Sanjay Jha was lured from Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) to serve as co-CEO of Schaumburg, IL-based Motorola (NYSE: MOT) and the CEO of the nearby Motorola Mobility division, which includes mobile handsets, wireless accessories, and home digital media devices. Now there’s a chance the wireless industry’s prodigious son might return to San Diego—and bring the headquarters of Motorola Mobility with him.

Motorola Mobility is the division that is set to become an independent company by the first quarter of 2011, and Jha says he plans to decide before the end of this year whether to put the new corporate headquarters in Austin, TX, Silicon Valley, or San Diego. Jha’s family still lives in San Diego, and he has retained ties here. So local interest in his pending decision is high, and there was a good turnout when he appeared as a guest speaker this morning at a regular meeting of the San Diego Venture Group.

Jha was forthright from the outset, saying “the days of us living off the fumes of the Razor are gone” and that Motorola Mobility had to develop a new strategy to anticipate the coming era of mobile data.

The Motorola executive estimates that today just 5 to 8 percent of U.S. mobile users are consuming 60 to 70 percent of the mobile data traffic. But he also notes that smartphones now account for 45 percent of all U.S. cell phone sales—and that share will be 60 to 65 percent by the end of the year. He says the accelerating popularity of smartphones and less costly data plans will catalyze widespread use of mobile data, which in turn will engender far greater use of mobile video and multimedia offerings.

Jha says that would send mobile data usage soaring—and that there is not enough wireless spectrum available for the time when the average mobile customer is using 3 gigabytes a month.

As a result, Jha says he views the home as the place where mobile users will transfer video, multimedia, and other large data files from their wireline Internet service to their wireless devices. He sees a migration in the capabilities of Motorola’s cable TV set-top box, which is the other major business he oversees, that will make it more of a data center and “mini-cloud” for managing multiple devices and data downloading.

“That was the strategic reason we put these two businesses together,” Jha says. Under Jha, Motorola Mobility has been integrating the … Next Page »

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NTT DoCoMo, the Japanese wireless communications provider, has invested $45.5 million to acquire a 35 percent stake in PacketVideo, the only operating company of San Diego digital media provider NextWave Wireless (NASDAQ: WAVE).

In a statement released last night, PacketVideo says the all-cash transaction is intended to strengthen DoCoMo’s position as a provider of music and video services in Japan. But the deal also provides a key infusion of cash for NextWave, which intends to use the net proceeds to pay down its debt and help with a corporate restructuring that NextWave announced last year, according to Neil Sharma, a PacketVideo spokesman and senior vice president.

Japan’s biggest wireless operator has been a key customer since 2003, when PacketVideo launched its video and audio media player software as part of DoCoMo’s 3G FOMA service. FOMA uses packet-based data transfer to support a broad variety of mobile software applications, including Internet access, e-mail, file transfers, remote log-in and Internet phone applications.

But Sharma tells me today a key element to the deal is that it is non-exclusive, meaning that PacketVideo is still free to supply its software to other wireless operators and mobile device makers. “DoCoMo has made it very clear that they want to strengthen their solutions in Japan,” Sharma says. But at the same time, they want to ensure stability in a company that is providing innovation to the entire industry. “This in effect allows PacketVideo to work more effectively,” Sharma says. “It’s almost a joint venture in a way.”

PacketVideo’s other customers include Verizon Wireless, T Mobile, Nokia, Motorola, Canada’s Rogers Telus, and France’s Orange. As of 2008, Packet Video estimates that its media software was embedded in more than 320 different mobile devices.

As Wade noted last September, NextWave has been dismantling or selling off its wireless semiconductor and network equipment businesses to focus on reselling the wireless spectrum it has licensed around the world and on PacketVideo, its sole remaining operating business. The company said in May that it lost $82.2 million on sales of $16.9 million in its first quarter ended March 28.

Sharma says PacketVideo’s all-in-one media software, called pvPlayer, was designed to play video and audio on mobile devices regardless of format. It is currently installed in more than 90 DoCoMo handset models. While PacketVideo is known primarily for its mobile media technologies, Sharma says the company also is capitalizing on the nascent “home connected market.” Its “TwonkyMedia” technology makes it possible for users to share video and audio clips on devices that share a home wireless connection.

The company has about 400 employees and contract workers in offices around the world.

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After rolling out its Sorenson 360 video delivery network last month, Sorenson Media of Carlsbad, CA, says its network now enables any website owner to publish video that can viewed on the iPhone’s web browser. The online media company founded in Salt Lake City, UT, says its enhanced video publish platform is compatible with all versions of the Apple iPhone (as well as the Apple iTouch via WiFi.) Apple’s iPhone does not support Flash video, which means most online video content cannot be viewed on the iPhone’s web browser. The company made its announcement at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, CA.

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By some estimates, some 40,000 software applications have been developed for the Apple iPhone. But with a few notable exceptions, such as Apperian, the Boston startup that Wade profiled earlier this year, not many companies are working on business apps for the versatile mobile phone.

So today’s introduction of a new iPhone app by MeLLmo, a startup based in Del Mar, CA, is more noteworthy than the run-of-the-mill apps that enable iPhone users to toss a figurative coin or to visualize guzzling a mug of beer. MeLLmo says its RoamBi application enables users to transform data from spreadsheets, tables, and other business software into interactive graphics that can be displayed on the iPhone. Users can view, analyze, and share the information.

The iPhone application is free, although the company says it plans to introduce a premium version in 90 days. MeLLmo says it also is offering a Software-as-a-Service version of RoamBi online so that new data can be transformed into a pie chart, for example, and transmitted to a company’s entire sales force. In fact, MeLLmo says it is working with San Francisco-based SaaS provider Salesforce.com to provide such enhanced mobile access to information stored by Salesforce users.

“It would be very useful for sales reps,” but they are not the only business user MeLLmo is targeting, co-founder, chairman, and CEO Santiago Becerra says. The goal is to provide a quick and easy way of presenting any kind of business information in a graphical display, including financial, production, and human resources data.

As part of today’s announcement, MeLLmo also unveiled RoamBi Enterprise, a server that allows both small and large organizations to transform business data and reports into visual analytics delivered to the iPhone. “We  give them the option of licensing the software and loading it on their own enterprise server behind a firewall,” Becerra says.

MeLLmo says RoamBi offers four views, or user interface templates, that have been formatted for the iPhone. The templates are specialized for viewing tabular data, catalog data, pie charts, and in a card-like format.

Becerra previously founded two software companies (he sold one to Oracle and the other to Business Objects) and is a former Booz Allen consultant and Harvard MBA. In a statement, Becerra says, “With RoamBi, we have introduced an entirely new format that unlocks the true value of accessing content on mobile devices and empowers users to publish dynamic and interactive information directly to their iPhones.”

Oh, and what does MeLLmo stand for? A spokeswoman for the company says it has no specific meaning. It’s just a name that Becerra’s grandson provided.

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Tapioca Mobile wants to see your cellular phone play more videos, and the San Diego-based wireless media company has the know-how to do it—no matter what phone you use. Tapioca has created a unique video-transcoding process and has, according to co-founder and CTO Chas Wurster, “the largest footprint of addressable video mobile devices in the U.S. We can get video into the hands of more consumers than anybody else.”

Tapioca is helping users gain access to video in a couple of different ways, by using multimedia messaging (MMS) or text messaging (SMS). Its customers include Univision, NBC, FOX-TV stations, and Border Media, a chain of radio stations previously known as BMP. These customers send video or audio clips of weather reports, news reports, and special messages to Tapioca, which uses its technology to distribute the clips to cell phone users who have signed up to get the broadcasters’ content.

Mass messaging is a technology and market that still has plenty of room to boom, as more video-capable devices come to market and prices come down. But any company attempting to provide such a service faces a daunting technical challenge: it’s not possible to use a single technology to transmit video that can be received by the multitude of cell phones.

For example, when Tapioca gets a video clip from Univision, the Spanish language network, the company processes the video so that it can be used with different messaging technologies. So video of a breaking news event can be sent to Univision’s subscriber base as an MMS message with the video clip or as an SMS message with a link that can be opened using the phone’s net browser. Different phones, bandwidths, carriers, transcoding, and video standards make this … Next Page »

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