innovative kiosks to recycle cell phones and other types of consumer electronics, said it won one of the coveted “Best of What’s New” awards given by Popular Science each year.
—Three startup companies have made it to the Dec. 2 finals of the San Diego Venture Group’s 11th annual holiday dinner and “PitchFest” business plan competition. The companies are Aonori Aquafarms, which has developed green technology for sustainable shrimp production; CortiCare, which provides hospitals and clinics with continuous EEG patient monitoring systems; and TakeLessons.com, which has developed a software platform to manage music lessons in over 2,800 cities across the U.S. The venture group will present the winner with a $20,000 check, depending on how the audience casts its ballot.
—In preparation for last week’s Xconomy Forum on Health IT, I put together what was intended to be a definitive list of health IT companies based in the San Diego area. Our event went off without a hitch, thanks to many people who stepped up when I was waylaid by a medical emergency. My personal thanks to Lisa Suennen of the Psilos Group (and who is a San Francisco Xconomist), Xconomy’s Michele Gerus, and to everyone who helped make the forum a success in my absence!
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.
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