—Venture capitalists invested $269 million in 23 deals in the San Diego area during the last three months of 2011, according to the MoneyTree Report from the National Venture Capital Association, PwC, and Thomson Reuters. That was almost a 20 percent gain in dollars, but a 28 percent slide in deal count from MoneyTree data for the fourth quarter of 2010. For the full year of 2011, the MoneyTree VC survey said $829 million was invested in 104 deals in San Diego, a 5 percent decline in dollars and a 17 percent slide in deals from the $871.7 million sunk into 126 San Diego deals in 2010.
—What should students study now to be prepared for the workplace 10 years from now? We asked that question of 22 Xconomists, including San Diego Xconomists Ramesh Rao, Duane Roth, Drew Senyei, Larry Bock, and Robert Noble. We’ve compiled all 22 answers in an Xconomy special report on education, which you can find here.
—San Diego Gas & Electric hosted a grand opening of its new Energy Innovation Center, which is designed to serve as an energy innovation showcase and education facility, and to meet the U.S. Green Building Council’s requirements for a platinum LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) certificate. The center includes a full commercial “food service demonstration kitchen” where San Diego chefs can test their recipes on energy efficient appliances and restaurant owners can learn about the advantages of new and more energy efficient equipment. Utility officials said Commercial kitchens are particularly energy intensive.
—San Diego-based Tealium raised $1.1 million in Series A financing from private investors, and plans to use the funding to expand development of the tag management technology the company created to help enterprise customers manage their online marketing. Tealium said the investors include Limelight Networks CEO Jeff Lunsford, former Visual Sciences CEO Jim MacIntyre, Collective CEO Joe Apprendi, EyeWonder CEO John Vincent, and eValue Group CEO Thomas Falk.
—After previewing their plans last year, the X Prize Foundation and San Diego-based Qualcomm Foundation officially unveiled the Qualcomm “Tricorder” X Prize, a competition offering $10 million to the team that can develop new wireless diagnostics technology. The winning entry must be able to accurately diagnose a set of 15 diseases across 30 consumers in three days, capturing real time, critical health metrics such as blood pressure, respiratory rate, and temperature, and providing information in a consumer-friendly way.
—Qualcomm’s leadership has been talking for several years about the anticipated competition between its ARM-based semiconductors and the CPUs developed for desktop computing in the expanding market for smart devices. Now some of those skirmishes are beginning. Illinois-based Motorola Mobility (NYSE: [[ticker:MMI]]) said recently it would use Intel’s (NASDAQ: [[ticker:INTC]]) latest low-power x86 Atom processor in a number of future Motorola products, marking Intel’s opening move into the smartphone market. A Motorola spokeswoman told me by email, “We will continue to use multiple chip set vendors.” Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]) already has hundreds of mobile devices using its Snapdragon processor, and has been working with manufacturers on hundreds more.
