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Intel to launch six-core microprocessor – A chip code-named Dunnington is expected to debut on Sept. 15. Intel will put six cores, or computing brains, on a single chip. But this is really no big deal. I’ve got a 666-core chip of my own in the works. I used a cookie-cutter to make it.

Linkedin gets linked to CNBC – The popular business social network will integrate its community and networking functionality into CNBC.com. Linkedin has more than 27 million members now.

Security deal has investors under water – Secure Computing is buying Securify for $15 million plus an earn-out of $5 million — far less than the investment into the company.

Michael Cerda joins Venrock — Cerda, founder of Internet telephone company Jangl, who joined competitor Jajah briefly after Jangl was wound down earlier this year (and its assets sold to Live Universe) has already moved on, and has joined Silicon Valley venture capital firm Venrock as an Entrepreneur in Residence. He’ll focus on digital media, specifically “multi-modal marketplaces, platforms and services.” By multi-modal, he refers to services “that aren’t just web or just phone or just video or just TV…but services that have on-ramps in some or all of those modes.”

Liberty Media to make public its DirecTV stake – The cable company plans to spin off its 50-percent stake in DirecTV into a new public company dubbed Liberty Entertainment Group.

Another Siemens snafu – Siemens has been accused of posting its rival’s secrets. French software maker Dassault Systemes says a confidential trove of its customer data was found on Siemens’ intranet.

hi5 launches 0.8 version of open social – The social network announced that it has launched a version of the OpenSocial 0.8 standard which gives developers the ability to build applications in languages other than English.

Seven funds known to have invested in Miasole’s latest round — Miasole, one of the biggest thin-film solar startups, has been raising a $200 million round. So far, the company has obtained commitments from seven funds.

The full story of how Google Chrome came to be — Niall Kennedy has the scoop on something that has generated reams of blogger text in very short life. This story alone could double the number of words written about Chrome to date.

Get ready to chuck your Blu-ray disks in five years — Samsung exec says that Blu-ray has five years left to get the video disc market before something else takes over.

Microsoft’s answer to Google Docs — Redmond is reportedly going to blast back at Google’s cloud-based applications suite by the end of the year.

Jen-Hsun Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, started his graphics chip company in 1993 and is now the last man standing. Back then, no one could have predicted that PCs and game machines would spawn the powerful visual computing we have today. In a speech in San Jose, Calif., Huang talked about how video games and movie special effects are only the tip of the iceberg for visual computing, which encompasses everything from digital art to medical imaging. Huang is celebrating the growth of this ecosystem this week with his own new visual computing conference, dubbed Nvision 08. But it’s a turbulent time for Nvidia as the company struggles against competitors and its own product bugs. After his speech, Huang took questions on a wide range of topics at a press conference. I’ve blended questions from the general press Q&A with my own one-on-one questions in this edited transcript.

VB: I remember when I interviewed you 14 years ago. You talked about how your graphics chips could be used as “Windows accelerators.” It was like there was no other use for a 3-D chip.
JH: The real breakthrough for our industry came when we at Nvidia discovered this perspective: graphics is not just putting pixels up on the screen, but graphics can be a medium for artistic expression. That was when we decided we had to build programmable shaders (subprograms that add custom special effects to a 3-D scene). We didn’t want graphics to just all look the same. This medium has a real artistic element. To deal with that, we had to create an infinite palette. To do that in a computer architecture, we had to make it programmable. That was the insight that allowed us to see that programmable shaders were the future. We blindly believed in it and made everyone believe it. Now, when you say that computer graphics is an artistic medium, you don’t sound like a psycho. That notion isn’t more than 10 years old.

VB: A lot of people in the world get excited about computer-animated art in movies or video games. But you’re excited about digital still art.

JH: If you think about what these people are doing, computer-generated art is part math, part imagination, and part programming. You have to know what the technology is capable of doing. It’s a complicated thing. It’s not for your average artist. Yet, as extraordinary as it is and as beautiful as it can be, it is really complicated to make worthy. Most people think all of the valuable things in life are expensive. But it’s hard to make a digital art piece expensive because it’s easy to replicate. The whole point is that it is written in software so that it can be generated flawlessly over and over again. There are complicated issues to solve with digital art. It doesn’t take away from how amazing digital art can be. I don’t know how artists even come up with the combination of skills to do it. I admire them for it and I hope that someone can figure out how to make it valuable. Read the rest of this entry »

Nvidia chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang took the stage at the inaugural Nvision 08 conference to celebrate the era of visual computing. You’d expect him to be the chief ambassador for this era, since the graphics chips that his company designs are at the heart of the hardware that powers visual applications, from car designs to video games.

The talk showed the range of what is now possible and where computer visualization technology will go. Huang said that the new era is just at its start. He brought up numerous examples of how visual computing is changing the way we do things. He noted, for instance, that Google Earth has been downloaded 400 million times and can transport us to the “Bird’s Nest” Olympic Statdium in Beijing within seconds.

He also noted there are about 100 million people who are actively playing virtual world games, known as massively multiplayer online games, around the world. At some point, social networks and MMOGs will converge and become one, he said. To reinforce that point, Huang invited the founder of Nurien, a three-year-old Korean company which has created a 3-D animated world where players can create their own realist avatars, or virtual characters. On stage, the company showed off a virtual character modeled after Huang. The fake Huang proceeded to kiss a virtual girlfriend.

“How much did she have to pay me for that?” Huang said. “You guys are awfully generous with that character. He looks like he is six feet two.” (Huang himself is considerably shorter than that.)

Nurien allows gamers to create their own virtual rooms and embed live videos in the walls, much like in worlds such as Lively by Google. Except the difference is that the Nurien technology is as close to lifelike as is possible with today’s graphics technology. Huang said such technologies would be the backbone of “the next Facebook.” He noted that Strategy Analytics predicts that one in seven people will be in such worlds by 2015.

Huang also highlighted the work of Sportvision, which created the still-frame “augmented reality” images used to visualize the performance of athletes at the Beijing Olympics. It showed, for instance, how Nadia Liukin proceeded through the air during a gymnastics routine. With the technology, Sportvision can insert graphics pointers into images, such as showing the path of a football pass during play. It can also show the flow of air over race cars in the midst of a race. That takes a lot of computation and thus maximizes the use of Nvidia’s graphics chips.

Huang also noted how visual computing is changing how we enjoy still photography. That’s where you use computer graphics to enhance a photographic image to blend both real and artificial images together.

Naturally, Nvidia had a lot of commercials for its technology sprinkled in the speech. Huang invited a Lamborghini car designer on stage to talk about how the designers had to use a combination of ray-tracing and rasterization to get the best graphics effects for a simulated car. It so happens that Nvidia’s newest graphics chips are capable of such hybrid processing. This capability is one of the ways that Nvidia hopes to hold off Intel as the world’s biggest chip makers readies a rival chip, dubbed Larrabee, that also promises to combine rasterization and ray-tracing.

Intel is mainly known for its microprocessors, but it’s another technology that was unveiled at this week’s Intel Developer Forum (IDF) that has a lot of people talking: Wireless power.

To some, the idea may sound like pure science fiction, but it is very real. Various groups of scientists around the world have been working on it for years, but the problem has mainly been the efficiency, or rather the inefficiency with which power is transfered over the air. Most of it is lost before it can reach its destination. On Thursday however, Intel showed that it could transmit 60 watts of power over a few feet while maintaining 75 percent efficiency.

“The power pack for you laptop isn’t that efficient,” Intel chief technology officer Justin Rattner told USA Today in an interview.

And that’s really the key. While it would be great to power a light bulb wirelessly, as Intel demoed at IDF, the real key is being able to charge our ever-growing array of devices wirelessly. I live in a fairly small apartment and have no less than 4 surge protectors, not so much because I’m afraid of power surges on all my equipment, but more because I need all those outlets for the number of gadgets I have.

The best use of wireless charging will be for wireless devices themselves. It’s tiresome to have to remember to plug in my phone, my iPods, my laptops and anything else I routinely use on the go. Imagine if these devices could recharge simply by being in your home. In fact, Rattner says Intel is working on a new laptop that will accept wireless power charges.

Of course, that’s a ways off, right now the technology only works over a few feet and that’s using very large coils (see the picture above) to send the electricity. Also problematic is the fact that the electromagnetic field made by this technology can interfere with other functionality of devices.

This technology is not dangerous to humans since it use magnetic fields to transmit energy and not electric fields. Magnetic fields can pass through the human body without harming anything.

MIT researchers made headlines last year with their “WiTricity” (Wireless Electricity) test that also lit a light bulb from several feet away, but at a much worse efficiency than the Intel test. Now those same scientists are said to have jacked up the efficiency to a pretty incredible 90 percent, meaning they’ve doubled efficiency in a year’s time. If true, it’s exciting to think about where this tech will be in another year.

Startups such as Powercast, WildCharge and Powerbeam are working on the technology as well.

Nikola Tesla, the scientist who was working on wireless power around the turn of the last century, would be proud.

Watch the video below for more on Intel’s efforts:

[photo: flickr/nick nunns and Intel]

The reason I liked the Internet television service Joost had nothing to do with the content. Rather, I saw its interactivity with other web services while watching the content as the future of television. While Joost itself may be struggling, the idea of adding widgets to the television experience lives on. Today at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF), Intel announced a partnership with Yahoo on the Widget Channel, an application framework that brings widgets to your television.

If you’ve used Yahoo’s Konfabulator widgets (now called Yahoo Widgets), this is the same idea, I was told as the Yahoo display booth today. Basically these are small programs that run on top of whatever you are doing in the background. Usually these run on computers so that backdrop is your desktop, now that backdrop will be programs on your TV.

But let’s call this what it really is: An app store. It’s a free app store, but it’s still an app store.

Who else has an app store — or rather the App Store? Apple.

Not only does Apple have the App Store, it also has several patents for putting widgets on your television, presumably through its Apple TV device. I’ve gone one step further before and said Apple will eventually extend its popular App Store, currently only available on the iPhone and iPod Touch, to the Apple TV (and other devices) as well. Widgets or small apps, what’s really the difference? They’re coming. You know it and I know it.

But Yahoo has a key weapon for its Widget Channel; despite being unveiled at the IDF with Intel, Yahoo doesn’t plan to be exclusively on any set-top device Intel may make, representatives tell me. Yahoo wants to own this space and put its widgets on any device possible. DVRs, cable boxes, Blu-ray players, you name it. By contrast, with any widget channel (*cough* App Store *cough*) from Apple, you can be be sure it will only be on Apple products.

Yahoo’s Widget Channel has been in development for about a year, but since it basically works the same way as the Konfabulator widgets, it has an even stronger background. Developers can use JavaScript, XML, HTML or Flash to write widgets for this new platform.

Yahoo representatives noted that Intel was currently the only chipmaker with something powerful enough to run its widgets as it would like. For the foreseeable future, these Intel chips will reside in set-top boxes, but eventually the plan is to integrate the Widget Channel right into the actual TVs.

One of the most interesting things to me about the Widget Channel is one of the showcase partners: The aforementioned Joost. I was confused about how exactly Joost would function as a part of the Widget Channel since Joost has its own widgets. Would you be running widgets within widgets? Yahoo admitted it hasn’t really figured out exactly how Joost will work on the platform yet, but that the company wants its content to be a part of the platform.

Another surprise widget is Blockbuster. The name once synonymous with movie rentals has been struggling ever since Netflix changed the game to DVD rentals over the mail, and now several services threaten to move the industry fully digital over the Internet. But Blockbuster, shortly after finally announcing it would allow instant streaming access to movie over the Internet (with the help of its Movielink purchase last year), finally seems to be embracing digital distribution over the Internet. With its Yahoo widget, you will be able to rent and watch Blockbuster movies on your TV.

The system itself, even in prototype form, is impressive. I saw the Widget Channel running on a stand-alone Intel box connected to an HD TV. It looked great. I was watching some nature show in high definition and pulled up the Flickr widget. On the left hand side of my screen I could see any pictures I wanted from Flickr while still watching the show. Or I could move them to the main screen and see them in all their glory.

Though Flickr is a Yahoo-owned company, Yahoo told me that it’s open to letting any other service create widgets. For example if the Google-owned Picasa made a widget, that would be fine.

Another interesting aspect of the Widget Channel is advertising. While there was one demo ad in the widget toolbar, Yahoo told me it want to be careful not to ruin user experience by placing too many ads on there. The ad, for a coffee maker, looked nice. Clicking on it opened the widget where you had the option to buy the product.

Interaction with widget was all done via remote control. This may sound cumbersome, but the Intel remote has a nice color-coded button scheme to ensure relative ease of use. Still, a Wiimote-like pointer might work better. That, of course, is dependent on what device the widgets are running on. Come to think of it, Yahoo widgets on the Wii would rock.

When DreamWorks Animation chief executive Jeffrey Katzenberg took the stage today at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) stating that he was about to show the “greatest innovation to occur in the movie business in 70 years,” I was skeptical. By the time he left the stage, I was sold.

This innovation is 3D filmmaking. But wait, “Wasn’t that around in the 1950s?,” you might say. “This is not your father’s 3D,” Katzenberg stated.

DreamWorks (as well as other movie studios) is using Intel’s INTRU3D technology to take 3D filmmaking to new heights. No longer does the 3D experience involve two projectors working in conjunction and those odd red and blue glasses. Now it’s a single projector doing advanced computing to render an image that is viewed as three dimensional with the much more sleek RealD glasses (think Tom Cruise’s glasses in Risky Business — or see me in them below).

During his presentation, Katzenberg had a giant movie screen wheeled out and asked everyone to reach under their seats. Taped under them were the RealD glasses which he then asked us to put on. He proceeded to show a clip from DreamWorks’ hit film Kung Fu Panda — fully rendered in 3D.

It was amazing.

I was sitting towards the back right corner of a huge room filled with thousands of people — hardly the ideal movie theater experience — and still, by the end of the several minute clip I felt totally immersed in the film.

But Katzenberg wasn’t done. After talking about filmmakers such as Robert Zemeckis, Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson and James Cameron commitment to three dimensional films, Katzenberg had the lights dimmed again. This time he showed off a new film coming in March of next year: Monsters vs. Aliens.

This animated film was beautiful.

“3D is the next great frontier,” Katzenberg said. The first big transition in cinema was from silent to sound, the next was from black and white to color, this will be the third transition: from 2D to full 3D, Katzenberg stated. He revealed that by 2009 all of DreamWork Animation’s films will be both authored and offered in 3D. And this is where Intel comes in.

Katzenberg said that creativity has largely been something that has only been on the screen. Intel’s work with INTRU3D brings creativity behind the scenes he explained. It’s not just the end product you see that is truly innovative, it’s the way these films are made.

INTRU3D gives animators and filmmakers the tools to render 3D images in real time and manipulate them to make the clip they want. Before Katzenberg took the stage, a montage was shown of how animation was done in the old days — by hand. An animated film could take months.

Now it’s just a question of having enough computing power to render images.

This technology eventually will enter your home as well. In the Q&A session afterwards, Intel execs didn’t seem sure about how well it will take off there because the format still requires glasses, but said much work was being done to remove that restriction.

I’ve argued before that 3D films should stay in theaters as a way to keep people experiencing movies as the filmmakers intended. After all, screens can only get so big when they’re in your home.

While I’m still not entirely sold that 3D is the future of all filmmaking, I do think it is the future of animated filmmaking after seeing today’s demos. The fact that these films can be fully rendered in 3D yields a beautiful end product.

[photo: DreamWorks Animation]

It seems obvious that the graphics chip wars are done, as far as start-ups are concerned. Intel is squaring off against Advanced Micro Devices (which bought ATI Technologies) and Nvidia. There is no obvious nook in this multibillion-dollar market where a start-up could thrive.

But somebody forgot to tell that to the folks at LucidLogix Technologies, an Israeli graphics start-up that came out of stealth today. They’re not doing a graphics chip. Rather, they’re doing a chip that serves as a kind of traffic cop and enables multiple graphics cards to be used together in parallel processing fashion.

Graphics experts might scratch their heads at this vague explanation. Nvidia does what I just described with its SLi technology for ganging together up to four graphics cards in a single PC. AMD does it with CrossFire. But when you put two graphics cards together, the processing isn’t as efficient. Maybe you get 1.5 times or 1.6 times the single-card performance.

With the LucidLogix Hydra 100 chip in the system, you could get a much better result. It’s almost linear, or close to two times better performance when you put two cards together, said Offir Remez, (pictured above) president and co-founder of the company, based in Kfar Netter, Israel.

The chip sits on a computer’s main board, or motherboard, and it acts as the traffic cop, directing tasks to the different graphics cards in a system to keep them busy. It doesn’t matter if those cards are from different vendors (theoretically, an Nvidia card ought to work with an AMD card) or if those cards are different types, such as an old Nvidia card paired with a new Nvidia card. The LucidLogix chip balances the load of processing chores so that every card stays busy.

Moshe Steiner, chief executive, and Remez started the company three years ago. They were joined by a familiar figure in the graphics chip industry, George Haber, who loved the idea (10 minutes into the pitch) and agreed to become chairman.

Haber has some unfinished business when it comes to succeeding in graphics, where, once upon a time in the 1990s, there were more than 50 start-ups. He is a serial entrepreneur who started a graphics chip company late in that last war. His company, Gigapixel, created a great technology that almost made it into Microsoft’s first Xbox video game console as it was being designed in 2000. Haber’s team had the deal and even moved into Microsoft’s Silicon Valley quarters to start design work. But Nvidia’s CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, cut a last minute deal that stole the contract away from Gigapixel. Nvidia went on to become the sole survivor among stand-alone graphics companies. And it eventually bought Gigapixel. Haber was frustrated with that result because he thought he had a better technology. (I know all of this because it was a chapter in my first book, “Opening the Xbox,” published in 2002).

But that was the last war. Haber says he’s happy that LucidLogix figured out a way to compete without going head-on against the big companies. It would be crazy, he said, to start a brand new graphics chip because it would require $200 million worth of investment and years of work just to get to the market. But Lucid completed its initial chip design with a total of $16 million in funding so far.

The investors include Giza Venture Capital, Genesis Partners, and Intel Capital. The latter is starting to make a lot of investments in graphics, including the design of a many-core graphics-oriented processor, dubbed Larrabee, coming out next year. LucidLogix has 70 employees and is expanding fast to deal with a number of customers, Remez said. The chip is expected to be available in the first half of 2009. A working prototype was on display at the Intel Developer Forum today.

Computer makers and motherboard designers would likely have to design the chip into their own high-end computers for gamers. That’s going to take time. In the meantime, it’s conceivable that big guys could figure out their own methods for more efficient parallel graphics processing. But LucidLogix has applied for 60 patents on the technology.

Historical resonance doesn’t get any better than this. It would be a wonderful company for either AMD or Nvidia to buy. Maybe even Intel. For Haber, it might mean he has a chance to sell a second company to Huang. But Remez notes that the company hopes to make it on its own.

Now the commercial starts. If the morning keynote here at the Intel Developer Forum conference by Intel Chairman Craig Barrett was light on the Intel hard sell, the afternoon is full of it. Pat Gelsinger, head of Intel’s digital enterprise group, is busy touting Intel’s latest products.

For many years, Intel all but ignored the system-on-a-chip and embedded processor markets. But as computers and the Internet infiltrate everything, the company has lined up a new family of chips for everyday gadgets. Gelsinger said that Intel’s low-power Atom chip has been designed into 700 gadgets since its debut less than two quarters ago.

Among the products that will use the Intel Atom chips is OpenPeak’s new IP media phone, which serves as a digital picture frame as well as a touch-screen Internet telephone. (Think the iPhone for the home). Another emerging market is computers in cars. Alex Bush of the BMW Group says his company is embracing the idea of an “open entertainment platform” for the car using Intel’s Atom processors. Yes, we now use smart GPS systems and other sorts of gadgets that, if we don’t pay attention, will get us into more car wrecks. The GPS system features 3-D scenery software from Planet 9 Studios, which hopes to make it easier for GPS users to see where they need to go.

All this Atom talk, however, is just preamble for Intel’s major announcement. Intel is now talking about its newest family of processors, code-named Nehalem, and formally to be known as the Core i7 processor family. This new chip aims to negate two advantages that Advanced Micro Devices has had for five years in its Opteron. (AMD’s Randy Allen, however, says that his company has its own advances on the way that will keep AMD ahead on performance and power efficiency.) The new Intel chip will use similar techniques to the Opteron for managing memory and data transfer.

Nehalem arrives in the fourth quarter, Gelsinger said. The chips will have as many as eight cores, or computing brains, on a single chip. The chip’s basic design is power efficient because it turns off parts of the chip that aren’t being used. That’s been done for at least a decade, but Intel can always improve on it. Gelsinger says that Intel can make these improvements because it controls both design and manufacturing.

Gelsinger said NASA will use a supercomputer with thousands of Nehalem chips for climate modeling and other scientific research. He said Intel is working with digital artists at Sony and Disney as well on the creation of computer animations for movies.

Of course, Intel didn’t want to just beat up on AMD. Gelsinger also talked about Larrabee, Intel’s new graphics-oriented processor with lots of cores on a chip. Gelsinger didn’t say it, but this chip will go after rival Nvidia. Intel showed a video with large numbers of translucent surfaces. The company also said that its memory design makes it easier for game developers to create complex scenes without going overboard on memory usage. In a word, Nvidia says that Larrabee isn’t quite so capable compared to its approach to graphics. You can bet that Nvidia will have more to say at its Nvision 08 conference next week in San Jose, Calif.

Silicon Valley start-up MetaRAM is announcing its second-generation chip set today with backing from Intel. MetaRAM’s technology can quadruple the memory capacity in a server, cutting the server costs as much as 90 percent. The Intel endorsement is a big win for a little San Jose company that has proven more clever than giant memory chip makers.

It’s no surprise that Intel will give MetaRAM some of the limelight at its “digital enterprise” keynote speech today at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. MetaRAM is one of the most interesting chip startups, with marquee backers such as Intel itself and tech luminaries Bill Joy and Vinod Khosla.

It was founded in January 2006 by Suresh Rajan, who had a simple but elegant idea. He figured out a way to trick a server’s memory controller. Normally, a server can access a limited amount of memory chips on a single memory module. MetaRAM creates a chip set for the memory module that lets the memory controller count multiple chips as just a single one. In doing so, it lets the controller overcome the memory limitations and access as much as four times more memory on a module.

This trick comes at a critical juncture for computer servers, whose processors are far outracing the performance of memory chips. It removes a bottleneck. That, in turn, can cut the cost of a server by as much as 90 percent.

MetaRAM is now launching a second generation chip set which supports DDR3 memory. As a result, Intel is endorsing MetaRAM as a solution to go with Intel’s upcoming new microprocessors, code-named Nehalem. Earlier this year, MetaRAM announced its first-generation chips based on DDR2 memory. That solution proved popular in servers from companies such as RackSpace. But it was used in a much smaller slice of the market for servers that use processors from Advanced Micro Devices. The new DDR3 chip set will be available in the fourth quarter. Memory chip maker Hynix is showing memory modules today with working MetaRAM DDR3 chip sets, including the world’s biggest 16-gigabyte memory module for Intel servers.

“Now the entire server market is open to us,” said Rajan, who shifted to vice president of marketing after he recruited a CEO, in an interview.

These kinds of servers will be able to run more efficiently, saving electricity costs in big data centers and allowing servers to handle complex files such as medical images without choking on the huge amount of data. The company has a team of 40 employees. The CEO is Fred Weber, the former chief technology officer at AMD who helped conceive the Opteron processor, which debuted in 2003 and saved AMD.

Weber serves as president and chief executive. The company has raised venture money from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Khosla Ventures, Storm Ventures, and Intel Capital. The amount hasn’t been disclosed.

MetaRAM’s rivals include the world’s biggest memory chip makers such as Samsung and Micron. But as the deal with Hynix suggests, those competitors could also be its partners, as MetaRAM still helps those memory chip makers sell lots of chips.

Craig Barrett, the chairman of Intel, travels to 30 countries a year. At the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco this morning, he took his audience of thousands on a tour of how tech is changing the places he visits. While Barrett didn’t make much news with his talk, he gave useful updates on where we stand in the global adoption of technology. I found his talk akin to a compass.

I can remember years when Barrett, as CEO, came out on stage to pound home the message that Intel’s processors were better than those from Advanced Micro Devices and we would all one day be using computers with Itanium chips. Now that there are a billion Internet users in the world, Barrett is taking his foot off the pedal on that hard sell on Intel. It tells you, perhaps, how unconcerned Intel is about competition now that it has reasserted its dominance over AMD and what Barrett really cares about.

His first demo didn’t even dwell on Intel’s chips, a task he delegated to other Intel speakers. Rather, it showed how the Nintendo Wii’s remote game controller can be adapted to control a computer on a screen. Then the demo guy, researcher John Lee, showed more advanced “multi-touch” technologies that, for $50, could create an electronic white board where you can draw on a kind of chalk board with a stylus.

He highlighted Kiva.org, a nonprofit which we chronicled earlier this year, which makes it easy to use the Internet to make “micro finance” loans as small as $25 to people in the developing world. It is making loans every 30 seconds and most of them go to women. Kiva had no connection to Intel, except to solicit people to make loans after Barrett finished his talk.

In Africa, Barrett said that the continent is “coming out of the dark ages” and is among the places adopting WiMax, which extends WiFi coverage for tens of miles and thus becomes a cheap wireless broadband infrastructure in places that don’t have wired networks.

Barrett also lay on the ground while demonstrating how an emergency health card could help him in Colombia. A bar code scanner could tell paramedics his basic medical information, transfer his medical records as necessary, and give the paramedics the contact info for his doctor. They, in turn, can wirelessly communicate back to a hospital. Numerous countries are adopting this approach to healthcare.

He also said that technology is making strides in solving the world’s energy problems. He pointed to a student who was trying to make solar cells out of plastic, which is cheaper to process than silicon solar cells and thus might be more energy efficient as well.

Next year, Barrett said Intel will give away four $100,000 awards to the best innovative ideas in technology for healthcare, education, environment, and economic development.

In advance of its Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, Intel researchers are talking today about the toughest computing problems they face. Among them is the task of connecting the physical and digital worlds in a way that is believable to users and then getting a computer to anticipate what users want.

Key to this is getting computers to act more like humans, with a keen sense of “situational awareness,” or what is going on around someone at a given time, where they are, what they want to do, what they’re feeling and what they ought to know.

Accordingly, Intel Research is pouring a lot of money and effort into technologies that can make it much easier to connect the physical world to the digital world, said Andrew Chien, director of Intel Research. To really make it effortless for users, computer researchers have to make breakthroughs in a variety of fields: visual computing (look out, Nvidia), sensors that can translate physical data into digital data that computers can process, and mobile technologies that deliver computing power and connectivity in a power-efficient way.

Jim Held, an Intel fellow, said that Intel is closely watching the development of virtual worlds such as Second Life, as the likely path for computing interfaces in the future. He noted there are more than 2,000 virtual worlds in development and that the number of users already in virtual worlds has surpassed 300 million. He notes how Second Life is a compute-intensive application, using 70 percent of a processor’s available computing power and 35 percent to 70 percent of a computer’s graphics capability. Part of the challenge is the difficulty in crunching all of the data associated with user-generated content.

Over time, he believes that such worlds will combine digital 3-D animations with real-world data, so that 3-D data can be overlaid on top of a real video image to help users identify locations or play new kinds of “augmented reality” games.

The sensing technologies under research have a broad range. At the microscopic level, Intel is looking at how it can track stem cell growth on a nanometer scale. Such tracking technologies could track individual cells and their rates of reproduction and movement.

“On the basis of how they behave, you can classify them on how rapidly they’re reproducing,” Chien said.

Intel is also doing research into skin cancer. It is using sensors to capture images of skin lesions to determine whether those lesions change over time and whether they are cancerous or not. The DermFind research is being done by May Chen and other researchers in Intel’s Pittsburgh research office. They can automatically process the data on the lesions, archive it, and allow doctors to look up the changes in the lesions.

On a higher level, computers need to be much better at recognizing objects in daily life, such as recognizing everyday objects, navigating a path through the physical world, and recognizing faces and the emotional expressions on those faces. In geek terms, real-time video detection requires four teraflops of computing power at 10 kilowatts of power. That’s not possible with today’s computers.

“Collecting data from sensors and getting to high-level results such as a ‘call for help’ are really difficult,” Chien said.

Some of these sensor projects are amusing. Intel has one project where it determines which person is watching TV at any given time based on how they use the remote control. The remote has accelerometers that detect the patterns of usage for the remote (which way it’s pointing, for instance). And it can distinguish who is using a remote based on the differences in the way family members use the remote.

“That gives us info on who is using what in a given living room without a lot of heavy-duty instrumentation,” Chien said.

Mary Smiley, director of the Intel Emerging Technologies Lab, showed off a “proactive wellness” application where a mobile phone with the appropriate sensors could show the heart rate, posture (sitting), and other data associated with what a person was doing at any given time and how far they were toward reaching the day’s energy expenditure and calorie intake goals. When the researcher, Intel’s Junaith Shahabdeen, started running, the data presented on the mobile phone showed his heart rate increasing and the message, “Calm down, please.” Shahabdeen said he has been using the device for weeks during daytime hours and has learned that his desk job keeps him too sedentary.

It’s time, she said, for humans to stop adapting to computers. “They should adapt to us,” she said.

Google is launching a new web site called Free the Airwaves, to publicly encourage the Federal Communications Commission to deregulate “white space,” or tiny fractions of available bandwidths between broadcast TV channels in the 50 MHz to 700 MHz spectrum band range.

New hardware devices and software services could use these airwaves to offer wireless Internet to more people. This means free or cheaper Internet for you, maybe, via a venue that Google — not a telecommunications company — might control. White spaces were originally intended to prevent radio transmissions from reaching into each other, and are considered too narrow to auction off.

The FCC has been doing field testing on the viability of white space wireless Internet services, and plans to make a regulatory ruling on the matter in the coming months. Television broadcaster consortium the National Association of Broadcasters is, together with cell phone companies, concerned that this method of transmission could interrupt television and phone transmissions.

Companies on both sides of this debate can’t help but signal their self-interest.

Google couches its position as being part of the good but unusually, goes out of its way to explain that its own “business interest” in this case is getting more people to use the internet. The Google-funded wireless Internet service here in Mountain View, Calif. automatically loads iGoogle, the company’s personalized home page service, whenever you first log on. So I’m going to guess that Google would do something similar with any white space internet service it might eventually provide.

NAB broadcasters appear to be generally against anything that Google wants to do to help itself — maybe this service would get more people using the web instead of watching TV? But, new devices may prevent interference with television transmissions, and allay broadcaster concerns.

However, some cell phone companies, like AT&T, are directly threatened by this move as they already offer broadband Internet services.

Meanwhile, Microsoft, Intel and Motorola are other large tech companies are also advocates for white space availability, and presumably would want to provide their own white space products. As usual, though, Google has beat these companies to championing a good cause, that has its own business benefits.

If you want to support Google Free The Airwaves, you can go sign the petition on the site.

[MG Siegler contributed to this piece.]

After the press slammed Intel in June for its hard-line stance on the USB 3.0 standards battle, the world’s biggest chip maker has apparently changed its position. Faced with an unpleasant spotlight, Intel chose to compromise. In doing so, it has probably headed off an antitrust fight.

Rivals in the chip set business said that Intel didn’t play fair when it took control of the standard, dubbed Universal Serial Bus 3.0 (or SuperSpeed USB), for transferring data in and out of PCs at high speeds. Intel said it shared details about the standard with everyone. But rivals accused it of withholding details of its design for implementing USB 3.0 in the form of a host controller for a chip set. By withholding details, Intel could selfishly give its own chip set designers a head start, but such a move was risky. It could either slow adoption or fracture the standard.

The technology is important to consumers because it will allow data transfer between computers and gadgets at a rate of 4.8 gigabits a second. That’s blazing fast compared to data transfer in the megabits a second today. For iPod users, that means you could move a high-definition movie from a computer to an iPod at much higher speeds.

Now Intel has released its host controller specification, dubbed the Extensible Host Controller Interface draft 0.9. Now the company’s rivals can also get started on making their own chip sets that are compatible with the USB 3.0 specification. In a press release, Intel said that “interoperability among devices from multiple manufacturers is important for consumer adoption of ‘SuperSpeed USB’ products.” The specification is available royalty free to any companies that sign a “contributors” legal release with Intel.

“Given the industry trend toward one specification, we resolved it was best to sign,” said one source.

Chip set makers — Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices, Via Technologies and SiS — threatened to rebel and pull out of the standard, setting the stage for a fight with Intel that resembled the revolt of PC clone makers against IBM in the 1980s. In a blog post where it defended its actions, Intel said that the design wasn’t done and it couldn’t yet share it. Intel had previously said it would share the design in the second half of 2008.

Intel compromised because it came under pressure from the chip set makers as well as Microsoft. The Redmond giant has a lot of clout itself and it didn’t want to write two types of software to support an Intel standard and the rivals’ standard. Microsoft offered its blessing on the latest deal, as did AMD, NEC, and Dell.

Nick Knupfler, a spokesman for Intel, said, “The industry is well on its way to high-speed USB nirvana.” Translation: all the chip set makers are expected to sign. Update: Knupfler also said that Intel has always planned on delivering the specification as soon as the silicon design was robust enough to be shared without fear that it will have to be redone in some way.

Clearly, Intel didn’t need this kind of bad publicity over alleged anti-competitive failure looming over it as the Federal Trade Commission kicked off a formal antitrust investigation against Intel. What is interesting is that Intel came around. The company had said that its work wasn’t done on the host controller and that it was under no obligation to share work that it had put “gazillions” of hours into.

But Intel changed its tune, invited the chip set rivals to come to talks, and said it would share that data to head off a fracturing of the standard. As we all learned in kindergarten, sharing is nice.

I can remember the first interview I did with Jen-Hsun Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, back when the company was coming out of stealth in 1995. Since 3-D games didn’t exist back then, Huang described his graphics chip as the ideal “Windows accelerator.” And if you remember those days, Windows needed a lot of help. Then came no less than 50 3-D graphics startups. They all came and went. Nvidia remains.

The company’s newest cell phone processors have more power than that PC graphics chip from 1995. And state of the art graphics processors can recreate a human head in uncanny detail, from the 5 o’clock shadow on a man’s face to the way light scatters underneath the skin and makes it glow.

Now the company is the big kahuna of graphics. It still faces Advanced Micro Devices, which bought ATI Technologies, and Intel is now moving into graphics chips. But now it’s Nvidia’s turn to encourage startups in the field of visual computing. Entrepreneurs are coming out of the woodwork to use the horsepower of the latest graphics chips to create rich applications from scientific computing to visual imagery from professional artists who are recognized by the nonprofit digital art group CG Society.

About 60 of those companies will talk about their plans at Nvidia’s Emerging Companies Summit, which takes place Aug. 26-27 in San Jose, during the Nvision 08 conference Aug. 25-27 at the San Jose Convention Center. Nvision 08 is Nvidia’s first major conference, featuring everything from a professional gaming tournament to a speech by Battlestar Galactica star Tricia Helfer.

Jeff Herbst, vice president of business development at Nvidia, said his company has invested in a variety of applications companies that exploit Nvidia’s chips and its new CUDA programming environment. The companies that will talk at the conference all fit into the tracks of visual computing, gaming, lifestyle computing, and high-performance computing based on Nvidia’s CUDA programming language. Over the years, Nvidia has invested in companies that exploit graphics, such as Keyhole, the satellite imagery company that was acquired by Google, which turned the application into Google Earth. Emerging companies scheduled to participate include Acceleware, Cooliris, Elemental Technologies, Emergent Game Technologies, MotionDSP, NaturalMotion, and Right Hemisphere.

“We’ve come to realize that visual computing is a platform in its own right,” Herbst said. “Without this ecosystem, our hardware won’t get used the way it should be.”

Calisa Cole, vice president of corporate communications, says that the time has come for these twin conferences because startups are plentiful and the benefits of visual computing are all around us. Our cars are better designed, digital movies are easier to edit, baby ultrasounds are clearer than ever, and bone scan results come back quicker.

Nvidia’s chips (as well as AMD’s) are the foundation for the visual computing ecosystem, including game developers such as Epic Games, which makes games such as the upcoming “Gears of War 2” as well as engines for graphics that game startups use to get into the business. There are hardware and software companies with applications ranging from airplane design to medical research to special effects animation.

Company conferences are starting to supercede industry-wide events in the tech industry. In a way, Nvidia is taking a page from the playbook of its biggest rival, Intel, which holds a variety of “Intel Developer Forum” (Aug. 19-21 at Moscone Center West) events to encourage an ecosystem around Intel products. It’s interesting that Nvidia’s first big event comes under a shadow; Nvidia reported a lousy quarter, which included a $200 million write-off related to technical problems with how its graphics chips are affixed to notebook computers. But Nvidia hopes that this era of visual computing will begin to overshadow the era of the microprocessor. The battle between Nvidia and Intel is just starting to heat up.

Speakers at the conferences include luminaries such as Jeff Han, the pioneer of multi-touch displays who was named one of Time magazine’s 100-most-influential people last year. Conference titles include “How We Crammed a Black Hole, a Star Cluster, and Turbulent Plasma into a GPU (and Live to Tell About It).” And for entertainment, there is the pro-gaming tournament and an evening music concert and light show dubbed “Video Games Live.” An estimated 6,000 to 8,000 people are expected to attend Nvision 08, while several hundred are expected at the Emerging Companies Summit.