Earlier this year, defense contractor SAIC celebrated the 40th anniversary of its founding near a ballet studio in La Jolla. Now the company, which has more than 45,000 employees, has moved its headquarters from San Diego to McLean, VA. Get that and the rest of the local technology innovation news here.
—Defense contractor SAIC, which made McLean, VA, its official headquarters last week, says that only about 20 corporate positions will move from its former headquarters in San Diego to Northern Virginia over the next year. But the company that was founded in La Jolla 40 years ago concedes that more of its 4,300 employees in San Diego could be relocated in future years.
—Santiago Becerra, the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Del Mar, CA-based MeLLmo, said the startup company’s graphics and visualization software for business intelligence data represents “a whole new paradigm for how to visualize and analyze data.” Angel investors apparently feel that way, too. The company announced it has just raised $4 million from private investors, increasing its overall angel funding to $10 million since its founding 21 months ago.
—In the main event of the DEMOfall ‘09 conference that came to San Diego last week, company founders got 6 minutes to demonstrate their startup’s technology to the media, investors, and prospective corporate buyers. In addition to winning one of seven “DEMOgod” awards for its invisible speaker systems, Waltham, MA-based Emo Labs won the DEMO People’s Choice award for best consumer product. The award entitles Emo Labs to $500,000 in free advertising services from IDG, the media, events, and research company. Emo plans to strike licensing deals with consumer electronics manufacturers, and says products incorporating its technology should appear sometime next year.
—Before he made a presentation last week to San Diego’s MIT Enterprise Forum, MindTouch CEO Aaron Fulkerson told me his San Diego-based company has grown exponentially over the past few years partly because of an early decision to build its Web-based collaboration software around an open source wiki program. MindTouch, which was bootstrapped, competes with Microsoft Sharepoint, Oracle, and other collaborative software offerings.
—San Diego’s stealthy V-Vehicle car company has begun work on doubling the size of a former GM parts plant in Monroe, LA, where V-Vehicle plans to make its cleaner and greener cars—although the company has not disclosed what that means. With financial backing from Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, and T. Boone Pickens, V-Vehicle plans to complete construction of the 400,000-square-foot plant by mid-2010.
