• One of South Florida’s most innovative architecture firms, Arquitectonica, will design the Riverpointe condo to be built next to the Aetna building on the Southbank. If you’re ever been on Brickell Ave. in Miami, you’ve seen the office/condo building with a hole in it - that’s their design.
• Featured in this month’s Florida Trend: local attorneys Nancy and Scott Makar. She’s with Florida Coastal, he’s with the General Counsel’s office and the mag says they’re a “power couple.”
• Attorney Bill Joel isn’t the only smart one in his family. The former bar association’s president’s son won the spelling bee at his school.
• The same man who put on the Super Bowl halftime and pregame shows, producer Don Mischner, is on a roll. When the international site selection committee for the 2012 Olympic Games visited New York, they were dazzled by a show he did for the occasion.
• Leimbach and Associates, a Jacksonville-based law firm specializing in immigration law and corporate outsourcing, will soon be opening a new office in Orlando sometime in March, said partner Ashwin Sharma.
• The Chamber has changed its quarterly awards. Instead of “Industry Appreciation Awards” to 2-3 companies each quarter, they’ll have just one called the “Chairman’s Award,” and last week’s went to Sea Star Lines.
• The Gator Bowl Committee gets its new year going Tuesday evening with a 5:30 meeting at the Omni.
• The pink Cadillacs are coming. Mary Kay Cosmetics, which gives a Caddy to its top producers, is having a big convention here starting next week. Over 2,000 are expected and the Adam’s Mark is the headquarters.
•The Holland and Knight law firm has also been in a charitable mood lately. The firm recently bought an air conditioner and computers for the Your Child Only day care center on Kings Road.
• Jacksonville-based Ivanabitch Vodka decided to take its product on the road, literally. Because most local billboard companies won’t allow Empire Communications, the company that came up with the Ivanabitch brand, to advertise its product on the side of the road, Empire has started putting its advertisements on the side of mobile billboard trucks, which have been driving around downtown since the Super Bowl.
• Some of those big tour buses outside City Hall last week weren’t just using the building for a bathroom break as we reported in a City Note last week. Jim Uccio, owner of Tourtime, said some of those buses are his and was doing a full tour of City Hall. “We definitely do the entire history of the St. James building,” he said.
• On the job: the Chamber’s new Government Affairs staffer, Amy Whitman. She’s been the lobbyist with KB Home and her first duties are meeting with committee members and planning the upcoming legislative session.