After more than eight years, Stan “The Fan” Charles is returning to the daily airwaves in Baltimore on Fox Sports Radio’s 1370 AM.

The founder of PressBox, a multi-platform sports media company known for its Web site and monthly print publication, will host a one-hour show called PressBox Sports Radio on weekdays starting at 12 p.m. The show will start Monday and will cover local sports (from high school to pro), will address sports business developments and will feature PressBox writers.

Charles was last on the daily airwaves with CBS Radio (1300 AM) doing a 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. show until the station released him in November 2001.

In an e-mail to me, Charles noted this will be the first time he’s on during the day.

“I was almost exclusively a night-time sports talker from 10 p.m.-1 a.m. … some 7 p.m.-10.p.m.,” he said. “The one exception was 1987, when in WFBR, I was on 5 p.m.-7 p.m., Drive-Time Sports.”

The partnership with Fox Sports Radio (WVIE) is the latest in PressBox’s efforts to deliver its product in a multitude of media channels. The company, which has weekly television and radio shows, also recently began producing the nightly sports casts for WMAR’s 11 p.m. news.

Other than strengthening its brand, the idea is that the more platforms PressBox is available in, the more ways its advertisers can spend money.

PressBox celebrates its 4th anniversary in April.

Fox 1370 is also boosting its radio lineup with more local talent and adding former Baltimore Oriole Chris Hoiles in the afternoon. Hoiles  will co-host a 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. weekday slot with Adam Gladstone, the former director of minor league operations for Ripken Baseball.

Hoiles and Charles are filling up the three-hour block the station used for nationally-syndicated radio sports personality Jim Rome.

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There’s probably some March Madness/basketball/rebound pun I could cook up here … but I’ll leave that for the comments section.

The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index’s new numbers were released today and we’re now at 52.5, up from 46.4 in February. The Present Situation Index also increased to 26.0 from 21.7.

Lastly, the Expectations Index improved to 70.2 from 62.9 last month.

Here’s another little related tidbit: Job losses held steady in February and the national unemployment rate has stayed at 9.7 percent. Yeah, yeah, it’s not going down. But it didn’t go up, either.

So now that we’re not hemorrhaging jobs and there’s a slightly more positive outlook on the future, will people start spending again? My prediction (based on what I hear in my reporting) is not really. Consumers are more likely to pay down their debt first than spend willy nilly again like they didn’t have a care in the world.

Careful spending and selective purchases for most of us regular folks (for the uber-rich folks’ spending habits, see McCourt, Jamie) will be the trend of the future. That’s what analysts tell me and I believe it.

Anyone care to debate?

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Once again Baltimore is choosing earnest sincerity over publicity stunts in hopes of grabbing Google’s attention.

No city name changes. No hiring sky writers to fly over the Mountain View, Calif., campus of the search engine giant. No diving into a National Aquarium tank with a dolphin renamed “Google” (we didn’t do that, did we?).

The latest pitch for Google to build a multimillion-dollar ultra-fast network in Charm City comes courtesy of philanthropist George Soros, whose Open Society Institute has an office here in town. Baltimore Sun columnist Jay Hancock namedropped Soros in a recent column, and several media outlets around town have been reporting for days that the billionaire investor would be part of the effort.

Soros issued a news release today urging Google to pick Baltimore as the field site for its fiber-to-the-home network. More than 600 cities and municipalities submitted a request for information, or RFI, to Google by its March 26 deadline.

Soros deftly straddles the line between trumpeting Baltimore’s assets — world-class research institutions, a unique arts community — and highlighting the city’s challenges. Namely the “failing schools, untreated drug addiction, and an over-reliance on incarceration” that prompted Soros to locate an Open Society Institute office here in 1998 and invest $70 million in a variety of programs.

“OSI-Baltimore’s efforts to develop a trained workforce, keep children and youth engaged in schools and in after-school programs, expand access to addiction treatment, and increase access to public benefits and training would be greatly enhanced through the tools enabled by Google Fiber,” said OSI-Baltimore Director Diana Morris in a statement. “In addition, we applaud Google’s intentions to make this an ‘open access network,’ which will further promote the principals of net-neutrality and open society values.”

This warts-and-all approach probably makes some local stakeholders wince, but it’s bound to resonate with a company sporting the unofficial motto “Don’t Be Evil.” If Google wants to do some good, perhaps it will see the same things that Soros and his Open Society team saw back in 1998 — strong community institutions “but still many people who suffer from being disconnected from important resources,” as Soros put it.

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A budding business from the mind of a University of Maryland student is in the running for seed funding from the Dell Social Innovation Competition.

Tseai Energy Unlimited works to empower communities through agriculture. The company develops bioprocessing plants to bring electricity to underdeveloped countries — with a focus on Africa, where many of the countries lack access to reliable and consistent electricity — and boost their economies at the same time.

Trevor Young, a University of Maryland Hillman Entrepreneurs Program student originally from Sierra Leone, established the company in May 2009. He named it after his daughter Tseai, which means sunshine.

Using abundant local crops and employing local farmers, the company installs small-scale agricultural processing plants.  Much of the revenue from the sale of the products goes back into the community through economic development and social services, including a free or low-cost health care clinic and free access to educational courses.

To get the energy piece of the project, Tseai converts waste from the mill into fertilizer and biogas to generate electricity. The first plant will be launched in Sierra Leone, where the company plans to process palm fruit into palm oil, and convert the waste into methane to generate electricity.

Dell whittled down the initial  pool of 700 applicants from 200 universities, and now Tseai is competing with 60 companies for the $50,000 grand prize. Three finalists will be chosen to travel to the University of Texas at Austin in May to present their business plans to the judges. Tseai is up against several other projects looking to bring change to Africa.

Tseai has already won $25,000 in other competitions. It’s also looking to nab winnings as a finalist in the Wake Forest Elevator Competition this weekend, where students get two minutes to make the pitch of their lives.

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As Facebook status updates go it was pretty typical.

“Another all-nighter,” it read. “I’m a slow writer. With high standards.”

But this post came courtesy of Baltimore’s “Google czar” — Tom Loveland, CEO of Mind Over Machines and a tech industry leader in the region. So his status update sent a signal that the city’s heavy lifting in its bid to become the home of a multimillion-dollar broadband network financed and built by Google was in the home stretch.

Google’s deadline for the RFI, or request for information, from interested cities is tomorrow. After the final blitz of i-dotting and t-crossing is complete, the coalition of Baltimore high-tech entrepreneurs, city agencies, businesses and nonprofits will have to sit back and wait.

They’re feeling pretty good about the case they’ve put forward.

“We didn’t just stress ‘how badly we want this,’ we built a concise, logical and detailed case for why Google should want us,” high-tech entrepreneur Dave Troy wrote on his blog today.

Among the assets the Baltimore group is highlighting, according to Troy’s post:

• A city-owned and operated conduit system running under the streets, which would enable Google to deploy a network faster and at lower cost.

• A pledge from billionaire financier George Soros (whose Open Society Institute has an office here) to support a Google investment with programs to help bridge the digital divide, a push endorsed by city schools CEO Andres Alonso in an early Web video testimonial.

• Talks that are underway with Bob Kahn, a co-inventor of the TCP/IP networking standard, on new ways to archive and share municipal data.

Local organizers were heading to City Hall this afternoon to give a final review of the RFI and then hold a possible “button-pushing ceremony” to transmit the document electronically to Google’s Mountain View, Calif., headquarters.

Stay tuned, we’ll post more when we know it.

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The Minnesota Twins’ eight-year, $184 million contract extension for Joe Mauer is being heralded as a win-win for the team and for baseball. And Baltimore’s own Ron Shapiro helped orchestrate it.

The deal is the fourth-largest contract in baseball history (behind two deals for Alex Rodriguez and one for Derek Jeter) and is being held up as a positive step for small-market teams and competitive balance.

Check out this account of the deal from MLB.com:

Joe Mauer’s agent, Ron Shapiro, received a text message on Sunday night from his son Mark, who is the general manager for the Cleveland Indians.

The text read, “Congratulations, Dad. This is a great day for baseball.”

Asked later about his son’s text, Shapiro said: “What he was saying was, ‘Isn’t it great when home-grown players can remain a part of their community long term?’ ”

But not everyone says the $23-million-a-year deal (easily 20 percent of the Twins’ annual payroll) is a great move for the team. Ron Cook of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette calls the contract “lunacy.” Cook says he understands the pressure on the team to do the deal — they are moving to a new, publicly financed stadium this season and need a star player to anchor it, and Mauer is young and supremely talented.

There’s also the speculation that Mauer as a free agent could have drawn $30 million a year from richer teams like the Yankees or Red Sox, according to Cook.

But all of that doesn’t make this a good contract for the Twins. Even if Mauer continues along a path that is headed to the Hall of Fame, it’s hard to imagine the team being able to put enough winning players around him to contend for a championship. … Good luck to ‘em trying to fill out the rest of the roster while keeping the payroll from soaring to dangerous numbers.

Cook pointed to the 2001 season when the Pirates were moving into publicly financed PNC Park and promised to keep their best players. He said the team “way overpaid” to re-sign catcher Jason Kendall, who never lived up to the money.

“Sadly, the Pirates still haven’t really recovered.”

Could this be a bad deal disguised as a good one? It looks nice on the surface — Mauer gets to be a hometown hero and takes less money than he would have likely made on the open market. Having met Shapiro (who is also Cal Ripken Jr.’s agent) a few times myself, I believe that the hometown factor really does mean something to him and his clients.

But digging a little deeper, is this a deal that’s financially smart for a team that traditionally hasn’t had a lot to spend?

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Offices are no doubt buzzing today over the news that an autistic teenager from the Chicago area correctly picked every game in the first two rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament.

The odds of doing so are about one in 13.4 million, according to BookofOdds.com. An MSNBC.com report says you have better odds of winning the lottery — twice.

But Alex Hermann, who entered his bracket at CBSSportsline.com, has apparently pulled it off — in an upset-heavy tourney that has seen top seeds Georgetown, Wisconsin and Kansas (the top seed in the Midwest region) go down in defeat.

Hermann, 17, credits his success to an aptitude for math and the ability to process the statistics he sees during the basketball games he watches on TV. CBSSportsline.com reportedly can’t confirm Hermann’s picks because it doesn’t track its bracket challenges that don’t have money on the line, one of which Hermann entered.

It seems unlikely to me, though, that he altered his picks, which you can see here, after the fact: He has Purdue winning the championship (because his brother went there) and Tennessee in his Final Four.

Imagine the professional envy — or jealousy — such a performance would spark in your office. As my colleague Liz Farmer noted in her March 19 story on how the tournament grips the workplace, the nation’s employers could lose $1.8 billion worth of lost productivity from March Madness. There would probably be some serious watercooler analysis of someone on the payroll picking every game right through the first two rounds.

Then again, perfection could build someone a practically insurmountable lead. Who’d care about the Sweet Sixteen? May as well stay focused and get some work done.

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In today’s story about urban development and author James Howard Kunstler’s comments on the future of American cities, the outlook seems a little grim. Kunstler, who’s good at being dramatic for effect, says an oil shortage will lead to the downfall of suburbs, airplane travel will become obsolete and petrol-based materials used to maintain massive skyscrapers will become too expensive.

Tuesday afternoon I sat in on a roundtable lunch with Kunstler and about 15 businesspeople who make their livelihood in downtown real estate (whether it’s building it or selling it) and it was fun to watch the debate play out.

Bryce Turner, an architect with Brown Craig Turner, took issue in particular with Kunstler’s argument that modern skyscrapers would become obsolete because the materials to repair and maintain them would become too expensive. f Kunstler’s prediction that more people will move back to cities holds true, Turner said, then that would increase skyscrapers’ property value.

He also doesn’t agree that the materials to maintain these buildings will disappear — and who says we need to use petroleum-based products, anyway?

“There’s nothing that says you can’t use wood and masonry and other materials as well for some of these buildings and I think we’re going to find a way to do that,” Turner said.

And, he added, there’s something to be said for being creative with architecture if a building is becoming obsolete for the current generation.

“I think we’re going to find ways to remake them — in some cases combining floors to make higher ceilings because that’s a big issue with some. Or add balconies,” Turner said. “I think there are a lot of opportunities to get fresh air into these buildings.”

And what about Kunslter’s suggestion that we return to buildings that are more modest and perhaps styled after ones built 100 years ago? Magda Westerhout, an architect with Marks Thomas & Associates, said bricks-and-mortar towers (examples around downtown Baltimore include the B&O Building or the Fidelity Insurance building, both on N. Charles Street) can be tricky.

“I think we don’t do it [now] partially because the foundations would have to be bigger because it’s heavier,” she said. “And if you’re designing against earthquakes you’d have to reinforce the bricks. … So yeah, I think it would be more expensive to build that way.”

Not everything Kunstler said was met with an argument. His point that suburbia is overblown and the population in mid-sized cities in key locations like Baltimore will increase was met with a lot of nods yesterday.

And it only takes a trip down I-66 outside Washington, D.C., — and seeing the foreclosed-upon McMansions or massive housing developments that are still largely unsold — to come to that conclusion for yourself.

“It’s true that in the suburbs there are some very difficult master plans that simply include lots of individual cookie-cutter houses where it’s very difficult to walk anywhere and the connection to commercial districts have made it very awkward,” said Turner.

Cookie-cutter housing developments could potentially solve that problem by building a connection to nearby commerce (or creating its own “Main Street” as many condo communities are doing). But “the McMansion that’s sitting out in the middle of nowhere is really going to struggle,” Turner added.

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A new study on crime is out, and Baltimore may want to brag a bit about this one.

The study, done by information security company Symantec Corp., ranks the cities most vulnerable to cybercrime and places Baltimore 36th.

Seattle, Boston and Washington, D.C, top the list. You can see the rest of the top 50 here.

The rankings were determined by Symantec and Sperling’s Best Places (a Web site that tracks and analyzes statistics on cities) through a combination of Symantec data on cyberattacks and potential malware infections. The study also used third-party data about online behavior, such as the way people access WiFi hotspots and shop online.

It stands to reason that U.S. cities known as hotbeds for technology innovation would be more susceptible to cybercrime, so perhaps a high ranking on this list is in some ways a badge of honor. The report notes, for example, that Seattle places near the top in categories such as wireless Internet access. This kind of access would in turn facilitate potentially risky behavior like banking and shopping online.

Boston and Washington, D.C., experience high levels of cybercrime because they have a high concentration of WiFi hotspots, Symantec points out.

The report also notes that even skilled and experienced Web users are at risk, which is why San Francisco ranks fourth.

Detroit, on the other hand, ranks 50th because its residents were found to be less likely to participate in risky online behavior and ranked low in cybercrime — no doubt because it also ranks low in access to the Internet, computer equipment expenditures and wireless Internet access.

Those aren’t exactly selling points that a Chamber of Commerce would want to trumpet.

All that said, it’s nice not to crack the top 10 in any set of rankings that purport to quantify crime and its impacts. Baltimore, after all, has drawn unwanted national attention — and inspired high-profile television programming — for murder and mayhem. Though, to be fair, we should point out that Charm City’s murder rate remained at a nearly two-decade low in 2009, and other violent crime statistics have dropped.

And in recent weeks, Baltimore has won decent marks in studies ranking the best cities for young adults and in its ability to withstand the recession.

Hey Google, are you reading this?

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As the 135th annual Preakness Stakes nears, promoters are revamping the new infield party with younger acts and a few more party-friendly features.

And, no. You still can’t bring in your own beer.

But for $20 bucks you can buy a souvenir mug that earns you free beer refills for the day … How’s that for a family-friendly atmosphere?

Last year Preakness promoters tried to clean up the infield party, which had become a booze-ridden mockery of what opening up the infield to the public was intended to do.

The opening of the Infield on Preakness day was a brainchild of former Pimlico Race Course general manager Charles John “Chick” Lang, who thought up the idea after bringing his daughter’s friends there in a school bus to watch the races and lacrosse games.

Lang, who died last week at the age or 83, became known to the horse racing industry as “Mr. Preakness” during his tenure at Pimlico. From 1960 to 1987 he served as director of racing, vice president and finally general manager.

The Maryland Jockey Club announced Friday it will rename the Hirsch Jacobs Stakes in honor of Lang and the Grade 3 sprint will be run on Preakness day, May 15.

Throughout his career, Lang held every job imaginable on the race track, from hotwalker (walking horses after races) to general manager to jockey’s agent. But his happiest years were at Pimlico.

“If there was anything Lang loved almost as much as his family, it was the Preakness,” a release from the jockey club says. “Chick promoted the Preakness like no other, traveling to Louisville with ‘Next Stop Preakness’ signs. He went as far as to float hundreds of yellow and black balloons over the Kentucky Derby Parade.”

During Lang’s tenure at Old Hilltop, Preakness attendance rose from 30,659 to 87,945.

After Pimlico, Lang worked alongside his grandson, Jeff, as WBAL radio’s racing analyst. While with WBAL, he earned several distinguished awards as a journalist and producer including two Eclipse awards, the highest award in the racing industry.

Lang’s wishes were to be cremated and to have his ashes spread at Pimlico in the Preakness winners’ circle near the cupola. A decision has not been finalized but the jockey club says a ceremony could take place on the opening day of the Pimlico spring meeting (April 17) or during Preakness week.

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