The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 32

tH Business Ihe (j Foreclosure plan would make "Wednesday; jdly 237 2007' lenders pay mortgages. As part that plan, state officials said they would use hardball negotiating tactics to force lenders to absorb any financial losses on the troubled mort deceptive mortgage loan advertising. Senate President Therese Murray said the bill "takes aim at predatory lenders and gives homeowners and borrowers a veiled state program may also need their loans reduced and prepayment penalties waived to avoid foreclosure, the draft said. Putting these provisions into place, however, could be difficult Mortgages today are sold and resold to investors, making it unclear who has the authority to make decisions on foreclosures. Often firms that hold and service the mortgages are restricted in what they can do by agreements with investor groups.

For example, some agreements prohibit or limit reductions in loan amounts, according to financial industry specialists. MORTGAGE Continued from Page Dl The goals are to "prevent as many foreclosures as possible and to minimize neighborhood de-stabilization by reclaiming vacant foreclosed properties for owner-occupied homeownership," the document said. Kevin Cuff, executive director of the Massachusetts Mortgage Bankers Association, said he hasn't seen the proposal and declined comment The meeting today will be the second time Patrick administration officials has met with mortgage lenders to map out a plan to soften the impact of skyrocketing foreclosures. Lenders have initiated more than 10,000 foreclosures in the first five months of the year, compared to about 6,000 in the same period in 2006, according to The Warren Group, which analyzes and publishes real estate data. The foreclosures have been concentrated among subprime loans, which are made to people with less than stellar credit and carry higher interest rates.

Many subprime mortgages have adjustable rates, and recent interest rate increases, known as resets, have further squeezed struggling homeowners. The Patrick administration earlier this month unveiled a $250 million fund that would help some subprime borrowers refinance into more affordable The increase in foreclosures this year has been concentrated among subprime loans. gages the state will seek to refinance. Also, yesterday the Massachusetts Senate unanimously passed a bill aimed at preventing foreclosures and cracking down on mortgage fraud. The bill, which still needs House approval, would make mortgage fraud a felony, punishable by up to five years in prison; license mortgage brokers and establish procedures to avoid -4m I I The NorthPoint developers have committed to build a new Green Feuding partners RENDERINGS BY NEOSCAPE Line MBTA station adjacent to the development and would replace the old Lechmere station.

put NorthPoint up for sale said. The initiative administration officials will present to lenders today takes a multipronged approach to preventing foreclosures. The plan calls for an outreach effort to identify struggling homeowners and refer them to counseling agencies for help. In some cases, the agencies will ask lenders to delay foreclosure proceedings by 30 to 60 days to allow homeowners to find alternatives, which could include selling the house or signing the deed over to the lender in lieu of foreclosure, according to the draft. Homeowners eligible for refinancing under the recently un Maine, for example, charged in a March lawsuit in Suffolk Superior Court in Boston that Cambridge North Point did not make "any substantial development progress for the first four and one-half years of the project." In April, Cambridge North Point filed a suit in Delaware court charging Boston and Maine with breach of fiduciary duties and asking that the partnership be dissolved.

One court document said the two owners have become "hopelessly deadlocked with respect to continued development of the project." Boston and Maine owned the land near the Gilmore Bridge and O'Brien Highway and entered a partnership with Spaulding Slye in 2001 to develop the property. One of the developers' responsibilities is to build an MBTA station adjacent to the development area to replace the decrepit Lechmere Green Line station. Marketing on the two condo buildings dubbed Sierra and Tango is continuing. About 100 of 298 market-priced condos are under sales agreements, out of a total of 329 units, according to Jones Lang LaSalle. Thomas C.

Palmer Jr. can be reached at tpalmerglobe.com. the concept into a professionally produced commercial. Such efforts can prove much cheaper than producing a full commercial. Ebo wouldn't disclose the ad's cost but said it was cheaper than a typical McDonald's spot.

Sosa and Malinsky were paid for their roles "like Ebo said, but neither he nor they could give specifics. One reason viral videos are becoming so popular among advertisers is that in many cases they've already been proven to resonate with their target audience, said Elbrese. For example, the original video being used in the McDonald's commercial had been viewed 152,000 times on YouTube as of yesterday. "That's a focus group right there," said Elbrese, the Harvard professor. Keith Reed can be reached at reedglobe.com.

fighting chance." Cuff, of the mortgage bankers group, said the bill was a "step in the right direction," but that it needed further revision in the House. For example, Cuff said, it's unclear how mechanisms to monitor and rate mortgage lenders, another of the bill's provisions, would work. "There's still some nip and tuck to tighten up this bill," Cuff said. "We think it will happen a lot quicker than that." Already, rents in Cambridge are hitting record levels, with the asking numbers in one premier building hitting $85 per square foot. And asking rents for "bio-tech-ready" space in Kendall Square are hitting $75, according to real estate firm Meredith Grew.

The two NorthPoint owners sued each other earlier this year, each charging the other with breach of contract. Boston and by the public to inspire its ad campaigns. In 2004, Arnold produced a campaign for Internet phone service Vonage Holdings which featured home videos of stunts that originally appeared on the Internet or on the network show "America's Funniest Home McDonald's also is currently running a commercial in Denver, Las Vegas, Colorado Springs, and Wichita and Topeka, that is based on a YouTube video created by two 18 year-olds from Waukesha, Wis. The teens, Nate Gessner and Greg Calhoun, recorded themselves singing their orders at a McDonald's drive-through and uploaded the prank to YouTube. More than 40,000 viewers later, the creative director for Karsh Hagan, which handles McDonald's advertising in some Midwestern markets, decided to turn Robert Gavin can be reached at rgavinglobe.com.

IBM will offer staff learning accounts' 40l(k)-style plans to help workers pay for desired training By Steve Lohr NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE In today's economy, corporations freely roam the globe for the most efficient, lowest-cost sources of supplies and labor, while American workers are told that the way to compete is constantly to improve their skills with training and education. Paying for it is usually up to beleaguered employees, which only adds to their sense of economic insecurity. IBM is taking a step to address the workers' economic problem a step it hopes other companies will follow and help encourage a change in tax policy. IBM, at a conference in Washington today, will disclose that it plans to offer its US workers special savings accounts for training and education. The "learning accounts" will be modeled on 401(k) retirement accounts.

Workers will put up to $1,000 a year into the accounts, and IBM will contribute 50 cents for every dollar put in by the employee. Under the IBM plan, the employee decides how and when to spend the money, held in an interest-bearing account. When an employee leaves IBM, the individual takes the account along with a 401(k) retirement account. Companies have long paid for employee education and training. Indeed, IBM spends more than $600 million a year on worker education programs.

Yet such spending is typically to upgrade a person's skills for their next job with the company. "This is truly path-breaking," said Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a professor at the Harvard business school. "The significance is that it's controlled by the individual. I'm not aware of any other majir corporation doing that, as opposed to programs that are part some career scheme that the con-panyhasinmind." Besides encouraging other corporations to take a look at such initiatives, IBM plans to talk wifh universities, urging them to consider tuition discounts for workers seeking new skills. A tax change is needed, accond-ing to IBM and some economists, to help workers to invest in their own education in new fields.

Currently, workers can deduct the cost of education and training in their own occupation, as defined by government job classifications, but not in new careers. Samuel J. Palmisano, IBM's chief executive, would also prefer the law to be changed to allow the new accounts to use pretax dollars, as a 401(k) does. Steps like the IBM learning accounts could well help some people make transitions to new jobs, but they will do little for many workers, said Jared Bernstein, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group. "This is a pretty forward-thinking move, but it's wrong to think that you can always train your way out of the box that globalization puts many of these workers in," Bernstein said.

"That larger problem is where the federal government ought to be." NORTHPOINT Continued from Page Dl er nearing completion. The owners are permitted to build a total of about 5 million square feet of various uses on the property, which is adjacent to a nearly complete luxury apartment complex by Arch-stone-Smith and is also near Museum Towers. Development plans include a 10-acre central park, retail stores, office and lab buildings, parking garages, a possible hotel, and about 2,500 residential units. The developers also are committed to building a new Green Line MBTA station. Cambridge North Point, which is made up of about 100 investors, most formerly affiliated with the former real estate firm Spaulding Slye, issued a statement yesterday calling the agreement to sell "a major step forward toward resolving the legal issues between the partners." It will "allow both parties to take advantage of the project's unique attributes at a time when there's a very positive outlook in the real estate market," the company said.

The sellers have not set an asking price, but the property is on the market at a time when prices for commercial developments are skyrocketing, and existing office The proposed Green Line station. A trial is set to begin soon in a Delaware court to resolve some of the many allegations the partners have made against each other. McDonald's finds gold in amateurs' nugget spoof also on the South Boston Waterfront, sold for about $200 million last year. Real estate executives said the bidding on NorthPoint, with twice as much land but on the edge of developed Cambridge, could fall somewhere in between. Thomas said its proximity to Kendall Square, an epicenter of biomedical and life sciences companies, should drive interest in NorthPoint.

"When this was approved, the city contemplated a 20-year development period," she have created a stir throughout the advertising world. Advertisers from Heinz to Dove to Malibu Caribbean Rum have held contests to find user-created videos to use as commercials. "There are countless examples of advertising agencies now looking for ideas from consumers and sometimes using them," said Anita Elberse, an assistant professor of marketing at Harvard Business School. "It generates publicity." The McDonald's commercial, and the buzz surrounding it, shows that the advertising world is embracing the advantages of viral marketing. The McNuggets commercial is the first time that Arnold, which represents McDonald's franchisees in several regions of the country, is using video pulled straight from YouTube.

But it isn't the first example of either the firm, or McDonald's, experimenting with content created and lab space, and land for new facilities, is scarce. "Through our more recent sales activity in Cambridge we're seeing new price points paid for land that can be redeveloped for life sciences use," said Elizabeth Carrillo Thomas, the executive director at Cushman Wakefield. By comparison, the 2 1 acres on Fan Pier in Boston, with about 3 million square feet of buildings permitted, sold two years ago for $115 million. And 23 acres formerly owned by Frank H. McCourt laugh at it.

"It was the pinnacle of this game that we played which was these hip-hop characters who were beat-boxing about McNuggets," Sosa said. But the video became a You-Tube hit, getting tens of thousands viewers. It found its way to Chris Edwards, Arnold's creative director, via an anonymous e-mail. Edwards still doesn't know who sent it, but that didn't matter: he had a campaign to produce pushing McDonald's 10 Extra Value Meals to young New Yorkers, the very audience that responds to YouTube videos. He hunted down Sosa.

"I was like, 'Is this for I didn't know who Arnold was," Sosa said. He knows now, after the deluge of calls he's gotten about the ad, which included an invitation to talk about it on Fox News Channel earlier this month. User-created commercials VIDEO Continuedfrom Page Dl He said the commercial, which has been running on about seven New York TV stations for two weeks, has helped increase sales of McDonald's chicken nugget meals "and the buzz that has been generated has been substantial. I've heard radio station DJs chattering about it. You can't pay for that." Malinsky shot and edited the video, which he said took less than two hours total, while Sosa and the third man performed in it.

The video was conceived when Sosa's co-star walked in on him eating Chicken McNuggets while rehearsing for a gig. They decided to make it a part of their routine and later created the video, which was shot at a McDonald's across from Chicago's Wrigley Field, with the idea that their friends and family could.