Innovation @ Intel

posted by Esther Baldwin (孟木兰) on June 07, 2008

I can hardly believe it has been two months since I was in Shanghai attending IDF and anticipating the innovation I would see there. I thought if it was memorable enough to stick in my mind two months after the event then it is probably worth including here. There was an innovation track at the event that included speakers from all over the company.

Some of the content that stuck was:

• Data centre virtualization – Intel IT has saved a ton of money doing this themselves
• Design engineering – supporting globally diverse design teams is a challenge and there are some creative collaboration tools to help
• 21st Century Challenges presented by Gene Meieran, a Senior Intel Fellow, made me think “wow investors and analysts should keep an eye on those emerging industries” –” maybe I should start a company?” This was well worth seeing again, and again…and again
• A big highlight was seeing the future presented by Andrew Chien VP of Intel Research – essential computing and everyday sensing and perception. I want that life with computers and sensors helping make life easier and I want it now. Webcast of this session is available on the website for IDF Shanghai (scroll to the last item on the list).

The topic I was most engaged in was Robotics – Researchers showed videos of robots that collect glasses, another that can see and identify objects and one that can sense when it is about to touch something ….very cool innovation. People asked for the videos to be replayed it was so impressive. Potential applications began to pop in my head and it was really fun to talk about “what if” with the researchers Dave and Sidd.

In the Digital Home area I saw gaming heaven. The demo team of Jerry, Mike, Gary and Michelle wowed the CROWDS around them with Skulltrail, it can operate 8 processing cores on one system and the results are phenomenal.

The key note presentations are always full of new and exciting things and this time it was no different, but since those and can be reviewed on line I won’t mention them again here. Lots of innovation everywhere I looked, what is impressive is to see over time the migration of technology from research to product.

Moving innovation out of the lab and into real products is a well known challenge for innovators that I discuss in my book. A “must not miss” is the Mash Maker tool you can get it at mashmaker.intel.com - and do your own combo site from your favourites and make the power of the internet work for for you.

IDF San Francisco is only 2 months away. See you there??

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tagged: Andrew Chien, Gene Meieran, idf08, idfshanghai08, innovation, intel, Intel Research, robotics