Some Friday News Briefs just in from San Francisco Business Times:
Giant Killer Robots is kaput. Reflecting escalating foreign competition and the difficulties of operating in high-rent, high-salary San Francisco, the Oscar-winning visual effects firm has closed its doors, leaving its 50 employees to find work at other studios around the region.
Tesco is cooking up a British invasion of the Bay Area grocery industry.
Europe's supermarket kingpin broke ground Dec. 13 on its first Northern California store in San Francisco's Bayview. While that store will not be open until 2009, the move into one of San Francisco's underserved neighborhoods signaled that the British retailer is serious about its goal of serving every neighborhood in California. In addition to the Bayview property, Fresh & Easy is closing in on deals in Fairfield, Pacifica, Danville, and in the Willow Glen neighborhood in San Jose.
Barclay's Global Investors is continuing to gobble up space, saying that a new, 350,000-square-foot headquarters under construction will not keep pace with its rampant expansion. In a surprise move, the San Francisco international finance firm has renewed a lease for about 120,000 square feet at its current headquarters at 45 Fremont St. It will also add about 90,000 square feet in the Orrick building at 405 Howard St. Together with the 350,000 square foot Foundry Square headquarters being built for it at 400 Howard St., BGI's downtown San Francisco footprint will grow to 560,000 square feet by April of 2008.
Charles Schwab Corp. will move jobs out of San Francisco over the next few years, seeking to reduce its office space here and boost its presence in less expensive places. The company plans to eliminate about 30 percent, or 1,400, of its "seats" in San Francisco by allowing more employees to telecommute and by moving work -- and jobs -- to less expensive areas of the country or through attrition. Those seats are filled by full- and part-time employees as well as contractors.
UCSF Medical Center has installed an advanced Leksell Gamma Knife Perfexion, adding the latest generation of gamma knife technology to its stable of high-end radiosurgery equipment. It cost UCSF nearly $3.9 million, according to a spokeswoman: The $3.2 million purchase price and about $675,000 for installation and associated software.
The outpatient radiosurgery tool from Sweden's Elekta AB zaps "a finely focused high dose of radiation to a specific area of the brain," allowing it to reach the intended tumor without damaging nearby brain tissue. It's also used to treat epilepsy, Parkinson's disease, nerve conditions and abnormal blood vessels deep inside the brain.
Other equipment used for similar procedures includes linear-accelerator and Cyberknife devices, said Dr. Michael McDermott, neurological director of UCSF's gamma knife radiosurgery program, but the gamma knife is used only for the head and neck. The medical center previously had an earlier version of the gamma knife, as well as a Cyberknife and eight linear accelerators.
The new unit "makes a big difference for us," McDermott said, in part because its design makes it easier to position patients for treatment, which takes roughly an hour versus two to three hours or more using earlier versions.
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