Using a wireless phone or laptop computer in public is so common now it escapes notice. Until you attend Qualcomm’s BREW conference and trade show. A sellout, the three-day event drew more than 2,500 attendees from 35 countries, packing the Manchester Hyatt’s 125,000 square feet of meeting space. In the public spaces, phones — many of which appeared to be models not available in the U.S. — and laptop computers littered cocktail tables and Internet bars. BREW stands for Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless. While the more than 100 panels and break-out sessions on the technology delivered the meat to the developers, entrepreneurs and investors, the 60 exhibitors in the Partner Pavilion showcased the sizzling toys, from weather services to 3D mapping. Games were plentiful. Among the most interesting were GestureTek Mobile’s which use a phone’s camera as a motion-sensing device. Instead of using buttons to play a game, you simply move the phone. The experience is similar to playing games on Nintendo’s Wii.

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Big Brother may not be watching, but Big Mother or Big Father soon might be, using everyday cell phone technology to monitor the location of their children. Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs used the occasion of his keynote speech at the BREW conference to ann-ounce the Sept-ember rollout of Amber Watch Mobile. Using BREW technology, the software developed by WaveMarket will allow:

• Alerts where individuals will be able to send alerts, which include their GPS location, to family and friends to indicate that they need assistance.
  
  
• Location Views where select family and friends will be able to view a loved one’s location on a map from a PC or mobile phone.
  
  
• Scheduled Checks where parents automatically can be notified that their children are where they should be, like arriving at home from school.
  
  
• Phone Tree so that if a loved one feels threatened, sends an alert and their primary contact is not reachable, the system will continue to be active until a secondary contact is reached.

Qualcomm will donate all of its proceeds from the effort to the AmberWatch Foundation.

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The national telecom sector is riding high, enjoying the fruits of a worldwide comeback that led Business Week to feature as a cover story: Telecom: Back From The Dead. San Diego is sizzling. “The biggest challenge we have right now is finding enough talent,” says Rory Moore, CEO of CommNexus, the telecom industry trade group. “There are far too many job openings.” Moore says 70 percent of UCSD’s engineering graduates — “fresh outs” — leave town for jobs elsewhere. “We have to do a better job of keeping them here,” he says. “Silicon Valley is back with a vengeance. Google is a vacuum cleaner and so are eBay and Yahoo. They are sucking up all the software people from San Diego.”

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Josh Berman, a founder and COO of MySpace, headlined San Diego Venture Group’s fifth annual Venture Summit that filled the largest ballroom at the Omni Hotel adjacent to Petco Park. And why not? Since starting myspace.com in November 2003, he and his partners built the Internet’s No. 1 trafficked site, with more than 170 million users and 42 billion page views per month. Berman is fond of San Diego and familiar with its Downtown, recalling for the crowd taking his CPA exam at the Convention Center.

It seemed like half of San Diego’s intellectual property attorneys were at the event, trolling for clients or hovering over existing ones. Berman didn’t disappoint. “People have a lot of lawyer jokes out there, but they can come in handy when you need them,” he said, recounting how carefully the partners’ interests were protected when investors came in and later when Rupert Murdoch bought the company for $580 million.

Berman says the company is working on lots of ambitious technology features, but succeeds by keeping its focus on what users say they want: “better pictures, better photo albums and better slide shows.”

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The Wall Street Journal and The Wireless Association are among the prominent media and business organizations calling on President Bush to overturn a U.S. International Trade Commission ban on new cell phone and wireless device imports containing Qualcomm chips. The ban was issued by the ITC after it determined Qualcomm was illegally using technology patented by Irvine-based Broadcom. The opportunity to overturn the ITC decision expires in early August. Most of those opposing the ban prefer to see any penalties, and remedies, to emerge from existing litigation moving through the federal courts.

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Motorola Ventures, the strategic venture capital arm of Motorola Inc., has made an investment in San Diego-based Vocel, a wireless push technology company and developer of the Interactive Commerce Accelerator wake-up mobile marketing service. While the value of the investment is secret, the fund’s usual investment amount is $3 million to $5 million. Vocel’s patent-pending technology allows wireless operators to bring potential purchases to the attention of wireless users, rather than waiting for the user to navigate to a page and make the buy.

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Akin to high-tech speed dating, Market Link is coming Sept. 12-13 to San Diego. Sponsored by Motorola and Motorola Ventures, the event pairs local telecom companies with multinational corporations in one-on-one sessions, hoping to identify and license new technologies. Up to 16 spots, and four standby positions, are available. Final notices of acceptance go out Aug. 27. More information is at commnexus.org.

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Continuing to grow, Qualcomm has leased more than 150,000 square feet at the 535,000-square-foot, three-building Pacific Center Complex in Sorrento Mesa. RREEF is the owner and developer of Pacific Center. When two additional buildings planned, but not started, are completed, the project will total 805,000 square feet.