With merger and TechPitch win, SLO’s startups are on the fast track
In the past couple of weeks, Alex Minicucci has successfully merged his fast-growing mobile marketing company with a publicly traded firm out of Iowa. Meanwhile, an entrepreneurial emergency room doctor from Nipomo came up a with a brilliantly simple solution for holding an iPad one handed that swept the most comprehensive tech pitch night on the Central Coast to date.
Out of this world: Santa Barbara company produces saucer-shaped UAVs
Flying saucers have landed in Santa Barbara.
Aerobat Aviation, a Santa Barbara firm with ties to Georgia, is planning to take its saucer-shaped unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV, on the road in the coming months hoping to raise $5 million from investors.
Refinery rail project would ease crude oil supply concerns
A Phillips 66 refinery on the Nipomo Mesa is hoping to supplement its dwindling inflow of California crude by extending a rail spur that will allow it to import oil from out of state.
The refinery — tucked away off of Highway 1 in South San Luis Obispo County — is a little-known yet critical part of the Golden State’s petroleum infrastructure. It processes the state’s heavy, sour crude into semi-refined products that flow through 200 miles of pipeline to Conoco’s 128,000-barrel-a-day facility in Rodeo in the Bay Area, where it is turned into gasoline.
Energy efficiency firms snag $5M
The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded $5 million to semiconductor and lighting companies in the region.
UC Santa Barbara, Buellton-based SixPoint Materials and Soraa were the recipients of money from the department.
Mindbody breaks ground on $20M campus in SLO tech corridor
San Luis Obispo is set to get its flagship high-tech campus as software company MindBody CEO Rick Stollmeyer and local officials broke ground Oct. 29 on a $20 million project including a new office building, four-story parking structure and promenade that will link with an existing facility, eventually boosting employment to 1,300 people.
Gov. Brown vetoes Amgen-backed anti-biosimilars bill
Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a bill supported by Thousand Oaks-based Amgen and other biotechnology companies that would have made it more difficult for pharmacists to dispense so-called biosimilars, the biotech industry’s analogue to generic pharmaceuticals.
Senate Bill 598, approved by both houses of the legislature, looked mostly like a procedural change to state’s pharmacy laws. If it passed, the bill would have allowed pharmacists to fill prescriptions with biosimilars that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration deems “interchangeable” with brand-name counterparts.
The art of advertising: PureClick keeps an eye on Google
Internet veteran Tim Rodgers founded PureClick with a simple goal. Google’s display advertising networks offer to place banners and ads on thousands of websites across the Internet, playing a sort of matchmaker by putting those ads next to what it deems to be the most relevant content. PureClick aims to let advertisers double-check Google’s work.
