SMALL BUSINESS

Home of the Technopolis: The folks at Accelerate Technology, the Small Business Development Center at UC Irvine, have a new nickname for the region: Orange County Technopolis. The term, says Accelerate’s director Tiffany Haugen, underscores Orange County’s strength in high-innovation sectors--electronics, measuring devices, drugs and medical instruments. In employment, Haugen says, Orange County surpasses the Silicon Valley in all of these except for electronics. Orange County Technopolis, of course, is populated by a lot of small obscure start-ups, some of which are getting help from Accelerate. Among them, as reported in the latest Accelerate newsletter, are Belle-Amie Inc., a developer of non-surgical approach to mastectomy prosthetics; Biognosis, whose product detects e-coli and other bacteria in meat; CADtest, a designer of combined hardware and software solutions for electronics test automation; and Funzone, a paper product maker.