Qualcomm is taking another leap forward in advancing our wireless health efforts by launching our first wireless health patient program right here at Qualcomm’s San Diego on-campus Health Center.

As the saying goes, “Challenges bring out the best in us.” And now we’re facing a formidable one: The 1000x challenge.

Here in sunny San Diego, it’s easy to lose perspective on the global smartphone adoption rate. Everywhere I look, I see mobile devices being used as nothing short of a sixth sense. From one-off activities like friends checking the weather or a Padres score, or a local store owner running a small business from the palm of their hand, smartphone activity is enveloping our daily lives.

Mobile phone users, whether they want to admit it or not, are becoming more reliant on texting and emailing than making a typical voice call—and rightfully so. While there have been major advances in the areas of text recognition (i.e., dictation, visual voicemail, ) and email integration (i.e., POP3, OMAP, Exchange), the same can’t really be said about quality of voice calls. Well, that’s about to change.

When I think of last year’s devastating tsunami that ravaged the northeastern coast of Japan, I recall the first images I saw on the news. The horror of ocean waters crashing onto the land, causing incomprehensible damage was astonishing. As with any natural disaster, we are left with the overwhelming task of rebuilding communities and restoring critical social services to displaced citizens.

On June 11, 2012, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services announced that, after only ten short weeks of accepting applications, it had reached the Fiscal Year 2013 cap on congressionally mandated H-1B work visas. This came as a surprise to many, considering it took six months to reach the cap for Fiscal Year 2012 and more than eight months for Fiscal Year 2011.

Quick question for you—what technology do you use when you make a voice call on your shiny new 4G LTE smartphone? Answer - 3G, and in some cases even 2G!

Through decades of research, the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (NCTAF) has documented the importance of collaboration in enabling teachers to improve their practice. Often, however, the norm for teachers in the United States is to work in isolation, cut off from colleagues and from technology that can help them access resources and expertise. This isolation is especially detrimental for new teachers, who are at the highest risk for leaving the profession.

Before the introduction of Qualcomm’s 2net™ Platform, medical devices were siloed and biometric data was locked within proprietary systems and uniquely configured devices. The launch of Qualcomm Life’s cloud-based service liberated this data, creating new possibilities for end-to-end device connectivity.

Over the past few years, Microsoft has used Snapdragon processors in all of their Windows Phones. Inside every Window Phone 7 handset was either a Snapdragon S1 or S2 processor. The close collaboration between Microsoft and Qualcomm has resulted in a sea of fast and powerful smartphones with great battery life. So fast, in fact, that Microsoft invited anyone to come into a Windows Store to get “Smoked by Windows Phone.”

Each year, an astonishing 7.6 million children around the world die before their fifth birthday. The heartbreaking fact is that a large majority of these deaths are preventable. For the first time in history, the technology and the knowledge now exist to address this terrible problem by bringing life-saving interventions, even to those that live in the hardest-to-reach areas.

Midwives in the Philippines now have access to a set of mobile health applications, thanks to a newly-expanded project by Qualcomm’s Wireless Reach™ initiative, the Philippines Department of Health and the Tarlac Provincial Health Office.

The Snapdragon™ S4 processor is incredibly cool. I mean that literally.

Today, health care apps and medical devices are coming to the market and big players are jumping into the field faster than our professions’ and industries’ DNA can adapt. I observe this in action every day in my role as a physician, employee health advocate, and technology proponent.

Executives from the leading consumer electronics, healthcare, technology and communications companies are convening today at the 7th Annual Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance Convergence Summit here in San Diego.

In today’s data crazy, texting, tweeting, socially networked world, I think people still value a good “clear” voice conversation. Don’t you agree? Even more importantly, a large portion of mobile operator revenues come from voice services. And as usual, we at Qualcomm are at it again, bringing the best possible voice experience through our HD Voice offerings. So much so that Sprint announced their first HD Voice device running on Snapdragon recently.