Qualcomm Acquires Video Technologies, State Senate Blocks Brown’s Job Package, Wildcat Expands Funding Round, & More San Diego BizTech News

The Labor Day holiday made for a short week of technology news, but we’ve labored to pull it all together for you here.

—Underscoring the growing importance of mobile video, San Diego-based Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]) said it’s acquiring video processing technologies and other assets from Integrated Device Technology (NASDAQ: [[ticker:IDTI]]) of San Jose, CA, for $60 million in cash.

—California Gov. Jerry Brown won support from San Diego innovation leaders last week for a legislative package to raise $1 billion in taxes on out-of-state companies, and to use the proceeds to provide tax breaks for small and innovative businesses.  Local business leaders in the audience included Camille Sobrian Saltman, president and COO of Connect, Ruben Barrales, CEO of the San Diego Chamber of Commerce, and Bill Geppert, interim CEO of the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corp. The California Assembly passed the measure, but the state Senate blocked Brown’s plan late Friday.

—Carlsbad, CA-based ViaSat (NASDAQ: [[ticker:VSAT]]) said the launch of its ViaSat-1 high-capacity Internet satellite has been pushed back another couple of weeks. The ViaSat-1 launch, which originally was set for May, has now been postponed several times. The Ka-band satellite now is set for launch in Mid-October.

—San Diego’s Wildcat Discovery Technologies, founded in 2006 to develop advanced materials for clean-energy technologies, increased its recent financing round from $8.7 million to $11 million, according to a regulatory filing. As we reported in July, Wildcat is using high-throughput screening to identify and develop new materials for batteries, hydrogen storage, and other technology applications. The startup’s investors include CMEA, 5AM Ventures, and the Virgin Green Fund.

—San Diego-based Verimatrix, which provides encrypted software and related technologies that enable pay-TV networks to for transmit their digital TV programming over the Internet, said it has formed a broad partnership with South Korea’s LG Electronics. The new partners said a range of LG “Smart TV” devices will offer Verimatrix’s embedded security technologies. Verimatrix raised $7.5 million from investors earlier this year.

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.