Qualcomm Expands Web Tech, MeLLmo Raises $30M, Bandsintown Acquired by Cellfish, and More San Diego BizTech News

There wasn’t a surfeit of tech news last week, but what we had was meaty. Your Monday tech briefing has arrived.

—Web technology development has become an increasingly important focus at San Diego-based Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]), especially at Qualcomm CDMA Technologies, the chip-design business also known as QCT. As the number of software engineers at QCT outpaces the number of hardware engineers, product management director Sy Choudhury says, “This whole move to Web apps, and programming in Javascript and HTML instead of C++, is a very big trend for the whole industry.”

—MeLLmo, the Del Mar, CA-based provider of Web-based visualization software for the iPhone and iPad, raised $30 million in a venture capital round led by Sequoia Capital. The startup previously raised $20 million from private investors. MeLLmo plans to expand its suburban San Diego headquarters and establish a global presence.

—The Irvine, CA-based Tech Coast Angels have joined with the Menlo Park, CA-based Band of Angels and New York City’s Golden Seeds to create the Angel Syndication Network, a way of spotlighting angel-funded startups in each region for individual investors in other cities. Richard Sudek, chairman of the Tech Coast Angels, says several additional angel groups are in the process of joining the new Angel Syndication Network, including Seattle’s Alliance of Angels and the Pasadena Angels near Los Angeles.

—Qualcomm has combined its proprietary Femtocell modem chipset with Wi-Fi and Ethernet equipment (used to set up wireless local area networks) made by Atheros, the San Jose-based data communications company that Qualcomm acquired earlier this year. Adding Qualcomm’s femtocell to the Wi-Fi box expands the capabilities of wireless networks.

—New York-based Cellfish, a mobile and social applications publisher, acquired San Diego’s Bandsintown, the live concert tracking service and app for discovering new touring artists. Bandsintown, which was launched by Todd Cronin in Somerville, MA, before moving to San Diego, helps 3.4 million music fans track their favorite artists on Facebook. (Wade profiled the company here.) Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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. View all posts by Bruce V. Bigelow