Scenes from the Uplinq Conference: How Qualcomm’s Strategy is Playing Out

build the enabling technology. So we imagine the things that consumers want to do, and we build the enabling technologies.”

As for an “Intel inside” type branding campaign, Jacobs said Qualcomm would “try to amplify some of the buzz that gets created around” the knowledge that savvy consumers aquire about the Snapdragon chips in their phone. But you’re not going to see Qualcomm do a “Qualcomm inside” campaign. “It’s always been my philosophy that if I have a dollar to spend, I spend it on engineering as opposed to advertising because I know what I get out of that for the most part,” Jacobs said. “It’s just been sort of the way the company has been.”

So with Microsoft developing Windows 8 for mobile, and the increasing prevalence of Qualcomm’s low-power ARM (Advanced RISC Machine) processors, will we ever see Qualcomm chips moving into laptops, desktops, and more conventional computing systems?

“We see that as a huge opportunity for us going forward, particularly with Microsoft putting big Windows onto the ARM platform,” Jacobs said. “What consumers are going to see out of this are very, very aggressive form factors.” Devices will become much thinner and lighter, with better battery life, he predicted, and they will be always on and always connected. ” There are companies that have talked about ARM-based server chips and all that kind of stuff. Once it gets started, I think the sky’s the limit.”

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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.