Wireless Devices to Double by 2020, Overland Set for Turnaround, Ford Demos Wireless Health, & More San Diego BizTech News

Mobile technologies were the topic of the week as the wireless industry’s big enterprise & applications conference came to town. But we also had some interesting economic new, and our Xconomy week in review begins now.

—The number of wireless-connected devices around the world will double by 2010, from roughly 12 billion to about 24 billion, according to a study released by the London-based GSMA industry group on the first day of the CTIA Enterprise & Applications Conference in San Diego. About half of the 24 million devices are expected to be machine-to-machine connections, with personal mobile devices making up the other 12 billion.

—A TechCrunch report that Hewlett-Packard was laying off “around 500” employees and rolling up its entire San Diego Software unit set off a scramble last week among local media, which knocked down much of the report. Mike Freeman of The San Diego Union-Tribune reported that HP is eliminating about 50 jobs at its suburban campus related to help desk and analytics products, which came from HP’s $425 million acquisition of Peregrine Systems in 2005.

—The Ford Motor Co. demonstrated a voice-activated system that could someday help motorists monitor their own health and chronic illnesses on the road. Ford’s prototype uses voice-recognition software to help diabetic motorists who use wireless glucose measurement technology to monitor their blood glucose while driving. K. Venkatesh Prasad, a senior technical leader at Ford Research & Innovation, told the Wireless Health 2011 technical conference that Ford’s in-car health and wellness technology is part of a broader effort to expand the capabilities of Ford’s SYNC in-car connectivity system.

—Local technology industries have had a disproportionate effect in boosting San Diego’s regional economy, according to a study from the National University System Institute for Policy Research. Counting direct, indirect, and induced employment, the study found that San Diego’s 363,000 technology-dependant jobs represent more than 29 percent of all jobs in

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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.