Briefly

Itron sells software to Ford Motor

Spokane-based Itron Inc. announced it sold software to Ford Motor Co. to help the automaker cut energy costs at 42 locations in North America.

Itron’s Enterprise Energy Management software will help Ford manage electrical and natural gas consumption at its largest sites in the United States, Canada and Mexico, according to an Itron press release. That software helps energy consumers analyze and reduce energy costs and consumption.

Itron acquired the software when it acquired Anaheim-based Silicon Energy in early 2003.

Terms of the Ford contract won’t be disclosed, said Itron spokeswoman Mima Scarpelli.

The Itron release said Ford officials expect to have the Itron software installed and working by the end of the year.

Commerical project planned in Seattle

Seattle An upscale hotel and a gourmet grocery store are coming to South Lake Union, joining other businesses as part of broader plans to redevelop the area north of downtown.

Pan Pacific Hotels and Resorts, a unit of Tokyo’s Tokyu Group, will open a 160-room hotel at 2200 Westlake, a mixed-use development located on the corner of Westlake and Denny. It will be joined by Whole Foods Market, part of the popular Austin, Texas, chain of gourmet groceries.

The entire project is expected to be finished in August 2006. It’s being backed by Paul Allen’s Vulcan Inc. and the Milliken Urband Limited Partnership.,

Allen, the billionaire and Microsoft co-founder, is the largest landowner in the Seattle neighborhood. He’s spent about a quarter of a billion dollars buying land to transform the area into a high-tech hotspot that also includes housing, shops and offices.

Before his buying spree, which most recently included acquiring property from The Seattle Times Co., the area had mostly been populated with small businesses and warehouses.

Former Verizon worker indicted

Sacramento, Calif. A former Verizon Wireless employee was indicted by a federal grand jury Thursday on charges he stole more than $20 million from the company’s prepaid cellular telephone service.

Timothy Charles Mattos, 32, of Folsom, was indicted on 10 fraud and money laundering counts. A warrant has been issued for his arrest.

As a customer service representative, Mattos had access to a password-protected Verizon computer account in which the company kept a record of prepaid cell phone minutes.

Customers on the plan could buy cards on which were printed 15-digit personal identification numbers. They would then call a telephone number to activate the prepaid minutes to make a telephone call.

Mattos is alleged to have copied more than $20 million worth of the 15-digit numbers and sold them on his own between November 2002 and March. He continued accessing the Web site and copying the numbers even after he left the company in November 2003, the charges allege.

FDA clears Lilly drug in suicide case

Indianapolis The Food and Drug Administration has concluded that Eli Lilly and Co.’s newly approved antidepressant Cymbalta did not trigger the suicide of a 19-year-old woman who was taking part in a clinical trial.

An FDA investigation found that Cymbalta could not be linked to the death of Traci Johnson, who hung herself with a scarf in Lilly’s Indianapolis drug-testing clinic.

Johnson, a former Indiana Bible College student, killed herself Feb. 7 as she was participating in a study to see how high doses of the drug affected healthy volunteers.

A memo about the closing of the FDA investigation of the suicide is part of the FDA’s Cymbalta approval package, the first part of which was sent to Lilly last week, an FDA spokesman said. It gives the drugmaker permission to start selling Cymbalta.

The FDA declined to immediately release any written documents related to its investigation.

Lilly has not yet received the memo, but the company was told by the FDA that it had no further questions about the suicide, Lilly spokesman David Shaffer said.

A Philadelphia native, Johnson had stopped taking the drug and was being weaned from it when she killed herself. She took doses up to six times the recommended 60 mg daily dose for depressed patients.

Lilly later increased from four days to eight the weaning period in the drug trial.

IBM says it plans to hire nearly 19,000

Armonk, N.Y. IBM Corp. raised its estimate Thursday for the number of people it expects to hire in 2004 to 18,800, up from an earlier forecast of 15,000, citing strong growth in key business areas such as consulting, grid computing and Linux.

One-third of the positions are in the United States, spokesman Edward Barbini said.

The total does not include jobs taken on through acquisitions or services deals in which other companies outsource labor to IBM, Barbini said. He said he could not provide details on how many jobs already have been added.

After attrition and other additions are factored in, the technology bellwether expects to have a work force of more than 330,000, its highest level since 1991, when the company employed 344,000 people. By 1994, amid systematic problems at Big Blue, the work force had fallen to 219,000.

IBM, like other big companies, has come under fire for shifting programming and other white-collar jobs to lower-cost countries in Asia. Recently, the company indicated that it would send 2,000 U.S. jobs offshore this year.