SD BizTech Roundup: Qualcomm, Razer, Avalon’s Zynga Windfall, & More

Been on vacation? Get back up to speed with our end-of-the-holidays roundup of San Diego tech news.

—Almost half of the top 50 venture-backed startups had at least one founder who was an immigrant, according to a study from the National Foundation for American Policy. Such findings led author Stuart Anderson, who also is executive director of the Virginia-based foundation, to conclude, “America gains a great deal when we’re open to talent, wherever that talent was born.”

—The FCC approved Qualcomm’s sale of some spectrum rights to AT&T for nearly $1.93 billion. Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]) had spent $683 million acquiring the lower 700-megahertz band and UHF Channels 55 and 56 for its FLO-TV network for transmitting television programming to mobile devices. As we recently reported, Toronto’s QuickPlay Media acquired the network operation center that Qualcomm built in San Diego for its FLO-TV operations. Qualcomm said the FCC approved the spectrum sale after AT&T abandoned its proposed $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile. AT&T plans to use the additional spectrum to improve its network capacity as it rolls out its 4G wireless network.

—In a separate announcement, Qualcomm disclosed that founding CEO Irwin Jacobs plans to retire from the company board at its annual meeting on March 6. The 78-year-old Jacobs will officially become Qualcomm’s founding chairman and CEO emeritus.

—Razer, the Carlsbad, CA-based maker of computer and video gaming peripherals, said it is raising $50 million in a Series A venture round led by the IDG-Accel China Capital Fund, a global investment fund established by IDG and Accel Partners. The 12-year-old startup’s funding previously came from

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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.