Looking Back To The Future - IDF Rewind

posted by Bob Duffy on September 25, 2009

Lots to take in at IDF this year, and as usual I could not see all I wanted to. Here’s a list of stuff that stood out to me this year

Light Peak: Light Peak is a connectivity technology using light to transmit data to and from your PC, and does it EXTREMELY FAST. It transfers at 10 Gigabits per second. Think of it this way, if a typical network runs at 10Mbps. this is a 1000 times faster. So for the same speed of transferring a 100 Meg file you could transfer 100 Gigs. It’s also full duplex. So you can pull in content as fast as you can push it out. Meaning you can watch a HD video while also transferring large amounts of data. Cable length can go up to 100 meters, which is amazing.

Moblin 2.0: It was announced that Moblin 2.0 is built to work with handhelds with voice support. That means we can see this new snappy little operating system on smart phones when Moorestown comes out next year. Also Dell announced it will ship its Mini 10v netbook with Moblin. That means the OS will be tuned to work with the hardware so you expect a great experience. I test drove Moblin while at the show, and found to be a simplistic and visually appealing OS designed to give you easy access to your media, social content, web, and applications. It has an almost kiosk like feel, making it a highly intuitive experience and very effective for small netbook displays.

Tangent Bay Concept PC: This is a concept laptop with 4 screens, with 3 small screens just above the function keys on your keyboard. These are multi-touch screens, giving you quick access to media, devices, tools, etc without taking up room on your desktop. I think we can imagine OEM’s will have their own take on this concept. It demonstrates an evolving laptop market. Netbooks may not be the only spin-off segment. With OLED, touch screen, and a host of other technologies that alter how we might interact with data, we can imagine how PC and mobile designs will continue to shape themselves into new segments.

Atom Developer Forum:The term thrown around to describe this was “AppStore”. And just the thought of an “AppStore” for Atom brought up excitement and controversy. The vision from Intel is, across Intel’s architecture you only need to compile once, regardless of the device. Meanwhile here is a major initiative fostering development around the Atom and most specifically for Netbooks. I believe those ideas are complimentary. We have to be honest. Netbooks are not the same as Notebooks, largely because of the form factor. As you get smaller, Windows based apps built for 1024 displays are not ideal. That issue actually creates opportunity for new app types and new application user interfaces. I see this as start of an Intel architecture marketplace to help spawn innovation for smaller form factors while putting money in developer’s pockets.

Widget TV: Widget TV appears to be much more than Widget TV. It’s a whole space and technology. Widget TV has also moved from the TV to a set-top box that adds Internet apps as a layer to your TV. And that is smarter! Your Xbox, Tivo, AV Receiver or any other devices connect as normal, but the Widget TV console as the last item in the chain, adds Widget application as a layer to the whole experience. So regardless if you are playing a PS3 game, a Blue Ray video or watching a slide show from your PC, the widget apps will always be there, giving you access to content from various services. Widgets could aggregate your media content from your DLNA devices on your home network. Other widgets can provide you on demand content and shows from your favorite broadcaster, or give you access to your social networking content and friends. All directly via your TV. A game service was also shown. This game store allows you access to a variety of licensed games from leading game developers, for immediate play on your TV. The target is casual gaming, which fits well for a TV experience. More reason not to get off the couch.

3D Television: Justin Rattner gave, hands down, the best demo of the show, by livecasting in 3D. It literally gave a whole new dimension to livecast conferencing as we saw a person from outside the room, show up in the room in full 3D while talking to Justin, as if they were actually standing side by side. Truly like something out of a SciFi experience, but done right then and there during the keynote.

Whiteboards: I SO like the whiteboards; extremely low tech, popular and fun. As we all know, some of the most technical and forward thinking inventions started as doodles. Here we got to see attendees show off their vision of future technologies across dozens of large whiteboard displays. I hope Intel publishes these and extends this in the digital space

You’ll notice something here. Not a mention of the word “processor” in this whole post. That was not a conscious effort. I think it shows what Intel is up to. It is a company working hard to innovate new technology that lives in our future. Processors are part of that story, but certainly not the end of the story and certainly not the end of Intel’s innovation.

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tagged: 3d, future, IDF, IDF09, light peak, moblin, tangent bay, tv, widget