San Diego Tech Roundup: Flud, Verve, and a “Swiss Cheese” Job Market

stage later this week at “The Rock Stars of Innovation Summit.” Quantified health might be described as “big data meets big biology.” As director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, Smarr understands the computational requirements needed to use genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics to track patient health in unprecedented detail.

—Avalon Ventures founder Kevin Kinsella says Zynga already was cash-flow positive by the time the game developer closed its Series A venture round. Kinsella offered his thoughts about Zynga and other investment gems during a gathering of current and former MIT students last week at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. Avalon partner Rich Levandov led the firm’s $5.3 million investment in Zynga, which yielded about $340 million in Zynga’s December IPO.

—Verve Wireless has found plenty of business in developing a Web-based platform that regional newspaper publishers and broadcasters can use to provide news and serve ads to their customers’ mobile devices. Now the startup, which is based in Encinitas, CA, and Washington DC, is helping educate its media customers to understand the paradoxical market. Why paradoxical? Verve’s chief marketing officer says people spend 23 percent of their time on mobile devices, yet mobile gets only about 1 percent of total spending on media advertising.

—Flud co-founder and CEO Bobby Ghoshal talked with Sarah about the app developer’s “do-over.” Flud, which is based in San Diego and Detroit, pulled its news aggregating app for Android after a month and a half of user complaints and critical reviews. After reaching out to Google, Ghoshal said Flud overhauled its Android app.

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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.