Bracken to direct Entrepreneurship Center

By Business Report Staff

DENVER — Alexander “Sandy” Bracken, vice president of public affairs for Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp., will become the executive director of the Bard Center for Entrepreneurship Development at CU-Denver. Bracken, who served as interim president at CU before current President Elizabeth Hoffman was selected, will officially assume the position April 18.

The Bard Center is part of CU-Denver’s College of Business and offers students courses in entrepreneurship, serving more than 120 students each semester. Bracken spent 19 years with Ball and has also served as chairman of the Colorado Commission on Higher Education. Ford Office Interiors moving

BOULDER ? Ford Office Interiors Inc., a provider of office supplies, furniture and ergonomic workstations, is moving out of Boulder and into a new, larger location in Broomfield.

Stephanie Lazewski, an accountant with the company, said Ford Office Interiors plans to be out of its current location at 2887 30th St. by April 15 or May 1 at the latest. The move will allow the company to consolidate warehouses in Denver and Broomfield and offices in Boulder into one warehouse space at 2770 Industrial Lane in Broomfield.

The company currently has between 20 and 25 employees. It had sales of $3.5 million in 1999. Flagstaff Properties of Boulder is handling lease of the space, which is still available, according to Lazewski. Freshwater working with AOL

BOULDER — Freshwater Software, a 4-year-old e-business software firm, has announced an agreement with America Online Inc. to provide one of its software tools to the company.

AOL will use one of Freshwater’s monitoring software suites to monitor Web sites promoted through its interactive brands. Some of Freshwater’s tools include SiteScope, an e-business management and monitoring tool that ensures that e-commerce and other transactional processes work properly, SiteSeer, a service that watches businesses’ sites from outside the firewall and SiteReliance, an annual subscription offering Web administrators managed services for their internal or outsourced Web environments. Freshwater employs about 60 people in Boulder County.Belgian chocolate shop opens

BOULDER — Belvedere Belgian Chocolates has expanded and opened a shop in Boulder at 1634 Walnut St. The other Belvedere shops are located in Castle Rock and in Denver. Owners Johan and Han Devriese moved from Belgium in 1998 and brought with them the Belgian chocolate tradition.

The shop will offer a wide selection of chocolate produced from the couple’s Castle Rock store. The strict rules of making Belgian chocolate are followed to produce chocolate with no preservatives. The couple will run the Boulder store with the help of one employee to start. Sales Data Solutions acquired

BOULDER — After 20 months in business, Sales Data Solutions Inc., a company that sells software programs to food manufacturers and was a tenant of the Boulder Technology Incubator, has been acquired by Information Retrieval Methods Inc. of Carrolton, Texas, a food and consumer packaged goods information technology provider. The transaction was a stock purchase of all SDSI stock to IRM in exchange for IRM stock.

All three SDSI partners will remain in Colorado as employees of IRM. “This deal represents the ultimate in a true strategic business combination,´ said Dean Abrams, who was president and chief executive officer of Sales Data Solutions and is the senior vice president of sales and marketing for the merged company. “The merging of SDSI and IRM allows both companies to continue with a single vertical market and allows the combined companies to become something greater than the sum of its parts.”Community First closes nine branches

BOULDER — As part of a strategic restructuring, Community First Bankshares, a company based in Fargo, N.D. with banks in 155 communities in 12 states, has announced the closure of nine of its branches, including its Gunbarrel location, its Cherry Street location in Louisville and its Biggs-Grant Street location in Thornton. The company also is selling 13 of its banks in Arizona, Nebraska and North Dakota.

“These decisions are based on improving the allocation of our resources,´ said Mark Anderson, president and chief executive of Community First Bankshares. “This will enable us to focus more resources on the markets where the greatest potential for growth and return on investment exists for our shareholders.”

Community First Bankshares has 39 banks in Colorado, including four in Boulder and two in Louisville. The company has no plans to close any more of its branches in the future, said Dean Froslie, corporate communications coordinator for Community First Bankshares.

Employees of all closed offices will be given the option of relocating to another Community First office or receiving out-placement assistance and a severance package based on length of service.

Community First Bankshares is a financial services company with $6 billion in assets that offers various financial services, including investments, insurance, mortgage and trust and a focus on small business lending.OnStream closes doors

LONGMONT — Tape storage start-up OnStream Inc. has closed its doors, laying off approximately 64 employees at its headquarters in Longmont and almost 200 at its offices in the Netherlands.

Company officials cited market conditions as the reason for the company’s closure. OnStream was a spin-off of Philips Electronics. The company developed two lines of digital tape storage technologies for the low end of the market. Products targeted small businesses with large storage needs.

Since OnStream was founded in 1998, the company managed to secure nearly $125 million in two rounds of venture financing. It was in the process of seeking a third round when the closure was announced. IpSEAL Inc. moves to Westminster

BROOMFIELD — IpSEAL Inc., which develops software for new generation service providers, will move to Westminster in April.

The company, begun in 1999, employs about 20 people, 14 of which are in its Interlocken office. IpSEAL’s new digs measure 14,000 square feet in the Westmoor complex.

The company expects to grow its employee base by about 75 by the end of the year and is currently working on a second round of venture funding.Boulder gallery closes on mall

BOULDER — After 12 years, the Busch Gallery has closed its location at 1426 Pearl St. Ellinor Busch, who founded the gallery with her daughter, Yvette, blamed the recent economic downturn for her decision to close. Ellinor also said she wants to spend more time with family in Germany, where her children reside.

The Buschs run a toxicology lab, Trace Minerals International in Boulder, as their main occupation, and the gallery was a hobby they pursued on the side. Some of the gallery artists displayed were Arlene Hayes, Emilia Van Nest Markovich and Jim Rabby, all painters. The gallery will still do business via its Web site www.buschgallery.com.190 laid off at Sheldahl

NORTHFIELD, Minn. — Sheldahl Inc., a manufacturer of products for the automotive and electronics and data communications markets, will cut 190 of its more than 900 employees. The company has about 100 employees in Longmont. While most of the job cuts will take place at the company’s Minnesota headquarters, its other domestic and European facilities will also be affected. No specifics for Longmont were available.

Meanwhile, Kenneth Roering and John Kassakian, members of the board of directors for Sheldahl, have resigned. Roering is a professor at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. Kassakian teaches electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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