Israel’s daily business newspaper Calcalist is reporting that San Diego’s Qualcomm has invested $7 million in modu, a modular mobile phone maker headed by the inventor of the USB flash drive.
Founder and CEO Dov Moran started modu in 2007 in Kfar-Saba, Israel, after selling his previous company, msystems, to SanDisk in 2006 for $1.6 billion.
In a way, modu’s concept is similar to a flash drive. Its slim mobile phone, which was officially declared the “lightest phone in the world” last year by Guinness World Records, handles the user’s basic communications tasks. It is designed to be inserted, like a cartridge, into a variety of consumer electronic devices, or jackets, that expand its functionality. For example, the modu phone can be inserted into jackets that make it into a personal music player, GPS system, or digital camera.
The modu phone slides into another handheld device
The company made its debut at last year’s Mobile World Congress, pricing the basic module plus two jackets at $200.
The U.S. spokesman for modu had no comment this morning on the Calcalist report, which was relayed by Techcrunch. Qualcomm has not responded yet to a query about the deal, but we’ll update if they do.
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.
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