WEBCard Receives Patent For Shape
Of Its CD Disc
The area’s No. 5 Internet service provider, ranked in the San Diego Business Journal 2001 Book of Lists, has been sold.
Dallas-based Allegiance Telecom, Inc. is the new owner of Internet service provider CTSnet of Kearny Mesa. Allegiance acquired the company from San Diego’s Datel Systems, Inc. for an undisclosed price.
The company will keep its name, retain the 60 employees it had before the merger, and be a wholly owned subsidiary of Allegiance.
The company had been looking for a partner, and Allegiance fit the bill nicely, said Morgan Davis, senior director of operations at the San Diego facility.
The Business Journal’s June 2000 list ranked service providers by number of employees. CTSnet employment is now 20 percent down from the 75 employees reported in that midyear survey.
CTSnet was founded in 1993. It has 17,000 billed accounts, and counts 2,500 business users. Its offerings include collocation services in its Complex Drive data center. Some 8,000 square feet of space devoted to that part of the business alone will soon be augmented by 4,000 more square feet.
Allegiance is now in 27 U.S. markets. Company leaders say they want to be in 36. The company trades on the Nasdaq under the symbol ALGX.
– – –
Grape-Shaped?: Escondido-based WEBcard Technologies Inc. has received a U.S. patent for the ornamental shape of its credit card-sized compact disc, which might be described as a grape with four corners.
The patent was assigned to the WEBcard predecessor Spike Interactive LLC of Escondido on Jan. 2, and lists Jimit H. Mehta of Encinitas and Jason D. Coker of Escondido as inventors. Coker is founder and CEO of WEBcard, which counts Kodak, Mattel, Motorola, Honda and PriceWaterhouse-Coopers as high-profile users of the card design.
Just what is the patented shape? Imagine taking a wheel from a piece of redwood patio furniture, and sanding opposite sides of the wheel flat. That’s the shape of a WEBcard. You can find an illustration of it at (www.webcardinfo.com).
Anticipating W-CDMA: Samples of electrical components for mobile devices using wideband code division multiple access (W-CDMA) should arrive from Qualcomm Inc. in the third quarter of this year, the company announced. Coming is a transmit processor, a receive processor and a power amplifier module (the latter designed in partnership with Greensboro, N.C.-based RF Micro Devices, Inc.).
That builds on Qualcomm’s November announcements predicting complementary chip samples for mobile devices and cell sites arriving in the second and fourth quarters, respectively.
Wireless followers and acronym lovers take note: W-CDMA is a mode of the UMTS standard (that’s universal mobile telecommunications system). W-CDMA is actually an outgrowth of GSM (global system for mobile communications), a standard that competes with the CDMA standard that made Qualcomm famous.
– – –
Columnar Components: San Diego-based InfoGation Corp., which provides software and services for vehicle-based Internet (a.k.a. telematics), is headed for the heart of the auto industry. Bill Fodera, the company’s new director of U.S. automotive sales, is in charge of opening a Detroit office for the company. InfoGation has announced plans to expand its staff and offer services in Europe and Japan, all this year. Rancho Santa Fe Technology, Inc. is in new headquarters: 8,500 square feet at 5961 Kearny Villa Road. It has also expanded its Bay Area office in Alameda. The company, which provides network infrastructure services, is marking its 10th anniversary. Spinitar, formerly Presentation Products Inc., has opened a San Diego office at 13220 Evening Creek Drive. The audiovisual systems integrator is based in Santa Fe Springs.
Graves’ column appears weekly. Write him at bgraves@sdbj.com.