Post-IPO Active Network Shows Profit, SmartDrive Raises $10M, Human Engines Goes Commercial, & More San Diego BizTech News

only as “a new social/local/mobile application for the global entertainment market. Brian Dear and Dan O’Neill founded the Internet startup.

—Xconomy released its 2011 Guide to Venture Incubators. Each of the 64 listings in the guide includes information on how entrepreneurs can apply, what the programs look like, what companies have graduated, and how much of your company you’ll have to give up to participate.

—Wade noted in his column, World Wide Wade, that the number of venture incubators in the Xconomy Guide has tripled over the past two years. He suggests the proliferation of incubators could exacerbate the problem that incubators were invented to solve in the first place—the difficulty of getting a new company off the ground—by making it harder for individual startups to get noticed.

—San Diego’s Human Engines launched its first commercial product, a system for Android-based mobile devices that organizes the daily flood of e-mail, calendar notices, alerts, text messages, and social media messages. Former Qualcomm managers Baback Elmieh and Rachid El Guerrab founded Human Engines three years ago, and Elmieh told the startup was immediately cash-flow positive and revenue-generating.

—Hookit CEO Scott Tilton tells me in a note that the San Diego social networking company has expanded its “Spots and Sessions” mobile service to include the location of local businesses, such as bike, surf, and skateboard shops. It’s a move that will help tie Hookit.com’s network of more than 700,000 action sports enthusiasts with discounts and promotions—and provide Hookit with new online advertising revenue.

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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.