Sony Electronics Outlines its 3D Strategy, Fallbrook Files For IPO, Electronics Recycler EcoATM Raises Venture Round, & More San Diego BizTech News

It was a great week for innovation in San Diego, with Fallbrook Technologies filing for an IPO and Sony Electronics previewing its 3D strategy (along with some new products) after opening the doors of its new $160-million North American headquarters.

—Sony Electronics showed off its new 11-story North American headquarters building in San Diego during an open house that included a press briefing and demonstrations of the new Sony Dash, a personal Internet appliance, and other consumer electronics products. Sony also plans to make a big marketing push for 3D television and related technologies later this year.

—San Diego’s Fallbrook Technologies intends to raise $50 million through an initial public offering, according to a regulatory filing. Fallbrook is a cleantech venture developing a proprietary transmission that offers improved efficiency for a variety of vehicles.

—Tao Venture Partners of San Diego is leading the first round of institutional investment in ecoATM, a local startup that has developed an automated kiosk for recycling consumer electronics. Coinstar founder Jens Molbak also joined in the round, the value of which was undisclosed, and has joined ecoATM’s board. Co-founder Mark Bowles also told us why he thinks ecoATM is a hot startup deal.

—San Diego-based Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]) revealed plans to roll out a variety of new applications that enable certain features of its Flo-TV technology to run on netbooks equipped with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor. Qualcomm previewed its concept last week in Barcelona at the industry’s Mobile World Congress.

—San Diego telecom startup TelCentris announced the debut of a universal translator service for e-mail, text messaging, Internet chat, and certain social networking messages. The translation service has been integrated into its VoxOx VoIP messaging software.

—Cleantech investor Jim McDermott, a co-founder of U.S. Renewables Group, told a San Diego audience that a lot of innovation remains to be done in wind power technologies.

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.