So, IDF 2011 – it is finally underway & think it is off to a pretty good start! For me personally, I was able to roll-in at about 8AM, grabbed some coffee & a bagel, then had a few meetings & connected with a lot of my friends in the world of social media (@kentonwilliston, @cvelis, and @bobduffy), then got pretty good seats to see the keynote…
To open, Johan Jervoe (Intel Vice President and Director of Creative Services) started us off giving some highlights of the Keynotes we’ve got lined up this week as well as some major other items going on this week, including panel with our CIO, Diane Bryant and other great opportunities to learn from Intel experts.
Then, we had Paul Otellini, our President & CEO come out & give the Day 1 keynote. He started with talking about how computing has come a long way in 30 years since the first PC, the changes still yet to come may be even more remarkable. A common theme was, despite all that has been accomplished, it is all almost nothing when compared to what will be coming next. While that may seem hard to believe, I think he’s actually captured the future pretty well. Unlike almost any other industry, automobiles, aerospace, even electrical utilities in general, the world of computing is not experiencing any kind of “plateauing” often seen elsewhere. For example, in the early days of aviation, the top speeds & top ranges grew by leaps & bounds for decades, but eventually started to slow until the significant increases are decades apart instead of just years apart. When you look at the general world of computing – and the engine behind computing: Moore’s Law – there seems to be no slowing down. In fact, due to the miracles of a connected world, some aspects are actually speeding up!
But, at the center of it all, is the user. We are seeing critical transition:
From Personal ComputERS to Personal ComputING
The difference is the above is not simply a grammatical tweak, but rather a landmark shift where the computing DEVICE is still important, but the computing EXPERIENCE is the priority. And in order for that to come to fruition, we need to embrace these 3 Computing Essentials:
- Computing Must Be Engaging
- Computing Must Be Consistent
- Computing Must Be Protected
On the first point – Engaging – it is the continuation of what we’ve enjoyed over the last decade. Pictures must have greater context (geo-tagging, people tagging, time stamps, etc.). Video must be easier to take, edit, and share with your friends and loved ones. We need to be able to ignore the tsunami of data flowing around us & instead just pay attention to the knowledge gleaned from said data. In short, we need great processors to make our lives better in almost every way.
On the second point – Consistent – I took it to mean 2 things – people need to be able to interact with their devices in an intuitive & consistent way (like not having different methods for doing something like sending emails just because you are doing it on different devices) and, perhaps most importantly, you need all your different computing devices to share your information & digital properties seamlessly & effortlessly. When you take a great picture of your kids playing & having fun, you don’t want to have to remember where you copied that to or where you haven’t – you just want to be able to access that picture from any device, at any time, without any muss or fuss.
And that brings us to the last point – Protected – where you want easy access to your information while you want unauthorized access to that same information to be practically impossible. You also want to be able to use your various computing devices in a worry free way where you don’t need tobe a computer expert just to stay safe. You want your computing devices, with its Gigahertz of speed in Gigabytes of memory, to be smart enough to know what is safe and what is not safe to do, so you can just enjoy the computing experience without the previously associated computing fears.
To discuss this last point, Paul brought out on stage an executive from McAfee to discuss a new technology called: DeepSAFE. Click the link to learn all about it, but the short version is it leverages both Software & Hardware together to keep you safer then you’ve ever been before. They showed a demo where two almost identical systems experienced a “Root-Kit” attack, but the system with the DeepSAFE technology was able to detect it & stop it in real-time while the other systems was not so fortunate!
From my perspective, there were some other great things shown, such as an Intel Processor being powered by ONLY a Solar Cell the size of the heat-sinks we USED to have to use (this processor required NO heat-sink). He also talked about the next generation codename after Ivy Bridge called “Haswell” & how it would be laser focused on being an order of magnitude difference in the power consumption needs of future computing devices. And, perhaps one of the coolest things, from my perspective was, Google announced that ALL Future Releases of Android would be FULLY Optimized to run on Intel Processors. To me, that is huge because it will just further expand all the places where Intel Technology can help to make an even better computing experience!
So, that’s it, that’s a quick recap of a great hour worth of news from the Day 1 Keynote at IDF 2011. There was obviously a lot more that happened than I can write about in a single blog, so feel free to watch the webcast of the keynote for yourself, but I’ll leave you with the quote shared by an Executive from Dreamworks:
Dreamworks Animates Great Movies – Intel Animates the WORLD!
