Qualcomm has its fingers in a lot of technological pies these days— robots, enhanced eyewear, and even high-tech Lego play sets, to name a few—but the tens of millions of smartphone chipsets it ships every month are still what really pay the bills.
So even as the mobile chip giant spent a good deal of time talking up its Internet of Things (IoT) prospects here at its annual Uplinq developer conference on Thursday, Qualcomm also made sure to wet the beaks of its core mobile device developers with some new software tools for getting more out of LTE-enabled handsets.
The first of those toolkits was the LTE Broadcast SDK, which allows developers to leverage the evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (eMBMS) capabilities of fourth-gen cellular networks to broadcast data over a radio frequency spectrum, but with even more efficiency and variegation than is possible with traditional terrestrial TV broadcasting technologies.
"LTE Broadcast will fundamentally transform the way we experience and interact with live content," said Raj Talluri, a Qualcomm senior vice president of product management. "The availability of our LTE Broadcast SDK will provide developers with the tools to innovate and create applications and services that will enable LTE Broadcast technology to reach its full potential. With a common API, the expansion of LTE Broadcast-based features will broaden the ecosystem, stimulate development, and enhance user experiences in new and unique ways."
Mobile TV is one major application of LTE broadcasting that has captured the industry's imagination, but Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf argued here that it's just the tip of the iceberg. For example, venue-casting and pushing out software updates to mobile devices via LTE broadcasting are some areas ripe for development, he said.
That last application is one that hits home for a company like Facebook. The social network now has some 400 million users who access the site solely on mobile devices, many using Facebook's mobile app to do so, according to Facebook vice president of engineering Jay Parikh.
"We need the experience to be as fast, efficient, and as reliable as possible on mobile," Parikh said, noting that pushing out Facebook software updates to devices more efficiently with LTE broadcasting would be a boon to a company that upgrades its mobile app every couple of weeks.
South Korea's SK Telekom was the first carrier to turn on LTE broadcasting and U.S. carriers like AT&T plan to the same in 2015, Mollenkopf said. The ability to take advantage of Qualcomm's LTE Broadcast technology is baked into the company's latest Snapdragon-based 4G LTE chipsets, he noted.
The second software toolkit released by Qualcomm on Thursday was the LTE Direct SDK, which also allows for development of apps leveraging an LTE capability currently built into Qualcomm's chips.
LTE Direct is described by Qualcomm as an "autonomous, always on, proximal discovery solution," which boiled down means it's a way for mobile devices to discover each other within a limited range. In the case of Qualcomm's solution, that's within a half-kilometer radius of the home device.
The usefulness of this capability seems a little murkier and potentially mired in general concerns over location tracking, though targeted advertising and other location services, as well as any sort of mobilization of people spread out across a few city blocks, seem like places to start. Facebook's Parikh suggested using LTE Direct to quickly organize "impromptu meetups with people in the neighborhood," preferably folks connected to each other via Facebook, naturally.
As far at the privacy concerns go, analyst Patrick Moorhead figured that LTE Direct would have to be opt-in, if only for the efficacy of the technology itself.
"LTE Direct is all about a direct connection between apps and devices that have the capability. As LTE Direct-enabled apps would broadcast the user's information and capabilities, I strongly believe this will be done only with the user's knowledge," said Moorhead, principal analyst for Moor Insights & Strategy. "Because I think it will be self-regulated, it will work itself out. Otherwise, governments will get involved and no one developing LTE Direct wants that, as it slows everything down."
