Products from two different companies spun out by electrical engineers at UC San Diego are finalists for CONNECT’s 2007 Most Innovative New Product “MIP” Award – in the Communications Technology & Hardware category.
CONNECT is a globally recognized public benefits organization that fosters entrepreneurship in San Diego. The winning product will be announced at a December 14, 2007 award ceremony.
The two UCSD spin-out companies are Mushroom Networks, Inc., founded by Rene Cruz, and Ortiva Wireless founded by Sujit Dey – both of whom are electrical engineers at the Jacobs School.
Mushroom Networks was nominated for its Broadband Bonding Network Appliance and Ortiva Wireless for Ortiva Mobile Content Delivery Network.
Mushroom Networks’ Broadband Bonding Network Appliance provides cost-effective accelerated Internet connectivity to entities within multi-tenant buildings who wish to aggregate multiple Internet access lines for increased performance and reliability. With the Broadband Bonding Network Appliance, up to five DSL, cable modem or T1 services can be combined.
The Ortiva Wireless Mobile Content Delivery Network gives content providers and aggregators an innovative, hosted means of managing and delivering content to mobile subscribers. It delivers smooth video, clear audio, and rich multimedia experience to mobile users under highly variable wireless network conditions. Ortiva’s mobile network operator solutions extend the coverage and expand the availability of rich media content.
Rene Cruz, an electrical engineer from UCSD, founded Mushroom Networks in 2004 with Dr. Cahit Akin. Cruz currently serves as Chief Science Officer. Cruz works in the area of performance analysis of communication networks and has developed traffic and service models for communication networks that have been widely adopted within the research community. He is an internationally recognized expert in the area of Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees in packet switched networks, and was elected to be a Fellow of the IEEE on the basis of these accomplishments.
Sujit Dey, an electrical engineer from UCSD, founded Ortiva Wireless in 2004 based on technologies developed at the Jacobs School. Dey heads the Mobile Systems Design and Test Laboratory within the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Jacobs School. He has twenty years of experience in research, technology, and product development in wireless networks, wireless multimedia, systems, circuits, and design tools. He currently serves as the Chief Technologist for Ortiva Wireless.
In 2004, Dey won a grant of $50,000 from the Jacobs School's von Liebig Center for Entrepreneurism and Technology Advancement to build a first proof-of-concept for software that dynamically shapes data in applications as a function of network and device conditions and constraints.
Rene Cruz received commercialization advisory services and incubation space from the von Liebig Center.
