San Diego VC Activity Falls 55 Percent, Ford Adopts Focus as EV “Tech Platform,” Verve Raises $3.5M, & More San Diego BizTech News

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Verve Wireless, a mobile advertising platform company based in Encinitas, CA, and Bethesda, MD, has raised $3.5 million of a planned $6 million from investors. Verve previously raised $12 million from BlueRun Ventures and the Associated Press.

—San Diego-based Cymer (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CYMI]]) said that TCZ, its division that has been developing systems used to make advanced flat panel displays, has received a volume order for TCZ’s new Gen 5.5 crystallization system from an unnamed leading Asian flat panel display (FPD) manufacturer. The company says this represents TCZ’s second volume order in 2011 and its fourth tool customer. Cymer said its TCZ-1500B system is used for the production of advanced liquid crystal display and next-generation organic light-emitting diode displays. Cymer told me last year that TCZ would sell its tools at a range of $7 million to $12 million per system.

—The San Diego-based West Wireless Health Institute awarded a $10,000 prize to Steven Palmer, a Rhode Island software developer, for an iPhone app he developed for use in a monthly self-examination for signs of melanoma. Palmer answered a challenge the institute issued six months ago in conjunction with the Veterans Affairs Innovation Initiative (VAi2).

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.