great collaborations with Brian on YouTube and ways in which the DreamWorks brand can serve as a valuable, defining brand for him."

Benjamin Mogil, an analyst with investment bank Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., said in a research note that the purchase was "strategically prudent" and likely ends the possibility that DreamWorks will buy a pay TV channel as an outlet for the animated content from its franchises such as "Kung Fu Panda" and "Madagascar." He said the acquisition will likely hurt DreamWorks' earnings per share in the short term.

Rachel Egan, a spokeswoman for ad-buying network TubeMogul, said the purchase "seems like a broad recognition by DreamWorks that their younger audience — like the rest of us — are increasingly streaming content online, on mobile devices and in social media."

The announcement came a day after DreamWorks announced quarterly earnings that beat analysts' expectations on both revenue and profit, although both showed a decline.

Shares of DreamWorks, which is based in Glendale, Calif., were up $1.44, or 7.5 percent, to $20.72 in late trading Wednesday.

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Google, T providing free public WiFi at South Station

Google, Biederman Redevelopment Ventures Corp. and the MBTA have partnered to build the infrastructure for free public WiFi service inside Boston's South Station.Starting today, free WiFi access will be available throughout South Station.

Google has invested in the network and BRV Corp., who manages the public space programming inside South Station, is responsible for the WiFi deployment.

"Google is excited and proud to provide the infrastructure for free WiFi for the first time inside South Station and to support the Greater Boston community," said Steve Vinter, engineering director for Google. "We understand that people want to stay connected from anywhere, at any time, from any device. As a major hub for Boston area residents, the new WiFi network at South Station will allow hundreds of thousands of commuters to be even more productive online each day."

"We're thrilled to partner with Google and the MBTA on the creation of this free public WiFi network in South Station. As we watch this area of Boston surge with new businesses, more and more people pass through the station each day and they will appreciate this new amenity," said Ted Furst, project manager for BRV Corp.

"Anything that improves our customers' transit experience is a good thing," said MBTA General Manager Beverly Scott. "By coupling this new initiative with the WiFi service provided on commuter rail trains, the MBTA is keeping its customers connected from the moment they enter South Station to the time they exit trains."

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IBM makes tiny movie by pushing molecules around

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. — Scientists have taken the idea of a film short down to new levels. Molecular levels.

IBM says it has made the tiniest stop-motion movie ever — a one-minute video of individual carbon monoxide molecules repeatedly rearranged to show a boy dancing, throwing a ball and bouncing on a trampoline.

Each frame measures 45 by 25 nanometers — there are 25 million nanometers in an inch — but hugely magnified, the movie (http://bit.ly/17ZmHIt ) is reminiscent of early video games, particularly when the boy bounces the ball off the side of the frame accompanied by simple music and sound effects.

The movie is titled "A Boy and His Atom."

Videos showing atoms in motion have been seen before but Andreas Heinrich, IBM's principal scientist for the project, said Tuesday this is the first time anything so small has been maneuvered to tell a story.

"This movie is a fun way to share the atomic-scale world," Heinrich said. "The reason we made this was not to convey a scientific message directly, but to engage with students, to prompt them to ask questions."

Jamie Panas of Guinness World Records said Guinness certified the movie as "Smallest Stop-Motion Film."

IBM used a remotely operated two-ton scanning tunneling microscope at its lab in San Jose, Calif., to make the movie earlier this year. The microscope magnifies the surface over 100 million times. It operates at 450 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (268 degrees below zero Celsius).

The cold "makes life simpler for us," Heinrich said. "The atoms hold still. They would move around on their own at room temperature."

Scientists used the microscope to control a tiny, super-sharp needle along a copper surface, IBM said. At a distance of just 1 nanometer, the needle physically attracted the carbon monoxide molecules and pulled them to a precisely specified location on the surface.

The dots that make up the figures in the movie are the oxygen atoms in the molecule, Heinrich said.

The scientists took 242 still images that make up the movie's 242 frames.

Heinrich said the techniques used to make the movie are similar to what IBM is doing to make data storage smaller.

"As data creation and consumption continue to get bigger, data storage needs to get smaller, all the way down to the atomic level," he said.

___

Associated Press Science Writer Seth Borenstein contributed to this report from Washington.

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Newsstand tab to make Orleans paper daily again

NEW ORLEANS — Months after cutting its print edition to three days a week, The Times-Picayune of New Orleans on Tuesday announced plans for a three-day-a-week tabloid called TPStreet available in stores and newsstands on days when the full paper isn't printed.

On the same day as The Times-Picayune's announcement, its rival The Advocate reported on its website that New Orleans businessman John Georges has completed his purchase of the Baton Rouge-based newspaper and named two former top Times-Picayune news executives to lead it.

Georges said he will serve as publisher and named former Times-Picayune managing editor Dan Shea as general manager and another former Times-Picayune managing editor, Peter Kovacs, as editor. The Advocate's announcement said current editor Carl Redman would remain in the position of senior editor.

The Times-Picayune's announcement came on its website, nola.com. Editor Jim Amoss said the 75-cent tabloid will be published Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays beginning this summer and that the publication won't be available via home delivery.

Home subscribers will be able to get an electronic replica of TPStreet on the days it is published, in addition to an electronic version of the full Times-Picayune editions published Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays (including an early Sunday edition published Saturday afternoons.)

"It will allow our readers every day to zoom in on content as they browse through the e-edition's pages on their laptops, tablets and desktop computers," Amoss wrote.

In June of last year, The Times-Picayune's owner, privately held Advance Publications Inc., and a new subsidiary, Nola Media Group, announced the paper would lay off 200 employees and shift its focus to the free nola.com site. Advance has pursued similar three-times-a-week strategies with several other newspapers in the chain.

The decision met with harsh protests in tradition-bound New Orleans, where readers had a tight bond with the 175-year-old Pulitzer-winning paper, especially after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city in 2005.

Georges acquired The Advocate from the Manship family, which has owned the seven-day daily since 1909. The Advocate's announcement said the closing capped two years of negotiations.

Terms of the sale were not disclosed. The deal does not include WBRZ-TV, which will continue to be opened by the Manships.

The Advocate expanded its coverage of news in the New Orleans area in 2012, opening a New Orleans bureau and marketing itself as the city's only daily newspaper after The Times-Picayune cut back to three days of publication a week. Officials of The Advocate say about 20 percent of its daily circulation of 98,000 copies and Sunday circulation of about 125,000 comes from the New Orleans area

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Oil price falls to $93 on China manufacturing data

BANGKOK — The price of oil fell to near $93 on Wednesday after data showed a slowdown in China's manufacturing growth.

Benchmark oil for June delivery was down 45 cents to $93.01 a barrel at midday Bangkok time in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract fell $1.04 to finish at $93.46 per barrel on Tuesday in anticipation of another increase in U.S. crude supplies.

The China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing, an industry group, released data Wednesday showing that manufacturing grew at a slower pace in April and that export orders had been declining steadily. The federation's purchasing managers' index fell to 50.6 in April from 50.9 in March. On a 100-point scale, numbers above 50 indicate an expansion.

The pace stoked fears that the recovery in the world's second-largest economy might not meet expectations.

Investors, meanwhile, are also waiting for information on U.S. stockpiles of crude and refined products. Analysts surveyed by Platts estimate that oil supplies rose by 1.4 million barrels in the week ended Friday. The report from the Energy Department's Energy Information Administration will be released later Wednesday.

Brent crude, which is used to set prices of oil from the North Sea used by many U.S. refiners, fell 89 cents to $101.48 on the ICE Futures exchange in London.

In other energy futures trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange:

— Wholesale gasoline fell 2.4 cents to $2.778 a gallon.

— Heating oil retreated 2 cents to $2.82 a gallon.

— Natural gas rose 2.1 cents to $4.364 per 1,000 cubic feet.

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The Ticker

Smartphone sales over 50% of market

With worldwide shipments of 216.2 million units during the first quarter, smartphones grabbed 
51.6 percent of the total mobile phone market, according to InformationWeek.

This is the first time that hardware makers have shipped more smartphones than feature phones on a global basis.

Phone makers shipped 418.6 million devices during the quarter, which was up 4 percent compared to the year-ago quarter (402.4 million), but down compared to the previous quarter (483.2 million). The first quarter typically sees a downturn in sales following the holiday quarter, so these numbers are following the seasonal trends.

TODAY

 Alnylam Pharmaceuticals and Cognex Corp. release quarterly financial earnings.

TOMORROW

 Aegerion Pharmaceuticals, Momenta Pharmaceuticals, Pfizer, and Vertex Pharmaceuticals report their quarterly financial results.

 Boston-based public relations firm Schneider Associates has hired John Jowers, left, as account supervisor to the firm's corporate, education and nonprofit practice. Prior to joining Schneider, Jowers worked at Cone Communications in the corporate social responsibility practice.

 MassHousing has announced the appointments of five individuals to senior management positions.

Timothy Sullivan, of Brookline, was named deputy director for finance and rental programs.

Monte Stanford, of Saugus, has assumed the position of director of rental lending.

Peter Milewski, of Duxbury, was appointed director of homeownership lending.

Kevin Mello, of Norton, was named director of 
homeownership servicing and operations.

Karen Kelleher, of Arlington, was named general counsel.

 Lesley University has hired Alison Harris, former director of communications at the Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development, as the college's new director of communications. Harris will be joined in the Office of Communications by Amanda McGregor who was promoted to communications manager.

 Burlington-based Zappix has hired two key executives for its U.S. management team. Shay Artzi will serve as chief technical officer for the company, while Gal Steinberg has been appointed vice president of marketing.

 Cambridge-based Celtra Inc. has hired Deborah Szajngarten as vice president of marketing communications. Szajngarten previously served as global communications director for Vimeo.

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Galaxy’s mostly a star

Remember when there were rumors swirling that Samsung's next Galaxy smartphone would include eye tracking? And then Samsung held a big event and announced the new Galaxy S4 would identify facial expressions and scroll down automatically — and pause videos when users look away?

All this super-exciting stuff? Does. Not. Work.

Samsung made a big deal out of features that no one asked for and then botched them in the end.

It's a shame because the Samsung Galaxy S4 is an otherwise nice Android offering.

The unit I tested is from AT&T, which is selling the S4 at $199 with a two-year contract.

The 5-inch 1080p resolution screen is gorgeous.

The quad-core processor exudes power, and AT&T's LTE was a joy to use.

But compared to the HTC One and the iPhone 5, the Galaxy S4 can feel insubstantial.

The body is made of plastic, which doesn't inspire a ton of confidence.

The 13-megapixel camera gets the job done, but it still falls short of the picture quality and color saturation delivered by the iPhone 5.

Yet in every other way that counts, this and other new Android smartphones are increasingly making the iPhone look static and antiquated.

Still, anyone interested in this phone should disable those gimmicky features that don't work, which is easily done. Smart rotation is supposed to adjust to your angle of sight. But it only worked about half the time for me. The screen would either adjust in a way I didn't want or do nothing at all.

A smart pause feature is supposed to detect when you are facing away from the screen. That also worked about half the time. Videos you're watching will end up pausing randomly unless you disable this feature.

Smart scrolling was the worst of the gimmicks because for me, it just plain never worked. A few times a page I was reading would scroll downward before I was ready, but that was the closest I came to this function.

It boggles the mind that Samsung would enable features that are clearly in beta without labeling them as such.

As Apple has shown, it's not as important to be first with a feature as it is to have it work better than anyone else.

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Hub IT startup beefing up work force

A Hub-based IT startup said it will use a recent seven-figure investment to increase its sales and delivery teams while also creating tools designed to "augment" the capabilities of ServiceNow's software-as-a-service platform.

Acorio, which launched six months ago, plans to expand its employee headcount to 100 people nationally over the next 18 months, President and CEO Jim Lampert told the Herald.

ServiceNow, an enterprise IT cloud company based in San Diego, was the first technology company taken public by Morgan Stanley after Facebook.

"We're very honored to have the partnership we have with ServiceNow," said Lampert, 48, an EMC veteran. "We want to be able to apply services and, in some cases, unique technologies to make that platform even better."

Lampert added Acorio's proprietary POWERBooster tools are designed to help Fortune 2000 clients implement and integrate ServiceNow's platform faster and more efficiently into their own enterprises or connect the same platform with a human resources SaaS platform like Workday.

"One of the big challenges right now organizations have is they have a lot of disparate cloud platforms within enterprises," Lampert said. "If we can help our clients connect (ServiceNow's) platform to some of their other cloud platforms to help the overall enterprise become more efficient, more agile and more automated, there's a significant value there."

The company secured its first round of funding from Momentum Equity Partners, whose chairman, Frank Selldorff, founded the startup.

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Gov asks SBA for loans to those hit by bombing

Gov. Deval Patrick has called on the U.S. Small Business Administration to provide some relief in the form of low-interest loans for small businesses and private nonprofits affected by the Boston Marathon bombings last week.

In a letter, Patrick asked the agency to issue an Economic Injury Declaration for Suffolk County so that long-term and low-interest SBA loans would be made available to businesses and private nonprofits.

"Requesting this federal aid will help Boston and the commonwealth recover faster from the tragic events that unfolded at the marathon," Patrick said. "I urge the Small Business Administration to approve our request quickly to help the small businesses that keep our commonwealth strong rebuild."

In order to receive this federal assistance, the commonwealth must show that businesses suffered substantial economic injury.

If the agency issues the declaration, emergency officials will coordinate with the USSBA and Boston's Office of Emergency Management to have specialists available in the city to work with businesses that may be interested in the loans, Patrick said.

Businesses were gradually allowed to reopen on Boylston Street this week, several days after two bombs went off killing three people and injuring hundreds.

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