Beck’s CEO Looks to SAIC’s Buyout, San Diego’s Venture Funding Improves, Korean Watchdog Slaps Qualcomm With $208M Fine, & And More San Diego BizTech News

Venture capital investments are viewed as one indicator of economic health, and a couple of reports last week suggest that San Diego’s VC actvity is recuperating—or at least stabilizing. Catch up on that and other developments in local biztech news below.  (Meanwhile, we’re keeping the lights on at Xconomy San Diego, but I’m going to recharge my personal batteries this week. See you back here on Aug. 3)  

—Russ Stepp, the CEO of Seattle engineering firm R.W. Beck, talked with Greg about San Diego-based SAIC’s imminent acquisition, at a reported purchase price of $155 million. Stepp had no comment on the size of the deal, but says most of R.W. Beck’s 550 employees will be joining SAIC’s Energy, Environment, and Infrastructure business. Beck’s Disaster Recovery unit, however, will be consolidated with SAIC’s Homeland Protection and Preparedness unit.

—The question lingering after two surveys showed a rebound in VC funding from April through May is whether VC activity is bounding off the bottom or bouncing along the bottom. The second-quarter reports—one from Dow Jones VentureSource and the other from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association—show venture investments were down more than 40 percent in San Diego compared with the same quarter last year. But that was still an improvement over the first three months of 2009.

—The Knight & Carver Wind Group, a National City, CA, company that specializes in repairing wind turbines and designing and manufacturing innovative wind turbine blades, is moving to commercialize its new STAR blade. Also known as a Sweep Twist Adaptive Rotor, the 89-foot blades are designed to enable wind turbines to operate in low wind speeds of 10 to 15 mph. The 250-employee company, which was spun out from the Knight & Carver shipyard, developed the STAR blade under a $3 million collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy.

—South Korea’s antitrust watchdog, the Korean Fair Trade Commission, slapped a $208 million fine on Qualcomm last week, and ordered the San Diego wireless chipmaker to end its unfair business practices. Qualcomm, which anticipated the fine was coming, says it disagrees with the ruling and plans to appeal. Korean press reports say it is the largest fine the agency has ever imposed on a single company.

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.