Qualcomm has been both buying and selling, indicating the shift of priorities in its world. It has offloaded its first ever business, vehicle tracking service Omnitracs, which will go to Vista Equity Partners for $800m. Meanwhile, it has acquired the technology of media place-shifting pioneer Orb Networks, which it will incorporate into the broad media streaming/home hub platform it is building around its far larger acquisition of Atheros in 2011.
Qualcomm’s first major offering after it was founded in 1985 was its satellite-based tracking and messaging platform for longhaul trucks. Some of the technology developed for Omnitracs found its way into CDMA, the chip firm’s seminal breakthrough, but it continued to run the vehicle telematics unit as a standalone business, evolving it into a fleet management and logistics system. Indeed, it clung onto it far longer than most other businesses which sat outside its core chip and IPR operations ‘ its infrastructure unit was sold to Ericsson in 1999, its handsets to Kyocera a year later, and more recently it has sold or closed the FLO mobile TV and Lifecomm healthcare divisions.
Of course, the company has also been buying into new markets with purchases such as Atheros, AMD Adreno, Berkana, Flarion and Airgo. Its latest purchase is media streaming specialist Orb Networks, which will now wind up its services and stop selling its devices. Its technology will apparently be integrated into the Qualcomm Atheros media platform. Orb offered the free MyCast streaming service as well as Orb Live, along with the Orb TV and Music MP-1 devices but, once ground breaking with its support for ‘place shifting’, it has recently been sidelined by the rise of cloud-based content and by offerings like Windows Media Player.
‘For the last 18 months we have been working to make our underlying technology a de facto standard for streaming media’ Joe Costello, Orb’s founder and CEO, wrote in a blog post. ‘We made a tremendous amount of technical and market progress, but we were clear from the start that we would need one or more big strategic partners to help us complete the vision.’