And now for some tech skinny around town... Sign of the times? When it was recently reported that a local high-tech entrepreneur had purchased beachfront at Del Mar's north end for $25 million, local wags began playing out the possibilities. When the likely suspects — ranging from "old money" (Waite, Moores, Jacobs) to more recent wealth creation (Rickey of AMCC, venture capitalist Stensrud, Markee of Copper Mountain, several new millionaires spawned by Texas Instruments' purchase of Dot Wireless, JNI executives, Robertson of MP3.com and several biotech entrepreneurs) — passed 30, they realized they had far too large a field and gave up all hope.

The case for 10 meters: Bluetooth start-ups in town are organizing into a loosely affiliated interest group and will begin touting the virtues of that Personal Area Network communications standard more publicly — as much to influence the local market as the national telecom scene. Just another sign that San Diego, in its influence on emerging standards, markets and companies, is a force to be reckoned with in its own right. (Bluetooth is a wireless communications interface that connects digital appliances.)

No more backwater blues: Another sign of a maturing technology infrastructure in San Diego is that not only is our venture capital community achieving national notoriety for building truly astounding valuations for many of its start-ups, but also several of our VCs have begun carving out technology spaces for themselves. Enterprise Partners has become known for expertise in data transport — backbones, routers, load balancers and the like — while JMI (the John Moores-backed VC firm) has developed a national reputation for funding "middleware" plays. Apropos of that, JMI was selected as one of the top 25 VC firms in the United States last year by Red Herring.

On Internet time: Jim Moriarty's Change.com, a business-to-business (B2B) dot.com play in Solana Beach, has kicked itself out of its own nest. Incubated by e-companies' Jake Winebaum and Sky Dayton, both national figures on the Internet scene, Change.com's brooding term was remarkably accelerated. "We challenged ourselves to go from a standing start to second-round funding in 90 to 180 days," notes Moriarty. He achieved the landmarks in his business plan in 170 days, he says, and is now on the road, pitching to close his second half of Series B funding.

Java on a roll: Motorola is betting that Sun's Java, running as an embedded "virtual machine" in an appliance, is a great way to manage Internet-fed applications in a downsized form. The KVM solution increases portability and enables developers to write platforms for small, embedded devices (256 kbs) that have low processing power, memory and power consumption. Which could be good for San Diego, since in all likelihood the Java development effort will be located here. Rumors abound that Motorola already has leased multiple facilities in Rancho Bernardo, and plans on recruiting at least 500 software engineers to drive this very significant initiative.

Fractured fairy tales: San Diego Telecom Council President Joe Markee's ship came in not too long ago. And, my oh my, it turned out to be bigger than an aircraft carrier. The self-effacing Markee, founder and chairman of Copper Mountain, says that it was a "market dislocation" that has made him a millionaire about 230 times over. He posits that the Telecom Reform Act of 1996, which deregulated local dial tone, spawned a new breed of phone companies that were eager to leverage Copper Mountain's novel DSL technology to provide broadband services to consumers. Look for dislocations in mature markets, he counsels, and there you'll find immense opportunity. (For you latecomers, Copper Mountain is so named because it provides a way to "re-purpose" the huge mountain of copper telephone wire that is installed in the United States, enabling it to handle much more data traffic.)

Adult-onset Noblesse Oblige? Bill Stensrud, Godfather of the local VC community, is riding high these days. As chronicled in this publication and elsewhere, Stensrud-led investments (Juniper, Paradyne, Packeteer, Globespan, Rhythms NetConnections and I-Pivot) have generated billions upon billions of dollars of value for shareholders. Word has it that Stensrud, having ascended to the top rung of Maslow's hierarchy of human needs — being the need to help your fellow human being — is leading a movement to build a world-class Graduate School of Business at UCSD. He has personally pledged a very significant sum in pursuit of a $100-million endowment, and word has it that he has persuaded several other technology executives to contribute.

Whatever happened to...? It’s fascinating how quickly technology waxes and wanes these days. Have you noticed that data mining and data marts have disappeared from the technology lexicon? And what about those "facilities incubators" that cropped up here in town a few months ago — the VenturePlexes and @startups that were going to provide premium space and services for tech foundlings in return for equity. The plan was to provide the three amenities tech wunderkinds must have to write good code: massive bandwidth, mountain bike corrals and wood-fired pizza. But these real estate plays seem to have disappeared as quickly as they came. Word has it that @startup's proposed campus has been leased, en masse, to HNC, which was seeking to consolidate its burgeoning workforce under one roof. While everybody is delighted that Dot Wireless generated an astounding valuation in its sale to Texas Instruments, it wasn’t so long ago that the CDMA chip developer had difficulty floating a $5 million private placement in this, the heart of CDMA country. Which begs the question: How do you go from a perceived worth of $10 million to $475 million in roughly 20 months? (Excuse me, but isn’t that more than $23 million per month?) Touted by investment bankers SalomonSmithBarney (Los Angeles and San Francisco offices) as the only "design-to-tape" pure-play CDMA chip development house available in the world, Dot was seen by the integrated circuit majors as a quick way to gain entry into the CDMA sector and compete with Qualcomm. When the parties then moved to viewing comparables — similar companies and their sales prices — one index that was scrutinized was valuation as a function of number of staff engineers. With an estimated 65 engineers on board, it seems that each one turned out to be worth roughly $7 million.

Good, clean fun: The San Diego Telecom Council continues to discuss a possible branding campaign that would establish the region, once and for all, as one of the three global centers of telecom innovation, and enhance recruiting efforts. One concept being floated is comparing the quality of life of the tech rich and famous here vs. techsters of similar wealth and rank in Silicon Valley. The first gambit would be Web cams, running on the Telecom Council's Website, that continuously compare streaming video of Santa Clara's Highway 101 with surf conditions at Del Mar. A second visual, entitled "Exit Strategies Here and There," would compare photos of Marco Thompson's (Doctor Design) abode in Fairbanks Ranch with a comparably priced estate in Palo Alto; i.e. an 1,800-square-foot bungalow with no yard.

Gregory McQuerter, CEO of the McQuerter Group, has been providing marketing support to San Diego’s top high-techs for more than a decade.