The San Diego members of Southern California’s Tech Coast Angels (TCA) have established a $1 million nonprofit foundation in the name of John G. Watson, the late San Diego life sciences executive and investor who was slain here almost two years ago.

In a touching afterward to the tragedy, TCA president Stephen Flaim tells me that Watson left a $1 million gift to set up some kind of fund that would support entrepreneurs and startup activities in San Diego. “The foundation is based on this endowment,” Flaim says. “We’ve put the money under management and hope to solicit additional contributions. We want the fund to grow.”

Watson, a retired pharmaceutical executive, was active in San Diego’s network of angel investors and was overseeing plans for the group’s “Quick Pitch” competition for the second consecutive year when he died. Two TCA members discovered Watson’s body in his La Jolla townhome on June 8, 2010, after he failed to show for a regular TCA board meeting at the UC San Diego faculty club.

Kent Thomas Keigwin, a local investment adviser who was charged in Watson’s death, was convicted by a San Diego jury two months ago of first-degree murder, identity theft, attempted grand theft of personal property, burglary, and forgery. The prosecutor, Deputy District Attorney Sharla Evert, argued that Keigwin used a stun gun to immobilize Watson and strangled him. She told jurors that Keigwin used Watson’s personal information to impersonate him and had transferred $8.9 million from Watson’s personal accounts at the time he was arrested. Keigwin’s sentencing is scheduled for later this month.

In a statement from the TCA, Watson’s sister, Gillian Ison, says, “John loved investing, innovation, and the entrepreneurial spirit that he discovered when he arrived in San Diego. We believe that a foundation supporting entrepreneurism is the best way to honor his memory and his life.”

A native of the United Kingdom, Watson graduated from Cambridge University with a bachelor of science degree in economics before coming to the United States to study as a Fulbright Scholar at Indiana University. He earned a … Next Page »

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In Forbes magazine’s annual piece about America’s most dangerous cities, published in October, the article leads with an anecdote from Detroit. Detroit has been a mainstay on such lists for decades, and last year, it led the nation in violent crimes with with 345 murders and 1,111 violent crimes reported per 100,000 residents.

According to the Detroit Police Department’s website, 327 murders have been committed as of Dec. 11, a 12 percent increase over 2010, which means we’re on pace to have another exceptionally violent year. (Interestingly, though Forbes put the 2010 murder total at 345 using data from a combination of sources, including the FBI, Detroit police put the 2010 murder total at 292. Given that the department has been under a federal consent decree since 2000 due to concerns over its use of excessive force and arrest and detention practices, I’m inclined to go with the bigger number.)

What gets lost in Detroit’s raw crime statistics are the innovative, tech-heavy, crime-fighting efforts of the Wayne State University Police Department—efforts that are now beginning to pay off. Along with installing cameras and using CompStat data to constantly refine deployment to ever-shifting crime hot spots, the department has embarked on an ambitious crime-mapping project with the university’s Center for Urban Studies.

WSUPD Chief Anthony Holt has also made it a priority to heavily engage his department with local business owners and security officers from all the major institutions in his jurisdiction, including the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Detroit Medical Center, Henry Ford Hospital, and the Detroit Public Library.

In a city where the police department at large is viewed as underfunded and overburdened at best and hopelessly inept at worst, Chief Holt’s strategy shows what’s possible in Detroit when cooperation and accurate data meet good old-fashioned community policing.

“All of these activities have resulted in a major reduction in crime,” Holt said. “Crime overall in Midtown is down 15 to 25 percent, break-ins are down 29 percent, and … Next Page »

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Here at Xconomy, it’s unusual for us to shift far from our focus on the business of innovation—especially to cover something off the local police blotter.

But the 2010 murder of retired biotech CEO and angel investor John G. Watson hit close to home for San Diego’s innovation community, especially among local life sciences investors and members of the San Diego chapter of the Tech Coast Angels (TCA). Shortly after Watson’s body was discovered on June 8, 2010, San Diego police arrested Kent Thomas Keigwin, who knew Watson and had been working as a financial advisor in a local office of Wedbush Securities.

The case came to an end Friday, when a San Diego jury convicted Keigwin of first-degree murder, identity theft, attempted grand theft of personal property, burglary, and forgery. Deputy District Attorney Sharla Evert argued that Keigwin killed Watson to steal his money, firing a stun gun at Watson and strangling him inside Watson’s La Jolla apartment. The prosecutor said Keigwin used personal information he found in Watson’s wallet to impersonate him, transferring some $8.9 million from Watson’s accounts.

Keigwin’s lawyer, Deputy Public Defender Stacy Gulley, argued that the evidence showed only that Keigwin had committed a theft.

The trial began on Nov. 7, and ended exactly two weeks later. Dana Littlefield of the San Diego Union-Tribune reports that jurors also found Keigwin guilty of committing the murder under special circumstances—murder for financial gain and murder during a robbery. That makes him eligible for a sentence of life in prison without parole.

During his years in San Diego, Watson’s social network consisted mostly of the local innovation community. As I reported at the time, he was a 65-year-old bachelor and former pharmaceutical executive who had settled into his retirement in La Jolla after moving to San Diego several years earlier to run Ionian Technologies. Watson was active in the Tech Coast Angels, a group of individual investors who fund and mentor early stage startups, and Connect, San Diego’s nonprofit group for technology and entrepreneurship.

Judge Frederic Link, who presided at the trial, set Keigwin’s sentencing hearing for Jan. 20, at 9 a.m. in the downtown San Diego County Courthouse.

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A co-founder and former chief executive of MOD Systems was convicted of federal fraud and money laundering charges today in federal court. The U.S. attorney’s office says Mark E. Phillips, 36, of Seattle, could get up to 20 years in prison when he’s sentenced in late May. Federal prosecutors say Phillips transferred $1.5 million from MOD Systems to his own account for a down payment on a penthouse, and also spent company money that had been transferred into a girlfriend’s account. Seattle-based MOD Systems, which makes technology to deliver movie and music files through self-service kiosks, announced in December that it was cutting 35 percent of its workforce. It had better news last fall when it raised $6 million in financing.

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Kent Thomas Keigwin, a former certified public accountant, has been ordered to stand trial on charges that include murder for financial gain in connection with the death of John G. Watson, a retired biotech executive and San Diego angel investor whose body was found June 8. Prosecutors presented evidence at a three-day preliminary hearing that Watson was struck by a Taser and strangled, according to The San Diego Union-Tribune. Witnesses also testified that Keigwin posed as Watson while trying to open an account at Scottrade, an online brokerage firm, and attempted to transfer $7.5 million of Watson’s money into it. Superior Court Judge Yvonne Campos ruled that prosecutors had presented enough evidence for the case to go to trial.

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The Book of Odds isn’t betting its future on any one thing, and founder and president Amram Shapiro see that as one of its strengths.

“A lot of websites and startups are one-trick ponies,” Shapiro says. “Everything really has to work or pretty much they’re out of it. We think of ourselves as a 10- or 20-trick pony.”

Those tricks include a website, data service, gaming outlet, book franchise, and risk management tool (it’s just recently started working on the last three). Last year, the Boston-based startup came out of a roughly three-year stealth mode, to roll out its destination website. BookofOdds.com has close to half a million “odds” statements, based on data its staff has pulled from sources like government agencies and surveys. It frames each probability statement with the geography and time frame that the number refers to, the source of the data, and definitions of the terms within. A random example: The odds that a U.S. female 20 or older eats cheese at least once a day are 1 in 3.56.

Its content hinges on semantic technology, supplied by another Boston-area startup, Cambridge Semantics, which helps form relationships among a slew of facts and data. The Book of Odds then takes the information stored in the relational databases to populate its consumer-facing website with the odds statements. The semantic technology ascribes metadata—information about the data—to each statement, so the information within can be pulled apart and reworked for other statements.

Another fun factoid: The odds a female Internet user 18 or older will consider the person she is dating her boyfriend or girlfriend after three to five dates are 1 in 12.5.

As much fun as the random facts about subjects from food to death to dating can be, Shapiro sees his Web service ultimately as a source of measuring risk and a tool for connecting people with information to help improve their odds in areas of their lives like health, careers, and investing. So his team has been building a number of improvements to the site, in a closed beta version, designed to bring greater meaning to the numbers and sources it provides.

“It’s about taking our unique information, and making it very, very easy to find,” he says.

At present, the factoids are all accessible via a simple search bar on the company’s home page, where users plug in a key word (I used “cheese” and “boyfriend” for the statements above). They can filter their results pages through a number of relevant key words, the date of the odds statement, and the likelihood that an event will happen, but Shapiro hopes the impending improvements will give greater context and meaning to the often quirky statistics.

He gave me a sneak peek of the upcoming features, which he expects to go live on the site in a month or so. They frame the odds statements with more specifics, graphics, and comparison data. For example, under the healthcare umbrella, a user can search for the odds of a person getting diagnosed with cancer in a given year. Once they get that answer, they can … Next Page »

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San Diego authorities are adding a murder charge to the case against a 59-year-old man who was jailed last month on identity theft charges, which stemmed from the illegal transfer of $7.5 million from the account of a biotech investor who was found dead June 8.

Kent Thomas Keigwin will be arraigned for murder tomorrow in connection with the death of John G. Watson, a retired life sciences executive and San Diego Tech Coast Angels board member, according to Steve Walker, a spokesman for the San Diego County District Attorney.

Keigwin was charged last month with financial fraud, and his bail was set at $2.5 million. Authorities allege that Keigwin was posing as Watson when he moved $7.5 million from a Deutsche Bank account into another stock trading account. Since then, the San Diego County Medical Examiner determined that Watson, who was 65, was strangled to death, according to a statement issued today by Lt. Ernie Herbert of the police homicide unit.

Steve Flaim, the current president of the San Diego Tech Coast Angels, says the group is “pleased that the San Diego police have proceeded far enough on the John Watson homicide investigation to be able to press charges and we hope that this case is solved with a conviction of the guilty party as soon as possible.”

Watson, who was born and raised in England, was a retired pharmaceutical industry and biotech CEO. He had spent much of his career at big pharma companies like Johnson & Johnson and Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, and arrived in San Diego about six years ago to head Ionian Technologies, a local life sciences company. After retiring, Watson joined the angel investor group in 2008.

Two of Watson’s friends and fellow angel investors discovered his body in his residential apartment on Camino del Oro in La Jolla after he failed to appear for the San Diego Tech Coast Angels’ regular monthly meeting on June 8. Watson, who was 65, was active in the group, which mentors entrepreneurs and invests in local startup technology companies. He also was active with Connect, the San Diego nonprofit program for technology and entrepreneurship.

Police investigators arrested Keigwin early in the morning of June 11, when he showed up at Watson’s door with Watson’s laptop computer and other personal belongings. Police investigators, who were in Watson’s home searching for evidence, already knew that someone posing as Watson had drained $7.5 million from Watson’s account.

Keigwin had been representing himself as a financial advisor to the “entrepreneur and investor community” in San Diego, according to authorities.

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San Diego’s life sciences community and angel investors are watching transfixed as investigators unfold the suspicious death of La Jolla resident John G. Watson. We also saw some huge funding deals over the past week, and we’ve summarized it all for you here:

—Carlsbad, CA-based Regulus Therapeutics announced a lucrative partnership with Sanofi-Aventis, the Paris-based pharma giant, to discover, develop, and someday co-market microRNA drugs. Sanofi agreed to pay Regulus as much as $750 million in milestone payments, eclipsing the $600 million deal Regulus struck with GlaxoSmithKline in 2008.

—Kent Keigwin, a 59-year-old financial advisor, appeared in a San Diego County Superior Court yesterday to face identify theft, grand theft and forgery charges. San Diego Police say Keigwin posed as John G. Watson, a retired biotech executive and local angel investor, and illegally transferred $7.5 million out of Watson’s brokerage account. Watson, who was 65, was found dead in his La Jolla home on June 8.

—San Diego’s Neurocrine Biosciences (NASDAQ: NBIX) granted worldwide rights to experimental diabetes drugs to German drug maker Boehringer Ingelheim in a deal that could be worth as much as $225 million. In a separate deal, the U.S. drug giant Abbott Laboratories agreed to pay Neurocrine up … Next Page »

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San Diego authorities have charged a 59-year-old man with identity theft, saying he unlawfully transferred $7.5 million from a Deutsche Bank account by posing as the actual account holder—a retired San Diego biotech executive and angel investor who was found dead on June 8.

San Diego police also are investigating the death of the executive, John G. Watson, as a possible homicide. Watson, who was 65, was a board member at the San Diego Tech Coast Angels and active with Connect, the San Diego nonprofit program for technology and entrepreneurship.

Police arrested Kent Keigwin, 59, on June 11 after he showed up at Watson’s residential unit on Camino Del Oro in La Jolla, according to Deputy District Attorney Sharla Evert. Police investigators, who were in Watson’s home searching for evidence, already knew that someone posing as Watson had transferred $7.5 million to a Scottrade account that was opened in Watson’s name, Evert says.

Keigwin had been representing himself as a financial advisor to the “entrepreneur and investor community” in San Diego, Evert says. Keigwin pleaded innocent to identity theft and related felony fraud charges at a June 15 arraignment. His bail was set at $2.5 million, and Evert says he remains in jail.

Police homicide Lt. Kevin Rooney told me yesterday that investigators are awaiting a formal determination on the cause of Watson’s death by the San Diego County Medical Examiner.

As I reported last week, Watson’s body was found on the floor of his bedroom on the evening of June 8 after he failed to appear for the San Diego Tech Coast Angels’ regular board meeting and dinner event at the UC San Diego faculty club. Watson was expected to serve as the event’s master of ceremonies and fellow board members, who were alarmed and concerned by his absence, found his body. It was unknown how long he had been dead, but TCA members told me Watson had not responded to e-mails sent days before the event.

Evert says the new account in Watson’s name appears to have been opened the previous day, on June 7.

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San Diego police have launched a homicide investigation into the death of John G. Watson, a retired biotech executive and board member of the San Diego Tech Coast Angels, according to members of the startup investment group who were close to Watson.

Watson’s body was found in the bedroom of his La Jolla Apartment on June 8th when he failed to appear for a regular TCA board meeting and dinner event at the UC San Diego faculty club, said Steve Flaim, who is current president of the TCA’s San Diego chapter. Flaim says he notified TCA members by e-mail yesterday that Watson’s death “appeared suspicious” to San Diego police and that Watson also “was the subject of fraud and embezzlement.” Flaim says his e-mail prompted Frank Peters, a TCA member in Orange County, to report that Watson had been murdered in an item published on his website yesterday.

San Diego police have made an arrest, Flaim told me, although I was unable to confirm that with the police last night, and it isn’t clear whether the arrest is related to the fraud or murder investigation—or both.

“We’re all angry and shocked and upset that something like this could happen to one of us,” Flaim said in a phone call last night. He described Watson, who was 65, as “a happy bachelor” who had retired in La Jolla, and was active with Connect, San Diego’s nonprofit group for technology and entrepreneurship, and as an angel investor.

Two TCA members found Watson’s body on the floor of his bedroom 11 days ago, Flaim said. Watson had missed the group’s afternoon board meeting, and was expected to serve as master of ceremonies during the dinner event, which included presentations by several entrepreneurs. Watson also had failed to respond for several days before the event to e-mails from … Next Page »

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A federal judge today ordered the CEO of a Bellevue, WA, computer programming and Web design company to pay at least $264,000 in fines and restitution and to serve 90 days’ home confinement for an alleged act of cyberspace sabotage. According to the U.S. Attorney’s office in Seattle, Minecode CEO Pradyumna Samal ordered a Minecode employee to send computer commands that completely deleted a customer’s website, e-mail server, and its customer database in retaliation over a contract dispute. Vinado, an e-commerce wine-seller, had hired Minecode to develop a “virtual gift shop” for its website. The cyberspace sabotage cost Vinado more than $115,000 and forced the company out of business.

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Woe to the hoodie-wearing miscreant who steals a Mac laptop equipped with MacTrak. He’s likely to find his photo plastered all over the Internet—and the police at his door.

MacTrak is a beta application for Macs introduced today by Portland, OR-based GadgetTrak. It’s similar in conception to Absolute Software’s LoJack for Laptops and to Adeona, a free open-source tracking system released this summer by computer-science researchers at the University of Washington and the University of California, San Diego. But it has a couple of interesting twists that may increase your chances of getting back your stolen laptop—or that, at the very least, will cause greater embarrassment for the thief.

First, once you activate the $59.95 program by logging into your GadgetTrak account, the software uses the laptop’s built-in iSight camera to snap a photo of whoever is using the machine every 30 minutes. If the laptop is connected to the Internet, the software will automatically e-mail these photos to you and post them to your account at the Flickr photo-sharing website (see image below). You can set these images to be private or public—depending on how much help you want catching the thief.

Second, MacTrak uses Wi-Fi-based location-finding technology provided by Boston-based Skyhook Wireless to determine the laptop’s latitude and longitude, usually to within about 20 meters. This information is uploaded to Flickr along with the iSight photos. You can then get help recovering your device by forwarding the information to GadgetTrak or directly to law-enforcement authorities.

Unlike the LoJack for Laptops system, GadgetTrak’s software doesn’t rely on a monitoring center, doesn’t send location information to the company, and doesn’t have backdoor access to the laptop’s operating system—measures the company, on its website, calls “an invasion of privacy.”

The Adeona system is also designed to preserve laptop owners’ privacy, and has the added attraction of being free. But the GadgetTrak’s positioning systems gives it a leg up: Adeona can only tell you which Internet routers communicated with your stolen laptop, whereas MacTrak can tell you the device’s actual location.

The integration of Skyhook’s Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS) into GadgetTrak’s product is the latest in a long line of software deals engineered by the Boston company; the most recent before this, was an arrangement to put WPS into the Symbian operating system used by millions of cell phones worldwide. “GadgetTrak is an excellent example of location-awareness enhancing the security of our valuable mobile devices,” Kate Imbach, Skyhook’s director of marketing, said in a statement.

For Windows laptops, GadgetTrak makes an application that, like Adeona, tracks stolen laptops to the nearest Internet router. The company also makes “search and destroy” software that can remotely erase sensitive data stored on missing laptops or smartphones.

Update, 12/3/08: In a related customer win for Skyhook, Awareness Technologies of Los Angeles announced today that it has added the Wi-Fi Positioning System to its Laptop Cop software for laptop recovery and remote file deletion.

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Crime shows generally turn me off, but for years I’ve enjoyed CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, because (as I’ve written before) the heroes are scientists. They catch crooks not by outgunning them, but by observing, hypothesizing, and testing. Of course, the dramatic license that CSI and other series sometimes take with real-world science can be disturbing: no matter how much you “enhance” a still from a surveillance video, for example, you can’t read a license plate in the reflection on someone’s cornea. But you’ve got to applaud creator Jerry Bruckheimer and the show’s writers for bringing out the glamour in a dweeby and meticulous profession like forensic science.

TV viewers clearly have an ongoing appetite for scientists as leading characters. And there are two new series this season that play on that fascination. One of them—another Bruckheimer creation called Eleventh Hour that premiered on CBS last night—tries its best to stick to known, real-world science and its uses and abuses. The other, the Fox series Fringe, has no such scruples. Created by J.J. Abrams, it gleefully mixes factual science with patently impossible claptrap, yet manages to stay charming.

I felt moved to write about the two shows this week because they’re both inspired by science, but take almost diametrically opposite approaches to portraying it—with wildly differing results. In short—though I wish it were the other way around—Fringe is an enjoyable romp, while Eleventh Hour (at least in its pilot episode) is preachy and predictable.

Fringe’s plot will feel familiar to any fan of The X-Files or of Abrams’ previous series, Alias and Lost. FBI agent Olivia Dunham (played by Australian actor Anna Torv) joins a top-secret interagency task force investigating a series of bizarre occurrences: a planeload of bodies dissolved by a mysterious virus, a mutant baby that hits Social Security age in under an hour, a bus full of people suffocated by instant Jell-O, a demonic underground torpedo that surfaces every few decades. The government thinks these events are connected: Dunham’s boss refers to the phenomena as the Pattern.

To study the events, Dunham recruits former Harvard scientist Walter Bishop—a mad-scientist type played to the hilt by John Noble, aka The Lord of the Rings‘ Lord Denethor—and his son Peter, a genius-dropout gamely portrayed by Joshua Jackson, the wisecracking actor who single-handedly made Dawson’s Creek tolerable. Walter has a childlike wonder about science, but is haunted by the memory of the defense-related experiments he was forced to perform in the 1970s (experiments that, it is implied, may have given rise to the Pattern). Meanwhile, Peter is on the run from some unpleasant people who loaned him a lot of money (and they’re not mortgage brokers).

Dunham’s investigations frequently lead her back to Massive Dynamic, a Microsoft-Apple-Intel-General Dynamics hybrid where all of the offices look as if they were designed by Ayn Rand protagonists. Her contact there is Nina Sharp, lieutenant to the company’s reclusive founder. Sharp has a bionic arm and is played with creepy gusto by Blair Brown (Altered States, The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd).

It’s actually Sharp, in the pilot, who’s given the line that sums up the series’ intellectual premise: “Science and technology have advanced at such an exponential rate for so long… it may be well beyond our ability to regulate and control them.” We’re meant to infer that the Pattern is a global experiment by some dark organization (SD6, perhaps?) that’s bent on transforming society but may be in over its own head. Clearly, Abrams has been reading books like Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity, which posits that genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics are about to give rise to a new species of hyper-intelligent and virtually immortal super-humans. But whereas Kurzweil greets this glorious future with optimism, Abrams sees the potential for boundless mischief.

I would be very surprised if Abrams ever reveals, or even knows, what the Pattern really is—I stopped watching Lost after it became obvious that he had no intention of clarifying who created the island or why the plane-crash survivors were brought there. But I think I may stick with Fringe, because in the end, it isn’t about the conspiracy. It’s really about Walter, who keeps the show moving forward by conceiving the brilliant (if pseudoscientific) experiments that provide the clues to solving each episode’s conundrum. (Hey, if we just hook up a TV to this corpse’s optic nerve, we’ll get a picture of the last thing she ever saw!) Walter is the MacGyver of neurophysics—his genius lies in his willingness to consider how, with the aid of defibrillators, LSD, and aluminum foil, one might approximate fringe phenomena like telepathy. The show’s big question is … Next Page »

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