What do the top executives at Qualcomm view as the key developments as mobile communications accelerate with the proliferation of smartphones, tablets, and other wireless devices?

At a town hall forum last night at the wireless giant’s San Diego headquarters, Qualcomm chairman and CEO Paul Jacobs said the mobile experience has gone through a critical change in the transition to 3G. It used to be just about voice communications. Now it is all about data. And going forward, Jacobs said, it’s going to be much more about enabling other technologies.

“Now what we see are the chips in phones are going into all these other mobile devices, where all things are connected.” In the world Jacobs describes, each of us would move through a world of wireless devices and networks. There could be some places where you could be surrounded by thousands of radios, and your mobile phone “will sense that and allow you to interact.”

This means the wireless environment is headed for even greater complexity. Jacobs says the smartphone you carry around is just going to have to deal with a lot more devices that use different technology platforms, different operating systems, different software, and different radios—including cellular, WiFi, Bluetooth, near field communication, and satellite-based systems. Qualcomm has even been developing technology that will enable users to move between Western GPS technology and Russia’s expanding Glonass system.

In anticipation of this new wireless ecosystem, Qualcomm demonstrated a new proximity-based, peer-to-peer networking technology called FlashLinq several months ago during the wireless industry’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. FlashLinq is designed to automatically and continuously enable mobile devices to “sense” each other and relay relevant information, based on a user’s individual preferences.

“The key is really going to be making all these things simple [for the user],” Jacobs said. Power consumption also is important, so the system is designed to exchange data with other devices instead of sending it back through the network. “You want to be able to discover what’s around you without burning up your battery, so peer-to-peer is more efficient,” Jacobs said.

Qualcomm also unveiled AllJoyn, an open source software technology for enabling developers to create new mobile apps that allow peer-to-peer groups to form to play a multi-player game or to share information at a conference, and then go their separate ways.

After covering all this in a short overview of the company’s technology initiatives, Qualcomm’s chairman and CEO was joined on … Next Page »

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It’s no secret that some big West Coast players have shown interest in Boston’s homegrown mobile technology lately. In the past few weeks, San Jose, CA-based eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) has bought Where, a location-based mobile advertising and recommendations provider, and mobile payments startup Fig Card, to roll into its PayPal division.

But Boston-based Skyhook Wireless has a slightly different relationship with a Bay Area Internet giant. It’s been wrestling in court with Mountain View, CA-based search engine giant Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), around its location-finding technology for mobile phones. Skyhook has sued Google for alleged patent infringement, as well as alleged interference by Google with deals Skyhook had inked with Motorola and Samsung for devices running on Google’s Android smartphone platform. (You can read more about the lawsuits here and here.)

It looks like there’s still a long way to go for that case to be resolved—last week lawyers from both sides met before a Suffolk County Superior Court. Google’s lawyers asked for the judge to throw out the case, on the basis that Google had pre-existing agreements with device makers, in which some of its standard apps automatically collected location data. Meanwhile, Skyhook’s lawyers re-emphasized their claim that Google road-blocked Motorola and Samsung from following through on agreements to ship smartphones with Skyhook’s XPS software, which determines a user’s location using WiFi, cellular, and GPS access points.

Yesterday, the judge denied both Google’s motion to dismiss the case and for a summary judgment, court documents show. The case will now to go into full discovery to gather the necessary documents and depositions, a period that could take six months—a timetable suggested by Google lawyers last week.

So it’s a small victory for Skyhook, but its legal work is just beginning. “Their goal is to try and bleed us out and our goal is to try and make sure we get the facts brought to light,” Skyhook CEO Ted Morgan told me this week.

Meanwhile, Skyhook has been nabbing some bigger victories out of the courtroom. This week it announced that MapQuest, the San Francisco-based mapping division of AOL, will use Skyhook’s technology in an upcoming turn-by-turn navigation app for Android phones. Skyhook has inked similar deals with UberMedia, Citysearch, and Priceline over the past few months.

“In the meantime what we’re doing is going after all the top Android apps that offer location,” Morgan says. “That way we’ll get on every Android device, but it will be through the apps instead of device makers.”

Google’s and Apple’s impending appearances before a U.S. Senate committee also shed some positive light onto Skyhook’s technology, he says. Lawmakers have expressed concern over reports that Apple logs user location data on mobile devices. Google, which has claimed that … Next Page »

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[Editor's Note: As the decade comes to an end, we've asked Xconomists and other technology leaders around the country to identify the top innovations they've seen in their fields the past 10 years, or predict the top disruptive technologies that will impact the next decade.]

1—Digital camera proliferation. Digital cameras and camera phones have become so pervasive in our lives, it is hard to remember a world where we actually took film to the store to get developed! But while camera phones did not begin shipping commercially in the U.S. until 2002, there are now well over 1.5 billion camera phones worldwide and millions of digital cameras. It was during this decade, that we enabled the ubiquitous and effectively free ability to capture the world around us, which is sure to have profound implications on our lives for years to come

2—Digital media. This past decade also marks the beginning of what will likely be a permanent shift to a world of digital media. Flash back to the year 2000 and the total number of iTunes songs purchased, Kindle books read and Hulu TV shows watched in the US was…zero. Since then, well over 6 billion songs have been purchased through iTunes, and Hulu had 856 million videos viewed during October alone. Meanwhile, the outlook for local bookstores, print newspapers and video rental shops does not look promising. The media sector will remain in flux for some time as the implications of this digital transition play out, but the consumers should be the ultimate winners as cost, convenience and choice continue to move in their favor.

3—Social media. Blogs, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter…. Any one of these now-household words might warrant a standalone place in history. But the meta-level disruption that has occurred is the ability for anyone with an Internet connection to publish anything to anyone (or everyone), instantly and for free. And the implications of these trends are likely in just the early innings of their long-term effects. Blogs (over 100 million of them!) are shifting the balance of power and voice of mass media; Facebook has added an entirely new dimension to the nature of our personal relationships (for 350 million people and counting); YouTube (with over 1 billion videos watched per day) has paved the way for Internet-scale video distribution. And Twitter (frequently producing more than 25,000 tweets per minute) is enabling an Internet-scale conversation to occur with anyone about anything. Wow.

4—Ubiquitous wireless Internet access. Having been a venture investor since 1998, wireless Internet was for years one of those trends that was always “just around the corner” but never quite seemed to get there as fast as we thought. Those days are officially over. The WiFi chipset installed base is approaching 1 billion units (Morgan Stanley Mobile Internet report—see here), making Ethernet cables a thing of the past. And we are expected to hit over a billion worldwide 3G wireless users during 2010. And as carriers upgrade from 3G infrastructure with data rates of about 2 MB/s, to 4G deployments with the potential of 10x-20x faster data rates, wireless data growth will only accelerate in the coming decade.

5—Open mobile platforms. While the infrastructure buildout to enable wireless Internet access was a major development this past decade, an equal, if not perhaps more, important development has been the emergence of open mobile platforms. Until recently, the wireless carriers held a tight grip on what users could and could not do with their wireless devices. With the iPhone and Android platforms leading the charge, the wireless Internet is now positioned for real application innovation without the constraints of the network providers dictating the end user experience. There is more progress to be made here in the coming years, but the genie is officially out of the bottle at this point, paving the way for massive growth in mobile computing.

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As interest builds in the coming introduction of new wireless netbooks, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs tells the San Diego Union-Tribune that many netbooks based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor also will include Qualcomm’s MediaFLO, the company’s satellite-based TV broadcast for mobile devices.

In an interview with the newspaper’s editorial board, Jacobs says the new line of netbooks—which he calls “smartbooks”—will use MediaFLO technology so users can watch live events and FloTV programming transmitted directly to their display screens. But the technology also will be used to rapidly broadcast and store Internet content. Qualcomm calls it “data casting,” Jacobs says. “That’s sending snippets of data down, so headlines, weather, sports, stock quotes — whatever you might be interested in — we are looking at broadcasting that down to the device. So when you open it up, there’s already live data on it. I think that will be pretty compelling.”

Paul Jacobs

The next three months should tell whether Jacobs is right, but we should expect a few more surprises by the time the Christmas shopping season begins in earnest.

In June, Collins Stewart analyst Ashok Kumar said Hewlett-Packard plans to launch a line of netbooks before the year ends that will be powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors, rather than the Intel Atom processors now dominating the sector. As the world’s No. 1 desktop PC maker, HP’s decision to power its netbooks with Snapdragon chips represents a significant endorsement for Qualcomm over Intel and the line of Atom processors developed for the emerging netbook market.

Neither Qualcomm nor HP have announced the deal, but Kumar told me at the time that he’s got sources in HP’s Asian supply chain who are vouching that HP’s new netbooks will have “Qualcomm inside.”

Analysts have been closely watching the uptake of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chipset—both for what it means for Qualcomm’s expansion into smartbooks (as opposed to netbooks) as well as the ramifications that has for Intel’s business. But in his interview with the Union-Tribune, Jacobs minimized the significance of the looming head-on competition between Qualcomm and … Next Page »

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Earlier this month, Xconomy reported that San Diego’s Ethertronics raised an additional $4 million in a secondary round of venture funding. Yesterday, I sat down with Sahil Bansal, Ethertronics’ director of strategic marketing, who explained how the company has emerged as a specialist in embedded antennas for cell phones and how it’s planning to use the new funds to move into the next-generation of wireless devices through “active antennas” for tuning into a diverse spectrum of mobile TV, FM radio, Bluetooth, and other services.

Ethertronics co-founders Laurent Desclos and Sebastian Rowson started the company in 2000 to commercialize new antenna technology known as IMD, for Isolated Magnetic Dipole. As Bansal explained it, both IMD and conventional embedded antennas are mounted on a circuit board and excited by an electric current. But with its patented IMD technology, Ethertronics can confine the current in the antenna element more effectively, which keeps energy from being dissipated through the circuit board and to surrounding components. Isolating the antenna in this way makes it more efficient, which allows for smaller effective antenna size and improved overall performance when a caller asks, “Can you hear me now?”

The innovation enabled Ethertronics to get its first patent in 2003 and its first order in 2004 from South Korea’s LG Electronics, currently the world’s third-largest handset maker. In the next two years, Ethertronics got its first orders from Samsung and Motorola.

Bansal says the privately held company now holds or has applied for more than 50 patents and ranks as a leading provider of embedded antennas for the wireless industry. Ethertronics has more than 180 employees, including about 35 at its San Diego headquarters and R&D center. Most of Ethertronics’ other employees work in South Korea, Taiwan, and China, and 80 percent of its global workforce is in engineering.

Ethertronics says it has shipped more … Next Page »

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Two Boston area venture capital firms, Castile Ventures and Battery Ventures, both of Waltham, MA, have invested big in Agito Networks, a mobile technology company based in Sunnyvale, CA, the companies announced today. Castile led the $13 Million series B round, which also includes Japan’s ITX International. Battery led Agito’s $9 million Series A round in 2006.

Agito’s technology makes it easy to roam between public cellular networks and internal WiFi (wireless broadband) networks, for instance when going in or out of an office building. Calling over WiFi normally costs less than using the cellular network; at the same time, the greater bandwidth gives better sound quality. Enterprises can use the Agito technology to give employees “mobile extensions,” meaning that all calls to a worker’s office number will be directly routed to his or her cell cell phone whether the employee is inside the office or out of it.

The equipment automatically detects when a user is inside a building and within reach of the company’s internal wireless network. In that case, the calls will be transmitted over WiFi; otherwise, they will go out over whatever cellular network the customer is using.

“The first time I tested it, I was fascinated by the fact that that the only thing you noticed, when the phone switched from the mobile network to WiFi, just was how the quality of sound got better,” says Carl Stjernfeldt, general partner at Castile Ventures, who will join Agito’s board of directors. “The automatic handoff [between networks] is what makes this special. As a user, you don’t want to have to press buttons to go from one network to the other.”

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“It’s probably the biggest publicity event any company can have,” says Ted Morgan.

Is the CEO of Boston-based Skyhook Wireless talking about running a Superbowl ad? Being endorsed by Oprah, perhaps? Or maybe ringing the opening bell on the New York Stock Exchange?

No. He’s talking about getting a mention from Steve Jobs in the Apple CEO’s annual Macworld keynote speech in San Francisco, which, in what’s shaping up as the iCentury, is the most-anticipated, most-watched, most-discussed technology event of the year. And on Tuesday, fortune smiled on Skyhook.

“You can count on one hand how many other company logos Steve Jobs puts up on the screen behind him,” says Morgan. “It’s usually Google and Intel. To have Skyhook up there is just enormous.”

Skyhook, if you somehow missed the news, is the company providing the technology behind the new Wi-Fi-based location-finding feature of the iPhone’s map application. Millions of Apple customers have been trying out the new feature thanks to a major iPhone software upgrade, made available shortly after Jobs’ speech Tuesday. (A similar upgrade for the iPod Touch brought it the mapping application, including the location-finding feature, for the first time—essentially completing its evolution into an iPhone without the phone.)

Morgan was still sounding giddy when I reached him last night in San Francisco. “It’s actually a breakthrough period for the whole business of location-based services,” he says. “We’ve all been talking about it for years, but to have Apple saying that it’s important, well, that’s big.”

Despite its lofty name, Skyhook, founded by Morgan and partner Michael Shean in 2003, has built its business on a firmly terrestrial phenomenon: the spread of Wi-Fi access points (also called routers) across the urban landscape. Stand in any given location in most major metropolitan areas in the United States, says Morgan, and it is possible to detect an average of 8 to 9 access points. In a few techno-saturated urban centers like downtown Boston, San Francisco, and Manhattan, that number is as high as 30 or 40. Since access points tend to stay in one place, and since each one continually broadcasts a unique digital ID that can be picked up by any passing Wi-Fi device, it would theoretically be possible to pinpoint one’s location to within about 30 meters, simply by measuring the strengths of every nearby Wi-Fi hotspot and comparing their IDs against a sufficiently thorough database of access-point locations.

Actually, strike the “theoretically.” This is exactly how Skyhook’s system works. To develop its Wi-Fi Positioning System or WPS (a name that deliberately echoes the satellite-based Global Positioning System, or GPS), Skyhook spent … Next Page »

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Boston’s ambitious effort to offer wireless Internet access throughout the city by the end of 2008 has run into technology and funding problems that seem bound to delay the network’s implementation, officials of the project acknowledge.

Pamela Reeve, head of OpenAirBoston, the non-profit organization created to manage the program, said the debut of citywide Internet access is “unlikely in 2008,” according to an account by Rob Weisman in today’s Boston Globe. The story notes that a WiFi testbed originally slated to be launched in June in a one-square-mile area in the city’s Grove Hall area will not be complete until later this month.

In announcing its WiFi plans in the summer of 2006, Boston deliberately eschewed the path followed by other cities such as San Francisco, which gave responsibility for building its wireless Internet network to Google and Earthlink. Instead of contracting with outside firms, Boston founded OpenAirBoston to raise up to $20 million in donations from foundations and businesses to build its own network. But Reeve’s group has not been able to raise such funds and has now scaled back its goals to between $12 million and $15 million—but has not said how much has been raised so far, according to the article. The piece also noted that the Grove Hall test bed has been troubled by interference and other technical difficulties and that OpenAirBoston will have to add up to another 13 routers to fill in coverage.

The article quoted Tim Scannell, president of wireless consulting house Shoreline Research, of Quincy, MA, as saying: “In general, Boston has been pretty lethargic about getting this going.” Of course, San Francisco has also suffered delays in its plans. And here in Cambridge, things haven’t moved quite as quickly as hoped, either. The city hasn’t yet firmed up its once-ballyhooed plans. And the Harvard Square Business Association, which had hoped to launch its own mesh network offering free wireless Internet access around Harvard Square by November 1, says its effort has also been delayed, at least for a few more days.

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