Intel (An SVW sponsor) today announced it would give out four awards of $100,000 each for innovative ideas in education, healthcare, economic development and the environment in 2009.

The announcement was made by Craig Barrett, chairman of Intel, speaking at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.

Dean Takahashi from Venturebeat reports:

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.

Intel Developer Forum: Chairman Craig Barrett takes us on a world tech tour » VentureBeat

I'll be at IDF on Wednesday and Thursday.

Here is some additional info on todays IDF from Annie Rodkins:

The conference unofficially started today with a press briefing put together by Intel’s Corporate Technology Group – the guys and gals who run R&D here at Intel. Here, researchers spoke about their vision of the future as Connected Visual Computing; you can catch up with Intel Fellow Jim Held at http://tinyurl.com/58hnlc or see some pretty amazing slides and highlights athttp://tinyurl.com/5e9cc2.



Rehearsals took place for two talks that will be livecast on Tuesday: “Using Information Technology to Meet 21st Century Challenges & Opportunities” and “Nehalem: Screaming Performance, Efficient Power.” For links to livecasts see http://tinyurl.com/5mtsek.



Lastly, the Upload Lounge is all set and ready to host bloggers and podcasters the world over:http://tinyurl.com/5j6mcm. Tomorrow at the Lounge you will be able to meet some guests from Craig Barrett’s opening keynote (we can’t say who), astronaut Story Musgrave and Intel Sr. Fellow Gene Meieran, and others.