Qualcomm Rides Wave of 3G Growth, Dissident Shareholder Emerges at Leap, UCSD’s Fowler Plumbs the Power of Social Networks, & More San Diego BizTech News

be built near El Centro, CA, will be the first customer for the biggest solar panel factory to be built in San Diego. As part of its deal with Tenaska Solar Ventures, SDG&E pushed for the company supplying the concentrating solar panels to build its factory in the San Diego region.

—San Diego-based Grid2Home, which develops software for the smart grid raised almost $2.6 million of a planned $3.1 million in equity investments. Grid2Home’s software provides two-way data communications from a meter to “smart” household appliances and electric vehicles.

—Roth Capital Partners‘ 23rd annual OC Growth Stock Conference begins today in Dana Point, CA, with scheduled presentations over the next three days by more than 430 small-cap public companies—including 100 based in China. That makes this Roth’s biggest conference ever. The San Diego-based companies scheduled to make investor presentations include Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]), Mad Catz (AMEX: [[ticker:MCZ]]), MaxLinear (NYSE: [[MXL:]]), Maxwell Technologies (NASDAQ: [[MXWL:]]), Mitek Systems (NASDAQ: [[ticker:MITK.OB]]), Overland Storage (NASDAQ: [[ticker:OVRL]]), LRAD (NASDAQ: [[ticker:LRAD]]), and Pure Bioscience (NASDAQ: [[ticker:PURE]]).

—San Diego’s Leap Wireless (NASDAQ: [[ticker:LEAP]]), a low-cost wireless service provider that spun out of Qualcomm in 1998, is coming under pressure from a dissident shareholder, Chicago-based Pentwater Capital Management. Pentwater, which nominated three of its own candidates for Leap’s board of directors, claims that Leap has made a series of poor strategic decisions in recent years. Pentwater owns almost 5 percent of Leap shares.

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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.