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.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

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 »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

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 »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

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.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

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.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

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. 

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

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.

Comments | Reprints | Share: