Paul Jacobs began his talk by expressing great optimism about the health and robustness of the US cellphone business
He pointed out that US cell phone users consume four times the cell phone minutes of European users.
He brought up some of the past debates between technologies that have come up in recent years, e.g. is Wi-Fi going to disrupt cellular? Is the phone going to disrupt the PC? Jacob sees the myriad of competing technologies as feeding off each other, driving innovation and the growth of the market. To drive home that point he showed growth numbers for cellular carriers worldwide, which continue to add subscribers and grow revenues at a 30%+ rate. He sees low power technology innovation as a crucial issue to continued growth.
Jacobs is also keen on the “SmartBook” category, ultra low-power netbooks that are 3G enabled
For these types of devices, Jacobs showed off Qualcomm’s “SnapDragon” low-power communications platform.
He expressed enthusiasm about the business model behind Amazon’s Kindle, the first wireless device to come without a monthly subscription. He is also keen on Brew’s free Skype service which they are making available to pre-paid cellular customers. In Asia, he pointed out there at 100M+ 3G subscribers already, where in the US 3G is embroyonic (Qualcomm is on the LTE side of the 4G fence, vs WiMax). He is also keen on the FloTV mobile TV service, which has partnerships wth NBC, FOX, CNBC, CBS, CNN, ESPN, to deliver video content to US subscribers.
He showed some examples of how Qualcomm is diversifying into health care instrumentation, new types of sensors including gyroscopes and MEM’s; and gaming platforms. His primary vision is that Qualcomm is going to build a wireless ecosystem around SnapDragon.