Denver

This just in: The PR folks for IKEA just sent out an e-mail blast alerting folks that plans are still on track for a fall 2011 opening of the IKEA store in Centennial.

IKEA 2009 Plan: it will be a while

Back in 2009 I gave a Construction on IKEA update that was a little depressing. And it seems like that still rings true.

From the e-mail this morning:

IKEA announced that contractors have been hired and a site-work permit
is pending for its future Denver-area store. This progress allows for a
Fall 2011 grand opening in Centennial, Colorado

So...it will be no earlier than Fall 2011.

Fall 2011 IKEA Opening in Centennial Colorado

But, it seems that they've hired folks and are getting final permits to get the show on the road...

Saunders Construction as the construction management firm. Other Colorado firms involved with this future IKEA store include: CLC Associates for civil design; Kimley Horn Associates as traffic consultants during the approval process; Ground Engineering providing environmental analysis and geotechnical services; Otten Johnson Robinson Neff & Ragonetti serving as local counsel; real estate brokerage firm Legend Retail Group assisting IKEA in the site selection process; Geothermal Systems of Colorado installing the geothermal component, and Miller Global selling the land. Atlanta-based GreenbergFarrow is architect responsible for store design, site planning and construction documents.

The actual clearing and prep of the site will start "soon" - I'll definitely try to get some photo evidence of the progress. As they say, it's not started until it's actually started. Given the long history of attempts at progress in the state I really hope this is finally a true start but it may not be.

The Photobucket site is a bit of a local Denver phenomenon. Started by Alex Welch who graduated from CSU at about the perfect time to launch a tech startup in Colorado. Photobucket is not nearly as well known among the tech crowd as Flickr and yet Photobucket beats Flickr in a variety of metrics (page visits, for example). Most folks in Denver have some connection to Photobucket through a friend-of-a-friend and people love swapping stories about how great and down-to-earth the guys are regardless of the amazing success of their company.

Slime Sandwich - Denver Game Company

Slime Sandwich is their next venture - an online, social, role playing game that will make money on subscriber fees. I found out about them because they kept coming up on the Colorado PHP News Aggregator that I set up - they're posting lots of jobs with a variety of skills. I created a channel for Slime Sandwich (which requires manual curation, but presents trend data that makes the manual activity worth it).

I look forward to watching the progress of slime sandwich over the next few years. According to a quick search they've got $1 million of seed funding on January 10th, though it's not 100% clear to me what the source of that funding was. They also can probably fund the company for a while based on profits that some of the founders made on previous projects. My guess is that it will take more than $1M to get their game online and start building the community for it so it will be interesting to see how they spend their money and build their business.

You may be wondering what's going on with IKEA in Colorado. I know I am. I was in Los Angeles for Thanksgiving this year and visited an IKEA out there and was reminded how nice it is to have high quality, reasonably priced household items within driving distance.

According to this article in the Denver Business Journal

"This is a very complicated project, and will take some time," said Joseph Roth, spokesman for IKEA Group’s U.S. headquarters near Philadelphia. "There’s still no time frame for groundbreaking or opening, but we are committed to the project and moving forward."

Once a construction timetable is fixed, the store will take 18 months to build, according to Roth.

Where are you going to recycle your computer or other fun metal stuff in Denver?

Atlas Recycling at 1100 Umatilla near Colfax and I-25.