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It’s that time of year again. Certain school supplies and clothing will be exempt from Virginia sales tax Aug. 2-4 for Virginia’s Sales Tax Holiday.
Each school supply item must be $20 or less, and each article of clothing and footwear must be priced at $100 or less. For a list of qualifying items, click here.
The holiday begins at 12:01 a.m. on Friday, Aug. 2 and ends at midnight on Sunday, Aug. 4.
Accenture is expanding its military health market business. The company’s subsidiary, Accenture Federal Services (AFS), has agreed to acquire Fairfax-based ASM Research Inc., which serves U.S. defense and federal health clients.
ASM Research will become a wholly owned subsidiary of AFS. Jim Traficant, AFS managing director, will lead the new subsidiary company.
Terms of the transaction were not disclosed, and the acquisition is subject to regulatory review and other customary closing conditions.
ASM Research has three decades of experience in areas that include healthcare IT, data analytics, cloud, data warehousing and software development.
Accenture Federal Services has offices in Arlington. Accenture LLP is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company.
Virginia Beach-based Virginia Business Coalition on Health has named Neil McNulty its new president and CEO. McNulty was president and CEO of Catholic Charities of Eastern Virginia.
Prior to working for Catholic Charities, McNulty founded and led a staffing consulting business for more than 20 years.
The Virginia Business Coalition on Health is a nonprofit membership organization that unites employers to improve worksite wellness. The coalition is made up of employers and providers and currently represents 350,000 employees in Virginia.
Richmond-based Virginia Commonwealth University has developed a free website that offers up-to-date information for health care practitioners and educators in medically underserved areas.
VCU librarians organized the materials for the new website, “A Common Wealth of Public and Primary Care Information.” The information will support research, clinical practice, interdisciplinary training and continuing education.
“Now a health care provider in downtown Petersburg or rural Pulaski or on the water in Reedville on the Northern Neck has equal and easy access to important medical information,” Barbara Wright, research and education librarian and project manager with VCU Libraries said in a statement. “It's all free and reliable.”
Tompkins-McCaw Library and two of Virginia’s eight Area Health Education Center (AHEC) programs – the Capital and the Rappahannock Area Health Education Centers – collaborated on the development of the website.
An advisory committee made up of VCU public health faculty members and public health and primary care professionals provided guidance for the project.
The librarians identified relevant public health and primary care subject areas and developed research guides highlighting resources on topics such as nutrition, maternal health and children’s health. They also searched free websites to find databases, journals, books and other information that may be relevant to the communities that providers serve.
A super fiber developed by Jefferson Lab in Newport News is about to take on a public persona. BNNT LLC plans to start producing the fiber, known as Fibril Boron Nitride Nanotubes (Fibril BNNT), by next spring at a 3,500-square-foot factory in Newport News. With potential uses in spacecrafts and golf clubs, BNNT isn’t marketing the product as a one-trick pony. “It’s a unique product that has potential impact in a broad scale of product areas,” says R. Roy Whitney, the company’s president and CEO.
Fibril BNNT looks like cotton but is
strong enough to be used in
jet engines.
BNNT LLC describes its product as a “super-strong, heat-resistant, textile-like polymer with the appearance of cotton, but a molecular backbone 100 times stronger than steel.” That means application areas could include armor, jet engines or cancer therapies.
Fibril BNNT could be used, for example, to lower the weight of tennis rackets while still giving them strength and flexibility. It could also provide high-temperature ceramics that do not crack, for use in jet and rocket engines.
The material was developed at Jefferson Lab, where Whitney has served as chief information officer/chief technology officer. He now is on leave to spearhead BNNT LLC.
“They are excited and understand the potential and are supportive that we succeed, which is great,” Whitney says of Jefferson Lab. NASA Langley Research Center and the National Institute of Aerospace in Hampton collaborated on the development of Fibril BNNT. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in Arlington also supported the project.
BNNT LLC is investing up to $4 million in the venture and creating 20 jobs, Whitney says. So far, response from potential clients has been good:
“They’d like to get their hands on the material,” Whitney says, noting that currently only 10 grams of Fibril BNNT (about the weight of four pennies) exist. BNNT LLC wants to “have a commercial scale of production which will be many times that” and sell it to interested customers, Whitney says.
The company is hoping to attract customers in the nanotube materials sector, a rapidly growing industry generating more than $1 billion per year in revenue. Possible applications for nanotubes range from use in computer chips, because they can conduct electricity, to the field of medicine, where nanotubes hold the potential to help fight cancer and other diseases.
BNNT LLC says that unlike the better-known carbon nanotubes, Fibril BNNT is more heat-resistant and is easier to synthesize in a high-quality form. “It’s not just one thing for one product,” Whitney says.
to be broadly impactful.”
“Please consider the environment before printing this email.”
Does that message sound familiar? It does to Ken Bryant, marketing manager for DASCOM Americas, a computer printer company in Shenandoah Valley. Bryant makes no secret that the printing industry has plateaued, so his firm has come up with a new way to fuel growth: LED lighting. (Don’t worry, though, DASCOM Americas has no plans of bailing out on its printer products.)
“We will be focused on industrial LED lighting. Lighting for warehouses, airports, those types of things,” Bryant says of the company’s new products, dubbed Sonaray, a mix of the Spanish-word soñar (to dream) and the English word ray.
DASCOM Americas will focus
on industrial LED lighting.
DASCOM Americas is moving from Waynesboro to Augusta County to accommodate its new business plan. The company recently purchased 9.4 acres of land for its new headquarters at Mill Place Commerce Park in Verona, where it eventually hopes to assemble LED lights and grow from 10 to 30 employees. The lights are currently manufactured in China, where DASCOM America’s parent company is located.
Aside from LED lights, DASCOM Americas also is introducing healthy lifestyle devices to its offerings, like pedometers and blood pressure and blood glucose testing products. Bryant says the company anticipates rolling out the LED lighting products by year’s end, pedometers shortly after and the testing products further down the road.
The U.S. Department of Energy estimated in 2010 that rapid adoption of LED lighting in the U.S. during the next 20 years could bring energy savings of about $265 billion. Short for “light-emitting diodes,” LED lights use less than one-fourth the energy of incandescent bulbs and last 25 times longer, the agency says.
“It makes a lot of sense for businesses because there’s an upfront cost, but they can make their money back shortly on energy savings, and LED lights tend to last longer than regular lighting,” Bryant says of the benefits of selling LED lights.
At first DASCOM Americas plans to focus on customers in the Shenandoah Valley and move tactically from there, Bryant says.
“We will use some existing channel partners we have in printers but look to cultivate some other accounts directly ourselves or by partnering with other folks that we think have some strategic value,” Bryant says.
A new building at New College Institute in Martinsville will be decorated with exposed brick from the area’s old factories. “We want to pay homage to the past … but move forward to what we hope will be a thriving economic future,” says Leanna Blevins, NCI’s associate director and chief academic officer.
The 52,000-square-foot building in uptown Martinsville will be the first created for NCI, established in 2006 to make college-level courses available to students in Southern Virginia. The institution partners with colleges and universities to offer bachelor’s degrees, master’s degrees and other special programs.
The new building, set to open in May, will house the regional governor’s school, classroom space, administrative offices, a grand hall and an advanced manufacturing high-bay lab with at least $1.5 million worth of equipment.
NCI officials hope that a focus on advanced manufacturing will help drive economic development in Martinsville, which lost thousands of manufacturing jobs in the 1990s, partly due to offshoring and a changing industry. The city consistently has the state’s highest unemployment rate (14.8 percent in May).
On the third floor would sit the Martinsville and Henry County Economic Development Corp. “We believe that EDC will be able to show [business] prospects just how seamless the approach is and how serious this region is to provide a workforce that industry tells us is needed,” says William C. Wampler Jr., the institute’s executive director and a former Virginia state senator.
The total cost of the NCI building project is $18.7 million, Wampler says. According to the Martinsville Bulletin, around $17 million has been raised or pledged so far, including a $700,000 state grant.
The building is not the only new feature at NCI. The institute also plans to offer health-care workers noncredit courses in telemedicine. The program would train 250 students on using digital equipment to remotely monitor at-risk patients and reduce unnecessary hospital readmissions.
Also slated to start this fall is NCI’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation . It’s modeled after Virginia Commonwealth University’s da Vinci Center for Innovation, which advances innovation and entrepreneurship through interdisciplinary collaboration.
In the next couple of years, NCI also hopes to increase enrollment in its Academy for Engineering & Technology (AET), which prepares high school students for high-tech careers.
Roanoke College in Salem may be small — the student population is approximately 2,100 — but it’s dreaming big. This spring the private liberal arts college launched its largest campaign ever, “Roanoke Rising,” which aims to raise $200 million in time for its 175th anniversary in 2017.
About $130 million already has been raised, including a $25 million gift from the Mulheren family of New Jersey and Paint Bank. “This campaign is a great way for us to articulate our ambition as an institution,” says Roanoke College’s president, Michael Maxey.
Those ambitions include constructing the Cregger Center, a building that would be used for academics, community events and athletics. It will have a 2,500-seat-capacity gym and the Roanoke Valley’s only competitive indoor track.
Another priority is renovating and expanding the school’s science complex. The college’s current science facility was built in 1970. The new buildings are “both huge statements for us about what’s important here, and they’ll be practical benefits for providing modern education,” Maxey says.
Campaign contributions also would be used to support other facilities, academic programs, faculty and students, including scholarships to allow more people to study at Roanoke College (tuition for the 2013-14 academic year is $35,108).
Maxey, who has been president since 2007, wanted to begin the campaign several years ago, but that effort was stalled, in part, because of the economy. The college has been making progress for a long time, he says. “It’s been a steady, sustained progress, and this campaign lets us take that and stand on it and see farther than people have been able to see before.”
Roanoke College traces its roots to 1842 when it was started as the Virginia Institute, a boys prep school just outside of Staunton. The institute became Roanoke College in 1853 and was admitting women by 1930. In 2012, the college was named No. 4 on U.S. News & World Report’s list of Up and Coming National Liberal Arts Colleges.
CAS Shiver doesn’t want you to buy one of his company’s T-shirts because it’s organic. “I want you to buy it because you like it,” says Shiver, founder of Sundog Productions in Fairfax. “Once you buy it, once you like it, you come back and say ‘I want more,’ and now I’ve got you, and now you’re paying attention to what you’re buying.” The company’s eco-friendly clothing line, Imagine GreenWear, produces apparel made of 100 percent organic cotton and uses seaweed-based dyes as opposed to plastic or water-based inks.
Sundog Productions’ ecofriendly clothing line,
Imagine GreenWear, uses seaweed-based dyes.
At a time when more than 97 percent of clothing sold in the U.S. is made overseas, Sundog Productions is expanding not only in the states, but in Fairfax County, a suburb more known for being a technology hub. “The coolest thing is we make something in NoVa,” Shiver says, whose goal is to double Sundog’s workforce from 60 to 120 as need demands.
Sundog Productions recently moved to its third home in Fairfax, a renovated parking garage on Jermantown Road, since outgrowing its home at the old American Medical Laboratory building where it had been since 2005. The new 40,000-square-foot facility uses solar energy, a system that is not only environmentally friendly, Shiver says, but also good for business. “You may spend a little bit of money in implementing the technology, but over time you end up saving money,” he explains.
Because Sundog uses solar-heated water, it is able to save approximately $2,000 a month on its gas bill as well as 3.75 million British thermal units (Btu) per day. That Btu total equals 161,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions that are not released into the atmosphere. Sundog also is working on implementing a geo-thermal energy system.
Sundog Productions has grown since the 1980s, when Shiver started the company in his father’s garage in Annandale. “It was a fun way to make some money, and it turned into a real business,” Shiver says.
Shiver’s business got so big, in fact, that big-box retailers eventually came calling, causing him to open an additional factory in Guatemala from 2003 to 2010. “The only reason to start it was to not let sales that could not be produced here in the USA go to someone else,” Shiver explained in an email. The Guatemalan plant was wiped out by a flood in 2010 (the town suffered fatalities, but no one at his factory was hurt). After that, Shiver decided to focus on smaller, more frequent orders, and he didn’t reopen the plant.
Sundog Productions now creates only American-made products. Customers include Disney, Smithsonian, Harley-Davidson and bands like AC/DC and Pink Floyd.
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