MoMIT presents: Dr. Paul Jacobs, Chairman of the Board and CEO of Qualcomm
Itay Sharfi
Dr. Paul Jacobs, Chairman of the Board and CEO of Qualcomm
When: 5:30 PM on May 6, 2009 (Wednesday)
Where: Bartos Theater, MIT Media lab (http://tinyurl.com/qualcomm-talk)
What: A presentation titled "What's next in our Wireless lives?"
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Dr. Paul E. Jacobs is chief executive officer of Qualcomm Incorporated and is also chairman of the Company's board of directors. Dr. Jacobs has been the primary driver of Qualcomm's focus on enabling wireless data services, which make the cellphone a tool not only for voice communications, but also the most personal device for entertainment, computing and information access.
Following completion of his Ph.D. in 1989 and a year as a post-doctoral researcher at a French government lab in Toulouse, Dr. Jacobs joined the company fulltime in 1990 as a development engineer leading the cellphone digital signal processor software team. As an innovative leader of a broad range of technical teams within Qualcomm, Dr. Jacobs has also been granted more than 25 patents for his inventions in the area of wireless technology.
“ The wireless Internet will have a greater impact on the world than the wired Internet. ”
- Dr. Paul E. JacobsChairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer
In 1995, he became vice president and general manager of the combined handset and integrated circuit division, which was subsequently divided into Qualcomm Consumer Products (QCP) and Qualcomm CDMA Technologies, respectively. He was named senior vice president of the Company in 1996 and president of QCP in 1997; he was named executive vice president of Qualcomm in 2000 and group president of Qualcomm Wireless & Internet (QWI) in 2001. At QCP, Dr. Jacobs gained extensive operational experience, helped launch numerous CDMA systems and cultivated important executive relationships at top network operators and manufacturers globally.
Other, important developments which began under Dr. Jacobs in QCP include the first Palm OS®-based smartphone. He started Qualcomm's initiative to include global positioning system capabilities in cellphones (which led to the acquisition of SnapTrack™ and Qualcomm's development of gpsOne™ position-location technology) and drove the development of a uniform set of application programming interfaces to simplify the process of putting software on handsets. Dr. Jacobs expanded this latter idea into the overall concept for the BREW® system, which included dynamic downloading of applications to cellphones with checks for digital signatures on the applications to ensure the integrity of the content, and the business ecosystem that enables BREW developers to engage operators globally and receive payment for their applications. The BREW solution is now deployed broadly by wireless network operators around the world.