UPLINQ 2012: Paul Jacobs Keynote Touts Ecosystem, Challenges Intel and NVIDIA

Today, Qualcomm kicked off the start of Uplinq 2012 with a keynote by Dr Paul Jacobs. It began with a show of dancers showing displaying themes that Qualcomm considers to be important. This was followed by the appearance of Paul Jacobs, CEO of Qualcomm.

(We will have video of Dr Jacob's Keynote here soon, thank you for your patience.)


Dr Paul Jacobs takes the stage

Jacobs began by talking about expected global figures for mobile: over one billion mobile phones to sell by 2014, and over 66 billion apps by 2016. “Global data revenues grew 23 percent last year to $320 billion. To put that in perspective, that's more than the worldwide revenues generated by the music industry, plus Hollywood movies, plus ISP services, plus cable TV services combined.” He continued with the role of mobile development in various fields such as Snapdragon processors showing up in televisions, cars using mobile processors which allows them to have car specific apps, and mobile healthcare and fitness. He went on to mention that globally, there are already more than six billion mobile connections to the internet.

The primary theme for today’s keynote was “Connecting the Internet of Everything”. The goal of this message is to eventually have every device be internet capable, able to be used and accessed remotely. This includes using mobile devices to access home appliances, medical devices, cloud services, etc

This segued well into the next topic which was AllJoyn. AllJoyn is an open source framework for connecting devices using a proximal ad hoc network, meaning that devices on the same network within close proximity can interact and share content. To showcase this technology, Dr Jacobs introduced the CEO of Nero, Jurgen Kurz.

Kurz began by discussing Nero Kwik Media, which launched last year, and will be continually increasing support for different platforms. Kwik Media is currently on 50 million devices, the program itself is designed to allow users to access their content from any storage medium they have, whether it be locally, on Dropbox, or even Facebook, and stream it in the correct format. Kwik Media is most effective when utilizing AllJoyn to interact between devices. This ability was demonstrated by having Kurz take a picture of Dr Jacobs using a smartphone. The picture immediately showed up on a nearby tablet, and was added into a slideshow on the fly, which was then presented on a television. This was to show the multiplatform capabilities of AllJoyn.

Paul Jacobs then returned to the main stage and mentioned the app that Qualcomm is using for Uplinq this year, Bizzabo. Bizzabo allows attendees to network with other conference attendees; it is a social networking app with proximal awareness.

Jacobs went on to showcase Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon technology. Qualcomm’s goal is to provide “PC-like performance” which also having great battery life. Jacobs says this is accomplished by Snapdragon processors because Qualcomm builds the CPUs and GPUs from the ground up, and they optimize the software to run on those chips. He also said that even Qualcomm’s dual core Snapdragons outperform competitors’ quad core processors. In a test of 13 benchmarks, the dual core Snapdragon beat out the competitors’ quad core by a margin of 20% on 9 of the tests and 100% on 3 of the tests. He then showed a video of three phones running a benchmark with sticks of butter on each of them, the phone running the Qualcomm processor melted the butter at a dramatically slower rate than the two competitors’ phones.