—Peter Clarke of EE Times reported that San Diego’s Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) has acquired Andover, MA-based Pixtronix, a startup founded in 2005 to develop Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) display technology. Qualcomm, which confirmed the deal with EE Times but provided no details or press release about the deal, reportedly spent between $175 million and $200 million for Pixtronix. The Massachusetts company founded by Nesbitt Hagood raised more than $53 million in venture funding, athough the Pixtronix technology has not yet been introduced to the market. Qualcomm has spent years working to refine its own MEMS-based display technology—known as Mirasol.

—More than 200 entrepreneurs turned out to hear TechStars founder and CEO David Cohen talk about the startup accelerator program he helped to launch in Boulder, CO, in 2007. Cohen told the rapt audience during a San Diego Tech Founders meetup that the Internet software community in Boulder “is just totally on fire” compared to five years ago. This was the night after Cohen met with local tech leaders to discuss the steps that helped boost the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the Colorado college town. Xconomy San Diego arranged the dinner discussion, and I plan to have more about our conversation later this week.

—Meteorologist Stephen Bennett and investor John Plavan founded San Diego’s EarthRisk Technologies in mid-2010 with the idea of creating predictive analytics technology that could extend the range of weather long-term forecasts from two weeks to 30 or 40 days. They are now providing their Web-based technology to commodities and energy-trading firms on a subscription-basis. Bennett told me the core business at EarthRisk Technologies is focusing on extreme weather events—heat waves, frigid cold snaps, and storms because extreme events are the ones with the highest impact.

—Mark Heesen of the National Venture Capital Association gave a good-news, bad-news presentation to the San Diego Venture Group last week. Among the interesting bright spots: Corporate venture capital is growing and San Diego-based Qualcomm now ranks as the nation’s second-largest corporate venture outfit. The bad news? U.S. VC firms invested $28 billion in startups last year, but only … Next Page »

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—Venture capitalists invested $269 million in 23 deals in the San Diego area during the last three months of 2011, according to the MoneyTree Report from the National Venture Capital Association, PwC, and Thomson Reuters. That was almost a 20 percent gain in dollars, but a 28 percent slide in deal count from MoneyTree data for the fourth quarter of 2010. For the full year of 2011, the MoneyTree VC survey said $829 million was invested in 104 deals in San Diego, a 5 percent decline in dollars and a 17 percent slide in deals from the $871.7 million sunk into 126 San Diego deals in 2010.

—What should students study now to be prepared for the workplace 10 years from now? We asked that question of 22 Xconomists, including San Diego Xconomists Ramesh Rao, Duane Roth, Drew Senyei, Larry Bock, and Robert Noble. We’ve compiled all 22 answers in an Xconomy special report on education, which you can find here.

—San Diego Gas & Electric hosted a grand opening of its new Energy Innovation Center, which is designed to serve as an energy innovation showcase and education facility, and to meet the U.S. Green Building Council’s requirements for a platinum LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) certificate. The center includes a full commercial “food service demonstration kitchen” where San Diego chefs can test their recipes on energy efficient appliances and restaurant owners can learn about the advantages of new and more energy efficient equipment. Utility officials said Commercial kitchens are particularly energy intensive.

—San Diego-based Tealium raised $1.1 million in Series A financing from private investors, and plans to use the funding to expand development of the tag management technology the company created to help enterprise customers manage their online marketing. Tealium said the investors include Limelight Networks CEO Jeff Lunsford, former Visual Sciences CEO Jim MacIntyre, Collective CEO Joe Apprendi, EyeWonder CEO John Vincent, and eValue Group CEO Thomas Falk.

—After previewing their plans last year, the X Prize Foundation and San Diego-based Qualcomm Foundation officially unveiled the Qualcomm “Tricorder” X Prize, a competition offering $10 million to the team that can develop new wireless diagnostics technology. The winning entry must be able to accurately diagnose a set of 15 diseases across 30 consumers in three days, capturing real time, critical health metrics such as blood pressure, respiratory rate, and temperature, and providing information in a consumer-friendly way.

—Qualcomm’s leadership has been talking for several years about the anticipated competition between its ARM-based semiconductors and the CPUs developed for desktop computing in the expanding market for smart devices. Now some of those skirmishes are beginning. Illinois-based Motorola Mobility (NYSE: MMI)  said recently it would use Intel’s (NASDAQ: INTC) latest low-power x86 Atom processor in a number of future Motorola products, marking Intel’s opening move into the smartphone market. A Motorola spokeswoman told me by email, “We will continue to use multiple chip set vendors.” Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) already has hundreds of mobile devices using its Snapdragon processor, and has been working with manufacturers on hundreds more.

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Since he set out last year to revamp the way the FDA reviews medical devices, Jeff Shuren of the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) has often met with industry leaders to hear their feedback and ideas for how to improve medical device regulation. Last week, he met with industry leaders in San Francisco, and this week he’s in Southern California.

Shuren’s schedule in San Diego yesterday included a stop at Nuvasive (NASDAQ: NUVA), a pioneer in innovative spinal surgery products, which must have been an interesting meeting. Last week, Nuvasive CEO Alex Lukianov told an audience in San Francisco that FDA regulatory delays in reviewing Nuvasive products are costing the company an estimated $70 million a year.

Shuren, who has overseen the FDA center for just over two years, also met with local reporters, and provided an overview of the steps he’s taken to make the regulatory review of new medical devices more predictable, transparent, and efficient. The way the industry has been talking, though, it sounds like Shuren has taken only the first steps on what must be a 1,000-mile journey.

Eight out of 10 biomedical CEOs say they “agree or strongly agree” that the FDA regulatory approval process has slowed the growth of their organizations, according to a new survey from PwC [PricewaterhouseCoopers], BayBio, and the San Diego-based California Healthcare Institute (CHI). BayBio and CHI released some early results of the annual survey at an event timed to coincide with the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference, the biggest annual gathering of life science investors and executives.

Frustration throughout the life sciences industry has been mounting, but Joe Panetta, who heads San Diego’s Biocom industry group, sounded a more conciliatory theme as he sat next to Shuren during the media briefing. “Both industry and the FDA agree that we need to provide safe and effective products for patients and physicians,” Panetta said. “We’re definitely partners in that initiative, and it doesn’t do anyone any good to keep beating up on each other.”

The FDA’s Shuren is “trying to take specific actions to improve the decision-making process at the FDA, and also the decision-making culture,” says Ross Jaffe of Versant Ventures, who was among the Bay Area VCs who met with Shuren last week at a dinner organized by CHI. “To his credit, he’s willing to … Next Page »

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—San Diego’s Active Network (NYSE ACTV), which provides online event registration and related services, acquired Philadelphia-based StarCite for about $51 million in stock and cash. StarCite, which provides Web-based event management services for companies around the world, has about 300 employees. The Active Network said StarCite will become part of its newly launched “Business Solutions” division, which will serve the events industry.

—San Diego-based Accelrys (NASDAQ: ACCL), which provides scientific enterprise research and development software and services, said it’s paying $35 million to acquire VelQuest, a Boston-area developer of systems that support good manufacturing practices for FDA-regulated industries. Accelrys said the VelQuest acquisition would expand its product line to include software used in pharmaceutical quality assurance and quality control.

—San Diego’s Entropic Communications (NASDAQ: ENTR), which specializes in Multimedia over Coax (MoCA) technology used in home entertainment systems, said it wants to purchase certain assets of Trident Microsystems’ set-top box and system-on-a-chip business. Entropic submitted its $55 million offer as part of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization that Sunnyvale, CA-based Trident filed last Wednesday. The bankruptcy court in Delaware must approve the Entropic offer, which could happen by the end of March if no other bidders step forward.

—Qualcomm Chairman and CEO Paul Jacobs is set to deliver the opening keynote address tomorrow morning at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Jacobs is expected to talk about Qualcomm’s vision for mobile computing as smart phones and tablets increasingly become a mainstay tool for consumer media and entertainment. The three-day show also will serve as a global stage for Sony Electronics, the San Diego-based arm of Sony’s U.S. business. San Diego’s Razer, Entropic Communications, Leap Wireless, Independa, Skin-It, and Marchon 3D, also are displaying products at the show.

—I profiled San Diego-based Verimatrix, a venture-backed company that develops encryption software and related security technologies for pay-TV networks. Verimatrix CEO Tom Munro told me the company has been successful in creating piracy protection software for Internet-Protocol Television (IPTV), and today more than half of the company’s business is in so-called unmanaged networks, such as Netflix, which provides streaming video “Over the Top” (OTT) of a cable- or satellite-based broadband Internet platform.

—The 2011 executive compensation survey showed a 3.7 percent increase nationwide in tech sector CEO pay over 2010. The annual CompStudy survey produced by executive search firm J. Robert Scott and law firm WilmerHale in collaboration with Noam Wasserman, associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. The study found that non-founder technology CEOs brought in average base salaries of $242,000 in 2011, up from $233,000 in 2010.

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Been on vacation? Get back up to speed with our end-of-the-holidays roundup of San Diego tech news.

—Almost half of the top 50 venture-backed startups had at least one founder who was an immigrant, according to a study from the National Foundation for American Policy. Such findings led author Stuart Anderson, who also is executive director of the Virginia-based foundation, to conclude, “America gains a great deal when we’re open to talent, wherever that talent was born.”

—The FCC approved Qualcomm’s sale of some spectrum rights to AT&T for nearly $1.93 billion. Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) had spent $683 million acquiring the lower 700-megahertz band and UHF Channels 55 and 56 for its FLO-TV network for transmitting television programming to mobile devices. As we recently reported, Toronto’s QuickPlay Media acquired the network operation center that Qualcomm built in San Diego for its FLO-TV operations. Qualcomm said the FCC approved the spectrum sale after AT&T abandoned its proposed $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile. AT&T plans to use the additional spectrum to improve its network capacity as it rolls out its 4G wireless network.

—In a separate announcement, Qualcomm disclosed that founding CEO Irwin Jacobs plans to retire from the company board at its annual meeting on March 6. The 78-year-old Jacobs will officially become Qualcomm’s founding chairman and CEO emeritus.

—Razer, the Carlsbad, CA-based maker of computer and video gaming peripherals, said it is raising $50 million in a Series A venture round led by the IDG-Accel China Capital Fund, a global investment fund established by IDG and Accel Partners. The 12-year-old startup’s funding previously came from … Next Page »

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What’s in a tech startup name? More specifically, is there a correlation between the type of name a company has and its success?

That’s a question every startup founder and investor should be interested in. Because if there is a correlation, then using a name-based strategy for picking winners would be, well, about as good as any other strategy. And much faster.

Consider the following companies: Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle. And more recently, Groupon, Twitter, Zynga. Or how about these biggies: Facebook, Salesforce, Qualcomm. These are all top companies, no doubt about it.

Notice anything about their names? None of them has a capital letter in the middle of its name—sometimes referred to as “camel case,” because an upper-case letter in the middle of a word looks like a hump. (Of course, there’s also plenty of startup name-ology around whether to use real words, made-up words, misspelled words, acronyms, and so forth, but we don’t have all day.)

Maybe I’m getting punchy as the holidays loom, but as an end-of-year exercise, I thought we’d play the name game and see where it leads. So let’s drill down into some specifics. What I’m really talking about are company names that are two words mashed into one, where each word or part could stand on its own. Because there are so damn many of them these days. Not just Facebook, Salesforce, Qualcomm, and Rackspace, mind you, but also Admeld, Airbnb, Dropbox, Foursquare, Zipcar, Wayfair, Redfin, Evernote, Flipboard, Shopkick…and the list goes on.

Note that the above companies—all of whom are doing reasonably well, I think—spell their names without the camel case. It’s Facebook, not FaceBook. Salesforce, not SalesForce. You can probably see where I’m going with this.

Historically, camel-case companies have had their share of difficulties. Consider the plight of AltaVista, the early search engine that lost out to Google. Or of struggling MySpace, which seems to have actually changed its moniker to Myspace—exactly my point, of course. More recently, GlassHouse, the cloud computing and virtualization company, withdrew its plans for an IPO earlier this month (for the second time). BlackBerry hasn’t done much to … Next Page »

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San Diego’s Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) says founding CEO Irwin Jacobs plans to retire from the board this spring, marking his final separation from the San Diego wireless technology giant.

Jacobs, 78, co-founded Qualcomm in 1985, and served as chairman and CEO through the company’s first two decades. During the trying early years, Jacobs led a prolonged and wide-ranging battle to establish Code Division Multiple Access, or CDMA, the wireless standard Qualcomm had developed. It was a time, however, after many European countries—and much of the world, it seemed—had adopted Groupe Spécial Mobile (GSM), also known as “Global System for Mobile Communications.”

By the time Jacobs stepped down as CEO on June 30, 2005, CDMA had been adopted in the United States as a wireless standard (in 1993) and Qualcomm was a public company that had grown big enough to be listed on the S&P 500 and Fortune 500.

One of the company’s most important watersheds came in 1999, when Qualcomm settled its long-running legal dispute with Sweden’s Ericsson over the wireless standards for what would then be the next-generation (3G) of mobile phones. The deal removed a cloud of uncertainty that had weighed on Qualcomm’s fortunes, and the price of Qualcomm shares skyrocketed in the following years.

When Jacobs stepped down as CEO, he was succeeded by his third-eldest son Paul, a Qualcomm veteran who was then president of Qualcomm’s Wireless and Internet Group. Irwin Jacobs continued to serve as Qualcomm’s chairman through March 2009, when Paul Jacobs took over the chairman’s role as well.

“Qualcomm’s business model and culture of innovation are due to Irwin’s vision and leadership,” Paul Jacobs says in a statement from the company. “He continues to inspire all of us here at Qualcomm as we pioneer the next generation of mobile technologies.”

Jacobs arrived in San Diego as a young engineering professor at the University of California, San Diego, after spending seven years on the engineering faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He left UCSD in the early 1970s to found Linkabit, a satellite communications and technology company that served as a launching pad for scores of other tech startups in San Diego. M/A-Com acquired Linkabit in 1980, and Jacobs remained as a vice president until he departed to start Qualcomm.

“When we first started Qualcomm, I told my wife Joan that, if we were lucky, we might grow to 100 employees,” Irwin Jacobs says. “We clearly have surpassed that. I am immensely proud of the company we have built, its more than 22,000 employees, and the impact Qualcomm has made on the telecom industry and the lives of mobile users worldwide.”

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Some of San Diego’s biggest tech news last week came out of the mHealth Summit near Washington, D.C. But we’ve rounded up all the other tech news too.

—San Diego-based Mingle, an Internet holding company operating Climber.com and several affiliated businesses, said it acquired Sunnyvale, CA-based Affinity Circles to expand its job hunting and recruiting capabilities. Financial terms were not disclosed, although VentureWire pegged the deal at about $1 million. Mingle CEO Michael O’Brien told me he plans to hire another 20 to 30 employees in 2012.

—Did you notice anything different about Xconomy last week? Just in time for the holidays, we completed an extreme home-page makeover, the first in a series of changes that are intended to make Xconomy more convenient and usable. We also moved our Xconomy headquarters in Cambridge, MA. We’re interested in your feedback, so please send us a note via editors@xconomy.com. If any of this suggests that Xconomy is growing and extending its reach into the innovation community, we are!

—After launching its ViaSat-1 satellite in October, Carlsbad, CA-based ViaSat (NASDAQ: VSAT) has begun a different sort of countdown. ViaSat said last week that its satellite-based Internet service is expected to begin through Wildblue Communications before December ends. ViaSat-1 is the highest capacity communications satellite ever launched into space, and download speeds for households in Wildblue’s sparsely populated service areas are expected to range from 2 megabits per second to more than 10 megabits per second.

—During the mHealth Summit near Washington D.C. last week, San Diego’s Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) said it formed a new subsidiary, Qualcomm Life, established a $100 million wireless health investment fund, and launched 2net Platform, a platform for distributing data from the potpourri of wireless health sources. As part of its new platform, Qualcomm also introduced the 2net Hub, a product that plugs into a standard electric outlet and serves as a gateway to the technology-agnostic, cloud-based 2net Platform.

—Other news from the mHealth Summit: Aventyn, a private health IT company based in Carlsbad, CA, said it has partnered with Annapolis, MD-based Zephyr Technology in an international, multi-center clinical study testing mobile technologies for remotely monitoring heart failure. Aventyn said the companies are working together to use Zephyr’s heart monitoring technology, which uses an Android smartphone to transmit data, with Aventyn’s remote patient monitoring and chronic disease management system.

—Independa also had news from the 2011 mHealth Summit this week. The San Diego startup unveiled Artemis, a wireless technology platform used to connect to a variety of in-home sensors for the elderly. Independa said the technology is intended to help relatives and caregivers monitor the vital signs of independent seniors, as well as room temperature, smoke, flooding, and other safety factors.

—The San Diego-based Endeka Group, a wireless Internet services provider and managed services operator, said recently it arranged $4.2 million in venture debt financing through the Agility Lease Fund of Prescott, AZ, and Trinity Capital Investment of Los Angeles. The two privately held firms specialize in financing and consulting for the broadband industry. Founded in 2004, Endeka provides wireless broadband services to campuses, military bases, hotels, convention centers, ships, and other locations.

—As part of an industry challenge to reduce the planning and installation costs of solar energy projects, the U.S. Department of Energy awarded $700,000 to the San Diego-based California Center for Sustainable Energy. The team will use the funding to develop standardized rules for permitting and interconnection processes to streamline rooftop solar projects, with the idea of fostering the adoption of solar projects throughout Southern California. Considerable barriers remain to scaling up solar, according to Andrew McAllister, director of planning and strategy at the nonprofit center.

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There seemed to be a paucity of news from San Diego’s life sciences sector over the past week, which makes our briefing especially brief.

—San Diego-based Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) established a $100 million fund for investing in wireless health and related health IT startups. The fund will be managed by Qualcomm Ventures, which already has invested in Sotera Wireless, Telcare, AliveCor, Cambridge Temperature Concepts, and WorkSmart Labs. In addition to the Qualcomm Life Fund, the wireless giant also unveiled a new subsidiary, Qualcomm Life, as well as a wireless connectivity platform developed to enable medical device makers to connect through the Internet to online data centers.

—Carol Gallagher, who is now the executive chair of San Diego’s AnaptysBio, offered some 140-character gems in an Xconomy-moderated Twitter chat about the state of biotech startups. In one epigram, the former Calistoga Pharmaceuticals CEO explained in one tweet why the Seattle biotech succeeded. Gallagher wrote: “Calistoga had a very clear and well-differentiated hypothesis that at each step the card turned over favorably and a Gr8 team.”

—Aviva BioSciences, a San Diego clinical research organization, disclosed that it plans to raise $500,000 through a combination of debt, securities, and rights to acquire securities, according to a recent regulatory filing. The company offers both specialized products, such as magnetic separation kits, and services, such as ion channel screening and custom cell lines.

—San Diego-based TrovaGene named Antonius Schuh as CEO, overseeing the company’s development of urine-based diagnostic assays that can be used to screen patients for infectious diseases. Schuh previously served as the chairman and chief executive of Sorrento Therapeutics, a biotechnology company he co-founded based on proprietary technology for generating very large libraries of human antibodies.

—San Diego’s Essentialis, which is developing a new medicine for treating cardiovascular and metabolic disease, said it had promoted Aaron Berg from president and chief commercial officer to CEO. Berg, who joined Essentialis just over a year ago, previously held senior positions at Schering-Plough and Kos Pharmaceuticals. Berg also joined the company’s board of directors.

—Neox Clinical Research, a clinical research organization, or CRO, based in the Czech Republic, said it plans to open an office in San Diego next year that will serve as the company’s North American headquarters. Matt Delaney, who was previously vice president of global sales and marketing for a rival CRO, was named managing director of Neox’s U.S. operations.

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Acquisitions and big venture financings made up the deals news for New England-area software and IT companies in the past week.

—Retroficiency, a Boston-based maker of energy efficiency software, raised $3.3 million in a funding round from Point Judith Capital and acquired the energy efficiency division of one of the venture firm’s other portfolio companies, Nexamp. Retroficiency’s technology allows customers like commercial property owners to evaluate the cost-energy impact of making building upgrades.

—Andover, MA-based Pixtronix, a maker of low-power displays, was acquired by San Diego-based Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM). Exact details weren’t disclosed, but Scott Kirsner’s Innovation Economy blog reported Qualcomm paid somewhere in the range of $175-200 million, according to sources close to the deal.

—Southborough, MA-based uTest raised $17 million in a Series D financing, to put toward expanding its testing platform for software applications. The deal was led by QuestMark Partners, and included existing uTest investors Scale Venture Partners, Longworth Venture Partners, Egan-Managed Capital, and Mesco.

—More seed-stage deals could come from BzzAgent founder Dave Balter, who joined Boston Seed Capital as a venture advisor. The one-year-old, early-stage investment firm is run by Nicole Stata, founder and former CEO of human-resources software firm Deploy Solutions.

—West Coast venture firm Andreessen Horowitz led a $33.5 million investment in Waltham, MA-based Actifio, a maker of data management software products for big companies. Previous investors North Bridge Venture Partners, Greylock Partners, and Advanced Technology Ventures were also part of the deal.

—Bedford, MA-based Progress Software, a company focused on helping organizations become more “operationally responsive,” said it has acquired decision management software maker Corticon, based in Redwood City, CA. And just this week, Progress announced the hire of its new CEO, Jay Bhatt.

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There wasn’t a lot of news out of San Diego’s high tech community last week. On the other hand, the news we had was big. Get your roundup here.

—Aptera Motors, which raised an estimated $36 million in venture funding to develop a teardrop-shaped, three-wheel electric vehicle, shut down its operations Friday, according to an e-mail signed by Aptera CEO Paul Wilbur that was sent to customers and others. The company ran out of resources, Wilbur says. After nearly two years of discussions and “exhaustive due diligence” with the U.S. Department of Energy, Wilbur writes that Aptera got a “conditional commitment letter” for a $150 million loan. However, Aptera needed fresh capital to match the DOE loan and Wilbur says large private investors had no appetite to invest in “the perceived low volume return of our three-wheeled vehicle.” Aptera’s venture investors included Idealab, Esenjay Investments, and Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google Inc., according to VentureBeat.

—Nettle, the San Diego startup that came to light in August with a $500,000 investment from Google Ventures, launched MovieGoer, a new iPhone app. The free app helps people browse movies with friends from their social circle, find friends who have seen the movie, arrange to go see movies with their friends, and submit quick video reviews from their iPhone. CEO Brian Dear who founded San Diego-based Eventful in 2004, co-founded Nettle in late 2010 with Dan O’Neill, the chief technology officer. The two met a decade ago at MP3.com, where they worked together.

—San Diego-based Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) acquired Andover, MA-based Pixtronix, which has been developing low-power display technology for liquid crystal displays (LCD). Scott Kirsner of The Boston Globe reported the price is about $175 million to $200 million. While Pixtronix relies on micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) technology, the move is nevertheleess puzzling, as Qualcomm is spending close to $1 billion to build a factory in Taiwan for its own Mirasol display technology.

—A spokeswoman for San Diego’s Chumby Industries tells me the software company has struck another partnership that will make its catalog of apps available on the LG Smart TV program. In June, Chumby showcased how its offering of Web-based music, photos, games, and web sites worked with Internet-connected TVs and set-top boxes under a collaboration with Pace. Chumby also has licensed its technology for use in its Dash internet-connected device, and the Tablet S, which Sony introduced in August.

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As the third annual mHealth Summit convenes today near Washington, D.C., San Diego-based Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) says it has formed a new subsidiary, Qualcomm Life, from its wireless health business unit. The wireless technology giant says it also has established a $100 million wireless health investment fund that will be managed by Qualcomm Ventures.

Qualcomm Life is headed by Rick Valencia, a former CEO at San Diego-based ProfitLine who joined Qualcomm a little over a year ago. Valencia previously helped to launch ProfitLine’s multi-billion dollar telecommunications management services business. Qualcomm’s wireless health guru, Don Jones, continues in a similar role at Qualcomm Life as vice president of global strategy and market development.

As part of today’s announcement, Qualcomm also unveiled the 2net Platform and Hub, and a video explaining the technology is available here.

The 2net Hub is a product that plugs into a standard electric outlet—it resembles a simple wireless router—and serves as a gateway to the 2net Platform, which operates as a technology-agnostic, cloud-based service. The platform serves as a kind of universal translator and intermediary that addresses one of the intractable challenges amid the convergence of different wireless health devices, technologies, standards, and systems. Data from the 2net Hub, a user’s mobile phone, or other gateways, is sent to the 2net Platform, where it is encrypted and made available in the cloud to patients, physicians, and other appropriate users. Qualcomm says the system meets medical privacy requirements and works with multiple carriers.

Qualcomm says its 2net Platform and Hub, which are on display at the three-day conference in National Harbor, MD, and will transfer, store, convert, and display a variety of medical device data. More than 40 customers and collaborators are either considering or already integrating with its 2net ecosystem, including Pittsburgh, PA-based BodyMedia, New York’s Hello Health, and San Diego-based ResMed.

In today’s statement, Valencia says, “Qualcomm Life was founded, in part, to assist medical device manufacturers who approached Qualcomm for help when their own wireless connectivity attempts became untenable due to technology selection errors, unscalable deployment models and prohibitively high operational support costs.”

Qualcomm’s 2net Hub device resembles a simple wireless router. Qualcomm says it “seamlessly connects to integrated partner medical devices via shortwave radio, uploading biometric data over the cellular network to the 2net Platform’s data center.”

The company describes its platform and hub as the core for a technology “ecosystem.” Qualcomm also says the devices are individually listed with the FDA as Medical Device Data Systems (MDDS).

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Pixtronix, an Andover, MA-based maker of low-power displays, has been acquired by San Diego tech giant Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM), according to Scott Kirsner’s Innovation Economy blog. Terms of the purchase weren’t disclosed, but the report cites a price range of $175-200 million, based on sources close to the deal. A source of mine confirmed the deal but couldn’t provide any details on the record.

Pixtronix started in 2005 and has raised a little more than $50 million in venture funding from Atlas Venture, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and other investors. The company reportedly has 45 employees, and they’ll stay in Andover. Pixtronix is led by CEO Anthony Zona.

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Contrary to what you might expect, the pace of tech news out of San Diego didn’t slow down much before the Thanksgiving Holiday. We still managed to round it all up, though, and our briefing begins here.

—As director of the UC system’s California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CalIT2), Larry Smarr is an Internet pioneer who frequently offers his perspective on the future of IT technologies. Lately, however, Smarr has been providing a glimpse at the future of “quantified health” and digitally enabled genomic medicine. In a Q&A with Smarr, he told me he found he had one chemical marker (out of 60 that he regularly tracks) that was five times higher than the recommended upper limit—triggering a kind of detective story that illustrates the potential revolution in health IT and wireless health.

—In the U.S. Navy’s largest demonstration of alternative fuels, a decommissioned Navy destroyer refitted as a kind of ocean-going test facility completed a 17-hour transit from San Diego to Port Hueneme. The Spruance-class destroyer used a 50-50 mixture of standard Navy diesel fuel and algae-based diesel produced by San Francisco-based Solazyme.

—Mellmo, the four-year-old startup based in Solana Beach, CA, has been moving into overseas markets in Europe and Asia with Roambi, its Web-based business intelligence graphics service. Mellmo co-founder Quinton Alsbury also talked with me about Roambi Flow, a new service that enables corporate customers to wrap text around their Roambi graphics to produce magazine-quality reports for the iPad.

—The case of the 2010 murder of San Diego angel investor and retired life sciences executive John G. Watson came to a close when a San Diego jury convicted Kent Thomas Keigwin of first-degree murder, attempted grand theft of personal property, burglary, and forgery. The prosecutor argued that Keigwin, who was working as a financial advisor, used Watson’s personal information to transfer some $8.9 million from Watson’s accounts.

—San Diego-based Next Autoworks, which was once known as V Vehicle, withdrew its … Next Page »

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A 48-percent uptick in new company formations, a funding deal, and two acquisitions made for an encouraging week in San Diego’s innovation economy. This is our roundup of tech sector news.

—The California Public Utilities Commission approved five power purchase agreements that Soitec, the photovoltaic chip maker based Bernin, France, negotiated with San Diego Gas and Electric. The five deals represent a total capacity of 155 megawatts of new solar power for San Diego, according to Soitec. As we explained in April, Soitec says its innovation, which combines concentrating Fresnel lenses and high-performance PV chips, operates twice as efficiently as conventional solar cells. Soitec plans to manufacture its solar modules in the San Diego area, creating about 450 new jobs. Building the solar facility will cost an estimated $500 million.

—Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) acquired HaloIPT, a UK-based startup developing wireless charging technology for electric vehicles. Financial terms were not disclosed. The technology uses inductive power transfer to charge an electric vehicle (EV). The car parks over an electromagnet, which generates an electric field that transfers energy to the EV power system. A couple days after announcing the deal, Qualcomm said it’s planning to carry out a field trial in London that calls for establishing the wireless EV charging systems for 50 vehicles.

—Cubic (NYSE: CUB), the San Diego defense contractor, conducted a series of local exercises to demonstrate new “combat ID” technology, which is intended to reduce friendly fire casualties among U.S. troops in combat. The technology integrates laser targeting with radio frequency identification tags (RFIDs) and a GPS-based system in a rifle-mounted targeting scope, according to Cubic. The RFID tag, mounted on each soldier’s helmet, transits a coded radio signal that enables users to distinguish between friend and foe combatants.

—The San Diego-based Active Network (NYSE: ACTV) paid $21.5 million to acquire RTP (also known as Resort Technology Partners), a specialized IT company in Colorado that provides online reservation and registration services for Vail and other ski resorts. The Active Network already provides Web-based registration services for … Next Page »

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San Diego’s Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) says it’s rolling out the first wireless electric vehicle charging trials next year in London—just two days after the mobile giant said it acquired HaloIPT, a London startup developing the wireless charging technology.

In a statement today, Qualcomm says it is collaborating with the UK government, as well as the Mayor of London’s office and Transport for London to deliver the trial.

As many as 50 specially modified electric vehicles (EVs) will take part in the trial, including electric taxis, according to a news report from London.

In the United States, San Francisco-based Ecotality has been installing 15,000 charging in 16 cities throughout California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Tennessee, Texas, and the District of Columbia. But these are plug-in charging stations.

The Qualcomm trial in London, however, uses technology that charges an EV without plugging in any power cords. Inductive power transfer is a wireless technology that transmits energy from an electromagnet in a plate on the ground to a receiver in the EV. The British program calls for installing wireless inductive power transfer plates throughout London’s Tech City.

The process is a breeze for motorists. The driver simply parks the EV over the plate, and the system automatically aligns itself to transfer power across the gap, from the ground to the EV. In the statement from Qualcomm, Prime Minister David Cameron says, “Creative, high-tech advances such as this are extremely important as we work to rebalance our economy, and the decision to trial this at Tech City shows confidence in the UK as an ideal place for innovation and investment.”

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