Most of the eight projects have come from ideas within Qualcomm with the exception of one which was brought on board through the recent acquisition of Tapioca Mobile. Isaac Babbs, the VP of the Qualcomm Services Labs, said the companies are 100 percent owned by Qualcomm Services Lab, a wholly owned subsidiary of Qualcomm. In practice, they’ll act like startups and will receive funding through rounds of capital allotted at certain milestones. Babbs declined to say how much has been invested, so far, but that generally the first round can range between $1 million and $4 million. Most companies have about two to eight employees. The program is different than Qualcomm Ventures, which invests in external startups.

The Labs are designed to move much faster than Qualcomm normally does with 16,000 employees. Having incorporated officially in November 2009, it started ramping up in February and March, and already has made eight investments. “Qualcomm has a long history of innovation, but the market has changed, and a lot of our traditional partners, like carriers or OEMs, want to see that you have traction before you launch anything. That’s what we want to do is prove that these work,” Babbs said. Internally, that means not holding up ideas because of long-drawn out debates about whether something is worth executing. “We can take them to the public and see if they work or don’t work. Let’s stop the debate and get the answers directly from the consumers.”

While the Labs do represent a new way of doing business, they definitely will support Qualcomm’s traditional revenues streams. For instance, they are still hoping to take these projects to carriers and OEMs to reach mass scale. Or, they hope they drive more handset sales. In their current state, Babbs said most of them are applications, but over time, it is the intent to to build an underlying platform that can be scaled across many players in the industry. The companies are encouraged to support all platforms, not just Qualcomm’s own Brew development framework and app store.

Four of the companies are being announced today with the rest being unveiled later this year:

1. Neer: Available today on the Android Market, it’s a social location service, targeted at woman aged 25 to 50, who want to coordinate their lives with their husbands, best friends and kids. It’s generated 12,000 downloads in first two and a half weeks of availability. An iPhone and Brew version are coming soon.

2. Qilroy: The service helps you find information on a location, like a city or baseball game, political rally or other event, by searching social networks, like Twitter, Gowala and Foursquare. It’s on the iPhone, and coming to Android and Brew.

3. Vive: This application is on Facebook today and drives recommendations around Brew applications on Verizon’s Get It Now storefront. Users get points and rewards. Coming soon to iPhone.

4. Tapioca mobile: Qualcomm acquired Tapioca Mobile earlier this year. It automatically formats video so it can be delivered and viewed on any device. You go to their site, get a URL shortened for the content, and then it will work across a BlackBerry, iPhone, or other device. This will likely not be a consumer-facing play, but is rather a strategic investment, Babbs said. If you can allow multimedia to work on all deices around the world, people will buy more capable phones, which is a big win for Qualcomm.