Qualcomm Strikes Deal With China’s Largest Cell Phone Maker, Volcano Moves to Buy Axsun, Life Technologies Buys Visigen, & More San Diego BizTech News

Innovation never sleeps, but the pace of San Diego business and technology news yawned a little over the Christmas and New Year holidays. Still, there were plenty of noteworthy developments to round up for the first Monday of 2009. Oh, and by the way, Happy New Year!The end of December brought news from faraway China that the world’s largest telecom market is starting a long-delayed upgrade to 3G, or third-generation, wireless technologies. That could be good news for San Diego’s Qualcomm (NASDAQ:[[ticker:QCOM]]), which said it signed a licensing agreement with China’s largest cell phone maker, Beijing Tianyu Communications Equipment Co.

Was anyone surprised when Dow Jones VentureSource announced that liquidity events for venture-backed companies fell to their lowest level in five years in 2008? The data shows that only seven venture-backed companies in the entire country completed IPOs, raising a total of $551 million. San Diego’s CardioNet, which raised $54 million in March, was the region’s sole IPO of the year. And for all of Southern California, the data show only 27 buyouts, generating a total of $919 million.

San Diego venture capitalist Kevin Kinsella became “The Big Man in Town,” and left the rest of us feeling like a “Rag Doll,” after becoming a major financial backer of Jersey Boys, the smash Broadway hit. Our account of how it all happened is here.

San Diego’s Volcano (NASDAQ: [[ticker:VOLC]]), which makes vision systems for detecting artery blockages and other problems, says it plans to buy Axun, a privately held laser maker in the Boston area, for $21.5 million.

Christmas came a little early for San Diego’s CalciMedica, which got

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.