Personal broadcasting to come to phones

Remember PointCast? The company promised to broadcast personal versions of the news to each and every subscriber. Futurists and visionaries loved it, but it went under even before the dot.com bubble burst.

Individual broadcasting, however, will make a return with 3G phones and Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (DMB), said Paul Jacobs, CEO of Qualcomm at the Society for Information Display, a monitor and television conference .

DMB is the technology for delivering television and multimedia to cell phones. In Korea, carriers first delivered TV over cellular signals. Consumers loved it, until they got the bill: a soccer game could cost hundreds of dollars.

DMB is a one-way transmission carried on different signals and radio towers. The cellular carriers erect fewer towers, and each tower is more powerful, Jacobs said. These networks will provide TV, but also news and information subscribers sign up for: weather, the surf report, stock alerts.

Qualcomm's own version of DMB is called MediaFlo. Verizon will become the first carrier to offer it.

"You can get stats for all of the concurrent baseball games," he said.

3G phones, he added, are selling well. 196 operators in 84 countries now offer 3G.

"Voice is still the killer app for wireless, but people are making the decision to upgrade" for the new services, he said.

One way to ensure that 3G services will grab consumers is to reduce the keystrokes, he added.

"The more buttons you press, the less you like the services," he noted.