SubAir grows, makes TurfBreeze here

SubAir got bigger since we last checked in with the company during Masters Week last year. The Graniteville company makes machines that make it easier for golf course superintendents to control turf growing conditions -- think giant underground hair dryer.

In August, they started adding onto their building, and now they are starting to ship products made through that expansion. They have a new metal fabrication division.

Call it insourcing.

Instead of an outside company doing the welding and shaping and coating of all the parts for the portable aeration -- think giant fan drying out the putting green -- they do it in Graniteville.

They even hired the guy who owned the shop in Connecticut to head up the new division.

It cost them about $300,000 for the expansion, not including the cost of moving all the metal fabrication down from the Northeast.

The first completely in-shop made TurfBreeze fans were shipped March 24 to Denton Country Club in Texas.

WAITING ON UBS: We're waiting to hear whether the UBS Financial Services office in Augusta (in Surrey Center) will become part of Stifel Financial Corp. Maybe they already know, but we media types have to wait on "officials" to say so.

Two weeks ago, Stifel signed an agreement with UBS to take 55 of UBS' offices across the country.

The "official" I spoke with said it will be another two or three weeks before they decide which 55 will be shifted to the new owners.

Stifel is buying them because they provide a strategic fit. The St. Louis-based company has only 203 offices, so this is a big growth move.

HOSPITAL COMMAND: Augusta's homegrown natural disaster management software company has branched into hospitals.

ESi has a new version of its Web-based crisis communications software just for hospitals. The company has been making a living off selling software to government entities and foreign nations to handle things like hurricanes and earthquakes.

What they did is tweak it to comply with Hospital Incident Command System standards. This gets hospitals ready to deal with an influx of people from a hurricane or earthquake.

Having a hard time conceptualizing what this software looks like? Think dozens of little chat rooms.

What the ESi folks have told me many times is the program also gets used for day-to-day operations.

SPEAR PHISHING: The next Internet jargon word has been invented: spear phishing.

It comes from the spamometer report from Ipswitch Messaging, which has an office on Broad Street. They measured the amount of spam e-mail that crawled through the Internet for the first three months of the year.

Spammers are trying to exploit the financial crisis with the messages on job opportunities and instant loans. The spamometer said these kinds of messages have tripled since the first quarter of 2008.

The spear phishing is happening right now. Tailored targeting of tax time right into your inbox where the bad guys are trying to get you to think they're the IRS and trick you into giving them all of your personal identification information.

Common sense is the best spam protection.

If the IRS wants you, they won't send an e-mail, they'll send the auditors in suits.

Reach Tim Rausch at (706) 823-3352 or timothy.rausch@augustachronicle.com.