Six years ago, when Qualcomm collaborated with Google on...

Six years ago, when Qualcomm collaborated with Google on the first Android smartphones, “I remember people telling us, ‘This will never be successful,'” Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf said Thursday in a keynote webcast on the Qualcomm website (http://bit.ly/1wwRXcX) from his company’s Uplinq 2014 developers conference in San Francisco. Fast forward to 2014, Mollenkopf said, and more than a billion smartphones cumulatively have been shipped with Qualcomm Snapdragon processors built in. “So it’s really been an incredible, incredible thing, and it’s just the beginning,” he said. “If you look at the scale of what we're working on today, last year, calendar year 2013, we shipped a little bit shy of 750 million chipsets. That’s more than twice the number of worldwide PCs. It’s incredible scale that happens in mobile.” Qualcomm estimates there are more that 1,350 models of Snapdragon-equipped devices announced or commercially available throughout the world, Mollenkopf said. “But what we're excited about is that scale is actually going to go into a number of adjacent markets and adjacent categories. We look at every area of consumer electronics, and it’s leveraging all the scale and technology that we're developing and others are developing in mobile.” For example, Qualcomm views tablets as “a scaled-up smartphone,” Mollenkopf said. “They use the same ecosystems. It’s not a secret as to why they use the same chipsets and the same technology.” As for computing, it’s “definitely about mobile computing today,” and “it’s going to be about wearable computing and pervasive computing in the future,” he said. In cars, they're “really all about trying to get connected now,” he said. “You have people that are trying to decide when to buy their car based on what type of modem is actually going to be included in the car. It’s incredible.” If one looks at the Internet today, “the really interesting things” are no longer happening “on your desk,” he said. They're happening “in your pocket through the phone, and where they're really going is that all these different devices are going to be connected together.” Qualcomm predicts that more than 8 billion new smartphones will ship globally in the next five years, he said. “And in the developed world, many of those smartphones are going to be connected to a sea of many other devices, and those devices are not only going to be connected to the smartphone, but connected to each other.” As a result, Qualcomm sees “an enormous amount of innovation and experimentation that comes [into] play when people start to innovate at the edge of the network,” he said.