SD BizTech Roundup: Ortiva Acquired, EcoATM, & Grid2Home Raise Cash

AKS Capital, Moore Venture Partners, PI Holdings and Singapore billionaire Koh Boon Hwee. Valuation wasn’t disclosed.

—Memjet, the San Diego-based developer of new inkjet printing technology, said it has reached a key agreement to assume direct ownership and control of 4,000 issued and pending global patents that were previously held and managed by Australia’s Silverbrook Research. Inventor and Memjet co-founder Kia Silverbrook, will continue to support Memjet as a special advisor and consultant. In a statement from an industry conference in Germany last week, Memjet says the deal clears the way for the continued commercialization of Memjet’s revolutionary color printing technology.

—San Diego’s Chumby Industries, which raised about $29 million in venture capital and debt financing, has been selling off its technology patents and other assets. Former Chumby CEO Derrick Oien told me that Chumby’s 30 employees are now working for Technicolor, the media business that is now part of Thomson, the electronics and media conglomerate based in France. Chumby began with a simple Internet-enabled wireless device, about the size of a bedside alarm clock, with a touch-screen that could display the time, weather, traffic, and serve as a music and video player.

—Israel’s Allot Communications (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ALLT]]) said it reached a definitive agreement to acquire San Diego’s Ortiva Wireless, which specializes in optimizing video streaming across wireless networks. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Ortiva Wireless CEO Marc Zionts told me the company will keep its office in University City after the deal closes, which is expected by the end of June.

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.