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United States: Putting Everything on a Mobile Network(TendersInfo (India) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) There s a theme emerging here in Las Vegas at the CTIA conference: Add mobile data capability to absolutely everything, including video cameras and the human body. That quasi-science-fiction notion is being tossed around at the show by mainstream companies like Qualcomm and AT&T. At a lunch for the press and industry analysts on Thursday, AT&T discussed its new emerging devices division, which is working on wireless applications for consumer electronics devices, including game machines, electronic book readers and video and still cameras. Glenn Lurie, president of the division, said that his group was talking to a whole range of device makers from garage start-ups to billion-dollar companies along with the major retailers. The business models for these devices are still developing, but Mr. Lurie said that, for example, camera owners might pay each time they send a video from the device over AT&T s network. Pointedly, he suggested but did not state outright that AT&T plans to compete in the e-book market, helping competitors go head to head with Amazon s Kindle. There will be quite a few other people building these, he said. Mr. Lurie said AT&T s interest was in creating incremental, profitable businesses through a variety of revenue streams. But there is a more fundamental concept here too: AT&T and its wireless brethren are trying to find new reasons to keep people connected, at more times and using more minutes or data network capacity, particularly as growth has slowed for wireless providers and handset makers. Qualcomm, the San Diego-based phone chip maker, is also trying to expand the wireless market into health care. On Monday, the company announced that it was sponsoring a health care institute in San Diego that would develop wireless applications in the field. For instance, the company has talked about using wirelessly connected patches that a person would wear. These would measure vital signs and send the results to a nearby device that could then send them over the network to health care providers. Paul Jacobs, the chairman and chief executive of Qualcomm, said in an interview that he could imagine such technology monitoring someone s heart or blood sugar. The advantage, Mr. Jacobs said, is that patients could be on the go while being monitored, rather than incurring hospital or inpatient costs. Also, he said, the wireless technology could allow for constant monitoring (while a heart patient is living daily life, for example) rather than periodic in-person spot checks. Mr. Jacobs said the business could be good for Qualcomm as a wireless provider, but also for a health care system that he said is sorely broken. Copyright © : Euclid Infotech Pvt. Ltd. Provided by Syndigate.info an Albawaba.com company (c) 2009 : Euclid Infotech Pvt. Ltd. |