1. technology and computing

SUNDAY
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OK, so it’s going to rain
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Danes beat Colgate
UAlbany quarterback
Will Fiacchi provides the
winning edge in the Great
Danes’ 24-17 nonleague
victory over Colgate before
4,952 fans at Bob Ford
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rEgIoN
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A $400,000 fine is levied
against a chemical plant as
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With red-light cameras on the
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on camera too?/C1
While those with certain
skills are benefiting from
the rise in high-tech jobs
here, others struggle./E1
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THE
Timesunion.com ∙ Sunday, October 26, 2014 ∙ Albany, New York ∙ $2.00 Final ∙ $2.50 in Outlying Areas
ElECtIoN 2014
Astorino aims for repeat of 2009 magic
Challenger would have to
beat Cuomo’s daunting
edge in enrollment, cash
By Matthew Hamilton
Albany
Rob Astorino is yearning for
bygone days — Nov. 3, 2009, to be
precise.
That’s the date when the Republican upended polls that had
showed him trailing by a wide
margin and beat Democratic
incumbent Andrew Spano to
take power in Westchester
County, where enrolled
Democrats outnumber Republicans 2-to-1.
Whether his victory
was the result of political magic or
old-fashioned hard work, Astorino
hopes for another come-from-behind
win five years later, this time in
2-to-1 Democratic New York state.
On the campaign trail, he repeats
the story in an attempt to woo voters
wondering if a vote cast for him will
actually matter on Nov. 4, when his
main opponent — based on polls and
campaign resources — is Democratic
Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
At a Ballston Spa farm last weekend, Astorino summed up what they
might be thinking: “‘You can’t win.
Why are you even running? You’ve
got no shot.’ Well that’s what they
said in 2009 when I chose to run for
county executive in a county of a million people, 49 percent of which are
Democrats, 24 percent Republicans.”
While Astorino has repeatedly
said he doesn’t focus on polls,
data from the last 11 months
show Cuomo heavily favored.
In a November 2013 Marist
College poll, Rensselaer County
Assemblyman Steve McLaughlin edged out Astorino in headto-head matchups with Cuomo,
earning 24 percent to Astorino’s
23 percent. In a Quinnipiac poll
from February — just before Astorino announced his run — the wide
gap between Astorino and Cuomo
was only three points tighter than
the margin separating Cuomo
and Manhattan business mogul
Donald Trump.
A Siena Research Institute
poll released last week showed
Please see govErNor A10 ▶
aStorINo
CuoMo
IN hEroIN’s grAsp
gENErAl ElECtrIC
Startup
frame
of mind
FastWorks concept to get
new technology to market
sooner adds up to more
jobs for Capital Region
By Larry rulison
Will Waldron / Times Union
Patty Farrell of Colonie stands in the bedroom in which her daughter, Laree, died of a heroin overdose at Farrell’s home in Colonie.
An enemy too powerful
A retired Albany police
officer talks of the hellish
experience of watching
her daughter lose her
fight with drug addiction
By Paul Grondahl
Colonie
When Patty Farrell discovered the
lifeless body of her 18-year-old daughter,
Laree, on that terrible spring morning,
dead of a heroin overdose in her upstairs
bedroom in the tidy bungalow they
shared, shock turned to grief and gave
way to a flood of emotions.
“I was so sad at first, and then I got
angry because I felt betrayed,” Farrell
said. “I trusted her and believed she had
stopped using and she played me. That’s
how powerful heroin is. If it killed my
daughter, who was really strong, it can
kill anyone.”
Farrell, 51, who is
SCOURGE OF divorced and raised
her daughter as a single
parent, retired in 2008
after 20 years as an Albany police officer, including a decade as a detective.
She now works for the state. Her law
enforcement career made Farrell streetwise and savvy about the drug culture
and criminal activity. It did not matter
against an insidious, deadly drug.
Malta
General Electric Co. CEO Jeff
Immelt wants more of his employees to work out of garages.
Well, not exactly. But Immelt,
who became CEO in 2000, has been
pushing GE employees to think and
act more like they are at a startup
company — the kind operated out of
a garage.
The concept — which GE calls
FastWorks — has had a big impact in
Please see gE A8 ▶
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HEROIN
Please see hEroIN A6 ▶
Courtesy Patty Farrell
Patty Farrell, left, and daughter Laree Farrell share
a smile near a family Christmas tree in a undated
photo. Laree died last year of a heroin overdose.
EXCLUSIVE: Stories with
this logo in today’s Times
Union can be found only in
the Times Union’s print edition, e-edition, and iPad app.
FROM THE COVER
a8 ∙ Sunday, OctOber 26, 2014
ge
▼ Continued from a1
the Capital Region. It has turned
GE’s Global Research Center
in Niskayuna, which employs
2,000 people, into a job-growth
engine in the high-tech and
clean-energy fields.
“In this day and age, technology has a very short shelf life,”
said Danielle Merfeld, who
leads electrical technology and
system research for GE from
the Niskayuna lab, overseeing
500 scientists and engineers
worldwide. “It’s really about getting technology to market more
quickly.”
The company has more than
300 FastWorks teams assembled to produce new ventures
and new products, and employees across the company are
being trained in the FastWorks
program.
The effort is creating new GE
businesses in the region. The
new ventures launched through
FastWorks are built on a smaller
scale than are most of GE’s
business units. That includes
GE’s massive industrial campus
in Schenectady, which employs
4,000 people and includes the
headquarters for its $25 billion
Power & Water division, as well
as its steam turbine and renewable energy units.
This may look like a “new”
GE, but David Kidder, a New
York City-based entrepreneur
who consults on the FastWorks
program, said GE is going back
to its roots, when Thomas Edison formed the company in 1892
in Schenectady.
“It’s become the new operating system for GE and how it
works,” says Kidder, who grew
up in Guilderland and is author
of “The Startup Playbook.”
Silicon Valley entrepreneur
and author Eric Ries, who specializes in teaching lean startup
principles, also works with
GE on FastWorks. He is from a
younger generation of business
minds consulted by the company to help it move in this new
direction.
“We got to this by engaging
with Eric Ries and others from
Silicon Valley who stimulated
us to think differently about
introducing technology, getting customers’ feedback fast,
learning what they tell you, and
pivoting to make your products
better and faster,” Mark Little,
the head of global research for
GE, told analysts last month.
He is a Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute graduate who
works in Niskayuna and once
ran GE’s turbine business in
Schenectady.
Little moved GE’s patent and
technology licensing team from
Princeton, N.J., to Albany last
year to help get technology from
the Niskayuna lab to market
faster.
Over the past four months,
FastWorks has spawned a GE
startup in Malta called GE
FuelCells.
GE also created another
spinoff at SUNY Polytechnic Institute in Albany that focuses on
making power electronic chips
from silicon carbide, a material
that could dramatically reduce
the size and cost of electronics
components in cars, airplanes
and renewable energy technologies such as wind turbines.
Combined, the two programs
have the potential to create hundreds of new jobs in the region,
with hundreds of millions of
dollars in investment flowing
into the state from suppliers and
future customers.
Even Steve Bolze, the
CEO of GE Power & Water in
Schenectady, has gone through
FastWorks training. And his
unit’s newest product, a highefficiency, air-cooled gas turbine, was developed using the
FastWorks process. The turbine
was brought to market in March
— two years earlier than under
GE’s old system.
The Capital Region is likely to
see more innovations and startups launched locally, especially
those developed in Niskayuna.
“Keeping it close by the
source of the technology is
absolutely the reason we have
them here,” said Merfeld, the
GE electrical technology leader.
“You should expect to see many
more here. It’s all about creating
the environment for that team.”
albany, new yOrk
∙ tIMeS unIOn
michael P. farrell / times union
Johanna Wellington, general manager of Ge fuel Cells, is shown with her startup investigation team. “in many
ways, i’m just like another startup,” she says of the unit she heads. “it’s all about speed to market.” rich romer,
left, matt Alinger, darren Hickey and ralph teichmann are on the team in malta.
That same concept also led
GE Healthcare to build a $165
million digital mammography
production facility in North
Greenbush in 2009 and a $170
million battery plant at its
Schenectady campus in 2012.
Both technologies came out of
Niskayuna.
GE Fuel Cells, on the other
hand, was launched differently, opening in just a matter of
months in space leased at Saratoga Technology + Energy Park
with just two dozen employees
working on prototypes and pilot
production.
Johanna Wellington, general manager of GE Fuel Cells,
reports to GE Ventures, the
venture capital arm that funded
the new business, and an independent board of directors.
GE Fuel Cells must hit certain
milestones to keep receiving
funding. Wellington even had
a see-through “garage door”
installed between her office and
the production floor for easy access to the manufacturing area.
“In many ways, I’m just like
any other startup,” said Wel-
lington, who previously worked
on energy technologies at the
research lab in Niskayuna. “It’s
all about speed to market.”
Dennis Brobston, president
of Saratoga Economic Development Corp., which works to
draw companies to Saratoga
County, the fastest-growing
county in the state, said GE
helps to instill more of the startup mentality into the region.
“Anything a company can do
to be more nimble is a positive.
Corporate bureaucracy can be
a process that slows decisions
and momentum,” Brobston
said. “I believe many companies
are watching others in order
to adopt techniques that prove
to be successful for growth.
Imitation is the sincerest form
of flattery.”
The startup culture’s biggest departure from traditional
corporate thinking is its tolerance for failure, says Kidder,
who runs a consulting company
called Bionic. Kidder says that
corporate executives are often
trained to limit risk and avoid
failure at all costs.
“Success is a bad educator,”
Kidder says.
Richard Frederick, the
managing director of Eastern
New York Angels, an investment
fund based in Albany that has
pumped nearly $2 million into
local startups, says he’s impressed with what GE is doing.
“It is a good approach,”
Frederick said. “Get (a product)
in the hands of customers and
iterate from there. The ‘fail
early, fail often’ approach is not
dissimilar. Software guys have
an advantage, but it can be used
effectively for manufacturing
as well.”
Capital Region businesses
need to support GE’s new approach to make the change a
complete success.
“There’s something very
cool about startups compared
to other forms of industrial
activity,” says Ries, the Silicon
Valley consultant. “And communities have to make a choice to
embrace them as well.”
▶ lrulison@timesunion.com ■
518-454-5504 ■ @larryrulison