Funds flowing to Utah's high-tech firms

Sure looks to me like purse strings are starting to loosen in Utah's technology industries.

Salt Lake-based Northface University closed a $13 million Series B round of funding earlier this month.

A week ago today, Orem-based Q Comm (AMEX: QMM; QMM.U) announced that it had closed a public offering with gross proceeds of $16.4 million, while Salt Lake-based Rubicon Medical (OTC BB: RMDC) announced a $2 million strategic investment from a corporate partner last Thursday. (Note: Rubicon is a Politis Communications client.)

I've also gotten an as-yet unconfirmed (and unannounced) tip about a Utah County high-tech company that has supposedly closed on a $5 million of venture funding in the past 60 days.

Top it all off with the NPS Pharmaceuticals (Nasdaq: NPSP) convertible debt offering of $192 million closed during the first half of July and we're talking about a fairly significant amount of monies coming into Utah tech firms in the past two months or so.

I'm not claiming by any means that we are fully out of the economic woods yet, either as a state, country or technology based society.

But $228 million in funding of Utah-based companies sure sounds like some good news to me, particularly in light of how the past two years have gone from a going forward standpoint.

Not that everything is rosy, mind you.

Although the move to the Pink Sheets has enabled ClearOne Communications shareholders to resume trading in the company's stock (Pink Sheets: CLRO) allowing the share price to get jacked up to nearly $3.00 per share in June, the daily trading volume has now dropped back dramatically to tens of thousands of shares traded per day instead of hundreds of thousands.

Why? Not because the business is hurting, because it appears (by all published accounts) that the business of selling and developing products is doing just fine at ClearOne, thank you very much.

Unfortunately, a cloud still hangs over the Salt Lake-based firm as there has been no resolution with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and its civil lawsuit against CLRO and two of its former executives.

The charge: that the company and the two former officers "engaged in a program of inflating the company's revenues, net income and accounts receivable by engaging in improper revenue recognition" during an 18-month period dating from March 21, 2001, to September 30, 2002.

Such charges have thrown into question the veracity of the financial figures filed by the company with the SEC for five quarterly and two annual report periods.