Qualcomm Raises Guidance

Qualcomm on June 11 increased financial guidance for the quarter ending June 28, citing increased demand for its mobile chipsets, but cautioned that the financial crisis was still hurting the value of its investments.

The chipmaker boosted guidance on revenues and operating income but held off on providing earnings per share guidance due to possible unrealized losses in the upcoming quarter.

Quarterly revenue estimates increased to $2.67 billion to $2.77 billion, up from $2.4 billion to $2.6 billion.

Snapdragon Device Makes Debut June 2

Luis Pineda, senior vice president of marketing and product development at Qualcomm, announced a new mobile computing device on May 28 which the chipmaker plans to unveil at the Computex Taipei 2009 show June 2-6. It’s powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chipset.

The “Smartbook” has the appearance and larger screen of a Netbook, but it functions like a smart phone with Wi-Fi access, always-on 3G network and location-based services. It will have a longer battery life of up to 10 hours as well as HD video playback.

The user experience will closely match that which is available on smart phones, Pineda said during a Webinar presentation.

Qualcomm Rolls Out Platform-Agnostic App Store

Qualcomm said May 18 that it was offering a service that enables mobile devices on any network to access an online application store.

Called Plaza Retail, the service will be platform-neutral and allow developers and mobile operators to sell applications to mobile users.

“It’s completely agnostic. The good thing for Qualcomm is that it opens up a much larger market for us,” said marketing director Sunni Tweet, who added that Plaza Retail will also work on phones without Qualcomm-designed chipsets.

Qualcomm Helps 211 Give Callers the 411 on Flu, Fires

By NED RANDOLPH – 5/18/2009
San Diego Business Journal Staff

The 211 San Diego assistance line has been up and running for five years, but local residents came face to face with it en masse during the 2007 wildfires that displaced 500,000 people and inundated the nonprofit’s call centers, which logged 120,000 calls in 10 days.

The service went off-line before being rebooted by Qualcomm, which stepped in and offered its information technology staff and data center to get the service going again.