—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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Janssen Healthcare Innovation, part of Johnson & Johnson’s reconstituted R&D operation in San Diego, is announcing an incentive prize challenge with awards totaling $250,000 for technology solutions that improve care for patients who’ve just been discharged from a hospital.

Janssen says it’s working with the National Transitions of Care Coalition to establish criteria and to recruit experts in transition care to serve as judges. The coalition was established in Little Rock, AR, almost six years ago to address a variety of care issues that often arise after discharge. The lack of coordination often means the primary care physician is unaware a patient was hospitalized (or released), newly prescribed medications don’t get reconciled, and patient complaints go unheeded, which can result in a range of adverse events and increased health care costs.

Hospital readmissions under Medicare cost $15 billion a year, and $12 billion of these readmissions are considered preventable, according to a Janssen spokeswoman. The challenge was announced at the Health Care Innovations Summit in Washington, D.C.

In a statement today, Diego Miralles of Janssen Healthcare Innovation says, “We hope that the Janssen Connected Care Challenge will inspire the best and the brightest entrepreneurs to develop effective, scalable solutions that can be deployed and truly make a meaningful impact in patients’ lives.”

Johnson & Johnson, based in New Brunswick, NJ, has consolidated a variety of its business units over the past year under the umbrella of Janssen Healthcare. Janssen says its incentive prize competition is intended to prompt “a crowdsourcing-inspired effort to rally entrepreneurs’ best ideas.” The goal is to create technology for coordinating patient care within and between different healthcare practices.

More information about The Janssen Connected Care Challenge is available on the Janssen Healthcare Innovation website. Janssen plans to award $50,000 to each of three finalists, as well as the chance to consult with healthcare experts to refine their solution. A winner will be selected in May, awarded $100,000, and get help to advance their concept toward commercialization.

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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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The concept for a life sciences startup put together by neuroscientists, a psychiatrist, and MBA student received the top prize—and $57,000 in cash and services—in UCSD’s fifth annual student-managed business plan competition.

The proposal for NeuroMap, a seed-stage life sciences startup, was pulled together by Alexey Terskikh, a neuroscientist specializing in development and aging at the Sanford Burnham Medical Research Institute; Dmitri Sivstov, a psychiatrist at UCSD Medical School; Andrew Rabinovich, a bio-engineering researcher at UCSD; and Daniel Norton of the Rady School of Management. They outlined a commercialization plan for assays developed to determine the efficacy of antidepressant medications for individual patients, an approach to personalized medicine with the potential to reshape a specialty now dominated by “trial and error” prescriptions. The team estimates its technology would be able to save insurance providers and patients $2,500 per patient.

The second prize, which includes $28,000 in cash and services, was awarded to DevaCell, a molecular diagnostics startup led by UCSD electrical engineering doctoral candidate Inanc Ortac and recent Ph.D graduates Ahmet Erten and Corbin Clawson. DevaCell has focused on using advanced detection technology to help healthcare providers screen for Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, the potentially deadly multi-drug resistant bacteria.

Third prize, and $15,500 in cash and services, was awarded to Interra Energy leader Thomas Del Monte for a system that turns biomass products into natural gas and soil amendment.

The 5th Annual UC San Diego Entrepreneur Challenge Business Plan Competition also awarded $2,000 prizes to the top entry in five categories: iConsent Medical (HighTech/IT); Oculeve (Biotech/Life Sciences); Interra Energy (Clean Technology); Mobcuts (Social Entrepreneurship/Consumer Product); and Lifelens (Undergraduates). The competition has operated as a wholly student and volunteer organization that hosts a series of free, public educational workshops on the commercialization process, networking events, and competition events each year.

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Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) chairman and CEO Paul Jacobs revealed today that the San Diego-based wireless technology giant has been working with the X Prize Foundation to develop criteria for a new $10 million X Prize grand challenge that is straight out of Star Trek—a “Tricorder X Prize.”

The idea—which is still being distilled—is to offer a $10 million incentive prize to the team that can develop the first diagnostic device that actually works like the ubiquitous medical tricorder of Star Trek fame. Generally speaking, the technology would have to be portable, use wireless sensors, be minimally invasive, and capable of providing rapid, low-cost diagnoses of medical ailments and injuries. Oh, and organizers also want the gadget to be able to diagnose patients better than or equal to a panel of board-certified physicians.

Jacobs announced the proposal during a keynote speech this morning at a wireless health conference in downtown San Diego. The X Prize Foundation officially announced the collaboration in a statement issued at about the same time from its headquarters near Los Angeles.

The X Prize Foundation gained worldwide renown as the organizer of the $10 million prize for the first reusable civilian spacecraft. X Prize founder Peter Diamandis issued the challenge in 1996, and a team led by famed aerospace designer Burt Rutan—with financial support from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen—won the $10 million prize in 2004.

“Part of prize development is to bring something to reality, but part of it also is to change the mindset,” said Jessica Ching, the foundation staffer who is responsible for developing the rules governing the competition. In the case of the X Prize for spaceflight, Ching says the Rutan-designed SpaceShipOne shattered the prevalent notion that only government-backed spacecraft could reach for the stars.

Spock with Tricorder

In a similar way, the Tricorder X Prize is intended to break the grip of conventional thinking in healthcare by extending the reach of health information and services to more people. “Health is important to everybody,” Ching said. Creating the prize, she added, “came from a real need and a desire to push for change.”

For now, however, the more immediate challenge lies in establishing the ground rules for a fair competition.

“It’s got to be really difficult, but not impossible,” said Ching. She estimated that developing guidelines for the Tricorder X Prize would take about six months—a process that Qualcomm is funding—and the foundation would likely formally announce the challenge sometime next year.

“What we have to do is take general characteristics and turn them into an objective set of criteria,” said Don Jones, Qualcomm’s Vice President of Business Development for Health and Life Sciences.

Ching, who also was attending the Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance Convergence Summit in San Diego, said that developing a portable medical diagnostic tool would require innovations across many technologies, including medical imaging, microfluidics, and wireless sensors. It also would likely require radical advances in such fields as artificial intelligence and decision systems.

In its statement today, the X Prize Foundation says, “This prize will bring understandable, easily accessible health information and metrics to consumers on their mobile devices, pointing them to earlier actions for care.” Or, as Qualcomm’s Paul Jacobs put it during his talk, “Imagine a future where the tricorder is just another app on your phone.”

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San Diego’s West Wireless Health Institute has awarded a $10,000 incentive prize to a Rhode Island software developer who answered a challenge the institute issued six months ago in conjunction with the Veterans Affairs Innovation Initiative (VAi2). The institute’s challenge called for development of a cost-effective wireless device or mobile app that enables VA patients and their healthcare providers to share pertinent patient care data.

The institute issued its award to Steven Palmer, a Vietnam Veteran and melanoma survivor, for an iPhone app he developed for use in a monthly self-examination for signs of the deadly skin cancer. The app enables users to collect precise color images of skin irregularities, lesions, and moles. Users can compare images of specific irregularities with images from previous exams, making it easier to see any changes, such as the size, shape, border regularity, or coloration of a lesion.

Palmer’s app, the Veterans Melanoma Early Warning System, also enables users to transmit images to a dermatology clinic for expert review, and even to schedule an appointment.

In a statement issued yesterday, institute CEO Don Casey says, “When we launched the developers challenge with VAi2, we wanted to spur exactly this type of breakthrough thinking to enable great outcomes at a much lower human and financial cost.”

Palmer, who received the Purple Heart in Vietnam, was treated for melanoma at the Providence, RI, Veterans Affairs Medical Center. He has been writing workflow software for the financial industry since 1974, when he received his Doctor of Science degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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San Diego Wireless Giant Qualcomm (Nasdaq: QCOM) today named New York-based Enterproid as the winner of its second Qualcomm Ventures QPrize international venture investment competition. Enterproid, which won $100,000 as a finalist, has been developing Android-based technology to enable professionals to consolidate their work and personal life onto a single enterprise-grade device. As the QPrize Grand Prize winner, Enterproid will get an additional $150,000 in convertible note funding from Qualcomm and will make a presentation at this week’s Demo Spring 2011 conference.

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Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM), the San Diego wireless technology giant, said today it awarded its top prize to two developers from Lithuania in its 2010 Augmented Reality Developer Challenge. The company awarded $125,000 to Lithuanians Paulius Liekis and Arminas Didžiokas for Paparazzi, an interactive game where the player becomes a virtual paparazzo who tries to photograph a vain celebrity before he gets agitated and attacks the photographer. Qualcomm awarded its second prize of $50,000 to Defiant Development for Inch High Stunt Guy, a game in which a stuntman jumps his motorcycle over various obstacles. The company gave its third prize of $25,000 to five graduate students at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts for their submission, Danger Copter, in which the player maneuvers a water-spouting helicopter to extinguish fires and rescue people from danger.

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Qualcomm Ventures’ Nagraj Kashyap told me back in 2009 that the economic slowdown was a key factor when San Diego-based Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) decided to set aside $550,000 and to launch its first “QPrize” competition. Qualcomm designed the incentive prize to provide seed money to very early stage mobile technology startups.

When I sat down again with Kashyap again yesterday, he said the U.S. has largely recovered from the economic meltdown, but the same can’t be said for other regions in the world—particularly India and China. “There’s always a few organizations available [overseas] to provide seed funding,” he said, “but it’s not to the same level as in the United States, and I think a lot of technology companies are really struggling.”

As a result, Kashyap says the quality of applicants for the QPrize has really gone up in the second round, which officially started with the wireless company’s announcment last September during the Demo conference in San Jose, CA.

Kashyap, who is leaving in a few days for the annual Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, says there also have been a few enhancements for applicants to the QPrize investment seed competition. Among them:

—Microsoft’s BizSpark program, which offers free software, development tools, and technical support to startup companies around the world, is reaching out to the recently announced finalists. As my colleague Greg Huang has reported previously in Seattle, Microsoft’s BizSpark was conceived with the goal of helping regional software economies—as well as getting … Next Page »

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I had to double-check after Qualcomm today announced the six regional finalists for its second annual QPrize venture investment competition. The San Diego wireless giant (NASDAQ: QCOM) held its inaugural QPrize event in 2009, but the logistics of running a global prize competition made it difficult to reprise the entire process in 2010.

So this is the second annual QPrize competition in three years.

In its statement today, Qualcomm says the six finalists were selected in a series of regional competitions and each will receive $100,000 (or €100,000 in Europe). Qualcomm Ventures, which oversees the QPrize, added Israel and South Korea this time, which expanded the number of regional finalists to six from the original four (North America, China, Europe, and India). The grand prize winner selected at DEMO will win an additional $150,000.

As finalists, the companies will proceed to the final round of competition, which will be held at DEMO Spring in Palm Desert, CA, from Feb. 27 to March 1. The region and finalists are:

—North America: Enterproid, a New York, NY, software startup (listed as a portfolio company at High Peaks Venture Partners) developing Android-based technology to enable professionals to consolidate their work and personal life onto a single enterprise-grade device without compromising security or functionality.

—China: Ji Ke, an independent mobile app store that offers more than 33,000 games, 15,000 handset applications, 56,000 books, and 9,400 videos. The company generated $4 million in revenue (and a $440,000 profit) in 2009.

—Europe: Cambridge Temperature Concepts, founded in 2006 by a group of Cambridge scientists, has developed a fertility monitor that uses a small sensor patch worn under the arm to monitor body temperature every second. The data is transferred wirelessly to a hand-held reader that displays easy-to-understand results, which are intended to help couples identify times when they are most likely to get pregnant.

—India: Reverie Technologies, founded in 2006, has developed technology for three screens (computer/Internet, mobile device, and TV) that is intended to provide businesses with a simple and effective way to reach mass audiences, irrespective of language.

—Israel: Corrigon uses proprietary object recognition technology in mobile applications to identify products for consumers and display relevant shopping information.

—South Korea: Kiwiple, a location-based information and social networking service company, uses an augmented reality-interface currently loaded on about 3 million Android phones in South Korea.

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A very light car powered by an internal combustion engine (and fueled by a standard gasoline-ethanol blend known as E85) won the $5 million purse today in the Progressive Automotive X Prize—proving you don’t need an electric vehicle to get over 100 mpg.

The nonprofit X Prize Foundation and Progressive Insurance, which sponsored the automotive incentive prize, named the Edison2 from Charlottesville, VA, as the mainstream class winner in a ceremony today at the Historical Society of Washington D.C. The sponsors also awarded $2.5 million apiece to winning entries in two other categories—The Li-ion Motors team from Mooresville, NC, was the winner in the automotive design category requiring a driver and passenger sit side-by-side; and the X-Tracer team from Winterthur, Switzerland, won for its E-Tracer entry in the tandem category for hybrid motorcycle-automotive designs.

The three winners emerged from 136 vehicle entries submitted by 111 teams from around the world. The Progressive Automotive X PRIZE was launched in 2008 to spur the development of a new generation of viable, safe and super fuel-efficient vehicles capable of achieving the energy equivalent of at least 100 miles per gallon. The evaluation process included on-track testing at the Michigan International Speedway, which included dynamic safety testing by Consumer Reports, and laboratory verification by the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory. The X Prize provided these details about each of the three winners:

$5 Million Mainstream Class Winner

—Edison2 “Very Light Car #98″

Economy: 102.5 MPGe (miles per gallon equivalent)

Fuel: E85 ethanol

Edison2 showed the lowest drag coefficient of any car with four wheels tested in the GM wind tunnel and at the Chrysler Proving Grounds. Its low weight of … Next Page »

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San Diego-based Qualcomm chose the Demo Fall 2010 conference in Santa Clara yesterday to announce the second round of the Qualcomm Ventures QPrize, an international venture financing competition for early stage startups.

The wireless giant’s venture arm inaugurated the QPrize last year, offering a total of $550,000 in “incentive financing” to finalists from China, India, Europe, and North America. The months-long selection process was billed as a business plan competition, which turned out to be something of a misnomer, since many entries were real companies with real products.

This year, the contest is open to entrepreneurs in North America, Europe, China, South Korea, Israel, and India—and Qualcomm is offering a total of $750,000 in convertible note financing (meaning the note gets converted to preferred shares of the startup company at their next round of equity financing).

Qualcomm also says it’s teaming with Demo, the debut forum for technology startups and their products, so QPrize winners can gain some additional exposure to VC investors. QPrize finalists will be invited to Demo Spring 2011, where they can exhibit in the Demo pavilion and compete in the final round for the QPrize grand prize. The grand prize winner also will get time on the Demo stage to present its technology to an audience of venture investors, industry reporters, bloggers and other DEMO attendees.

Qualcomm says the deadline for business plan submissions is December 14, which means the startups will be selected in 2011. Details on the event are here.

Qualcomm Ventures plans to select as many as six finalists from each of the six contest markets. The finalists will each receive a $100,000 in convertible note funding from Qualcomm. The grand prize-winner will get an additional $150,000 of convertible note funding, for a total prize of $250,000 in venture financing.

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In a bid to advance mobile health technology through a standardized social network platform, San Diego’s West Wireless Health Institute has announced a $10,000 incentive prize open to software developers around the world. In guidelines announced yesterday, the institute is challenging developers to design a secure “mechanism” that can be standardized and will integrate personalized information from an established social network interface (such as OpenSocial) with health data derived by wireless health sensors. The mechanism can include networking and transport layers, protocols, interfaces, data presentation, and application programming interface (API). Developers have just four weeks to meet the Sept. 15 deadline. Details about the challenge are here.

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And then there were nine. What began in April as a field of 136 experimental cars and 111 teams with their eyes on the $10 million Automotive X Prize has been winnowed to just nine cars and seven teams. Track testing was completed Tuesday at the Michigan International Speedway in Brooklyn, MI.

The nine finalists for the Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize include the Aptera 2e from Aptera Motors of Carlsbad, CA, and the Alias, developed by Zap of Santa Rosa, CA. Both California cars are battery-powered, three-wheeled, all-electric vehicles (EVs) that are competing in the alternative classification for “side-by-side” vehicles, that is, vehicles in which the driver and a passenger sit side-by-side.

“There are only five cars left in our class,” Aptera Chief Engineer Tom Reichenbach told me by telephone yesterday. Reichenbach, who joined Aptera in 2008 after 27 years with the Ford Motor Co., said he felt “tired,” but also “really good” about reaching the finals.

Aptera 2e

Finalists in two categories—the mainstream vehicle and alternative vehicle classes—now move onto a final, technical validation phase in which each car will undergo dynamometer testing under controlled laboratory conditions at Argonne National Lab facilities. The technical validation is intended to verify the numbers that each team has calculated for their vehicles in terms of aerodynamic efficiency, emissions, and performance requirements.

Zap Alias

Reichenbach tells me that Aptera’s numbers “are the best” in the alternative class. The contest was conceived to encourage the development of cars that could get at least 100 miles per gallon of gasoline, or the energy equivalent of that. The all-electric Aptera 2e gets the equivalent of 160 miles per gallon under “urban” conditions, and 196 mpg-e under highway driving conditions, according to Reichenbach.

Choosing a winner, though, is a … Next Page »

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As paragliders and hang gliders swooped overhead, the grandson of famed aviator Charles “Lucky Lindy” Lindbergh chose a stunning panoramic San Diego clifftop to announce the formation of a new incentive prize to recognize advancements in electric aircraft technology.

Seattle-area resident Erik Lindbergh says the Lindbergh Electric Aircraft Prize, or LEAP, is intended to stimulate the development of more environmentally friendly aviation technologies, and help the fledgling electric aircraft industry take off. Lindbergh created the prize, which actually consists of awards in four categories, through a nonprofit organization he founded, the Creative Solutions Alliance (CSA), which has partnered with the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA). The four LEAP awards, which have yet to be funded, will be awarded annually at the EAA’s annual AirVenture “fly-in,” the popular air show held each July in Oshkosh, WI.

Organizers also have arranged for students and teachers from a Seattle-area high school to participate in the process and attend the awards ceremony in Oshkosh this summer. Lindbergh says six students and six teachers from Aviation High School, a project-based magnet school in Des Moines, WA, just south of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, will attend in a bid to develop curriculum and stimulate student interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Lindbergh is a founding board member of the high school, which was started in 2004.

In introducing the prize, Lindbergh says it … Next Page »

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After reporting reporting last month that Israeli startup Panoramic Power won the inaugural QPrize, the incentive prize organized by Qualcomm Ventures, I recently got a chance to discuss the outcome with Nagraj Kashyap, vice president of Qualcomm Ventures. He says the San Diego wireless industry giant intends to organize a second round of its business plan competition—but plans to de-emphasize both the business plan and the competition.

While Qualcomm Ventures cast the first QPrize as a competitive program among wireless industry startups from around the world, Kashyap says “competition” was conjuring the wrong implications for too many contenders. Rather than a business plan competition in which teams were competing on the basis of a PowerPoint slide deck, Kashyap says, “these were real companies with real products” and some considered the notion of choosing winners and losers unappealing.

“In this case,” Kashyap says, “we ended up funding four companies—one global winner and three regional winners. As a result, Kashyap says the next incentive prize event will likely be described as more of an early stage venture funding program.

Qualcomm hosted Panoramic Power, which has developed wireless sensors that companies and other organizations can use to create “smart grid” technologies within their existing facilities, and the other three finalists at its Q Prize finals in San Diego on November 3. Each finalist made a presentation at the annual QC Ventures CEO Summit, the wireless technology giant’s invitation-only event for roughly 200 VC partners, wireless industry VIPs, Qualcomm managers, and CEOs of Qualcomm Ventures’ portfolio companies.

“We considered the event a success,” Kashyap says. “Four very promising startups got funding from us… a lot of the finalists got a tremendous amount of PR from the press in their respective regions.” (This seems a bit paradoxical to me, since Qualcomm did not open its CEO summit or the QPrize finalists’ presentations to the media.)

Kashyap says another sign of success is that one of the four winners, which he would not identify, has closed on a Series A round of venture funding—and two others got unsolicited inquiries from angel investors and small VCs that he characterized as “very strong commitments for future funding.”

The overall global incentive prize program was successful enough for Qualcomm Ventures to do it again—although Kashyap says the timing, format, and logistics required for a second round have yet to be determined. “We’ve been approached by some VCs who asked if we can do this together,” Kashyap says. Many details remain to be worked out, including specifics about the best way to reframe the QPrize as a global, early stage funding program for existing startups instead of a business plan competition.

But Kashyap adds that while the QPrize solicitation will definitely start in 2010, the logistics of running a global prize competition make it likely the final round would not be held until 2011. “We found lots of regional differences,” Kashyap says. For example, “Europe sort of shuts down for a couple of months of the summer,” making it hard to make much progress.

Each of the four finalists in the first round of the competition received $100,000 in convertible note financing (a note that converts to preferred shares if the startup gets equity financing), with Panoramic Power getting an additional $150,000 as the grand prize winner. The other finalists are:

—CooTek, a startup in China that has developed a user interface for touchscreen mobile devices that uses “prediction engine” software that helps the user contextually determine word sequences.

—Capillary Technologies, a startup in India pioneering a platform for customer relationship management marketing services. Capillary has deployed its products in more than 400 stores in 75 cities throughout India.

—txt.eagle, a startup based in San Francisco and Kenya, that has developed a crowd sourcing platform that enables mobile phone subscribers to earn small amounts of money or additional minutes of mobile phone service by doing tasks, such as translation and image tagging to market research surveys, for corporate clients.

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San Diego serial entrepreneur Michael Robertson is going to have to find something else to do now that Gizmo5, the VoIP (voice-over-Internet-protocol) company he founded in 2003, has become part of a certain search giant to the north. We have that news and more.

—Google confirmed that it’s buying San Diego-based Gizmo5, a six-year-old company that provides Internet-based calling software for mobile phones and computers. The service will become part of the Google Voice number-unification service. Google did not disclose the purchase price, which media reports put at about $30 million. Gizmo5’s 6 million users will still be able to use the service, according to a statement. But Google is suspending new Gizmo5 signups, and existing users can no longer sign up for a call-in number.

—Platformic, a Web-based startup that enables customers to create and manage their own websites, said it is adding social media capabilities. The two-year-old San Diego-based company, which has targeted broadcast companies, says its expanded software-as-a-service product will help a broadcaster’s audience share photos, create their own user profiles, and create personal blogs on the broadcaster’s Platformic-powered website.

—Qualcomm’s No. 2 executive opened a regional mobile technology conference in San Diego by providing an overview of steps the chipmaking giant is taking to help ease the pressure on wireless network bottlenecks as mobile data traffic soars. Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) Chief Operating Officer Len Lauer told the 3G CDMA Americas Regional Conference that in the year 2014, worldwide mobile data traffic in one month will exceed mobile data traffic for all of 2008.

—Technology innovations that help companies optimize their profitability will likely lead to the next wave of analytics-based software startups, according to Stephen Coggeshall of San Diego-based ID Analytics. Another hot area will be analytics that can help forecast consumer behavior, said Coggeshall, who was participating in a discussion about new opportunities in analytics during the San Diego Software Industry Council’s annual forum on analytics.

—Israel’s Panoramic Power won $250,000 and became the first winner of the top QPrize, the incentive prize competition launched earlier this year by Qualcomm Ventures. Panoramic Power is developing energy-monitoring wireless technology that enables a company or institution to deploy so-called “smart grid” technologies within their existing facilities.

—The San Diego-based Cannon Power Group said is getting $19.4 million in federal renewable energy grants to help fund construction of a giant wind farm in eastern Washington state, about 110 miles east of Portland, OR. The $1 billion Windy Point/Windy Flats project is expected to generate enough electricity for 250,000 homes.

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San Diego-based Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) says Panoramic Power, a wireless sensor startup based in Kidron, Israel, is the winner of the first QPrize, the incentive prize competition launched earlier this year by Qualcomm Ventures. Panoramic Power has developed energy monitoring wireless technology that enables a company or institution to deploy Smart Grid technologies within their existing facilities. Panoramic Power, which previously won $100,000 as a QPrize regional winner, was awarded another $150,000 and the opportunity to compete in a global business plan competition held at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

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It has been almost five years since a team of aerospace entrepreneurs funded by a software billionaire claimed the Ansari X Prize, the $10 million prize competition to develop the first reusable private spacecraft.

Since then, the frustrated space enthusiast who established the X Prize as a way to re-ignite astronautical innovation, Peter Diamandis, has won some prizes of his own. He was the inaugural winner of the 2006 Heinlein Prize for his efforts to deliver humanity to space; a Lindbergh Award in recognition of his pioneering work in creating incentive prizes; and an Arthur C. Clarke Award for innovation.

As the chairman and CEO of the X Prize Foundation, based near Los Angeles in Playa Vista, CA, the 48-year-old Diamandis says his goal now is to make the X Prize “the gold standard of incentive prizes that are well-promoted, well-executed, and hit the mark” in terms of targeting technology breakthroughs in such fields as energy, astronautics, transportation, medicine, genomics, and exploration.

In anticipation of his talk at San Diego’s MIT Enterprise Forum, I recently asked Diamandis how the X Prize Foundation has changed since it wrote a $10 million check in 2004 to spacecraft designer Burt Rutan and his investor, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

For one thing, Diamandis says, the foundation has grown almost tenfold—from five people to a staff of 45. The foundation also is working more rigorously now on what he calls “prize methodology,” developing the principles, procedures, and rules for prizes that will drive key breakthroughs in such fields as life sciences, exploration, energy, global development, education, and the environment. Among other things, he says the group has been working with scientists at UCSD’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography to develop prize methodologies for a possible “Ocean X Prize” in three possible areas:

—Ocean exploration. Since the U.S. deep submergence vehicle Alvin was launched 45 years ago and Russia’s MIR submersibles are over 20 years old, Diamandis says the foundation is considering a prize to create new technologies needed to explore the “Challenger Deep” of the Mariana Trench, 7 miles beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean.

—Ocean floor mapping. Diamandis says we know more about the surface of Mars than about the bottom of the ocean. So a prize for mapping the ocean floor could encourage the development of new underwater mapping technologies.

—Ocean conservation. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a region of the Pacific Ocean where plastic trash accumulates into vast masses of unsinkable drifting litter. The X Prize Foundation is considering a prize that would spur the development of innovative ways to “heal” such garbage patches.

To Diamandis, it is only a matter of time before incentive prizes become as important to innovation as venture capital. Diamandis says he’s heard Rick Burnes say that venture capital also seemed like a “very strange idea” in 1970, when Burnes co-founded Charles River Ventures in Waltham, MA. “Now venture capital is everywhere,” Diamandis says. “I think the same thing will happen with incentive prizes.”

With the success of the Ansari X Prize, similar … Next Page »

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