Delta CEO calls for open skies in Japan

TOKYO — The CEO of Delta Air Lines is urging the Japanese government to open the skies to greater competition from foreign airlines.

Richard Anderson says protection of domestic carriers is holding back foreign airlines such as Delta.

He told reporters Wednesday he wants to move Delta's Tokyo base to Haneda Airport, but the government is creating obstacles.

Anderson says Delta moved its Tokyo hub to Narita International Airport in 1976 at the government's request. Now Delta wants to be based in Haneda again because it is closer to central Tokyo and draws more business.

Anderson says Delta needs 25 additional plane slots to move back.

Haneda will soon add daytime slots for long distance flights, but Anderson says it is unlikely Delta will get all the slots it wants.

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FAA puts more restrictions on foreign jets at SFO

SAN FRANCISCO — U.S. aviation officials are no longer allowing foreign airlines to land alongside another plane when touching down at San Francisco International Airport.

The Federal Aviation Administration said Tuesday it implemented the change Sunday to minimize distractions during a critical phase of flight.

The change comes in the aftermath of the Asiana Airlines crash, and on same day the FAA started advising foreign airlines to use a GPS system instead of visual reckonings when landing at SFO.

In the past, two planes could approach SFO side by side if the weather is clear. Domestic carriers can do that, but air traffic controllers are now staggering the arrivals of foreign carriers.

FAA spokesman Ian Gregor said the agency hasn't seen any significant delays as a result of the change.

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New growth proposed for site in Forest Hills

Developers of a proposed 280-unit apartment complex near the Forest Hills MBTA station in Jamaica Plain will put their plans to the public at a community meeting next month.

Forest Hills Arborway, LLC has filed plans to build The Commons at Forest Hills Station, featuring four apartment buildings and approximately 8,000 square feet of "commercial/retail/amenity space."

The Washington Street site near Roslindale was formerly a petroleum product distribution depot.

The meeting is slated for Aug. 21 at 6:30 p.m. at Curtis Hall in Jamaica Plain.

Forest Hills Arborway, which consists of John M. Corcoran & Co. and The Brennan Group, formally filed the plans with the Boston Redevelopment Authority last week.

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Time Warner Cable drops CBS in 3 major cities

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Time Warner Cable has quickly stopped plans to remove CBS from its lineup in three major markets after initially announcing it would drop the network following a fee dispute.

Not long after Time Warner released a statement late Monday saying customers would lose the network at 12 a.m. EDT, it said it halted its plans at the broadcaster's request. The cable company did not immediately provide further details.

About 3 million customers in New York, Los Angeles and Dallas could potentially be affected by the spat, which centers mainly on how much Time Warner Cable pays for the right to retransmit signals from the CBS-owned stations.

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Chinese tech firm dreaming big

If a state-owned Chinese company called Hisense has its way, American retailers will soon sell as many Hisense refrigerators as they do Whirlpool and Kenmore, and as many Hisense Smart TVs as Sony or Samsung.

Aggressive, bizarre and brilliant, Hisense is the biggest consumer electronics company in China, owned by the government but with publicly traded shares. Now, it's making a big push to hire Boston area students as part of a bid to become the No. 3 tech company in the world by 2015.

Suffering from an overseas talent gap, the company held a recruitment drive at Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday. It treated a capacity crowd of area students — most, if not all, of Asian descent — to a dinner of quintessential college grub Chipotle, neon green Hisense shirts and on-the-spot interviews conducted by top managers including the company's president, Shumin Yu.

Unlike so many slick suits at top tech firms, Yu and the rest of her management team lacked all pretense and ego. They were dressed casually enough for a Sunday hangover brunch. Their PowerPoint presentations made heavy use of the Comic Sans font and clip-art from the 1990s.

"A lot of things very stupid (sic) about Smart TV," said Wei Ping Huang, the company's chief scientist and an MIT alum, before unveiling his company's superior product. "Interface … terrible."

Don't let the inelegance of the pitch fool you. Hisense TVs are the real deal. An intuitive, simple interface is the hallmark of the new Hisense "Vidaa" television line. Hisense has pioneered technology that conceals a good amount of TV guts in the power cord, of all things. And then there's this prototype: a little box that projects your smart TV on an in-home movie screen.

Indecision is not in the Hisense vocabulary. With its $13 billion in revenue last year, Hisense is rapidly expanding and acquiring companies. They interview and hire on-the-spot at these North American recruitment drives.

I got my own taste of the Hisense hard-sell when Yu — named one of the 50 most powerful women in business by Fortune Magazine — offered to fly me out to China for a tour of Hisense headquarters. I chuckled at what I regarded as polite small talk.

"No, they're serious," a public relations consultant interrupted, as if I should break out my calendar and book a flight right there.

Then there's the company's deference to Apple, which borders on parody. A display table at the MIT event featured Hisense tablets that appeared, at first glance, to be carbon copies of the iPad Mini and the iPad. And at one point during his presentation, Huang showed a picture of various set-top boxes and gaming consoles including Xbox and PlayStation. "Obviously Apple TV is the most famous of these," he said of the failed product, without a hint of jest.

I got the feeling Hisense doesn't mind being underestimated. It would be so easy for the U.S. consumer electronics industry to laugh off this company. But that, in my opinion, would be a big mistake.

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The Ticker

Treasury secretary: Avoid 'false crises'
With Congress and President Obama possibly heading to another showdown over raising the nation's debt ceiling, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew yesterday pleaded for lawmakers to "take away any cloud of uncertainty about the ability of the United States to pay its bills."
"It's not OK to default," Lew said on ABC's "This Week."
"I would certainly hope that Congress isn't looking to create confrontations and false crises because we did see, in 2011, how bad that is for the American economy," he said, referring to the partisan standoff, resolved at the last minute, that led Standard & Poor's to downgrade the nation's credit rating for the first time, from AAA to AA+.

Today
 National Association of Realtors releases pending home sales index for June.
 

TOMORROW
 Standard & Poor's releases S&P
 Case-Shiller index of home prices for May.
 The Conference Board releases the Consumer Confidence Index for July.
 Federal Reserve policymakers begin a two-day meeting to set interest rates.

WEDNESDAY
 Commerce Department releases second-quarter gross domestic product.
 Labor Department releases the second-quarter employment cost index.
 Federal Reserve policymakers meet to set interest rates.

THURSDAY
 Institute for Supply Management releases its manufacturing index for July.
 Commerce Department releases construction spending for June.
 Automakers release vehicle sales for July.

FRIDAY
 Labor Department releases employment data for July.

 Commerce Department releases personal income and spending for June.
 Commerce Department releases factory orders for June.

 Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick has appointed Nixon Peabody government investigations and white-collar defense partner J. William Codinha to serve as a commissioner on the Judicial Nominating Commission.

 Bluetrain Mobile has named Mary Monat as its vice president of sales. In this role, Monat will be responsible for building and leading a high-performance sales team to drive revenue growth, gain market share and develop strong customer relationships.

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Translating the tech

When Joe Morone, Jon Warman and Diana Brazzell were dorm mates at Brown University, they shared a vision of the importance of higher education and academic research, but they also knew that research, detailed in academic journals, could often be long, dense and inaccessible to the general public.

So in the fall of 2011, years after their graduation, they founded Footnote, a startup that collaborates with scholars to translate the most technical language into layman's terms — a CliffsNotes, if you will, for academic journals.

"Every year, 1.6 million articles are published in academic journals, but once the research is published, very few people end up seeing it because it's written for an audience of peers," Morone said.

"Our goal is to be a conduit between academic research and intellectually curious readers, policymakers, entrepreneurs and educators."

To do that, Footnote's editorial team works with researchers from Harvard, MIT, Yale and some of the nation's other top universities to craft articles based on those found in academic journals.

Subjects range broadly, from what happens to children when a parent goes to prison, to whether government should intervene to make people healthier.

"We look for issues we think are important and that can be impacted by the latest research," said Morone, whose company was named one of 128 MassChallenge finalists earlier this year.

"The challenge is how do we make better use of this information? We want to deliver brilliant research and expertise on issues that matter in a way that people can use."

Jesse Lyons, a postdoctoral researcher in systems biology at MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital, has written Footnote articles on multiple subjects, including how light affects the brain, whether stem cells offer a cure for deafness, and whether a drug that decreases sperm count in mice could lead to a birth control pill for men.

"The goal is to make specialized academic research accessible and engaging without losing the complexity," Lyons explained.

"We want to make it understandable without dumbing it down."

Footnote is partnering with the College and University Research Collaborative in Providence, where top policymakers in Rhode Island have gone with questions about economic development.

The collaborative takes their questions to researchers, whose answers Footnote then translates.

"It's absolutely so important to the work we're doing," said Amber Gilfert, the collaborative's program director.

"We see Footnote providing that key piece, taking research and putting it into a format that our policy leaders and community can easily understand," Gilfert said.

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Student entrepreneurs venture into business

Fresh-roasted coffee, artisan mango liqueur and glow-in-the-dark ultimate frisbee gear — those are some of the products ready to launch out of a Babson College summer crash course for young entrepreneurs.

The 10-week summer venture program featured 14 proposals from undergraduate and MBA students, hand-picked from more than 100 applications. The students presented their products last week to an auditorium packed with potential investors and mentors at the Wellesley school.

"It's a 10-week summer camp for our best and brightest young entrepreneurs," program director Steve Gold said.

Many of the companies were the result of years of planning and experience, but were jump-started by the program.

Hans Homberger, an MBA student from Costa Rica, unveiled a plan to sell the coffee beans his family has grown for four generations directly to consumers under the family name for the first time.

"I grew up looking at my grandpa and my dad going every week to the farms. It's not just the business, it's something I feel passionate about," Homberger said.

Homberger presented Fourth Wheel Coffee, his business that will ship Central American coffee directly to customers' front doors within 15 days of roasting instead of the months that commercial coffee can spend in a warehouse, 
he said.

"I've been working on this concept for over a year. In these past 10 weeks, I feel like I was really pushed to question everything I had learned already," said MBA student Emily Lagasse. "Because of that, I have a final product that I am 100 percent confident in and ready to move forward with."

Her gourmet dog food business, Fedwell, was inspired by the near-death experience of her dog. Lagasse said her high-end dog food is made without chemicals or preservatives and is more nutritious than conventional dog food.

Because of the presentations, many of the students made connections with key investors and industry insiders, Gold said.

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Cambridge single-family fresh from makeover

This unassuming two-family in North Cambridge has been converted into an upscale single-family home.

Built in 1894, the 2,100-
square-foot three-bedroom home at 225 Rindge Ave. was recently renovated with new systems and wiring, higher ceilings, slate and wide-plank wood laminate floors, recessed lighting and all-new marble bathrooms. It's on the market for the just-reduced price of $839,900.

Geared for low maintenance, the home has new vinyl siding and a tankless water-heating system. And although there is no front yard, there is a fenced-in grass backyard.

The exterior has been nicely restyled with gray siding and white trim with plum-colored shutters. A small front porch leads into a foyer with brown slate floors and a cutout that opens up to the adjoining living room, which has 10-foot ceilings with white soffits, wood floors and recessed lighting.

Straight ahead from the foyer, through French doors, sits a sunny formal dining room with two windows, recessed lighting and slate floors. At the far end of this room, under a metal overhead fixture, is a granite-topped cutout leading into the kitchen.

The home's recessed-lit kitchen has white soffits, brown slate floors, 15 custom wood cabinets and granite counters and backsplash. There are Samsung, Kitchen Aid and Whirlpool stainless-steel appliances.

Off the kitchen is a half bath and at the end of a slate hallway, there's a laundry room with a full-size Whirlpool washer and dryer.

The home's three bedrooms are on the second floor, reached via a turning staircase. The master bedroom suite, with wood floors and two closets with built-ins, has a high-end bathroom with brown marble floors and walls around a tub and shower and a stylish double-sink vanity. There's a back porch leading from this bedroom.

There are two other bedrooms, one good for a children's room and a third that's nursery sized. There's a stylish, second full marble bathroom with tiled surround for a tub/shower and white sink vanity.

The home's finished basement has a slate-floored family room plus an adjoining home office. There's also a full ceramic-tiled bath here with a tub/shower and white sink vanity.

There's extra storage space in an unfinished area of the basement, along with the home's high-efficiency gas-fired heating and cooling system, as well as a Rinnai tankless water-heating system.

A driveway next to the house accommodates three vehicles.

Broker: Bremis Realty, brokers Brenda Bremis at 617-828-1872 and Stephen Bremis at 617-828-1070

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Scion FR-S: Sporty ride
 at a great price

I loved the reaction I got to the 2013 Scion FR-S — is this a Porsche? Not quite, but this is a true sports car indeed.

I was quickly relieved to find the FR-S wasn't just a sports car lite made for kids fresh out of school looking for glitz with nothing under the hood to back it up. This is truly a high-performance car meant to be driven and a car that willingly returns the favor by being a blast to drive. As soon as the first exhaust note growls out, you know you've got a tiger by the tail.

The 2.0-liter 200-horsepower FR-S is born of a collaboration between independent Subaru and powerhouse Toyota. The Subaru boxer engine mated to a six-speed transmission is wrapped by aggressive styling, creating one very fun car to drive. The shark-like sweeping lines harken back to European sports cars of the '60s and '70s but with 2013 engineering.

The front and rear independent MacPherson struts with 17-inch alloy wheels turn this coupe into a quick, spirited and tight car to drive. The roadster handles crisply and stops confidently with precise steering and powerful ventilated brakes. Throw this nimble car into a turn, happily motor down the highway and it'll pay you back with immense feedback.

What is truly great about this hot little number is the little number — the price. As tested the FR-S will cost you just $26,166. The only upgrade that is available is the $635 stereo, so what you see is what you get with this rear-wheel-drive sportster. The FR-S is a little more than half the cost of the Porsche Boxster and a more powerful car than the Mazda Miata.

A race-inspired interior sports an extremely supportive seat and the thick, red stitched, leather-wrapped steering wheel moves the car with just a flick of the wrist. Even without the six-speed stick the car is powerful, quick and fast. A punch of the gas, downshift with the paddles and you go. There's no lag and when you drop it into sport mode, the shift points switch to aggressive gearing allowing you to wring out every RPM.

The clean dash has a speedometer, tach and gauges in plain view. The stereo was a bit cumbersome, but once I figured it out setting my stations and phone was not too hard. The interior is well-fitted and good-looking with cloth and mixed plastics. Aluminum trimming and accents finished the cockpit. Humorously, it has two "rear" seats that really are for stowing some gear, but my golf clubs had to ride in the passenger seat.

The FR-S returns a solid average of 28 mpg, rating at 25 in the city and 34 mpg on the highway. Although it's a twin mechanically to the Subaru BRS, it has different standard equipment so it cost about $1,000 less.

Compare this sports car to the Honda Civic Si, Hyundai Genesis and don't be afraid to sneak a peak at the Porsche and Nissan 370z to see how favorably it stacks up.

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