LOCAL BUSINESS
Alliance firms receive loans
Two tiny area startup companies have received low-interest loans from a new Alliance city fund designed to support promising technology ventures.
AMVONET, a company that makes software for online learning, and Creative Target Systems, which makes smartphone apps and other products for sport shooters, each received a $35,000 loan.
Creative Target Solutions is a one-man operation, while AMVONET has a few employees, according to Dennis Mitchell, a spokesman for the fund and manager of operations at the Technology Accelerator Alliance, a business incubator in a former bank building on West State Street. Both companies are located in the incubator.
The Alliance Startup Fund is accepting applications through Oct. 18 for its second round of loans. Companies must be in Alliance, and other rules apply. Register at www.jumpstartnetwork.org/apply.
To start the new fund, Alliance took $300,000 from its longtime revolving loan fund used for more traditional business lending, such as the purchase of real estate. Vince Marion, the city’s development director, has said the city hopes the fund will serve as a way to connect with entrepreneurial students at the University of Mount Union, as well as others in the area who have promising ideas.
JumpStart Inc., a Cleveland nonprofit that mentors and invests in startups, invested $250,000 in AMVONET last year. The company’s software has three platforms, including one that allows students to interact with teachers in real time and record sessions for later viewing. Interactions can be via audio, video or text.
— Staff writer Katie Byard
UTILITIES
Natural gas price increases
The monthly natural gas price for residential customers who have chosen Dominion’s Standard Choice Offer (SCO), or those who don’t choose their own supplier, has gone up slightly for September. Effective Thursday, the identical Standard Choice Offer and Standard Service Offer (SSO) rate is $4.17 per thousand cubic feet (mcf).
That’s 11 cents/mcf, or 2.7 percent lower than August’s price of $4.06/mcf. It’s 94 cents or 29.1 percent higher than the September 2012 price of $3.23/mcf. Under the new filing, the average SCO/SSO residential customer’s bill for the month of September 2013 would be $33.73, up $1.28 or 3.9 percent from $32.45 in September 2012. Residential customers pay the same usage-based charges to deliver gas to a residence and $22.01 monthly service fee whether they choose a supplier or stay with Dominion.
REAL ESTATE
Mortgage rates remain flat
Mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said the average interest rate on a 30-year loan was unchanged from last week at 4.57 percent, just below the two-year high of 4.58 percent reached Aug. 22. The average 15-year fixed mortgage held at 3.59 percent. The two-year high of 3.60 percent also was hit Aug. 22.
WALL STREET
Twitter plans public offering
Twitter, the short messaging service, says it has filed confidential documents for an initial public offering of stock.
But the documents are sealed, as Twitter is taking advantage of federal legislation passed last year that allows companies with less than $1 billion in revenue in its last fiscal year to avoid submitting public IPO documents.
The San Francisco company posted on its official Twitter account Thursday afternoon that it has “confidentially submitted an S-1 to the SEC for a planned IPO.”
The confidentiality probably will help Twitter avoid the public hoopla that surrounded the initial public offerings of other high-profile social networking companies, including Facebook Inc., which went public in May 2012.
Compiled from staff and wire reports