With online video consuming more and more bandwidth, ViaSat’s decision to design its own high-capacity satellite for Internet service is looking more and more prescient. We’re beaming that and the rest of the news to you now, so take off your foil hats and tune in.
—Frank Quattrone, a former investment banker and controversial figure following the dot-com boom, told a San Diego Venture Group gathering that the financial industry has grown too large, too over-extended, and strayed too far from its traditional focus on lending, trading, and principal activities. Quattrone spoke nostalgically about the tech IPOs he handled before Netscape’s 1995 IPO, which he also handled. That transaction, triggered a casino mentality of ever-bigger deals, he said.
—Merger rumors about San Diego’s Leap Wireless (NASDAQ: [[ticker:LEAP]]) are resurgent, following a Wall Street Journal report last week that Leap has hired investment bankers to advise the company on its strategic options. Leap, which provides flat-rate phone service through its Cricket operating company, has previously explored merger opportunities, primarily with Dallas-based MetroPCS. In a report Saturday, the San Diego Union-Tribune cast doubt on the latest speculation, citing a JP Morgan Chase analyst.
—Plans by Carlsbad, CA-based ViaSat (NASDAQ: [[ticker:VSAT]]) to launch its own satellite to provide high-capacity Internet service were helped significantly by the company’s $568-million acquisition of
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.
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