Today Qualcomm is formally announcing the launch of Qualcomm Services Labs (QSL), an incubation program that is a wholly owned subsidiary of Qualcomm. QSL is meant to serve as a platform to fund, commercialize and launch innovative consumer-focused mobile services such as Neer, an application that cleverly interprets location-sharing for the more private types among us.
Qilroy, Tapioca and Vive are three of the other mobile services and apps participating in the incubator program. Each has been selected for its potential to make an immediate impact on the market. As QSL services, each will also eventually become its own business entity or be integrated into an existing Qualcomm division.
Of the four incubated apps launching today, Neer is by far the most interesting and practical of the bunch. Not only is it market-ready and sleekly designed, but it tackles location-sharing in a way that a majority of mainstream mobile users will find is much more relevant to their lives than location-sharing a la Foursquare, Facebook Places or Google Latitude.
Neer: Location-Sharing for Private Types
Neer is a fantastic app currently available for Android devices, and soon the iPhone. The application is designed for private, automatic location-sharing, which makes it opposite in purpose and function to Facebook Places and Foursquare.
When demoing the application for Mashable, creator Ian Heidt described Neer as occupying, “the middle ground between Foursquare and Google Latitude.”
Neer creates an ideal mobile location-sharing experience for close friends, family members and spouses who want to automatically share their whereabouts with the people they trust. The application is integrated with the user’s native contacts, and even goes so far as to use calling and texting behaviors to determine a user’s closest contacts and automatically generate recommendations for inclusion in the user’s default group, the inner circle.
Users can create their own groups and control on a group-by-group basis who can view their location and when. others can also send notes to groups.
Neer runs in the background and automatically updates a user’s location, but it only shares place names, not physical addresses. Neer users must define and label preferred locations and then decide which groups to share those places with.
Right now Neer is perfectly structured for routine lifestyles. When you leave to drop the kids off at school, your significant other can know when they arrive. When you’re working late, your inner circle can know not to expect you for dinner.
Because Neer requires users to define the places that peers can see them at, however, Neer is less practical when you break from the routine and venture out to a new venue. Heidt promised that the mobile application will be enhanced to better handle less routine schedules and tackle real-world location problems that often face good friends in close proximity in the future.
Qualcomm-Incubated Services
Qilroy
Qilroy — pronounced “kill roy” — bills itself as a conversation platform organized around location. The service also doubles as a comprehensive search engine for public geo-located status updates, and hence a convenient utility for surfacing time and place-specific news.
On Qilroy, users can search location updates nearby or filter for places or events. Users can start conversations on site, with replies pushed out to the respective social networks where the original updates were posted. Replies to tweets, for instance, will show up as mentions on Twitter for the original author and include a link back to the Qilroy thread. Conversations can continue in a thread-like fashion on-site.
At launch, Qilroy pulls in geo-located updates from Twitter and Tweetphoto for users on the web or via its iPhone app [iTunes link]. Eventually Qilroy plans to aggregate and create conversations around a majority of location-based updates from other services such as Facebook Places, Foursquare and Gowalla.
Service creator Mike Bailey tested the application with student interns, who found it to be a “real-time bulletin board that allows for ad-hoc interactions and conversations.” In one example, an intern pointed to using Qilroy to find out whether or not the college library is crowded. Another cites using Qilroy as a way to find out about free food or promotions happening at the student center.
Even though Qilroy only surfaces content that users have selected to share publicly elsewhere, it’s still a bit jarring at times. Search for “lunch” and you’ll see a bevy of recently published geo-located tweets broadcasting where people are eating. Sure, users searching for a lunch buddy will find the information handy, but there’s also a handful of less-than-ideal scenarios that come to mind as well.
Tapioca
Tapioca generates short URLs — called Magic Links — for multimedia content. Content providers can use the service to generate shortened URLs and share multimedia that is consumable on all smartphones and feature phones.
Right now Tapioca is primarily a business-to-business play, but it ultimately aims to graduate to focus on consumer multimedia sharing as well. As such, end users could use Tapioca to generate a Magic Link to share cross-platform video formats with friends. The idea is to dramatically enhance the distribution and consumption of video media on mobile phones.
Tapioca was acquired by Qualcomm in April 2010. Terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed, but Tapioca had previously raised $5.5 million from Venrock.
Vive
Vive is focused on enhancing the social recommendation experience across web and mobile platforms. Publishers and retailers can add Vive buttons to their sites to allow for seamless product-sharing. Users can use Vive to recommend products, services and content to friends; active users are rewarded for their behaviors.
Vive’s behind-the-scenes technology is quite impressive and can translate content type on-the-fly to ensure that each user is served up with device-appropriate content. Vive is available as a Facebook application and soon as an iPhone and Android application.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, ariusz
