The City of Santa Clarita had an open space dedication March 12 at Golden Valley Ranch to celebrate acquiring more than 900 acres of open space, the largest amount the City has ever acquired. The 900-plus acres are located south of Via Princessa near the Golden Valley Ranch development. The acquisition was made through a partnership with the City of Santa Clarita, Pardee Homes and PacSun LLC. Now that the city has the land it will be preserved in perpetuity. “The City is very pleased with this partnership that brings in 900-plus of acreage that is now in public ownership,” Mayor Bob Kellar stated. “We are very appreciative of the partnership among the City and these developers.”

Charter Communications Inc. will sell information about the viewing preferences of its cable TV customers, the company announced. Cities served by Charter include Burbank and Glendale. Charter will provide to Nielsen Co. data from subscribers’ digital set-top boxes to give advertisers and TV programmers a clearer picture of the channels and commercials people are watching, the Los Angeles Times reported. No identifying information will be included in the data to protect the privacy of the customers, the Times quoted Jim Heneghan, senior vice president for ad sales for Charter, which is based in St. Louis. “There will be no way to trace the information back to any household,” Heneghan said in a phone interview with the Times. “It will go through our screeners so there is no personally identifiable information. All that they will have is the aggregated anonymous data.”

NEW YORK – Walt Disney Co. CEO Robert Iger detailed several ways that Disney hopes to benefit from high-tech – but one of them isn’t buying AOL, which many expect to be for sale soon. Iger said the company was still looking for new ways to adapt as people make greater use of technology to get entertainment, such as using searches on Google Inc. or downloading movies and TV shows from Apple Inc.’s iTunes service. Speaking to a media conference in New York hosted by The McGraw-Hill Cos., which owns Business Week magazine and Standard & Poor’s, he left open the possibility of making acquisitions. But he ruled out Time Warner Inc.’s AOL as a purchase target. Read the full story at http://www.dailynews.com/ci_8551070

The last book in the Harry Potter series will be made into two movies, the Los Angeles Times reported. Executives with Warner Bros. are expected to discuss their plans for “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” on March 13 at ShoWest, the movie exhibitors trade show and convention taking place in Las Vegas, the Times said. The two parts of “Deathly Hallows” will be filmed concurrently and released in theaters in November 2010 and May 2011, the Times said. The “Potter” films have pulled in $4.5 billion at the box office worldwide.

A threat to blow up the Van Nuys Airport led federal authorities to arrest a Massachusetts man. Michael Smeagal allegedly sent a hand-written letter containing a bomb threat to the Valley airfield and other airports, CBS2 reported at its website. “We can confirm that we received a letter allegedly from Mr. Smeagal at Van Nuys Airport,” L.A. World Airports Police Chief George Centeno was quoted by CBS2. “We are cooperating with federal authorities in their investigation.” The letter sent to the Van Nuys Airport also mentioned actress Jodie Foster, to whom Smeagal has sent dozens of letters and packages before finally promising to stop, CBS2 reported. The FBI said Smeagal targeted airports because he believed they were connected to the Screen Actors Guild, which he feels had been making disparaging remarks about Foster, the station said.

A survey of chief financial officers found that a majority believe the American economy is in a recession that will last into 2009. Reuters reported that 54 percent of the CFOs said the country is in a recession, and another 24 percent said there is the likelihood of one starting later this year, according to the survey completed March 7 by Duke University/CFO Magazine. The survey included responses from 1,073 CFOs, including 475 based in the United States, Reuters said. Campbell Harvey, a Duke professor and founding director of the survey said that 90 percent of the CFOs do believe the economy will turn the corner in 2008, Reuters reported. “Indeed, many of them believe it will be late 2009 before a recovery takes hold,” Reuters quoted Harvey.

Chris Kimball has been named the seventh president of California Lutheran University. He will begin his duties April 1. Kimball replaces the Rev. Dr. Howard Wennes, who has served as Interim President since July. Thousand Oaks resident Kimball joined the CLU administrative team as Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs in 2006, after serving as Provost and Dean of the Faculty at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, where he served on the faculty and held a variety of administrative positions since 1991. During Kimball’s tenure at CLU, he has been a member of the History Department faculty. An alumnus of McGill University in Montreal, Kimball received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. “Chris is a man of integrity and a man of action,” said Bill Kane, chair of the Board of Regents. “With his distinguished career as a leader and scholar and his passion for Lutheran higher education, he embodies the academic excellence of CLU and is uniquely qualified for the tasks ahead.”

Wi-Fi network provider Xirrus Inc. received $26 million in financing, the company has announced. The money will go toward customer acquisition and international expansion of the Westlake Village-based company. The funding round was led by Canaan Partners with additional participation of previous investors U.S. Venture Partners, August Capital, QuestMark Partners and Dirk Gates, president and chief executive officer of Xirrus. Eric Young, a general partner with Canaan Partners, will join the Xirrus Board of Directors.

Technicolor Digital Cinema signed on two more theaters at which it will install its digital cinema projection systems. The systems installed at the Scotiabank Theatre in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and the Cinema At The Renaissance 13-plex in Sturtevant, Wis. give the capability to show 3-D feature films and live events on the big screen. The Scotiabank Theatre is the flagship of the Cineplex Entertainment chain. The Wisconsin theater is owned by Marcus Theatres, a division of The Marcus Corporation, the seventh largest motion picture exhibitor in the U.S. The installation features an integrated networked system with a satellite system for content delivery and software enabling exhibitors to control theatre automation and manage trailers, advertisements, and features with simple drag-and-drop technology.

Hollywood took a big step today toward offering more movies in 3-D, announcing deals to convert as many as 10,000 more theater screens for the digital technology needed to accommodate the resurgent, eye-popping format. Access Integrated Technologies Inc. said it had reached agreements with four studios — Disney, News Corp.’s 20th Century Fox, Viacom Inc.’s Paramount, and Universal Pictures, which is owned by General Electric Co.’s NBC Universal — to finance and equip the screens in the U.S. and Canada during the next three years. The conversion will cost as much as $700 million, said Bud Mayo, chief executive of Access Integrated Technologies, which completed a first tranche of 3,700 digital conversions in October. For the full story visit http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-3d12mar12,1,3985997.story