EcoDog, a Vista, CA-startup developing a “watchdog” device to help consumers monitor their electricity use, inaugurated its plans to raise $5.6 million in angel funding today by naming its first angel investor. CEO Ron Pitt, who founded EcoDog in his garage four years ago, told me Tom Page, the former chairman and CEO of San Diego Gas & Electric and its corporate parent Enova (now Sempra Energy) made an undisclosed investment in the startup. Pitt says he developed the FIDO Home Energy Watchdog system, which is installed at the breaker panel to monitor energy consumption on every circuit. The device also uses the home’s own electrical wiring—and not the Internet—to send recommendations for conserving energy to the homeowner’s computer.
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.
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