PlanPhilly: Planning Philadelphia's Future

Fisker Automotive Inc., which this week said it was laying off 26 workers at a former General Motors plant in Wilmington that was being readied for the manufacture of hybrid cars, said Thursday that it was unclear when production would begin there, given protracted talks over financing with the U.S. Department of Energy.

I'M NOT a perfect Catholic. When Mrs. Paul had a monopoly on meatless Fridays, I sometimes managed to get my hands on a burger. Once, at confession, I lied about a sin, which must amount to purgatorial perjury. I've missed Mass, sassed the sisters behind

A 7-inch iPad is an idea that has been floated on the rumor mill and by analysts before, but the prediction was made once more by Ezra Gottheil of Technology Business Research. The analyst told Computerworld that he expects Apple won't introduce a Kindle Fire-sized iPad at the March event when it is expected to introduce the iPad 3. But Gottheil says it could come later this year. Amazon.com is the only company to successfully produce a 7-inch tablet device, the Kindle Fire, and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was pretty adamant that the approximately 10-inch size for the iPad is the ideal.

This winter has been a shifty one. One day is fair, the next, well, not particularly wintry. If the weather trends continue, spring cleanup this year should be a snap. No storm damage to worry about, for one thing; no ice dams on the roof, no clogged gutters, no overtaxed furnaces trying to keep up.

The value of Facebook's private shares have jumped by 10 percent since it filed for an initial public offering last week, giving it an estimated valuation of more than $100 billion. That market valuation is higher than a number of more established Silicon Valley technology giants, such as Hewlett-Packard, which has a market cap of about $58 billion. But Menlo Park-based Facebook is far behind the Valley tech company that is most valuable public company in the world, Apple. The iPad and iPhone maker's market cap has actually increased by about $100 billion, or the equivalent of one Facebook valuation, since co-founder Steve Jobs died in October...

When Barnes & Noble began its hunt last year for 100,000-square-foot-plus space to house its Nook development division, it was slim pickings in Palo Alto, writes Mary Ann Azevedo on Silicon Valley Structures blog. (While hardly a startup in the traditional sense, the company only recently entered the e-reader/tablet marketplace with its Nook products thus making it a startup of sorts in that space). In the end, the bookseller and e-reader/tablet maker ended up signing a lease for a nearly 208,000-square-foot building on Hillview in Stanford Research Park, where VMware used to be, as I reported in this week's Business Journal...

In Silicon Valley, the club of $1 CEOs is small, but it includes many household names: Hewlett-Packard's Meg Whitman, Oracle's Larry Ellison, and the Google guys, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt, writes Eli Segall on Silicon Valley BizBlog. Add one more to the list. At his request, Facebook’s 27-year-old CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, will take a $1 base salary starting Jan. 1 of next year. This week’s Business Journal looks at the $1 CEOs, and why there's no reason to start a charity fund anytime soon for them.

Chinese tech giant Huawei grew by being a "fast follower," John Roese, general manager of the company's North American R&D division, told me when I visited its Santa Clara campus recently, writes Diana Samuels on Silicon Valley BizBlog. The company, best known for making telecom equipment, looked at what its competitors were doing and followed them producing product at a lower cost. As I wrote in this week's Business Journal, Huawei has significantly ramped up its presence in Santa Clara over the last couple of years.

There was no official word about why trading of Alibaba Group Holding's Hong Kong listed unit's stock trading was halted on the Hong Kong exchange Thursday, but it's believed that it will soon announce a deal with Yahoo. Reuters cited unnamed sources who said the Chinese Internet giant run by Jack Ma plans to take its Hong Kong-listed unit, Alibaba.com, private. The news service said that a deal hasn't been finalized yet with Yahoo but the plan is to use borrowed money and internal cash as well as an asset swap to buy back most of a 40 percent stake that Yahoo owns in Alibaba Group.

The business: Local Food Systems creates B2B networks that connect local food warehouses, distributors and processors with high-volume buyers such as supermarkets, food services and large grocery chains. By automating and streamlining supplier business processes, this enables local food businesses suppliers to scale up to large buyers. Local Food Systems has built this supplier automation on technology from SAP AG. How it makes money: Local Food Systems charges the suppliers an installation fee for the process automation, and also gets a percentage of every transaction that the B2B network facilitates.

The Business Journal this week published a list of Silicon Valley electrical contractors, ranked by the total number of electricians based in the region. Information was obtained from company representatives. Here is a sneak peek of the top five. In order for a company to be considered for the list, the total number of electricians in the valley must be provided. The top five electrical contractors reportedly have over 2,000 electricians employed in the valley. The top five have over 4,500 electricians employed companywide...

A South Bay attorney has been sentenced to seven years in prison after he was convicted of defrauding investors of $1.1 million. David B. Prince ran an investment scheme from mid-2005 to early 2007 and defrauded more than 30 victims, prosecutors say. He was arrested in 2010 and, following a three-week trial, a federal jury convicted him last October of five counts of wire fraud. U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer sentenced Prince on Wednesday, citing Prince's status as a lawyer and the "extremely vulnerable nature" of his victims, according to the office of Melinda Haag, U...

Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk unveiled his electric car company's third vehicle Thursday night —a sport-utility vehicle with "gull-wing" doors that he plans to start selling next year. The vehicle is the second that Tesla plans to assemble at the Fremont factory where Toyota and GM used to make cars. Orders are being taken but pricing and driving range figures were not provided. The SUVs qualify for a $7,500 federal tax credit that is aimed at encouraging electric vehicle sales.

Imagine you're in charge of an old postindustrial city with little open land and a perennially anemic economy. Then a vast district you never knew existed is discovered. It's like a scene from an experimental Czech novel: Pass through a secret door and there's a ghost street grid, handsome buildings from a grand era just out of reach, empty warehouses as big as tankers, and ships as grand as castles. Most of all, a broad waterfront, as close to the sea as your city is likely to get.

So, Roland Martin's suspension has some black folks up in arms. Looks like CNN's indefinite canning of its ascot-wearing, progressive pundit has many of his supporters indignant. Some of them have even begun an online petition drive to get him back on the network sooner.

The closing of two oil refineries could become a financial disaster for Marcus Hook and Trainer, and Delaware County officials said Thursday that they were trying to make sure it didn't also become an environmental one.

Left for dead, a severely injured pit bull found in Chester County on Monday has undergone a dramatic recovery and provided inspiration to animal-control officers.

HARRISBURG - During his 2010 gubernatorial campaign, Tom Corbett made the funding of an Arlen Specter library in Philadelphia the punch line of a campaign ad about wasteful government spending.

One suspected drug dealer kept a four-foot alligator chained in his basement and two gigantic Burmese pythons in the dining room. He also had seven bundles of crack cocaine in a fish tank in the living room.

Tesla Motors Inc. CEO Elon Musk unveiled his electric car company's third vehicle Thursday night —a sport-utility vehicle with "gull-wing" doors that he plans to start selling next year. The vehicle is the second that Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) plans to assemble at the Fremont factory where Toyota and GM used to make cars. Orders are being taken but pricing and driving range figures were not provided. The SUVs qualify for a $7,500 federal tax credit that is aimed at encouraging electric vehicle sales...