Berkeley County facility for Google's eyes only?

Without a doubt, field trips to the new Google facility in Berkeley County are not in the cards.

Rhett Weiss, senior team leader for strategic development at the Internet search titan, shared some insight into business trends at a Charleston Regional Development Alliance meeting last week.

He also answered a few questions about why his company is so secretive.

Asked whether school groups would be able to tour the facility, he said, "I don't think we're going to have fifth-graders going up and down the racks of computers. And it's not just fifth-graders. The data centers are not open to the public. Period."

Weiss said that's because the data center stores privileged information, such as its users' e-mail accounts and also because a trained eye could learn about the operation and use it competitively. Visitors invited to the $600 million Google facility's grand opening earlier this month were not allowed inside.

Speaking to the development alliance Thursday, Weiss shared several emerging business trends. One of them, he said, is that simple operational information might become less and less public. Even the number of employees a company hires or the amount of electricity it uses can reveal too much to a rival.

"What I'm telling you is not to be so surprised if companies become increasingly close to the vest about information that might not seem like a big deal," Weiss said.

Google, part 2

How much value can you squeeze out of a throw-away item? Under a "Juicy Ideas" national contest sponsored by Google and ThinkTEC Charleston-area college students on 37 teams from Charleston Southern University, The Citadel, College of Charleston and Trident Technical College have until Friday to create a new use for a small glass medicine bottle. The use must create value while communicating a message of environmental responsibility for the throw-away item. Students were given 10 days to complete the project.

Throughout the process, the teams will chronicle their experiences on video and upload to YouTube (owned by Google, naturally) for judging. All areas with a Google data center are included in the competition.

The winner from Charleston will face the winning teams from North Carolina, Oklahoma, Iowa and Oregon to compete for the grand prize trip — a day at Google headquarters in California in January.

Under water?

The South Carolina Aquarium has deep-sixed its Halloween fundraiser, The Dark Water Masquerade, but plans to try again next year. The 21-and-over black-tie affair didn't generate the anticipated sales. Tickets were $125 per person or $200 per couple and included an open bar, hors d'oeuvres and live music and entertainment from 8 p.m. until midnight Friday. The event was geared to benefit the aquarium's conservation and education programs.

Aquarium marketing and public relations coordinator Chloe Byers said the first-time event was tough to get going this year, despite a lot of positive feedback.

"We think there's so much potential," she said. "We really want it to be a great event."

Talking trash

That stuff you toss out in the garbage and ends up in the landfill is being used to turn on the lights in a few homes across the state. Moncks Corner-based Santee Cooper and Phoenix-based Allied Waste announced last week the startup of a new 3.2-megawatt generating station fueled by methane gas from decomposing garbage at Anderson Regional Landfill near Belton.

The renewable green power station is the state-owned utility's fourth landfill-biogas powered generating station and its second with Allied Waste. The two organizations opened the Lee County Generating Station in 2005.

The $3.8 million Anderson landfill station includes two Caterpillar 20-cylinder engine generators, and it provides enough power for about 1,500 homes.

Meltdown musings

Academics still debate what caused the Great Depression, but a panel of law professors, economists and one lawmaker looked past that to focus on the current financial crisis at a forum on Friday in Columbia.

The symposium, organized by the University of South Carolina's South Carolina Law Review, gave speakers a chance to assess blame for the meltdown. By the end of the day, they had fingered numerous suspects, including corporate greed, financial market deregulation, mortgage fraud and a culture of corruption among major industry players.

Lending and investment practices that were meant to spread the risk around led to a lack of accountability. Alan White of Valparaiso University School of Law pointed to mortgage brokers who, in some cases, got more generous compensation for getting customers with good credit to sign up for loans with higher interest rates.

"I can't look at that in any way and not see that as crooked," said U.S. Rep Brad Miller (D-N.C.), who sits on the House Financial Services Committee.

Credit agencies didn't do a good job of rating mortgage-backed securities, while investors didn't do a good job of looking into what securities they were purchasing. Panelist Thomas Plank of University of Tennessee School of Law blamed the "hedge fund-like mentality" at Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, two government-sponsored enterprises that provided mortgage funding.

Despite varying backgrounds, the panel mostly agreed that the Community Reinvestment Act has taken an unfair share of the blame. That's because the 1977 law, which encouraged lenders to develop programs for low-income and minority families, only applied to federal depository institutions. Roughly 80 percent of subprime lending came from institutions that didn't have that designation, said Ray Brescia from Albany School of Law.