Active Network Sets IPO Price Range, MIR3 Expands Platform, Qualcomm Collaborates on $10M Tricorder X Prize, & More San Diego BizTech News

It has taken about 12 years and more than $275 million in venture capital for San Diego’s Active Network to get into the starting gate for an IPO. We have details on that and the rest of San Diego’s tech news.

—San Diego’s Active Network, which provides online registration services for sporting events and other activities, set a price range for its planned IPO at between $16 and $18 a share. The Active Network aims to sell 11 million shares in the offering, with 8.2 million shares offered by the company and 2.8 million from existing investors.

—Bryan Hertz, the CEO of San Diego-based Telcentris and its VoxOx business unit, offered his perspective on Microsoft’s $8.5 billion acquisition of Luxembourg-based Skype Technologies. Hertz told me, “It is entirely possible that Microsoft could continue to operate Skype as an independent division (much like Zappos within Amazon). If they are smart, that’s exactly what they’ll do.”

—San Diego-based MIR3, which offers Web-based technology that enables its customers to issue mass alerts and notifications, says it’s expanding its communications platform to integrate social media with its traditional corporate enterprise customers. MIR3 wants to be able to give its corporate users full control of their communications across any device or social network.

—Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]) said it’s helping the X Prize Foundation set the ground rules for a new $10 million X Prize grand challenge to create a medical “Tricorder X Prize.” By offering a $10 million incentive, the X Prize wants to stimulate the invention of a wireless, portable device that could be used to rapidly diagnose medical maladies and injuries—much like the stage prop used in Star Trek.

—San Diego’s On-Ramp Wireless formed a partnership with Sacramento, CA-based GridSense to combine their technologies in a way that will enable electric utilities to monitor their distribution networks at a lower cost, improve outage restoration, and improve demand-side load management.

—San Diego-based Proximetry, which has been developing software for the smart grid, named Andres Carvello as executive vice president and chief strategy officer. Carvello was previously the chief information officer at Austin Energy.

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.