Westchester County Business Journal + Front Page

It was the day before the stagehands’ strike shut down Broadway, and Yonkers business owner Neil Mazzella was in his element: an ornate theater in the Times Square district, where the plush seats were draped in plastic and aisles and stairways were cluttered with stage props, snaking clusters of electric cables and sound and light equipment.

With a changing Mount Vernon city government next year, plans for redevelopment of the city’s downtown are in flux.

Fairfield County’s largest bank kicked off 2007 by making a major commitment to Westchester County. A Westchester bank is closing the year by doing the same in Fairfield County.

When duty calls and the duty is dirty, who you gonna call?

Looking to strengthen its presence in Westchester County, Empire State Development Corp.has created a new position in the county and last week hired a South Salem resident to fill it.

If Las Vegas took bets on such things, David A. Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor’s, would make the odds at 3-to-2 against that a recession is in the near future.

The Ithaca-based parent company of Mahopac National Bank will pay $30.2 million to buy Sleepy Hollow Bancorp Inc. and merge the companies’ regional banks in a new $750 million community bank.

The developers seeking to build housing for people age 55 and older on the Reader’s Digest Association Inc. campus in Chappaqua are scheduled to appear before the New Castle Planning Board Nov. 20.

Financial Solutions Inc. of White Plains and Manhattan has merged with Business Resource Center Inc., a Huntington company doing business as Freelance Financial Inc., to provide accounting and financial executive outsourcing services in the region.

David Neeleman, the founder and storm-tested chairman of JetBlue Airways Corp., came to Manhattanville College last week as a guest of the college’s Center for Ethics to speak about his company’s handling of its public relations disaster in the wake of an ice storm that left the New York City-based airline’s flights grounded and its operations in chaos for a few days last February.

IBM officials in Armonk last week said the company has agreed to pay about $5 billion in cash to acquire a leading Canadian business software company.

A BAE Systems plant in Yonkers has been awarded a $28 million contract to produce radar warning receivers for use on the U.S. Air Force’s C-130 workhorse airplane.

Networking was the business of the day, when Westchester’s women entrepreneurs convened at the Women’s Enterprise Development Center’s 9th Annual Networking Roundtable.

As any scientist knows, there’s a formula for everything. For innovation, it’s a mixture of invention, insight and collaboration.