Qualcomm Co-founder Viterbi to Retire
Andrew J. Viterbi, co-founder and vice chairman of Qualcomm, Inc., will retire next month. Viterbi, who will remain a member of Qualcomm’s board of directors, intends to devote more time as an adviser to government, academia and the investment community.
Widely recognized for his contributions to Qualcomm’s core technologies of satellite and terrestrial digital wireless communications, Viterbi has been involved in developing the firm’s CDMA wireless technology and evangelizing the technology throughout the world.
His earlier inventions are used in the vast majority of digital wireless phones, data terminals and digital satellite broadcast receivers, as well as in such diverse applications as magnetic recording, speech recognition and DNA sequence analysis.
Before forming Qualcomm with Irwin Jacobs, Viterbi joined Jacobs in forming Linkabit Corp. in 1968, where he served as executive vice president and later as president.
A member of both the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering, he currently serves on President Bill Clinton’s Information Technology Advisory Committee and the Board of Trustees of the University of Southern California.
Barona Tribe Secures Wall Street Financing
The Barona Band of Mission Indians secured $18.9 million in municipal bond financing to fund the construction of a championship 18-hole golf course scheduled to open this summer on the Barona Indian Reservation.
The financing makes Barona the first California Indian tribe to obtain multimillion financing from Wall Street, said Clifford LaChappa, Barona tribal chairman.
Dura Considers Buying Spiros
Dura Pharmaceuticals, Inc. last week made an offer to the board of directors of Spiros Development Corp. II, Inc. to acquire Spiros for a total cash consideration of approximately $79 million.
Dura also announced it is discontinuing its R & D; program for Spiros’ steroid respiratory product Albuterol Spiros to focus its energies on developing and marketing two other Spiros steroid products, Beclomethasone Spiros and Budesonide Spiros.
Proflowers.com Hit By Hacker Attack
Proflowers.com, the San Diego floral E-tailer, fell victim Feb. 11 to a hacker attack similar to the ones that crippled CNN.com, eBay, Amazon.com, Etrade and Yahoo!
Around 1 p.m., Proflowers.com technicians discovered more than 4 billion “ping packets” hitting their system. The company began to assess the problem and traffic was redirected to Flowerfarm.com. The attack left Proflowers.com without full service for 90 minutes during its pre-Valentine’s Day season.
Proflowers.com was subsequently able to restore full service; no information was compromised and no data was lost.