Hot on Headsets - UCI News - University of California, Irvine

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ORANGE COUNTY BUSINESS JOURNAL
T H E C O M M U N I T Y O F B U S I N E S S TM
$1.50 VOL. 37 NO. 4
LUXURY HOMES
Leong: head of company’s
communications modeled
Hyper-X brand at CES in
Las Vegas
JANUARY 27-FEBRUARY 2, 2014
230,615-SF Bellwether
Deals for 18301 Von Karman reflected the
economy in recent years
$112
Million
$69
Million
$63.7
Million
$41
Million
Cigna Buys Into View
of Rising Rents for
Offices in Airport Area
2007
Private Piece of
Paradise
page 39
2008
2010
2014
REAL ESTATE: Greenlaw stays as
insurer’s partner, plans to move in
THE LIST
By MARK MUELLER
Hot on Headsets
T
page 11
Kingston Aims for Gamer Niche
By CHRIS CASACCHIA
ADVERTISING
Gallery of Fine Homes
PAGES A-40–A-43
Healthcare
PAGES B-45–B-55
Investment Properties
PAGES 58–59
Business Services .........61, 64, 65
Executive Suites ..............62–63
OC Law Guide ........................66
MAIL TO:
Kingston Technology Co., the world’s
largest memory products maker for computers and consumer electronics, is moving into
the audio accessories business.
The Fountain Valley-based company is set
to release a headset in the next few months,
targeting a loyal legion of gaming customers
who have come to know the company largely
through its tournament sponsorships.
The company is better known to most consumers for its ubiquitous USB drives and
flash cards sold through online retailers,
which represent the bulk of its $5 billion in
annual revenue.
Kingston, the third—largest private company in Orange County, aims to capitalize on
the growing numbers of gamers globally—
estimated at 1.2 billion, or roughly 17% of
the world’s population, according to Netherlands-based Spil Games.
Several brainstorming sessions across its
global operations beginning more than a year
ago came to a resounding conclusion last
Kingston 68
El Pollo Nuevo
‘Quick Service-Plus’ Chain Back to
Growth After 2 Years of Tweaks
By KARI HAMANAKA
El Pollo Loco Inc. Chief Executive Steve
Sather meets with the chain’s management
team every Monday from 10:30 a.m. to noon.
The latest data on limited-time offers or the
performance of new products being tested gets
reviewed to get a good read on what’s working
and what’s not.
Sather saw the company’s $250,000 investment a couple of years ago in IBM Corp.’s
Cognos Business Intelligence software as a
way to upgrade its financial analysis—or “rack
and stack numbers.” That means easier, faster
comparisons across the company’s 401 restaurants, 58% of which are franchised.
El Pollo 67
Sather: “just starting to fire up the development
machine”
An office tower in the John Wayne Airport area
of Irvine has changed hands in the latest deal by a
national investor bullish on the local market’s potential for rent growth.
The 230,615-square- Special Report:
foot building at 18301 Commercial Real
Von Karman Ave., part Estate Update
page 15
of the four-building Von
Karman Towers office
complex, sold this month for about $69 million, or
about $300 per square foot.
A venture headed by a real estate investment affiliate of Bloomfield, Conn.-based healthcare insurance company Cigna Corp. bought the building,
which holds the headquarters of food supplier
Office Tower 61
Why Keirstead Left
UCI for Corner Office
HEALTHCARE: Stem-cell pioneer
sees potential for commercial OK
By VITA REED
Orange County stem-cell
pioneer Hans Keirstead has
added another title to his
repertoire as the company he
now runs revs up its action.
The professor at University
of California, Irvine, has
stepped into the chief executive’s role at Irvine-based
California Stem Cell Inc., a
privately held company that Keirstead: FDA fasttrack amounts to
is using stem cells to develop “gold stars”
treatments for cancer and
other disorders.
The Food and Drug Administration last month approved the company’s request to perform a thirdstage clinical trial for melanoma, or skin cancer.
That trial was also designated “fast-track” by the
FDA, which facilitates and expedites the review of
Keirstead 68
Keirstead
68 ORANGE COUNTY BUSINESS JOURNAL
佡 from page 1
new drugs for treating serious or life-threatening conditions, as well as granted a special
protocol assessment.
“Those are two gold stars on a phase III
clinical trial,” Keirstead said in an interview.
Keirstead has ambitious goals for California Stem Cell, which was founded in 2005
and now has 34 full-time employees, and interns from schools such as Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.
The company manufactures the stem cells
it uses for its work.
“We’ve constructed a single shop that has
manufacturing, regulatory and clinical expertise,” said Keirstead. “Those are the three pillars that hold up translation.”
The company also is working with UC
Irvine faculty on stem cell projects.
Melanoma Trial
California Stem Cell plans to start its
melanoma trial in coming months.
Keirstead said he expects the trial to take
two to four years, depending on how patient
recruitment goes. He said commercialization
could come as early as two years after the
trial is under way.
“What I would like to do is firmly establish
California Stem Cell as the go-to company
for clinical translation and clinical development of stem-cell technology,” he said.
“We’ve proven we can do that, having a
Phase III approval for one stem-cell technology—melanoma.”
Keirstead has taken a leave of absence from
his teaching position at UCI, where he
founded the Sue and Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center. He has been with UCI since
2000.
“It’s a permanent situation, should I wish
to take it,” Keirstead said of his position at
California Stem Cell. “Any time a professor
Kingston
Local breaking news: www.ocbj.com
Irvine lab: Keirstead took leave of absence from UCI to oversee stem cell company’s operations
[steps] away to further his or her education
and experience, like I’m doing, the university just offers a year in order to retain the
right to go back. I have a year to make up
my mind, but my intention is to stay with the
company.”
Funding
California Stem Cell does not disclose its
investors or how much the company has
raised over its history.
It is looking for more as it takes tangible
steps toward commercial approval.
“The history of funding has been excellent,” Keirstead said. “We are moving into
several expensive clinical trials. Therefore,
our [capital] needs are much greater; so we
are exploring several options.”
He said those options include a public offering, venture capital, or strategic partnerships with other biotechnology companies.
Publicly traded stem cell companies have
faced some challenges, according to
Keirstead.
“It’s been disappointing—the stem cell sector hasn’t performed terribly well,” he said.
Several companies in the sector, including
Newark-based StemCells Inc.; Advanced
Cell Technologies Inc. in Marlborough,
Mass.; and Carlsbad-based International
Stem Cell Corp., have seen their market values plummet in recent years.
Geron Corp.
Menlo Park-based Geron Corp. shuttered
its spinal cord injury stem-cell program in
2011 for financial reasons. California Stem
Cell is interested in the technology, “but it’s
not been on the shelf to acquire,” Keirstead
said.
BioTime Acquisition Corp., a unit of
Alameda-based BioTime Inc., purchased the
spinal cord assets from Geron and assigned
them to a subsidiary called Asterias Biotherapeutics Inc.
Asterias is deciding what to do with the
Tie-In
The company plans to tie the product
launch to a gaming event, possibly at the Intel
Extreme Masters World Championship in
Poland in mid-March—where Kingston is a
title sponsor—or at PAX East in Boston a
month later.
It also could roll it out regionally, a strategy
Kingston frequently uses to test markets for
its memory products, according to Leong.
“We want to see how we can do,” he said.
The company has paid close attention to the
video gaming industry for more than a decade.
It introduced its first line of HyperX memory
products geared for gamers, computer enthusiasts and system builders in 2002.
Its products improve computer performance, thereby improving game play.
Now it sells specialized solid state drives
geared for the segment and sponsors 22 pro-
technology, according to Keirstead.
Keirstead said he was “maintaining a very
open door” with BioTime Chief Executive
Michael West and Dr. Thomas Okarma,
Asterias’ chief executive, about the former
Geron program.
Keirstead also noted that the stem cell industry has had various problems with manufacturing and regulatory issues and that
California Stem Cell is attempting to get
around those through getting stem cells from
patients’ tumors rather than making them
and transplanting them into the body.
“We pull the cancer stem cells out of [the]
tumors,” Keirstead said.
California Stem Cell is looking at other
cancers besides melanoma.
It just finished up a first-phase trial for
liver cancer and has applied to the FDA for
a second-phase trial for ovarian cancer.
California Stem Cell plans to “continue
down that cancer pipeline” for further research and development projects, Keirstead
said.
OC’s Eye Sector
The company will also work in other
fields. It’s interested in developing stem
cells for retinal disease, including age-related macular degeneration, a major cause
of blindness.
It received a $4.5 million grant from the
California Institute of Regenerative Medicine to pursue retinal disease work.
“If it does make it into the clinic, we
would be faced with the opportunity to partner it if we wish or fund it ourselves,”
Keirstead said of the retinal disease program.
Orange County’s ophthalmology dominance may allow California Stem Cell a
choice of potential partners.
“Allergan [Inc.] is right around the corner,” Keirstead said. “I maintain a very
healthy and professional relationship with
Allergan executives. They’re aware of what
we’re doing.” ■
Kingston’s U.K. office helped research
audio products makers for a potential partnership and found Sweden-based QPAD AB, a
well-regarded brand known for producing
quality headsets and other accessories.
“They’re a small company, but they’re very
well known, especially in the Nordic regions,” Leong said. “They don’t really have
a footprint in the U.S.”
佡 from page 1
year.
“Let’s do a headset,” Kingston spokesperson David Leong said as he prepped a
demonstration in a ballroom at Caesar’s
Palace during the International Consumer
Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this
month.
Ballroom visitors who wore the headsets
were instantly thrown into the chaos of Battlefield 4 on a computer monitor with the reverberating sounds of explosions, missile
launches and the carnage of war passing
through their ears.
The HyperX Cloud gaming headset can be
preordered through Newegg.com for $99,
with a shipping date after April 30.
JANUARY 27, 2014
Ceasar’s Palace ballroom: players wore Kingston’s headsets for more immersive experience in
Battlefield 4
fessional e-sports gaming teams around the
globe that compete for big prize money and
prestige in a tightly knit world without geographic boundaries.
E-Sports
A crowded ballroom at Ceasar’s Palace
packed with enthusiastic gamers cheering on
their favorite e-sports players next to
Kingston’s exhibit suite for CES provided a
glimpse into this burgeoning business opportunity.
Row upon row of theater seats were filled
with spectators, many of whom traveled
overseas, to watch the finals of the HyperX
DOTA 2 League tournament live. The tournament pitted four teams from China and
Europe in an action-laced strategy game for
a $50,000 grand prize.
Kingston also held a separate $10,000 prize
competition with finalists from China, Poland,
South Africa and the U.S. who competed in
various computer performance tests with components supplied by Kingston and its partners.
The professional gamers on stage donned
Kingston’s new headset, a detail not missed
by those in attendance.
Avid gamers often follow trends they see
online and in gaming publications, according
to Leong.
Indeed, the gaming circuit has taken pages
from Nascar and the PGA, making sponsorships part of the business for products ranging
from a mouse pad to a keyboard in hopes that
a leading player will help boost sales.
“It’s no different than you and me thinking
George Clooney looks good in that Armani
suit, so I should get myself one,” Leong said.
Competition
Kingston’s headset will compete against
some of the bigger players in the sector, including Denmark-based SteelSeries ApS,
Turtle Beach in Valhalla, N.Y., and San Francisco-based Astro Gaming.
Santa Monica-based Beats Electronics
LLC, launched by music mogul Dr. Dre, is
another major player in the segment, although
the company’s headsets are geared more for
music enthusiasts than hard-core gamers.
This is Kingston’s second foray into the
headset market, following last year’s ill-fated
soft launch of its SteelSeries Siberia V2
Hyper edition, which wasn’t marketed in the
U.S. and had marginal success in Europe.
That product, which was essentially rebranded by Kingston, is available online for
about $63.
The Hyper Cloud model, which has been in
development for about a year, was designed
by Kingston brass and product experts.
It features high-fidelity sound, memory
foam ear cushions, and a detachable microphone so users can listen to music.
It’s made of light aluminum and includes
red stitching, Kingston’s HyperX logo on
both sides of the ear cushions, and its brand
name across the top band.
“We wanted to come out with something
more distinctive and our own,” Leong said. ■