San Diego BizTech Roundup: Independa, Zui.com, Bandsintown, and More

It was a light week for tech news in San Diego. Our roundup today is short and sweet.

—Fueled by strong growth over the past nine months, San Diego’s Zui.com introduced “Facetube,” a social network intended to empower pre-teens to share age-appropriate content. The company that began in 2008 as KidZui also re-branded itself earlier this year due to the popularity of its Zui.com search engine. More than 2 million unique visitors visited Zui.com in March.

—Bandsintown, the San Diego-based app developer with the No. 1 free concert tracking application on Facebook and the iPhone, said it has branched out to Android devices with a free app that can now be downloaded from the Android Marketplace. Bandsintown, acquired by New York’s Cellfish in September, enables music fans to track their favorite artists’ shows and helps groups promote their music and sell concert tickets.

—Independa, a San Diego startup combining health IT and wireless health technology to help enhance independent living for older adults, said it raised an additional $750,000 beyond the $1.6 million in seed-round venture funding disclosed seven months ago. CEO Kian Saneii said the company plans to use the funding to expand sales, support, and engineering operations, as well as marketing efforts aimed at broadening its customer base. The company said its additional funding came from Miramar Venture Partners, City Hill Ventures, and other investors.

— San Diego’s Fallbrook Technologies said it has demonstrated performance gains and potential fuel-saving benefits of a variable speed supercharger drive that incorporates its continuously variable transmission technology. The cleantech company said its independent analysis shows that that vehicle manufacturers could move to smaller and more-efficient engines with no loss in performance or drivability by using a supercharger equipped with its “NuVinci” technology.

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.