SG Biofuels Gets $9.4M to Develop Jatropha, Motorola Spinout Could Land in San Diego, Startup Grid2Home Emerges Here, & More San Diego BizTech News

If Motorola’s mobile devices spinout establishes its new headquarters in San Diego, as many as 200 new jobs would be created here. That would be good news, of course, for a county where the unemployment rate in August was just reported to be 10.6 percent. We have that and the rest of the BizTech news wrapped up here.

—San Diego is one of three finalists under consideration as a potential headquarters for Motorola Mobility, the Libertyville, IL-based division that Motorola plans to spin out as an independent company early next year. The other two sites are in the San Francisco Bay Area and Austin, TX.

—San Francisco’s Granite Ventures raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding (reported by VentureWire to be several million dollars) for Grid2Home, a smart grid technology startup that moved to San Diego earlier this year from Campbell, CA. The CEO is Rick Kornfeld, a former Qualcomm vice president of engineering.

—Qualcomm said it is renewing its global incentive prize competition for wireless technology startups. The Qualcomm QPrize is offering a total of $750,000 in convertible note financing (meaning the note gets converted to preferred shares of the startup company at their next round of equity financing) to startup companies with the best business plan in North America, Europe, China, South Korea, Israel, and India.

—SG Biofuels, the Encinitas, CA-based developer of Jatropha-based fuels, received $9.4 million in Series A financing from investors that include Flint Hills Resources of

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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.