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Discretix Technologies Ltd. on Monday named Coby Sella its new chief executive.

Santa Clara-based Discretix focuses on embedded security products.

Sella was former senior vice president and general manager of Zoran Corp.'s (NASDAQ:ZRAN) Mobile division.

The company also announced that Gal Salomon, the company’s founder and outgoing CEO, has been appointed chairman of the board.

"The massive global demand for smartphones and the resulting rollout of premium content services have lead to rapid expansion of Discretix’ embedded security and content protection businesses in both Asia-Pacific and North America," the company said business card templates.

Discretix said Salomon will focus on the development of strategic opportunities including new markets, acquisitions and alliances.

Prior to joining Zoran, Sella held various positions at DSP Group, IBM and National Semiconductor.

Click here to read the press release.

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Restaurant chain Saladworks has signed a franchise deal that will introduce the company’s salads, soups, wraps and Fusion sandwiches to the Triangle.

Conshocken, Pa.-based Saladworks said in a news release Tuesday that the father-and-son team of Baldev and Unmesh Patel will develop three Saladworks restaurants in Wake County. The company did not specify when or where in the county the restaurants would open.

The Patels are moving to the Triangle from southern New Jersey, where they own and manage locations for Dunkin Donuts, Hampton Inn, Comfort Inn, and Howard Johnson’s, Saladworks spokeswoman Erin Salvadore said No teletrak payday loan. The Saladworks locations will be the Patels’ first franchise locations in North Carolina, Salvadore said.

Saladworks operates more than 100 restaurants in 11 states, and the chain currently has another 60 locations in development.

Entrepreneur Magazine named Saladworks the nation’s top salad franchise for 2009 and 2010.

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The chairman and president of Export-Import Bank, the official export credit agency of the United States, will speak in Wichita on Aug. 12.

Fred Hochberg’s visit is partly the result of a recent Brookings Institute report that ranked Wichita as the top community in the United States in export growth.

Hochberg will talk about the importance of competing in a global marketplace. He also will discuss export financing and its role in helping businesses create jobs.

Hochberg will speak at a noon luncheon at the Hyatt Regency. Tickets are $40 and can be purchased online at the Kansas World Trade Center Web site at kansaswtc.org.

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SurModics Pharmaceuticals, a Birmingham subsidiary of SurModics Inc., has agreed to license a biodegradable polymer implant technology being developed to treat sun-induced skin disorders to an Australian pharmaceutical firm.

SurModics licensed the SCENESSE implant formula to Australian-based Clinuvel Pharmaceuticals. The two companies have collaborated on developing the formula that is a prophylactic treatment for a range of UV and light-related skin disorders for several years.

“We are very pleased to announce the execution of this important license agreement with Clinuvel,” said Phil Ankeny, interim CEO of SurModics. “This announcement demonstrates the value of our sustained drug delivery technologies and reinforces how we partner with our customers to develop and bring to market compelling products that leverage our core technologies cash advance loans.”

Drugs released from the prophylactic causes melanin production in the skin to protect from ultraviolet rays. Estimates from the Royal Bank of Scotland projects the treatment could impact as many as 7 million people worldwide, according to a release from SurModics.

“Today’s announcement represents a natural progression of our relationship with Clinuvel,” said Arthur J. Tipton, senior vice president and chief scientific officer of SurModics. “Together, our teams have solved numerous scientific and technical issues over the years culminating in the signing of this licensing agreement. Clinuvel’s product provides a novel way to treat serious skin disorders.”

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Pinnacle Partners LLC of Quincy, Mass., filed Friday to liquidate under Chapter 7 of the U.S. bankruptcy code.

The company listed assets of less than $50,000 and liabilities in the range of $1 million to $10 million.

The major creditor with a secured claim — a pair of mortgages totaling $600,000 — is South Shore Savings Bank.

A major unsecured creditor is Pinncon LLC of Braintree, listed as holding a claim valued at $103,000.

Pinnacle is represented in the bankruptcy by David B. Madoff of Madoff and Khoury in Foxborough.

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Initial claims for unemployment insurance climbed last week, the government reported on Thursday.

The Labor Department’s report showed that jobless claims jumped 12,000 in the week ended June 12, compared to the prior week’s revised total of 460,000 claims.

Economists were expected initial jobless claims of 450,000 for the week ended June 12, according to Briefing.com consensus.

The report took the wind out of gains in the U.S. futures market.

The report was released one day after Senate Democrats revised a jobs bill, scaling back unemployment benefits and Medicare physician reimbursement measures. This revision would eliminate a $25 weekly supplement for the jobless that had been part of last year’s stimulus act.

The cut will reduce the bill’s cost by $5.8 billion over the next decade. 

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From the first day he launched his online skateboard store in 2002, Mike Duncan faced a problem that has plagued retailers since the dawn of online shopping: abandoned shopping carts.

That’s the term for customers loading merchandise into a virtual cart, then leaving the website without paying for anything. These customers aren’t stealing, but they drive merchants crazy. To them, every abandoned cart is a sale they failed to close.

"If you can get just a small fraction of customers to decide to make the purchase instead of leave, you’re talking about a business adding potentially thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in sales," says Duncan, who owns gear and apparel shop Warehouse Skateboards in Wilmington, N.C.

Last year, Duncan began using LivePerson.com to tackle his abandoned-cart problem. LivePerson (LPSN) specializes in connecting subject-matter experts with online consumers, and draws most of its revenue from selling its services to online retailers. Merchants like Duncan can rent LivePerson’s software to connect their own customer-service staffers with potential buyers.

For browsers poking through a website, LivePerson’s instant messages — the equivalent of a salesperson approaching in a store and asking, "May I help you?" — can be unsettling. But customers can click a button to dismiss the LivePerson agent and ignore the chat feature.

"We may get two out of 10 customers who dismiss us," Duncan says. From the eight customers who don’t, Duncan gets a wealth of information about his site–and the potential to close sales that might otherwise slip away.

"Customers will ask us, ‘Why can’t I see my shipping rate?’ Well, it’s because at that particular moment of shopping, we hadn’t collected their address yet, but it’s good for us to know they’re wondering that," he says. "Once we started using LivePerson.com, we’ve changed how our menus look, the content, the layout — it’s like we’ve been beta testing every day."

The service helps move more merchandise: "If you go into a store to buy a skateboard, the salesperson is going to say, ‘You need a helmet and some knee pads, right?’ We can upsell our average order value to the tune of $15 and $20," Duncan says. He’s also noticed a decrease in returns, because agents can guide customers — like parents holiday shopping for their kids — who don’t know the nuances of the latest skateboarding gear.

Duncan pays $99 a month for one LivePerson license, which shifts between two Warehouse Skateboard employees who staff the chat line from nine hours a day, Monday through Friday. During the holiday season, he ramps up to four licenses and expands the chat hours to 8 a.m. midnight, seven days a week. The staffers juggle their chat duties with their other customer interactions, using e-mail, fax, and the telephone to communicate

Duncan estimates that he’s been able to convert 1% of his abandoned shopping carts into sales. Sounds small, but for a company generates millions each year in sales (Warehouse Skateboards is privately held, and Duncan won’t divulge its revenue), small percentages add up fast. "It’s been very effective for us," Duncan says of the investment.

Francisco Bustos’, owner of two flower-delivery websites, took a different approach to the abandoned-cart problem. Using performance-monitoring technology from Gomez, he focused on shavings seconds off his sites’ page-load times.

Those seconds quickly add up to dollars: "You can just imagine for Mother’s Day, it’s very important. We can’t allow even two or three hours for the website to be slow or not working," says Bustos, who runs global retailers DaFlores.com and RosesnBoxes from Miami. The business has 10 employees and annual revenue of $3 million.

Gomez helps Bustos zoom in on problem spots. Customers from Australia were abandoning DaFlores in droves. After analyzing the traffic with Gomez, Bustos made back-end changes to speed up local load times. "We’re getting 25% more orders from Australia than we used to," he says.

Gomez prices its service based on consumption, with the bill varying depending on how extensively a customer wants to deploy its testing tools. The rates start at around $4,400 per year.

Bustos says it’s worth the hundreds of dollars each month he pays. The value really hit home one sleepless night at 3 A.M., when Bustos — awake thanks to his newborn son — glanced at his Web stats. To his astonishment, he saw orders piling up, unprocessed. A component had broken in his site’s shopping-cat software. Before Gomez, he only would have noticed something amiss after hours of inaction. But now, he was able to alert his IT expert and get the problem solved just before dawn — a critical advantage, since morning is a florist’s busiest time of day for processing orders.

Duncan puts the plight of the abandoned online shopping cart this way: "It costs a lot of money for a business to drive people to your website. If they leave without buying something, you’ve lost not just a sale but quite possibly a repeat customer." 

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Investors are having a hard time getting a handle on the stock market lately. And many are getting worried.

The whipsaw returns are producing flashbacks to late 2008, when triple-digit swings in the Dow Jones industrial average were the norm.

Wall Street’s worry list is long: the European debt crisis, huge U.S. government deficits, saber-rattling between North and South Korea, and the shakiness of the economic recovery.

With so much unsettled, the urge to go on the defensive is understandable.

"We’ve had a big recovery," says Matt Berler, co-manager of the Osterweis Fund (OSTFX), which has a reputation as a haven in a falling market. "Now that it’s behind us, we could see markets gyrate, and really end up going nowhere."

If that’s not for you, your options aren’t limited to shifting more heavily into bonds or cash. You can stick with stocks, but take a more cautious approach.

A select group of mutual fund managers have shown they’re masters of defense, capable of picking the stocks most likely to emerge unscathed when trouble strikes. They can cushion the blow further by selling some of their riskier picks and shifting heavily into cash.

Below are seven funds with top records during two especially steep recent declines in the Dow Jones industrial average: Jan. 14, 2000, to Oct. 9 2002, when the dot-com bubble burst, and Oct. 9, 2007, to March 9, 2009, when subprime mortgage troubles spread throughout the financial system.

The seven, screened by Morningstar, are diversified stock funds that finished in the top 3 percent among their peers during both downturns.

But these funds are about more than just defense. They’ve held up in rising markets as well. All have 10-year records placing them in the top 10 percent among their peers.

The seven, in alphabetical order:

— American Century Equity Income (TWEIX) has one of strongest records among large value funds over the past 15 years, with low volatility no fax payday advances. Lately, the fund has bet heavily on utilities stocks, typically good defensive plays in times of trouble.

— Calamos Growth & Income (CVTRX) supplements its stock holdings with convertibles, stock-bond hybrids giving the holder the option to swap from a bond to a stock at a predetermined price. It’s a way to get more potential upside than with regular bonds, along with a steady income stream and reduced volatility.

— Forester Value (FVALX) was the lone U.S. stock fund to finish 2008 with a gain, up 0.4 percent, while nearly every other fund suffered a double-digit loss. Forester Value trailed 79 percent of its peers last year as the same defensive characteristics, that protected it in 2008, held it back when the market turned around.

— Parnassus Equity Income (PRBLX) emphasizes mature dividend-paying stocks that can ride out downturns. The strategy has landed the fund in the top 1 percent among its peers over the past 3- and 5-year periods.

— Royce Special Equity (RYSEX) buys stocks of small companies with clean balance sheets and steady cash flow, and rarely trades them. It’s helped the fund post an average 11.5 percent return per year over the last 10 years.

— Sequoia Fund (SEQUX), which typically holds just 10 to 25 favored stocks, and sticks with them for years. Its latest top holding, at 20 percent of the portfolio, is Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett’s investment company.

— Yacktman Focused (YAFFX) focuses on large-company stocks. Its performance ranks in the top 1 percent of its peers over the last 3, 5- and 10-year periods. Lately, it has found safety in beverage stocks that aren’t buffeted by economic cycles.

If the recent slide extends into a bear market — defined as a drop of 20 percent or more — these funds should serve investors well.

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The Food and Drug Administration is looking into reports of at least 775 serious side effects from drugs recalled by McNeil, a division of Johnson & Johnson, according to a source close to a Congressional investigation.

Included in the reports were 30 deaths, nearly all of which were found to not be tied to McNeil’s recall of Tylenol, Motrin and Benadryl drugs from Jan. 1, 2008 through April 30, 2010, according to another source close to the investigation.

The FDA is also investigating reports of several hundred serious side effects — or "adverse events" — and seven deaths since May 1, when McNeil recalled 50 children’s versions of these non-prescription medicines because of serious quality and safety concerns.

The FDA’s investigation into the recalls is ongoing and the agency would not comment on the matter.

Adverse event reports are consumer complaints of a serious side effect associated with the use of a medical product, according to the FDA. Adverse events could include death, hospitalization, disability and other health complications.

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has scheduled a hearing on May 27 to examine the recall.

Following the most recent recall, Johnson & Johnson (JNJ, Fortune 500) has suspended production at McNeil’s facility in Fort Washington, Penn., that manufactured the children’s drugs.

McNeil’s latest recall is its fourth in the past seven months:

• In November 2009, five lots of Tylenol Arthritis Pain 100 count with the EZ-open cap were recalled for unusual odor leading to nausea, stomach pain, vomiting and diarrhea.
• In December, the recall was expanded to include all product lots of Tylenol Arthritis Pain caplet 100 count bottles with the red EZ-open cap.
• In January 2010, the recall was widened to an undisclosed number of Tylenol, Motrin and other over-the-counter drugs after complaints of consumers feeling sick from an odor.

McNeil has maintained that its recall of the children’s drugs was not "undertaken on the basis of adverse medical events" but as a precautionary measure.

"We track all adverse events and thoroughly investigate all serious adverse cases that are reported and, in turn, report these to the FDA, whether or not the event may be caused by our products," McNeil said in a statement Tuesday.

The FDA, which earlier this month issued a scathing 17-page inspection report listing 20 violations at the Fort Washington plant, also maintains that the recalled drugs pose a "remote" potential for serious health problems.

The House panel invited Johnson & Johnson Chief Executive William Weldon to testify but he declined to be present due to health reasons. The Committee said Colleen Goggins, worldwide chairman of Johnson & Johnson’s consumer group will testify at the hearings.

The FDA said Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, principal deputy Commissioner, Deborah Autor, Director of the office of compliance and Michael Chappell, acting commissioner for regulatory affairs, will testify on behalf of the agency. 

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Comstock Saloon opens today at the junction of North Beach and the Financial District.

The men behind the bar at Hayes Valley's Absinthe, Jeff Hollinger and Jonny Ragin, have teamed with Absinthe owner Bill Russell-Shapiro to open a contemporary take on an old-time saloon. Comstock will have a full menu of classic cocktails, and the bartenders will custom craft drinks to individual tastes.

The bar, at Columbus and Pacific avenues, occupies a building that has been a bar since 1907. That heritage inspired the space's design, which includes many decorative pieces from the last century.

A front "saloon" room contains a 20-foot long bar, five wooden booths and some small tables and chairs.

The adjacent main dining room has banquettes and tables; Carlo Espinas, late of Camino in Oakland, is the chef.

In addition to Comstock Saloon, Russell-Shapiro is also working on plans to expand into the former Citizen Cake location in Hayes Valley.

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