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A few years ago, news articles in Business Week, Nature, and elsewhere described a veritable stampede among big pharmaceutical companies like Roche, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, and GlaxoSmithKline to work with contract research organizations in China and India.

As it turns out, some of San Diegos smallest biotech startups have been doing the same thing.

The reasonfor big and small drug development companies alikeis that the scientific capab...

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Things were hopping over the past week in San Diego. Get into the rhythm here.

San Diegos West Wireless Health Institute named Donald Casey chief executive officer. Casey was formerly worldwide chairman of Johnson & Johnsons comprehensive care group. The Institute was founded last year with a $45 million gift from telemarketing and communications entrepreneurs Gary and Mary West.

Tocagen raised nearly $7.8 million in a Series D round that began Fe...

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A few years ago, who could have thought that phones would one day be running chips with a PC-quality oomph. Today, one such platform was announced, when STEricsson, a joint venture of Ericsson and ST Microelectronics released, U8500. It is powered by dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor with each processor core running at 1.2 GHz. A demo, currently being showed off at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is utilizing Googles Android OS to show off its various capabilities. The new platform, gives us a chance...

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Some of the lessons learned from the commercials during Super Bowl 2010: Beer solves lots of problems, women hold men back from their dreams and this year, pants are optional. But there were also some highlights for the web video world.

Flo TV pushed their mobile TV viewing device to hen-pecked men dragged out shopping to the game, but they also got behind will.i.ams My Generation remix.

Google had a relatively clever ad in the second half pushing their search ability but, um, did anyone need to be tol...

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Twitter just announced that it has acquired Mixer Labs, the developers of Mixer Labs GeoAPI. GeoAPI is a service that allows developers to easily add geolocation data to their apps. Twitter just launched its own geotagging API a few weeks ago. Even though a number of mobile and desktop Twitter apps like Seesmic Web and Birdfeed support Twitter's geotagging API, only a very small number of users is currently making use of this feature.

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According to Twitter founder Ev Williams, the company "will be l...

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Since 1995, when Sears mistakenly printed NORAD's phone number in its catalog instead of the number of its Santa hotline, NORAD has offered a Santa tracker online. Now, working together with Google, NORAD continues to offer the same service during the holidays. Starting at 2pm ET on Christmas Eve, the newly enhanced Santa Tracker will go live.

Santa Tracker

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This year, Google will use the Google Earth plugin to power noradsanta.org. According to Google, over 8 million people used the s...

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5 years to the month after it was founded, cross-blog social networking widget MyBlogLog will by closed down by Yahoo! in January, we're hearing from sources close to the project. MyBlogLog is a service that shows blog writers and readers the faces and profile information of other MyBlogLog users that visit their sites.

MyBlogLog was a wildly innovative service that grew fast after launching and was acquired in January 2007 by Yahoo! for $10 million. It made a deal with users: give us your personal inf...

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Aptly-named consumer trend blog TrendsSpotting just released its poll from more than 30 social media influencers. The market research presentation identifies six trends that will change social media in 2010. In accordance with Ustrategy co-founder Ravit Lichtenberg's predictions, the experts believe that 2010 will be the year that social media ROI is effectively measured. The question is, how do you measure a dollar value from Tweets and status updates?

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OneRiot, one of the leading real-time search engines, just announced the launch of a new advertising product for real-time apps. RiotWise Trending Ads will give OneRiot's partners a feed of ads related to currently trending topics on the Web. These ads can, for example, be integrated in a user's stream of updates in Twitter apps or displayed as regular mobile ad units. Digsby, for example, plans to place these ads directly in its users' streams, but because the units are delivered as a feed through OneRiot'...

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Editor's note: we offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write 'Sponsor Posts' and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products.

Over the past decade, the Internet has evolved at a rapid pace, and if you didn't jump on the bandwagon in years past you may be feeling like it's a bit too late to establish an...

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Ribbit Mobile, which offers a set of VoIP services that is very similar to Google Voice, just launched its first iPhone app (iTunes link). The app allows users to check their voicemail, read voicemail transcriptions, forward voicemails by email and create a "to-call" list based on these messages. The app uses the iPhone's native phone app to make calls and the default SMS app to send text messages.

Ribbit also gave us 500 invites to hand out to our readers. If you would like to get one, just read on to fin...

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Kynetx offers developers a platform for building browser extensions. Developers write their code in Kynetx's own rule-based language and the service builds the actual extensions. Originally, Kynetx only supported Firefox and Internet Explorer, but a few days ago, the company also announced support for Google Chrome. Thanks to this, developers can now use Kynetx's AppBuilder tool to build and deploy custom extensions for the three top browsers that offer a built-in plugin architecture.

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For now, of c...

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Location-based social network Brightkite announced this morning that it has added what it calls the first mobile Augmented Reality advertising for US markets to its AR layer in the Layar augmented reality browser. Augmented Reality (AR) is a class of technologies that places data from the web on top of a camera view of the physical world. Layar is a browser for a wide variety of AR data layers, from real-estate to government data to messages posted to networks like Brightkite. Layar is available for Andr...

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According to a report by Bloomberg's Spencer E. Ante, Twitter's search deals with Google and Microsoft made the company about $25 million - enough to turn Twitter into a profitable business in 2009. According to these reports - which Twitter did not comment on - the deal with Google made Twitter about $15 million this year and a similar deal with Microsoft generated about $10 million in revenue.

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Based on the assumption that Twitter's operating costs are roughly $25 million, this would mean that th...

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Dailymotion, the Paris-based video sharing portal that is extremely popular in Europe, just launched its first set of iPhone applications. Dailymotion launched two apps: a free ad-supported version (iTunes link) and a paid version for $5.99 (iTunes link) that does not feature any ads. The app allows iPhone users to play videos from Dailymotion's catalog of roughly 12 million videos. Dailymotion users can also use the app to upload videos directly to the service.

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Until now, the only way to access Da...

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Just over a year ago, we were excited to report on a new website for programmers. StackOverflow was the brainchild of coders/rockstars Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, and it was a social Q&A; channel that promised to give programmers solutions for even the most obscure bugs.

Apparently, that approach to developer support was a solid one. These days, the site gets well over half a million unique visitors a month and has served as a prototype for white-label Q&A; sites for companies, too. The site's latest merit bad...

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