Service-now Hires New CEO, Fallbrook Yanks IPO Filing, VoIP Specialist VoxOx Launches iPhone App, & More San Diego BizTech News

Is software-as-a-service provider Service-now.com be poised to become San Diego’s next big thing? We’ve got that and the rest of the local tech news, and our roundup starts now.

—San Diego-based Service-now.com co-founder Fred Luddy told me he expects the company’s revenue to double every year for the foreseeable future. So it’s hard to underscore the importance of the company’s decision last week to hire enterprise software veteran Frank Slootman as CEO. Service-now provides Web-based IT management services for the 2000 largest companies in the world, and Slootman has experience as a fast-growth CEO at Santa Clara, CA-based Data Domain. Luddy, who was the founding CEO, is moving to chief product officer.

—San Diego’s Fallbrook Technologies, which filed for an IPO in February, 2010, withdrew its registration to go public on Friday. The company, which has developed a continuously variable transmission that offers greater energy efficiency without gears, last updated its IPO filing last August. I confirmed the news, which was on the Renaissance Capital website, with Fallbrook CEO Bill Klehm, who tells me he’s prohibited by SEC rules from commenting on the move, but adds, “stay tuned.”

—We’re watching for more details on the local impact of Nokia’s decision last week to eliminate 7,000 jobs around the world, which amounts to the largest cuts in the wireless company’s history. Nokia is moving some 3,000 of those jobs to Accenture. In the United States, the Finnish wireless giant plans to reduce 500 positions at its sites in San Diego and White Plains, NY. Nokia CEO Stephen Elop is scheduled to be a keynote speaker in San Diego next month at Qualcomm’s Uplinq conference.

—VoxOx, the San Diego startup that provides free communications service based on voice over Internet (VoIP) technology, launched a

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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.