Qualcomm CEO Jacobs Talks Up ‘Internet of Everything’ at Mobile Congress

During a morning keynote session at the Mobile World Congress, in Barcelona, Spain, Qualcomm (QCOM) chief executive Paul Jacobs.

Jacobs talked huge R&D investments that have fueled dramatic change, and re-hashed a slogan he rolled out at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, “born mobile.”

Jacobs noted that a survey conducted with Time magazine found 81% of people said they check their phone at least once an hour.

“The best way to think of this is a vision we have for the digital sixth sense, where you will augment your five senses with a wireless sixth sense … ”

With devices that interact with information in your world. You can think of it as taking your phone and using your phone to augment reality by interacting with things that don’t have a user interface, such as the home automation, the HVAC. Imagine getting into your car and telling your car to stream information from your phone to your car. All these kinds of things are possible under the notion of a digital sixth sense. And a number of technologies will make this possible. And it’s all part of this Internet not of things, but of everything.

Jacobs threw up a slide that predicted 24 billion devices will be “connected” by 2020.

He said there is concern about building a Tower of Babel, where devices won’t talk to one another. So, Qualcomm is proposing a new technology standard called “AllJoyn” that let’s each device tell other devices what its capabilities are. “It creates this notion of a personal cloud of things that are in the world around me that I can interact with.”

Jacobs noted a stat, that smartphone shipments were more than twice the number of PCs sold last year. In emerging markets, the smartphone is “the only type of computing device.”

Jacobs noted the lack of change in the field of education and suggested that kids be able to collaborate with one another outside the classroom, and said it had revealed an improvement in test scores in some trial projects.

During same keynote session, General Motors (GM) vice-chairman Steve Grisky said the company is going to embed 4G wireless running the long-term evolution, or LTE, network standard in millions of vehicles, including Chevrolet, Buick, and GMC in US next year, then in Opal and other European brands following that. He said the system will not be dependent on mobile phones, and will bring a number of features, such as in-car entertainment. AT&T (T) is the initial partner for the deployment of LTE, said Grisky.

Grisky compared autos with LTE to Apple‘s (AAPL) iPad, something that starts out as “why do I need that” but then quickly moves to the status of “how did I live without that?”