San Diego Tech Roundup: Ecor, Qualcomm Life, Applied Proteomics

Get your week started with our San Diego technology news briefing.

—The Qualcomm Life Fund made a strategic investment in San Antonio, TX-based AirStrip Technologies, solidifying their alliance to develop technology for wireless home monitoring of patients with congestive heart failure. AirStrip did not disclose the size of Qualcomm’s investment.  AirStrip already has an FDA-approved app that enables doctors to get the electrocardiograph (ECG) of hospitalized patients on their iPhone and iPad. Qualcomm and AirStrip unveiled plans to integrate the AirStrip mobile patient monitoring technology with the Qualcomm 2net Platform in December.

—Robert Noble, the sustainable design architect (and San Diego Xconomist) told me he is installing manufacturing equipment in a renovated distribution warehouse where Noble Environmental Technologies plans to produce a green replacement for medium density fiberboard (MDF). The factory and design lab in downtown San Diego’s Barrio Logan neighborhood will showcase the production and uses for the company’s “Ecor” brand structural panels.

—Danny Hillis, who gained recognition as the co-founder of Thinking Machines and at Disney Imagineering, was instrumental in developing the computational capabilities of Applied Proteomics, a molecular diagnostics company that moved to San Diego last year from Los Angeles. Hillis co-founded Applied Proteomics with USC cancer specialist David Agus to pioneer technology capable of analyzing all of the proteins circulating in a drop of human blood. The company, which has raised a total of $26.5 million, last week named biomedical diagnostics veteran Peter Klemm as CEO.

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.