Open for business
As well as trying to help end-users find stuff, Qualcomm is also looking to get involved in the actual mobile retailing. It has a suite of software called Plaza, which Healy also manages in EMEA.
Plaza is an evolution of Brew, Qualcomm's proprietary mobile platform, which is big in the States, where CDMA technology is commonplace. Apparently the Brew app store remains the most profitable one out there.
But everyone (except Apple, of course) seems to agree that the future is open, so a proprietary platform is not the way forward. Hence Plaza, which is subdivided into Retail and Mobile Internet flavours.
Plaza Retail is a white label mobile retail solution, which Qualcomm intends to sell to anyone looking to establish a mobile retail presence. It's designed to work across multiple platforms and devices. Plaza Mobile Internet is a ‘widget platform', that's designed to assist in the development of web-based content for handsets.
"The mobile Internet has arrived as a mass-market phenomenon so you have to ask how you create a value proposition around it," said Healy. "Plaza is a mobile content economy. Social media use will accelerate and a key thing to happen on mobiles will be to facilitate social interactions."
Of course, Qualcomm can't buy every start-up developing software for the mobile Internet, so it will always have plenty of competition in all the increasing number of areas it operates in. But we have yet to see so many parts of the mobile Internet proposition offered up by one company, so it looks like Qualcomm is positioning itself well for the feeding frenzy to come.
