Qualcomm Ventures’ Kashyap Sees QPrize Drawing Better Entries, Especially Overseas

Qualcomm Ventures’ Nagraj Kashyap told me back in 2009 that the economic slowdown was a key factor when San Diego-based Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]) decided to set aside $550,000 and to launch its first “QPrize” competition. Qualcomm designed the incentive prize to provide seed money to very early stage mobile technology startups.

When I sat down again with Kashyap again yesterday, he said the U.S. has largely recovered from the economic meltdown, but the same can’t be said for other regions in the world—particularly India and China. “There’s always a few organizations available [overseas] to provide seed funding,” he said, “but it’s not to the same level as in the United States, and I think a lot of technology companies are really struggling.”

As a result, Kashyap says the quality of applicants for the QPrize has really gone up in the second round, which officially started with the wireless company’s announcment last September during the Demo conference in San Jose, CA.

Kashyap, who is leaving in a few days for the annual Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, says there also have been a few enhancements for applicants to the QPrize investment seed competition. Among them:

—Microsoft’s BizSpark program, which offers free software, development tools, and technical support to startup companies around the world, is reaching out to the recently announced finalists. As my colleague Greg Huang has reported previously in Seattle, Microsoft’s BizSpark was conceived with the goal of helping regional software economies—as well as getting

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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.