Legend 3D Lays Off 15 Percent, Avalon Ventures Holds 6.1 Percent of Zynga, SweetLabs Launches App Platform for PCs, & More San Diego BizTech News

There was no shortage of news from San Diego’s high-tech business front last week. If you’ve been on a holiday the past few days, here’s your chance to get up to speed.

—Legend 3D, the San Diego-based 3D film conversion specialist, laid off 15 percent of its local workforce Friday, according to a note I received over the holiday on behalf of the company and its founder and president, Barry Sandrew. As I reported last year, Legend 3D, has been on a fast-growth curve—increasing its local workforce to almost 400 five months ago. In the note, a spokeswoman for the company says working with Hollywood requires constant staff shifting and flexibility. Legend 3D attributes the local cuts to “the traditional summer season slow period, after having ramped and completed a round of large, successful blockbuster film projects.” There was no mention of Legend 3D’s workforce in Patna, India; I’ll follow this story with an update if I can gather more details.

—Zynga, the San Francisco-based maker of such popular Facebook games as Farmville and Mafia Wars, registered with the SEC for an initial public offering on Friday, saying it hopes to raise $1 billion. While that would normally be a more appropriate story for Xconomy San Francisco than here, Zynga’s IPO filing shows that San Diego’s Avalon Ventures holds a 6.1 percent stake in the company. Avalon founder Kevin Kinsella told me in September that Avalon’s investment in Zynga could rank as the firm’s single most successful deal. In November, Xconomy’s Bob Buderi talked about Zynga with Avalon’s Boston-based partner, Rich Levandov, who made the deal.

—San Diego-based SweetLabs, which was previously known as OpenCandy, launched a beta version of Pokki, a new platform the startup developed to help bring the convenience and ease of mobile apps to desktop PC users. SweetLabs also made its Pokki software developers’ kit widely available to third-party software developers. A spokeswoman for SweetLabs tells me that German software developer Uwe Keim created the first third-party Pokki app less than 24 hours later. It’s a Zeta-Uploader that allows users to send large files over email.

—Pentwater Capital Management, which owns about 3 percent of San Diego’s Leap Wireless, has asked a Delaware court for an order that would put three of its candidates up for election to

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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.