Angel Investing Loses Altitude, Avalon’s Levandov Talks About His Digital Investments, TechAmerica AeA Investor Conference Opens Today, & More San Diego BizTech News

It was a relatively quiet week for BizTech news in San Diego. Get caught up on all you need to know here.

—Executives from several San Diego semiconductor companies are scheduled to make investor presentations today at the TechAmerica AeA Financial Classic, which continues through tomorrow at the downtown Manchester Grand Hyatt. Local presenting companies include Carlsbad, CA-based MaxLinear (NYSE: [[ticker:MXL]]), San Diego-based Cohu (NASDAQ: [[COHU]]), and Entropic Communications (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ENTR]] of San Diego. The AeA investor conference, which is observing its 40th year, features microcap technology companies.

—I profiled ShowUhow, a three-year-old San Diego startup that produces and hosts host online video instruction guides for corporate customers that sell consumer products that require assembly. ShowUhow raised $3 million in August from Syncom Venture Partners of Silver Springs, MD.

—Call it “angel investor fatigue.” A new report from the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire showed a 6.5 percent nationwide decrease in angel investments during the first half of 2010, compared to the same period in 2009. The study noted that only 26 percent of the 25,200 angel investments counted were classified as seed or startup stage deals, continuing a two-year downward trend.

—Xconomy’s Bob Buderi sat down with Avalon Ventures’ lone East Coast partner, Rich Levandov, who works just blocks from Xconomy’s headquarters in Cambridge, MA. Levandov led Avalon’s investment in Zynga, the San Francisco game developer—and the deal has been so successful that similar digital investments could be the leitmotif of the ninth fund that Avalon has been raising.

—A demonstration of the beta version of a new social medial product developed by Mountain View, CA-based LinkedIn is one of the highlights expected Wednesday during the all-day SuperMath analytics conference at the Del Mar Marriott. The annual conference organized by the San Diego Software Industry Council was previously known as the San Diego Forum on Analytics.

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.