Lawrence S. Kramer (MBA '74), who spent twenty years as a newspaper reporter and editor for publications such as the Washington Post and the San Francisco Examiner, was himself in the news last January. Kramer's financial information company, CBS MarketWatch.com, debuted with one of those breathtaking Internet IPOs - the company's stock went from $17 to $95.50 on its first day of trading. "It's the first pure-play journalism IPO," Kramer told USA Today (January 26, 1999), adding that the wonders of the Web are such that even "journalists have a chance to build something" in cyberspace.

Kramer is no stranger to entrepreneurship. In 1991, he created a sports data service that he sold three years later to Data Broadcasting Corp. (DBC), a firm that hired him to set up DBC News, where he founded MarketWatch. With Kramer as CEO, MarketWatch joined forces with CBS in 1997.

This year's IPO was an odd experience for Kramer the journalist: SEC rules prohibited MarketWatch from covering its own much-anticipated debut - or even from running stories by other news media that might mention it - so as not to unfairly promote its stock. Apparently, investors needed little prompting. After the dust had settled on that first day of trading, Kramer's personal stake in CBS MarketWatch.com was reportedly worth some $19 million.

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Taking a good idea to heart, Mark Krasnow (MBA '96) and Jonathan Reis (MBA '96) have launched a 24-hour call-in and emergency service system, CardioResponse, Inc., to serve recovering cardiac patients and other individuals who may have potential heart problems.

Reis, a medical doctor and former emergency-room physician from Israel, explained that a similar service has operated in Israel for some ten years. "I was very surprised it didn't exist in the United States," he told the Boston Business Journal (January 1­14, 1999). Added Krasnow, "The [medical] system today doesn't really provide the resources people need. Patients are discharged from hospitals very quickly."

CardioResponse customers rent or buy portable EKG devices that render readings that may be transmitted over phone lines to the firm's Natick, Massachusetts, offices, where experienced cardiac nurses also field voice calls. Most calls are questions about symptoms or the advisability of various lifestyle behaviors. Calls involving symptoms undergo a triage process and are immediately referred to a doctor (preferably the patient's own). In cases of full-blown emergencies, CardioResponse alerts emergency services and hospitals and provides them with the patient's medical history, current data, and other necessary information.

Marketing itself to hospitals and insurance companies as a money-saving alternative to unnecessary emergency-room visits, CardioResponse, which took on its first customers last May, eventually hopes to expand well beyond Massachusetts.

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A self-professed "guy from upstate New York," James R. Houghton (MBA '62) has recently become chief of one of downstate's toniest citadels of culture, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Houghton, who retired as chairman of Corning Inc. in 1996, told the New York Times (January 12, 1999) that a principal facet of the job of Met chairman is that "you've got to watch to keep your place at the top of the pinnacle." Houghton takes over at the museum at a key time, with the Met in the midst of a campaign to raise $400 million.

The article also detailed Houghton's lengthy stint of physical therapy and rehabilitation after a near-fatal accident in 1993 when he was struck by a car as he stepped from a sidewalk in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia. "Everybody says, 'Jeez, what a terrible thing,' " Houghton noted. "And I say, 'I'm so happy to be here, I can't tell you.' " Of her husband's rehabilitation, Maisie Houghton added, "He just behaved completely in character. He's a person of enormous energy, and he absolutely attacked it."

Houghton said the accident did not figure in his retirement at Corning, where, the Times observed, "he was often described as a visionary leader" during his thirteen years as chairman of the company.

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