Qualcomm Offers Cash Incentives, Broader Support, in Bid to Energize App Developers (and Partners Like Twitter)

After taking a hiatus in its annual Brew developers conference last year, Qualcomm raised the curtain yesterday on its new and improved Brew MP (mobile platform) at Uplinq—a reincarnated developers conference that recasts the two-year-old Brew MP as a “fully realized” mobile operating system that is broader, deeper, and more developer friendly.

Following a multimedia music video intro that blared the pop hit “Hey Soul Sister” by Train, Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]) chairman and CEO Paul Jacobs opened the conference and almost immediately addressed the old Brew versus new Brew question.

“Why did we change the name to Uplinq and how is it different from Brew conferences?” Jacobs rhetorically asked. “The Brew conference was focused on just one platform. Uplinq is focused on many platforms, because we support many operating systems on our chips… We’re working to optimize the integration of our hardware and software, so your applications run better on Qualcomm’s chips and especially our Snapdragon chipsets.”

From there, Jacobs moved into a coordinated presentation, which included a bow to AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint (the three U.S. operators working with Brew MP), and a variety of partners developing new Brew MP-based apps that were at times dazzling. (A webcast of Jacobs talk is here.)

The biggest crowd-pleaser was a demonstration by two Mattel executives, including the vice president of technology, Peter Marx, who played an augmented reality version of “Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots.” While the robots existed only virtually—on the display screens of a pair of Nexus One handsets (running Android 2.1 on a Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset)—the amusing battle included thunderous, clanking sound effects and showers of sparks with each metallicized blow that prompted cheers from the audience. Augmented reality, Marx said, “allows us to do things that were unimaginable not that long ago. Think about what we can do with Barbie and with Hot Wheels.”

Following another demonstration of an augmented-reality computer game by David Helgason, CEO of San Francisco-based Unity Technologies, Jacobs announced Qualcomm’s first augmented-reality developer challenge. The Qualcomm challenge offers a total of $200,000 in prizes for the top three teams that create “the most creative augmented reality apps,” using Qualcomm’s just-released software development kit. The first-place award is $125,000, second-place is worth $50,000, and third is $25,000.

In this same vein, Qualcomm separately announced a similar contest for

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.