Pbn Friday With Howard Dicus; #129

How does Hawaii work? How does Hawaii work? How does Hawaii work? It's PB and Friday with Howard Dykes. Hello. This week we talk story to the publisher of Pigeon to the Max. But first, Ukubiz coming at you wiki wiki. Pacific Business News has learned that the payroll tax will probably be cut. Democrats who blocked it last year say they will support it this year. The payroll tax about one grand per worker funds jobless benefits. There's a big surplus because so few people have been out of work lately. Winter airline capacity to the islands is down from last year but down less than one percent. Here's an example of where some of these people are coming from. As usual, these visitors are coming mainly from Los Angeles, San Francisco, Tokyo,

Phoenix, and Seattle. After them, Vegas, Chicago, and Osaka. Maccadamia orchards, the Macnut growers who sell all their nuts to one buyer, will start selling to several companies next year. They have new contracts to sell to Mac farms, island princess, and Hamakua maccadamia, about two thirds of the nuts they've been selling to Manoloa. All those Kakakokondo towers, the first one is done. Hokua on Alamona Boulevard across in the park. They started handing out the keys this week. All 247 units are sold, but then 93 percent of them were sold before the foundation was poured in 2003. In a moment, retail development and developments in biotech on PBN Friday. Major funding for PBN Friday is provided by the first insurance company of Hawaii Charitable Foundation.

With a strong commitment and the right support, we are helping Hawaii's communities realize their full potential. The first insurance company of Hawaii Charitable Foundation. And by the Merrill Group. The ultimate joy is not only a home in paradise, but a home that is itself a paradise. Such are the homes of Merrill, where every detail before, during, and after construction is carefully considered and flawlessly executed. We work with the island's leading architects to help bring your dream home to life. Merrill, where Hawaii loves to come home. PBN Friday is a joint venture of PBS Hawaii, K -H -O -N -2, and Pacific Business News. Here again, Howard Dykes.

The Wanda -Lua Center at Pearl Harbor has lots of new tenants moving in between now and summer. Seven quick service restaurants are moving in and offices for both Verizon and Singular. The Wong family is sold whenward town and country plaza to investors from California. PM Realty Group handled the deal. Matthew Bittic is a vice president with the company. Matt, what does the PM stand for? PM stands for Performance Matters. And it's a company that's based on the main line but has extensive operations here in Hawaii. Right, we're a national company, but we're privately held. One of the things I noticed about this shopping center sale is that the new investors say they want to renovate the place. And that seems to be kind of a pattern now where people who are buying office buildings or malls immediately want to invest some money in it so that they get a bigger profit later on. Exactly. Wendell Brooks in our office, he heads up our retail department. He was the broker involved with the sale. He primarily focuses on assets of that kind of quality with investors that have that exact program in mind. Now, Monroe's Collier Freeland

-Lander just put out kind of a wrap -up report on 2005 office vacancy rate. That would be really low. I was just wondering what your take on that was. I think the trend is absolutely going in that direction. Absolutely no question about it. They track the entire market. Our office predominantly focuses on the Class A and Class B market. We see the end of the year at about 9 % for those specific buildings. But the office market is absolutely tightening up and we see some great things happening in the marketplace here. I'm glad you brought up Class A and Class B. Why don't you explain that to a civilian? What are the different classes of office buildings? We have three different classes. Class A, B and C. Class A building would be a typical high -rise providing amenities such as 24 -hour security and janitorial services and such. The quality of the improvements are granites versus various different types of high

-end type of quality of improvements. Class B and Class C, it varies between the three buildings, building types. And also the rents usually are in a broad range that kind of people expect once they know what class the building is. When you see downtown Class A, Class B and Class C markets for specific office buildings, you know, rental vary in the various segments. You've been doing a lot of business on Oahu, but your opening office is on the neighbor islands. Why don't you tell me about that? Absolutely. We've opened up offices both in Kona and Maui, predominantly as a result of the expansion and the retail segment of our business. Headed up by, again, Wendell Brooks. We've expanded. We've been involved with the sale and are now involved with managing multiple projects in both the Big Island and Maui. So the demand and the outer islands for retail has just been booming and we wanted to meet that demand by providing service to our clients. Okay. Final question is another request for a prediction,

I guess, with interest rates about where they are and prices about where they are and the economy where it is. Do you expect another year of a lot of buying and selling of office buildings and retail space? Absolutely. The volume is going to stay, you know, very, very high at high level. Interest rates aren't going to change very much. The demand is going to stay high. And I think we're going to see very much the same in 2006 that we saw in 2005. Okay. Matt, thanks. Appreciate it. Thank you. Matt Bittic is with PM Realty Group. Hundreds of biotech scientists are in town this week for a conference. If you're one of them, I've been saving this next interview for you. Just before Christmas, I spoke to Victor Wong, CEO of a startup called Biosene, and UH molecular biologist Winston Sue about an exciting project. Victor, you are working with Winston on the development of a technology that can actually help to spot disease. Correct. Our company, Biosene, was formed in 2004 with

the intent of licensing technology from the University of Hawaii. And with that technology, we also sponsor research with Dr. Susan Lab, and Dr. Sue probably can explain a little more about the technology. Yeah. Why don't you start by telling us how you've developed this kind of a biological machine that go looking for bird flu or whatever disease you're hunting down? Sure. Our technologies are considered a nanotechnology because this bio machines that we're developing are actually membrane proteins. So these are synthetic proteins. They're very small. They're in the nanometer range, and the nanometer is roughly four to five thousand times smaller than the thickness of a human hair. And the idea is that we create this bio machines that we can put into liquid, just like water, and then you put a drop of this water or the solution, mix it up with a sample that you suspect may have virus or toxins or other toxic material

in it. And then they changed the color, and then from there you can tell that there's such toxins there in the sample. So in a metaphorical sense, it lights up the fact that it has discovered what it's looking for. Yes, correct. Now, how do you do something that's small? Something that's thousands of times smaller than a human hair? How can you produce that protein? Is it even a process that you can look at through a microscope while you're doing it? It's small, but we can still see it, and there are various techniques that you can use biochemical techniques that you can use to actually see it. But we don't really need to see the protein per se, or this bio machine per se, what we are looking for is this change in color, which is actually very easy to detect, and that's one of the advantages of this technology. It's very easy to use, and you don't need to use very sophisticated machines

in order to see the change in the color, and that is actually a big advantage of the technology. Okay. And Victor, when I referred to bird flu, obviously I mentioned that because there have been some indications that that might actually be a practical application of this. Right. We selected avian influenza, which is known as bird flu, as one of our initial products because of the exposure it's getting right now. But our technology and platform actually can be applied to many different biological targets, but I think this is a good way to validate the technology and allow the company to reach next milestone to raise more funding. Well, where are we on the practical side of this? For example, how many years might it be before it would be physically possible? And I'm not talking about FDA approval, but how long before it would be physically possible to manufacture on a fairly large scale, something like this? Our goal is actually to have a commercial product before the end of next year if possible. You're talking months rather than years for this? Possibly, hopefully. Wow.

Something like that. It just sounds like it would be like there would be so much trial and error, you know what I mean? It's actually not as far -fetched as most people think, because when I talk to my friends and colleagues about this nano -sensory and whatnot, the first impression is like, oh, this is like Star Trek stuff. You know, this is like, you know, many, many years away, but actually because our initial targets are diagnostic products, and actually they're quite achievable. And our first one of the first target is this birth food sensor. And we are hoping that in a time frame of a year or probably two years, we are hoping to achieve to develop this sensor, actually. This is very exciting, and very exciting that it's happening here in Hawaii. I know you're local and you're rapidly becoming local, so I'm sure you're both very happy it's happening here in the islands. Thanks for coming on the show to explain it to us. I appreciate that. Thank you so much. Victor Wong is CEO of BioZene and Winston Sue is professor

at the College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources at the University of Hawaii. Before we go on to the next regular interview, there's another topic I wanted to bring up just briefly because it's coming up this week. Come on over here, Beth. This is a Beth Bush from a job quest, and we had you on a few months ago when there was a job fair at Blazedale, and you've got another one coming up. We have one coming up next Wednesday from 10 to 3 at Blazedale Center. How many employers this time? We have 170 are signed up to date, but we think we'll hit 200 before next Wednesday. And what kind of employers, what's the mix? It runs the gamut. We have everything from healthcare, we have

security, and we're seeing a lot of retail come in. Why do you think that is? I think they're really having trouble. It's that trickle -down thing. People are getting better jobs, and now it's harder to fill those entry -level positions. Okay, now the admission for somebody who wants to go seek a job. $3 for regular job seekers, and then military students and seniors with ID are for a dollar. And don't wear slippers. Don't wear slippers. Come ready for an interview. Okay. Thanks for coming on the show, and we hope you get a lot of people. I'll have to check back with you later and see how many you did get. Thanks for having us. Beth Bush from JobQuest. This month has brought us another player in the wireless telephone market. Meet Bill Jarvis, the president of MOBI PCS Hawaii. First of all, Bill, what does MOBI stand for? What's that come from? MOBI is actually

short for MOBI. It's in many other parts of the country or many other parts of the world, actually. People reference their MOBI as MOBI. We wanted something that was short and punchy and memorable, and we started using MOBI around the office, and it's stuck. Okay, and PCS, of course, Brent also uses those letters, and they stand for personal communication services. Okay. Now, how long has the company been in existence? We've actually owned the license for several years, but we actually just started building our network about a year ago. And we launched Commercial Service on January 3rd of this year. And you're covering most of the population on Oahu so far. We cover about 80 % of the total population where they live, work, and play. And we have plans to get to 95 % of the total population covered by the middle of this year. Once involved in putting up another station in an area where maybe you've got coverage, but you want to make it a little better, it's kind of complicated, isn't it? It is an amazing amount of work. There's a permitting process, first you have to determine the right location and make sure that it will meet the coverage needs that our customers

have. From there, you go through the planning and permitting process. There's a construction process as well, and then from there, you ultimately do the ultimate fine -tuning once you've brought the site up and on the air to make sure that it's doing what we intended it to do. If you, and I'm assuming this is all true of your competitors as well, if you've got a site and the permits are all in and the site's not an unusual one for installation, how many people and how long does it take to put in a cell phone repeater tower? Well, it can take about three to six months, depending mostly on the permitting process. But once it's back in our control, we can get our construction crews on it and have a site up and on the air in about a month and a half. What if any of your plans for neighbor islands? We will be expanding out to neighbor islands. We have licenses in Kauai and the Big Island, and we're working on Maui as we speak. But we want to make sure that we get Oahu right first, and those are the customers we're serving today. So we want to make sure that we

really make sure it's working, and then we'll expand out to neighbor islands. How do you figure you'll distinguish this local company with your competitors that at this point are mostly national companies? This is an entirely different way to look at wireless. We are offering unlimited local and long distance service with no contracts and no credit checks for under $50 a month. I've been doing this for 20 years now, and it took 20 years to get to a point where I said, you know, there's really a lot better way to run this business. Customers demand more. They've been conditioned to accept two -year contracts. They've been conditioned to accept the overage charges. We're offering unlimited calling. So you can call it all you want. The biggest challenge we've had actually so far is people don't believe that we can do this. And there's a lot of skepticism. It's like, well, what's the catch? But there really is no catch. It's unlimited calling for under $50 a month. No, and that was what you started with. How many employees have you got at Moby so far? We're up to 15 employees.

And how many of those are technicians that are actually working with setting up the network and running it? It's about 40 % network -related folks, and we've got general administrative teams, and then about 25 or so salespeople located through the four retail stores that we have on the island. Okay. Well, good luck to you, and we'll have to check back with you and see how the company's doing. Thanks very much. Bill Jarvis is president of Moby, PCS, Hawaii. The mother of all local publishing successes is out with a new addition. Joining us is the publisher, Buddy Bess of Bess Press. And of course, we're talking about pigeon to the max. Correct. Thank you for having me here, Howard. Buddy, how many copies does that book

sold? The series has sold over 200 to 250 ,000. We're not quite sure, because the first year it came out, it was self -published. And they sold just in Honolulu, I think primarily on a wall, close to 100 ,000 copies. Since then, that series has been extended to include facts to the max, poo poo to the max, and Honaho, of course. And this year, we've got a 25th year anniversary collector's item, we hope. We've put together pigeon to the max and Honaho for the first time to celebrate the 25 years of the book. Nice. Now, you've got a copy of that in here, which of course I buried amongst your other publications. Yeah, here we go. You know, you put the two books together. It's pretty, pretty thick. Looks like you printed it on nice thick paper as well, so this copy will allow you to do it. Well, we did. And the first edition was Saddle Stitch. This does actually have a spine to it, but it's usually shown fraudouts. It's been very successful and continuous to sell between

five and 10 ,000 copies a year. How many titles do you have that are still in print right now? We have, that's a good question. It changes from day to day. We're printing about 20 books a year right now, and we have approximately 220 books, I think, on any given day in print. Some of those do go out of print, and some of them are reformatted into other books at times as well. Now, pigeon to the max is an unusual book. It went way beyond anything else I can think of that's been published in the islands. And then at the other end of the spectrum are books that are self -published, and they sell a few hundred or a few thousand copies and then disappear from view. But I guess there are a lot of books of Hawai 'iana that fall somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. I think Hawai 'i has one of the richest regional publishing businesses in the entire United States. If you go to any other area of the country, I don't think you'll see as much diversity. And I think it really reflects the nature of the state of Hawai 'i, the ethnicity, the environment, the culture, the food. Just about

everything one can write about or want to write about can be found here. But pigeon to the max did hit the pulse beat of local humor. And good books do either educate or entertain, I believe. And that does it both, actually. Yeah, that's very entertaining. And I'm sure a lot of the people have bought it, bought it because they didn't yet know what a lot of those words meant. And I think a lot of people still buy that and give it to newcomers who come to the state and introduce the part of the language, the pigeon language to them. Usually with a warning, don't try to speak this without assistance. Yeah, good welcome, wagon gift. Now, you came from New York? I was in New York for about 10 years in college and then in publishing for six years out of New York City, traveling internationally. And my wife actually got a job teaching here in 1976. And I joined her, came out, I just met her, actually. And I couldn't find a job.

So I played a lot of basketball and body surfed a lot. And as a result, got to hear and feel the, not just the ocean and the physical beauty that Hawaii is, but also the languages that are here. I'm always interested in languages. And pigeons sort of fascinated me, especially in the water at Sandeys or on the basketball court. One had to pick up the tone and the inferences and try to make sense of it to survive over there. So that explains why you published Pigeon to the Max. But now you've expanded into just a wide variety of different books. And these will provide a pretty good example. Why don't you just tell me what these are as I'm holding them up? Well, in 1978 there was a constitutional convention, excuse me, that mandated Hawaiian history language and culture be taught in the schools. And I had been a child of the 60s and the early 70s and seen what had happened on the mainland. And I felt that the Hawaiian Renaissance was going to happen here. And

indeed it did with the Hokulea, the passing of the Concon. So we developed Hawaiian history, language and cultural textbooks for the schools, public schools primarily. And that has since expanded down into Micronesia. Now we're publishing Pacific Island books mostly on social studies and language. That's an interesting niche to be in. Yes. But you're still doing popular stuff in addition to Pigeons of the Max. Here we have another example of that. Lietana Uchi is the Pigeon Gorilla. I don't know if you've seen or met him. He'd be a great person to have on this show. He's humorous, wonderful, very humble. And he put this dictionary together over three years with the help of the people of Hawaii. We actually had websites and people put those in. What's this one that has a CD in it? This is a new publication format that we're actually... This is our first book that we did, the story of who it's a children's book. A young girl asking her Kumo what is Hulu very simply and the Kumo explaining it to her. And we've added a CD so you can hear the chance and

the instruments of Hulu. And a couple of others that you brought very quickly? Then there were none. It was based actually on a PBS documentary. Right. And it's unusual because usually a film is made from books, but in this case we reverse the process and made a book out of a film documenting the history of the Hawaiian people. And the illustrated Hawaiian dictionary we published 15... I'm not sure, 12 or 15 years ago on a hardcover format. And the sales actually plummeted in the last year or two. And we reissued it in this inexpensive 995 paperback. We've already reprinted it once. It's been the right formula for that particular product. You outsourced the printing to the mainland in elsewhere? If it's black and white interiors, we usually go to the mainland. Although more recently we've been going to Asia for just about everything. They're quite strong on color separations and binding. And the

combination package that you saw with the book and the CD is a good example that we can keep our prices very affordable, which we have to do. It's a very competitive business. And a very interesting line of work to be in. Thanks for joining us, buddy. Thank you, Howard. Buddy Bess is the owner of Bess Press. This program repeats Sunday at 3. It's also on Oceanics News on Demand. I'm Howard Dykus. Come back next week and we'll learn more about how Hawaii works. Good night. Major funding for PBN Friday is provided by the first insurance company of Hawaii Charitable Foundation. With a strong commitment and the right support, we are helping Hawaii's communities realize their full potential. The first insurance company of Hawaii Charitable Foundation.

And by the Merrill Group, the ultimate joy is not only a home in paradise, but a home that is itself a paradise. Such are the homes of Merrill, where every detail before, during and after construction is carefully considered and flawlessly executed. We work with the island's leading architects to help bring your dream home to life. Merrill, where Hawaii loves to come home. This has been PBN Friday with Howard Dykus, a co -production of PBS Hawaii, KHOM2, and Pacific Business News. We understand how Hawaii works. The

first insurance company of Hawaii Charitable Foundation. You can