San Diego Tech Roundup: Givit, ID Analytics, and Rain on the Parade

—A steady rain is lingering this morning from the monster storm that blew through San Diego over the weekend. Also lingering is what you might call my “curiosity of the week:” Don Casey resigned as CEO of the San Diego-based West Wireless Health Institute, just two years after he was lured from Johnson & Johnson’s Comprehensive Care group to lead the non-profit institute. Casey, who will retain his seat on the institute’s board, expects to accept a position with a major health care company, according to a statement. I wonder if the institute is still working to identify its role? I hope to get a chance to provide more insight about what’s happening there.

—Timing is everything: The private online video sharing service that San Diego’s Givit unveiled in November officially started on Thursday—with an invitation to former FlipShare customers to move their videos over to Givit. FlipShare was the business that Cisco created from its $590 million purchase of Pure Digital Technologies, and then killed last year as the quality of video-enabled smartphones made a standalone camera increasingly irrelevant. Givit was created as a new business by San Diego-based VMIX. In an e-mail over the weekend, VMIX Founder and CEO Greg Kostello said user numbers are not yet available, “but the response has been really amazing.”

—As part of its plan to acquire San Diego’s ID Analytics, Tempe, AZ-based LifeLock raised $100 million from venture investors and another $70 million in debt funding. LifeLock CEO Todd Davis said the database that ID Analytics created has been an important base for the identity theft protection services that LifeLock provides to more than 2 million subscribers. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but I hope to talk soon with ID Analytics CEO Bruce Hansen.

—Connect, the San Diego nonprofit established to support technology and entrepreneurship, has arranged an opportunity for half a dozen San Diego Internet startups to make presentations to

Pages: Page 1, Page 2

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.