San Diego’s Wireless Incubator Hatches, Geospatial Software Gains Ground, EcoDog Gets an Angel, & More San Diego BizTech News

As the unemployment rate climbed to 11.5 percent statewide in California, and 9.4 percent in San Diego County, two local industry groups announced major initiatives to encourage and support innovation in the region. Read up on that and the rest of San Diego’s business and technology news:

—San Diego’s software industry, which already hosts a cluster of developers that specialize in predictive analytics, is organizing a business networking group for geographic information systems, or GIS. Organizer Yash Talreja says a combination of mapping, GPS, and Internet technologies are making GIS a hot sector. Next month, some 14,000 people are expected to attend the conference held each year in San Diego by Redlands, CA-based ESRI, a leader in GIS mapping and modeling technology.

—With the recession opening a void in local startup activity, San Diego’s wireless industry is creating a non-profit incubator to provide free office space and business support for up to two years to communications-based startups. Rory Moore, who heads the industry group CommNexus, says the new EvoNexus incubator is intended to help a new generation of companies get started.

—San Diego DivX (NASDAQ: [[ticker:DIVX]]) CEO Kevin Hell says managing the video codec developer depends on anticipating the next step in the evolution of consumer media. That means enabling any online content to play on any device, according to the DivX boss. He views “video freedom” as being able to seamlessly move a video among a computer, TV, and wireless mobile device.

—The former chairman and CEO of San Diego Gas & Electric gave an endorsement of sorts to EcoDog, a Vista, CA-based startup, by allowing the company to announce that he is the first angel investor in an early stage round that aims to raise $5.6 million. EcoDog founder Ron Pitt told me he has developed a device that encourages conservation by helping homeowners monitor their electricity.

—San Diego’s Accelrys (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ACCL]]), which specializes in scientific software used in computation, simulation, and the management and mining of scientific data, named former Interwoven president Scipio “Max” Carnecchia as CEO. The company later said Carnecchia will be entitled to purchase up to 800,000 shares of the Accelrys common stock at an exercise price per share equal to $5.38. Carnecchia, also is joining the board.

—The era of employee ownership came to an end Friday at San Diego defense contractor SAIC, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune. When nuclear physicist (and San Diego Xconomist) J. Robert Beyster founded SAIC 40 years ago to provide high-technology research and engineering services, he viewed employee ownership as crucial to the startup’s entrepreneurial culture. The defense conglomerate has become a more conventional public company since Beyster left the company in 2004. He wrote in his blog that the battle to preserve employee control at SAIC was lost years ago.

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.