Contrary to what you might expect, the pace of tech news out of San Diego didn’t slow down much before the Thanksgiving Holiday. We still managed to round it all up, though, and our briefing begins here.
—As director of the UC system’s California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CalIT2), Larry Smarr is an Internet pioneer who frequently offers his perspective on the future of IT technologies. Lately, however, Smarr has been providing a glimpse at the future of “quantified health” and digitally enabled genomic medicine. In a Q&A with Smarr, he told me he found he had one chemical marker (out of 60 that he regularly tracks) that was five times higher than the recommended upper limit—triggering a kind of detective story that illustrates the potential revolution in health IT and wireless health.
—In the U.S. Navy’s largest demonstration of alternative fuels, a decommissioned Navy destroyer refitted as a kind of ocean-going test facility completed a 17-hour transit from San Diego to Port Hueneme. The Spruance-class destroyer used a 50-50 mixture of standard Navy diesel fuel and algae-based diesel produced by San Francisco-based Solazyme.
—Mellmo, the four-year-old startup based in Solana Beach, CA, has been moving into overseas markets in Europe and Asia with Roambi, its Web-based business intelligence graphics service. Mellmo co-founder Quinton Alsbury also talked with me about Roambi Flow, a new service that enables corporate customers to wrap text around their Roambi graphics to produce magazine-quality reports for the iPad.
—The case of the 2010 murder of San Diego angel investor and retired life sciences executive John G. Watson came to a close when a San Diego jury convicted Kent Thomas Keigwin of first-degree murder, attempted grand theft of personal property, burglary, and forgery. The prosecutor argued that Keigwin, who was working as a financial advisor, used Watson’s personal information to transfer some $8.9 million from Watson’s accounts.
—San Diego-based Next Autoworks, which was once known as V Vehicle, withdrew its
