When it comes to tech startups—especially in Internet software and app development—San Diego has been adrift in the horse latitudes. That’s the term Spanish mariners had for the waters where the trade winds died out for days and even weeks at a time. Becalmed sailors desperate to gain some headway would heave their horses overboard to reach the New World.

It hasn’t reached that point yet in San Diego, but you would never know that software was once a thriving entrepreneurial community here. Even now, the software sector accounts for more than a third of San Diego’s private technology companies. But as I’ve written previously, it feels as if the local software companies speak different languages. In contrast to the flourishing tech hubs in Seattle, Boston, and New York—not to mention Silicon Valley—San Diego’s software scene is sleepy and indifferent.

Still, there are signs of a freshening breeze.

David Cohen last week at UC San Diego

Scores of new seed-stage startups have begun to emerge throughout the region, including a dozen that just moved into the new EvoNexus incubator in downtown San Diego. These emerging companies are led by young entrepreneurs who view San Diego’s innovation establishment as old-school and irrelevant. They are turning out instead for informal “hackathons” and “meetups.” They tell me they’re yearning for real mentoring by real tech entrepreneurs, and for access to real tech investors who are really investing.

Last week, more than 200 people turned out to hear David Cohen talk at U.C. San Diego about TechStars, the early stage fund and accelerator program for Internet startups that he co-founded with three partners in Boulder, CO, six years ago. Cohen is the CEO, and by any measure, the startup program has been wildly successful.

TechStars enrolled its first 10 Internet startups in 2007, providing as much as $18,000 in seed funding and an intense, three-month mentorship program for each company in exchange for a 6 percent stake. Since then, TechStars has expanded to … Next Page »

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Here’s a quick update on the agenda for Mobile Madness 2012: Total Mobility, the annual half-day mobile conference we are organizing here at Xconomy Boston. The event is taking place on the afternoon of March 14 at Microsoft NERD in Cambridge, MA. We are looking forward to a packed house and some outstanding talks, discussions, and networking.

I’m pleased to announce a few more startup participants:

—Apperian founder and chief strategy officer Chuck Goldman will join us for a discussion of mobile business strategies, along with Mobiquity founder and CEO Bill Seibel. Goldman is a former Apple exec who leads Apperian’s strategic and business development efforts in enterprise mobile apps. Seibel, for his part, was a founding partner at Cambridge Technology Partners and went on to lead ZEFER, Demantra, and Gumball; he currently leads Mobiquity’s efforts to help businesses develop mobile strategies.

—Fiksu CEO Micah Adler joins us to talk about his company’s approach to marketing mobile apps. My colleague Erin recently wrote about Fiksu’s consumer-facing service, which lets people try out apps from various brands and stores for free.

—Paydiant co-founder Chris Gardner will be on hand to discuss his vision for the future of the mobile wallet—banking, shopping, and e-commerce via your smartphone.

Other confirmed speakers include Jason Jacobs of RunKeeper, Chris Lynch from Vertica/HP, Chuck Kane from One Laptop Per Child, and Seth Priebatsch from SCVNGR. We’ll also have a special panel of Boston’s “mobile mafia,” including Lars Albright (Quattro Wireless, Session M); Mike Baker (Enpocket, DataXu); Tom Burgess (Third Screen Media, Linkable Networks); Jeff Glass (m-Qube, Bain Capital Ventures); and Ryan Moore (GrandBanks Capital investor in Enpocket, Where, and Nexage, now with Atlas Venture).

There are more announcements to come, and I will be posting the detailed agenda soon, so stay tuned. Meantime, you can still grab the early bird rate if you register today.

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San Diego’s MOGL, a Web-based customer loyalty and rewards program for restaurants and bars, says it has raised $10 million in venture funding to fuel its expansion into San Francisco, New York, and other markets.

The Menlo Park, CA, office of Sigma Partners led the Series B round, which was joined by San Diego’s Avalon Ventures and Austin, TX-based Austin Ventures. That brings total funding for MOGL to $12.4 million, according to a statement from the company. Entrepreneurs Jon Carder, Jarrod Cuzens, and Jeff Federman started MOGL in 2010.

The Internet startup offers its customers multiple incentives for returning to member restaurants and bars, using a mixture of technology, games, and psychology. The incentives include a 10 percent cash back each time a customer returns to eat at participating restaurants. A contest  offers monthly cash prizes to the top three most-frequent customers at each locale. Customers also can automatically donate a meal to someone in need every time they spend $20.

MOGL Homepage Screenshot

MOGL says it provides customer analytics and return-on-investment data for participating bars and eateries. In a statement from the company, Sigma partner Peter Solvik says, “The MOGL team has generated an explosive response from both consumers and restaurant partners, while effectively positioning itself as the most innovative loyalty platform of its kind.”

Since it was launched last April, MOGL has signed up nearly 350 Southern California-based eateries and bars, donated more than 27,000 meals to Feeding America, and has rewarded its members with more than $350,000 in cash back to date.

The company also offers a location-based mobile app for iPhone and Android, so MOGL members can easily locate participating restaurants while on the go. The mobile apps also help customers track their cash rewards and jackpot opportunities, as well as the number of meals donated in their name.

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—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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—Venture capitalists invested $269 million in 23 deals in the San Diego area during the last three months of 2011, according to the MoneyTree Report from the National Venture Capital Association, PwC, and Thomson Reuters. That was almost a 20 percent gain in dollars, but a 28 percent slide in deal count from MoneyTree data for the fourth quarter of 2010. For the full year of 2011, the MoneyTree VC survey said $829 million was invested in 104 deals in San Diego, a 5 percent decline in dollars and a 17 percent slide in deals from the $871.7 million sunk into 126 San Diego deals in 2010.

—What should students study now to be prepared for the workplace 10 years from now? We asked that question of 22 Xconomists, including San Diego Xconomists Ramesh Rao, Duane Roth, Drew Senyei, Larry Bock, and Robert Noble. We’ve compiled all 22 answers in an Xconomy special report on education, which you can find here.

—San Diego Gas & Electric hosted a grand opening of its new Energy Innovation Center, which is designed to serve as an energy innovation showcase and education facility, and to meet the U.S. Green Building Council’s requirements for a platinum LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) certificate. The center includes a full commercial “food service demonstration kitchen” where San Diego chefs can test their recipes on energy efficient appliances and restaurant owners can learn about the advantages of new and more energy efficient equipment. Utility officials said Commercial kitchens are particularly energy intensive.

—San Diego-based Tealium raised $1.1 million in Series A financing from private investors, and plans to use the funding to expand development of the tag management technology the company created to help enterprise customers manage their online marketing. Tealium said the investors include Limelight Networks CEO Jeff Lunsford, former Visual Sciences CEO Jim MacIntyre, Collective CEO Joe Apprendi, EyeWonder CEO John Vincent, and eValue Group CEO Thomas Falk.

—After previewing their plans last year, the X Prize Foundation and San Diego-based Qualcomm Foundation officially unveiled the Qualcomm “Tricorder” X Prize, a competition offering $10 million to the team that can develop new wireless diagnostics technology. The winning entry must be able to accurately diagnose a set of 15 diseases across 30 consumers in three days, capturing real time, critical health metrics such as blood pressure, respiratory rate, and temperature, and providing information in a consumer-friendly way.

—Qualcomm’s leadership has been talking for several years about the anticipated competition between its ARM-based semiconductors and the CPUs developed for desktop computing in the expanding market for smart devices. Now some of those skirmishes are beginning. Illinois-based Motorola Mobility (NYSE: MMI)  said recently it would use Intel’s (NASDAQ: INTC) latest low-power x86 Atom processor in a number of future Motorola products, marking Intel’s opening move into the smartphone market. A Motorola spokeswoman told me by email, “We will continue to use multiple chip set vendors.” Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) already has hundreds of mobile devices using its Snapdragon processor, and has been working with manufacturers on hundreds more.

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Bellevue, WA-based Finsphere has added $7.3 million in fundraising and a board member from Vodafone Ventures, according to a new SEC filing. The new money, which appears to include the sale and exercise of some options, adds to a total of $3.95 million that Finsphere raised in related equity financings last year.

Finsphere, founded in 2007, is headed by veterans of the wireless and finance industries. It offers software and data analysis services that use consumer mobile phones for identity verification, with an emphasis on helping banks and other financial providers track fraud and identity theft. Finsphere also offers a slimmed-down version of its financial-fraud protections for consumers, called Pinpoint.

The apparent investment from Vodafone Ventures is significant—it’s the venture arm of Vodafone, a huge U.K.-based mobile operator. The new Finsphere board member is Vodafone Ventures director Tobin Ireland, a tech-industry veteran whose previous work includes a stint as chief marketing officer at AOL.

This latest chunk of money brings Finsphere’s venture investment total to about $30 million. Previous investors are Bezos Expeditions, Frazier Technology Ventures, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and Shasta Ventures. I’ve e-mailed Finsphere for comment on the latest SEC filing and will update if I hear more.

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Money pumped into San Diego’s regional economy by venture capital firms hit an eight-year low in 2011, with a total of $829 million invested in 104 startups throughout the year, according to the MoneyTree VC survey being released today. The 2011 deal count was the lowest seen in San Diego since 1997.

The 2011 numbers represent a 5 percent decline in dollars and a 17 percent decline in deals in comparison with the previous year, when VCs put a total of $871.7 million in 126 startups, according to the MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers, the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and Thomson Reuters.

The decline in San Diego’s venture activity ran counter to the nationwide trend in 2011, in which $28.5 billion was invested in 3,673 deals—and ranks as the third-highest total in the past decade. The U.S. numbers represent a 22 percent increase over the $23.6 billion in 2010 VC funding and a 4 percent rise over the previous year’s deal count, according to the MoneyTree analysis.

The overall U.S. trend depicted in the MoneyTree Report generally agrees with the rise in venture activity nationwide that CB Insights charted last week in its 2011 findings. CB Insights, the New York financial analysis firm, said the $30.6 billion VCs invested in 3,051 deals throughout 2011 was a 10-year high in terms of both dollars and deals. (The two sets of numbers don’t line up exactly because the firms use different methods to collect their venture data, and count dollars and deals in different ways.)

In the fourth quarter of 2011, the MoneyTree Report shows that venture capitalists invested $269 million in 23 deals in the San Diego area, with life sciences startups in diagnostics, drugs, and devices accounting for roughly two-thirds of the transactions. It represented a … Next Page »

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Venture capital deals backed off just a tad during the last three months of 2011, but remained strong enough to carry VC activity during the year to a new high-water mark, according to data being released today by CB Insights, a financial data firm that maintains a venture capital database.

VCs invested $7.6 billion in 755 companies nationwide during the fourth quarter, bringing the total for 2011 back to pre-recession levels, with $30.6 billion invested in 3,051 deals. The New York firm says that marks a 10-year high for both dollars and number of deals.

In the regional breakdown, Massachusetts regained its No. 2 ranking, eclipsing venture activity in New York during the fourth quarter. CB Insights reports that a total of $959 million was invested in 93 Bay State deals. In New York, $568 million went into 73 deals, which ranked third in terms of both deals and dollars.

California maintained its usual poll position during the quarter, with the $3.8 billion invested statewide accounting for just over half of the nationwide total and the 300 deals representing 40 percent of the total U.S. number. There wasn’t a lot of variation in California’s deal count over the previous four quarters, but the capital invested during the quarter was 45 percent higher than the $2.6 billion that went into the Golden State during the same quarter of 2010.

In Washington State, venture activity remained well behind the big three, with $146 million invested in 24 deals during the quarter, prompting the wags at CB Insights to write, “We’ll bring back our ‘Sleeping in Seattle’ metaphor as Washington continued its … Next Page »

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Since it was founded in 2000, San Diego-based Verimatrix has raised about $50 million in institutional venture funding and spent untold hours of software programming to address a relatively simple problem nagging the pay-TV industry for more than a decade. As Verimatrix CEO Tom Munro puts it, “We keep people from watching television without paying for it.”

These days, however, the security issues confronting Verimatrix and the pay-TV industry have only become more complex.

Munro estimates there are 110 million consumers in the United States who pay to watch television provided by cable, satellite, and other TV service providers (with an estimated market penetration of 90-plus percent). At the same time, the number of U.S. consumers who are watching TV online, using Netflix, iTunes, Hulu, and other Internet video services has exploded—with the fast-rising total estimated at somewhere between 40 million and 70 million, according to consultant Bill Rosenblatt of New York’s Giant Steps Media Technology Strategies.

Meanwhile, cable TV operators like Time Warner, Comcast, and Cox Communications are moving to offer their subscribers “Everywhere TV” that allows them to watch any digital video content on any device. And of course, electronic device-makers have been busy developing an estimated 1 million different types of gadgets that consumers can use to watch digital content anywhere.

Verimatrix fits into this industry maelstrom by developing encryption software and related security technologies for pay-TV networks. In some respects, Verimatrix’ task has gotten easier as ever-increasing bandwidth has enabled the industry to move increasingly to a “pure digital” format, and away from more specialized electronic devices, such as Blu-Ray players. Riding this trend, the company has been successful in creating piracy protection software for Internet-Protocol Television (IPTV), and today more than half of the company’s business is in so-called unmanaged networks, such as Netflix, which provides streaming video “Over the Top” (OTT) of a cable- or satellite-based broadband Internet platform.

“The nice thing about our solution is that it’s based on software, and not on a hardware, card-reader type of security technology,” Munro says. He describes Verimatrix as … Next Page »

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Mobile industry leaders are looking for big moves in 2012 from the Seattle area’s two technology heavyweights, taking the lead from a surge by Google’s Android operating system, according to a new survey from Issaquah, WA-based Chetan Sharma Consulting.

Sharma’s 2012 Mobile Industry Predictions Survey, compiled from about 150 responses through the consulting firm’s global mailing list of industry insiders, also predicts that mobile payments and commerce will remain a big focus for businesses and consumers alike, further roiling the waters for retailers.

When asked what the biggest storyline of 2012 would be, survey respondents put Amazon’s entry into mobile in second place, with a Microsoft and Nokia “resurgence” close behind in third (the top story was the continued growth of mobile data usage worldwide).

The interest in Amazon certainly owes a lot to the newness of the e-commerce pioneer’s move into mobile computing, with the late 2011 debut of the Kindle Fire tablet. So there’s clearly a lot more room for Jeff Bezos and company to grow.

The company is also pretty well-regarded for its focus, and it has shown an ability to execute very well with Amazon Web Services, another business not directly tied to its Internet retailing niche.

Sharma says the extension into tablets, and perhaps a mobile phone in the near future, is just part of Amazon growing to become a “super-retailer for everything. They are already into groceries. Electronics is very heavy—they sell a lot of phones online.”

Amazon’s newly unveiled business model with tablets, which (at least currently) sells the device at a small loss and makes up the margin on content sales, is very hard for other companies to replicate, Sharma says. And the company’s retailing expertise means it knows shoppers’ tastes better than almost any other company.

“Amazon is very, very well placed, and they’re just starting to show their hand as to what their ambitions are,” Sharma says. “I think they’re sitting very pretty for many years to come.”

Microsoft’s role in the future of mobile has a lot to do with the success of Nokia, its main hardware partner for the refreshed Windows Phone operating system. The immediate stakes are higher for the Swedish phone-maker than they are for Microsoft, Sharma says, because cash-rich Microsoft can afford to play a bit longer game with the mobile market. But he notes that initial response for new Nokia phones has been “tepid” in Europe so far, and needs to show much better response when devices start hitting the U.S. market.

“If they don’t do that successfully by Q4, then definitely they’re in trouble—some of the same trouble that RIM is in,” Sharma says. Without success selling newer handsets, he adds, ”Nokia might not survive, or it might have to morph into something else.”

That possibility was surely on the minds of survey respondents who placed Microsoft No. 1 among the companies expected to make the biggest mobile acquisitions of 2012, with more than a quarter of the responses. Google and network operators broadly grouped together were in second and third place, with Amazon thought to be the fourth most likely to make a big M&A splash.

Sharma said one response that surprised him was the low rank given to Windows in the tablet sector. The latest version of Windows for tablets isn’t a reality for consumers yet, but Sharma asked respondents to look out two years—and they still saw Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android platform taking most of the market.

“People still didn’t think Windows would make a big dent. That was surprising,” he says. “I think they can have a decent impact on the marketplace, because in the enterprise especially, there you have to have create tablets versus consume tablets,” the difference between filing out a spreadsheet and watching a YouTube video, for instance.

“Mobile is starting to become very important for Microsoft longer-term,” Sharma says. “Even if they are not doing that well today, five years out they have to be doing really well.”

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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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A decade ago, when newspaper and magazine editors prepared their rundown of the year’s most important news stories, they really were just choosing the articles that they thought had the most impact. That was old media.

Today, everything is measured and anything can be quantified—at least on the Internet. In cyberspace, people vote with their clicks, and my list of the top 10 stories of 2011 is based on the stories posted on the Xconomy San Diego website (from Jan. 3 through Dec. 23) that attracted the most traffic. That’s new media.

And a new year is beckoning, so it’s out with the old and in with the new.

Believe it or not, some stories published before 2011 still pulled in a lot of interest over the past year. For example, one of the top stories of 2011 was a post I wrote two years earlier about the pervasive skepticism voiced by biofuels industry leaders during the 2009 Algae Biomass Summit in San Diego. It also is noteworthy, although perhaps no surprise, that a 2009 post I wrote about the first human trial of San Diego-based Histogen’s hair regrowth treatment continues to attract readers who are Googling for news about baldness and hair restoration.

The No. 1 story of 2011, however, was surprising—at least to me. It was a commentary about the dramatic changes underway in new treatments for hepatitis C by San Diego Xconomist Steve Worland, the CEO of San Diego-based Anadys Pharmaceuticals. Worland alludes to the spate of new product introductions by Merck and Vertex, and predicts an increasing number of direct acting, cocktail-type antiviral drugs. It’s a hot topic, although Wall Street’s interest might have been piqued as analysts and traders searched to understand why Roche acquired Anadys for $230 million about five weeks after we published Worland’s op-ed.

It’s also worth noting that these high-traffic stories tend to occur in … 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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Now back on its own, T-Mobile stands to grow its coverage area with some assets from the breakup penalty that AT&T will pay for its failed buyout attempt. But most of the consolation prize will stay with T-Mobile’s German parent company, which has been looking for a way to exit the U.S. market, rather than go into supercharging T-Mobile’s market position.

In a statement, Deutsche Telekom outlines how it plans to use the breakup fee and associated assets that AT&T had to forfeit for scrapping the proposed $39 billion merger with T-Mobile. AT&T has valued the breakup fee at $4 billion, which includes $3 billion in cash and $1 billion in spectrum assets. As Deutsche Telekom noted, it’s “one of the highest payments ever agreed [to] between two companies for the termination of a purchase agreement.”

Deutsche appears to be keeping the cash. At the tail end of its statement, the company says the $3 billion payment “directly reduces Deutsche Telekom’s net debt.”

But Bellevue, WA-based T-Mobile will reap some rewards: It gets “a large package” of wireless spectrum in 128 markets, including 12 of the top 20 U.S. cities. T-Mobile also is getting a roaming deal with AT&T that lasts more than seven years, which improves coverage for existing customers and increases the company’s footprint by about 50 million potential customers, giving it a network that could cover some 280 million people.

That’s a significant boost to T-Mobile’s previous plans, which called for the company to cover 290 million people with its 3G and 4G networks by 2013.

Tom Huseby

What should be T-Mobile’s next move? Seattle investor and wireless industry veteran Tom Huseby says it’s back to building the business until a suitor can be found.

“I’d be surprised if T-Mobile is actually working on a Plan B very actively. I think the Plan B by default is to resume the activities that allowed them to compete in the first place,” Huseby says. “They have to go back to what they were doing before—they had a series of initiatives that I thought were doing a good job of positioning them relative to their larger competitors.”

After that, Deutsche Telekom can maybe move into the next phase of looking for a new owner, or some other creative way of unloading the T-Mobile business. In its statement today, Deutsche Telekom says its current fiscal year financial forecast remains unchanged, and says it “will go back to reporting T-Mobile USA as continuing operations in [the] future.”

The two remaining possible acquirers in the wireless industry are definitely not slam-dunks for Deutsche Telekom, either. Market leader Verizon clearly couldn’t make a buy for the same regulatory and anticompetitive reasons that No. 2 carrier AT&T got shot down. Third-place Sprint was previously rumored to be interested in a buyout of No. 4 T-Mobile, but the two companies have built their networks around incompatible technologies.

Then there are an entire group of suitors who aren’t really in mobile now, but want to be. That prominently includes the TV providers, who have been heading toward more direct competition with the mobile network providers for some time.

“But I think they [T-Mobile] should view that as a longer timeframe, personally,” Huseby says. “They should make sure they can get back to turning the crank on their business first,” before seriously considering another buyout possibility.

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There’s got to be plenty of mixed feelings for all those magenta-clad T-Mobile folks in Bellevue right now. News that AT&T is abandoning its mega-merger attempt to acquire the fourth-place U.S. wireless carrier raises a ton of questions about T-Mobile’s future—none of them particularly reassuring.

Now that AT&T is on the hook for a $4 billion breakup fee and roaming agreement to share airwaves with Deutsche Telekom, will the German parent company find T-Mobile a newly attractive business? That’s definitely not clear, since Deutsche Telekom was trying to get out of the U.S. market entirely with the sale.

T-Mobile could find partners of another variety. Sprint was rumored to be looking at a possible combination with T-Mobile earlier this year, just before the AT&T bid was announced. At that time, Deutsche Telekom Chief Financial Officer Timotheus Hoettges told Bloomberg reporters that “In general, all options are open in the U.S.—the sale of the whole business or of parts.”

Sprint and T-Mobile would still leave a three-carrier market, although one much more balanced than if AT&T had gobbled up T-Mobile. Still, a tie-up between Sprint and T-Mobile would be difficult at best, at least partly because they use very different sets of technology for their networks.

TV companies also could make attractive suitors in a bid to broaden out and compete against the phone giants, with the Dish Network’s CEO on record saying T-Mobile might be a target for his company. That brings up the question of whether the feds would approve a horizontal merger rather than a vertical one, of course.

Washington State Rep. Reuven Carlyle, a Seattle Democrat who has long experience in the wireless industry, says the status quo won’t last long for T-Mobile.

“Given the cost of next-generation wireless infrastructure, I think it’s fair to assume that a long-term change in T-Mobile’s current structure seems inevitable,” Carlyle says. “Whether a partnership with Comcast, Dish Network, Sprint, Clearwire and/or others makes sense, the market will ultimately determine.”

“The marketplace is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but in the wireless arena it is far more efficient and effective than government and I fear that one day, elected officials who jumped on board to oppose this merger will regret their decision,” Carlyle says.

Giri Sreenivas, a former T-Mobile manager who is now CEO and co-founder at Seattle startup Mobilisafe, says T-Mobile could continue to compete as a smaller carrier—but that depends on the resources at its disposal.

“I have many sharp friends still there, so I believe the company is positioned to do some great things with their network and pricing positioning,” Sreenivas says. “I think the key thing to track is whether the breakup fee is reinvested into the T-Mobile USA business and what kinds of partnerships can be struck to improve network quality perception, handset options and services.”

Sprint (NASDAQ: S) officials had vigorously opposed the AT&T bid, even filing its own lawsuit against the deal. The Overland Park, KN-based company—majority shareholder of Bellevue’s Clearwire—was predictably jubilant at news of the AT&T deal collapsing.

Vonya B. McCann, Sprint’s senior vice president of government affairs, said in a statement that the breakup was “the right decision for consumers, competition and innovation in the wireless industry.”

“From the beginning, Sprint has stood with consumers who spoke loudly and clearly that AT&T’s proposed takeover of T-Mobile would create an undeniable duopoly that would have resulted in higher prices, less innovation and fewer choices for the American consumer,” McCann wrote.

Sprint also praised the federal regulators and state attorneys general who opposed the deal. Washington state Attorney General Rob McKenna, the Republican frontrunner for governor, was among the state officials opposing the merger. His presumptive Democratic opponent, Congressman Jay Inslee, also didn’t like the AT&T buyout.

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After a brutal few months battling Obama administration officials on two fronts, AT&T has given up its blockbuster $39 billion bid to acquire Bellevue, WA-based T-Mobile USA from Deutsche Telekom.

The end of an outright merger was clearly telegraphed a week ago, when the two companies and the Justice Department postponed a federal antitrust lawsuit. AT&T had earlier pulled its application from the Federal Communications Commission in the face of opposition from regulators and staff there.

What’s a little more unexpected is that AT&T is apparently ditching any sort of alternative deal that could have given the nation’s No. 2 wireless carrier access to T-Mobile’s assets, particularly wireless spectrum. That was held out as an option last week, when the two companies said they were “actively considering whether and how to revise our current transaction to achieve the necessary regulatory approvals.”

But today’s statement on the deal falling apart paints the breakup as pretty definitive, with AT&T saying that federal officials need to find some other ways to make sure the industry has the spectrum it needs to accommodate the growing hunger for broadband.

“First, in the near term, they should allow the free markets to work so that additional spectrum is available to meet the immediate needs of the U.S. wireless industry, including expeditiously approving our acquisition of unused Qualcomm spectrum currently pending before the FCC,” AT&T chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson said in a statement. “Second, policymakers should enact legislation to meet our nation’s longer-term spectrum needs.”

It should be noted that while AT&T painted the acquisition as mainly about spectrum needs, opponents pointed out the side benefit to AT&T of sweeping a scrappy competitor off the floor. Federal officials, both at the FCC and the Justice Department, said the deal would have concentrated too much power in the industry and made things worse for consumers. Regulators also didn’t buy any of the supposed benefits that the companies put forth to soften the blow.

The big question now is what happens to T-Mobile, a business that Deutsche Telekom clearly doesn’t want—or didn’t want, anyway. AT&T says it’s taking a $4 billion charge to pay for a breakup fee, and will also “enter a mutually beneficial roaming agreement with Deutsche Telekom.” Could that make the U.S. carrier an attractive option for Deutsche to continue owning?

There are other partners waiting in the wings, too. Last week, just as the lawsuit was being put on hold, Dish Network’s CEO told Bloomberg that his company would be interested in a tie-up with T-Mobile if the AT&T deal fell apart.

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According to Bobby Ghoshal, the future of news consumption is in finding new ways for users to interact with content and influence other users’ reading habits, and the development of online “news personalities.” Ghoshal is the co-founder and CEO of Flud, a news aggregation app that unveiled its updated platform for the iPhone and iPad earlier this month. (The Android version is set to launch in January.)

With Flud, everyone has the potential to become a news source,” Ghoshal says. “It’s all about taking consumption and merging it with social networking.”

Flud’s new platform allows news enthusiasts to create their own news profiles, recommend content to their community, discover new information and sources from friends, and to build information networks around key interests. The San Diego-based startup recently received funding from Detroit Venture Partners and Detroit-based Ludlow Ventures.

What Flud aims to create is a sort of meta aggregator, where users are curating content to create individualized aggregation sites within the larger Flud ecosystem. If that sounds daunting to a novice, Flud has also created a “hit list” of content Ghoshal and other members of the Flud team consider especially worth reading. (For example, I discovered during my interview with Ghoshal that Xconomy is on that list.)

Flud thinks of its content as having three tiers. Tier 1 belongs to the publications that are ubiquitous at news stands: Time; Cosmo; Sports Illustrated. Tier 2 is the place for niche blogs that are widely read—think TechCrunch or Perez Hilton. Tier 3 is the home of blogs that may not be household names, but that have enough of a readership to stay relevant in the market.

Tier 3 is where Ghoshal sees a big opportunity with Flud users. The new platform includes a feature that allows users to see who else is reading an article at the same time they are. (Ghoshal calls it “serendipitous news discovery.”) Ghoshal is hoping that users will be pleasantly surprised to see 20 or 30 other people reading the same cult-favorite blog they are, and that will lead them to reach out for additional content recommendations.

Other new features in the updated platform include a Flud button, which allows users to endorse high-quality content; an activity feed to track what’s trending inside a user’s news circle; the ability to push content out to Tumblr and connect to Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, Instapaper, and Read It Later accounts;  and synching across devices so that a user’s “news legacy” follows them from phone to tablet and vice versa.

It was the popularization of the tablet computer, Ghoshal says, that inspired he and Matthew Ausonio to found Flud in the first place. “The tablet was intriguing, and we guessed that using them to read news would be huge,” he says.

The initial app was launched in August 2010, but Ghoshal describes those … Next Page »

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San Diego-based VMIX has been revising its strategy, which was originally focused on providing a technology platform that enables TV stations and other media companies to stream online video. Earlier this year, VMIX began rolling out technology that allowed consumers to use the company’s video streaming technology on social media sites like Facebook.

Now the six-year-old startup is launching Givit, a new consumer-oriented business that makes it easy for users to share video privately. In contrast to posting a video on Facebook, where just about anyone can see it, Givit users can selectively send a private video link to designated friends and family.

After introducing a beta version of Givit last month, VMIX says today that users can download the Givit app for use on the iPhone and iPad. The technology was previously available as an app for Windows or Mac OS-based laptops and desktop PCs.

Basic Givit service is free; service that provides additional video storage capacity is available as a subscription. While there are plenty of competitors that already enable consumers to share videos online, VMIX says Givit is the only video-sharing service designed to restrict the people who can watch a video.

“One of our big value propositions is private video,” VMIX CEO Greg Kostello told me earlier this week. “There already are a number of ways to share video publicly through Facebook. But everyone who sees it is not necessarily a friend. They just friended me.”

In a statement from the company today, Kostello says, “Smartphones are now the camera of choice for recording everyday moments, but sharing mobile video is often a frustrating process. Givit makes it easy-and most importantly, by default we share securely and privately, rather than broadcasting your personal content across public social networks.”

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The evolution of computer security is not merely some dark mirror, passively reflecting advances in technology. While technology provides new opportunities for threats, these become true dangers only when there is a motivation to exploit them and a means to do so.

Stefan Savage, writing in The New York Times, Dec. 5, 2011.

By his own admission, Stefan Savage’s interests are all over the map.

Savage is a professor of computer science at the University of California, San Diego, who works on computer and network security issues with researchers at the University of Washington, where he got his PhD, as well as UC Berkeley, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and elsewhere.

Last year, a team led by Savage and UW’s Tadayoshi Kohno showed that a hacker with physical access to an automotive electronic control unit could alter software to stop the engine, disable the brakes, and carry out other nefarious tasks. In follow-up research published earlier this year, Savage and company said they had succeeded in performing similar tasks remotely—using the cellular phone in a car to insert malicious software that enabled them to override various vehicle controls. (Their findings can be found at the website of the Center for Automotive Embedded Systems Security, a UW-UCSD collaboration.)

Savage also has helped lead wide-ranging studies of Internet spam, outlining the global “ecosystem” that supports compromised accounts, spam mailers, credit cards, e-mail lists, and other tools of the trade. This work led to a comprehensive study of just how much revenue spam advertising can generate, even when most of the spam is blocked. In a recently published paper, the scientists from Berkeley and San Diego counted more than 100,000 orders a month in just one spam network. The group also offered a “rough but well-founded” estimate that revenue generated from spam-advertised pharmaceutical drugs amounts to tens of millions of dollars a year.

He recently fielded some questions from Xconomy:

Xconomy: You’ve been involved in so many different aspects of cyber-security. What do you see as the single biggest danger in … Next Page »

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San Diego’s Sotera Wireless says it has raised $12.2 million in a Series D round of financing led by the Singapore-based global fund EDB Investments.

Sotera says it also signed a commercial agreement with Cerner, the Kansas City, MO-based giant that provides complete health IT systems for hospitals and other medical organizations to integrate and manage all electronic medical records, physician orders, and financial information. Cerner’s investment arm, Cerner Capital, joined the latest round as a new investor, along with existing investors Qualcomm Ventures, Sanderling Ventures, Intel Capital, and the West Health Investment Fund.

In a statement, Sotera says it has asked the FDA in August to clear its mobile vital signs monitoring technology for the U.S. market. If all goes as planned, funding from the current financing round will be used to support the launch of Sotera’s “ViSi Mobile System” in early 2012.

As we reported last year, Sotera’s ViSi system enables hospital ICUs to continuously monitor critical care patients on general hospital floors. The system tracks a patient’s blood pressure, respiration, temperature, blood oxygen levels and heart rate. ViSi collects data from two sensors—one on the chest and one on the thumb—connected to a wristband device slightly larger than a sports watch, which maintains a Wi Fi connection to a hospital workstation.

By continuously charting a patient’s vital signs, the system can show whether a patient’s condition is deteriorating and serves as a kind of early warning system for developing problems.

In Sotera’s statement today, EDB Investments chief Chu Swee-Yeok, says, “Health systems worldwide are facing the challenge of an increasingly high-risk and frail patient population. We believe Sotera offers a disruptive platform that will provide clinicians with the visibility they need for pre-emptive and preventative care. EDBI looks forward to actively assisting Sotera to tap into new business opportunities in the Asia-Pacific market to expand its global footprint.”

The latest financing round brings Sotera’s total venture backing to roughly $46 million, according to VentureWire.

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