Venture Financing Looking Up, Sorenson Media Launches Online Video Technology, Avalon Ventures Buys Copley Building, & More San Diego BizTech News

targeting a market now dominated by Brightcove of Cambridge, MA.

Larry Smarr, an Internet pioneer who is founding director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, is now a pioneer in health IT. By keeping detailed records about his own personal health, Smarr is using the data to adjust his behavior, lower his caloric intake, and fine-tune his wellness.

—The Gary and Mary West Foundation, the namesake family foundation that launched San Diego’s West Wireless Health Institute, increased its philanthropic support by donating another $20 million to the non-profit center for mobile health research and development. No wonder the institute is named for them—the donation brings their total contributions to $65 million for the institute.

—About 200 investors and others registered for the annual Wireless-Life Sciences Investor Meeting, which was held last week in La Jolla. That’s almost twice as many as attended last year, and an auspicious sign that interest in the emerging industry is increasing.

—The CEO of Norway’s Think said the company intends to ship 500 of its long-range electric cars to the U.S. before the end of this year. Think wants to test its cars in five or six markets, and one of them could be San Diego.

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.