Julia Wilson says the Telecom Council’s new name reflects the technology’s place at the convergence of other tech efforts. (photo/alandeckerphoto.com)

The San Diego Telecom Council is celebrating its seventh birthday by giving itself a present — a new name: CommNexus San Diego. Chief Executive Julia Wilson says the name reflects the telecommunications industry’s shift toward the convergence of communications, particularly wireless, into electronic components and consumer products like cable television and sunglasses.

For example, Oakley designer sunglasses are now available with a Motorola Bluetooth wireless antenna built into the earpiece. Golfers can use handheld devices to get GPS data on a particular course, while football and baseball fans can track game statistics and player records. And thanks to innovations by San Diego companies like Entropic Communications, people can connect all the televisions and electronics in their homes to operate on a single network over coaxial cable. A DVD movie playing in the living room can be viewed by a family member in a bedroom.

The change comes after a yearlong soul-searching and rebranding process that included months of work by San Diego-based Mires Branding, which counts Starbucks, Gateway and Qualcomm among its clients. The name was selected by a council subcommittee and eventually the entire board from a list of 30 possible candidates presented by Mires.

San Diego was moved to the end of the name to reflect the organization’s new direction.

“We’re really becoming a global player,” says Wilson, who will travel to India, Hong Kong and Barcelona in the coming months. “As we go out to Europe and Asia, it becomes less about putting San Diego first and more about the business of San Diego.”

Wilson’s trips are designed to introduce foreign communications companies to wireless innovation going on in San Diego, including startups that don’t have the budget to travel overseas.

CommNexus So. Cal?

As CommNexus chairman, Mark Steele sees his organization’s new name opening the door to more sponsors. (photo/alandeckerphoto.com)

Regionally, CommNexus has its sights on Orange County and Los Angeles for possible franchises that could eventually turn CommNexus San Diego into CommNexus Southern California. The goal is to make the organization a regional powerhouse with the infrastructure, diversity and talent to keep its members at the forefront of wireless innovation and competition. Wilson hopes the Los Angeles franchise will bring in gaming, multimedia and Hollywood studio players that San Diego lacks.

The new name also makes the organization more welcoming to technology developers outside traditional voice and data, paving the way for more diverse and monied sponsors.

“Companies have come to us in the past and said, ‘Telecom is too narrow,’ or, ‘It’s just San Diego,’” says Mark Steele, CommNexus chairman. “My priority is using the new name and the new logo to really go get some sponsorships from large companies that aren’t based in San Diego and local companies that previously have said, ‘We’re not really telecom, but we use communications.’”

Steele settled in San Diego 10 years ago after choosing among multiple offers to work in Phoenix, Seattle and San Diego. The vice president at New York-based Symbol Technologies did some research and found hundreds of companies involved in communications here.

Now, he says, the CommNexus list of potential suitors can include all those firms and more, not just the ones in telecom.

Steele says the organization, whose $1 million annual budget is financed by sponsorship sales, is financially sound. “We didn’t do this because we needed to make money,” he says. “We did it because there’s a linkage between the programs we would like to do and the money it will take to do it.”

At the top of Steele’s linkage list is the experimental Market Link program designed to introduce big industry players and small innovative startups. The first experiment connected Samsung with about 20 emerging companies in San Diego. Steele hopes to expand the program along with another called Next Stage, in which experienced entrepreneurs are paired with start-ups to offer advice, contacts and lessons learned.

The Breakfast Club

Seven years ago this month, San Diego Metropolitan broke the news of the creation of the San Diego Telecom Council.

CommNexus got its start when a small band of local technology executives, lawyers, accountants and investors met in a series of informal breakfast meetings to answer a question: how can we grow our businesses? After debuting on the November 1998 cover of San Diego Metropolitan, the San Diego Telecom Council was formally launched in December with a presentation by Irwin Jacobs on the history of his own company, Qualcomm. The council’s 18 founding members set out for some heavy-duty recruiting using local venture capitalists, investment bankers and giants like Qualcomm and Science Applications International Corp. to lure potential partners from technology hot spots.

“San Diego was known as a vacation spot and a Navy town,” says Vicki Marion, the council’s founding president. “We set out to correct that misconception. We wanted the world to know that we had world-class talent in the technology sector here.”

Many of the world’s largest communications manufacturers now have a presence here, including LG, Nokia, Ericsson, Kyocera and Intel.

Marion was at the time CEO of San Diego-based Jabra, the first company to push hands-free communications devices for wireless users. The company has since relocated its headquarters to Chicago, and Marion is now CEO of San Diego-based Viadux, which provides broadband access tools for cable and telecommunications.

The difference between trying to pitch San Diego technology now and in the days before the council existed is vast.

“When I first went to (wireless) carriers with Jabra products, people said, ‘Why are you based in San Diego?’” says Marion. The question forced a sales pitch that began with explaining San Diego’s technology sector, which is now unnecessary. Marion would like the organization to continue reaching outside of San Diego for speakers and resources including convincing more investors to set up shop in the area.

“You can never have too much venture capital,” says Marion.

The industry-driven organization has 220 sponsors and represents 300 companies and about 40,000 local workers. “It was an organization that was waiting to happen,” says Martha Dennis, the council’s founding vice president and later president and CEO from January 2003 to December 2004.

The most recently available economic indicators from the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce show that telecommunications accounted for 15.7 percent of 159,650 high-tech jobs in San Diego in 2003. The computers, software and electronics sectors comprised a combined 31.4 percent.

And San Diego’s $11.5 billion communications sector is maintaining a steady rebound after the dot.com bubble burst, reports the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corp. The value of all San Diego’s international trade exports increased from less than $5 billion in the early 1990s to more than $10 billion in 2000 and has remained steady. Dennis estimates that 99 percent of all local communications products and services are already sold in worldwide markets. And while chipsets manufactured here and sold to major cell phone manufacturers may eventually find a home in the hands of a local consumer, it will be a “worldwide route that gets it here,” she says.

Meanwhile, Wilson says the organization is moving toward a business function, brokering negotiations among international players rather than just giving local entrepreneurs and engineers a place to meet.

Wilson hopes to travel to Cambridge, England, in December to sign a memorandum of understanding with a comparable organization named Cambridge Networks. The agreement will facilitate information sharing and partnerships.

Despite its worldwide focus, CommNexus and its small staff are sticking to humble roots as a volunteer organization. “The biggest challenge for us and many, many nonprofits is getting enough volunteers, and getting volunteers that have the time to spend,” says Steele.

He and Wilson are hoping the new name will excite enough people to bring in the sponsorships and expertise that can turn what has been a simple breakfast club and a local special interest group into a major regional playmaker.