Zack Seward, WXXI

You know how Facebook works: friends, family, “friends” all posting a steady stream of What’s Going On.

Well, ThingWorx is like that - but with machines instead of people.

“We joke: the Facebook for devices,” says ThingWorx marketing director Chris Kuntz. “These are cars, these are buildings, these are appliances. They’re medical devices, they’re windmills, they’re bridges.

“There’s a lot of value in businesses securely connecting to and communicating with smart things.”

That’s where ThingWorx comes in.

This is a how the city of Rochester describes its Inner Loop:

The Inner Loop Expressway rings the City of Rochester’s Central Business District like a noose, strangling the downtown area from adjacent vibrant densely-populated neighborhoods. 

The above is from a failed 2009 application [PDF] for $22.5 million in federal transportation funding. Late last year, the city struck out again with the feds - this time in a bid for a $14.7 million TIGER grant.

Now, in a letter to City Council, Mayor Tom Richards wants to spend $2 million for another shot at filling in the city's sunken expressway.

Angella Luyk, owner of Midnight Janitorial, runs a finger along a wooden banister.

"One of the hard things with an old mansion like this is dust," says Luyk, walking up an ornate stairway. "Dust, dust, dust and cobwebs."

And while Luyk says her cleaners have the dust under control, they joke that occasionally they're plagued by something beyond their expertise: ghosts.

"I don't believe in ghosts, but my hair would stand up like it was really somebody there!" laughs employee Jessica Perez, as she cleans a law office in the converted East Avenue mansion.

"When you walk in the day after we've cleaned, it smells clean, it feels clean," owner Luyk says. "And we're ghost hunters - just kidding about that part."

One thing Luyk isn't kidding about: giving people with disabilities a shot at steady employment.

Roc Brewing Co. got off to an auspicious start.

Last October, the then four-month-old Rochester microbrewery became the first of two beermakers in the country to win mentorship and funding from Boston Beer Co. - the craft beer behemoth behind Samuel Adams.

Boston Beer's $10,000 loan helped Roc Brewing buy a keg cleaner.

Now co-founders Chris Spinelli and Jon Mervine have just returned from their first mentorship session with the company that helped launch the craft beer movement.

"It's great to hear from the big guys and how they did it," says Spinelli. "We got to really learn things that could help us improve and move forward and become successful ourselves."

Sealed Air, a packaging manufacturer with about 26,000 workers worldwide, is closing at least two plants in upstate New York.

The company announced Thursday it was closing its Rochester facility.

A filing with the New York State Department of Labor also shows a plant closing in the Schenectady suburb of Scotia, N.Y.

The Capital Region plant will be shuttered by May 20.

About 180 Sealed Air workers in Rochester will lose their jobs. Another 70 will be affected in Scotia. 

Former Buffalo assemblyman Sam Hoyt was in the Rochester area Friday delivering Governor Andrew Cuomo's 2012 budget address.

It was mostly a recap of Cuomo's 2011 legislative victories and a brief sketch of the governor's 2012 priorities.

But one thing was not mentioned: Cuomo's billion-dollar pledge to the state's second-largest city.

"I can assure you that Andrew Cuomo is not giving a blank check to Buffalo," Hoyt, now a senior VP at Empire State Development, said after the presentation.

"If they come up with a half-assed plan, the governor's going to reject it," said Hoyt. "There's no, 'Here's your billion dollars, spend it as you please.' If they use it as pork, or member items, the governor will say, 'Sorry, you blew it. You blew this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.' "

Executives from foreign solar companies are descending on Rochester over the next couple of weeks, to hear a pitch from Natcore Technology.

“What we’re saying is, ‘If you want our technology, you have to take a hard look at it here,’ ” says Natcore CEO Chuck Provini.

Natcore has a small research facility at Rochester’s Eastman Business Park. For about a year, the company has been looking for money to establish a much bigger manufacturing presence in Rochester. But Natcore says talks with federal and regional officials have yielded no funding.

Now, Natcore is turning to solar companies from India, China and Italy for a possible joint venture that would make flexible solar cells on equipment that once made Kodak film.

But there’s a catch.

“It’s their money,” Provini says of the foreign companies. “And if they say, ‘Chuck, we really enjoyed the visit, but no,’ [then] we’re a business ... and we’ll go where we can best help save the world, not just a country.”

The Innovation Trail went to the Rochester Public Market last weekend - just days after Kodak filed for bankruptcy protection - to hear from you.

With all that's been written about the demise of Kodak, we wanted to capture the human side of the equation - in a city where Kodak still matters.

Why? Because for many thousands of Rochesterians Kodak is more than just a company.

Xerox is bringing a new call center to its Webster, N.Y. manufacturing campus.

But not without a hefty aid package from the state.

"We've got call centers in more than a dozen states," says Xerox spokesman Carl Langsenkamp. "We could have put the call center anywhere."

Xerox is spending $4.3 million on the new customer care center and planning to create up to 500 jobs by the end of 2013, according to Langsenkamp.

To land the project, the state's economic development arm is dishing out up to $6 million in incentives and Monroe County is chipping in with $271,000 in tax relief.

One observer says the cost far outweighs the benefit.

"For the 300 to 500 families who will get a job at the call center, this is great news," Reuters columnist David Cay Johnston tells the Innovation Trail. "For everybody else, this is awful.

"It is the latest example of corporate socialism."

Kevin Purdy makes connections.

When we sat down with the former editor of Gawker's Lifehacker blog at TEDxRochester in November 2011, he had just wrapped up organizing Buffalo's TEDx.

Purdy talked to us about what he's doing when he's not writing about tech, food and "Other Freelance Nonsense."

Top of the list: hooking people up (not like that).

Like the music? It's "The 19th letter - no words" by Buffalo-based Fourem.