Qualcomm To Make India Major Brew Hub

[Arun 795]

Monday, 06 June , 2005, 09:20 AM

San Diego:

The US-based telecom major Qualcomm is set to make India one of its major hubs for developing mobile applications using its BREW platform. The company, which has nearly 1,500 Indian engineers at its US facility, plans to tap the software skills in India. It is also aggressively working towards introducing data capabilities such as e-mail access on low-cost handsets.

Peggy Johnson, President, Qualcomm Internet Services, said, "We are very happy with the developers in India and we would like to tap the software skills available to develop applications not just for the Indian operators, but also for other markets.''

Qualcomm had recently set up a research and development centre in Hyderabad to support applications for 3G services.

BREW is a platform that enables application developers, publishers, content providers, device manufacturers, operators and customers to use Qualcomm's technology to build applications for mobile devices.

Johnson, speaking on the sidelines of the BREW Conference 2005, said gaming and music would be the drivers of mobile applications in the coming months. Six of the 10 BREW-based developers in India including webdunia.com and phoneytunes.com participated in the conference in San Diego, California.

Johnson said education is another segment where applications could be developed specially for the Indian market.

To address the enterprise market, Qualcomm is pushing forward its BREW for the business portfolio.CDMA-based operators including Reliance Infocomm and Tata Teleservices plan to deploy these solutions on their networks.

According to industry sources, Reliance Infocomm is in negotiations with handset manufacturers to launch business applications on the lines of Airtel's tie-up with Blackberry to offer mail and Internet access on the move.

On the introduction of low-cost handsets, Kanwalinder Singh, President, Qualcomm India and SAARC, said the company was working with vendors to enhance data capability on the entry-level phones through the BREW platform.