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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Finding the best answers to big problems can mean looking to an outside party with bright ideas. The trouble is finding those fixes immediately. New York’s ChallengePost, a Web-based platform for running competitions, gives organizations and individuals a way to attract contenders who think they have got the right stuff.

Brandon Kessler, CEO of ChallengePost, says he created the three-year-old startup to be a central place for community groups, government agencies, companies, and others to call attention to issues they want help resolving. Users of ChallengePost include First Lady Michelle Obama’s campaign to improve school lunches and the World Bank, which shared data with developers via the platform in an attempt to help meet United Nations Millennium Developmental Goals such as fighting disease and poverty. “Large organizations use our platform to solve big problems through technology,” Kessler says.

New funding from investors is helping ChallengePost meet some of its own goals. Kessler says the company raised $4.1 million in a series A round, announced Tuesday, led by Opus Capital. Other participants in the round include … Next Page »

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Ernst & Young, the global consulting and accounting firm, selected six San Diego executives for its 2011 Entrepreneur of the Year awards on the 25th anniversary of the program, which has expanded to recognize business leaders and entrepreneurs in more than 140 cities and more than 50 countries. The firm also bestowed its San Diego Lifetime Achievement Award to Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Jacobs.

The six categories and winners, who were named Thursday at an E&Y dinner event, are: Life Sciences, Millennium Laboratories CEO James Slattery; Technology, Service-now CEO Fred Luddy; Engineering Services, Fyfe Co. President Edward Fyfe; Earth Sciences, Dos Gringos President Jason Levin; Consumer Products, Stone Brewing CEO Greg Koch; and Master Entrepreneur, Life Technologies CEO Greg Lucier.

All of the regional winners will be invited to the Entrepreneur Of The Year National Awards gala, hosted in Palm Springs, CA, by Jay Leno, on November 12.

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The wireless news out of San Diego seems to have picked up in recent weeks, with Qualcomm playing a central role in most of the developments. Our briefing is ready for you now.

—The world’s largest wireless chipmaker agreed to buy San Diego-based Rapid Bridge’s LiquidCell technology, used to accelerate chip design, but Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) did not disclose the price. The Rapid Bridge asset sale is expected to close by Sept. 25, the end of Qualcomm’s fiscal year. EE Times London Editor Peter Clarke said “LiquidCell is a library consisting of a metal-programmable sea-of-transistors that can be configured into millions of usable elements supporting more than 160 functions from the 750 standard cells. The metal programmability allows designers to iterate designs, produce derivatives and meet industry-standard specifications through respins that only involve a few metal layers.”

—The success of Qualcomm’s succession is the subject of a story in The New York Times today. The Times notes that co-founder Irwin Jacobs passed the mantle of CEO to his son Paul six years ago, and that last year Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) accounted for 41 percent of the total market share in terms of smartphone chip revenue, according to one analyst’s estimates. Qualcomm also holds nearly 61 percent of the market share for application processors used in smartphones powered by Google’s Android operating system.

—The Department of Energy awarded funding to two San Diego companies, Genomatica and General Atomics, that is intended to advance technologies for bio-based fuels and chemicals that can be easily “dropped into” existing oil refinery and petrochemical production facilities. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Friday that Genomatica would get as much as $5 million to enhance the commercial profitability of integrated bio-refineries used to produce 1,4-butanediol (BDO), an intermediate chemical. Genomatica has genetically engineered bacteria to make BDO. Chu said General Atomics would get up to $2 million to reduce the cost of fermentation processes needed to make algae-based biofuels.

—Analog Analytics, a San Diego-based white label provider of social coupon technology for old media newspapers and broadcasters, has been growing revenue at a monthly compounded rate of roughly 50 percent, according to co-founder and CEO Ken Kalb. I profiled the company, which counted nearly 1.9 million page views for all its sites from … Next Page »

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The Marconi Society, a group established in Palo Alto, CA, to recognize the creative spirit of Nobel Prize winner Guglielmo Marconi in today’s scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs, has named Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Jacobs and computer theorist Jack Kiel Wolf as winners of this year’s Marconi Prize.

Jacobs, 77, was cited for his contributions to digital and satellite-based communications. His work was fundamental to the technical and commercial success of Code-Division Multiple Access (CDMA), a method of digital wireless communications that became the standard for 3G cellular networks around the world.

Wolf, a UC San Diego scientist best known for mathematical research that helped lay the foundations for digital information and communications, died in his La Jolla home on May 12, just after he was selected for the prize. He was 76. The $100,000 honorarium awarded as part of the Marconi Fellowship and Prize will be split between the Jacobs and Wolf families. Past Marconi Prize winners include Adobe Systems founders John Warnock and Charles Geschke, Internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Bob Metcalfe, and Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

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The Qualcomm shareholder meeting was something of a five-year anniversary yesterday for Paul Jacobs, who was named to succeed his father, Irwin M. Jacobs, as CEO of the world’s largest provider of wireless chipsets and software technology in March 2005.

As milestones go, 2010 was a great year for Qualcomm, which had a record-setting year in the chip business, with about 400 million MSM chips shipped for 3G devices in 2010. That means Qualcomm delivered 30 percent compound annual growth in chipset revenue from 2003 through 2010. Paul Jacobs gave a comprehensive and upbeat overview of the company’s technology development and business performance, and he  emphasized the highlights in a presentation about Qualcomm’s performance since he took over with a new management team:

—3G mobile subscriptions (which rely heavily on Qualcomm technology) have increased 380 percent, to about 1.2 billion.

—Qualcomm’s market valuation has increased 73 percent, to about $95 billion.

—Annual revenue increased by 140 to 150 percent, to an estimated range between $13.6 billion and $14.2 billion in fiscal 2011.

—Annual earnings increased by 84 to 95 percent, to an estimated range between $2.3 billion and $2.46 billion in fiscal 2011.

—Available cash increased by 143 percent, to $19.1 billion.

“It’s nice to have that kind of cushion,” he said, referring to the $19.1 billion. “We all remember the early days of Qualcomm when things really were hand-to-mouth.”

One of the most interesting moments, though, came when a shareholder asked if it was just a coincidence that rival Broadcom (NASDAQ: BRCM) filed its multi-million-dollar patent and anti-trust lawsuits just as Paul Jacobs took over as CEO.

“I’m not sure it was a coincidence,” he responded. “I think they saw … Next Page »

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It was a relatively quiet week for life sciences news. But we nevertheless saw some interesting developments in personnel moves and fund-raising, as some key local scientists helped start a couple of new companies, as well as in the clinical test of a new experimental cancer drug.

—The Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation (GNF) has named H. Martin Seidel as the permanent replacement for the chemist Peter Schultz, who was the institute’s founding director. Seidel, who was second-in-command during Schultz’s tenure, has served as interim director of GNF since Schultz stepped down in March.

—San Diego-based Apricus Biosciences (NASDAQ: APRI), the contract research organization that changed its name last month from NexMed, said it has closed on a previously announced securities offering, raising gross proceeds of more than $9.3 million. Apricus Bio said it plans to use the proceeds for product and technology development and general corporate purposes.

—UC San Diego biologist Trey Ideker, along with Columbia University’s Andrea Califano, Stanford University’s Atul Butte, and Eric Schadt of Pacific Biosciences are pooling their resources for an unusual effort at Seattle nonprofit Sage Bionetworks. The four world-class biologists are sharing their experimental data and models on the connections between genes, proteins, drugs, and disease states into a public database at Sage, with the hope of connecting the dots between malfunctioning DNA, RNA, and proteins.

—John “Chip” Scarlett, who was once a fellow in the UC San Diego lab of Jerrold Olefsky, is now the executive chairman of Vega Therapeutics, a South San Francisco biotech with a big idea for tackling Type 2 diabetes. Scarlett told Luke the big idea that Vega is pursuing is that inflammation is one of the major culprits causing problems for people with Type 2 diabetes.

—About 400 scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and investors have been attending the Wireless Health 2010 conference this week at the Hilton La Jolla Torrey Pines. Chris Toumazou, director of the Imperial College Institute of Biomedical Engineering in London, said in his keynote talk that the human body represents the next great application for wireless technologies. The four-day meeting in La Jolla also featured talks by Segway inventor Dean Kamen, Qualcomm founder Irwin Jacobs, and Dr. Eric Topol, who directs the Scripps Translational Science Institute in La Jolla.

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The tweets have been flying out of San Diego’s Sorrento Valley, where wireless technology giant Qualcomm is hosting the Dave Matthews band and multi-instrumentalist Tim Reynolds tonight as part of the company’s 25th anniversary festival. Thousands of Qualcomm employees and invited guests flocked to the party, which began at 5:30 p.m. at the company’s headquarters on Morehouse Drive, and officially ended at 10 p.m.

The company kept the appearance of the popular Dave Matthews band a closely guarded secret, although rumors of the show had been circulating on the bands’ fan site since Tuesday.

Qualcomm’s anniversary show included the opening of a new Qualcomm museum and a ceremony introducing one Qualcomm employee who started working for the company in each of the past 25 years, beginning with founding CEO Irwin Jacobs in 1985. The program then moved on to fireworks and a two-hour performance by the Dave Matthews Band and virtuso guitarist-pianist-drummer-violinist-keyboardist-bassist-harpist Tim Reynolds.

Among many who exulted about the experience was KPRI music blogger, longboard surfer, and self-described tech geek Chris Cantore, who tweeted, “trippy, dave matthews is playing / doing his jimi thing at the qualcomm 25th anniversary party … the q musta had a good year. #qc25″ Tim McClain, the San Diego County director of communications and former editor of the San Diego Metropolitan business/lifestyle magazine, tweeted that the Qualcomm festival featured the “best portapotties ever. Full length mirrors and water and soap inside.” In another tweet, McClain noted, “Have not seen an iPhone among those raised to record Dave. Mathews.”

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It has been 25 years since seven former Linkabit employees met at Irwin Jacobs’ La Jolla home and founded a startup company to provide digital communications services. They saw their venture at the time in terms of QUALity COMMunications, and agreed to call the new company Qualcomm.

Since its beginnings in July 1985, Qualcomm has become a global pioneer in digital wireless technologies—especially with its proprietary Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) innovation in cellular communications—the world’s biggest mobile chipset provider, an $11 billion technology giant, and the largest company in San Diego. So Qualcomm has something to celebrate as the company marks its 25th anniversary on its website, and in events that have included appearances by Irwin Jacobs and his son, Qualcomm CEO and chairman Paul Jacobs.

Qualcomm’s success has been extraordinary by any measure, but especially in San Diego, where few technology and life science companies grow from seed-stage startups all the way to Fortune 500 goliaths. Whether by accident or design, San Diego operates more like a greenhouse nursery, where cultivated seedlings are usually sold after attaining a certain size, and in many cases transplanted or consolidated out of town.

Xconomy invited some of our top editorial advisors, or Xconomists, along with other wireless experts to offer their thoughts about the technology breakthroughs and other factors that enabled Qualcomm to flourish over the past 25 years—and whether the wireless giant can accomplish innovation on the same scale in the next 25 years. Here are their thoughts, and we invite you to join in the dialog:

San Diego Xconomist Ramesh Rao, Director of the San Diego Division of the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology and Qualcomm Endowed Chair in Telecommunications and Information Technology at UC San Diego.

Xconomy: How did Qualcomm get to 25 years?

Ramesh Rao: “They got going as a serious wireless player very early in the S-curve of mobile communications. There was a lot of spectrum yet to be released all around the world at ever-greater auction prices, fueling the demand for ever-more efficient radios. Communications has universal appeal for billions of people on the planet, if it can be made sufficiently low-cost. So all that created a positive virtuous cycle.”

X: What were their key innovations or stratagems?

RR: “Strong focus on hard-core technical innovations. Seeking out and … Next Page »

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Summertime, and the livin’ is easy. ISE’s bankruptcy filing marked the only bit of pain in what was another serene week of tech news and unseasonably cool summer temperatures in San Diego. Get caught up on everything you need to know here.

—ISE Corp. the Poway, CA-based maker of hybrid-electric drive trains for buses and other heavy-duty vehicles, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization. The company, which went public less than six months ago on the Toronto Stock Exchange, had a total deficit of nearly $90 million at the end of March. VentureWire reported that ISE’s main shareholders are NGP Energy Technology Partners and Rockport Capital Partners, which each owned about 17.1 percent of the company as of June. Siemens Venture Capital owned about 13.6 percent.

—St. Bernard Software CEO Lou Ryan told me that as part of the San Diego company’s purchase of Red Condor’s e-mail spam-filtering technology, two of Red Condor’s longtime venture investors also made an investment in St. Bernard Software (OTCBB: SBSW).

—The West Wireless Health Institute announced an incentive prize competition that’s intended to advance mobile health technology through a standardized social network platform. The institute says it is offering a $10,000 prize to software developers around the world to design a method for integrating personalized information from an established social network interface (such as OpenSocial) with health data derived from wireless health sensors. More on the prize can be found here.

—Ryan talked with Lisa Suennen of Psilos Group Managers about the New York-based venture firm’s investments in health IT startups. Suennen is a regular visitor to San Diego, where she serves on the board of PatientSafe Solutions, which makes handheld devices that deliver data that help reduce medication errors.

—A CB Insights demographic study of Internet startup founders found that Massachusetts has a far higher proportion of women founders (27 percent) than California (6 percent) or New York (7 percent). The study also looked at the education of these entrepreneurs, and found throughout the country that more startup companies are headed by founders with MBAs (55 percent) than by MS degrees (32 percent) or law degrees (9 percent).

—Qualcomm founder Irwin Jacobs and his wife Joan decided recently to go public about their recent decision to give at least half of their $1.2 billion fortune to charity,according to a page one story in The San Diego Union-Tribune’s Sunday newspaper. The Jacobs family joined a group of 40 U.S. billionaires, led by Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates, who agreed to pledge 50 percent or more of their wealth to philanthropic causes. The Jacobs family says it already was doing that anyway; the newspaper says they have publicly disclosed pledges of roughly $120 million for the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego, $75 million for a UCSD specialty hospital, $120 million for the San Diego Symphony, and $20 million to replace San Diego’s downtown central library.

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I can’t do justice to a comprehensive review of yesterday’s FiReGlobal (West Coast) conference at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seattle. Instead, I’ll just give a few of my key takeaways. The all-day event, organized by Strategic News Service, focused on how to solve some of the most pressing problems in technology, business, and society—in areas as diverse as broadband access, entrepreneurship, education, sustainability and the environment, political discourse, human health, and mobile devices.

The sweeping conference had the tagline, “Global technology driving local solutions.” Interesting, as that’s sort of the reverse of Xconomy’s mantra, which is reporting about local stories with global impact. But I think they’re two sides of the same innovation coin.

So, in “ESPN plays of the day” style, here’s my top 10 list from the conference (if only I had the video to go with it):

10. Setting up entrepreneurial zones. A panel led by Ty Carlson of Microsoft proposed denoting special “R&D zones” from Oregon to British Columbia geared toward supporting startups in fields like renewable energy, sustainable farming, and biotech. The idea would be to offer tax credits and other incentives to create a more entrepreneurial culture in the Northwest, especially in rural areas.

9. What government should and shouldn’t do. Investor and entrepreneur Martin Tobias of Seattle-based Kashless said, “Startups and investors can’t make a 10-year bet when you have a two-year tax credit.” Those conditions freeze out small companies, especially in costly ventures like energy. So government should create open markets and set minimum market sizes for new technologies, Tobias said. But it shouldn’t pick the technology winners themselves.

8. Northwest tech startups do the Olympics. Tom Guthrie, CEO of Seattle-based Twisted Pair Solutions, said his company has helped numerous agencies on the Olympic Peninsula inter-operate their radios—a key problem in disaster response and other scenarios. Twisted Pair, which is backed by Ignition Partners and other investors, is also working on a laser system to deliver broadband signals. Meanwhile, Paul Manson, CEO of Vancouver, BC-based Sea Breeze, talked about his company’s project to build a high-voltage, direct-current undersea cable between Victoria, BC, and Port Angeles, WA. This would be a fast, controllable power transmission component of a smart grid; it should be under construction by mid-2010, he said.

7. The world according to Dell. In a chat with Mark Anderson of Strategic News Service, Michael Dell said he is excited about China and the rest of Asia as fast-growing economies. He anticipates a U.S. recovery from the recession, but says, “I don’t think you’ll see an immediate snap-back.” And he likes South America as an emerging market (Dell does sales of more than $1 billion in Brazil alone). But Europe, not so much—he sees a lot of uncertainty in the workforce there.

6. Get ready for Dell smartphones. “Mobility is absolutely the theme,” Dell said. He was talking about the relative importance of desktop computers, laptops, netbooks, and mobile devices to … Next Page »

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The big story out of the International CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment expo in San Diego last week could perhaps be summed up in one word: “spectrum.” We also have reports from the Algae Biofuels Summit and other big news, so read on.

—Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Jacobs and his son Paul, who is now chairman and CEO of the San Diego wireless giant, told CTIA goers that Qualcomm’s labs have reached the limit in terms of optimizing the efficiencies of wireless devices within current radio bands. Yet demand continues to accelerate for mobile data services. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said in a different session that finding more spectrum is the agency’s No. 1 priority. “Spectrum is oxygen,” Genachowski said.

—In a report that preceded the CTIA conference, Seattle-based Ontela released a survey that shows people still have problems doing simple things like transmitting photos on their mobile phones, even as the popularity of mobile data plans and services such as text messaging continue to grow in the U.S.

—Denise gave us a preview of the 3rd Annual Algae Biomass Summit, which also was held in San Diego last week. Cleantech San Diego president Lisa Bicker said more than 625 cleantech companies are now based in the region, including more than 30 algae biofuels companies.

—At a time when investment capital has been pouring into the development of algae-based biofuels, Bill Barclay of Columbia, MD-based Martek Biosciences said it could take a decade or more for commercial-scale algae biofuels production to become reality. Scientists still need to identify the best algae strains, optimize production processes, and find the best ways to convert “green crude” to fuels.

—San Diego-based Achates Power has raised $12.1 million out of a $20 million venture round, according to a regulatory filing. The company has been developing a radical new design for a high-efficiency two-stroke automotive engine.

—We’ve been too busy to do much celebrating, but Xconomy’s San Diego website officially marked its one-year anniversary last week. In the past year, we’ve published more than 1,400 news stories, briefs, and commentaries about the innovation leaders, businesses, technologies, and trends that make up the “exponential” part of the San Diego economy. Thanks to all our readers for their great comments.

—While the Obama Administration continues to push its plans for healthcare reform, Gary West is refining his own plans for using the new San Diego-based West Wireless Health Institute to catalyze innovations in wireless health that help deliver healthcare equivalent to what’s generally available today at lower cost. The non-profit institute, which was funded in March by a $45 million donation from the Gary and Mary West Foundation, ranks as one of the first organizations in the world to seek improvements in healthcare specifically through advances in wireless technologies.

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The co-founders who introduced San Diego-based Qualcomm’s wireless digital technology in 1989 envisioned from the early days that it would be ideal for the Internet. But Irwin Jacobs says now even he’s amazed at how many things a cell phone can do today.

A new generation of innovators is now using Qualcomm’s proprietary technology to develop new cellular devices and services in such fields as healthcare, transportation, and energy—and “None of that was quite obvious to us in the early days,” Jacobs said in a presentation at a wireless conference in San Diego yesterday. Yet the Qualcomm co-founder and his son, Qualcomm chairman and CEO Paul Jacobs, also say the wireless industry is pushing the limits of cellular networks by cranking out ever-faster wireless devices that feature more and more mobile data services. Many of the new products just over the horizon are driven by Qualcomm’s own advances in technology—including 4G smartphones, netbook computers, and palm-size wireless TVs.

Rapid changes in cellular technology and the potential for network constraints became part of a wide-ranging keynote address at the CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment conference in San Diego. Unlike most keynotes, though, Qualcomm’s father-and-son dynasty appeared together onstage for what was intended to be a living-room discussion with CTIA president Steve Largent, the former Oklahoma Republican Congressman and Hall of Fame pro football receiver.

Irwin Jacobs

One of their most interesting revelations came while Irwin, who turns 76 later this month, was discussing the technology advances that led to the current generation of smartphones. Despite rapid technology advances, the market for mobile Web-based services was slow to develop, and Irwin observed, “The iPhone was really a major breakthrough, in terms of developing a simple interface.”

Paul added, “We always used to talk about developing the killer app, and the killer app ended up being a simple user interface,” and he says most advances in computing capabilities and graphics technologies are now focused on making the interface even simpler to use. Paul, who was named Qualcomm’s CEO in 2005 and chairman earlier this year, says he envisions a future in which wireless technologies are “increasingly embedded in everything,” enabling a homeowner to use their cell phone to remotely control their TV, stereo, and lights.

According to Irwin, wireless networks provide cellular coverage for roughly 80 percent of the world population today, and he estimates there are … Next Page »

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Perhaps the week before Easter was a good time for San Diego’s technology innovators to be taking stock. Amylin is busy weighing how best to fend off dissident investors Carl Icahn and Eastbourne Capital before next month’s annual shareholder meeting. Other San Diego startups, such as Trius Therapeutics and Sangart, are considering how best to move forward in their development of new biopharmaceutical products. So read on!

—San Diego’s Amylin Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: AMLN)  is preparing for a proxy battle with billionaire investor Carl Icahn and Eastbourne Capital Management at next month’s shareholder meeting. The two dissident shareholder groups have each nominated a slate of five candidates for the company’s 12-member board of directors, although fielding so many candidates could simply ensure that Amylin’s candidates get elected.

—San Diego wireless chipset provider Qualcomm and Verizon, one of its biggest customers, seem to be on different pages when it comes to deploying the fourth generation mobile phone technology known as LTE, for Long-Term Evolution. Verizon has said it will have LTE in 20 to 35 markets by the end of 2010. But a Qualcomm marketing director said he expects the commercialization of LTE devices won’t happen until 2012 or later.

—The venture purse strings loosened a bit last week in San Diego. Nirvanix, a startup providing “data storage in the cloud,” added $5 million in a secondary round of venture funding. Nirvanix said it previously had raised $18 million in venture funding from Intel Capital, Valhalla Partners, Mission Ventures, Windward Ventures, and the European Founders Fund. Ethertronics, which develops embedded antennas for wireless devices, got an additional $4 million in a secondary round of venture funding. A spokeswoman told me Friday that its investors include Bank of America, Sevin Rosen Funds, and Ridgewood Capital.

—In an interview last week, Trius Therapeutics CEO Jeff Stein said the biotech firm is assessing the best way to move ahead in its development of a new anti-bacterial drug. In mid-stage clinical trials, Stein told me the San Diego company’s drug candidate torezolid cured 96 percent of the patients who had nasty-looking skin infections. But to get to the next stage in clinical trials, Stein says Trius will either have to raise more venture capital or find a strategic partner.

—San Diego-based Sangart is at a crossroads in developing an oxygen-carrying compound called MP4, which is made by purifying and chemically modifying … Next Page »

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When Qualcomm co-founder and longtime chairman and CEO Irwin Jacobs stepped down as chairman of the wireless giant last month, he said he was taking another shot at retiring. Jacobs, who turned 75 in October, told The San Diego Union-Tribune after Qualcomm’s annual shareholders meeting that his first attempt at retiring didn’t take, presumably because he remained active at Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) after his son Paul succeeded him as CEO four years ago.

As a retiree, though, Jacobs has still been keeping a fairly busy schedule. In February, he gave an extended lecture at MIT’s School of Engineering on “providing chips and technology for a world with 4 billion cellular customers,” in which he provided some intriguing up-to-date industry analysis, which has been embedded at the bottom of this report. And on Friday, Jacobs was a speaker at the La Jolla Research and Innovation Summit, which was organized by Connect, the San Diego nonprofit that promotes technology innovation, as a showcase of local technology for venture investors.

“I was asked to forecast,” Jacobs told the San Diego audience, “but I must admit I’m a terrible forecaster. When I started Qualcomm in ’85, I told my wife we might have as many as 100 employees if everything goes right.” Today Qualcomm has a global workforce of roughly 14,000 employees, including more than 9,000 in San Diego.
In discussing Qualcomm, Jacobs also steered clear of making any forecasts, although he made several interesting historical observations.

—At Qualcomm, he said, “We made a strategic decision early on that we really wanted to focus on innovation.” Because it was difficult in the beginning, however, for Qualcomm to gain market acceptance for its CDMA digital wireless technology, it became necessary for the company to make its own handsets and related cellular equipment. Once Qualcomm became established, Jacobs said, “We sold off the handset division to concentrate on the chips and software.”

—”All phones are getting smart,” Jacobs said. He held up a copy of the New York Times business section with a story headlined, “Laptops? They Are So Yesterday. Try a Netbook” and described the progression of smaller and more powerful computers from desktops to laptops and netbooks. At the same time, he noted that mobile phones are progressively getting bigger and more powerful, “So they’re going to meet in the middle, where we’re getting colliding galaxies here or something.”

—Amazon’s Kindle “will be the only way you read a book in the future,” Jacobs said. “It’s got a Qualcomm chip in it, and all the data going to Amazon goes through our data center.”

In his February lecture at MIT, Jacobs repeated one of the mantras that kept him excited during the early days at Qualcomm. “I always said we’ve got at least 10 years of excitement ahead of us, and every year of that 10 years moves out a year,”Jacobs said.

His MIT lecture is embedded below, or you can watch on MIT’s website by clicking here.

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It’s hard for any company to raise capital in this recession, but several San Diego life sciences startups disclosed last week they had done just that. A few bright spots also appeared during a local seminar on mergers and acquisitions—so let the news light your way.

—A big deal on the other side of North America last week may bear some significance for San Diego’s Anadys, which has been developing a new treatment for hepatitis C. Cambridge, MA-Vertex Pharmaceuticals said it was buying ViroChem Pharma of Laval, Quebec, for about $375 million. Vertex, which has about 200 employees in San Diego, is adding some punch to its own hepatitis C drug by acquiring ViroChem.

—Qualcomm took another step in its succession plan last week when CEO Paul Jacobs added board chairman to his title, a job that was held by his father, Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Jacobs. The San Diego wireless chipmaker also disclosed that Paul Jacobs and company president Steve Altman took 25 percent pay cuts last month when the company froze the salaries of all employees.

—In an unrelated development, Qualcomm recently acquired the key assets of Digital Fountain, a Freemont, CA, startup that has developed software to optimize digital media transmitted over any network. The assets include a team of seven engineers led by Digital Fountain’s founder and CTO.

—The lore of technology innovation is replete with stories of iconic hits and misses, of Googles and Pets.coms. Xconomy added a new chapter to the literature last week with a tale about Erwise, an Internet browser invented by four Finns before Netscape changed the online world as we know it. It also was the first Xconomy story written by Juha-Pekka Tikka, a veteran newspaper reporter from Helsinki who is Xconomy San Diego’s Innovation Journalism Fellow through June.

—Regulus Therapeutics, the Carlsbad, CA-based joint venture formed in 2007 by Alnylam (NASDAQ: ALNY) of Cambridge, MA, and Carlsbad’s Isis, got $20 million in a first step toward independence. Alynlam and Isis each contributed $10 million to Regulus, which has developing microRNA-based drugs and now intends to continue that work as an independent company.

—A new life sciences company has come to light in San Diego. Evoke Pharma has been developing a new drug treatment for diabetic gastroparesis, a gastrointestinal disorder. Evoke Pharma has been operating in stealth mode since it was founded two years ago, but a financial filing that surfaced recently shows the biotech has raised almost $12.3 million in venture funding since 2007.

—While the overall market for mergers and acquisitions remains gloomy, John Stiska of Agility Capital says he sees a few signs of encouragement. Stiska, who spoke last week at an M&A workshop in San Diego, says mid-market equity funds are still buying stable, well-run companies. And Stiska says small-to-mid-size defense contractors throughout Southern California represent ideal targets for acquisition.

—San Diego’s Optimer Pharmaceuticals, which has two antibiotics for treating diarrhea in late-stage clinical trials, raised $32.9 million in a registered direct offering to institutional investors. Optimer (NASDAQ: OPTR) says it plans to use the proceeds for ongoing drug development and general corporate purposes.

—Lou Ryan, chairman of San Diego’s St. Bernard Software (OTCBB: SBSW) has stepped in as CEO with plans to expand the company’s line of Internet-filtering network security products. I spoke with Ryan, a software industry veteran and former venture partner at Menlo Park, CA-based Sand Hill Capital, about the firm’s new strategy.

—Jay Lichter, a San Diego venture capitalist and founder of Otonomy, told Luke his goal is to someday make the specialized drug developer for hearing disorders as big as Alcon, the Swiss eye care company. One of Otonomy’s early drug candidates is aimed at Meniere’s disease, an imbalance of inner ear fluid.

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Qualcomm said today that CEO Paul Jacobs is succeeding his father, co-founder Irwin Jacobs, as chairman of the San Diego wireless giant. Irwin Jacobs, 75, started the digital wireless company with Andy Viterbi and a handful of others in 1985 and served as CEO for 20 years. He plans to remain on the board.

The transition is effective immediately, according to the company, and reflects the measured change that Qualcomm has undertaken in shifting to its next generation of leadership. Paul Jacobs, 46, was named as Qualcomm’s CEO in 2005—after heading the company’s wireless and Internet group. He joined the company in 1988, fresh from getting his doctorate in electrical engineering from UC Berkeley.

In its release, Qualcomm said Paul Jacobs has been the primary driver of Qualcomm’s focus on wireless data services and the expanding possibilities of next-generation technologies for mobile entertainment and computing and on-the-go information.

Earlier in the day, Qualcomm signaled the strength of its balance sheet by announcing the company will increase its dividend to 17 cents a share (from 16 cents) for quarterly dividends payable after March 27th.

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Constrained by legal restrictions and zealously protected by their handlers, the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are rarely enlightening when they make public appearances. But Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) CEO Paul Jacobs delivered a close approximation of candor this morning in what was billed as a keynote presentation at the Red Herring Global 100 summit, which is taking place this week in downtown San Diego. The presentation turned out to be a conversation with Red Herring publisher Alex Vieux, who began by saying he had different questions for Jacobs than the ones he had previously submitted to Qualcomm.

What I found insightful were Jacobs’ responses to questions about running a public company, which covered the gamut from the company’s evolving, less contentious intellectual property strategy to M&A plans to its R&D strategy and more (see below). In the end, Vieux observed that it’s “obviously a much bigger headache than it was five or 10 years ago.”

“I’ll tell my father that,” Jacobs responded wryly, referring to Qualcomm founder and chairman, Irwin Jacobs. Paul Jacobs started working at Qualcomm as employee No. 33 in 1988, after getting a doctorate in electrical engineering from UC Berkeley. The younger Jacobs’ work initially focused on writing software code to compress speech for digital communications systems, although he gained managerial experience overseeing new technology development. He was president of Qualcomm’s Wireless and Internet Group in 2005, when he was named to succeed his dad as CEO.

“When I got hired, the board said, ‘Oh, no one can replace Irwin,’ ” Paul Jacobs said. “We’re going to be a team. You go focus on the technology and these other guys are going to go off and focus on the licensing and IP [intellectual property]. And that just didn’t work out. You can’t do it that way.”

Vieux did not ask Jacobs how that situation had changed. But Qualcomm has engendered … Next Page »

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The economic downturn means it’s likely the wireless industry will stay with third-generation, or 3G, technologies for the foreseeable future, Qualcomm’s top executives said last night during a panel discussion.

Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs said customers of the San Diego wireless giant have pushed out their chip orders for 3G technologies because of the economic downturn, but the company is looking for a business rebound in the second half of 2009. He cited the “uncertainty of consumer demand” as a key underlying issue, but Jacobs also noted that sales of 3G handsets based on Qualcomm technology have increased 25 percent over last year.

The panel discussion at Qualcomm’s corporate headquarters, in the 534-seat Irwin M. Jacobs Qualcomm Hall, was billed as a “town hall” meeting by CommNexus, the San Diego telecom industry association that organized the event. “It’s meant to disseminate ideas, share knowledge, and build networks with industry peers,” CommNexus CEO Rory Moore told the audience.

Jacobs, who was named as Qualcomm CEO in 2005, is the son of Qualcomm founder and chairman Irwin Jacobs. The second-generation CEO was joined by his second-in-command, former Sprint executive Len Lauer, who was named as Qualcomm COO in August, and by Steve Mollenkopf, who also was named in August to head the all-important QCT, Qualcomm CDMA Technologies.

So in a way, the event featured the 2.5G version of Qualcomm management discussing 3G technologies and the prospects for 4G products and services.

But for all the discussion about digital wireless technology, the Qualcomm chips in the Blackberry Storm and Qualcomm software in Google’s Android operating system, about USB dongles, and LTE versus WiMax, what may have been the most interesting question didn’t come until the end.

“What do people misunderstand about Qualcomm?” asked Iain Gillott, the wireless industry expert who was recruited as moderator for event.

“From a PR point of view, I think the way we are most misunderstood is from the newspaper headlines and everyone attacking our licensing model,” said Lauer, referring to industry complaints about the high cost of Qualcomm’s licensing deals. “What they miss underneath that is all of the innovation and research and development we do… opening mobile radios to new apps and services.”

CEO Jacobs added that because of Qualcomm’s patent lawsuits against Nokia and Broadcom, “You think this is a litigious company, but we did not go out and sue everyone first… Our (business) model is built around licensing. We have one of the broadest models. We don’t sell cell phones to end users. We work with partners. We consciously developed this strategy of working through partners and we go to our partners and say we’re here to be a good partner with you.”

It was an interesting moment of executive self-reflection, especially since a federal appellate court last week upheld most of a lower court’s findings against Qualcomm in a patent dispute dating to 2003. The court found substantial evidence that Qualcomm had deliberately withheld its proprietary video compression technology from a standard-setting industry group, a move that left room for Qualcomm to later file a patent-infringement lawsuit against Broadcom, a rival chipmaker in Irvine, CA.

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