Qualcomm, the San Diego wireless technology giant, launched an internal “wireless fitness challenge” almost four weeks ago for a group of its employees—testing the idea of using similar workplace competitions to promote awareness of wireless health technologies.

When vice president Don Jones kicked off the challenge on July 14, he wrote in a Qualcomm blog that 32 employees were organized into four teams for the eight-week challenge to increase activity and lose weight. Contestants got an armband monitor from Pittsburgh, PA-based BodyMedia or an Internet-connected wireless weight scale from Withings of Issy-les-Moulineaux, France, (or both) to capture weight loss, calories burned, sleep, and overall activity levels.

“These devices wirelessly send our health data to the cloud, where we have built a platform that seamlessly ‘mashes up’ our information from both devices and leverages the BodyMedia analytics,” Jones writes in his blog. The results will be weighed, so to speak, to determine the winners, who also happen to be the biggest losers. (In an aside, Jones tells me by e-mail, “I doubt the Fortune 500 would get behind the ‘biggest loser’ branding.”)

While the challenge looks a lot like a publicity stunt, Matthew Holt of San Francisco-based Health 2.0 said during a mobile health and social networking conference in San Diego last week that there has been a big explosion in employer-based health, wellness, and fitness initiatives that rely on emerging mobile health and social networking technologies.

“We will also be posting follow up blogs, videos, check-ins with some of the team members, etc.,” Qualcomm spokesman Garrett Ponder told me recently by e-mail. Ponder, who also has been participating in the challenge, tweeted on July 29 that he burned 4,715 calories the previous day. On July 31, another participant tweeted: “Just 2 weeks & already over 1 Million calories burned by the 32 peeps in the Qualcomm Wireless Fitness Challenge!”

You get the idea.

Ponder also routed a few Xconomy questions to Don Jones, and provided these answers:

Xconomy: After two weeks, how would you describe the progress so far, both for the team and you personally?

Don Jones: So far, the progress has been good. On a daily basis at Qualcomm you see participants taking the stairs instead of the elevator, tweeting about their workouts, and genuinely focusing more on their activity. The real-time feedback from wireless health devices provides additional motivation throughout the day. Personally, the BodyMedia armband has been helpful because I bring it everywhere with me. In the past two weeks I have traveled to London, back to San Diego, and to the East Coast for business. Being able to monitor my activity during lengthy travel is eye-opening.

X: And supposing this gets rolled out to the rest of Qualcomm, and then to other big companies, do you see it becoming a competition, like “The Biggest Loser”?

DJ: The plan is to roll out a wireless health program offering to the rest of Qualcomm employees, and eventually broaden it to corporations in several geographical regions and industry sectors. We want to highlight how wireless technologies enable new connected health applications and services, which will transform the way we go about managing our own fitness and wellness. By collecting and mashing up data from multiple devices, you can create personal feedback dashboards and incentives that are both relevant and unique to individual consumers.

X: How are the teams organized?

DJ: 32 members of the wireless health team are participating in the Qualcomm Wireless Fitness Challenge. Spanning 4 countries and 3 continents, we have interns and executives competing against one another to increase activity and weight loss to improve overall health.

Asked for an update this morning, Ponder says via e-mail: “We are almost halfway done and no mutinies so far. We plan to put out a video blog with testimonials from a few participants this week (likely tomorrow) and I am currently pulling together stats on the total calories burned/pounds lost for all participants…I had a big day because my wife and I ran/walked about 7 miles and then ran a bunch of errands, but don’t reveal my secrets to the rest of the competitors. (smiley emoticon.)

Qualcomm chatting all about the next generation
Qualcomm is claiming that its next generation of Snapdragon chips will bring greater power to phones than today’s gaming consoles.

S3 is the current top-of-the-range processor from the chip developer, with mysterious S4 ‘Krait’ devices set to be launched at the end of the year. Qualcomm has said that the S4 devices will include 28nm quad core processors.

The point of inflexion will come, according to Qualcomm, when it releases that Krait Snapdragon S4 chip, with upgraded Adreno 225 GPU – the power of this will equate to being able to display more fluid and faster graphics on your phone than even a PS3.

Power to you

It unlikely this means that Sony and Microsoft will just pack up and go home, but consider being able to plug your phone into a TV and use it like a console – either with the phone in your hand or via a separate controller. That’s a pretty mad scenario considering where phone technology was even five years ago.

The improvements to these integrated chip systems means that we’ll be seeing quad core phones with radically enhanced GPUs in the next year or so – whether this will be enough to convince studios to release the games capable of taking advantage of this power remains to be seen.

What do you think? Would you swap a PS3 for a phone for the added convenience or would you just feel like too much of an early adopter when you have to tell your friends?

Qualcomm’s Android-ready hardware and patents may be the solution to the hit-or-miss quality of Android phones and Google’s ongoing intellectual property fiasco.
Google Android has been incredibly successful, but it has also been wrapped in a series of problems. A good deal of the problems come from Google’s attempt to tear down the software licensing model Microsoft had been using for years. Much like if you try to put a round peg in a square hole, this kind of thing results in problems.

Interestingly enough, Qualcomm has come up with what may be the best, though least well-known, way to make a better Android phone. I was on-site at Qualcomm this week, and I think I can explain why some of the most successful Android phones run Qualcomm technology.

The Microsoft World
In a Microsoft world, Microsoft makes the platform, tends to get most of the profit, and pays for most of the marketing. The way this typically works, Microsoft delivers a very complete and locked-down software product to the OEMs, whether they build PCs or phones. These OEMs pay Microsoft, and Microsoft kicks back a percentage, which goes directly to that OEM’s marketing department to sell the device. In many cases, virtually the entire marketing budget for a new PC or Microsoft phone is sourced from this process.

The OEMs complained up a blue streak that this model didn’t allowed them to differentiate. Basically, rather than Microsoft providing outsourced software for them (effectively serving as their underlings) they had all become outsourced hardware for Microsoft (they were Microsoft’s underlings). In short they really didn’t like working for Microsoft.

The Android Problem
Google parachuted into this world with Android. The company gave it away for free, didn’t lock it down, and left it unfinished in order to address this huge concern about differentiation. However this became, particularly for tablets, the round peg in a square hole. The OEMs didn’t have the skill set to finish the product, because in a Microsoft world, they didn’t need it. Smartphones and tablets were more like PCs then they were like regular phones. Google didn’t kick back marketing money because it wasn’t being paid. The savings should have allowed the OEMs to fund marketing themselves, but instead they went for more aggressive pricing, leaving nothing for marketing.

So instead of getting better differentiated products, we generally ended up with very similar, less reliable, under-marketed products. There were exceptions. Motorola’s Xoom tablet got a lot of marketing, but was both unfinished and overpriced — to pay for that marketing. Verizon stepped and did the marketing for Motorola and HTC on the Droid phones, but created a new problem for the OEMs because the Droid branding belonged to Verizon – the OEMs were back to being “outsourced hardware” again.

Some of the Android phones are good, many aren’t, and no Android Tablet has even worried Apple yet. More troubling is that Android typically does better with carriers who don’t have the iPhone, suggesting it is just a placeholder until the iPhone gets to that carrier in the latest version.

Google had a good idea, the market just wasn’t ready for it, and Google didn’t know how to fix that problem. Oh, and there is the little problem of 37 ongoing lawsuits, most of which are against the OEMs because the intellectual property in Android isn’t properly protected. Or more accurately put, because folks like Steve Jobs think Google stole it.

In short, under Google, OEMs aren’t subservient to Microsoft anymore, but they are still screwed.

Qualcomm’s fix
Qualcomm is one of a handful of vendors that have a complete hardware package for Android — all of the components from processors, to graphics, to modems and radios. It is even developing screen technology that could be used to more positively differentiate some phones with better battery life and better outdoor view ability.

Qualcomm also has one of the largest patent portfolios in the business, and one of the largest software units. That may mean the company can indemnify more of the phone and better assure the quality of devices that use the full suite of Qualcomm’s offerings. The indemnification part is weak, largely because much of the exposure is sourced in Google and not in anything Qualcomm can do. But the ability to better assure the quality of the phone by helping to complete it is not.

What is interesting is that many of the folks who use Qualcomm’s hardware don’t use their software services, so you can’t just say that a Qualcomm-based phone will be better.

The irony appears to be that there is a problem, there appears to be most of a fix, but the industry doesn’t seem to understand either.

Android isn’t working
Selling lots of products that then get wrapped with litigation or don’t sell isn’t being successful. Google came up with an interesting new alternative to the Microsoft world, but didn’t fix the ecosystem to facilitate it. The result is either low quality or rich attorneys, and in some cases both. Qualcomm is taking the interesting path of trying to step in and assure the quality, and at least partially mitigate the litigation risk, but it is having mixed success. Ultimately, it may simply not be able to address the litigation risk effectively. Google’s response this week appears to be to whine about the unfairness of it all, which doesn’t seem to be working.

This leaves the ball in Google’s court. It needs to either embrace Microsoft’s model, or find a way to utilize companies like Qualcomm to modify the ecosystem so that its new model can work. It might also be wise if Google more seriously addressed its intellectual property problem as well.

Guest contributor Rob Enderle is the founder and principal analyst for the Enderle Group, and one of the most frequently quoted tech pundits in the world. Opinion pieces denote the opinions of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views of Digital Trends.

Qualcomm has teamed up with a private high school in Japan to launch a 3G smart phone wireless textbook project to help drop outs and students seeking vocational training earn diplomas.

The effort involves Renaissance Academy in Daigo-cho, Ibaraki, Japan. The school offers specialized and vocational training often outside the classroom. Many of its students work, so having access to coursework via smart phones allows them to study while commuting, on breaks from their jobs and so forth.

Qualcomm’s Wireless Reach Initiative will provide a grant to pay for 500 smart phones, mobile educational content and 3G wireless connectivity to Renaissance Academy students. The students will use the smart phones to access educational content and resources through a 3G wireless network. Students also will be able to download educational applications and take lessons or tests anytime and anywhere using their smart phones.

The company did not disclose the size of the grant

I’ve no doubts in my mind Qualcomm is super serious about the prospects of the augmented reality technology. The company — which we usually know for their chipsets — has a dedicated R&D center in Vienna, Austria that has already released an Android SDK, allowing mobile developers to add AR experiences to their apps. Now they’ve launched an iOS SDK to include all those companies and individuals that make iPhone and iPad apps to the mix.

Available as a free download, Qualcomm’s Augmented Reality SDK for iOS enables developers to use Apple’s XCode and Unity 3 to build “high-performance, interactive 3D AR experiences.”

If you’ve missed our previous posts on the subject, you should know that Qualcomm’s AR platform delivers a broad range of experiences that “entertain, engage and inform consumers” with a new form of interactive media. The platform enables developers to build AR experiences on real world images, such as those used in print media (books, magazines, brochures, tickets, signs) and on product packaging…

As power of applications processors far outpace the power of baseband, the company finds its primary business that of a computing company like Intel rather than in its traditional radio role
SAN DIEGO—At Qualcomm’s Uplinq developer conference this week, there was very little talk of 3G/4G connectivity—a surprise considering Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) is the world’s largest maker of mobile broadband radio chips (CP: Qualcomm struts its mobile gaming stuff). But that may just reflect the direction Qualcomm’s business has taken in recent years. Qualcomm today is much more a computing company than it is a connectivity company.

As handsets have become more sophisticated, the balance of complexity in their embedded silicon has shifted from the radio baseband to the applications and graphics processing units and from signal processing software to application software. There’s plenty of evidence of this trend in the rapid gains Qualcomm has seen in its dedicated app processor Snapdragon business, but at Uplinq, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs hinted that this trend started long before the first Snapdragon chip ever shipped.

Qualcomm’s primary business is in integrated chips that combine the baseband modem and other radio technologies with applications processing. Even the lowliest 2G chip for the most basic talk and text device requires some kind of applications processing capability, but as Jacobs pointed out at a press conference at Uplinq, Qualcomm focuses primarily on the mid-range to high-end of the market, powering the smartphones and feature phones that lean heavily on multimedia. Though there’s no exact way to tease out the value of the app versus the baseband processing in such integrated circuits, Jacobs said it’s fair to say that the sophistication and complexity that go into the apps side is far greater than that of the radio components. If Qualcomm were to sell a stand-alone single-chip radio, it wouldn’t make very much money off of it, Jacobs said. But Qualcomm does sell stand alone Snapdragon processors—though only for high-end computing devices with no 3G/4G connectivity—and those chips certainly aren’t cheap.

In short, it’s fair to look at Qualcomm now as primarily a computing and software company. However, it’s a computing company that owes a good deal of its success to its legacy radio technologies. Though Qualcomm would probably claim it could sell stand-alone Snapdragon processors just as easily as Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) sells stand alone Tegra processors, the fact that even its most sophisticated chips come with multiple radio technologies is nothing to scoff at. Mobile computers need connectivity as much as they need the ability to render polygons and hi-rez videos.

Nvidia isn’t blind to that need either. It just purchased mobile baseband maker Icera, which may eventually produce an integrated modem-apps processor (CP: Nvidia eyes a bigger footprint in the smartphone). Meanwhile Qualcomm certainly isn’t letting its connectivity expertise get rusty. It just closed on its $3.2 billion acquisition of high-powered Wi-Fi chip maker Atheros, adding a powerful local area networking component to its already strong wide area networking portfolio.

But Qualcomm’s shift toward the applications side of the industry was obvious at this year’s Uplinq. While carriers were certainly in attendance, they were by no means the pivot point of the show as they’ve been in previous years. Qualcomm’s feature phone OS BREW made few appearances (Unfiltered: BREW remains quiet at Uplinq) and as mentioned previously, 3G/4G discussions receded to the background. What Qualcomm and its partners talked about was Android, Windows Phone 7 (CP: Nokia’s Elop declares war on Google), augmented reality, 3D video and gaming, peer-to-peer connectivity and above all, the considerable power of Snapdragon. Qualcomm was speaking primarily to a developer and handset audience.

Qualcomm President of Internet Services and Senior Vice President of Software Strategy Rob Chandhok said that Qualcomm is by no means ignoring the operators, but the vendors’ fundamental relationship with them has changed in recent years. While Qualcomm still works closely with them on carrier services and software like BREW and QChat, much of the application and services focus has shifted away from the operator to the handset manufacturer and operating system provider. Five years ago, devices shipped with a bevy of services and apps offered by operators and requiring deep integration down to the silicon layer. That required three-way collaboration between carrier, handset maker and Qualcomm. Today that integration work is done between Qualcomm, the handset maker and the OS provider

Qualcomm is working with Microsoft to get Windows 8 working on its ARM-based processors.

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon range of chips is already powering a huge number of Android smartphones and tablets, but it seems that tablets running Microsoft Windows 8 will also be Snapdragon powered – finally breaking the long-standing relationship between Intel chips and Windows software.

The Snapdragon is a nice chip: a licensed ARM core surrounded by graphics, communications, cache and all the other bits needed to run a mobile computer. The MSM8960, which is shipping next month, has a pair of cores and a load of systems to reduce power consumption. That is, apparently, the one that will appear in the first Windows 8 tablets.

That processor also has an LTE radio (and 3G) built in, for tablet manufacturers selling into markets with 4G networks.

We’ve seen Windows running on ARM hardware before, the BBC is hosting a nice video demonstration from January, and the companies involved are only talking about tablets and mobile computing. But that’s small consolation for Intel, which used to be the undisputed best buddy when it came to Windows.

Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM), lifted the curtain today on a new partnership with Hollywood’s powerful Creative Artists Agency, setting the stage for a new generation of mobile apps that can take advantage of CAA’s portfolio of movie stars, athletes, musicians, and video games.
Qualcomm chairman and CEO Paul Jacobs revealed the new partnership today at Uplinq, the San Diego wireless giant’s annual app developer conference. The new partners said they have formed a joint venture called Creative Mobile Labs (CML) to develop games and other content for mobile devices, with Qualcomm providing the underlying enabling technology and CAA providing the rights to such celebrities as Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, Derek Jeter, and David Beckham.
Michael Yanover, CAA’s director of business development, told the audience that their goal in creating CML is “to find the best talents of story-telling and character development,” and “to create the ultimate mobile app experiences.”
New mobile apps created through CML “may live somewhere between games and entertainment,” Yanover added, “but they will certainly push into both.” In what amounted to a recruiting pitch, Yanover also encouraged app developers in the audience to join CML.
The partnership reflects how Qualcomm has begun to work with major entertainment companies like CAA, Dreamworks, and Sony Ericsson to both expand the reach of its own technology and to enhance the content available for mobile devices. Qualcomm’s Jacobs used examples of advances in audio, 3D, and augmented reality throughout his hour-long presentation.
Qualcomm’s expanded emphasis on content also represents a logical step from the focus of last year’s Uplinq developer’s conference, when the world’s largest maker of wireless chips sought to assure app developers it was working to make its technology compatible with a wide variety of operating systems.
In another example of the company’s expanding mobile media strategy, Jacobs explained how Qualcomm has been working to help Dreamworks promote the sale of DVDs like Kung Fu Panda and Transformers 2 by using augmented reality (AR) technology. The Qualcomm CEO then introduced John Batter, Dreamworks’ president of production feature animation, who showed how a smartphone users will be able to watch an AR preview of a movie by just pointing their camera phone at the back cover of the DVD’s packaging.
Jacobs also invited Rikko Sakaguchi, Sony Ericsson’s executive vice president and chief creation officer, to make a presentation about the company’s Experia product line, which is based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chipset and the Android operating system. In explaining the new Experia Play, which is a smart phone with gaming capabilities, Sakaguchi said Sony Ericsson is focusing increasingly on content and content development.

Qualcomm has announced its first tri-band Wi-Fi chipset that supports communications in the 60GHz band, promising multi-gigabit wireless capability for video streaming and other applications such as wireless docking.

The AR9004TB has been developed by Atheros, which Qualcomm acquired earlier this year, and start-up firm Wilocity.

It is based on new specifications for high-speed Wi-Fi from the Wireless Gigabit Alliance and IEEE 802.11ad working group, and should be capable of delivering over 10 times the data rate of current Wi-Fi.

However, the chip is only due to start sampling to hardware vendors this summer, which means that kit featuring the new standard is not likely to appear before next year.

According to Qualcomm, the AR9004TB is compatible with existing 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi bands, but adds support for seamless hand-off to the new 60GHz standard. This band is being promoted for applications that call for relatively short-range super-fast data transfers, at rates up to about 7Gbit/s.

Such applications are set to include synchronisation of high-definition movies in seconds rather than minutes, wireless connection to hard drives, synchronisation between mobile platforms, streaming video to projectors, TVs and monitors, plus wireless docking for laptops.

“AR9004TB will allow users to enjoy new generations of rich applications in the home and at work while also helping keep their devices and information fully synchronised,” said Amir Faintuch, senior vice president of Qualcomm Atheros’ consumer business unit.

Any products based on the new Wi-Fi hardware should be available in the UK, as regulator Ofcom declared the 59.1GHz to 63.9GHz portion of the wireless spectrum exempt from licensing restrictions last year.

The Wireless Gigabit Alliance is looking to promote interoperability around the new technology, in the same way that the Wi-Fi Alliance did with earlier wireless standards. Its members include Cisco, Broadcom, Intel, Microsoft, Samsung, Panasonic and AMD.

Qualcomm said this week that its Snapdragon application processors are gaining traction with tablet and smartphone makers, with 125 announced devices either on the market or planned, and another 250 devices in development.

That’s up from the San Diego wireless giant’s previous market estimates for Snapdragon, which pegged penetration at 150 devices that were either launched or under development.

Snapdragon is Qualcomm mobile applications processor — the brains powering smartphones and tablets. It gives the company a bigger piece of the smartphone chip market beyond its core baseband modems to connecting the phone to wireless networks.

Qualcomm said its penetration has been especially good for tablet computers, with about 40 tablets in development using Snapdragon processors.

The company said Snapdragon is being used on multiple operating systems, including Android; Android 3.0 Honeycomb, which targets tablets; BlackBerry; Google’s Chrome; Hewlett-Packard’s webOS; Windows Phone 7 and the next version of Windows, which Microsoft has said is being tailored to work on processors based on ARM Holdings architecture. Qualcomm licenses the chip architecture for Snapdragon from ARM, then adds its own technology.

“We are very pleased with the tremendous Snapdragon traction we have been getting with a variety of companies,” said Luis Pineda, senior vice president of product management, computing and consumer products at Qualcomm.

At the Computex conference in Taipei, Qualcomm is showing off Snapdragon processors in devices from HTC, HP, ASUS and others.

In addition, Qualcomm new Atheros subsidiary, which it acquired last month for $3.1 billion, is unveiling a range of Wi-Fi chips the use both the 2.4 gigahertz and 5 gigahertz frequency bands, enabling consumers to access cleaner spectrum for more reliable wireless media streaming that requires interference-free bandwidth and minimal latency. Qualcomm Atheros also will be introducing power line and Ethernet connectivity chips.