Everyone knows mobile is everywhere, and everything is mobile. Smartphones, tablets, and mobile software are transforming how we all shop, connect, get around, and lead our daily lives. In the five years since Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone, the mobile industry—and the tech world, more broadly—has changed radically. So what are the emerging opportunities, pitfalls, and strategies in this sector? And how will the next five years play out?

On March 14, Xconomy will hold its fourth annual half-day mobile conference to tackle these questions—and much more. Mobile Madness 2012: Total Mobility will take place at Microsoft’s New England Research and Development (NERD) Center in Cambridge, MA. We are convening some of the most prominent mobile technology and business leaders from the Boston area and beyond—and we are expecting a packed house.

We are still working on the agenda and full speaker list, but I can share a few highlights with you now. We will have a keynote panel consisting of Boston’s “mobile mafia”—founders, CEOs, and investors from some of the region’s biggest mobile successes, including m-Qube, Enpocket, Quattro Wireless, and Where. This distinguished panel—which will include Jeff Glass, Mike Baker, Lars Albright, and Ryan Moore—will discuss Boston’s mobile history and how the region can continue to lead the world in mobile innovation.

Other themes we’ll tackle include next-generation consumer and social apps; mobile retail and commerce; the convergence of mobile marketing and big data analytics; emerging business strategies around mobile apps, mobile websites, and hybrid models; and, more broadly, how mobility will continue to change the way we all interact with content, products, and each other.

To those ends, we will also hear from Jason Jacobs, CEO of FitnessKeeper; Jeff Janer, CEO of Spring Partners; Ted Morgan, CEO of Skyhook; Seth Priebatsch, CEO of SCVNGR; Greg Raiz, CEO of Raizlabs; Michael Schreck, CEO of Zmags; and Michael Putnam, director of mobile products for TripAdvisor (only the biggest consumer Web company in New England). We’ll also hear from up-and-coming startups including ByteLight, HeyWire, Kinvey, and Crashlytics. Again, this is only a partial list of speakers—we’ll have more updates soon.

If you register by February 1, you can take advantage of the early bird rate. Looking forward to seeing you all at NERD on March 14.

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Bedford, MA-based Zink Imaging said this week it has closed $35 million in Series B financing led by Genii Capital. The company, whose name stands for “zero ink,” is developing technology for inkless digital printers that can be attached to or integrated with cameras, consoles, and other devices.

Zink’s technology was conceived at Polaroid Research Labs. It uses special “paper” consisting of dye crystals encased in polymer film. The technique essentially puts color-producing materials in the paper itself, which get activated by thermal print heads, like those used in fax machines. The result is a small color printout of a photo or document, say. The company has partnerships with Polaroid, Dell, and other firms to manufacture devices for consumers.

Zink also announced it has hired former board members and Polaroid veterans Mary Jeffries and Ira Parker as co-CEOs. They succeed former CEO Wendy Caswell (also a former Polaroid exec), who led the company for almost six years since it started in 2005.

My colleague Wade wrote an in-depth profile of Zink back in early 2008. At the time, the startup was about to debut its mobile photo printer at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

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Pixtronix, an Andover, MA-based maker of low-power displays, has been acquired by San Diego tech giant Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM), according to Scott Kirsner’s Innovation Economy blog. Terms of the purchase weren’t disclosed, but the report cites a price range of $175-200 million, based on sources close to the deal. A source of mine confirmed the deal but couldn’t provide any details on the record.

Pixtronix started in 2005 and has raised a little more than $50 million in venture funding from Atlas Venture, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and other investors. The company reportedly has 45 employees, and they’ll stay in Andover. Pixtronix is led by CEO Anthony Zona.

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Anti-theft technology for mobile devices just got smarter. Boston-based Skyhook Wireless announced today that its location-finding software has been deployed by Mountain View, CA-based Symantec (NASDAQ: SYMC) in its new Norton Anti-Theft Web service. Financial details weren’t given, but the arrangement will put Skyhook’s software on more devices over a broader range of applications—namely, security.

The anti-theft Web service enables people to lock, locate, and, if all goes well, recover a lost or stolen laptop (Windows-based), smartphone (Android), or tablet (Android)—all from afar. Skyhook’s technology, which uses Wi-Fi, cellular, and GPS signals to locate a given device, is already used by tens of millions of devices and applications, the company says.

Skyhook has been embroiled in two lawsuits against Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) since last year. The suits allege that the search giant infringed on four of Skyhook’s patents and interfered with deals that Skyhook made with Motorola and Samsung. Those deals involved putting Skyhook’s location-finding software on Android devices.

Symantec’s deployment of Skyhook’s software is the latest example of how Skyhook has managed to maneuver its technology onto Android devices despite its feud with Google, which, like Apple, wants to own location technology for its devices itself.

Back in May, Skyhook CEO Ted Morgan talked about his company’s technology being deployed by MapQuest, Citysearch, Priceline, and other Web applications on Android (and other) devices. “We’ll get on every Android device, but it will be through the apps instead of device makers,” he said.

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Score one for open source startups. Modo Labs, a Cambridge, MA-based mobile software company, is announcing today it has closed a $4 million Series A round from Storm Ventures and New Magellan Ventures. The round includes $2 million that the startup raised last year; the new money ($2 million) comes from Silicon Valley-based Storm, led by founding general partner Tae Hea Nahm.

Modo Labs, which grew out of MIT’s Mobile Framework project, makes an open source software platform called Kurogo, which helps universities and other organizations put their information online and make it quickly available on devices like smartphones, tablets, and so forth. Lots of colleges are already using Kurogo for their mobile sites, including Boston College, Brown University, Harvard University, Middlebury College, University of Vermont, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Modo Labs says it wants to open up its platform to student developers.

But the 20-person company sees a big opportunity in enterprise apps as well. Specifically, big banks and hospitals need the kind of tech support Modo Labs provides, the company says. And it’s about more than making tools for developers.

“We have some really deep interest in making sure the users’ experience is the best they can be,” says Modo Labs CEO Andrew Yu. That means providing “solid and robust templates” so that enterprises can get their websites and apps up and running fast, he says.

Modo Labs is “aggressively hiring right now for developers” of native and mobile Web software (both iOS and Android), says chief technology officer Marshall Vale. He stresses that business customers “absolutely have to deal with multiple device types” across operating systems, handsets, and tablets, and that his company’s software is optimized for that.

Storm Ventures has a couple of notable companies in its portfolio that are complementary to Modo Labs: MobileIron (mobile device management for businesses) and Appcelerator (enterprise mobile development platform).

On a more human-interest note, Storm Ventures is a particularly apt name. Yu, Modo’s CEO, was scheduled to fly out to the West Coast to pitch the firm in August, but his flight was canceled because of Hurricane Irene. So he had to do the pitch by phone. While there was some concern about the geographic distance from a main investor, Yu emphasizes that Storm “really understood this space and was really willing to work with us.”

Let’s hope the unseasonably early October snow, and future storms, don’t wreak havoc for Modo and its investors. It could be a long winter in Boston.

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You know the type. He’s at every tech startup event, every investor event, and every incubator and early-stage mentorship session (at least every good one). He’s talked to every entrepreneur in the area and has had a hand in the development of many of their companies.

He has been a fixture of the local software scene for some 30 years, even though he doesn’t look nearly old enough for that. Worst of all, he comes across as a genuinely nice guy and doesn’t seek the limelight or talk a big game.

That would be Reed Sturtevant—and his reputation is as distinguished as his name. He is one of the Boston area’s most active and respected techies, known especially for his technical prowess and product experience. He’s also an Xconomist—one of our informal advisors who helps keep Xconomy plugged in to the innovation scene—so I wanted to take some time to catch up with him in more depth.

Sturtevant grew up outside of Washington, DC, and is a self-professed MIT dropout (we need more of those, don’t we?). He started his career as a programmer at Strategic Planning Institute in the late ‘70s and went on to work at Graphic Communications, maker of Freelance Graphics—which was bought by Lotus Development, where he stayed for about 10 years. During the ‘90s, he co-founded Radnet and RadioAMP before taking a senior role in 2000 with Idealab, where he was responsible for new company development in Boston. There he helped start six companies: Refer.com, Compete, Picasa (bought by Google), Newbury Networks, Paythrough, Pathspace, and Newbury Payments.

After Idealab, he became chief technology officer for Eons, the Jeff Taylor-led social networking site, and stayed for almost two years. He left Eons and helped found Microsoft Startup Labs in 2007, where he directed a team that developed the user experience for Bing Twitter search, among other projects. He left Microsoft in late 2009 to focus on startups and investing—which brings us to what he’s doing today.

Sturtevant currently co-runs Project 11 Ventures, a seed-stage investment fund (co-founded with Katie Rae) that works together with angel investors to back young tech startups. He tells me that since last fall, Project 11 has invested in seven companies—Locately, Scriptpad, peerTransfer, GreenGoose, and three undisclosed startups. In his spare time, he is a mentor for TechStars Boston, a lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a founding member and trustee of the Awesome Foundation.

I caught up with Sturtevant over e-mail this week, asking him a variety of questions ranging from the state of the economy to the challenges of building a consumer-focused tech company (especially in Boston), to the most important trends to watch in computing. Here are his answers:

Xconomy: Let’s talk about the broader economic backdrop for what you do: startups and investing. How does the bleak macro-outlook for jobs and the stock market affect your strategy?

Reed Sturtevant: Obviously we’re all better off in times of economic tailwinds, but I’m seeing a couple of effects on the very early stage startup arena.

First, job security in established companies and industries is clearly an illusion. I teach at MIT and this week I asked our students whether they expect to work in, or found, a startup. Two-thirds of … Next Page »

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Like pineapple and pepperoni, Domino’s Pizza and Apple seem an unlikely pairing. But the Ann Arbor, MI-based company has openly embraced the consumer electronics giant to push sales of pizza, salads, and bread sticks.

Last month, Domino’s released an iPhone app that allows consumers to order products over the Internet through their mobile device. Though the company – which has 9,169 stores around the world – has offered online ordering application since 2006, this is Domino’s first foray into the fast growing universe of smartphone software.

Jeff McCrumb, Domino’s manager of mobile development, said sales through the Domino’s app is already beating out competitors like Pizza Hut. Domino’s iPhone app has a four star rating in the Apple App Store and a steady amount of downloads each day, he said.

The company is exploring apps with other popular mobile devices like Androids and tablets.

“Our goal really is, as a pizza company, to provide a conduit for the consumers to get pizzas ordered,” McCrumb recently told a gathering at Mobile Monday Michigan.

Domino’s is the latest example of how Michigan companies are increasingly embracing mobile technologies, whether it’s traditional businesses reaching out to consumers or high tech software firms developing new apps. Mobiata, an Ann Arbor-based startup recently acquired by Expedia, is developing hotel reservation apps for the travel website. The Big Three automakers, especially Ford Motor in Dearborn, MI, are developing mobile apps for their in-car computer systems.

For large companies like Domino’s, a mobile application is “an extension of an existing product.” says Keith Bourne, co-founder of Mobile Monday Michigan. Conversely, for a small startup, “basically the app is the company.”

“But I think in the long run, everyone’s going to mobile now,” Bourne says, “so everyone’s going to have to figure out how to incorporate it into what they do and how it can enhance the service that they offer.”

Recognizing the potential for a mobile technology industry in Michigan, Linda Daichendt, the other co-founder of Mobile Monday Michigan, established the Mobile Technology Association of Michigan (MTAM) last September. The organization, which now boasts 60 members, is the country’s first statewide trade association for the mobile industry.

MTAM’s mission is to grow local mobile technology companies and explore new ways of incorporating mobile technology into Michigan’s businesses, Daichendt says.

Daichendt says a lack of communication between developers, carriers, and retailers means Michigan’s mobile industry wouldn’t reach its full potential.

“I could tell that was going to prevent the industry from growing the way it really has an opportunity to grow in Michigan,” Daichendt said. “And so, we decided to try to bring all of those sectors together, get them talking together, get them working on things together to try and really get the industry to grow rapidly in Michigan so that it could create jobs.”

According to study by the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC), one new mobile tech job creates 3.9 jobs in other industries. The average annual income for the 47,313 people working in the mobile tech is $63,000, the report says. MTAM estimates 9,250 more mobile tech jobs will be created in the state over the next four years.

Detroit-based Compuware is likely to generate many of those new jobs. The company has worked on mobile technology with businesses ranging from banking and automobiles to advertising. Compuware is now exploring Google-made Android technology and applications for tablets like the iPad, says executive vice president and chief technology officer Paul Czarnik.

Czarnik, a MTAM board member, described how tablets are leading the way for upcoming mobile technology, as the device provides “a different perspective of the data you’re using” simply by rotating it.

“All that new kind of functionality with the human interface provides new ways to present information, to write applications that are different,” Czarnik said, “and that’s the most exciting thing.”

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Here in Boston, we fret about losing tech talent and leadership to the West Coast. So today, let’s celebrate the return of one of our own.

Michael Schreck has joined Boston-based digital publishing firm Zmags as its new CEO, as of earlier this month. Schreck, a prominent investor and entrepreneur, has spent the past eight years in the cultural wasteland of Orange County, CA, as CEO and managing director of Equity Pacific Group, a private equity shop. Before that, he made his name in Boston as a co-founder of a number of startups including m-Qube and Upromise, and a co-founder and general partner at venture firm General Catalyst Partners. He originally came to town in the early 1990s to work at Monitor Group and then attended Harvard Business School; now he’s moving back.

These things come full circle. Ten years ago, Schreck was helping recruit big-name CEOs to run companies. Now he is the big-name CEO.

But why Zmags? My colleague Wade wrote about the company back in 2009, when it was best known for its platform for publishing digital magazines (hence its name). Over the years, Zmags also has been focused on digital marketing—helping brands design and develop interactive catalogs for the Web and mobile devices. The firm started in Denmark in 2006 and moved its headquarters to Boston in 2008. This month, Schreck succeeds former CEO Jens Karstoft, a co-founder who is staying on as vice president of strategic innovation.

Zmags is also rolling out a new digital merchandising and e-commerce service today, called CommercePro. The basic idea is to help brands optimize their catalogs, marketing materials, and shopping analytics across iPad, iPhone, Android devices, Web browsers, and other channels. A key feature: the new software lets consumers make purchases directly from within a Zmags catalog or magazine (on a Facebook fan page, say), and also helps brands keep track of what’s working and what’s not.

“You can imagine it, architect it, test it, and get the data back,” Schreck says.

It sounds like an intriguing opportunity for Schreck (see left), who has some deep perspective on digital and mobile marketing. In the early 2000s, he helped start m-Qube, which grew out of a previous startup called Proteus Mobile. Back then, Schreck says, the question was, “Is texting going to be big in the U.S.?” Major wireless carriers thought no—that consumers would leap-frog to an enhanced messaging system—but m-Qube stuck with its plan, keeping mobile-marketing content simple and short via SMS. But marketing via text messages severely limited what brands and marketers could do on mobile devices.

What’s changed in the interim? In a word, the iPad/iPhone. Schreck calls it “the great leveler—nobody could imagine that device [iPhone] until it appeared in our palm.” Schreck’s epiphany for his new job came to him during a boardroom meeting with a bunch of public-company CEOs. Apparently it’s a faux pas to have your laptop open during such meetings. But “we all had our iPads out,” he says. “It was weird, I’ve never seen anything like it.” There were different age groups represented in the room, from junior to senior execs, he says. “It was everybody. You could have an iPad there, it was this sort of information appliance. You couldn’t have a laptop. I thought, ‘This is amazing.’”

Indeed, according to Jeff Glass of Bain Capital Ventures, who worked with Schreck … Next Page »

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[Updated 4/24/11. See comment below] Chalk up another $100 million-plus purchase of a Boston-area mobile technology company. First there was m-Qube, then Third Screen Media, Enpocket, Starent Networks, Quattro Wireless, and now, Where. Their acquirers read like a who’s who of tech giants: VeriSign, AOL, Nokia, Cisco, Apple, and now, eBay.

Indeed, Boston-based Where’s purchase by eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY), announced yesterday, is at least the sixth big mobile acquisition around town in as many years. Financial terms weren’t given—the deal is expected to close later this quarter—but a source with knowledge of the deal confirmed the price was about $135 million (as first reported by Mass High Tech and BostInnovation). I’ve also learned that Where was considering other options—including an acquisition bid from Research In Motion (RIM), the BlackBerry maker, as well as further financing from venture investors.

Where (formerly called uLocate) started in 2003 with the idea of providing location-tracking for GPS-enabled cell phones. The company re-launched in 2007 around a new set of location-based services, with backing from Venrock, GrandBanks Capital, and Kodiak Venture Partners. (The firm has raised around $20 million since the re-launch.) In recent years, Where has released a local search and recommendation app for mobile devices, and rolled out a location-based advertising network. More recently, it has gotten into daily deals and merchant services. The company has grown from 30 to 120 employees since early 2010, and in February, it said it had been profitable for the preceding six quarters.

Where’s management team didn’t reply to a request for comment yesterday (the eBay PR clamps must be tight). But eBay spokeswoman Kathy Chui confirmed that Where will report to the PayPal division of the San Jose, CA-based e-commerce giant. The acquisition is part of eBay’s bigger strategic plan to strengthen its position in mobile and local commerce, Chui says. And the deal builds on eBay’s recent acquisitions of local shopping startup Milo, barcode-scanning mobile developer RedLaser, and online retail giant GSI Commerce. Meanwhile, the Where team will stay in Boston and “plans to grow,” Chui says, but she declined to give specifics.

A little more background on the deal: According to Chui, Where’s CEO Walt Doyle was meeting with the PayPal team over the past few months, working on a possible integration between the two companies’ services. The transition to acquisition talks “happened very quickly,” Chui says. “There may have been coffee and beer involved.” (And, if my sources are accurate, competing interest from RIM and VCs probably upped the urgency of the deal—and the price.)

For its part, PayPal said in a blog post, “As a first step, we plan to integrate PayPal into the Where mobile app to make it even easier for PayPal customers to take advantage of the local deals.” That’s a boring way of saying PayPal wants to use Where to turn your smartphone into a … Next Page »

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EvoNexus, the pro bono technology incubator supported by San Diego’s CommNexus non-profit industry group, has taken in NewBlue, a fledgling startup developing integrated video effects technologies. NewBlue is focused on supporting the coming introduction of Vibop, a patent-pending, cloud-based technology that enables social networking and shared video across smartphones and other mobile devices.

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Ben Kazez needs a place to live. Preferably a warehouse loft he can rent somewhere in Ann Arbor, MI. A quiet place where he can finally grab some ZZZZs.

You can forgive Kazez for neglecting his living situation. Since selling his startup Mobiata to online travel giant Expedia (Nasdaq:EXPE) last fall, Kazez has been hard at work developing Mobiata’s first product for his new employer—so much so that he still resides in a noisy building that deprives him of sleep.

There’s a lot riding on Expedia Hotel, a free phone app that will launch on Apple’s iPhone this month. For the first time, Expedia customers will be able to research and book hotel rooms directly through a native app designed for a smartphone. Normally, they must use the phone’s mobile browser to access Expedia.com.

Hotels are the largest source of revenue for Expedia, based in Bellevue, WA. In 2010, hotel revenue (mostly commissions from bookings made through the site) grew 11 percent to $507 million, or about 63 percent of Expedia’s overall business. The company said total revenue jumped 16 percent to $808.4 million, mostly driven by hotels.

Kazez, a boyish-looking 24-year-old computer science graduate of Carleton College, recently demonstrated Expedia Hotels to me over lunch in downtown Ann Arbor, not far from Mobiata’s office.

The first thing I noticed was the eye-popping, high-resolution photos of hotel rooms. That seemed to please Kazez, since photo quality was one of Expedia’s top priorities. The other was a streamlined process that allowed Kazez to quickly book and pay for a hotel room in four steps.

There were also a bunch of minor improvements to Expedia’s Web-based reservation process, seemingly unnoticable on their own. But add them all together and you get an enjoyable user experience, Kazez says.

Expedia Hotel is only the first step in the company’s Expedia Everywhere mobile device strategy as it rolls … Next Page »

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Littleton, MA-based Movik Networks, a developer of software for delivering content to mobile devices, has raised $25 million in a Series C round of funding, according to a report in Mass High Tech. The financing was led by Oak Investment Partners and also included previous investors Highland Capital Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners, according to the report.

A company spokesman was not able to confirm the report when I called him this morning, but we’ll update this story when any additional details come in. Movik, whose “Content Aware Edge” software is designed to help mobile phones more speedily access video, websites, social media sites, and other Internet applications, hired Highland venture partner and telecom veteran John St. Amand as CEO in February. The startup raised a $3 million debt deal in December, and previously nabbed $8.75 million in equity based funding.

If the report is accurate, this would be at least the third sizeable venture financing of a Boston-area mobile company announced this week. On Tuesday, enterprise mobile-app firm Apperian said it raised $9.5 million led by three venture firms (including North Bridge), and Mobiquity, a mobile services startup, said it had closed $5 million from two VC firms.

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Boston-based Mobiquity, a mobile services startup founded by Bill Seibel and Scott Snyder, said today it has raised $5 million in Series A financing led by Longworth Venture Partners and Sigma Partners. The company aims to help big businesses take advantage of growth opportunities in mobile computing via smartphones and tablets (like the Apple iPad). Seibel, Mobiquity’s CEO, was previously a senior exec and founding member of Cambridge Technology Partners, and founder and CEO of Zefer. Snyder, who serves as president and chief strategy officer, was previously president of Breakthru Advisors and CEO of Decision Strategies International.

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It’s a big day for the New England mobile community. Boston-based Apperian, the maker of a software platform for enterprise mobile apps, said it has raised a $9.5 million Series A round from North Bridge Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (iFund, focused on Apple iPad and iPhone software). The company’s seed-stage investors, CommonAngels and LaunchCapital, also participated in the round.

Apperian, which started in early 2009, previously raised $1.9 million in angel capital. About a year ago, the startup unveiled its plan to help big companies create, deploy, and manage iPhone and iPad apps (and soon Android), through a software platform called the Enterprise Application Services Environment (EASE). Then, last September, David Patrick, a veteran of The Learning Company, Ximian, and Xkoto, came on as CEO to raise a venture round and expand the business. Apperian founder Chuck Goldman, a former Apple executive, shifted over to chief strategy officer and remains as involved as ever.

My colleague Wade has previously delved into the technical features and issues around Apperian and EASE. But I’m just about the money. In particular, the fact that a sizeable new venture round led by Boston, New York, and Silicon Valley firms should go a long way towards bolstering Apperian—and Boston—as a leader in mobile apps, particularly for big businesses.

“There’s an opportunity for a new generation of software companies,” Patrick says. “We knew from the first meeting that these were the partners we wanted to have at the table. This gives us three centers of power.”

Outside venture firms seem to be paying a little more attention to Boston these days. In recent months, Balderton Capital and Google Ventures helped pour $15 million into SCVNGR, while Sequoia Capital, Google Ventures, and Salesforce.com led a $32 million round for HubSpot. Throw in Gemvara’s $15 million round announced last week, led by Balderton, and Boston software startups are practically rolling in outside dough.

Apperian will use its new cash to build out its sales and marketing teams, as well as its engineering and development teams. The company expects to double its headcount from 25 to about 50 people this year. It is also moving into a new 9,000-square-foot office on Summer Street in Boston this May, … Next Page »

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The Qualcomm shareholder meeting was something of a five-year anniversary yesterday for Paul Jacobs, who was named to succeed his father, Irwin M. Jacobs, as CEO of the world’s largest provider of wireless chipsets and software technology in March 2005.

As milestones go, 2010 was a great year for Qualcomm, which had a record-setting year in the chip business, with about 400 million MSM chips shipped for 3G devices in 2010. That means Qualcomm delivered 30 percent compound annual growth in chipset revenue from 2003 through 2010. Paul Jacobs gave a comprehensive and upbeat overview of the company’s technology development and business performance, and he  emphasized the highlights in a presentation about Qualcomm’s performance since he took over with a new management team:

—3G mobile subscriptions (which rely heavily on Qualcomm technology) have increased 380 percent, to about 1.2 billion.

—Qualcomm’s market valuation has increased 73 percent, to about $95 billion.

—Annual revenue increased by 140 to 150 percent, to an estimated range between $13.6 billion and $14.2 billion in fiscal 2011.

—Annual earnings increased by 84 to 95 percent, to an estimated range between $2.3 billion and $2.46 billion in fiscal 2011.

—Available cash increased by 143 percent, to $19.1 billion.

“It’s nice to have that kind of cushion,” he said, referring to the $19.1 billion. “We all remember the early days of Qualcomm when things really were hand-to-mouth.”

One of the most interesting moments, though, came when a shareholder asked if it was just a coincidence that rival Broadcom (NASDAQ: BRCM) filed its multi-million-dollar patent and anti-trust lawsuits just as Paul Jacobs took over as CEO.

“I’m not sure it was a coincidence,” he responded. “I think they saw … Next Page »

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Mobile is becoming redundant: in technology, everything is mobile. It’s not just location-based services, or devices, or advertising—it’s networks, consumer Web apps, business software, social commerce, human-computer interfaces, you name it.

Every company and every tech entrepreneur is touched by this revolution. That’s part of why the future of mobile is so exciting—and so very hard to predict. And that’s why we’re going to have a blast on March 9.

That’s when Xconomy is convening our next forum, Mobile Madness 2011, at Microsoft New England Research and Development Center (NERD) in Cambridge, MA. You can see the full agenda here and registration details here (saver rate ends today).

Just a sampling of what’s on offer: We’ll put Qualcomm, Clearwire, and Ruckus Wireless together to hash out the future of 4G. We’ll have Google Ventures, Swype, and Vlingo talk about how your phone is making you smarter. We’ll have interactive panels on the maturation of mobile payments and enterprise apps.

Add two mystery startups that will emerge from stealth at the event…Throw in a “location smackdown” in which SCVNGR, Skyhook Wireless, Where, Locately, and others will debate the future of location-based software and how to actually build a sustainable business there…

And just to make things really interesting, we’ll ask Stephen Wolfram, the creator of Mathematica, A New Kind of Science and Wolfram Alpha, to give his perspective on where mobile is really headed—and how it touches software companies like his (Wolfram Research).

My colleague Wade, who will be in town from San Francisco to emcee the event, has been previewing some of the key themes in the mobile industry. He has compiled a list of seven questions that will decide the future of mobile.

One that caught my eye in particular: who will be the new mobile gatekeepers? Look for Part Two of his column tomorrow, where he’ll tackle questions about the future of physical commerce, business IT, whether context and location-based services are a legitimate business (or just a feature)—and the ultimate question, what comes after mobile? (OK, before we get to that, I also want to know what’s going to happen with Microsoft and Nokia.)

We look forward to seeing you on March 9 to help us get to the bottom of these questions.

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Boston-based Skyhook, a wireless technology firm, said today that Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) has licensed its location-finding software and will make the technology available on Intel chip-based devices. Skyhook also announced that Citysearch, the online local guide, has integrated Skyhook’s technology into its mobile and deals apps for Android devices. Financial details of the two agreements were not given. Skyhook’s software determines the location of a mobile device by combining data from Wi-Fi access points, GPS, and cell towers. The company is currently embroiled in a legal battle with Google over location-based intellectual property and business practices.

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I just got a new BlackBerry smartphone last weekend, which makes me a mobile expert—for circa 2005-2006 maybe. Luckily for you (and me), there’s a big event coming up called Mobile Madness, which will tell you all you need to know about the industry in 2011 and beyond.

Xconomy’s third annual mobile conference, Mobile Madness 2011, is happening on the afternoon of March 9 at Microsoft N.E.R.D. in Cambridge, MA. This year’s theme is “getting down to business.” We want to delve into what the real, important business questions are for mobile startups and big companies; which kinds of money-making strategies are working (and which aren’t); and how consumer behaviors and expectations are evolving in the age of ubiquitous smartphones and tablets. All that and more, across the sectors of mobile payments, mobile interfaces, location-based services, enterprise apps, and 4G wireless infrastructure.

To that end, we are convening some of the top names in mobile and wireless computing from the Boston area, as well as our other hubs, for a series of interactive panels and chats. We’re excited to announce a few additions to the speaker lineup today. The group includes:

—Michael Sievert, chief commercial officer at Kirkland, WA-based Clearwire (NASDAQ: CLWR), the wireless broadband provider (and developer of WiMax).

—Mark Lowenstein, managing director of Mobile Ecosystem, a Brookline, MA-based wireless/mobile consulting and advisory services firm. (You can read his top five wireless trends to watch in 2011 here.)

—Andrew Paradise, founder and CEO of AisleBuyer, a Boston-based mobile checkout company.

—Drew Volpe, co-founder and CTO of Locately, a Boston-based location analytics startup.

—Meredith Flynn-Ripley, CEO of MediaFriends, the Boston-area mobile communications firm that makes HeyWire, a free text-messaging service.

These speakers join a distinguished cast of presenting companies that includes Qualcomm, Ruckus Wireless, Skyhook, SCVNGR, Swype, Vlingo, Where, Apperian, Fig Card, Ground Truth, Enterprise Mobile, and Ondeego. We’ll also have some prominent investors on hand who have skin in the mobile game, such as Jeff Bussgang of Flybridge Capital Partners, Jamie Goldstein of North Bridge Venture Partners, John Landry from Lead Dog Ventures, and Rich Miner from Google Ventures. And we’ve got a couple of other surprises in store, just to spice things up…

My colleague Wade and I will be posting the detailed agenda pretty soon, so stay tuned. In the meantime, you can register for the event here. We’re looking forward to seeing you on March 9.

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Interesting news from the video world today. Portland, OR-based Elemental Technologies says it has been working with Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) for the past year to make its video-processing software run on the chip giant’s new “Sandy Bridge” microprocessors, which blend traditional processing with graphics capabilities. The two companies are demoing the technology at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas later today.

Financial details of the partnership weren’t given, but it’s a big deal for Elemental, whose software until now has run only on Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) graphics processors (GPUs). “We’ve got a viable second source for GPU-powered video processing. This will allow more flexibility and choice for our customers,” says Elemental co-founder and CEO Sam Blackman, in an e-mail.

If all goes well, it sounds like the Elemental-Intel partnership could improve the efficiency of delivering video to different kinds of devices. As Blackman sees it, the new technology “will continue to drive down the cost of creating the many different flavors of video streams required for adaptive bit rate delivery today.”

He adds, “At CES we are expecting to see the introduction of many new tablet, connected TVs, and mobile devices—if history is any guide, each will require additional resolutions, bit rates, and formats of video. To make delivering video to the ever-expanding universe of devices cost-effective for our customers, faster and more efficient architectures are critical.”

Elemental Technologies was founded in 2006 and is venture-backed by Voyager Capital, General Catalyst, and Steamboat Ventures. The company has raised $14.6 million in venture financing.

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This is pretty big news for a local mobile startup. Boston-based Where, a mobile applications and advertising firm, announced today it has been granted a patent covering a wide swath of location-based services—in particular those related to delivering certain kinds of advertising, alerts, and coupons to mobile devices.

Where now has strong intellectual property protection around a burgeoning area in mobile. U.S. Patent No. 7,848,765 relates to a number of technologies around “geofencing”—this basically means establishing a virtual perimeter around a real-world area and alerting users of location-based services when a person or object of interest crosses that perimeter. When combined with location-aware mobile devices such as GPS-enabled smartphones, the technology can let people keep track of where their friends and loved ones are, for example, or allow companies and retail stores to know when consumers enter certain neighborhoods (so they can sell them stuff).

In a statement, senior analyst Greg Sterling of Opus Research called the news a “very significant patent and win for Where.” He added that geofencing and location-based ads are “among the most strategic opportunities in what will become a huge mobile market.”

Indeed, a whole slew of startups and big companies are trying to cash in on this emerging market. Companies from Foursquare and SCVNGR to Whereoscope (a Y Combinator startup), Google, and Facebook are looking to implement location-based local advertising in a smart way. One thing seems clear: for now at least, the intellectual property highway for these kinds of services goes through Where. The company hasn’t said yet whether it intends to defend the patent against potential infringers in court—an increasingly common tactic these days (see, for example, our recent coverage of infringement suits filed by Seattle-area firms Interval Licensing and Intellectual Ventures).

Where (formerly called uLocate) was very early in the location-based services game. It filed an application for the patent in question back in 2005. Since then, the company has built mobile apps—local retail listings and recommendations—across all the major smartphones and mobile devices. It also runs a location-based ad network, which it says reaches more than 50 million consumers around the U.S.

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