People Make Business

Kellogg is hoping Pringles will satisfy its craving for a salty snack.

The food giant is best known for its lineup of sweet breakfast items, including Frosted Flakes and Eggo frozen waffles. But on Wednesday, it became the world’s second-biggest savory snack maker behind PepsiCo Inc.’s Frito-Lay with a $2.7 billion deal to buy the potato snack brand from Procter & Gamble.

The addition of Pringles bolsters Kellogg Co.’s cupboard of salty snacks such as Cheez-It and Keebler’s Club crackers. It also positions the company to expand at a time when the appetite for on-the-go foods is growing worldwide, particularly in emerging markets like China and India.

“When you have people moving to the cities and becoming urbanized, they’re less likely to eat foods they grow themselves,” said Tom Graves, an analyst for Standard & Poor’s who follows Kellogg. “There’s a bigger opportunity to sell packaged foods.”

Kellogg, which gets most of its revenue from North America, is looking for Pringles to help it expand into a global snacking company.

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Regency Window Co. confirmed Thursday that it’s out of business, and now Dorothy Harris and dozens of other customers wonder if they’ll ever see their money again.

Harris gave Regency $980 in December as a down payment on five replacement windows for her duplex in Cleveland. Her check was cashed, but the installers never showed up.

Twinsburg-based Regency abruptly stopped answering its phones after Jan. 13 and its future was unclear. A company attorney said Thursday that Regency had defaulted on more than $4 million in loans and that its assets had been seized by its secured lender, Roynat Business Capital of Charlotte, N.C.

“The bank has got to figure out what to do with those customers’ issues,” said attorney Roger Stewart. “The bank has been told that there’s customers who have paid deposits and they’re waiting for their windows to be installed.”

Consumers should contact the Ohio attorney general’s office with complaints, Stewart said.

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Investors participating in a deal to slash Greece’s massive debt would face an overall loss on their bond holdings of more than 70 percent, a person involved in with the negotiations said early Tuesday.

European leaders at a summit in Brussels said a final debt deal could be signed off in the coming days, together with a second multibillion-euro bailout package designed to save the country from a potentially disastrous bankruptcy.

Athens and representatives of investors holding Greek government bonds over the weekend came close to a final agreement designed to bring Greece’s debt down to a more manageable level. Without a restructuring, those debts would swell to around double the country’s economic output by the end of the year.

If the agreement works as planned, it will help Greece remain solvent and help Europe avoid a blow to its already weakened financial system, even though banks and other bond investors will have to accept big losses.

The person involved in the talks said Monday that the more-than 70 percent loss was the result of cutting the bonds’ face value in half, reducing the average interest rate to between 3.5 per cent and 4 percent and pushing repayment of the bonds 30 years into the future.

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When Robert Laraia’s wealth management firm, NorthStar Wealth Partners, grew too big for its Newington office space in 2008, he searched several nearby towns and cities for a new home.

Downtown Hartford was in the mix, but Laraia and his team eventually settled on space at West Hartford’s Town Center office building on South Main Street, located near Blue Back Square and West Hartford Center.

Laraia said the town’s affluent demographics and the buzz created from the vibrant retail and restaurant scene nearby made the location attractive.

“We saw a lot of upside in growing our business here,” said Laraia, who also lives in town. “It’s really the address to be.”

While many of Greater Hartford’s cities and towns continue to struggle with high office vacancy rates, West Hartford has been a bright spot in the market, largely maintaining its ability to attract and maintain tenants at a time when many employers have pulled back on office space in recent years.

The offic

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — The executive who negotiated a deal that brought the Golden Globe Awards to NBC in the mid 1990s testified Tuesday that he didn’t feel it was necessary to tell its organizers they were signing away rights to the show that could keep it on the network indefinitely.

Former dick clark productions President Francis La Maina testified he informed the then-president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association about a so-called “perpetuity clause” and he felt it was her responsibility to explain that element of the deal to the full membership. The NBC deal was brought to the group in 1993, a decade after it had been bumped from network television because of scandal.

The clause allows the production company, which is no longer owned by entertainment pioneer Dick Clark, to work on the Globes as long as it airs on NBC.

La Maina was the first witness in a trial in federal court that will decide ownership of the broadcast rights to the Globes, a glitzy awards banquet that brings out Hollywood superstars and in some years serves as a predictor of Oscar contenders.

The production company, also known as dcp, used the language of the 1993 deal to support a $150 million contract extension signed in 2010 that keeps the Globes on NBC through 2018. T

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by J. Jennings Moss Jan 15 2012 What do you find at the meeting point of business, technology, philanthropy and creativity? A day-long conference that owed its high points to the late Steve Jobs and the lessons of host Pixar Studios. For a dose of inspiration, a look into intriguing startups, and advice from top entrepreneurs, Portfolio.com takes you inside Fast Company‘s Innovation Uncensored gathering in San Francisco. And you don’t have to pay a cent. Entrepreneurs, educators, and officials converge on Washington for the Future of Entrepreneurship Education Summit to present their ideas to stimulate business creation and success. We have some highlights. A crowd gathers at Pixar Studios’ headquarters in Emeryville, California for The Intersection’s inaugural conference. Image: J. Read more…