Wireless Medicine Gets $45M Booster Shot, Arena’s Weight-Loss Trial Underwhelms Wall Street, Venter’s Synthetic Genomics About to Ramp Up, & Other San Diego BizTech News

in coming months. The startup packages two small video cameras with a wireless gateway, enabling secure, real-time Internet video viewing of everything from family birthday parties to remote business operations.

When Qualcomm (NYSE: [[ticker: QCOM]]) acquired Advanced Micro Devices’s (NYSE: [[ticker:AMD]]) graphics chip division in January, the San Diego wireless giant also acquired Finland’s Bitboys. The company has an amazing and turbulent past, as explained by Juha-Pekka Tikka, our Stanford innovation journalism fellow.

Sweden’s Innovationsbro (Innovation Bridge), a business networking organization, said it is establishing its first overseas office in San Diego to help Swedish technology companies enter international markets.

Juha-Pekka profiled Tyson McDowell, the 27-year-old CEO and co-founder of Benchmark Revenue Management, a San Diego software developer that helps hospitals handle billing and collection issues more efficiently. McDowell helped invent the PandaCam at the San Diego Zoo and flies an ex-Soviet fighter jet in his spare time.

San Diego’s Veoh, which is seeking online video users in a market dominated by YouTube and Hulu, replaced its chief executive and cut 25 employees, or 36 percent of its work force. Founder and former CEO Dmitry Shapiro replaced Steve Mitgang, who joined the venture-backed company from Yahoo about two years ago.

A couple of venture deals showed San Diego’s life sciences sector still has a pulse. Ambrx, which is developing breakthrough therapeutics with genetically-engineered drugs, raised $10 million, and Traversa Therapeutics, which is developing RNAi-based treatments for cancer, raised $5 million from Newton Centre, MA-based Morningside Venture Investments, San Diego’s Mesa Verde Venture Partners, and existing investors.

Cambridge, MA-based Genzyme, which operates two facilities in San Diego, reported that its gene therapy for people with peripheral artery disease failed in a clinical trial to help them regain some mobility. The treatment was supposed to help stimulate the growth of new blood vessels around clogged arteries in the legs.

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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.