San Diego’s Qualcomm Embraces Experiment in Incentive Prizes

encourage third party developers to use the chipmaker’s technology. As Paul Jacobs, Qualcomm’s chairman and CEO noted during his keynote talk, almost three out of five presenters at the Uplinq conference are third-party developers. Jacobs also announced another new incentive prize contest during his talk, this time offering a total of $200,000 in cash prizes for a Windows RT Metro Style App Developer Contest.

The $25,000 grand prize from the codefest went to Rich Stoner, a research engineer at UC San Diego, for demonstrating an app that could be used to detect signs of autism in 12-month-old infants, which is about two years earlier than is possible with conventional tests. Stoner’s app took advantage of eye-tracking capabilities built into the Snapdragon platform, and his app also won the $5,000 prize in the category for “best prototype app using facial processing.”

Winners in the other four categories were:

—Best multi-screen experience using Qualcomm’s AllJoyn technology: Car Join, an app that uses the near-proximity technology to quickly establish direct peer-to-peer networks to provide certain health data and call 911 after a car crash.

—Best HTML5 Web app: Qgram, which combines three Qualcomm Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to apply colorful filters to smartphone photos.

—Best Windows Phone app: Expensify, which helps users track and manage their business-related expenses.

—Best context awareness app: Breadcrumbs, which uses Snapdragon’s GPS technology to passively track user activities.

When I talked with Stoner this morning, he said he had been invited to attend Qualcomm’s Uplinq conference to meet the company’s technical staff and to see the kind of work that’s

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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.