Crains New York - May 28, 2012 - (Page 6)

CRAIN’S Business Breakfast Forum: MEET Secretary Shaun Donovan U.S. Housing and Urban Development Join Crain’s New York Business for a discussion with Secretary Shaun Donovan, U.S. Housing and Urban Development. Secretary Donovan will discuss the Obama administration’s efforts to manage the foreclosure crisis, the plans to revive the housing market, and the outlook for the federal funding of New York housing programs. He will be questioned by Crain’s assistant managing editor Erik Engquist and Greg David, Crain's columnist and author of the new book Modern New York: The Life and Economics of a City. NEW YORK,NEW YORK edited by Valerie Block EVENT DETAILS: DATE: Tuesday June 5, 2012 PLACE: Sheraton New York Hotel and Towers Metropolitan West and Central Park East/West TIME: Networking Breakfast: 8:00-8:30AM Program: 8:30-9:30AM L At library, lunch is the main course REGISTER HERE: www.crainsnewyork.com/events-sdonovan Or call the Events Hotline: (212) 210-0739. COST TO ATTEND: $90 for individual ticket(s). $900 for table(s) of ten. You must be pre-registered to attend this event. No refunds permitted. SPONSORED BY: ong before the New York “power lunch,” there was the Automat, the soda fountain and the cafeteria, all of which will be on display in a new exhibit, “Lunch Hour NYC,” at the New York Public Library starting on June 22. ¶ The library’s extensive culinary collection, which includes an archive of 45,000 menus spanning more than a century of dining in the city, will be trotted out for the nine-month exhibit. Also on display will be an antique Automat the library is borrowing from a private collector and original caricatures of actors and other famous people that appeared on the walls of Sardi’s restaurant. ¶ Apparently, Esquire was the first to coin the term “power lunch” in an article in 1979, while Delmonico’s in the 1830s was the first Manhattan eatery to offer this style of high-power dining. ¶ Visitors will learn that hot-baked pretzels cost a penny in the 1920s and that the federally subsidized school-lunch program originated in the Big Apple with a 3-cent meal. ¶ The exhibit will also include a series of food-related events at libraries across the city. For example, the Food Network’s Ted Allen is giving a talk on cooking at home, and there will be a food festival at the main library on Fifth Avenue. ¶ “The Automat will be a showstopper,” said Rebecca Federman, the culinary collections librarian. People will be able to —lisa fickenscher open some of the Automats’ windows and take recipes out. More food for Web TV The Web TV foodie universe just keeps expanding. Ifood.tv, a 5year-old website that bills itself as offering the largest collection of cooking videos (around 40,000), has just rolled out seven new specialty channels. They’re in addition to the main ifood.tv channel that launched in the fall. All the channels are in a Web TV bake-off with rivals like AllRecipes.com, Recipe.TV and HealthiNation. Ifood.tv’s Simply Vegetarian, Italian Food and Feast in the Middle East, featuring Blanche Shaheen (right), can be viewed on Webconnected television sets or through set-top devices like Roku and Boxee.The company has also launched matching mobile applications, so users can see how to make flatbread pizza or vegetable rotini on their phones. CEO Alok Ranjan said ifood.tv’s approach makes it easy to find recipes by cuisine—and easy to cook with apps that provide both video and text. “We’ve tried to make things especially for foodies and serve different niches,” he said. The company is investing “hundreds of thousands” of its own dollars in the expansion, he said. Ifood.tv gets about 4 million unique visitors a month; advertisers include major brands like Kellogg’s, Kraft and BMW. Mr. Ranjan co-founded the company while a student at Columbia Business School and then moved it to Menlo Park, Calif. He’s now opening a New York office and expects to close on a space in SoHo any day. The office will be devoted to marketing and video production. “There are a lot of food shows in New York,” he said. “We want to be able to cover them.” —matthew flamm Bank wants more popularity Years ago, actor Ramon Estevez took the stage name Martin Sheen so he wouldn’t be typecast as a Latino. Now Banco Popular is trying to do much the same thing. In order to appeal to a broader audience, the Puerto Rico-based institution is changing its name to Popular Community Bank, effective June 4. Although Banco Popular opened its first U.S. branch in New York 51 years ago and has 39 here now, New York region executive Brian Doran said a name change is in order because the communities it serves are increasingly diverse. The change was first tested in Chicago two years ago, then spread to bank locations in Florida and California. Popular soon will be trumpeting its new identity with ads on TV, radio, newspapers, buses and lampposts. The rebranding strategy has shown promising results. Renamed branches saw a 14% increase in new accounts, while deposit balances among non-Hispanic customers more than doubled. Popular could use a change in its image—and fortunes. The bank has struggled in the past few years, and its stock trades for less than $2 a share. It has yet to repay the $935 million in federal bailout money it received during the financial crisis. Only one other bank, Synovus Financial Corp. in Georgia, owes the government more, according to a report from the U.S. Treasury. —aaron elstein 6 | Crain’s New York Business | May 28, 2012 nypl, division xyz http://www.crainsnewyork.com/events-sdonovan http://www.crainsnewyork.com/events-sdonovan http://www.Ifood.tv http://www.ifood.tv http://www.Ifood.tv http://www.AllRecipes.com http://www.Recipe.TV http://www.bestplacestoworknyc.com http://www.bestplacestoworknyc.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Crains New York - May 28, 2012

Crains New York - May 28, 2012
Contents
Kids’ Lines Behave Badly for Retail Industry
City’s Scarcest Resource These Days? Engineers
Taxi! Follow That Cab’s Fare Increase
Nasdaq Attack the Facebook Fallout in the Markets
Bronx Retail Strip Goes From Famously Bad to Bustling
It’s the Return of the Automat
The Insider
Real Estate Deals
Opinion
For the Record
The Week on the Web
Classifieds
Taking Urban Farming to a New Level
Anne Fisher: Manufacturing Jobs Make a Comeback
Hot Jobs
Movers & Shakers: Russian Banker Shares His u.s.plans
Gael Greene: Fighting the Crowd at Primola
The Week Ahead

Crains New York - May 28, 2012