Moving and Storage Business News

The News Review:

- … (R) Inc., Announces the Purchase of Sarasota Franchise -…
- Rackable sees red, despite sticky AMD
- Seed companies boost crops using traits of relatives

… (R) Inc., Announces the Purchase of Sarasota Franchise -…
Free with registration – Business Wire – AccessMyLibrary.com – Oct 31, 2006
– PODS[R] Enterprises, Inc. , a leading provider of mobile storage and moving solutions has announced the purchase of the Sarasota territory. Sarasota becomes the eleventh compa.

Rackable sees red, despite sticky AMD
Register – Oct 31, 2006
“The phenomenon that we are seeing in Q3 and Q4 is that there is a fair amount of stickiness (around Opteron),” Barton said. “There have been more barriers to change than we had initially anticipated. As it turns out, large customers that have already certified their Opteron-based systems are staying with the products rather than moving over to new Xeon-based kit. Back on the RackTurning to Rackable’s financials again, we find the company quite happy with its top three accounts – Yahoo!, Microsoft and Amazon. In the last quarter, though, Rackable added some new customer names such as AOL, Facebook and YouTube. The company now has 12 customers which have purchased more than $1m of gear and 57 customers that have bought more than $100,000 worth of systems… Rackable hopes to acquire between 2 and 4 new customers that account for 10 per cent or more of its total revenue, putting them on close to equal footing with the Big Three. One such customer could come from the defense industry, while two others might come from the financial services industry, Rackable said. The company managed to pull in $13m from storage sales during the third quarter, so that storage accounted for 16 per cent of total revenue. Rackable upped its fourth quarter revenue projections, saying that revenue should come in between $100m and $110m.

Seed companies boost crops using traits of relatives
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette – Pittsburgh Post Gazette – Oct 31, 2006
“The public is lukewarm on GMO products,” says George Kotch, research director of Syngenta AG’s North American vegetable seeds business. “Now we have a technology that doesn’t have an image problem. ”

Using it, Syngenta, the big Swiss biotech company that operates the Iowa laboratory, is developing drought-resistant corn, which someday could open up more of the Great Plains to the crop. ‘s Pioneer Hi-Bred unit is developing corn that resists a Midwestern bane called Anthracnose stalk rot. has developed soybeans whose oil stands up to repeated reheating, as in fast-food restaurants, without having to be hydrogenated, which creates artery-clogging trans fats… Such a change could return seed companies to competing more heavily on the vitality and productiveness of their seeds, not just the latest trick of bioengineering. “Breeding is getting better and faster,” says Monsanto Chief Executive Hugh Grant. “The competitive dynamic is moving back to what it had always been. ”

The seed companies are beginning to boast of their prowess with marker technology by touting such things as their computer power. Plenty of that is needed for the extensive calculations involved in linking a plant trait to a subtle DNA variation. Monsanto says that by next year its data-storage needs will be up 12-fold from 2003. Seed companies are starting to hire Ph.