Digital Video Experts React to Google’s WebM, Motorola Out Scouting for Spinoff Headquarters, BakBone Cuts ColdSpark, & More San Diego BizTech News

It might be hard to remember last week’s flood of local high-tech news after enjoying the three-day weekend that usually kicks off the summer vacation season. Lucky we’re here to remember it for you.

—The digital video experts at Qualcomm, Sorenson Media, VMIX, and elsewhere provided their perspective on WebM, an Internet video technology standard that Google is promoting with roughly 40 other companies. Two companies conspicuously missing from the list of WebM supporters are Microsoft and Apple.

—San Diego’s wave war continues: American Wave Machines, the Solana Beach, CA, startup with technology that is making waves (quite literally), says the U.S. Patent Office invalidated all of the patent claims that its cross-town rival, San Diego-based Wave Loch, asserted in a patent infringement suit. But Wave Loch counters that neither the litigation nor the patent review process is complete, and that its patent claims against American Wave Machines are stronger than ever.

—San Diego is on the list of cities that Schaumberg, IL-based Motorola (NYSE: [[ticker:MOT]]) is considering as the possible headquarters for its cell phone spinoff set for next year, along with Chicago, Houston, and California’s Silicon Valley. Motorola co-chief executive (and former Qualcomm COO) Sanjay Jha, who will continue to head the business post-spinoff, told the San Diego Union-Tribune that his family is still living in San Diego.

—Cymer (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CYMI]]), the leading maker of deep-ultraviolet lasers that are used in semiconductor manufacturing, opened a facility in Santa Clara, CA. With the move, San Diego-based Cymer said it could more easily recruit

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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.