Qualcomm Cuts Deal With Creative Artists; PowerGenix Targets Micro-Hybrid Market, Ferruolo Moves to USD Law School, & More San Diego BizTech News

The Memorial Day holiday made it a short week for high-tech news in San Diego. Here’s what you need to know from last week.

—About 2,000 mobile app developers and others attended the two-day Uplinq conference hosted by San Diego-based Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]), the world’s largest wireless chipmaker. A new partnership with Hollywood’s Creative Artists Agency that Qualcomm chairman and CEO Paul Jacobs announced during his keynote talk highlighted a major theme at this year’s conference, which was the importance of developing creative games and entertaining content for mobile devices.

—PowerGenix, a San Diego company that has been developing new nickel-zinc battery technology has shifted its focus to what CEO Dan Squiller calls “a huge opportunity” in the emerging market for “micro-hybrid” electric vehicles. Micro-hybrid vehicles are powered by a conventional, gasoline-powered internal combustion engine, which simply shuts itself down at traffic stops. Press the accelerator, and the micro-hybrid electric system restarts the motor, enabling micro-hybrid vehicles to save 5 to 8 percent on gasoline.

—Stephen Ferruolo, a longtime San Diego business lawyer (and Xconomist), is leaving his specialized practice in technology and life sciences startups, corporate governance, and mergers and acquisitions, to take over as the new dean of the University of San Diego School of Law. In a statement, Ferruolo said, his new role is “a fulfillment of my two previous careers, first as a teacher-scholar and then as a business lawyer.” Before he became a lawyer, Ferruolo taught history at Stanford University.

—Hydro-Gear, a Sullivan, IL-based designer and maker of precision drive systems for lawn and garden equipment, plans to integrate its hydrostatic transmissions with San Diego-based Fallbrook Technologies’ continuously variable transmission technology. Fallbrook says Hydro-Gear is scheduled to begin full production in early 2013, and represents the first commercial use of its NuVinci technology in an infinitely variable transmission (IVT) application.

—San Diego’s Legend3D, which specializes in converting conventional films into 3-D movies, has cut about 60 employees, or roughly 15 percent of its local workforce. The San Diego company told The San Diego Union-Tribune it now has about 360 employees.

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.