By Prince Osuagwu

After sponsoring the training of about 30 application developers at the just concluded Mobile Web West Africa (MWWA 2013) in Lagos. Senior Director Business Development West Africa at Qualcomm, Mr Alex Dadson granted Hi-Tech Interview in his Victoria Island Lagos office to talk in details, reasons behind that gesture. At the end of the interview, we were able to discover that Qualcomm has the plan to ensure that every Nigerian owns a smartphone, since that is what is driving developments across the world. Here are the details:

Qualcomm is a major player in Nigeria, how do you help in the growth of the economy?

We are essentially a technology enabler for the wireless industry. All around the world, what we do is generate ideas around how wireless or mobility can impart people’s life. And with these ideas we develop technology which becomes our popular chipsets that are acceptable by all the Original Equipment Manufacturers, OEMs. This chipsets are used for high-end chipset and also entry level chipsets.

The unique nature of our chipsets is such that the same application you can run on high-end devices can also run on low end devices and sometimes with some limitations but in general you can run the app across the entire family of chipsets that we have. The long and short of it is that at Qualcomm we enable technology for the wireless ecosystem as our technology is used by network operators, Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and application developers.

Mr Dadson

There are competitions in these areas you have just described. What stands you out, really?

We are not looking at what others are doing. In any case we do not think anybody is a competitor particularly if the effort is geared towards enriching the mobile ecosystem. At Qualcomm, we are constantly innovating along the features that are embodied by our Chipsets. We have very advanced graphics processing unit in our chipsets with solid computational unit, good connecting technology in form of modem, excellent radios that talk to 3G and 4G networks and these are all innovations that enable the end users have great experience with their mobile devices and enjoy online mobile content and applications running on their mobile devices.

One other thing we also do is look at the challenges and critical needs in the market we operate and then with our technology we provide the needed solution to make life easier for people. So whatever we discover to be a major problem in a place, just like as power is now a problem in Nigeria and other emerging markets, we innovate in the area of power management in phones that have our chipsets.

So what technology can take care of this identified problem in Nigeria, for instance?

We have a technology called the Asynchronous multi- process technology. It improves and optimizes the phone battery by monitoring how the various chords in the chipsets of the phone are operating and making sure the applications draw minimal power thereby extending the battery life. Again, there is another innovation, the Augmented Reality (AR) technology. This is a computer based application which actually augments your reality. A phone with Augmented Reality app has the ability to scan and recognize images and then overlay on the screen extra information about the reality you are observing.

For example, if you want to know the outside temperature, you could simply point your phone to an outside window and then you certainly will see the actual temperature of the environment on your phone. AR is exciting and the potential of the AR app in this market is incredible. We have demonstrated the use of the AR app in one edition of the Genevive magazine which was augmented with an AR app. In that edition of the magazine, if you open a particular page and see an article, your smart phone recognizes an artiste and plays content related to the artiste.

This is one of such practical applications of AR which makes the readers have unique experience with the magazine. It was on the use of this innovation we are training the 30 Nigerian app developers. Once they are through with the training, they should be able to build commercial applications in the Nigeria market with the Augmented Reality.

Qualcomm is now synonymous with Snapdragon. What is this thing about Snapdragon?

Snap Dragon is essentially our chip set brand. Like I said, we come up with various chip set with very esoteric name and we decided to make our chip set a bit more digestible by the mass market so we came up with this snapdragon brand which really encompasses a family of processors used in the mass market devices and other high end products.  Devices like  Samsung S4 uses our snapdragon processor.

QUALCOMM is committed to the research and development to infuse even more technology into our processed base and to let them know how well differentiated this chip sets are from the competition. I think the message is now catching in Nigeria. We want everyone to buy smart phones because it contains the QUALCOMM chip set and we will not rest in our oars until we are sure that every Nigerian has a smartphone.

Today we have $100  smartphones, you can get a smartphone that sells for N12,000 That is because we are building our chipsets in a way they can aid cost acquisition of mobile devices without sacrificing capability. So some of this $100 dollar smartphones  are just as capable as the higher branded devices. They are all running similar versions of Andriod and they have gigabyte processes in them, they have very capable modem in them and they can really be used very effectively by major segment of the society.