Qualcomm Steps into the Sun with Focus on Mobile OS Development

the third Uplinq conference is Brew (and its successor, Brew MP), the mobile platform that Qualcomm introduced more than a decade ago. Qualcomm made Brew MP a highlight at its inaugural Uplinq conference in 2010, but no more.

During an afternoon press conference, Jacobs said the company has made the decision to focus Brew software development on feature phones, to “provide capabilities to people who can’t afford smartphones.” Chandhok later told reporters that the shift at Uplinq—from being a Brew conference to a major operating systems conference—is one of the realities of the market that Qualcomm doesn’t control. “Our place in the ecosystem has changed too, and we now see ourselves as platform providers,” Chandhok added.

Qualcomm also used its annual developers’ conference to unleash a series of announcements, including:

—Qualcomm is now collaborating with Cambridge, MA-based Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ: [[ticker:AKAM]]), to develop new protocol enhancements for mobile Web browsing that are intended to accelerate download times and promote greater bandwidth efficiency. More specifically, the collaboration is intended to optimize Akamai’s Aqua Mobile Accelerator performance on Snapdragon-based devices by the fourth quarter of 2012.

—In a separate collaboration with Microsoft, Qualcomm has been making Snapdragon-based test PCs for Windows RT available to select developers. The initiative is intended to allow developers to test their Metro style apps on a physical Windows RT device to ensure optimization. Qualcomm also said it will award a total of $200,000 in cash prizes 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.