Washington State Business

For Sirti, Client Services are the core goal: helping Inland Northwest entrepreneurs develop a product, and often a company. Client Services first examines the product and the marketplace to assess the proposal’s viability. Should the assessment be positive, Sirti’s team puts its skills to work to accelerate the path to market.

Telect, which for all of its nearly 25 years in business has focused solely on serving telecom companies, now wants to take what it knows about sophisticated signal connectivity and cable management to the residential market.

Key lawmakers, including legislators involved in creating the program or selecting projects, now say the jobs fund in its current form was a mistake. Although there are good projects getting state money, they say, many of them raise questions.

The research identified 10 major double-double sectors: those that posted double-digit percentage increases over the respective periods in both categories.

Biodiesel producers like Imperium could be attractive to investors who have soured on ethanol companies, which use increasingly expensive corn and other grains to make a gasoline substitute.

Microsoft on Friday announced the biggest acquisition in company history in a bid to grab more of what Microsoft estimates is a $40 billion global digital-advertising market from arch-competitor Google.

Bryan Starbuck, a 10-year programming veteran at Microsoft, is introducing a new online service Friday called TalentSpring that allows job seekers to rank other candidates based on the quality of their resumes.

Formed from the assets of the non-profit Human Resource Institute, the i4cp already boasts more than 100 corporate clients who tap into the Web site for detailed research and analysis on workplace topics. The 64 topics — anchored by the reports from the Human Resource Institute — include offshore moves, executive compensation and employee retention.

And as the ties grow stronger, officials say, even public-school children will be making friends down under through their math and science curriculums.

"We are moving as fast as we can,"