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With ‘Computational Photography Platform,’ Seeing is Believing

You could call it a camera, but its builder wants you to think bigger.

Silicon Valley-based Lytro Inc. calls it a “computational photography platform.”

From what I understand, the camera’s talent is grabbing and processing a whole lot of light, then letting the user complete the picture later. The $1,599 machine does its magic with a top-of-the-line, 800-series Snapdragon processor from Qualcomm Inc.

I saw the Lytro Illum at the Medium Festival of Photography, which was kicking off at the Lafayette Hotel on Oct. 23.

At 55 megabytes, the photo files that this camera creates are about 10 times larger than the ones the editors commonly handle at the Business Journal. They might take up a lot more room on a hard drive, but these files offer a certain flexibility. A viewer is able to manipulate the focus of a picture long after the shutter has been snapped.

A Lytro representative showed me a photo where the viewer stares down the hood of a classic, circa-1940s automobile. You can adjust the focus forward, so the hood ornament is sharply defined, or backward, to the face of the hard-boiled, fedora-wearing man behind the steering wheel, or at any point in between.

One Qualcomm (Nasdaq: QCOM) representative on hand noted that Lytro engineers harnessed the Snapdragon’s architecture in a creative manner to put it in their camera. Though slightly different from what Qualcomm engineers originally envisioned, the arrangement works.

It works so well that engineers at both companies are mulling how they might push the technology further. They say they’re thinking of video.

• • •

Proximal Heads for the Exit: Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. has acquired a young San Diego company that produces software for “virtual machine” computing, which distributes applications among several computing platforms.

The South Korean electronics giant said late Nov. 2 that it bought Proximal Data Inc., based in the University Towne Center area. Terms of the sale were not disclosed.

Proximal Data’s specialty is caching software — code that improves storage performance by controlling and storing frequently used data more efficiently. ProximalData markets the software under the name AutoCache.

Rory Bolt is CEO of the San Diego firm, which was incorporated in 2011. Company investors include Avalon Ventures, Divergent Ventures and Correlation Ventures, according to the Proximal Data website. TechCrunch’s CrunchBase website reports that investors put $8 million into the company through April 2013.

Samsung had recent annual sales of $216.7 billion and counts 286,000 employees in 80 countries.

• • •

Beacons Gain Ground: Gimbal Inc., the San Diego maker of proximity beacons and software which spun out of Qualcomm last spring, is settling into new quarters on Roselle Street in Sorrento Valley. The place is a lot of fun, with an open architectural design and Gimbal’s symbol (it looks like a ball made of mesh) painted prominently on the walls. Compared to Qualcomm, the new place has more of a startup feel, said Rocco Fabiano, Gimbal’s CEO. For example, the break room has the obligatory table game — and beer on tap. … Proximity beacons help deliver location-specific messages to a person’s cellphone (see this issue’s special report). You might notice such beacons operating at Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s stores. The retailer — with 840 stores and $28 billion in sales last year — uses an application from Silicon Valley-based Shopkick, testing it last year in San Francisco and New York. Macy’s Inc. (NYSE: M) said that customers using the Shopkick app get more personalized department-level deals, discounts, recommendations and rewards. The retailer is embracing a lot of other new technology, too, including the Apple Pay mobile payment system from Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL).

• • •

Short Takes: Foundation Technologies LLC, a Minnesota company that provides information technology to creative businesses such as architecture firms, has expanded to California. Leaders of the business decided to forgo the greater Los Angeles or San Francisco areas in favor of San Diego — partially, they say, because San Diego feels a lot like Minneapolis. For now, Foundation is here with minimal staff, working out of a shared work space downtown … Pop star Taylor Swift is out with a new album called “1989,” but don’t look for it on the streaming service Spotify. As a matter of fact, don’t look for any of Swift’s songs there; as of this writing, the recording artist had pulled her entire song collection from Spotify in an apparent dispute over distribution. Listeners were still able to find at least part of the pop star’s catalog on other services, including Slacker. “Taylor Swift’s new album is not currently offered on Slacker Radio, but we do continue to stream her earlier albums,” said a publicist for San Diego-based Slacker by email. “Slacker Radio and Universal Music Group have enjoyed a solid working relationship for many years.” … Carlsbad Chipmaker MaxLinear Inc. (NYSE: MXL) shipped the 10 millionth copy of its DVB-T2 tuner for set-top boxes, the company said on Nov. 3. … Juniper Research predicts a relatively slow start for smart glasses, such as Google Glass from Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG). The U.K.-based research house said shipments will not exceed 10 million until 2018.

Send San Diego technology news to bradg@sdbj.com.

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