A recent Harris poll found that most Americans have never heard of a smart meter and they don’t know what the smart grid is, but these new technologies are coming anyway. We’ve got a lot of cleantech news, which we’ll dispense as efficiently as possible.
—Is Leap Wireless, (NASDAQ: [[ticker:LEAP]]) optimizing its operations for a possible merger? Or is it trimming its costs in an increasingly competitive market for low-cost service? The San Diego company, which provides flat-rate wireless services through its Cricket Communications operating company, said it has laid off 180 employees and closed or transferred 38 of its Cricket storefronts.
—San Diego Gas & Electric is on schedule to complete installation of 1.4 million electric smart meters and 850,000 gas smart meters by the end of 2011. But SDG&E’s senior vice president for customer services, Anne Shen Smith, told a Metering America conference last week the industry is “lagging in developing the kind of software that goes with this technology.”
—A Harris Poll recently found that
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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