Qualcomm wants “to make it easy for people to get on the Internet of Everything,” CEO Steve Mollenkopf said at the AT&T Developer Summit this week. “We are a company that tries to make it easy for people to use technology that’s becoming more and more complex.”
This idea—that complicated technology can be simple—was part of a wide ranging discussion between Mollenkopf and AT&T Mobility CEO Glenn Lurie that was held on the eve of the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. They were joined on stage by Cisco Systems CTO Padmasree Warrier, Andreessen Horowitz partner Benedict Evans, and SmartThings CEO Alex Hawkinson.
The panel talked about the promises and challenges of building the Internet of Everything. “It’s a very complex world that we’re moving to and I think it’s going to require a lot of different technologies,” Mollenkopf said. Qualcomm is a well-equipped to tackle this complexity because it’s “very similar to what we did in the smartphone space,” he said.
Lurie asked about what a mature IOE infrastructure might look like. “Will devices communicate all the way back to the server or back to the cloud or do you think there will be local ecosystems for devices to work with and multiple protocols?” he inquired.
“We think the most interesting things that are going to happen to the Internet—are going to happen at the edge of the Internet. And in some cases you won’t see data that moves very far away from where it’s actually originated,” Mollenkopf said. “I think it’s all going to be connected to the cloud in some way, but the bandwidth that it uses to go back and the frequency that it goes back may be different for different use cases. And those use cases can move with a person, or with a device. There needs to be a lot of complexity in order to do that. “
At the event, Lurie also showed the improved AT&T Digital Life home automation services that support Qualcomm Life’s 2net™ Platform and Hub, a medical-grade device connectivity platform and standalone gateway.
