Santa Ana’s STEC Inc., a maker of flash memory drives for corporate and industrial uses, filled the board seat left by Microsemi Corp. Chief Executive Jim Peterson, who stepped down last month.
The chief executive of the Irvine chipmaker gave up his seat after he was found to have lied on his official biography after a short selling in-vestor spurred an inquiry into his education background.
STEC added Chris Colpitts, the 41-year-old managing director and global head of technology investment banking at Deutsche Bank AG in San Francisco.
Before that, Colpitts spent nine years at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., most recently as global head of electronics investment banking.
Microsemi is facing a review by the Securities and Exchange Commission to see if Peterson’s denials of the allegations that he lied about his degrees constitute a misleading of investors.
In January, STEC added Matthew L. Witte, founder of Newport Beach-based private equity firm Marwit Capital, as an independent director.
Witte replaced Vahid Manian, a former Broadcom Corp. head of global engineering who was fired last month after the short selling investor tipped off the company to look into his education credentials.
Irvine-based Broadcom found that Manian didn’t receive a bachelor’s or master’s degree from the University of California, Irvine, as he had stated on his resume.
Photo Kiosk Buy
Buena Park’s Noritsu America Corp., a maker of photograph software, scanners and printers, said it plans to buy a maker of self-service photo printing kiosks for stores.
Noritsu, part of Japan’s Noritsu Koki Co., is set to buy Vienna, Va.-based Lucidiom Inc. for undisclosed terms.
The deal is expected to close in the current quarter.
Lucidiom makes self-service kiosks that are used in stores that allow customers to upload photos from the Internet, CDs and storage cards and order prints.
Noritsu said it plans to leave Lucidiom’s East Coast operations and management team intact. Lucidiom has roughly 50 workers in all.
Under the terms of the deal, it will also get Lucidiom’s British operations, which serve customers in Europe.
Noritsu has about 100 workers here.
Big customers include professional photographers, the military and Walgreen Co. stores.
The two companies teamed up on a product launch earlier this year.
In January, Noritsu and Lucidiom debuted a packaged photo kiosk and printer combination for retailers that allows consumers to make enlargements, greeting cards, calendars, posters, signs, scrapbooks and other items from their uploaded digital photos.
Noritsu has a long history here. It’s been in Orange County for nearly three decades.
The company was the first to pioneer one-hour photo development in the 1970s.
Camera Phone Contest
Kingston Technology Co. wants to see your best photos and video shots from a camera phone.
The Fountain Valley-based maker of memory products for computer manufacturers and consumers recently launched a mobile-focused contest where winners can get some 30 prizes.
Kingston’s looking for the best of the following categories: “dance/pose, fun pet tricks, travel/vacation and sports.”
A panel of judges will decide winners for each category.
Prizes include various bits of Kingston swag, such as memory cards, flash drives and card readers.
Other local tech companies pitched in a few gadgets for prizes.
Fountain Valley’s D-Link Systems Inc., a unit of Taiwan’s D-Link Corp., kicked in a digital photo frame and wireless router.
Lake Forest’s Western Digital Corp., which makes disk drives, gave a brand new high-definition media player.
Kingston is collecting entries through the end of this month via its Web site and YouTube.com.
Navigating Deals
Aliso Viejo-based Networks In Motion Inc., a maker navigation and local search software for mobile devices, bought some assets from TrafficGauge Inc., a Seattle-based maker of software for real-time traffic.
Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.
Networks in Motion, known as NIM, is set to get four workers from TrafficGauge who’ll stay in Seattle.
TrafficGuage’s software is set to be integrated into NIM’s cell phone software to help increase the accuracy of its traffic information.
The software works by turning each cell phone on a network into a sort of probe that constantly gathers traffic information.
The information is sent to a server through the wireless carriers’ network, where it’s combined to create a real-time look at traffic conditions.
The traffic information can be called up by a cell phone user via NIM’s software.
“It’s a strategic acquisition and one that is focused on helping improve the quality and uniqueness of our technology,” said Chief Executive Doug Antone.
Antone said the buy was “a pretty small deal” but declined to give more details.
NIM didn’t get TrafficGauge’s hardware device business, customer base, service contracts or Web sites.
Sales Update
A few weeks ago I gave Aliso Viejo’s Buy.com Inc. short shrift on its yearly sales.
The privately held company doesn’t disclose financials, so we gave it our best guess. Turns out we missed the mark,Buy.com saw roughly $500 million in yearly sales for 2008.
