There’s been a lot of tech news in San Diego over the past week, from Web 2.0 startups like SocialIQ that are identifying and measuring social media influencers, to changes in the executive leadership at established companies like Qualcomm. Our roundup begins now.

—San Diego’s Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) said it has installed its network security technology on the Facebook platform under a new partnership that’s intended to help protect Facebook users from uploading malware from malicious websites. Websense said its security technology would kick in whenever a Facebook user clicks on a URL posted within Facebook. Websense said its cloud-based technology is designed to analyze such links in real time and warn users of unsafe websites.

—Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) announced a series of executive changes that will become effective on Nov. 12. The San Diego wireless giant promoted executive vice president Steve Mollenkopf to president and chief operating officer. Steve Altman, who has served as president for the past six years, will become vice chairman. Derek Aberle was promoted to executive vice president & group president. In addition to overseeing Qualcomm’s divisions, business operations, and other areas, Mollenkopf will continue as president of Qualcomm CDMA Technologies (QCT).

—Carlsbad, CA-based ViaSat said the launch of ViaSat-1, the first high-capacity satellite dedicated entirely to Internet service, has been scheduled on Oct. 19 from the historic Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The broadband satellite, which will enable non-urban Internet providers to provide basic service at 10 megabits per second (compared to existing capacity of 512 kilobits per second), represents a more-than-billion-dollar bet by the company.

—San Diego-based Legend 3D, which had almost 400 employees here in February, said it has reduced its workforce by “less than 10 percent,” according to a note relayed from Barry Sandrew, the company’s founder and chief technology officer. The layoff, which follows a 15 percent reduction in July, leaves Legend 3D with a local headcount of nearly 250 artists and engineers—close to the size of its workforce in mid-2010. Yet Legend 3D said it is still the largest 3D conversion studio for Hollywood films in the United States.

—New York-based Enterproid, which won Qualcomm’s incentive QPrize earlier this year, said it closed on $11 million in Series A funding to extend its engineering capabilities, expand distribution, and launch a series of global partnerships. San Diego-based Qualcomm Ventures (NASDAQ: QCOM) joined in the round, which was led by … Next Page »

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As part of the anticipatory celebration for today’s official debut of Xconomy’s sixth website in New York City, I profiled New York’s Enterproid, which was Qualcomm’s grand prize winner in its 2011 QPrize competition. Get that and catch up on the rest of San Diego’s innovation news.

—Andrew Toy, Alexander Trewby, and David Zhu founded New York-based Enterproid last year to roll out technology that enables mobile customers to combine the features of their mobile consumer system and a secure enterprise system on the same Android-based device. Enterproid launched a private beta version of the technology, called “Divide,” on Feb. 28—the same day they were named as the 2011 QPrize grand prize winner by San Diego’s Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM).

—San Diego-based Sony Online Entertainment is stopping work on an undelivered game called “The Agency,” and closing its game development offices in Bellevue, WA; Denver, CO; and Tucson, AZ. A total of 205 jobs are being eliminated as SOE consolidates operations at its San Diego headquarters.

—San Diego’s Connect, the non-profit group created to support innovation and entrepreneurship, officially inducted Titan founder Gene Ray into its Hall of Fame at a luncheon celebration last week. Ray started Titan in 1981 to provide … Next Page »

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When Andrew Toy, Alexander Trewby, and David Zhu worked together at Morgan Stanley in 2007, they collectively managed the BlackBerry Enterprise Server for the global financial services company and its 60,000 employees. At that time, Morgan Stanley’s implementation of the corporate platform for e-mail messaging, calendaring, and collaborating was considered to be the largest in the world.

As a result, Toy, Trewby, and Zhu had a good sense of the strict data security requirements and stringent banking and securities compliance policies that governed mobile services for major business operations.

But they also saw the proliferation of mobile apps for the iPhone and the coming wave of broad-based, consumer app development that Android’s open mobile platform now makes possible. And they could see that such consumer apps on an open mobile device were fundamentally incompatible with the enterprise mobile paradigm that the BlackBerry exemplifies.

Instead of putting business users in the position of using two mobile devices—one smart phone for business and another for pleasure—the trio developed technology that enables users to combine a mobile consumer system and a secure enterprise system on the same Android-based mobile device. Called “Divide,” the technology is the core offering from Enterproid, a New York-based startup that Toy, Trewby, and Zhu founded in 2010. It is listed as a portfolio company of High Peaks Venture Partners, based in Troy, NY.

“Divide allows you to maintain completely separate profiles—personal and professional—on a single Android device,” says Michael Kirkland, a spokesman for the company in San Francisco.

Enterproid launched a private beta version of its Divide platform on Feb. 28, the same day that Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM), the San Diego wireless giant, named the startup as the grand prize winner of its 2011 QPrize.

“It was a fairly unanimous choice,” Qualcomm Ventures’ Nagraj Kashyap told me last month. The startup won $100,000 in convertible note financing (a Qualcomm loan that converts to stock when Enterproid raises its first equity round) by winning the top prize in North America, and another $150,000 as the Grand Prize winner against other finalists from Israel, Europe, South Korea, India, and China.

“They had a lot of relevant experience by being at Morgan Stanley,” said Kashyap, who oversees the annual … Next Page »

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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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With the Mobile World Congress underway this week in Barcelona, you can expect a cacophony of wireless news this week. San Diego’s Qualcomm was among the companies that issued some news ahead of the conference, and we’ve got it wrapped up for you here.

—Two San Diego technology companies, Peregrine Semiconductor and Fallbrook Technologies, were among 121 companies on file to go public on U.S. exchanges at the end of December, according to a report from the Ernst & Young accounting firm. During the fourth quarter of 2010, 57 companies went public and 56 others registered for IPOs, according to the report.

—There are Qualcomm chips inside the new Verizon version of Apple’s iPhone 4, according to home repair website iFixit. The Verizon iPhone includes both a Qualcomm MDM6600—a “world mode” baseband chip that can support both CDMA and GSM cellular frequencies—and a Qualcomm PM8028 power management chip.

—San Diego’s Active Network acquired Fellowship Technology without saying how much it paid for the Irving, TX-based company, which provides software as a service for church management and ministry activities.

—The Mobile World Congress has begun in Barcelona, where San Diego’s Qualcomm will demonstrate FlashLinq, a new type of peer-to-peer network technology. Qualcomm said last week that its synchronous TDD OFDMA technology advances a concept known as proximal communications, which allows cell phones to find one another and share information at broadband speeds without the need for a network to connect them.

—Qualcomm Ventures’ Nagraj Kashyap talked about changes that have been made to the wireless giant’s QPrize seed investment competition. Six finalists will compete in the grand finals competition, which will be at the Winter Demo conference in Desert Springs, CA at the end of this month. Qualcomm is awarding a total of $750,000 in financing to the finalists.

—Analytics startup Algebraix Data of San Diego has raised $7.5 million in an offering of debt, securities, and rights to acquire securities.

—In reporting financial results for its fiscal third quarter that ended Jan. 1, Carlsbad, CA-based ViaSat said its commercial satellite services business segment contributed $59.3 million in revenue—a 383 percent increase compared to the third quarter of fiscal year 2010. ViaSat said the revenue increase was primarily attributable to its WildBlue acquisition, as well as growth in mobile broadband services.

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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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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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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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[Editors note: Revises and corrects the terms of QPrize convertible note funding]

When San Diego-based Qualcomm Ventures announced it was organizing a new international prize competition last May, the economy was already reeling and the venture capital industry had slammed on the brakes.

That slowdown in VC activity—especially for early stage startups—was probably the key factor in the company’s decision to set aside $550,000 in incentive funding for finalists in the “QPrize” competition, according to Nagraj Kashyap, who heads Qualcomm Ventures. With the Aug. 21 deadline for “QPrize” applications drawing near, Kashyap agreed to meet with me to discuss the business plan competition and the corporate venture arm, which usually maintains a relatively low profile here.

Nagraj Kashyap

Since Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) launched the venture arm nine years ago, it has provided funding for about 30 startups around the world, with investments typically ranging from $500,000 to $10 million, and from Series A to Series C rounds. Kashyap says the fund’s managers look for startups that provide both a strong potential for return on investment and that complement Qualcomm’s existing products and services. Its investments include lithium battery developer A123 Systems of Watertown, MA, video game console maker Zeebo of San Diego, and remote blood pressure monitor startup Triage Wireless in San Diego.

Kashyap says Qualcomm Ventures’ foray into organizing a business plan competition “all started when we saw this precipitous drop in venture funding, which hurts the early stage guys disproportionately.” An additional source of seed-stage funding won’t change the prospects for some startups, such as semiconductor design companies, because the capital costs are so high these days. But Kashyap says seed funding can make a big difference to … Next Page »

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Joining in the latest wave of funding innovation, San Diego’s Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) today launched a new international business plan competition called the QPrize.

In a short announcement, the wireless chipmaker said its corporate venture fund has created a pool of $550,000 to provide early stage funding to the most-promising plans submitted by entrepreneurs “who can accelerate wireless technologies in key business sectors.”

Qualcomm Ventures will select a semi-finalist from China, India, Europe, and North America. The four semi-finalists will each receive $100,000 in funding and an invitation to Qualcomm Ventures’ CEO Summit in San Diego in November to compete  for a Grand Prize. There are no entry fees, but Qualcomm’s rules require participants to pay for their own travel and accommodations.

Qualcomm says the winner of the final QPrize competition will get an additional $150,000 in convertible note funding.

History is replete with examples of cash prizes that were used to spur innovation. One of the most-notable success stories was a series of prizes established by the British government in 1714 for a method that could precisely calculate the longitude of a ship at sea.

The X Prize, which was created in 1996 and awarded in 2004, has revitalized the practice. Peter Diamandis, who created the $10 million X Prize to stimulate the development of technologies capable of taking ordinary people into space, has said he was inspired by the $25,000 Orteig Prize that Charles Lindbergh claimed in 1927 with his solo flight from New York to Paris. The U.S. government even joined in, with the Pentagon sponsoring a contest to develop autonomous robotic vehicles.

In Qualcomm’s case, the company appears to be using its QPrize as part of its broader strategy to proactively seed its proprietary technology across various markets. By stimulating the creation of new companies, especially in China and India, the wireless giant can broaden its sphere of influence by creating a business ecosystem that shares the same technology.

[Xconomy San Diego Editor Bruce V. Bigelow contributed to this report]

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