San Diego’s Economic Development Leadership Resumes CEO Search, NewBlue Launching Mobile Video Editing Technology, & More San Diego BizTech News

It was an abbreviated week for technology news following the July 4th holiday, so our roundup should be a quick read.

—The president and CEO of the Greater Phoenix Economic Council, Barry Broome, had a change of heart less than two days after he was publicly introduced as the new leader of the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corp. (EDC). Broome decided to stay in Phoenix, telling newspapers there that he was overwhelmed by the hundreds of messages he received from friends and colleagues after his move was announced at a Wednesday news conference in San Diego.

—A San Diego startup, NewBlue, is rolling out Vibop, its video editing technology for mobile users, and also is looking to raise about $1 million in early stage funding from individual investors. Melissa Jordan Grey and Todor Fay, who initially funded NewBlue themselves, introduced their video editing technology for the desktop in 2006. Grey told me in an e-mail over the weekend, “I’m happy to report that Vibop! will be going live next week.”

—ParAccel, the high-performance database systems developer based in Campbell, CA, and San Diego, said it had raised an undisclosed amount of new financing from Amazon and existing investors Menlo Ventures, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Bay Partners, Walden International, Tao Venture Capital Partners, and Silicon Valley Bank.

—Thousands of people who specialize in Geographic Information Systems are expected to attend the Esri International User Conference, which begins today at the San Diego Convention Center. The user conference, hosted by Redlands, CA-based Esri, released a new web service last week called Community Analyst, which enables government agencies, civic organizations, policy makers, and others to access vast amounts of data and instant reports and maps through a cloud-based GIS application.

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.