Qualcomm Ends Direct Flo TV Service, Chumby Gets New CEO and $3M in Venture Funding, Equifax Acquires Anakam, & More San Diego BizTech News

We had a lot of wireless news pile up in San Diego last week. Good thing we had the bandwidth here at Xconomy to bring it all together for you here.

—Aneesh Chopra, the first federal chief technology officer of the United States, offered numerous examples of how the Obama Administration is opening government data to entrepreneurial uses when he spoke in San Francisco last week at the “DC to VC” summit on healthcare IT. The nation’s CTO also gave an interview to Xconomy San Francisco Editor Wade Roush, who asked him to explain what constitutes “meaningful use” for electronic medical records, among other things.

—San Diego-based Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]) is joining forces with a Mexican cell phone company and “Clinica 27,” a public health clinic in Tijuana, to test wireless technology designed to keep better track of diabetes patients. The 10-month trial, set to begin this month, will involve 360 diabetics in eastern Tijuana. More than 16,000 patients who use Clinica 27 have been been diagnosed with diabetes.

—Verve Wireless co-founder Tom Kenney had been overseeing Nokia’s investments in mobile Internet technologies when he saw an opportunity about five years ago to start Verve and create a mobile platform for local news and other content. Kenney said he was just seeing how local advertisers followed consumers-and that consumers followed local content.

—Qualcomm is ending its Flo TV direct consumer mobile television service to new customers, and will stop broadcasting to its subscribers by mid-June 2011. The San Diego wireless giant said it also has stopped selling its Qualcomm pocket-sized personal TV.

—Chumby Industries has a new CEO, Derrick Oien, who replaced

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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.