Confident Technologies Makes San Diego Debut, Startups Get Fresh Venture Funding, Peter Preuss Gets Inducted to Connect Hall of Fame, & More San Diego BizTech News

—Xconomy’s list of San Diego’s top 10 VC deals during the first quarter of 2010 included funding for three high-tech startups, although investments in life sciences and medical devices accounted for most of the money and deals. EMN8, which is developing automated kiosks for fast-service restaurants, raised almost $14.5 million; Avaak, which developed a wireless webcam system, got $10 million; and AwarePoint, which developed a wireless tag and tracking system for medical equipment and supplies, also got $10 million.

—Confident Technologies, a new startup with network security technology salvaged from Portland, OR-based Vidoop, announced its debut as a San Diego-based startup. The company says its image-based security technology is intuitive and easier for customers to remember.

—Connect inducted software industry pioneer Peter Preuss into its Entrepreneurial Hall of Fame, a pantheon that includes Qualcomm founder Irwin Jacobs, Idec Pharmaceuticals founder William Rastetter, and SAIC founder J. Robert Beyster. Preuss, the eighth inductee, founded ISSCO, one of the first software companies to specialize in computer graphics. He sold the company to Computer Associates in 1986.

—San Diego’s Imagine Communications, a five-year-old digital video startup, raised $10 million in a Series C round of venture funding from its existing venture investors. The company, which has now secured more than $34 million, specializes in digital video technology for cable TV operators.

—Google Ventures led a $5 million Series B round of venture funding for San Diego’s OpenCandy, a web-based venture that operates a kind of online marketplace for open-source software. The company, started by

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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.