San Diego BizTech Roundup: RealAge, Qualcomm, Angel Deals, & More

This week’s roundup of tech news from the San Diego area is short and sweet.

—Sharecare, an Atlanta-based interactive health and wellness platform, has acquired San Diego’s RealAge, home of the RealAge test that helps people to live a healthy lifestyle. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, according to a statement. RealAge, which provided health and wellness tips and other information, was founded in San Diego in 1994 and was sold to Hearst in a 2007 deal estimated at somewhere between $60 million and $70 million. Sharecare, founded in 2010, is an interactive, social media platform that provides information about health and wellness, including a question-and-answer format.

—San Diego’s Irwin Jacobs was a former engineering professor and one of seven Qualcomm co-founders when he presided over the wireless giant’s first annual shareholder meeting in February 1992. Twenty years later, in a farewell speech to Qualcomm shareholders last week, Jacobs said, “We’ve been very lucky to go from seven [employees] to 23,000 around the world.” After stepping down from the board, Jacobs now has the title of Qualcomm founding chairman and chief executive officer emeritus.

—A nationwide study of angel investments reveals that angels are joining together more frequently, which helps to explain why the median size of rounds involving investments by groups of angels increased 40 percent in 2011, from $500,000 to $700,000. Angel investors showed a clear preference for deals in the healthcare and Internet space, which accounted for 58 percent of angel investment deals nationally. Investments in medical device and equipment companies accounted for 60 percent of those healthcare deals.

—Organizers of the WBT Innovation Marketplace, billed as the world’s largest showcase of emerging technology companies, said they plan to host 100 startups at its 10th annual forum, set to run from Oct 24-26 at the San Diego Convention Center. Connect, the San Diego nonprofit that supports local innovation and entrepreneurship, is working with the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corp. to host the event, which features presentations by pre-screened and pre-prepped startups focused on developing technologies in life sciences, materials science, energy, information technology, and nanotechnology. More information is available at the WBT website.

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.