venture capital investments in San Diego have continued to decline over the past three years.
—Carlsbad, CA-based ViaSat (NASDAQ: [[ticker:VSAT]]) said its ViaSat-1 satellite, designed to provide high-capacity Internet service, is ready for flight, following an extensive independent review of its solar array design. The expected July launch of ViaSat’s Ka-band satellite was delayed after a solar array onboard the Telstar 14R communications satellite failed to fully deploy following its launch in May. The Telstar satellite and ViaSat-1 were both built by Space Systems/Loral and use many of the same solar array elements. ViaSat-1 is now set for a September launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
—San Diego-based Ormet Circuits has raised more than $1.7 million from investors to build out its proprietary technology for printing circuit patterns on plastic, paper, and other materials. The ink is cured to become a fused metal network that alloys itself to conventional circuit materials, and has high electrical conductivity.
—EarthRisk Technologies, a San Diego company developing software analytics and visualization technologies, said its new HeatRisk program can be used to forecast heat waves and other extreme weather events up to 40 days before they occur. Targeting utilities, energy companies, and other customers, EarthRisk says its technology offers a way to drastically reduce the costs of summer energy resource planning.
—San Diego-based Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]), the world’s biggest maker of wireless chipsets, appointed Kanwalinder Singh to head business development in new markets for Qualcomm CDMA Technologies (QCT). The company said Singh will focus on growing Qualcomm’s chipset business in smart energy, smart automobile, and other machine-to-machine (M2M) markets.
