CONNECT Announces Second Hall of Fame Honoree; Honoring the founders of San Diego's innovation economy; Walter J. Zable to Receive Award.

SAN DIEGO -- CONNECT has named Walter J. Zable as the second inductee into the CONNECT Entrepreneur Hall of Fame. The Cubic Corporation founder will be honored for his professional and personal contributions to San Diego's thriving high-tech community.

The Entrepreneur Hall of Fame, CONNECT's highest honor, celebrates San Diego's entrepreneurial heroes who have paved the way for today's technological innovations and businesses, and who continue to inspire future generations of entrepreneurs.

According to CONNECT CEO, Duane Roth, "The Hall of Fame recognizes individual entrepreneurs who have led their San Diego-based technology or life science businesses to success over the years. As a business leader, Walter J. Zable has made important contributions to the growth of technology in the areas of defense and transportation, and via his numerous civic activities including service to both USD and UCSD, the San Diego Hall of Champions, the San Diego Crime Commission and the YMCA. We are delighted to be able to honor him as our second Hall of Fame inductee."

CONNECT honors two Hall of Fame recipients each year during two luncheon events, where the inductee tells his or her story to the audience through a live one-on-one interview with Fred Lewis, host of ITV's "The Heart of San Diego". Cubic Corporation founder Walter J. Zable will be honored on February 22 at the Estancia La Jolla.

Zable has served as chairman, president and CEO of Cubic Corporation for more than five decades. The publicly traded company, which has more than 6,000 employees worldwide and reported revenues of $804 million for fiscal year 2005, has produced technological innovations for transportation and defense markets around the world.

Born as a small San Diego-based electronics company in 1951, Cubic Corporation's early successes include cutting edge precision distance measuring equipment and aerial photo mapping and survey systems. The company's efforts in the defense and mass transportation markets have produced innovative global technologies, such as instrumented combat training systems and high speed wireless data links for the military, and automatic fare collection systems for public transit. Cubic's broad technological contributions range from development of the nation's first electronic stadium scoreboard to creation of the SECOR satellite surveying system -- a predecessor to today's Global Positioning System (GPS) technology -- to the production of a transmitter used on the Hubble telescope.

Throughout its 55 years of history, Cubic has been recognized for its contributions to technology. Recent awards include the teleFUSION award from the San Diego technology community for the company's innovation in Communications for Security and Defense (2003), and an award this year from the American Public Transportation Association for the company's contributions to the development of Universal Transit Smart Card Standards & Guidelines for transit fare collection systems. The standard is currently under review as a possible national standard for development of large scale, regional smart care fare collections systems.

"It is a genuine honor to be recognized by CONNECT and my peers with this award. I am proud of the technology advances Cubic has made in both the defense and transportation industries," said Zable. "We are a company of ideas, and intellectual capital is our biggest asset," he added.

Zable, a former professional football player for the Richmond Arrows and the New York Giants, has supported San Diego through his active involvement with numerous academic and community organizations. He has served as a member of the UCSD Cancer Foundation, and the board of trustees for the University of San Diego and the University of California San Diego. He also holds board directorship positions on the San Diego Chapter of the National Football Foundation and College Hall of Fame (NFFCHF), the San Diego Crime Commission and the San Diego County Junior Golf Association. In addition, he serves on the YMCA Corporate Planning Board.

He has won numerous awards throughout his lifetime including in 1987 when the NCAA acknowledged his contribution to athletics by naming Zable as winner of the Teddy Roosevelt Award, its most prestigious honor. Other winners have included former President George Bush, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Senator Leverett Saltonstall. In 1962 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED named him to the Silver Anniversary All-American Team. In 1982, the California Manufacturer's Association named Zable "Manufacturer of the Year," and in 1980, Zable received the National Football Foundation & College Hall of Fame's Gold Medal Award. This nationwide honor is this organization's highest award. That same year he was voted into the College Football Hall of Fame.

As the second recipient of the award, Zable joins Qualcomm's Dr. Irwin Mark Jacobs as a member of the CONNECT Entrepreneur Hall of Fame, which is memorialized at the CONNECT offices in La Jolla. CONNECT, along with a group of local business leaders, envision a future technology museum in San Diego that will house the CONNECT Hall of Fame, a place where the San Diego community can view artifacts associated with the development of local tech companies and their products, and learn about the history of the region's tech entrepreneurs and their economic and social contributions to San Diego.

CONNECT is a technology business accelerator, originally founded by the University of California, San Diego, dedicated to the creation and sustained growth of innovative, science-based companies whose development will contribute to the prosperity and global position of the San Diego region.