Last week was the storm before the calm, as a warm front of high-tech news moved through the San Diego region before the Thanksgiving holiday. We’ve got the details here.

—San Diego-based DriveCam said it raised $85 million through a private placement that will be used mostly for its acquisition of RAIR Technologies. As I explained a couple of years ago, DriveCam puts its video data technology on the dashboards of fleet vehicles. Brookfield, WI-based RAIR provides technology that helps U.S. Department of Transportation-regulated fleet operators manage driver qualification requirements, vehicle inspection requirements, hours-of-service logs, and scoring for compliance, safety, and accountability. A New York private equity firm, Welsh Carson Anderson & Stowe, provided the $85 million in investment capital.

—The San Diego Venture Group awarded top honors—and $10,000 in startup capital—to San Diego-based SwoopThat at its annual PitchFest event. More than 70 early stage startups applied for the PitchFest competition, which ended last week in final presentations by SwoopThat, Gamer Grub, and Deal Current Network. SwoopThat helps college students at 2,347 schools nationwide save both time and money by purchasing their textbooks through Web-based technology that matches buyers with sellers of used textbooks. SwoopThat also operates a search engine that provides price comparisons for over 15 million products.

—A model fuels consortium formed six years ago by San Diego-based Reaction Design has developed software that can accurately simulate the formation of soot particulates during internal combustion. The modeling software was developed in anticipation of new engine exhaust regulations aimed to dramatically reduce the size and number of soot particles in gasoline and diesel-powered engines. As I had previously explained, Reaction Design develops software that models gaseous chemical reactions.

—A new San Diego startup, Swarmology, said it has raised $1.2 million as part of its emerging Web-based business, which mines social media as part of an integrated marketing approach for healthcare clients. Pharmaceutical and health IT executive Malcolm Bohm founded Swarmology to analyze online conversations about specific health concerns.

—Austin, TX-based car2go, a subsidiary of Daimler North America, announced the debut of its all-electric car-sharing program in San Diego—the first in North America. The company began deploying 300 zero-emission smart “fortwo” electric-drive vehicles here Friday, and said they are now in service.

—First, IBM’s Watson beat the best players on TV’s Jeopardy! game show. At last week’s SuperData Summit, IBM executive Christine Kretz said the company is now working on … Next Page »

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San Diego-based Ortiva Wireless, which specializes in scalable, high-performance technology for optimizing video on wireless networks, has raised $2.5 million in a combination of debt and rights to acquire securities, according to a recent regulatory filing. The company, which intends to raise nearly $3.8 million in this financing, closed its Series C round in venture funding seven months ago, according to VentureWire. Investors include Mission Ventures, Intel Capital, Artiman Ventures, and Comcast Ventures.

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San Diego’s Verimatrix has raised $7.5 million of a planned $7.6 million from investors, according to a regulatory filing earlier this week. Verimatrix spokeswoman Kelly Foster, who is in Las Vegas, NV, with the company at NAB 2011 (the National Association of Broadcasters’ annual convention) says the funding is related to the company’s recent acquisition of Munich, Germany-based Comvenient. Verimatrix provides software-based content security technologies in pay-TV networks for telecommunication providers.

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July was a busy month for small deals, according to the latest data from CB Insights, the New York information and data services firm that tracks the private company deals that help fuel the innovation economy. CB Insights sweeps the sub $1 million deals for both technology and life sciences companies into this roundup. Many of these are debt or option financings, rather than venture equity investments, which makes me wonder if this could be part of the “new normal” for raising capital in these parts. Or perhaps this is just a kind of pay-as-you-go plan as startups do what needs to get done.

Perhaps folks out there have some thoughts on that. Here’s the rundown, drawn from CB Insights, and other sources as noted:

—San Diego’s Novalar Pharmaceuticals, the specialty dental pharmaceutical company, raised just over $1 million of a $2.5 million round of debt, rights to acquire securities, and other securities. The company’s chief product is an injectable drug, phentolamine mesylate, that helps dissipate the numb feeling of dental anesthetic. Novalar raised $30 million in a 2007 Series D round that included Domain Associates, Genevest, Montreux Equity Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Sears Capital Management and SR One, according to VentureWire.

—Ortiva Wireless, a San Diego developer of software to deliver video clips over mobile networks, is offering $151,000 in warrants that can be converted into shares of preferred stock and other securities. The wireless company raised $15 million in a 2007 round that included Artiman Ventures, Avalon Ventures, Comcast Interactive Capital and Mission Ventures.

—Althea Technologies, a San Diego a contract services organization for the life sciences industry, is offering $552,500 in warrants that can be converted to … Next Page »

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It’s been a while since San Diego’s high-tech community saw this much deal news in one week—and most of it was good news, too. We gathered it all in one place for you here.

—Investor demand helped boost Carlsbad, CA-based MaxLinear’s shares (NYSE:MXL) by 33 percent on their first day of trading, with volume of nearly 6.9 million shares. MaxLinear, which makes wireless semiconductors for receiving and processing television and video signals over a broadband wireless connection, got about $50 million of the almost $90 million raised in the initial offering of 6.4 million shares, which was priced at $14 per share.

—Connect, the San Diego nonprofit group for technology and entrepreneurship, found that 319 startups were launched in 2009, about 13 percent more than the 282 startups of 2008. The data point was just one part of a report on San Diego’s innovation economy that Connect released for the fourth quarter of 2009.

—The Department of Energy turned down an application for $321 million in loans submitted by San Diego-based V-Vehicle, a venture-backed startup automaker that planned to build a factory in Northeastern Louisiana. The V-Vehicle Co. sought funding under the DOE’s Advanced Vehicle Technology Loan Program for what it called … Next Page »

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San Diego-based VMIX, which specializes in video hosting technology and services, has raised $2 million in additional venture capital, according to a regulatory filing with the SEC today. When I checked in with VMIX about two months ago, CEO Mike Glickenhaus was in the second year of heading a new VMIX business strategy that’s focused on serving media companies. The company previously raised $21.5 million in venture funding from JK&B Capital, Mission Ventures, ATA Ventures, and Enterprise Partners. A spokesman says all four participated in the latest round as well.

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When San Diego-based Avaak made its debut earlier this month at the spring DEMO conference in Palm Desert, CA, chief executive Gioia Messinger offered a grand description of the company’s personal video technology.”It’s like your own personal Google Street View, except it’s live, expandable, sharable, and easy—very, very easy,” Messinger told the Demo audience.

The technology enables users to easily set up a wireless Internet gateway and two small video cameras for $300, providing real-time video of anything from a family gathering to a company warehouse that can be viewed online via a personal “VueZone” account. In the same way that YouTube became ubiquitous and Google Earth forever changed the way people view the planet, Messinger said in a company statement, “We believe the Vue personal video network will transform the way consumers use remote video viewing.”

Since Avaak plans to begin selling the technology in the next few months, I met recently with Messinger and marketing vice-president Dan Gilbert to hear the Avaak story.

Messinger told me the idea for Avaak’s technology was hatched about five years ago, when the Pentagon was searching for inexpensive sensors that U.S. troops could leave behind when they must evacuate an area after securing it. In particular, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was looking to expand on wireless networking technology developed by a UC Berkeley computer science team headed by Kris Pister. The Berkeley team created wireless networks consisting of millimeter-sized sensors that were so small and so inexpensive that Pister coined the term “smart dust” to describe them. (Avaak itself is the Hebrew word for dust.) Such technology could be used by the military to track enemy movements, or to detect poisonous gas or radioactivity. Since then, Pister has founded his own startup, Dust Networks, a Hayward, CA-based company commercializing … Next Page »

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It’s been a little over six months since Brandon Nixon moved into the driver’s seat as CEO at San Diego-based DriveCam, a venture-backed company that uses a combination of technologies to help reduce risky driving behaviors. That seems like enough time for a new boss to get up to speed, so I stopped in recently to ask Nixon why he agreed to take over a startup that’s already got some mileage on the odometer.

Nixon has his reasons, three to be specific, all related to the potential growth he sees for the company and its technology. And his reasoning carries some weight. As a general partner at Housatonic Partners, Nixon oversaw the private equity firm’s investments in a number of telecommunications-related companies. In 2002, he stepped into the CEO’s job at a Housatonic portfolio company, Enerdyne Technologies of El Cajon, CA, and led Enerdyne’s sale four years later to ViaSat (NASDAQ: VSAT) of Carlsbad, CA, for $17 million.

So in essence, by naming Nixon as CEO, DriveCam was redefining itself as less of a video technology company and more of a data communications technology business.

Yet DriveCam’s business strategy has only come into focus since 2005, when the company got about $50 million in venture funding from San Diego’s JMI Equity, Silicon Valley’s Menlo Ventures, New York-based Insight Venture Partners, and Integral Capital Partners, the Menlo Park, CA, firm that also put money into Google, Akamai, and Qualcomm.

Until then, DriveCam was mostly bootstrapped, although spokesman Eric Cohen says “there’s not a lot of historical information” available now about the first seven years. The company was founded in San Diego in 1998, after Australian inventor Gary Rayner experienced one of Southern California’s infamous road rage incidents. His idea for mounting a small video camera on the dashboard was novel enough to win a most-innovative product award in 2000 from Connect, the San Diego non-profit group that promotes technology and entrepreneurship. The device combined hardware and software to store unbiased video clips that served as an unbiased eyewitness to traffic accidents and other highway incidents.

Fast-forward 11 years, and it now seems as though hardly a cable TV channel goes by without seeing reality TV video footage of some terrifying high-speed police pursuit that was recorded by the dashboard-mounted camera in a patrol car. “There are a lot of crash recorders on the market,” Nixon conceded. But the company learned a long time ago there wasn’t much demand for … Next Page »

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San Diego’s DivX (NASDAQ: DIVX) says its chief technology officer Markus Moenig has resigned to “return overseas and explore new entrepreneurial opportunities.” The company said Moenig’s primary focus, which was integrating H. 264 digital video technology, has been realized in its soon-to-be released DivX 7 product. The vice president of engineering, Jim Reesman, will lead DivX’s global engineering organization.

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A federal appellate court agreed that San Diego’s Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) should be punished for hiding its work from industry groups developing a new video technology standard. But the three-judge panel ruled that a San Diego trial judge went a step too far by invalidating Qualcomm’s patents on the video compression technology it had concealed.

Qualcomm’s misconduct emerged in a January 2007 trial that was the culmination of a patent infringement lawsuit the San Diego wireless giant filed two years earlier against Broadcom (NASDAQ: BRCM), a rival chipmaker in Irvine, CA.

In its ruling yesterday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld much of the punishment that San Diego federal Judge Rudi Brewster imposed on Qualcomm in his August 2007 opinion. The panel agreed, for example, that Qualcomm must pay Broadcom’s attorneys’ fees in the case, which totaled more than $8.5 million. Instead of stripping Qualcomm’s video patents, however, the appeals court said Qualcomm cannot assert its patents in connection with what’s known as the H.264 standard, an upgrade to MPEG 2 and MPEG 4 video technologies.

Perhaps more importantly, the appellate opinion clarifies the proper legal course that technology companies should follow in disclosing their internal technology development to standards setting organizations.

The appeals court agreed that Qualcomm was legally required to disclose its intellectual property rights as a participant in an industry group called the Joint Video Team that was developing a standard for video compression technology in 2003. That’s because a patent holder is in a position to “hold up” other participants in the group from implementing a new standard by claiming its patents take precedence. Instead, Qualcomm withheld the fact it had established two key patents in the area in 1995 and 1996.

Qualcomm then sprang its patent “ambush,” citing its key patents in a 2005 lawsuit filed against Broadcom. Throughout the case, Qualcomm and its lawyers insisted the company had not participated in the 2003 standard-setting meetings, which would have precluded the company from filing its suit. Broadcom lawyers uncovered emails during the trial, however, that showed Qualcomm had participated and its engineers were closely following the technical progress of the standards setting organization.

A federal magistrate in San Diego later sanctioned six lawyers representing Qualcomm for withholding tens of thousands of emails in a “monumental” violation of the legal rules for pre-trial discovery.

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San Diego-based Solekai Systems Corp., an independent services firm specializing in digital video technology, is selling its Boulder engineering test lab. SocalTECH.com says the lab is being combined with assets from Vidiom Systems to form enableTV, with about 60 former Vidiom and Solekai employees joining the new company. Financial terms were not disclosed. 

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Bellevue, WA-based UIEvolution, a maker of multimedia publishing software for mobile phones and other consumer electronics, announced that it has raised a Series A round led by Intel Capital, with Itochu also participating. The deal is reportedly worth some $5 million.

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