[By Hubert Nguyen, Ubergizmo]

EXCERPTS

Dr. Paul Jacobs, Qualcomm’s CEO, has introduced mobile computing as a “force of social change”, as he referred to the recent events in the middle east during which people “armed only with mobile phones” could document facts on the ground and share them with the world, instantly.

And that’s only the beginning. Qualcomm estimates that data usage will grow by up to 12X by 2015. The future will be dominated by both HSPA+ and LTE networks it seems. Both networks are powered by Qualcomm technologies.

Yet, Qualcomm reminds the Uplinq attendees that feature phones (“non smartphones”) will still represent 500M units in 2015. Although they are not sexy, this segment still represents a huge opportunity in the industry. Paul Jacobs calls developers to cease their “moment” and build apps that can reach “hundreds of millions”.

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CAA, Creative Artists Agency:  CAA has announced the creation (with Qualcomm) of a “creative mobile lab”. The goal of this new entity is to create much better entertainment applications and will cover video games, music and movies. CML calls developers to join its rank – although the incentive for developers wasn’t really clear during the keynote.

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3D content: of course, there’s no escaping from the 3D push of the entire industry. We’ve been shown games, demos and movies that show stereo 3D in all its glory. Yet, this is something that end-users mostly don’t “desire” yet. The glasses-less devices might change this, but the overall opinion of most people that we talk to is: I don’t want to wear glasses.

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Augmented Reality:  Qualcomm’s Augmented Reality (AR) software development kit (SDK) is coming to iOS – for free.  Qualcomm has been a big believer of AR for a long time. There was a nice demo in which upon looking at DVD boxes thought a smartphone camera, the movie trailer would be played on the box via AR. The main challenge of AR, in my personal opinion, is the lack of an efficient (real-time) visual recognition engine, along with a complete database that should power it. This is going to be a multi-year (or decade) effort. When it works, AR can be refined and improved for years to come, and it will need a steady supply of processing power – this is a big stake for Qualcomm and others.

Dreamworks was talking about how “AR” was going to simplify DVD pre-sales, but what they were showing was really a QR-code (2D barcode)… I don’t see how it related to AR, and frankly Asian countries had that a decade ago. Another “AR” application was the ability to take pictures on top of which the movie characters were added. Again, not really “AR-ish” for me.

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See the full article here: http://www.ubergizmo.com/2011/06/qualcomm-keynote-uplinq-2011/