Smartphone Demand Powers Qualcomm Results, Soitec Makes Case for Solar Project, West Wireless Recasts Its Mission, & More San Diego BizTech News

a seat on the institute’s board of directors.

—In a presentation at Connect’s Third Annual La Jolla Research & Innovation Summit, the director of UC San Diego’s San Diego Computer Center said the amount of digital data generated by such instruments as DNA sequencers, cameras, telescopes, and MRIs is now doubling every 18 months. “Digital data is advancing at least as fast, and probably faster, than Moore’s Law,” said Michael Norman, who became the center’s new director in September.

Dow Jones VentureSource released its survey on venture capital activity during the first quarter, showing that VCs invested $6.4 billion into 661 startups nationwide. That’s a 35 percent increase in capital and a 5 percent rise in deals over the same period last year, and the biggest gain among three recent surveys of venture activity. In San Diego, Dow Jones VentureSource showed nearly $214 million was invested in 26 deals during the first three months of this year.

—Japan’s Kyocera International named Yasuhiro Oishi as president of San Diego-based Kyocera Communications, a subsidiary that provides the sales, marketing, customer engineering and service functions for Kyocera- and Sanyo-branded wireless devices in the Americas. Oishi replaces Eiichi Toriyama, who served as KCI’s president since 2008 and accepts a new role as KCI’s chairman.

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.