My Life on the Wireless Frontier

Dr. Irwin Jacobs helped found QUALCOMM in 1985 and under his leadership it became a Fortune 500 company, listed in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index and traded on the NASDAQ. This former professor of electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and of computer science and engineering at the University of California-San Diego led the commercialization of Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) technology, regarded as the world's most advanced voice and data wireless communications technology. CDMA technology--which converts speech into digital information that is transmitted over a wireless network and reconverted to speech on the other end--was first demonstrated in 1989. Elizabeth Corcoran is a senior editor at Forbes Magazine and has been covering the technology sector for years from the publication’s Silicon Valley bureau. Jacobs will share with Corcoran his journey from hallowed halls of academia to the vanguard of telecommunications and also comment on the next wave of new technologies driving the wireless world.