Memjet Launches at Chicago Expo, Teradata Encourages Use of Unstructured Data, Cleantech Initiative Issues Second Round of Grants, & More San Diego BizTech News

Here we are, trapped between Halloween and Election Day. Good thing we have some interesting biztech news, or there would be nothing fun to do.

—Memjet, the San Diego-based startup developing super-fast color inkjet printing technologies, says it is launching its on-demand printing technology for the label and packaging markets at the Pack Expo International 2010 Conference, which began yesterday in Chicago. As I reported in July, Memjet has developed what CEO Len Lauer calls “truly disruptive” technology—its print engine technology is used in the SpeedStar 3000 label maker, which prints high-resolution product labels at a rate of 12 inches per second.

—New sources of online data this year will total 1.2 zettabytes (or 1021), Facebook has more than 500 million subscribers, and there are 85 million Twitter “tweets” per day, according to Darryl McDonald, Ohio-based Teradata’s executive vice president of development and marketing. McDonald, who was in San Diego last week for the 2010 Teradata Partners User Group Conference & Expo, says those are all examples of the “tsunami” of unstructured data that innovative retailers and other businesses can take advantage of as part of the “socialization of data.” More than 3,000 people—a record crowd—attended the conference last week at the San Diego Convention Center.

—The William J. von Liebig Center at UC San Diego, the City of San Diego, San Diego State University, and Cleantech San Diego launched the second San Diego Cleantech Innovation and Commercialization Program last week. A $50,000 grant was awarded to each of three cleantech projects for proof-of-concept studies and prototype development, and the von Liebig Center’s business advisors will assist the innovators prepare and execute a plan to commercialize their technologies. The winners are: Doug Grotjahn of SDSU for technology to make hydrogen from water; Yuvraj Agarwal of UCSD for technology to reduce computers’ energy consumption; and Stephen Bennett of UCSD for advanced climate and meteorology solutions for business decisions.

—San Diego’s Connect, the non-profit organization for technology and entrepreneurship, was among four groups honored last week by the U.S. Commerce Department’s 2010 Innovation in Economic Development Awards. Since the California Governor’s Office of Economic Development designated San Diego as one of California’s seven Innovation Hubs (iHUB), Connect has served as the leader of San Diego’s local iHUB effort. The federal economic development award singled out Connect as an exemplar in regional innovation clusters.

—An ad hoc group of 30 San Diego CEOs have signed an open letter to local voters concerning their views on Proposition 23, an initiative on the California ballot tomorrow that calls for suspending the state’s landmark clean energy law, known as AB32. The letter urges voters to vote against the proposition, saying the state mandate to develop clean energy and clean technology solutions has created more than 500,000 new jobs and $9.1 billion in private equity investments in the state. The signers include Envision Solar CEO (and San Diego Xconomist) Robert Noble; Startup Circle CEO Robert Reyes; SafeList CEO Karim Pirani; Camille Sobrian; Connect CEO, Mario Larach; Kai Bio Energy CEO; and EcoDog CEO Ron Pitt.

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.