it has delivered the first set of its innovative Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS) to the U.S. Navy for installation aboard the new aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford. The ship, which is under construction by Huntington Ingalls Industries in Newport News, VA, will be the first to use electromagnetic systems to launch and recover aircraft.
—Almost four weeks after a massive security breach at its San Diego data center, Japan’s Sony Corp. says it has begun restoring service for its PlayStation and Qriocity networks in North America, Europe, the Middle East, Australia, and New Zealand. Sony said confidential information for roughly 100 million customer accounts was compromised in a hacker attack that was discovered April 19.
—San Diego Gas & Electric said it added two more 25-year contracts with French-based Soitec that will supply a total of 125 megawatts from solar energy sites using Soitec’s Concentrix CPV (Concentrating Photo-Voltaic) solar panel modules. The two deals follow three previous contracts for 30 megawatts of CPV-generated solar power, with all five projects to be developed near SDG&E substations in San Diego County.
—San Diego’s Chumby Industries has raised half of a planned $3 million financing round, according to a regulatory filing last week. The company makes a compact device that can act like a clock radio, but which also uses a wireless Internet connection to fetch information from the Web, whether it’s music, box score, or animations.
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.
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