In Search of New Markets, Qualcomm Moves Uplinq to Silicon Valley

Qualcomm BREW Conference 2001 (Qualcomm photo)

About 800 people flocked to the downtown San Diego Marriott Hotel and Marina back in 2001, when Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]) staged its first BREW developers conference. The San Diego-based company created BREW, an acronym for Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless, as a technology platform that would make it easier for independent programmers to create games, mapping services, and other programs for mobile phones and other wireless devices of the day.

The Wall Street Journal described it as “an ambitious move to assume a Microsoft-style role in the wireless industry.”

But last year, Qualcomm decided to back away from BREW—and this year the wireless giant is holding its annual developers conference outside of San Diego for the first time in 13 years.

So if the “Uplinq ” conference that Qualcomm is hosting next month in San Francisco isn’t all about BREW, what is it about? And why did the company move its big developers conference out of town?

In an invitation I received, Qualcomm bills this year’s Uplinq 2014 as the premier (and only OS-agnostic) mobile developer conference. When I asked why Qualcomm had moved Uplinq to downtown San Francisco, the official response was:

“We listened to the needs and interests of the developer and wireless communities and decided to move Uplinq 2014 to the Bay Area. As Uplinq 2014 is aimed at developers and technology providers, the move makes sense given the Bay Area boasts the largest concentration of high-tech companies, including Qualcomm.”

In other words, as mobile apps have moved increasingly to the iOS and Android platforms, Qualcomm decided to hold its conference in close proximity to Apple and Google—where the developer community is most concentrated—and where Qualcomm itself is estimated to now have about 2,000 employees.

While Qualcomm continues to support BREW, senior engineer Steve Sprigg wrote in a blog last year that the company had decided “to step back from aggressively pushing our BREW OS and app download business in favor of other emerging smartphone and tablet platforms.”

“Qualcomm is a big believer in

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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.