Apex Offshore Wind, a national developer of wind-energy facilities, has selected our supporting member the SUNY Fredonia Technology Incubator in Dunkirk for a new regional office.

Apex, which has another NYS office in Poughkeepsie, has completed more than $1 billion in wind-power projects nationally, including the 20 MW Steel Winds project on the site of the former Bethlehem Steel mill in Lackawanna. The company cited the incubator's proximity to Dunkirk harbor on wind-friendly Lake Erie as a strategic advantage.

Apex will be the 10th tenant and key strategic anchor of the incubator. For more information, please see the university's news release here or attached as a pdf.

Separately, the Dunkirk Observer website covered the graduation of three non-profit and social-venture tenants incubated under the university's HUD-sponsored Dunkirk-Fredonia Partnerships and Center for Social Entrepreneurship.

The three organizations are moving across the street to the handsomely renovated and privately owned Chadwick Bay Lofts.

Under a grant from NYSEG, our member The Technology Farm (the Cornell Agriculture & Food Technology Park) has relaunched its website, recreated all its promotional material and launched a Facebook page. Much of the graphics work was done by tenant firm CMCreative Design, which joined the park during the past year.

The Technology Farm also announced the opening of a retail store where visitors may purchase some of the products made on site including squash seed oil from Stony Brook Partners; CherriBundi; and, soon, non-food products from tenants TQHP and Advanced Biological Marketing.

In the inaugural edition of its newsletter, The Technology Farm also announced its new membership in BIA/NYS.

All the partners in the 160 Varick Street incubator operated by our supporting member NYU-Poly incubator program celebrated the one-year anniversary of the space, and the imminent graduation of five startups incubated over the past year.

For coverage of the event and the graduations, please see the online Wall Street Journal and Crain's New York Business. For background on the arrangement among NYU-Poly, the City of New York, and building owner Trinity Real Estate, please see the news release issued jointly by the New York City Economic Development Corporation and NYU-Poly. A short video is embedded after the break.

The five tenants set to graduate, according to Crain's, are:

• Ecological
• Pixable
• iTB Holdings
• CB Insights
• The Hotlist

The Syracuse Community Test Kitchen, a kitchen incubator-within-an-incubator collocated with our member the South Side Innovation Center (SSIC), will double in size and add production capacity, according to recent coverage on the website of the Post-Standard newspaper.

The new equipment will allow local food entrepreneurs to make actual production runs of specialty-food products and other recipes developed at the Test Kitchen. The SSIC and the Test Kitchen operate under the umbrella of the Falcone Center for Entrepreneurship at Syracuse University's Whitman School of Management.

Array Optronix, a California-based developer of photodetector devices for medical, industrial, and homeland-security markets, will take 1,800 square feet at our member the Orange County Business Accelerator and an additional 2,600 square feet at at the Accelerator's extension site elsewhere in New York International Plaza. The Orange County Business Accelerator projects that Optronix will create 25 jobs in its first three years and up to 100 over five. The new entry brings occupancy at the main Accelerator site to 94 percent. For more information, see the Accelerator's blog posts here and here. 

The previously discussed incubator network bill has advanced another step in the state Legislature with introduction of A11616, an Assembly "same as" equivalent of S7048. The Assembly version was introduced by Assemblyman Marc Alessi (D-1st District) and has been referred to the Committee on Economic Development. We will keep the incubator community advised of its progress. 

Our supporting member the Syracuse Technology Garden has announced the graduation into nearby commercial space of Destined Studios, a web, graphics and multimedia studio. For more information see the news release here. The Tech Garden also announced it will host an office of Venture Connects, a program of SUNY Morrisville State College, offering entrepreneurs with an associate degree the chance to earn a bachelor of business in entrepreneurship in small business management. More information here. 

nfrastructure, an IT services company that works with public agencies and private companies to improve the efficiency (energy and otherwise) of their computer operations, will relocate 25 employees from its R&D, workforce education and other technology operations to 6,600 square feet in 107 Hermes Road at our supporting member the Saratoga Technology + Energy Park (STEP)®. For more information, see the NYSERDA news release.