If Motorola’s mobile devices spinout establishes its new headquarters in San Diego, as many as 200 new jobs would be created here. That would be good news, of course, for a county where the unemployment rate in August was just reported to be 10.6 percent. We have that and the rest of the BizTech news wrapped up here.
—San Diego is one of three finalists under consideration as a potential headquarters for Motorola Mobility, the Libertyville, IL-based division that Motorola plans to spin out as an independent company early next year. The other two sites are in the San Francisco Bay Area and Austin, TX.
—San Francisco’s Granite Ventures raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding (reported by VentureWire to be several million dollars) for Grid2Home, a smart grid technology startup that moved to San Diego earlier this year from Campbell, CA. The CEO is Rick Kornfeld, a former Qualcomm vice president of engineering.
—Qualcomm said it is renewing its global incentive prize competition for wireless technology startups. The Qualcomm QPrize is offering a total of $750,000 in convertible note financing (meaning the note gets converted to preferred shares of the startup company at their next round of equity financing) to startup companies with the best business plan in North America, Europe, China, South Korea, Israel, and India.
—SG Biofuels, the Encinitas, CA-based developer of Jatropha-based fuels, received $9.4 million in Series A financing from investors that include Flint Hills Resources of