Author: Olivier Blanchard

Who tried to take down Qualcomm? What were they after? Why didn’t they prevail? What does Qualcomm’s resilience mean for the future? These are the questions that Futurum Senior Analyst, Olivier Blanchard, dives into in the first episode of this three-part series, in which regulators challenged the company’s technology licensing model. Under the guise of investigating potential “anti-competitive” behavior, the Chinese, Taiwanese, Korean, Japanese, and European equivalents of the United States’ FTC all took turns attempting to paint Qualcomm’s technology licensing and/or business practices as anti-competitive, when they, in fact, were not.
Futurum’s Olivier Blanchard covers Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 888+ 5G Mobile Platform, a mid-year upgrade to its flagship Snapdragon 888, which it had just introduced in December. Improvements include boosted CPU clock speeds and significant AI engine performance, blistering 7.5 Gbps x60 modem, triple ISPs, up to 200 MP photo capture, 8K video capture, and all of Qualcomm’s Elite Gaming features.
A new report from Strategy Analytics indicates that Samsung and Vivo were the fastest growing 5G smartphone vendors in Q1 2021, but Apple still leads the charge in net units with over 40 million 5G phones shipped to Samsung’s 17 million units. Futurum’s Olivier Blanchard breaks down four key 5G smartphone market trends confirmed by this report and shares his insights on what these Q1 numbers suggest for the market segment FY2021.
Last Friday, House Democrats introduced five new antitrust-style bills aimed at curtailing the market dominance of U.S. technology companies. Futurum’s Olivier Blanchard breaks down the nuances of the bills, outlines the problems with each, and shares thoughts on the challenges ahead.
The U.S. Government’s launch of the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Task Force is an effort to help improve U.S. competitiveness in the AI research race, which many have referred to as the next iteration of an “arms race” or “space race” between superpowers. Here’s a look by Futurum’s Olivier Blanchard on why that’s better late than never, but sooner would’ve been better.
The EU will introduce a digital wallet initiative ahead of the US, setting a first major milestone for 2022. Futurum’s Olivier Blanchard covers the many nuances of that initiative, including Qualcomm’s prescient 2019 updates to its Snapdragon 855 Mobile Platform and subsequent security clearance, what’s likely ahead there, as well as whether the EC will back down at all in its crusade against major US tech companies, whose assistance will no doubt be needed here.
The new Qualcomm-Microsoft Snapdragon developer kit announcement signals growing enterprise buy-in for an always-connected compute platform. Futurum analyst Olivier Blanchard breaks down why the market is hungry for good enough performance laptops and explains Microsoft’s interest in Qualcomm’s Snapdragon compute platform.
The X65 5G Modem-RF system will now feature support for 200 MHz carrier bandwidth in the mmWave spectrum, as well as mmWave support in standalone (SA) mode. With mmWave commercial deployments currently underway around the world (over 150 global operators are already investing in these high-band frequencies), including all major operators in the U.S. and Japan, these new capabilities make sense as a next step to enable global mmWave deployments, particularly as China and other markets invested in 5G SA mode look to begin scaling their mmWave deployments.
Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 compute platform brings a major upgrade to budget laptops. The platform’s specs on the whole look to be raising the bar for entry-level mobile compute platform performance and features.
Futurum’s Olivier Blanchard on why the European Commission’s antitrust case against Apple is a lot more dangerous to the tech sector than it seems.
Cisco’s acquisition of Socio Labs points to the future of hybrid event management services. Futurum’s Olivier Blanchard walks through what this will add to the Cisco Webex offering and why it’s attractive.
The Sevis Systems eCallme! Platform continues to evolve with new call security and customer engagement features that are designed for enterprises. These are much-needed, especially in the enterprise space, as it relates to protecting against the spoofed call process and providing identity protection assurance for customers.

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