WiTricity and Qualcomm Add Their Perspectives to Smart Energy Forum, Coming June 8

As the editor of San Diego Xconomy, I’m as thrilled as the next journalist to say I have electrifying news—and this time it’s almost literally true.

In planning the Xconomy forum on smart energy, now just five weeks away, we’ve asked some of San Diego’s leading luminaries in energy innovation to discuss what they’re doing to develop smarter ways of using energy. We’ve recruited strategic thinkers, such as Terry Mohn of Balance Energy, leading visionaries like Calit2 director Larry Smarr, and startup CEOs like Achates Power’s David Johnson, to enlighten us with their ideas and views, as well as their technologies and startup business plans.

Today, I am pleased to report that the closing keynote speaker of the afternoon will be Eric Giler, CEO of Watertown, MA-based WiTricity, who is overseeing the development of technology that transmits electricity without wires. As I said, it’s electrifying. The technology was conceived by MIT assistant professor of physics Marin Soljačić, who won a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 2008 for his work in this field. WiTricity was named the emerging innovative company of 2009 by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council, and it won the audience choice award among startup energy companies in Boston last June at XSITE, the Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entreprneurship. Today, WiTricity is pursuing a host of applications, such as wireless recharging of cell phones, laptops, and other mobile consumer electronics. But another prospective application—recharging electric vehicles—could have major ramifications throughout Southern California.

In addition to WiTricity, we have landed Qualcomm Senior Director of Business Development Manuel Jaime, who will give a case study presentation on technology that Qualcomm is developing to help electric vehicles communicate with the power grid.

As I mentioned last month, when we first announced the Xconomy Forum event on Smart Energy, many of the innovation clusters that already exist in San Diego specialize in technologies that will be needed to help make people smarter about using energy. By providing a glimpse at innovations that lie just over the horizon, the smart energy forum offers an opportunity for people with expertise in IT, wireless communications, data warehousing, and software analytics to understand how and where these new opportunities are emerging.

Our Xconomy Forum is set for the afternoon of June 8 in the Calit2 auditorium at UCSD, and tomorrow is the final day you can buy discounted tickets at the super-saver rate of $75. If the previous Xconomy Forum on San Diego Life Sciences 2030 was any indication, tickets for the 200-seat auditorium will sell out well before the event. Additional information and online registration is available here, and maps and directions to Calit2 can be downloaded here.

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.