Frontier Communications announced its 2011 highlights for its Midwest Region which consists of Indiana and Michigan.

• Invested $56M in broadband deployment across the Midwest Region
• Made Frontier High-Speed Internet available to an additional 46,000 Hoosier households
  
• Completed 14 broadband deployment projects in the northwestern Indiana area
  
• Launched a $24 million all fiber optic ultra-high bandwidth network
  
• Established dedicated business commercial sales team across the Midwest Region
  
• Re-entered the commercial customer premise equipment market
  
• Launched Metro Ethernet and Dedicated Internet Access products across the Midwest Region

The Northwest Indiana Small Business Development Center is offering QuickBooks Essentials Part II from 9 a.m. to noon Saturdays March 24 and 31 at the Purdue University Calumet Academic Learning Center, 9900 Connecticut Drive, in Room 231.

The workshop continues an overview of the program and is for those who want to take their skills to the next level. It is recommended that participants have a working knowledge of QuickBooks or have taken the first essentials workshop.

Since we launched in February of 2010, we’ve always made it a point to consistently reach out to the people, organizations, and businesses in Northwest Indiana to contribute their good stories and messages to us so we can shout those out to our ever-growing audience. We like to jump up and down and shout about all of the good things happening, we just need to know about them.

Now, to us “contribute” just meant letting us know your story through sending us a photo, video, story, blog, note, or any other means. After we thought about it a bit, we were worried that message may be muddled, so now we’re asking you to share with us!

We’ve set up This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and created a new, easier-to-use Share Tool at www.portagelife.com/share to make sharing your story with us quicker and easier than before. You don't have to be a member to share a story of photo with us any more, and this one-step set-up should make the sharing process much more streamlined.

Researchers are developing solar cells that might be manufactured using special ink printed onto sheets of a supporting material, an approach that could lead to new low-cost solar cells economically competitive with other energy technologies.

The project, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, strives to achieve critical requirements not met by other solar technologies: It should be able to be mass-produced at low cost and not limited by the availability of materials.