The Inside Story of SAIC and Network Solutions (a Tale in Two Parts), Rayspan Raises Capital, & Other San Diego BizTech News

It was a light week for technology stories in San Diego last week, as I took time away from Xconomy for a family road trip through the Pacific Northwest. The traffic along Interstate 5 was mild, however, in comparison to the record Internet traffic on Xconomy’s San Diego website for our two-part story about SAIC, Network Solutions, and the rise of the Web. Read on for that and the rest of last week’s news.

—Mike Daniels, a former senior executive at San Diego-based SAIC (NYSE: [[ticker:SAI]]), told me the San Diego research and engineering contractor also known as Science Applications International Corp. probably made five or six offers before it finally acquired Network Solutions of Herndon, VA, for $4.7 million in 1995. In a follow-up Q&A, SAIC founder J. Robert Beyster said that by 2000, the company had realized billions on its investment.

—San Diego’s Rayspan is using $12.5 million in Series B venture funding to advance its work on a smaller, more sensitive, and more versatile antenna for mobile devices. The technology under development at Rayspan is known as MIMO, for multiple-input-multiple-output, and it could pose a threat to rival embedded antenna technology developed by San Diego-based Ethertronics.

—Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]), the San Diego-based wireless chipmaker, and Verizon Wireless said they are forming a joint venture to encourage corporations to use Verizon’s cellular network for more than phone services. Using machine-to-machine (M2M) wireless technology, for example, public utility companies could monitor and interact with circuit breakers, transformers, and other equipment to manage the power grid more efficiently and reliably.

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.