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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