The board of directors of The Ryland Group Inc. declared a first-quarter dividend of $0.12 per share. The dividend will be paid on April 30, 2006 to common stockholders of record on April 15, 2006. Ryland is a national homebuilder and mortgage-finance company operating in 28 markets across the country.

IRIS International, Inc., a producer of urinalysis technology in Chatsworth, reported a 110 percent increase in net earnings for the fourth quarter 2005. It reported earnings of $1.7 million, or $0.10 per share on revenues of $17.2 million. The increase was a result of sales growth of the iQ 200 Automated Urinalysis product line. For the same period in 2004, the company reported earnings were $831,0000, or $0.05 per share on revenues of $12.2 million. For the full year of 2005, earnings increased 169% to $6.1 million, or $0.35 per share on sales of $62.8 million compared to earnings in 2004 of $2.3 million, or $0.14 per share on sales of $43.7 million.

MannKind Corporation will present at the Cowen & Co. 26th Annual Health Care Conference on March 6-9 at the Boston Marriott Copley Place in Boston, Massachusetts. Management for the company, which is developing and commercializing treatments for diabetes and cancer, will speak on Monday, March 6 at 3:10 p.m. A Web cast of the presentation will be available in the Investor Relations section of MannKind’s Web site for two weeks.

Digital Insight Corp., an online banking provider in Calabasas, renewed and extended its agreement with ABN AMRO in the Netherlands, the parent company of Chicago-based LaSalle Bank Corporation, through 2010. The agreement extends Digital Insight services to LaSalle Bank and the continual development of CashPro, an Internet banking system used to manage cash flow under the ABN AMRO trademark. In 2005, CashPro was ranked #1 for cash management Internet applications in the Greenwich Associates Website Benchmarking study. LaSalle Corp. has $114 billion in assets while its parent company, ABN AMRO has a total of over $1 trillion in assets and has locations in over 60 countries.

Valley Economic Development Center, Business Plan Basics 4 p.m. 5 p.m. Valley Economic Development Center, 5121 Van Nuys Blvd., 3rd Floor Contact: (818) 907-9922

Construction is set to begin next week on the second phase of the $90-million Burbank Entertainment Village development. The project, named The Burbank Collection, will include 118 condominiums along with 40,000-square-feet of retail and restaurant space. The project, located on a city block bounded by Magnolia and San Fernando Boulevards and Orange Grove Avenue and First Street, follows the completion of the entertainment village, including a 16-screen AMC theater and 30,000-square-feet of restaurants and retail stores. It was completed by AMC Entertainment Inc. in 2003. The Burbank Collection, developed by Champion Development Group, will also include pedestrian walkways and streetscapes. The project is expected to be completed in spring 2008.

Albert Greene has joined Valley Presbyterian Hospital as President and CEO. Greene most recently served as CEO of Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital, where he returned the facility to profitability within eight months of taking the job and increased the size of the medical staff by 50 percent in two years. He also started HealthCentral.com, a health Web site that he turned into a business with $86 million in annual revenues after 28 months.

Beverly Hills Bancorp Inc. said it plans to restate its full year, 2004 and other quarterly financials as a result of an error in computing net operating losses and the subsequent tax liability. The Calabasas-based bank said it overstated net income for the quarter and year ended Dec. 31, 2004 by about $1.6 million. Assets and stockholders’ equity for the fourth quarter of 2004 as well as the first, second and third quarters of 2005 were overstated as well, the company said. The error resulted from the amount of net operating losses the bank used in computing taxes.

3D Systems Corporation, a provider of 3-D printing, prototyping and manufacturing in Valencia launched a new dental lab system, the InVision Dental Professional. The system was revealed at an exhibition in Chicago last Saturday at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers. 3D Systems will begin shipments of the new system in the second quarter of 2006. The InVision DP is a 3D printer which creates the dental molds used for copings and bridges. Abe Reichental, 3D Systems president and CEO said it can produce castable customized patterns for 150 individual copings in less than six hours. Dental treatment is an $84 billion industry in the United States, according to a recent study at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services and reported on Fortune.com. According to the report, Americans are expected to spend 7% more a year on dental treatment through 2014, totaling $147 billion. Dental labs produce almost 55 million dental prostheses a year. The InVision 3D printer was named one of the most innovative and ground-breaking technologies in the dental industry by the WOW! Issue in the Journal of Dental Technology.

On a computer monitor in a Calabasas office, Dan Clements points to lines of text originating from a hacker chatroom that include credit card numbers and expiration dates, all obtained illegally. With three simple keystrokes, Clements can call up another credit card number onto the screen. And then another. And then another. “We grab those numbers in real time,” said Clements, chief executive officer of Card Cops, a data collection company. “When a merchant runs that number when they get an order and it comes up, the number will be redflagged.” And that is how Clements and Steve Peisner, president of SellitSAFE.com are working together to protect merchants from identity thieves who fraudulently use credit cards to rack up charges that the merchants are responsible for. That merchants must pay chargebacks of up to $25 per fraudulent transaction is an under-reported aspect of identity theft, Peisner said. “There is no financial loss to (the consumer),” Peisner said. “The loss is borne by the merchant.” The Federal Trade Commission reported in January that out of 685,000 consumer complaints filed in 2005 with the agency, 255,000 were related to identity theft. That was an increase of more than 40,000 complaints from 2003. Internet-related complaints overall comprised 46 percent of the total complaints received by the agency for 2005. There is a riddle that Peisner likes to say around the office space shared by Card Cops and SellitSAFE.com: when is a consumer not a consumer? “When he’s a merchant,” Peisner answers. “A business owner who is at home has the same rights as any other consumer. But between 8 and 5, those same rights as a consumer are given away for anyone who shops at their business.” SellitSAFE.com has been in business for one year, slowly growing its base one client at a time through word of mouth and referrals, Peisner said. The “spark” for the company came from knowing that merchants lacked protection as the number of identity theft cases rose, said Peisner, a member of the risk and fraud committee of the Electronic Transactions Association. Card Cops provides the data to SellitSAFE then makes available to the merchant clients who are charged $10 a month and 10 cents per transaction. The nice thing about the service is that it is automated and piggybacks on an existing address verification system a merchant may use, said Card Cops President Michael Brown. But for SellitSAFE.com to work, a few merchants do have to take a financial hit so that it becomes known when a credit card number has been stolen, Brown said. “Where we come in is we can stop those initial hits from happening,” Brown said. Card Cops can come across 5,000 to 10,000 stolen credit card numbers a day from hacker chatrooms, webboards and websites, Clements said. Because so many of the hackers trading or selling the information are in foreign countries, they are beyond the reach of the FBI and U.S. Secret Service and so difficult to shut down, Clements added. But while Peisner cautions that he cannot guarantee that a merchant will not use a fraudulent credit card by checking with SellitSAFE.com, the chances of risking chargebacks fees does decrease. “We don’t make the Internet a safe place to shop,” Peisner said. “We make it a safe place to sell.”