TheBuzz
TheBuzz
School-friendly
businessfolk
Lanai High and Elementary School students will be eating lunch courtesy of Ford Motor Credit Co. Hawaii this month and next.Company employees and Hawaii Ford and Lincoln Mercury dealers have donated $4,000 to supplement the school's lunch program, and will subsidize meals for more than 500 children through December and January, according to school officials.
The money was donated to the school at the suggestion of the Lanai Co., according to Ford Motor Credit Branch Manager Walter Lawson.
"We go every year in July," Lawson said, "and the people there are so good to us -- we felt like giving back to show our appreciation."
Ford Motor Credit hosts an annual three-day event for all the Ford and Lincoln Mercury dealers in Hawaii and books an average of 110 people into both The Lodge at Koele and the Manele Bay Hotel, Lawson said, and they're on again for this year.
Fueling future tech biz
Selected students from public and private Hawaii high schools will get an exclusive taste of the latest in high-tech at the 24th annual Pacific Telecommunications Conference Jan. 13 to 17 at Hilton Hawaiian Village.Conference details can be found at www.ptc.org.
Executive Director Hoyt Zia hopes to "educate, expose and inspire them to focus more on technology, to go to college, study the high-tech area, engineering or whatever and come back to Hawaii to help propagate this stuff."
Exhibitors this year number 80 -- markedly fewer than the 107 at last year's conference, but PTC officials attribute the decline more to the economy than the terrorist attack.
The number of registrations is slightly behind last year.
"We probably have brought about 8,000 people to Hawaii each year during the week of the conference who live in hotels, buy up suites, entertain people and add several million dollars each year to the local tourist economy," Zia said.
By PTC design many of those who come are senior executives, "if not the top guys from the telecom industry throughout the world," he said.
While PTC has tried to promote Hawaii as a good meeting place, "more recently we're trying to highlight Hawaii as a place to expand -- not just to show up for one week a year," he said.
"We have a lot of bandwidth sitting out there," Zia said, "enough to serve the expected and hoped for needs of any company that would want to come here. We have more bandwidth than we know what to do with."
Zia concedes that there are still "first-mile issues," of accessing it.
"It's like you have a thousand-lane superhighway but we still have to build the on-ramps to it."
Erika Engle is a reporter with the Star-Bulletin.
Call 529-4302, fax 529-4750 or write to Erika Engle,
Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 500 Ala Moana Blvd., No. 7-210,
Honolulu, HI 96813. She can also be reached
at: eengle@starbulletin.com