San Diego Tech Roundup: Qualcomm, TechStars, Apps Challenge & More

raised $18 billion nationwide from their limited partners, which include university endowments and pension funds. It’s not sustainable, and Heesen says, VCs need to raise more capital.

—Johnson & Johnson’s research and development center in San Diego, now known as Janssen Healthcare Innovation, announced an incentive prize challenge with awards totaling $250,000 for technology solutions that improve care for patients who’ve just been discharged from a hospital. The idea is to invent a cross-platform tracking system that shares information with a variety of care-givers.

—The City of San Diego is coordinating an “apps challenge” that offers a total of $50,000 in incentive prizes for code writers. In posing the challenge, the city has assembled data on transit schedules, construction permits, crime statistics, energy usage, ocean temperatures, and 370 other datasets from dozens of city departments, as well as San Diego Gas & Electric, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and the San Diego Metropolitan Transit System. The grand prize for best overall app is $15,000. There also is a $5,000 prize for best City of San Diego app and $5,000 for best SDG&E energy app. More info is here.

—San Diego-based Proximetry, which provides Smart Grid network management technology, said it is extending its collaboration with Cisco (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CSCO]]), the networking giant based in San Jose, CA. Through Cisco’s Connected Grid ecosystem, Proximetry said it has been working with Cisco and Itron (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ITRI]]), the smart grid equipment maker in Liberty Lake, WA, to develop network management systems that meet electric utility needs to monitor, control and manage a vast and disparate set of loosely coupled systems.

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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.