Chip company Qualcomm made its fortune in mobile connectivity, but is pursuing additional initiatives as well. Most recently, it has created an open source mesh-networking platform called AllJoyn, which connects nearby devices to each other instead of connecting each device back to the Internet. Qualcomm plans to announce its plans at the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona this week.

AllJoyn would provide a scenario like this: “when you enter your home in an AllJoyn world your smartphone could send the song you’re listening to over to your home stereo no matter who makes the handset and who makes the stereo (or speakers). Same thing would happen if you wanted to ship the music to your car,” explains GigaOM.

Qualcomm wants this sort of connectivity to occur within the home on the mesh-network. “I don’t need to control my light bulb from Tahiti,” said Rod Chandhok, president of Qualcomm’s Innovation Center. “When you have 1,500 connected devices in your house I don’t think you want all of them connected to the public Internet.”

How does this happen? “Qualcomm has built a software overlay that can work on any processor and hopefully on any operating system. Right now it does this via an application, but Chandhok hopes that consumer electronics makers will integrate it into the firmware on their many devices in the future. He says Qualcomm already has customers, but he declined to name them. For consumers, the end result is that you can install applications on your smartphone that will work with AllJoyn compatible devices and control them from your handset,” writes GigaOM.

Qualcomm’s peer-to-peer AllJoyn networking platform is a new variation of the “Internet of Things” philosophy that ETCentric reported about during this year’s CES. The SDK is available at the AllJoyn site.