Paul Otellini, the former CEO of Intel, the world’s second largest chipmaker, died in his sleep the company announced Tuesday - he was ten days shy of 67 years old.

His retirement from Intel in May 2013 capped nearly 40 years working at Intel. He was on the fast track early in his career as Technical Assistant to Andy Grove, CEO and Chairman, and then served in key leadership positions in Intel's business groups.

Otellini was Intel’s fifth CEO but the first chief executive without a technical background  — he held a Bachelor Degree in Economics for University of San Francisco. He was also the first Intel CEO to retire suddenly, leaving the board to scramble in a search for his successor. Intel's CEOs are forced to retire at 65 years old and then transition to a chairman role.

There is always a planned succession but Otellini surprised the board with his early retirement And he did not serve as Chairman.

He was replaced by Brian Krzanich - an executive with an engineering background.

Krzanich said. "He was the relentless voice of the customer in a sea of engineers, and he taught us that we only win when we put the customer first."

His legacy at Intel stands out in several ways. He had to layoff about 10,500 staff in 2006 -- the company's largest layoffs.

He admits he missed the importance of the smart phone market where rival ARM scored major design wins. 

And several business initiatives had to be closed or scaled back including the Itanium microprocessor -- which cost billions of dollars to develop and support. 

Intel's $7.68 billion acquisition of McAfee security software firm in 2010 was spun out earlier this year into a joint venture with private investment fund TPG.

Intel’s move back into the chip foundry business in which it makes custom chips has yet to show results in terms of clients and revenues.

During Otellini’s tenure Intel continued its dominance as the world’s largest chipmaker. Earlier this year it lost the top spot to Samsung. 

Otellini was also a current member of Google's Board of Directors.

From Intel:

 

Paul and his wife, Sandy, were married for 30 years. He is survived by his wife; his son, Patrick; and his daughter, Alexis. Since he retired in 2013, Otellini dedicated time to mentoring young people and being involved with several philanthropic and charitable organizations, including the San Francisco Symphony and San Francisco General Hospital Foundation.

https://newsroom.intel.com/news-releases/paul-s-otellini-1950-2017/

Visionary Awards: Craig Barrett, center with Tim O’Reilly and Jane Evans-Ryan, Genuity. 

This year’s Silicon Valley Forum Visionary Awards featured a tribute to the late Andy Grove, the legendary leader of Intel, who helped build the company into the world’s most valuable semiconductor company.

Three additional people received a 2016 Visionary Award: Carl Bass, CEO Autodesk; Tom Wheeler, Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and Jennifer Pahika, founder and Executive Director of Code for America.

 The Silicon Valley Forum is one of the oldest professional associations in the SF Bay Area (it previously was known as SDForum)

Andy Grove died March 21, 2016 and his is the first posthumous award by the 33-year old organization. It was accepted by Craig Barrett, former CEO and Chairman of Intel. He recited a poem and praised Grove for his mentorship that included himself and many others, some who later became heads of large companies. Grove was an immigrant from Hungary and worked at Intel for more than three decades. 

Jennifer Pahlka, founder and executive director of Code for America, was introduced by her husband Tim O'Reilly, founder of the publishing and events company O'Reilly Media, and a 2014 Visionary Award winner. Pahlka gave a passionate speech about government, communities, poverty and social justice.

Carl Bass, president and CEO of Autodesk spoke about the opportunties ahead. Tom Wheeler, the 31st Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission spoke about the importance of broadband infrastructure and net neutrality.

1978: Andy Grove, left, with Intel colleagues Robert Noyce (center) and Gordon Moore.

Intel yesterday announced that Andrew Grove, its former CEO and Chairman, had died aged 79.

Present at Intel’s 1968 founding with Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, Andy Grove became Intel’s President in 1979 and CEO in 1987. He served as Chairman of the Board from 1997 to 2005. Both during his time at Intel and in retirement, Grove was one of the most influential figures in technology and business, writing best-selling books and widely cited articles, and speaking out on an array of prominent public issues.

I met several times with Andy Grove when I worked at the Financial Times and became a great admirer of his work at Intel.

I saw him for the last time in September 2015, at a Churchill Club event honoring his long career and contributions to Silicon Valley. Churchill Club: Intel's Andy Grove Receives 'Legendary Leader Award

Grove was looking very frail. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease in 2000 and has made large charitable contributions to medical research.

At Churchill Club 2015 :From left: Saleem Janmohamed; Andy Grove, Ben Horowitz and Geoffrey Moore.

Grove was the main driving force within Intel since it’s founding in 1968. He created a “Marine Corps” culture encouraging frank, open discussions along with a management style that relied on a lot of shouting (he was partially deaf).

It was an effective management style because Intel grew to  become one of the most valuable public companies in the world, the world’s largest chip maker, and has created huge returns to shareholders for decades by dominating markets for microprocessors — the most profitable chip device category. 

Diversity in corporate governance 

After he retired from CEO and then later as Chairman, he remained as a special advisor to Intel. He has worked very hard over the past ten years to make sure Intel became a model of corporate governance.

He helped recruit a diverse board of directors (below) and insisted on a separation of CEO, President and Chairman positions. Many tech companies allow their CEOs to also be President and Chairman.

Intel’s board of directors earned a perfect score from GovernanceMetrics International. Only 21 other company boards have received this recognition.

 Above: Intel’s Board of Directors in 2013.

Grove’s influence and focus on diversity led to the appointment in May 2013 of Renée James (below) as President, essentially a co-CEO position with Brian Krzanich. Ms. James worked as Technical Assistant (TA) to Mr Grove for four years. The position of TA to the CEO is a traditional fast-track path for senior Intel executives. Ms. James left Intel in January 2016.

 Former Intel President Renée James.

The culture Grove helped create at Intel can be a harsh one but it is also intensely loyal.

I have made many friends at Intel over the past 30 years and the extraordinary thing is that nearly all are still there. This is rare in Silicon Valley and it is a testament to Intel that a confrontational culture in the workplace doesn’t prevent strong bonds of loyalty and cooperation inside its teams.

Andy Grove’s legacy is immense and his influence in Silicon Valley and beyond has been extraordinary.

- - -

Please see:

Analysis: The Hand Of Retired CEO Andy Grove Is Seen In Intel's New Leadership

Meet Intel's King Makers - A Truly Exemplary Board Of Directors

Andy Grove’s Last Stand - Forbes

From left: Saleem Janmohamed, Accenture; Andy Grove, Ben Horowitz and Geoffrey Moore, M.C.

Andy Grove was a founder, CEO and Chairman of Intel during a long career that saw the Silicon Valley firm grow to become the world's largest chip maker.

Andy Grove, the former CEO and Chairman of Intel, was honored late last week with the "Legendary Leader" Churchill Award from The Churchill Club, a long running Silicon Valley technology forum.

His award was accepted by Ben Horowitz, a VC who was impressed with Grove's 1983 book "High Output Management.". There was also a video recording of Silicon Valley executives such as Mark Zuckerberg praising Grove.

A very frail looking Grove, 79 years old, took to the stage to thank everyone and spoke briefly.

Grove is credited with building a tough talking and hard working culture at Intel that propelled the company from a failing memory chip maker to a microprocessor manufacturer that dominates desktop and server markets.

Grove escaped from Hungary to the US after surviving the German occupation of the Second World War and then the Hungarian revolution against the communist government and invasion by Soviet forces in 1956.

His migrant status was mentioned by Horowitz in regards to closed borders and the migrant crisis in Europe and in the US, which would likely have kept Grove out.

Spinal meningitis took away Munder's hearing at an early age. He was mainstreamed with other deaf students and has been fully immersed in deaf culture since he was young. He doesn't rely on hearing aids, and the only technology he uses to communicate outside of Intel is a video phone that connects to a video relay service.

"Outside of Intel, I use video conferencing to a relay operator who interprets," explains Munder through one of his interpreters, Christian Hansen. "For instance, if I want to order a pizza, I'll call the relay service, they'll see me on the video phone, I'll see them, and then they'll place the call to the pizza place, and they can interpret the call for me."

Being deaf inside Intel...

Within Intel, it's a different story as Munder frequently has highly technical meetings with groups of engineers who often speak simultaneously, use acronyms specific to Intel, and who may speak with accents, each of which are often challenges for interpreters to understand and communicate.

"Inside Intel, it's kind of challenging," says Munder. "External technology isn't really applicable here. If I use video relay to call someone here at Intel, that interpreter is not going to know any jargon or lingo plus IP [intellectual property] happening here at Intel, so we just have the interpreter team here."

Intel has contracted with an outside agency to provide interpreting services for deaf employees.

"There were a lot of different challenges when I first joined Intel," says Munder. "The first six months, I was completely lost. I didn't understand Intel's language, it was very difficult for me to figure out the Intel culture."

Over time, Munder and his interpreters developed ways to share and understand acronyms and other technical terms within Intel.

"The interpreters had to listen to the Intel language and they would have to figure out how to translate it to English so that it made sense and understand the concept behind the science," says Munder. "And then they would have to interpret it and translate it into the American Sign Language for me."

American Sign Language has its own grammar, syntax, structure and doesn't follow the same grammar as English. ASL also includes body language and facial expression. For example, a question is indicated through a facial expression - raising one's eyebrows. A simple spoken question of "what is your name?" is translated into essentially "name, what" in combination with raised eyebrows.

"When you write ASL down, it doesn't make sense in English," explains Munder. "The actual grammar structure is more similar to Romance languages, so it's very different than in English."

"The actual interpreting process that happens here at Intel is very unique to interpreting in general," explains one of the interpreters, Bekki Mullenaux. "This is a highly contextual, fast-paced environment. In general, as interpreters, we try to fade into the background and try not to be conspicuous...but not at Intel." Mullenaux adds that she had to force her way into the middle of groups of Intel engineers, shout over the noise of loud equipment and engage in multiple, simultaneous conversations.

Another challenge that Mullenaux recounts is having to do sign language while fully suited up in an Intel "bunny suit," the protective suit used in extremely clean manufacturing environment, with only her eyes being visible.

"Sign language is a very visual language depending on small hand movements, facial expression and body language," says Mullenaux. "It was like trying to talk to someone while being gagged."

The coming of signing technology...

While there is a promise of technology coming that will be able to fully understand ASL as well as lip reading, it still seems to be a ways off.

"In order to fully interpret American Sign Language grammar and structures into spoken English, a computer needs to read all facial expressions, body language and signs in parallel," explains Munder. "It requires a quite complicated algorithm for that."

Even within Intel, there are technologies that map faces and gestures that are commercially available, like RealSense and Pocket Avatars (now called YAP). But despite the complex algorithms powering these services, much more would need to be done.

"Facial expressions, body languages and signs are all related," says Munder. "The major challenge is that we need to create a range of innovative tools to allow the recording and the processing of motion to capture American Sign Language context. It is not that easy to design a complete workflow from the movement capture, including all upper body parts articulations, facial expression and gaze direction."

But efforts are being made to bridge technology and human gestures, from monitoring movement, facial expressions and motion using cameras and sensor-laden gloves, to a developer working with the RealSense SDK to create rudimentary sign-language interpretation.

Until that day arrives Munder is just fine with the way things are. "Being deaf is a difference in human experience rather than a disability."

Clint Zeagler, co-curator and co-designer of the “On You: A Story of Wearable Computing” show at the Computer History Museum.

By Intel Free Press

While wearables may be the latest rising trend, the concept of technology that can be worn on one’s body has actually been around for decades. Some of those original concepts even faced the same challenges that current devices currently are up against. A new exhibit, “On You: A Story of Wearable Computing” at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, showcases how wearables have evolved and overcome many challenges during that time.

In 2001, Thad Starner, who was part of the original MIT “borg,” founder and director of the Contextual Computing Group at Georgia Tech’s College of Computing, where he is also a professor, and co-curator of the exhibit, published an article in IEEE Micro that outlined the challenges of wearable computing at that time. In the paper, Starner presented several critical challenges facing wearable computing including power and heat, networking, mobile input, and display, each of which is showcased at the exhibit, complete with wearable examples of the time.

It turns out, many of the challenges confronting developers of wearables in the past decades still hold true today. But smaller circuitry, advanced power and communications capabilities, and better graphical outputs have turned the field of wearable computing into a skyrocketing movement.

“The show is a really good retrospective of how we met the challenges along the way to be able to get the device that you can wear,” explains co-curator and co-designer of the exhibit, Clint Zeagler, who is a research scientist at Georgia Tech’s Interactive Media Technology Center.

According to Zeagler, wearable computing early on had vast challenges. “There was no cloud in the early ‘90s,” says Zeagler. “We went from a motorcycle battery to something that is one-fourth of the size.” Mobile input was another hurdle, especially when coupled with minimal or lack of connectivity.

“If I want to have a mobile computer, one of the things that I want to be able to do is give input to that computer while I’m walking, otherwise I’m wearing it, but I’m having to stand in one spot,” explains Zeagler. Connected wearable users 15 years ago had to use a “bag phone” to be able to get a signal to a connected wearable, but “if you moved 3 feet then everything had to be reconfigured,” says Zeagler.

The trend to build wearable computing sprouted up across the globe, primarily driven by the military, academia and medical industries as well as makers who were creating their own wearable systems for personal use. Many of these inventions are on display at the show.

Designed by Mark Spitzer in 1997 for Thad Starner, the MicroOptical prescriptive glasses can be viewed as a precursor to Google Glass.

Several of the items at the show are one-of-a-kind inventions, including a pair of prescriptive glasses designed by Mark Spitzer in 1997. Specially made for Starner, the glasses sported a monochrome display that had a 9-degree field of view and a 320 x 240 pixel resolution. The LCD panel in the earpiece had its image projected and reflected through the lens and is quite similar in design to Google Glass. According to Zeagler, Starner wore the glasses for only a couple of months because the weight of the glasses kept causing it to slide off his face, impairing the viewing of the display.

The FIDO, an academic prototype, explored the idea for canine wearables to assist in the communication between service dogs and their handlers.

There are even wearables for dogs on display at the exhibit. The Fido Project, which Zeagler worked on in 2013, examined ways for assistance and rescue dogs to use wearables to better communicate with their handlers. According to Zeagler, the designers were faced with a similar human interface challenge but this time with canines. Tug and bite interfaces were tested, with the team eventually finding that a bite interface, using a capacitive air bladder (not on display at the show), had the most effective performance.

While the exhibit aims to look back at the evolution and challenges in the wearable space, it also provides glimpses of the future.

“If you talk about consumer wearables, most of what is out there right now are fitness tracking devices,” says Zeagler. “There were a lot of people in academics trying to log their activity. But then when they got that data, it was a bunch of numbers. An academic can look at those numbers and say ‘oh, I did a lot of walking this day’ but the general public doesn’t want to look at just a stream of numbers.”

Zeagler says the industrial, product and experience designers helped evolve academic design into producing “an output that gives an experience that is helpful to the individual.” Zeagler believes the next evolution similar to fitness trackers will come with heads-up displays. He also thinks the fashion industry, using “fully integrated garments where the technology is actually woven into the fabric of the garment” will be a huge disruptive force to the wearable marketplace.

While Zeagler believes wearables could detach from the smartphone, no device will be completely autonomous from the network – wearable devices must connect to something eventually, whether it is a smartphone or directly to the cloud. What will change are the form factors, the size and inevitably, the function.

“The thing about wearables is that we have a cellphone that will do everything that we want it to do,” says Zeagler. “I think what you will see with wearable technology is peripherals that start to interface with that. I don’t think it will be one killer use or application; it’s going to be a killer existence.”

We will all be using a new type of memory chip soon reports Intel Free Press, thanks to the fruits of a partnership between Intel and Micron.

By Intel Free Press

After years of research by Intel and Micron Technology, the first new memory technology in 25 years has been announced. Called 3D XPoint it combines the best of DRAM and NAND (Flash) and promises to change computer designs.

"This has no predecessor and there was nothing to base it on," said Al Fazio, Intel senior fellow and director of Memory Technology Development. "It's new materials, new process architecture, new design, new testing. We're going into some existing applications, but it's really intended to completely evolve how it's used in computing."

Memory and storage technologies such as DRAM and NAND (Flash) have been around for decades, and their [performance has gradually increased with each generation. Quantum leaps in performance are extremely rare but the 3D XPoint technology announced by Intel in partnership with Micron has been called the biggest memory breakthrough since the introduction of NAND in 1989.

It is non-volatile like NAND Flash memory but is up to 1,000 times faster, almost as fast as DRAM and lasts 1,000 times longer.

3D XPoint owes its performance and name to a transistor-less three-dimensional circuit of columnar memory cells and selectors connected by horizontal wires. This "cross point" checkerboard structure allows memory cells to be addressed individually. This enables data to be written and read in smaller blocks than NAND, resulting in faster and more efficient read/write processes.

Changing game technology...

Removing bottlenecks in a system is key to increase overall performance. Memory has been a constant constraint because performance gains in microprocessors have outpaced both the speed of hard disks and the cost and density of DRAM.

"What's exciting about the technology is that it unleashes the microprocessor. It gets more data closer to the CPU. It has 10 times the density of DRAM at near levels of performance, and it allows people running applications to have much more data available to them," said Rob Crooke, vice president and general manager of Intel's Non-Volatile Memory Solutions group.

"Conversely in the storage, it's up to 1000 times faster than NAND. To put that in perspective, most people have experienced an SSD versus a hard disk, where the SSD is about 1,000 times faster than a hard disk. This new technology is going to be that same level of pop like everything's in memory."

"We've looked at gaming performance, and it has a phenomenal impact and gives the game creators much more freedom," explained Crooke.

"As opposed to constraining their game levels to how much they can fit in memory and then loading a new level, they now have total freedom to create a much richer game experience and one that's seamless and continuous, and they can decide if they want to break it up. It's at their artistic and creative discretion to do that, as opposed to some physical limit like memory size."

Made for big data...

"It'll be a game-changing experience not only in the client platforms but also in the data center where they're trying to analyze remarkable amounts of big data," Crooke continued. "More and more data needs to be driven to the CPU to analyze faster. Having much more data available to the CPU at a very short latency is pretty exciting."

Intel and Micron partnership

Micron and Intel have been jointly developing this technology since 2012. There was, however, basic research on various technologies at both companies for years prior to this partnership. The research team could have tried an easier route--committing to performance and density, or performance and cost, for example--but "if you want to change something, you've really got to go for that tougher problem and tie them all together," Fazio explained.

In 2012, Micron and Intel agreed to jointly pursue the most promising technologies from the research findings. Hundreds of Intel and Micron engineers have been involved in developing the technology to its current state, spanning facilities in California, Idaho and around the world. Over the last three years, the process development for this technology occurred in Micron's state of the art 300mm R&D facility in Boise, Idaho.

"Nobody has ever attempted productizing a stackable cross point architecture at these densities. Learning the characteristics and developing the integration methods for this novel architecture was full of engineering challenges," said Scott DeBoer, vice president of R&D at Micron.

"3D XPoint technology required the development of a number of innovative films and materials, some of which have never before been used in semiconductor manufacturing. Understanding the characteristics and sensitivities of these new materials and how to enable them was daunting."

3D XPoint, NAND and DRAM

While 3D XPoint may have capabilities that can displace DRAM and NAND, DeBoer noted that it's an additive technology that will co-exist with current solutions while also enabling new innovations. "DRAM will still be the best technology for most demanding highest performance applications, where non-volatility, cost and capacity are less critical. 3D NAND will still be the best technology for absolute lowest cost, where performance metrics is less critical."

What could be a significant factor in these different memory solutions co-existing is that they can all share manufacturing facilities.

"This technology is fabricated using the same manufacturing lines and methods as conventional memory technologies," said DeBoer.

"With the cross point architecture and the materials systems required for the new cell technology, some unique tooling was developed, but these requirements are on par with standard technology node introductions for NAND or DRAM. This technology is fully compatible and not disruptive to current manufacturing lines."

Scalable architecture...

The future of this technology looks wide-open too. "The cross point memory cell should be the most scalable architecture," said Crooke. "It should allow us to scale the memory technology to pretty good densities yet allow it to be byte-addressable or word-addressable like memory is, as opposed to NAND, which is accessed in blocks of data."

New models of computing...

A technological solution that paves the way for new models of computing doesn't come by very often. It took teams of hundreds of experts, countless flights, and constant open lines of communication and cooperation to bring make 3D XPoint technology possible.

"Entirely new technologies don't come around very often, and to be part of this team was truly a once-in-a-career opportunity," said DeBoer.

"One of the things that we should be proud of is the persistence we've had over a long period of time," Crooke added. "Working on a technology problem that you don't know is solvable for a sustained period of time requires a level of confidence and stick-to-it-iveness."

- - -

Chris Preimesberger at eWeek has a great analysis of the new memory chips: 

Intel, Micron's New Baby Could Eventually Speed Up Most IT

If these chips work as well as advertised, big data-type systems with large workloads will be lining up to use them. The companies are positioning 3D Xpoint not as a replacement for NAND flash storage or standard random access memory, but as a complement to them to hold so-called "hot" data—the most recent and relevant data—nearer to processors so that it can be accessed faster.

. . .

Bill Leszinske, an Intel vice-president who runs strategic planning and business development for the company's Non-Volatile Solutions Group, told eWEEK that there is a wide range of early use cases for the new memory chip.

"One is cloud service providers with data centers who understand the workloads very well, that have real storage and performance problems, or are trying to build huge arrays to do things like genomic analysis," Leszinske said. "Other early adopters will be the HPC (high-performance computing) or cloud folks who are trying to do faster transactions and need a way to move data in and out very, very quickly.

"That's on the data center side. On the client side, gamers always want more performance, and we see that as a real application of these very high-speed solutions."
. . .

As far as improving data movement from servers to storage, which has been a historic problem in IT, Leszinske noted that the entire industry is moving storage connections from SATA (serial ATA) controllers to solid-state PCIe devices, and that it works hand-in-hand with the capabilities of 3D Xpoint...

PCIe-based flash storage has the ability to bypass traditional storage overhead by reducing latencies, increasing throughput and enabling efficient processing of massive quantities of data.

Above, modeling uncertainty in human-robot interaction at UC Berkeley.

The good news is that humans will still be needed in the factory of the future; the bad news is that humans will still be needed in the factory of the future. A report from Intel Free Press:

By Intel Free Press

Contrary to what you may see at the movies, robots will not come to rule the world any time soon, experts say. Ken Goldberg, University of California, Berkeley professor of industrial engineering and operations research, and Otherlab CEO Saul Griffith, spoke at an event on factories of the future: “Bold Bets: Tomorrow’s Industrial Entrepreneurship.” 

“Machines are very good at lots of things: precision, repetition. But they are extremely bad at any type of creativity or insights,” said Goldberg.

Intuition, something humans take for granted but machines simply cannot learn on their own yet, is important. And future automation systems need to be able to understand when to call for help when faced with a decision.

“Machines are overweight, blind, stupid, slow and weak,” said Griffith.

Humanoid robots have many huge components, cannot truly see what they are doing, only do what they are told (like playing back a prerecorded macro), and for the amount of power they demand, are much slower and weaker than their human counterparts.

It takes a human about 100 or 200 watts of power to lift 30 pounds; it takes an industrial robot about 10 kilowatts to do the same action. Griffith says these limitations need to be optimized if we are to truly have mobile and smarter robots.

University risk-takers…

While some may be funded by corporations, these types of innovations largely emerge from academic environments. “Universities are well-setup to [take risks],” explained Goldberg. “The tenure system and various approaches, let you take a chance to do something that may fail. Industry is different; there you can fail and you can lose your life savings or lose your job. Here in the university…you can take all kinds of chances.”

Griffith says that universities could be even riskier and bolder if there was more money available to invest in projects. 

“There has to be a very close ecosystem, relationships and collaboration between the researchers and the academic community and the people who do more of applied research inside the industrial complex,”  said Eric Benhamou, founder of Benhamou Global Ventures and former CEO of 3Com.

From mass to custom production…

Certain tasks that require intricacies and precision beyond a human’s means, such as computer chip production, are where machines excel. Even then, automated chip factories could see a shift.

Former Intel CTO Justin Rattner believes the factories and fabrication facilities of the future will evolve to shift from massive scales of single production units to more customized production in smaller volumes.

“There are certain things that require an economy of scale,” said Rattner. “We are very likely to see chip factories that shift from making a few designs at very high volume to make hundreds or thousands of designs in low volume.”

“The most important thing is that people have to think less about invention and more about innovation…getting the idea to a form where a product organization can engage and turn that thing into something you can sell.”

The world's largest chipmaker sees massive opportunities in IoT. Intel Free Press interviews Rose Schooler, head of Intel's Internet of Things Group.

By Intel Free Press

With the chance to connect “sensors to the cloud in every industry on the planet,” Rose Schooler,  vice president of the Internet of Things Group at Intel, says the Internet of Things (IoT) opportunity is massive. 

But interoperability, along with provisioning and managing these devices, are critical factors for success.

Her organization is responsible for delivering platforms for the networking and storage market segments as well as providing solutions for telecommunications service providers.

With so many emerging technologies and opportunities in IoT, how will everything be able to talk to each other?

When you look at how massive this IoT opportunity is, it’s literally sensor to cloud in every industry on the planet. So you are trying to create an über horizontal platform and the über scale experience. You are not going to get 100 percent of that. 

You are still going to have some uniqueness at the sensor, you are going to have some uniqueness at the application. But everybody looks at that opportunity and says if it were a bingo card, I can play ‘cover all’. 

I have got to figure out if I’m going to go for a postage stamp or if I’m going to try and get regular bingo. As people do that, they say ‘if I’m going to try to do that and get a regular bingo, then if I’m going to fill out the rest of the card, I’m going to need the rest of the ecosystem to do so’. 

I do believe that there is still some room for improvement, on isolating and identifying and pulling together the critical set of standards bodies – there are a million of them right now and we need to start focusing on the ones that are really going to drive the industry forward and accelerate the opportunity.

What recommendations would you have for developers who want to get into the IoT space?

This is generic but pretty important. You have got to focus on some kind of end user interest or problem. You have to either improve the way they live, you have to help them save money or make money or improve customer experience.

And I think if you start with those kind of basic end-user tenets, and build your solution based on solving a problem in that domain, I think that is step one.

Step two is then how do you leverage whatever is available that is out there that is horizontal, that is scalable, and somewhat open source – because the more open, the more interoperable, the more industry validation has been done of the interfaces, I would look to not stand up something that’s very vertical or very proprietary, but look to see what you can do with what is open standards-based, horizontal platforms.

What’s needed for successful IoT solutions?

You have to create ease-of-use and scalability from the sensor to the gateway to the network to the cloud, and have the ability to run analytics either on the edge or in the data center.

I don’t think that one takes precedence over the other, though I would say that if you can’t connect the device, you are kind of stopped in your tracks there.

Is there one area that is of more importance for developers?

The ability to have devices connect to the network seamlessly, support multiple protocols, and easily ingest data off of the things – I wouldn’t call more important – but I would call ‘step one’ in the evolution of enabling IoT solutions.

And then once you can connect that device, identify it, provision it, and manage it you can also look at how security is a critical foundational element from sensor to gateway to network to cloud.

You need to be able to harden the device, secure the data transmission, and make sure you are monitoring and managing in real-time your security performance throughout your end-to-end solution.   

What have you seen from IoT that excites you?

Some of the initial adoption pilots or use cases that you see are around how people are transforming their businesses, how are they becoming more efficient with their utilization of their assets, and I think those are great use cases.

But what really excites me emotionally is how IoT can help solve some of the big global challenges that we see in front of us today, around the fact that if we look ahead at a population of 10 billion people in 2040, we are going to need to produce 70 percent more food than we produce today, we are going to consume 56 percent more energy, we are going to have a much bigger set of carbon dioxide emissions.

What is Intel doing in this space?

From a solution perspective [Intel] is trying to cover the bingo card. But we aren’t going to be the ones that provide all of the chips. We are going to have to go for help.

Intel has an unsurpassed, scalable silicon story. When you look ahead from Curie to Quark to Atom to Core to Xeon, we have the most comprehensive silicon portfolio in the industry. Add to that the software assets we get from McAfee and Wind River, and a strong interest and desire to extend security both in silicon and software from sensor to cloud.

In addition to that, we have a history of defining platforms that deliver scale. We have a history of building ecosystems and we have a history of standing up use cases quickly where we can iterate and learn repeatedly. 

Technology moves fast and today's tech products become outdated faster than the seasons change and are thrown out. Hoarders (such as Freda Clark, above) are unconscious archivists of our digital age and are now sitting on some iconic treasures. Here's a report from Intel Free Press...

By Intel Free Press

Hoarders who are finally clearing out their stashes are finding that some of their trash is actually treasure

Forgotten items sitting in the dark corner of garages or hidden away in attics are often just old clothes and household items. But on the rare occasion, there could something worth tens, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

 David Clark of Surrey, England had his magazine collection stored under his floorboards, with one issue that fetched $10,000 from Intel. In 2005, Intel set a bounty on the April 19, 1965, issue of Electronics magazine, notable for containing what's known today as Moore's Law.

Unique discoveries such as these capture the attention of the public. Clark's story with the 1965 magazine was featured on the front page of BBC News, above a headline about Prime Minister Tony Blair.

More recently, news hit of a San Francisco woman who disposed of an original Apple 1 computer at a recycling center. That particular Apple 1 went to a collector for $200,000, but other examples of the computer made by Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak have sold for as much as $905,000.

Even though these tech artifacts are only decades old, their relevance to computing history are significant, making them highly sought after by museums and collectors.

Now a decade after Clark collected his prize money, the self-identified "electronics hoarder" reveals how his collection started, and his possession of another antique computer, a magnetic tape-drive IBM 729 Mark II, that might find its way to a museum someday.

Q: What was it about Electronics magazine that compelled you to collect so many? Was it an interest in electronics in general, or was it something special about the publication?

David Clark: Having studied physics on a scholarship to Oxford, I was accepted at Imperial College London to do a Ph.D. in particle physics. But just after starting, I discovered that the grant situation meant that I had to do a Ph.D. in solid state quantum physics instead.

I did this for nearly three years, but it did not work out, so I applied to Philips Research Labs (PRL) in the UK, and was accepted. Starting in January 1974, I was doing work on early digital consumer systems such as Teletext and early personal computers and electronic games. The Philips CD-i was a major project I was heavily involved in.

PRL had an extensive library, but space was naturally limited, so they constantly disposed of old journals and books by allowing personnel to take them away free. I made full use of this to build up my own home library, including some 10 years of Electronics magazines, IEEE Spectrum, early home computer mags, etc.

Not having a car, I would carry bags of books or magazines on the back of my bicycle, which on one occasion got me in some hot water with a PRL security guard, who wondered what company secrets I was disappearing with in the dark.

Q: Did these magazines all go under your floorboards, where you found the 1965 issue of Electronics?

All these acquisitions were stored in our loft (we have an 1888 house with a reasonable sized loft). But in 2005 we were in the middle of converting our loft to extra living space, so its contents had to be stored elsewhere.

The Electronics magazines were relocated under a trapdoor in the floor of our front room, waiting for me to search through them on that memorable day.

Q: How did people react upon learning about your reward and how you used the money?

People's reactions to the money were what you might expect, with quite a lot of laughter and leg-pulling -- pack-rats were referred to.

Though my wife Freda was horrified that it gave me some excuse for hoarding, male friends started wondering if they had anything hoarded of similar value.

Q: Do you still collect things?

 Furnistore, a charity founded by [my wife] Freda, had a warehouse. We were able to use one corner of it to store my 'hoard'.

By then this consisted of over a hundred boxes and bags of souvenirs, technical papers and electronics kit from my various Philips projects. Much of this related to CD-i, where I was responsible for the video chapter of the CD-i specification.

In 2010, I retired and bought a second small house to rent out to augment my pension. The house came with a lockup garage, and this became my main storage place. Everything was moved here from the Furnistore warehouse.

In 2011, we had an extension built at the back of our house, and the front room was converted for Freda's 95 year old aunt to live in. This meant covering over the trapdoor (though it is still there), so the magazines were also moved to the garage.

Q: Besides the 1965 copy of Electronics, are there any other notable items from your collection?

There is one other thing that I acquired that you may be interested in -- the craziest thing of all. In 1973, while on my Ph.D. course, I saw a newspaper advertisement for a sale of surplus electronics kit, and got a bit carried away.

I could not resist one of those gorgeous magnetic tape units that you see whirring away in old movies -- an IBM 729 Mark II! We lived in a small flat at the time, and when it was delivered it sank into the tarmac of the pavement outside.

It was too heavy to move, so I took it to pieces, and when we moved to this house the pieces went with us. I still have them all, apart from the square section tubular frame that everything was mounted on. That frame was used by our children as a climbing frame, and eventually scrapped.

The 729 Mark II was the first of that series to use transistors rather than valves, and I think there are not many of them left.

I have all the working parts, so they may be capable of being reassembled. I am planning to contact a suitable computer museum this year, to see if anyone is interested.

Q: Do you regret parting with that famed copy of Electronics that contained Moore's Law?

Well, it's always nice to have a 'complete set' of anything, but the one I lost has gone to a very good home. I believe it is currently in an Intel museum in California, so probably I could visit it someday and see how it's doing.

Coincidentally, we were recently contacted by someone else looking for original Electronics articles. James Biard of Texas Instruments, inventor of the GaAs LED, published articles in 1959, 1965 and 1967 issues of Electronics. He will be 84 in May, and his grandson contacted us to ask if we could find these magazines, as he wished to give them to him as a surprise birthday present.

After much searching, we were able to find the 65 and 67 issues, but my collection doesn't go back to 59. Currently they are winging their way across the Atlantic on their way to Texas.

So, the collection is once again restoring old memories to people who made important steps in electronics development.

The chip industry is governed by 'Moore's Law" and it has been an incredible innovation platform delivering ever cheaper digital devices. Intel Free Press takes a look at the original article in the original magazine...

By Intel Free Press

Amid all the fanfare around the 50th anniversary of Moore's Law this year, there will be multiple references and notations from a brief article written by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in the April 19, 1965 edition of Electronics magazine, which ceased publishing 20 years ago.

It was the early days of the integrated circuit, and Intel was not even born yet when Moore, who was still at Fairchild Semiconductor at the time, was asked to contribute an article for the 35th anniversary of the magazine. In it, Moore pointed out that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since their invention. But, more importantly, he predicted that the trend would continue into the foreseeable future.

"Integrated circuits will lead to such wonders as home computers or at least terminals connected to a central computer, automatic controls for automobiles, and personal portable communications equipment."

In a short biography accompanying the article, Moore was described as "one of the new breed of electronic engineers, schooled in the physical sciences rather than in electronics." But his prediction proved to be remarkably accurate for the future of the electronics industry. Indeed, it became the driving force for exponential growth and innovation over the next five decades.

While the article is known primarily for its prediction of the doubling of transistors, Moore also predicted how some of those transistors would be used in the future.

"The future of integrated electronics is the future of electronics itself," Moore wrote. "Integrated circuits will lead to such wonders as home computers or at least terminals connected to a central computer, automatic controls for automobiles, and personal portable communications equipment."

In 2005, at the 40th anniversary of Moore's famous observation, Intel realized that it didn't own an original copy of the magazine, only photocopies. So to raise awareness for the importance of the "law" and the seminal article that ended up guiding the industry, the company reached out to Moore, who had long since retired.

"We checked around and asked Gordon if he may have had one, but he only had a photocopy," said former employee Howard High, a communications manager who worked closely with Moore, as well as other Intel CEOs Andy Grove and Craig Barrett, during his 27 years at the company.

So the company went looking for an original copy of that April 19, 1965 issue of Electronics magazine. But not just any copy, said High. "We were looking for the best one we could find, either mint or excellent condition," he said, so that a key piece of history for the semiconductor industry could be persevered in the company archives.

The Bounty

Intel put up a $10,000 reward for anyone who could come up with an original copy of the issue in question.  The notice was posted on eBay using the auction site's now-retired "Want It Now" section. The posting, with a little help from Intel, also captured the attention of the media.

"It was quirky enough that it quickly made the rounds and got a fair amount of attention in the geek world," High recalls. Unfortunately, many of the initial leads were either reprints or photocopies of the original.

It also caused somewhat of a stir among various engineering libraries around the U.S., some of which reportedly put back issues of the magazine under lock and key, according to reports and comments on a few library mailing lists at the time.

The earliest respondents had magazines that were in less than ideal condition, but just four days after word had spread came photographic evidence of a near-mint copy. A British engineer and self-proclaimed "hoarder" by the name of David Clark learned about the bounty from Slashdot.org and discovered he had a copy of the issue buried amid stacks of old magazines under the floorboards of his home in Surrey, England. In a brief ceremony at Intel's Swindon office in the U.K., Clark handed over the prized issue.

Today, the copy that was once buried under the floorboards of a house in England is now carefully kept on the other side of the Atlantic in the Intel archives.

Now 50 years off the printing press, the magazine is too delicate to flip through or even lay flat, according to Elizabeth Jones, manager of the Intel Museum and Intel archives. "The binding is very fragile," she said. "It's practically shredding, so we have to handle it very carefully."

The original copy does not even get displayed in the Intel museum, a popular tourist attraction in Silicon Valley. It is managed and maintained much as a rare manuscript might be, in a climate-controlled environment, in an archival folder, in a special archival box.

Jones is so protective of this important piece of history that she recently blocked an effort to have it travel for use in an internal video being shot with Moore at his home in Maui for the 50th anniversary. "I said it can go to Hawaii but I need to personally carry it," she said. "It's that important." It stayed in the archives.

Ironically, Electronics magazine was first published in 1930 and was designed for "managerial and technical interests" but was never known as the kind of publication one would keep around, according to Moore in an earlier interview. High echoed Moore's assessment, and said the magazine was one of those 'throw away' trade publications you would read and then toss, not at all like a technical journal.

This made it all the more remarkable that one in excellent condition surfaced 40 years after it was first published.

High, a technology communications professional who lived a life of "sound bytes," said it was amazing that Clark had a copy in such fine condition.  "You never know when an idea that is going to change the world will land on your desk, or line the bottom of your bird cage."

Or fetch $10,000 and land in a museum.

- - -

1. 30 Years at Intel: A Look Back


2. Robert Noyce: Mayor of Silicon Valley


3. Silicon Valley Before the Startup


4. Toy Story: the Intel and Mattel Startup

Above, Lindsay VanDriel and Qua Veda are the co-founders of Awake@Intel

Meditation boosts productivity so when it comes to expensive tech workers the gains are very valuable. And so are the lower healthcare costs. 

By Intel Free Press

What started as a grassroots effort among a few colleagues  to meditate during the lunch hour has now grown into an officially supported 10-week long program at Intel.

Now in its third year, the Awake@Intel program imparts on participants concepts such as mindfulness, intention and relational intelligence. Intel is among a growing list of companies, such as Google, General Mills, Ford and LinkedIn, to offer classes on mindfulness.

It may seem paradoxical that taking a moment to slow down and be mindful would be beneficial to environments where agility is paramount, but elite athletes such as Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant and Derek Jeter practiced mindfulness techniques.

Intel employees Lindsay VanDriel and Qua Veda are the co-founders of Awake@Intel

Similar mindful practices are helping workers at Intel, many of whom are engineers, lower their stress levels, boost focus and increase productivity, say the program instructors. Stress costs US businesses upwards of $300 billion annually, according to the American Institute of Stress.

“The idea is to give people a set of fundamental skills that they can use at anytime, anywhere, to help them deal with stressful situations,” said Lindsay VanDriel, a platform strategist in Intel’s Software and Services Group and a co-founder of Awake@Intel. “Instead of having their brilliance diluted across multiple projects all the time, they can bring all of their brilliance into laser-like focus, go deep and apply that into one project.”

For health insurance company Aetna, the idea came from its CEO Mark Bertolini, an active practitioner of yoga and meditation. Aetna now offers a 10-week program to teach thousands of its employees mindfulness and yoga.

In 2012, the company saw a 7.3 percent reduction in medical claims, which translated to $9 million in savings. Aetna also saw an additional 62 minutes of productivity per week for each worker, worth around $3,000 per worker per year.

Led by VanDriel and another Intel employee Qua Veda, who is a market research analyst in IT, the Awake@Intel program is now taught at Intel’s campuses in Hillsboro, Oregon and Folsom, California, and there are plans to expand it to offices in Chandler, Arizona; Santa Clara, California; and Bangalore, India, later this year. 

While mediation practices are an integral part of the course, the majority of each 90-minute Awake@Intel session involves participants journaling thoughts, discussing concepts, and sharing problem-solving techniques.

The results are measurable. Intel management identified nine key areas to survey relating to feelings of stress, ability to focus, engagement in meetings, creativity and innovation, among others.

“We saw a positive 2-point shift on a 10-point scale on all indicators, and we’ve replicated that  over the years,” said Veda. “We have very consistent results even across different groups.”

Focused Problem-Solving

Anand Sharma, an Intel software engineer, found that practicing meditation has alleviated headaches and increased energy. And it has had a positive effect on his colleagues, enabling quicker problem solving.  

“The team was not sure about delivering a key component that was expected from us in the next few weeks,” said Sharm. His team was already stretched thin and working on multiple tasks in parallel. A 30 minute meeting stretched to two hours. “At the end of two hours we had a solution which we could not have imagined. This was only possible with patience and empathy.”

Not New Age-y

Brian Cockrell, an Intel software engineer who participated in Awake@Intel in 2013, went into the program “very skeptical,” but discovered it “was very down to Earth and not at all New Age-y.” The mindfulness concepts even helped Cockrell devise a solution to an engineering problem by filtering out distractions.

Nearly two years later, Cockrell says he still applies the teachings he learned.

“The core concepts are still with me.  I set an intention most days in order to organize my busy personal and work life,” Cockrell said. “I shut off email and turn off instant messenger frequently so that I can concentrate.  I am mindful about not constantly using my phone when I’m with family and friends so that I can be engaged with them.”

Mindful Managers

Managers such as Matthew Bruce, an engineering manager in the Intel Internet of Things group, are finding that mindful practices are helping them become more effective leaders.

“It starts with your conversations with your employees and the way you relate to them,” said Bruce. “If you’re constantly focused on whether or not the person you’re talking to has met expectations, then you’ve dehumanized the relationship. As a manager your goal is for long-term, sustainable output.”

Bea Rataj, a localization manager in IT, said, “My mind is clearer. I remember more about what was being said. I understand things better and can provide better input.”

“I used to come home tired, grumpy, frazzled and wasn’t much fun to be around. Now I come home just tired,” Rataj said. “The quality of tired is that of having done a good day’s work and feeling satisfied with it. I have felt more engaged and am actually looking forward to work the next day.”

Awake Inside and Out

The Awake@Intel co-founders are looking to also help specific groups inside and outside the company. “There are about 2,000 veterans at Intel and I would like a special offering for them,” VanDriel said.

Graduates of Awake@Intel are also reaching outside of the company on their own personal time, to places such as high schools or working directly with at-risk youth groups, to teach mindful concepts.

“It’s an inspiring example of how employees can be empowered and engaged to make something great happen,” said Veda.

Intel Free Press reports on moves to harness smartphone sensors to help apps better personalize their services based on context...

By Intel Free Press

The 2013 film “Her” featured an operating system that could personalize itself to the user to the extent where the intelligence appeared anything but artificial. By taking cues from user data and its environment, the OS was able to respond to the user’s needs, even on an emotional level. While “Her” was science fiction, progress in the area of contextual computing is bringing such intelligent systems one step closer to science fact.

From GPS sensors to accelerometers to gyroscopes, smartphones already have been capturing and utilizing sensor data to enrich a user’s experience. Services such as Google Now combine user data with location to provide information on nearby attractions and travel times for calendar appointments, but much more can be done with smarter sensors.

For example, an ambient audio sensor along with calendar and location data could give a mobile device the contextual awareness to determine whether it can alert you with either an audible cue or a subtle vibration instead if you are in a meeting or movie theater.

Sensor hubs 

In 2012, Intel introduced a sensor hub, a low-power hardware solution dedicated to gathering data from multiple sensors. Other industry players recognized the value of a dedicated sensor hub and also developed solutions. In 2013, Apple integrated a sensor data-collecting M7 chip into the iPhone 5S and Qualcomm repurposed its Hexagon DSP to handle sensor data.

Intel has since incorporated sensor hubs into mobile-focused Atom chips such as Merrifield, Moorefield, and, most recently, Cherry Trail.

“The demand for the sensor hub is the awakening of contextual sensing where always-on sensing is required without [the smartphone] being engaged,” says Claire Jackoski, sensor planner within the client components group at Intel.

Analytics firm IHS predicted 658.4 million sensor hubs shipped in 2014 and forecasts shipments to reach 1.3 billion units by 2017.

But what good is sensor hardware without the software to know what to do with it? To make sense of a collection a sensor data, developers need to put it into context.

Sensors that know what you’re doing

“Humans are very contextual by nature,” says Lana Nachman, principal engineer for User Experience Research, who runs the Anticipatory Computing Lab at Intel. “It’s very hard to come into somebody’s world without understanding the context.”

To this end, Nachman believes for contextual sensing technology to be adopted by users, the technology has to be able to learn proper behavior from users. Nachman likens this to a child’s learning. As they make mistakes, “you have to teach them and then over time…you can see [them] evolve.”

To enable a device to learn the proper behavior of the individual user, it must be taught and trained, and it should also have the contextual awareness to do so. Intel is providing developers the tools to accomplish this with a contextual sensing software development kit (SDK) and underlying hardware.

Ned Hayes, product manager for the context sensing SDK and context service at Intel, outlines that context also needs to pass between devices to understand which device is active, such as switching from laptop to smartphone, as well as how it is being used, allowing better interpretation and prediction of activities. Software analyzes and extrapolates data coming from hardware – think of it as big data for small devices – and developers can programmatically present actions or outputs based on the intersection and understanding of various sensor data.

“If a developer wants to know everything that a user is doing, [they] need to know the user’s context and create a narrative of the user’s day,” says Hayes. “Our system allows developers to have a holistic view of this user’s behavior.”

Intel has taken numerous algorithms believed to be helpful for understanding a user’s behavior and created on-device rules and context engines that operate within the sensor hub.

“Our intention is to make developers more productive and allow them to write an application that can run anywhere,” explains Hayes.

Contextual sensor hubs 

Specialized always-on sensing chips are more efficient at their tasks than a general CPU, leading to overall power savings and decreased overhead for other systems to perform at greater capacity. But taking advantage of dedicated sensor hubs requires tweaks in software.

“All too often, these algorithms are not optimized to run in the sensor hub,” says Hayes. “So if you are trying to do a pedometer, many of the systems out there haven’t actually done the work to run it in the sensor hub as a separate call, so it is actually running in the CPU which runs down the battery and which means that depending on your connectivity and battery life, your phone life might not be as long, and the responsiveness might not be as good.”

All is not lost should a device not have a sensor hub; a developer using the context sensing SDK can gracefully execute the code within the CPU. This makes a developer’s work a bit easier as the context engine will run the appropriate code based on the hardware environment.

The Atom-powered Asus ZenFone 2 is one of the first mobile devices to include the contextual sensor hub and associated software allowing it to respond to gestures using ZenMotion. Speaktoit, a “personal assistant” for smartphones and tablets, uses the context sensing SDK to augment its aid to go beyond the stock assistant features of Apple Siri, Google Now and Microsoft Cortana by allowing for customized commands, remembering places and services, and offering functions matching a user’s location and schedule.

With the latest sensors now listening and learning where we are, what we are doing, and guessing what our next action or activity will be, it might not be too much longer before we have intelligent conversations with our smart devices.

Intel Free Press reports that wireless power could become the best way to supply energy to billions of connected devices. If a solution is not found then IoT won't happen...

By Intel Free Press

With 25 billion connected Internet of Things (IoT) devices expected to come online by 2020, finding an adequate and efficient way to power each device is critical to the success of this emerging technology.

A “connected thing” could be anything from a smartphone and laptop, to a wireless sensor network, medical and military equipment. Connected things are also found in electronic signage, digital merchandising and even inventory tagging. And each of these “things” can contain a multitude of sensors.

According to Sandhi Bhide, Intel’s director of innovative IoT solutions, the energy required to power these devices and their internal sensors is “huge,” and demand for energy is outstripping supply. Bhide believes the next wave of IoT devices will not be able to rely entirely on batteries and wired power.

Bhide extrapolated the following example: in 2012 there were approximately 75 million vehicles shipped with an average of 80 sensors in each vehicle, equaling 6 billion sensors total. If the average wattage of power per sensor is 1 watt, this means that 6000 megawatt-hours are consumed by these sensors. By 2020, an expected 110 million vehicles will ship that year with 200 sensors per vehicle, which equates to 22 billion sensors in automobiles alone consuming an estimated 22,000 megawatt-hours.

Bhide puts this into easier to understand examples: 6000 megawatt-hours equals approximately 4.8 million customers consuming energy (the population of Lebanon); and 22,000 megawatt-hours is equivalent to 17.8 million energy customers (the population of Shanghai) – just to power sensors in automobiles.

As greater quantities of connected devices and sensors push the total energy consumption meter higher, advances in chip and sensor design as well as energy harvesting technologies need to evolve in order for the ecosystem to be sustainable.

“Energy harvesting technologies to allow devices to power themselves—even 1 milliwatt saved across 50 billion devices translates into a lot of power,” say Intel Labs leader Wen-Hann Wang.

Energy generation, or more accurately energy loss prevention, comes in all sizes and forms, such as photovoltaic (solar), thermal and mechanical (vibration or electromagnetic).

Using light energy from the sun is already well-researched and advanced to the point where PCs can run directly off a solar panel.

Racing down the tracks to energy generation

Many electric and hybrid vehicles use friction to generate power — actually capturing energy being lost through regenerative braking systems. Greenrail, an Italian startup, has developed a system that can be retrofitted into railways that incorporates a piezoelectric (vibration) system that generates electricity as trains pass over.

Similarly, walking or running shoes outfitted with piezoelectric generators can generate enough electricity to power small devices such as GPS sensors, receivers and perhaps even a smartphone.

But energy generation by vibration or friction depends on external movement, so researchers are also turning elsewhere to capture potentially lost energy.

The waves are all around us

Another source of energy could be scavenging radio waves already in the air. This harvesting method looks so promising it compelled Joshua Smith, an associate professor at the University of Washington and former principal investigator at Intel Research Seattle, to form an energy-harvesting start-up.

“Moore’s Law, in addition to giving us more transistors and cheaper transistors, is also giving us more energy efficient computing,” says Smith. “If you compare energy efficiency of computing in 2010 to 1940, it’s improved by a factor of a trillion, and it’s continuing to scale."

“Now we can start thinking about powering certain workloads wirelessly, even using pre-existing radio waves that are already in the air. The amount of power in the air hasn’t really changed that much since 1950.”

Smith is referring to radio and TV broadcast transmissions, which is the focus of his research into wireless ambient radio power. He believes this ambient energy can be captured from the air without changes to the existing infrastructure. According to Smith, all that you need to capture radio frequency (RF) power are antennas and circuitry, which many devices have already.

“I think wireless power is the best solution because…our devices are already built to transfer information using electromagnetic waves and so just adding the capability to do power through that same antenna, form factor and housing is attractive,” explains Smith. “We are already using electromagnetic signals for communications so if we use it for power as well, everything can be consistent.”

Vital for a connected future

While there are various methods to capture energy, as well as new chip designs to make the capture, usage and storage more efficient, considerable advancement is needed in this area to support the billions of sensors coming online in the coming years.

“If we don’t find a comprehensive solution to this energy problem, then there is no way that we will be able have an Internet of Things,” declared Smith. “It just won’t be feasible.”

Intel Free Press writes about a discrete Intel project aimed at Millennials that is having problems reaching millennials because it looks too much like a children's app...[Advice to Intel: If an app flops it never gets a second chance — keep the underlying tech but rework the UI. And use your brand.]

By Intel Free Press

In 2014, Intel navigated into new waters when it released Pocket Avatars, a messaging app available for iOS and Android, which is aimed at the millennial demographic and allows users to send expressive, short video messages using preselected characters or avatars.

While there are an abundance of messaging applications for mobile devices, Pocket Avatars differentiates itself by allowing users to map their facial gestures to a chosen 3D avatar, including the likenesses of Katy Perry, Lego, Annoying Orange and even President Obama.

The mobile app maps over 30 points on a user’s face and can even distinguish between the sticking out of a tongue versus the opening of a mouth. The gesture points are then used to control the facial expressions of avatars in a video, which can then be messaged publicly or privately.

Bandwidth-friendly technology

According to Wenlong Li, who leads the Pocket Avatars engineering team in China, one of the project’s initial goals back in 2008 was to investigate how to use a facial gesture tracking algorithm and avatar mapping to reduce the amount of data transmitted during video conferencing. With initial prototypes of the technology, Intel engineers were able to achieve a 40 to 60-times reduction in the amount of data by shifting from video transfer to the simple transmission of facial data points used to animate the avatar.

By 2011, the focus was on the detection, mapping algorithms, improving accuracy, and enhancing the rendering of the avatars,  Li said, with the desire to create an animated graphic representation of a user. The algorithm accuracy increased over the years, and by September 2013, the Pocket Avatars project had full backing of then-new CEO, Brian Krzanich.

Even with executive support, however, the company chose to downplay the brand and nowhere within the app is there an Intel logo. The Intel name only appears on app store listings and within the Terms of Use, Privacy Policy and Legal Information.

“This was intentional,” said Richard Hannah, general manager of marketing at Intel. “This is a new, untested project for Intel.”

Mapping to millennials

Although they have not said what the specific target numbers are, Pocket Avatars is still looking for more active users.

“We are still in that iteration phase, still in that experiment phase, still trying to figure it out,” said Hannah. “We haven’t reached the goals that we have set for ourselves… we need to see more active daily users and a more rapid viral adoption rate before we’ll claim success.”

“You need to have an enormous subscriber base in order to be seen as a player,” Hannah said. “It takes a lot of effort to catch fire.”

To achieve broad scale, Pocket Avatars has to work on a wide variety of devices and operating systems and with varying specifications. The engineering group had to develop extremely efficient algorithms to produce a favorable user experience regardless of the hardware.

“Our goal is that we don’t require people to buy something to make it work,” explains Josel Lorenzo, product manager on Pocket Avatars. “[Users] will use their existing device and OS and we will try to make it work there.”

Ironically, the app may be attracting an audience that is even younger than the team initially had planned. “What we have built is an app that is cute, whimsical and fun,” said Hannah, but 18-24 year olds are looking for something that is “cool, hip, and edgy.”

“It really is a new paradigm to teach people that their face is being mapped,” said Mary Smiley, engineering general manager at Intel. “They literally have never seen it before.”

“We’ve got a product that ostensively is right in the sweet spot of what [these users] want to do, but we have a look, feel, aesthetic and some content partners that is a jarring moment for those people — they say ‘oh, this is designed for kids, this isn’t for me,'” said Hannah.

Lorenzo likens growing an app to building a business.

“There are so many [apps] out there, the way people use apps now is really about trying it and maybe they will forget it, or, if they do like it so much, what would make them come back a week or a month later,” said Lorenzo.

“When you build a business, it’s not just about going out and starting it, you actually have to see how it evolves. And when you see that, that is when you can take deeper learnings in that phase.”

Intel Free Press has noticed that square designs are becoming too square and the world is moving to rounded shapes for its wearables and other gizmos... (Why can't we have triangular?)

By Intel Free Press

Take a casual survey of personal technology and electronics on the market today and you will notice the majority of them are rectangular in shape. But there is a rising trend, or perhaps a return, to more rounded design.

The smartwatch is the latest area of debate of round versus square. The circular screen of the Motorola Moto 360 Android Wear watch makes it stand out among competitors with more traditional, rectangular screens, such as the Samsung Gear, Pebble and even the upcoming Apple Watch. Just revealed at the 2015 Mobile World Congress (MWC), the LG Watch Urbane and Huawei Watch smartwatches both also have perfectly round displays.

Why round?

Motorola design chief Jim Wicks cites “time” as the biggest inspiration behind the round design of the Moto 360, which recently won the award for best wearable at MWC.

“Eighty-five percent of the watches sold in the world are round, and there’s a reason for that – its comfort and people are used to it,” Wicks adds. “When you go back in civilization, time was always represented with a circle, whether it was the sundial or pocket watch.”

Apple, a company known for its focus on design, is sticking to a rectangular design for its Apple Watch. In an interview with the New Yorker, Apple design lead Jony Ive explained why the Apple Watch has a rectangular screen: “When a huge part of the function is lists”—of names, or appointments—”a circle doesn’t make any sense,” Ive said. Even then, the Apple Watch features a circular dial and a rounded case with no abrupt edges.

Wicks feels differently, saying that the round shape actually maximizes screen area for what’s most comfortable when worn on the wrist. “If you took the same diagonal,” Wicks said, gesturing at the Moto 360’s round display, “and made a square device, you’d have a decent amount of surface area, but the corners of the material would be poking into your wrist bones. So with a round display, you get the maximum surface area while maintaining a very comfortable fit.”

A few informal polls suggest that users prefer round watch faces, but it remains to be seen which design approach will ultimately win customer favor. There’s considerable research that suggests that humans innately prefer rounded objects – and the consumer electronics industry seems to be leaning towards making products with that in mind.

A 2006 study conducted by Harvard Medical School wrote: “Our findings indicate that humans like sharp-angled objects significantly less than they like objects with a curved contour, and that this bias can stem from an increased sense of threat and danger conveyed by these sharp visual elements.”

Another study from 2013 from the University of Toronto builds on empirical research going back almost 100 years to the 1920s showing a preference for curved over angular designs in our architectural environments.

Now, besides just smart watches, curvier designs are a rising trend in consumer electronics.

Computers

Although Apple is going rectangular with its watch, the company revealed in 2013 a new Mac Pro that is completely cylindrical in design. But Apple wasn’t the first to experiment with a rounded PC; announced in 2004, First International Computer (FIC) launched the Piston in 2005, a small-form-factor (SFF) PC. Similar to the Mac Pro, the Piston used a unique form of air flow and venting to cool the components via the cylindrical chassis.

One possible reason why more computers haven’t used round designs is because the form factor is not conducive to third-party components that are frequently flat and rectangular.

Thermostats

For decades, thermostats were round, mainly driven by Honeywell’s design dating back to 1953. The T-86, otherwise known as “The Round” was designed by Henry Dreyfuss. Earlier thermostats typically had mercury thermometers and some sort of a clock mechanism. In the 1970s and ’80s, thermostat designs reverted back to a rectangular format and started including electronic and digital interfaces.

In 2011, Nest Labs, now owned by Google, re-introduced the round thermostat design to the market with its innovative “learning thermostat.” In August 2014, Honeywell too re-introduced its version of the round thermostat known as the Lyric.

Smartphones

While rectangular screens dictate much of the form of smartphones, Korean companies LG and Samsung are experimenting with curved smartphone displays. The LG G Flex 2 curves the device so the screen cradles the user’s face like an old-fashioned phone would. The Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge has curves that bring the screen edges right into the palm of the user’s hand.

Making its debut at MWC is a perfectly round smartphone called the Runcible, from the startup Monohm, which aims to be a lifestyle piece.

Televisions and monitors

Ironically, early television sets made with cathode ray tubes (CRTs) pushed a circular image due to the nature of the designs. As display technology advanced to LCDs, LEDs, DLP and other technology, displays not only became flatter, they also became rectangular. Now we are coming full circle with the most cutting-edge high-definition TV designs exhibiting a gentle curve in toward the viewer.

Wearables of the Future

The Intel Curie, a tiny system-on-a-chip (SoC) is placed on a circuit board that’s perfectly round and small enough to fit on a jacket button. Curie is intended for wearable technologies and integrates in the Quark SE SoC a motion sensor and Bluetooth radio that runs off a coin-sized battery.

Rounding out the tech

Why then, with so much research showing that people prefer round objects, are the vast majority of devices today are still rectangular?

Oshin Vartanian, adjunct assistant professor of the department of psychology at the University of Toronto Scarborough, says the leading explanation involves the economics of manufacture. “In other words, we see more sharp than round objects because the former are less expensive to manufacture and mass produce. Whether this is really true remains to be determined empirically, although it is the reason frequently given by designers and manufacturers.”

Vartanian, who led research in finding preference for curvilinear architecture, cautioned that the preference for rounded objects isn’t observed universally. “In our own studies we always find a significant minority that prefers sharp, angular objects. There could be lots of reasons for these individual differences, based on past experiences, formal training and schooling, cultural background and the like. Nevertheless, despite these variations, most people seem to exhibit a preference for curvilinear design.”

Will technology design follow what the researchers have found? Time, and perhaps the round smart watches, will tell.

The writers at Intel Free Press have prepared a fascinating profile of Ramune Nagisetty, one of Intel's top engineers. She's developing wearables with abilities for emotional communications. [It's designed not just for men.] 

By Intel Free Press

Ramune Nagisetty is a principal engineer within Intel Labs designing wearables that monitor biometrics as well as provide an emotional connection to others. 

Q: What are you working on?

Ramune Nagisetty: For the last couple of years, I have been specifically focused on wearable technology. When I say wearable, I’m talking about wrist-worn form factors and also things like rings and badges.

I’m starting a new project that has to do with maintaining an emotional connection between people through wearables. Every time technology has evolved, one of the first usages for technology has been for people to communicate with each other. 

That’s true whether we are talking about people writing letters and sending them across the country using the Pony Express, to sending telegrams, then telephones allowed people to stay in touch and communicate, and then came smartphones, and we can communicate using videos and more than just words. 

The next step is to actually be able to use wearables to allow people to be continuously connected.

Wearables that are being created for health and fitness can also be used for certain types of emotional connection as well because a lot of our emotions actually manifest themselves through different types of biometric signals.

We are just on the brink of a whole new set of usage models related to wearables. In the world of wearables, I don’t expect or want a wrist-worn wearable to do what my phone does, just like I don’t want my phone to do what my laptop does. All of these things have their distinct advantages.

Question: Why did you become an engineer?

My mother is an engineer. I was born in the former Soviet Union in Moscow and my mother is Lithuanian. My mother has a master’s degree in physics from Moscow State University. She also has a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Toledo. And her third master’s degree is in computer science, more specifically in artificial intelligence, and she got that while she was working as a full-time engineer at Ford.

My mom had two kids, three master’s degrees and a full-time career, and we lived 75 miles away from Detroit so she also commuted 150 miles a day. So if you want to talk about where you can find inspiration for hard work and being super-motivated, it’s not too far. This person, my mother, did all of this.

I think what is important is that in the former Soviet Union, women were considered to be equal in the workforce. Women in engineering, women in construction and women in all sorts of different fields – that have taken longer here for women to break into – in the 1950s, women were already breaking into those areas in the Soviet Union.

My father is a math professor and taught at the University of Toledo. And so between having a mother as an engineer and father who’s a mathematician, it seemed pretty obvious that going into engineering would be a possibility.

I wasn’t that interested in doing what my parents wanted me to do so I was more interested in things like architecture and philosophy. My parents basically said they would not appreciate it that much, and if I wanted to study something besides engineering, I would have to come home and go to community college.

Q: What was your first job?

I pumped gas in high school. I was one of those people wearing the Standard Oil blue jumper, washing your windshield, checking your oil and tires, and pumping your gas.

Q: What turned you on to engineering?

I actually didn’t like the course work for engineering that much. But what I found was that when I got my first summer internship, and I worked as an intern at a company called Chicago Laser Systems, it changed everything.

All of a sudden I was doing real hands-on work, I could see my results. It turned out that getting out of the classroom and into the more hands-on internship situations was a tipping point for me when I realized that I actually really liked engineering. I liked doing hands-on work; I liked seeing results.

I studied general electrical engineering, and that is how I got my first job at IBM in Essex Junction, Vermont. And that was also really eye-opening because having a general purpose engineering degree is one thing, and then going into the workforce, where it’s a very specific type of work, required a lot of learning as well.

What I did at IBM was work on device characterization, essentially characterizing transistors — that’s pretty specific — and I didn’t have that much training or theoretical background from college in that area, and so what I found was that after two years at IBM, I wanted to go to graduate school to get a better theoretical understanding of transistors. So I went to UC Berkeley and got my masters in electrical engineering there; my specialization was in transistor device physics.

Q: How did you get your job at Intel?

Intel was recruiting on campus for this thing called the Rotation Engineering Program and I was offered a position on the spot.

I started in the rotation program in New Mexico, and I worked three different rotations there. And when I took my final placement, my goal was to actually work on the leading-edge transistor technology development and that happens in Hillsboro, Oregon. Hillsboro is the epicenter of world-class technology development in the entire world, as far as I’m concerned.

I went to a conference called the IEDM (International Electron Devices Meeting), and I met up, just per chance, with a bunch of folks from Intel in Hillsboro and explained that I was looking for my final placement. They were really interested in me because of my background in transistor device physics.

Q: How would you describe your time at Intel?

I have had three main phases in my career [at Intel]. The first one was working in logic technology development [LTD] in the Technology and Manufacturing Group [TMG]. In this phase, I did device characterization where I delivered several process technology nodes – 65 nm, 90 nm, 130 nm, 180 nm.

For 65 nm, I was the lead technology development engineer. I have patents in the area of high-performance transistors related to strained silicon.

Then I decided I wanted to see what else Intel does, I wanted to understand more about what makes products compelling and successful.

It was actually pretty difficult to leave technology development because I was really an expert in that area…but I really wanted to explore the new frontiers outside of transistor technology development.

So I went to Intel Labs in 2006, and I started running strategic technology programs.

These technology programs reported straight up into Intel’s executive management. It was kind of the opposite of transistor technology development because transistors are essentially very small, and you have to be very detail-oriented — the level you are looking at is the atomic level. And then you go to strategic technology programs, and you are essentially on the complete flip side, and you are talking more about things in systems integration and technology roadmaps and the future.

You are all of a sudden going from the carpet to the sky. I was exposed more to the long-term strategy, which was a very important phase of my career.

Q: What about women in technology?

I went to university into engineering school and it was always dominated by men and there weren’t very many women, but it never actually bothered me at all. It seems like if you have grown up this way, you don’t feel like you don’t belong because this is how it’s always been.

Until eight years ago, I didn’t really do a lot with women in technology and STEM because I always felt like these programs were for somebody else and that they weren’t really for me. I didn’t really understand the benefit of those programs.

About eight years ago, we had our first Women’s Principal Engineer Forum at Intel, and I was invited to attend this event even though I wasn’t yet a principal engineer.

I actually wasn’t planning to go, I just thought, “I don’t really need that,” but what happened was that Kelin Kuhn (below) was actually the person who sent me an email and copied tons of people on it saying, “these are the people I want speaking for the Women’s Principal Engineers Forum,” and she had this list of speakers and I was one of them.

I think Kelin is the smartest person I’ve ever met, and if she tells me that I’m going to be a speaker at this forum, well I’m going to the forum and I’m going to do what she tells me to do.

I had a chance to present work that I had been doing for a long time that I was really an expert in, but for the most part, it had always been presented at conferences by people other than myself, people who were more senior, people who were recognized as spokespersons for Intel.

So I really never had that chance to stand up and talk the data that I had been working on for a long time. I had this chance to get up and speak and what I found was that it was great!It was great to get that feeling that I actually am more than capable of speaking to this information; and this opportunity gave me some insight into how valuable that is.

I came back from the Intel Women's Principal Engineer (PE) Forum that first year and I thought, “you know what, I wonder if I should be a PE?”  

I went down the path to become a principal engineer, but it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t had that opportunity to present at the [Women’s Principal Engineer] Forum. It gives you the courage to take that next step.

 

What I discovered was that these types of events are actually really important. And the other thing is, it’s really important to establish a network of women that can give you support when things aren’t going so well because a lot of times when things aren’t going so well there aren’t going to be other people who are going to relate to what you are going through.

 

One of the things I do tell people at these events if you can come away with one new friend…who can relate to the challenges you face because that friend will be someone you can rely on when things get tough.

I have attended every single Women’s Principal Engineer and Fellows Forum since that first year, and I work with anybody who wants to have any type of mentoring in their career.

Q: What advice do you have for people thinking about entering engineering?

There is something there about making connections between technology and engineering and the things that you love that sometimes doesn’t really come through when it is not presented in a way that you can understand.

And that same kind of comparison about finding a music teacher who can teach you according to how you would like to learn or how you would best learn is important. That same analogy works when you are trying to connect people with technology and engineering — finding ways to present these concepts is important for those students to grasp.

In my education, the most important thing has always been the teacher, and I can say for a fact that the teachers who resonated with me had the biggest impact on my career and that’s going to be true whether we are talking about teachers or role models, especially nowadays when technology is becoming so personal.

When they realize that can create things that are useful and that have a special place in their lives, then you are connecting the technology side with the human side with the emotional side. And when I think you can make those connections, you will appeal to a much larger base of people, including girls and women, in terms of studying engineering.

I do think that having a more diverse group of people, pursuing engineering, will result in more creative uses and solutions. You can have a lifetime career and never get bored. To encourage not just girls and women, but all sorts of people from all sorts of diverse backgrounds, to pursue engineering I think is a good thing.

It’s important to realize that engineering IS a creative outlet. The more that people can realize that it is creative, I think the more interested they’ll be in pursuing engineering.

Q: You starting playing music recently, what prompted you to do so?

I’ve always really enjoyed music, my brother is a professional musician, so I have been surrounded by music my whole life, but I never really had a talent or proclivity for it.

About five years ago, it was Presidents Day weekend, I was really bored, to tell you the truth, a little bit bored with my life. I felt like I had achieved a lot of things, I had a really wonderful career, a wonderful home life and husband, and had achieved a lot of those things that we strive for in our lives.

On a whim, I went to a guitar store with a friend and picked up an electric guitar. Within a few months, I was writing my own songs.

My first teacher wasn’t the right teacher. What I think that is really important and actually what makes a really good teacher is finding the way to teach that individual. Certain people are going to learn theoretically and other people will want to learn songs and mostly that’s what I do.

Some people are much more intuitive, some people will learn by seeing and reading music, some by hearing music. And so I think a really good teacher is actually one that can adjust their teaching style to what the student’s learning style is.

Q: What’s your favorite song?

I think, “Mirror” [by the Velvet Underground] is a great song that I’ll cover someday. And also, it ties into the importance of being able to relate to role models and teachers.

“I’ll be your mirror
Reflect what you are, in case you don’t know.”

We now have Barbie dolls connected to the Internet and new types of"smart" toys being introduced. The writers at Intel Free Press recall the time when Intel wanted to be in the toy business. 

By Intel Free Press

In the late 1990s Intel and Mattel forged a unique relationship that led to a series of connected toys, which also provides some interesting insight into early thinking around smart toys and user experience.

Mattel Inc. and Intel Corporation went beyond collaborating on devices; the two companies actually created a startup and gave it a brand of its own.

Aiming to combine the technology and innovation around computing at Intel with the toy-design expertise of Mattel, the joint venture became the birthplace of several "smart" toys under the Intel Play brand.

According to Herman D'Hooge, who managed the Smart Toy Lab initially, Intel was (and still is) constantly looking for ways to extend the use of the personal computer in the home. Today, it's RealSense 3D cameras and perceptual computing, but back then the connected toy offered a unique new usage for families and children. Ironically, one of the toys produced offered an early look at today's perceptual computing concept.

"My team was trying to understand how computing in the home could be useful away from the computer," recounts D'Hooge. "One of the areas we identified as an essential area of interest was things that kids play with...and that led us to think about toys as a new category as a peripheral for computers."

Around this same time, Mattel was looking to counteract the erosion of its toy consumers to video games. According to D'Hooge, after doing some market research, Mattel realized if it could license the Intel brand, it could potentially generate more revenue for its toys.

When the original concept was presented to Andy Grove, who was Intel's CEO at the time, his reaction was lukewarm at best, says D'Hooge. D'Hooge paraphrased Grove's response as "Intel is about real technology and not plastic toys."

Eventually, however, Grove came to embrace the partnership. In the spring of 1998, executives from Mattel's Strategic Planning Department and the Developer Relations Department at Intel decided to further explore the idea of creating interactive high-tech toy concepts and developed a business plan that led to the birth of the Smart Toy Lab.

According to D'Hooge, the lab was designed to act like a startup. They even leased space in a trendy neighborhood in downtown Portland, away from the office complexes at Intel a dozen miles away in Hillsboro, Oregon.

"It was a collaborative project," says D'Hooge. "The philosophy was to keep our headcount very small, keep under the radar so we could move quickly without being burdened by any internal bureaucracy or processes and approval loops."

The initial vision of the team was to create toys that were fun, open-ended, educational and innovative, but they also had to be perceived as being high-tech and had to involve a personal computer.

By the summer of 1998, the Smart Toy Lab had developed eight toy concepts, three of which were chosen in the fall of that year as ones to market under the new "Intel Play" brand: the Intel Play QX3 Computer Microscope, the Internet Discovery Set and the Intel Play Me2Cam Virtual Game System.

Another, the Internet Discovery Set, which would have used a radio frequency (RF) tag reader to allow kids to browse websites based on RF tags in toys, was too complex, owing to the fact that it needed Internet safety controls and browsing software specifically designed for kids. The team decided not to pursue development of this concept.

QX3 Microscope

In February 1999 at the International New York Toy Fair, early prototypes of both the QX3 Microscope and the Me2Cam system were presented. And based on positive feedback, the Smart Toy Lab rushed to get the products into mass production in order to hit the 1999 holiday shopping season. The QX3 was rated the top-selling multimedia toy of the 1999 holiday season.

Instead of operating like a traditional optical microscope, the QX3 contained a built-in camera that transmitted live video via a USB connection to a PC. Using a complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) sensor, miniature halogen bulbs and lenses, and optical magnification of up to 200x, the QX3 was able to compete with entry-level laboratory microscopes on the marketplace at that time, all while hitting the desired $99 price point.

The Me2Cam

The Me2Cam, priced at $69, was a tethered, USB PC camera. Consisting of a series of interactive and immersive, arcade-style games, the Me2Cam was one of the first, commercially available, consumer-oriented PC application products using computer vision technologies.

After a user's background was masked out by the Me2Cam software, the user appeared on the computer screen and could interact with five virtual games via gestures, movement or by "touching" objects. Using gestures to manipulate objects on the screen was a precursor to Intel's Perceptual Computing Initiative today albeit with far less compute power and lack of 3D cameras.

Plug pulled on Smart Toy Lab

A variety of factors led to the eventual closing of the Smart Toy Lab, including the dot-com bust, limited revenues from the venture and internal changes at both companies. In May 2000, Intel and Mattel decided to formally dissolve their joint venture. Intel's Connected Products Division, however, continued with the Intel Play toy line, hired a few Mattel personnel and over the next year, produced two additional products: the Computer Sound Morpher in the fall of 2000 and the Digital Movie Creator in 2001. These were the last products produced under the Intel Play brand.

In March 2002, Intel discontinued the Intel Play brand, and it was sold and rebranded under Digital Blue, part of the Prime Entertainment holding company. The QX3 microscope, while discontinued, can still be found for sale online. It has since been replaced by the QX5 and QX7, which are both based on and build upon the original design from Intel Play.

QX3 Microscope

The following article is by Intel Free Press - a small team of writers working at Intel.

By Intel Free Press

Riding a motorcycle is an amazingly freeing experience. The strong connection the rider has to the road is due to the minimal barriers between themselves and their surroundings. But the trade-off, especially when compared to cars, is in creature comforts and high-tech gadgetry.

Premium motorcycles have been gaining automotive wizardry such as traction control and active suspensions, but bikes are still challenged to give the rider the same sort of information a car driver can have.

A car cabin has the space for a large dashboard of information compared to a small gauge cluster on a motorcycle. One solution from Intel's New Devices Group, is a research project to make helmets do more than just protect your head. 

Stephanie Moyerman, a 29-year-old Philadelphia native with a Ph.D. in astrophysics and cosmology from the University of California, San Diego, often commutes to and from Intel’s Chandler, Arizona, campus on her Kawasaki Ninja 300. One of her many ideas is to better connect the rider to the machine via technology.

Upgrading the brain bucket

Currently on the market are bolt-on upgrades to motorcycle helmets such as Bluetooth headsets that connect to smartphones for navigation, music and voice communication, but they operate as independent units from the vehicle. The smartphone or GPS does not have any connection to the bike. New helmets in development right now, such as the Skully AR-1, which bills itself as “the world’s smartest motorcycle helmet,” add an impressive array of features such as a heads-up display and rearview camera, but do not pull any data from the bike.

A two-person team comprised of Moyerman and Santa Clara, California-based software engineer Xiaochao Yang worked with BMW to develop both software and Intel Edison-based hardware that is able to read data from the motorcycle’s computer systems and transmits it to an Android smartphone. From there, the rider is able to interact with the intelligent unit by speech and using the trigger phrase, “Hello Jarvis” that’s not unlike Apple’s “Hey Siri” or Google’s “OK Google.” In fact, the custom Android app uses Google’s speech API.

Rider to bike communication

What makes the Intel/BMW prototype special is that riders can talk directly to the bike while still accessing the Internet. “If you need directions, say ‘take me home’ and it’ll queue up directions and give them over audio. But if there isn’t enough gas, then it will redirect you to a gas station first because it can read the bike’s remaining fuel range,” explains Moyerman. “It will also do smart navigation, so if a blind turn is approaching, it’ll give you warning to slow down.”

The system will also make safety checks easier, says Moyerman. “You can ask for bike status, so all the things that you’re supposed to check, but never do – like your tire pressure and oil level – you can just ask it. You can just say ‘status’ and it’ll do a full systems check for you.”

Edison’s wireless capabilities can extend to interface with other Wi-Fi devices, such as action cameras so the user can command recording with just his or her voice.

Making sense of the CAN bus

Putting together a system like that is much more complicated than plug and play. Every vehicle maker has its own data language, which means that there’s no universal standard to interpret the data. The team at Intel worked with BMW’s Bay Area group to translate a R1200GS adventure motorcycle’s own language from the CAN bus (controller area network) to Edison, which then sends it to the smartphone via Bluetooth.

“The CAN bus data is all in bike code, and you can see all these bytes fly by like watching the Matrix,” said Moyerman. “And you’re hacking it all apart and putting it back together.”

Reading the CAN bus’ code wasn’t the only foreign language challenge. “BMW sent us a 111-page CAN bus document, and it was entirely in German,” Moyerman said, laughing. “So we had a fun time trying to figure it all out.”

For worldwide markets

One would assume that a system that works with the $16,000 BMW R1200GS would only be targeted to those with deep pockets, but currently this is strictly a research endeavor rather than product development. Moyerman says there’s been some interest to apply the technology to places where two-wheeled transportation is even more common than the car: “For example, in emerging markets where it may be incredibly dangerous to ride your motorcycle or moped, like through the streets of Calcutta, finding your way around, getting gas, etc.” She claims that the Edison system would cost just a fraction of what others do, especially those with heads-up displays such as the Skully AR-1.

Safety first

“Safety is one of the big ones,” says Moyerman on the next area of focus. “You could put range sensors so that the phone can alert you if there’s someone in your blind spot. Things like that in cramped spaces are incredibly cool.”

The concept of saving lives while pursuing a passion for motorcycling is reflected in Moyerman’s personal life. When her connected motorcycle helmet project got approved, she was in between motorcycles at the time and sought to remedy that with a new model – but there were voices of concern.

“My wife is a surgeon, and she was very opposed to people riding motorcycles because she’s seen the result of accidents,” said Moyerman. “When this project got picked up, I hadn’t had a bike in two years, so I wanted to buy a bike to get riding again. My wife wanted me to take the safety course so my skills would be refreshed.

“I convinced her to take the safety class with me, and she loved it and is now deciding what motorcycle she wants to buy.”

So, why motorcycles? Why develop something for a niche market? Moyerman said that the team is exploring the application of the same technology to cars, but, "motorcycles are cooler.”

Intel Free Press takes a look at some of the oddest tech from the past six years at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

By Intel Free Press

Every year at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, we all get to see and hear about the best product debuts but we don't always hear about the weird and the odd. Here's a look at the past six years of CES. 

CES 2015: Racing into Silence

At this year's CES people could enter the "shell of silence," Silentium's Comfort-Shell (above). "It basically looks like a giant, white version of those spiky shells that Lakitu throws in the original Mario," wrote Jacob Kastrenakes on The Verge. Despite its odd looks, any way to deaden the noise that is characteristic of CES is a blessing.

CES had plenty of smartphones, the Tonino Lamborghini 88 Tauri phone definitely drew attention for its race car inspired design and its price tag. Revving in at $6000 and in scarce supply, its design turned a few heads but left others scratching theirs.

"With a stitched leather finish that's the real deal and gold-plated stainless steel surrounding this phone, you're bound to stand out in the crowd if you're crazy enough to even want to pay $6,000 for pure stupidity," said The Verge's Tom Warren.

CES 2014: Helping the body?

Some design and product features found in some of the CES 2014 health tech products were questionable.

A bit creepy looking the Sen.se Mother has "Cookies" to hand out as it watches and monitors its family. This Russian Doll-looking devices captures temperature and motion data from attachable sensors called Cookies.

And as you wander the house being watched by the Sen.se Mother, you might be wearing a laser helmet by iGrow which claims to thicken thinning areas of the scalp as well as strengthen hair follicles.

"This is a helmet with lasers inside? It makes your hair grow? There aren't enough sarcastic question marks in the world to express our skepticism on this one," wrote Rachel Feltman on (Quartz).

To round out the "healthy" tech, there is the Foreo Issa toothbrush. The "unique" design of this toothbrush raised many eyebrows. As Gizmodo's Mario Aguilar put it "It vibrates like your Sonicare, and comes in woozy pastel colors. Let's not kid ourselves: this is a sex toy disguised as a dental revolution."

CES 2013: Stick a Fork in High-Tech Health

CES is a proven launch pad for health and fitness gadgets, but sometimes those gizmos go a step beyond useful such as the HAPIfork, which vibrated if you ate too fast, and did rake in some awards.

"This was the most popular entry in the 2012 Was A Stupid Year category," said John Mitchell, in ReadWrite.

"Little matter that it looks like a toy, needs connecting with a USB cable and wouldn't be acceptable in any decent restaurant..." said Matt Warman in The Telegraph.

There were also a few products at CES 2013 that were in the crapper -- literally -- such as the iPotty, which coupled a training potty for kids with a tablet holder.

"The iPotty is a children's potty with a built-in iPad activity stand...Make sure you teach your toddler what the real purpose of an iPad is at an early age," said TechHive.

CES 2012: Smart Watch in the Bag?

The "Watch your Bag" was a watch, a bag and a color light show as well.

"Some products are hard to sum up in a sentence. And then there's 'Watch Your Bag,' the alarm clock that comes with a bag, filled with a rainbow of morphing colors.' What it can't tell you, however, is why anyone might find such a proposition appealing," said Brian Heater on Engadget.

The march of accessories also continued in 2012 with one of the biggest and loudest of all: the iNuke Boom speaker for the iPhone. The behemoth boasted 10,000 watts, weighed 700 pounds, cost a mere $30,000 and dwarfed the iPhone docked atop it.

"Is the iNuke Boom ridiculous? Absolutely. But it's also fun and completely cognizant of its audacity, which is something we commend even if we don't feel comfortable dropping fat stacks of cash on a monstrous beast," said Buster Heine in Cult of Mac.

CES 2011: Bling for Your Smartphone (or Tablet)

From glitzy faux gems to glitter and other snazzy options, there was no shortage of bling for iPhone and iPads.

"Seriously, folks, how many cases do you actually need? From shiny be-dazzled iPhone cases to every bizarre iPad stand/case/kiosk thing, the one thing that CES had in plenty was cases. Look, we appreciate a well-designed case as much as anyone, but do we really need four dozen of each type? Don't answer that -- it was a rhetorical question. Color us sick of iPhone and iPad cases, with only a few notable exceptions," said Rob LeFebvre in 148Apps.

"The custom-made crystal case (in the Lux Mobile booth)... costs a whopping $3,000 -- just about six times the value of the iPad it's actually supposed to hold," said Mike Schramm in TUAW.

CES 2010: Wearables in Search of a Use Case

In 2010, CES offered up such forward-looking innovations as Android-based "smart" microwaves and "unbreakable" phones. And the march of wearables continued with products such as the Phubby, an elastic, smartphone-carrying wristband.

"Now this one takes the cake... an ugly wristband with a pocket that you can slide your iPhone into. It's basically a fanny pack for a new generation," said Paul Cash on Yahoo.

"We have to ask: what's so wrong about carrying your phone in your pocket?" said the Huffington Post.

CES 2009: Hands-Free Tech

Back in 2009, the Cell Mate promised to provide a wearable, and truly "hands-free" option for holding your smartphone -- no Bluetooth connection required. Coverage at the time was less than positive.

"It's possibly the single most embarrassing-looking contraption we've seen in years," said Evan Shamoon in the Huffington Post.

Not to be outdone, the iCap offered a new way to listen to music, hands-free. With a 1GB MP3 player and built-in speakers, you (and those around you) could hear it all . . . hands-free.

"Hear that kids? If you use any product other than the ridiculous looking iCap, you're practically playing Russian Roulette with Dr. Death," said Darren Murph in Engadget.

- - -

Images: Cell-Mate, Gesten Technologies, South Mill Design, TUAW, Can You Imagine, Behringer, Hapi.com, CTA Digital, Android Police, recombu, Sen.se, iGrow Laser, Foreo.

Near field communications chips (NFC) are used to create a smarter active stylus and make possible novel applications.

By Intel Free Press

Intel engineers are working to develop a next-generation active stylus, one that eliminates the need for a battery to power it and uses NFC as the core component.

Some of the issues surrounding active styli — according to Shwetank Kumar, director of touch engineering within Intel’s human interface technology group — are batteries running out of charge, lack of consistency between stylus manufacturers, and proprietary stylus technology tied to a single type of device.

“I think the pen is a very important aspect of the user experience on tablets, which has so far been largely ignored or slapped together through some combination of what ecosystem players have been able to do themselves,” says Kumar.

“There really should be no reason in this day and age that you have to carry a paper and a pen anymore, you should just be able to use an electric pen across the board on different devices.”

Intel's development of new forms of styli came out of its work on embedding NFC technology into PCs.

"Typically, NFC-enabled devices like tablets, kiosks and computers are destinations," says Anand Konanur, a senior radio frequencies engineer within Intel’s PC Client Group.

In a PC, the 4 cm by 6 cm NFC coil is typically placed on the back of the display.

Konanur and his team realized that users wanted to tap their NFC devices directly against the screen and not on the back of their computer.  

Fortunately, the trend by display manufacturers is to replace metallic deflector sheets used to maintain brightness with non-metallic sheets.  NFC coils can be placed directly within the layers of the display.

Once Konanur and his team had NFC friendly displays they set out redesigning active styli, by stripping out much of the circuitry and the battery. NFC allows the stylus to draw power from the coil in the display.

“We started off trying to replace the battery just to make it cheaper and also to let this anxiety from people go away that they will lose their stylus in the middle of something important and that it will get discharged,” says Konanur. “How do you know that you will always obtain power as required?"

“Using NFC, we realized that you can add a communication link between the stylus and the PC,” says Konanur. “You can pre-program the stylus to act as a particular way, you can pair a stylus with a PC. There are things we can do now with storing little bits of information in the stylus.” 

NFC-powered styli are also greener — no battery to make and recycle, and the design could become an open standard used  application developers and industrial designers.

There's also space inside the stylus space to add sensors and microprocessors that could make it into more of a stand-alone device.

There are still some challenges,  especially with large displays and in ensuring the NFC-stylus has active power instantly with no perceptible delay

“At the end of the day, a stylus can be a very finely crafted instrument,” says Konanur. “It’s probably a computing device in its own right.”

By Intel Free Press

The word "drone" often conjures up images of autonomous, militarized technology. But in the context of small aircraft with multiple rotors that you often see carrying cameras, drones are more accurately associated with hobbyist sport and commercial applications.

They've begun attracting mainstream attention as drone makers such as Parrot introduced affordable models putting them in the hands of a broader range of buyers.

The giant Las Vegas International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) has for the first time, created a dedicated  Unmanned Systems Marketplace, where over a dozen companies will be grouped together to show off their latest flying machines.

According to the Consumer Electronics Association, sales of consumer drones are predicted to reach 400,000 units and $130 million in revenue in 2015, and surpass $1 billion in annual sales within the next five years. 

Drones' affordability and their extraordinary flying agility is directly related to Moore's Law and lower costs for powerful chips. Drones are complex systems requiring precise control of multiple rotors and positioning in three dimensions.

Sensors feed data to a microprocessor, which decides on the rate of spin for the individual rotors, clockwise and counterclockwise...and that's just to hover.

A pilot's command to pitch, roll or yaw is received, calculated and translated to motor response in thousands of a second. Thanks to the miniaturization of key components as a result of smart phones and laptops, low-power CPUs, RAM, flash, sensors and I/O can be crammed into compact spaces and sold affordably.

As more powerful microprocessors become available,future consumer and military drones will have many new capabilities.

The space is evolving rapidly. Modern drone "brains" add orientation control, GPS-based points of interest, failsafe mechanisms, cruise and cameras to the list of features siphoning compute cycles.

Large drones designed for the defense industry, such as the RQ-4 Global Hawk,  already have massive computer power "equivalent to an airborne super computer." They're immensely expensive (think hundreds of millions of dollars).

Manufacturers of cost-sensitive drones will use more affordable systems on a chip.

"It's really not too different from the benefits of advanced computing on a mobile device," says Brandon Basso, senior research and development engineer at 3D Robotics.

"Specific to drones, there are a couple of application domains that make sense for advanced computing. The first is computer vision--being able to sense the environment more effectively. Optimization and routing are also math-intensive problems."

3D Robotics sells a sub-$1,000 quad-copter able to track and follow GPS-enabled devices running Android. Its 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4 powered controller can keep the drone's camera pointed at you. Or, using DroidPlanner 2 software, it'll follow a flight plan of your creation and train its GoPro on a specific region of interest.

The company recently demonstrated a version of its Third-Person View (3PV) with Follow Me technology, which employs optical tracking of a subject, rather than following a GPS signal. According to Basso, the task is as much as 100 times more compute-intensive.

3D Robotics' engineers needed to beef up their controller and turned to Intel's postage stamp-sized Edison module, plus a dual-core 500 MHz Atom SoC with 1GB of LPDDR3 RAM, 4GB of flash memory, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

"The Edison hardware is better suited for vision tracking because of its high clock rates and more RAM," says Basso. "Plus, it integrates well with open-source libraries for vision processing."

With smarter chips, the next big thing in drone technology will likely be affordable radio and laser remote sensing subsystems to address routing -- flying from one point to another in the presence of obstacles or adverse environmental conditions.

"One of the enabling technologies that got drones to where they are today is cheap MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) sensors--accelerometers and gyroscopes," says Basso. "That was wave one. The next wave of lidars and radars, which used to cost thousands of dollars on their own, are coming down in price."

Also, expect significant advancements to the cameras carried by drones. Today the emphasis is on higher resolutions and stable picture quality. But hyperspectral imaging, which involves the collection of information across the full electromagnetic spectrum (and not just the narrow band that humans see), promises a greater level of information than current systems.

3D Robotics drones are often used in surveying farms and with a full spectrum camera system they'll be able to collect better data on crops and make farming more efficient, using less water and pesticides. 

A sensors improve, new business applications will materialize. Delivery is one example. Amazon always wants to serve customers more quickly at lower cost, and is experimenting with its Prime Air drone delivery concept.

As the technology continues to improve and becomes less expensive, it is likely that multi-rotor drones will significantly change Amazon's business.

A future world with skies swarming with buzzing drones will require some form of air traffic control. Regulations will likely mandate that drones will require permission to take-off and land just as aircraft do today. It'll have to be a highly reliable and automated system and it'll need a lot of computer power.

Until that happens, today's hobbyist flight controllers benefit from return-to-home functions. Should a craft fly out of radio range, an autopilot will guide it back towards its point of takeoff.

Todays hobbyist drones are packed with advanced technologies -- not bad for something that's priced in the hundreds of dollars.

Flush with the success of a pilot program at its Silicon Valley HQ, Intel is rolling out digital restrooms across 22 campuses globally. From overflowing toilets to empty towel dispensers to faulty faucet motion sensors, Intel employees can now swipe their washroom maintenance requests using smartphones.

By Intel Free Press

Near field communications (NFC) chips  installed in the restrooms of Intel's Robert Noyce Building at the beginning of 2014let employees anonymously report maintenance needs with a tap of their mobile phone. Those without NFC-enabled smartphones have the option to scan a QR code.

Based on positive feedback from the Silicon Valley pilot, Intel is re-plumbing restrooms in all of its global offices to include NFC and QR codes. In order to ensure a clean flowing process, signage is being translated into eight different languages and the mobile application is being updated to have the most commonly reported restroom issues being the most accessible within the app.

Each of the restroom signs is custom-coded for that particular restroom so that when the mobile application is triggered, it is for that restroom. 2,215 signs with NFC/QR codes will be hung worldwide.

Streamlining the service request process addressed a big challenge for facility maintenance staff, according to Joe Maestas, a former project manager for Intel Corporate Services involved in the initial pilot program.

"One of the things that everybody loves to complain about is bathrooms," he said. "But people never report issues."

That general lack of movement prompted Maestas and his team to plunge into finding a way to unclog the restroom maintenance request process and get things flowing down the right pipe.

30-second window...

According to Suzy Hart Langdell a communications specialist in the projects and solutions team of Intel's Technology Manufacturing Group, there are over 20,000 restroom service requests per year worldwide.

"There is [generally] a 15- to 30-second time period from when a person sees something to when they will report it -- if you make it really easy," said Maestas. "Outside that 30-second window, the opportunity is lost."

Previously, employees could submit service requests via an 11-step process on the company intranet or call them in, neither of which had much sense of urgency. The restroom signs with NFC chips and QR codes keep opportunities to report issues from going down the drain by making the process easy -- now three clicks or fewer -- and immediate.

Gender bias...

Initially, usage has been divided along gender lines with approximately eight in 10 requests coming from men's restrooms. According to IT in the Toilet, a study conducted by marketing firm 11Mark, smartphone use in the bathroom doesn't differ much for men (74 percent) and women (76 percent), but men are more likely to bring their smartphone: 30 percent claimed they never go to the bathroom without their phone, compared with 20 percent of women.

"I know I don't bring my phone into the restroom," said Michelle Creed, a project manager on the program. "Maybe the guys keep it in their pockets or have it on their belt. So, that could be the difference, the mobile phone actually going with the person."

In order to attract restroom visitors to use the new system and ensuring that bathroom "surfaces" are clean, Intel corporate services teased a giveaway of a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 that Intel employees could enter to win using the new smartphone restroom app.

The janitorial staff in charge of clean restrooms noticed an increase in bathroom "issues" as people tried to enter via reporting a problem in the restroom. Even though the link to enter the giveaway did not require an "issue" being entered.

Regardless of where the requests come from, there is some anecdotal evidence that the new smartphone process has shortened response time to maintenance requests. Maestas cites the example of an empty soap dispenser that was refilled before the person who submitted the request had even left the restroom.

"From a customer perspective, that is what you want -- real-time results," he said.

Intel Free Press writers Michael Sheehan and Marcus Yam show their smart watches at IDF 2014.

By Intel Free Press

Thinking of gliding through airport security wearing your new FitBit, Android Wear watch or soon, your Apple Watch? Think again.

New wearable technology in the form of smart watches, activity trackers and jewelry with embedded tech may cause confusion for security screeners.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) have yet to write official policies around security, safety and usage of wearable technology. 

The TSA says that over 1.75 million people pass through its security checkpoints every day.

"There are millions of things that people can bring through a checkpoint so it's hard to give a policy or directive on one piece whether it's a phone or other type of jewelry, so it's in the best interests of the passenger to get items screened or put through an X-ray machine just to verify that they do not alarm," said Ross Feinstein, spokesperson for the TSA.

"Our goal here is to ensure that there are no prohibited items on the passenger or in their luggage when they get access to the airport."

FAA PEDS...

 Under current rules, the FAA classifies wearable technology as a Personal Electronic Device (PED), defined as any piece of lightweight, electrically powered equipment capable of communications, data processing and/or utility. Examples are: lightweight electronic devices such as tablets, smartphones and electronic toys.

The FAA doesn't distinguish between a PED and wearable tech products such as a smart watch or a light-up skirt. "If the device performs PED functions, then PED rules apply," said an FAA spokesperson.

It is not clear how much attention companies working on wearable technology are paying to security situations such as at airports, but the issue is bound to become more prevalent as more devices come onto the market. Because there's no specific policy in place, experiences - and opinions of protocol - during travel may vary.

Tim Pettitt, product line manager in Intel's New Devices Group who helped design the MICA wearable (below), says that while Intel and Opening Ceremony follow the Federal Communication Commission's (FCC) guidelines on capabilities needed, they haven't worked directly with the TSA or FAA.

Bluetooth wearables...

Pettitt says whether or not your wearable has a cellular modem may determine what actions you need to take when going through security or using it on an airplane.

"In most cases, you can leave your wrist-worn wearable on through security and won't need to power it off in flight," says Pettitt. "Most airlines are not concerned about Bluetooth and will explicitly tell you to shut down your Bluetooth device if required. However, if you have a device, like MICA, which has a cellular radio, you need to put it into airplane mode just like you would a phone."

A recent travel experience while wearing a Samsung Galaxy Gear Live Android Wear was in line with Pettitt's statement. For security checkpoints that allowed jewelry and other accessories to remain on the person, the smart watch was treated no differently - though it's unclear if security personnel recognized that it was an electronic device.

Techno-Fashonistas...

Fashion wearables such as the MICA may further blur the lines of what's considered jewelry and a PED. While removing a bracelet or necklace may just be a minor inconvenience, tech-laced clothing with integrated sensors could pose logistical problems for passengers asked to place all electronic items in the plastic bins.

Onboard aircraft, passengers are now always instructed to switch all personal electronic devices into airplane mode, and most wearable devices today have such on/off capabilities for radios.

"For travel purposes, we did make it possible to turn off the wireless capabilities directly from the touch-screen interface of the new [Basis] Peak," said Jef Holove, former CEO of Basis and now general manager in Intel's New Devices Group. Basis, a maker of biometric smart watches, was recently acquired by Intel.

While there's yet to be a formal policy in place, agency representatives and wearable makers recommend following a number of guidelines when traveling with wearables.

Tips for Travelers with Wearables

- Consolidate - Feinstein recommends consolidating all of your electronic gadgets into your carry-on, handbag, purse or briefcase and passing your carry-on through the X-ray screening device.

- Leave it at home - If you don't absolutely need your expensive wearable, it's best to leave it at home.

- Fully charge your wearable - Condé Nast Traveler reported the TSA wants travelers to validate that your cell phone is real by powering it on. When asked about this new policy, Feinstein said it was for certain airports outside the United States for flights coming to the United States and that it was not a policy implemented in domestic airports. It's often difficult to find free plugs and enough time at airports to charge your device, and most airplanes don't have plugs.

- Follow the PED rules  As per FAA guidelines, if the flight attendant asks you to turn off your wearable or put it in "airplane mode," do it otherwise you may have it taken from you.

Remember, not every security screener has seen each and every wearable on the market. Some ankle-worn activity trackers have even been confused by authorities as a law enforcement ankle bracelet. 

Intel's engineers have been working with students helping them adapt the tiny Intel Edison microcomputer to control satellites the size of a soda can. Above, a Can-Sat launch by Magnitude.io.

By Intel Free Press

Magnitude.io, a project-based education company in San Francisco, aims to boost interest in STEM subjects (maths, science, tech and engineering) with hackathon-style projects relating to the exciting world of rocket ships  and aerospace.

Students' imaginations are captured by the lure of rocketry and exploration and to attain the heights of outer space requires achieving new heights in core STEM subjects. 

On Sept. 8, 2014 Magnitude.io helped university students launch a rocket containing a CanSat, a miniaturized satellite that can fit inside a standard soda can, at Black Rock Desert in Nevada.

At the heart of the CanSat is Intel Edison, a postage stamp-sized platform on a chip that contains dual-core Intel Atom and Quark processors, along with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth for wireless and cloud connectivity.

Ted Tagami, CEO and co-founder of Magnitude.io, knew that he wanted Edison when an Intel employee in Japan pulled an alpha prototype out of his pocket. "I saw that, understood what it did, and said, 'We're putting that in space.'"

"We knew Edison was perfect for aerospace because of its low mass and volume, with high-powered computing and low-power draw," Tagami said. "It also runs a Linux environment, and it can emulate Arduino, which is a great building block for students to get into things like sensors and motor controls."

(Above) The innards of an Edison Can-Sat sans can...

This isn't the first time that Edison has reached great heights; it was recently at altitudes of around 100,000 ft in near space as part of a weather balloon experiment.

Magnitude.io didn't initially target only rocket science for its educational programs, but the area of focus made itself clear when the company found that teacher and students responded three times better to aerospace topics than any other.

"We came across the rockets because we needed a great vehicle that could also teach basic principles of physics to students and the rocket was perfect for that," explained Tagami. "Everyone's imagination begins to get quite vivid when thinking about leaving earth."

According to Tagami, these aerospace-related education programs at the high school level have students so engaged for hours that they often have to be offered only as after-school and extracurricular activities.

The first Edison CanSat launch took place within days of the 15^th anniversary of the first ARLISS (A Rocket Launch for International Student Satellites), which is a collaboration between Stanford University, other educational institutions and rocket enthusiasts to build, launch and recover prototype satellites.

In another ARLISS connection, Magnitude.io has the expertise of Bob Twiggs on its advisory board. Twiggs proposed the university-based space program and later co-invented the larger form factor CubeSat, a one liter cubed-sized satellite.

Magnitude.io and the UC Davis School of Education are now developing a curriculum mapped to Common Core and Next Generation Science Standards, where student teams go hands-on with a rocket to experience every step of a launch.

"Students will gain hands-on laboratory experience in testing and analyzing data from a suite of sensors, including a magnetometer, barometric pressure sensor, humidity and temperature sensor, and an accelerometer," lists Magnitude.io's CanSat site.

Tagami drew parallels between satellites quantifying the earth with IoT-connected sensors to how some people don wearable technology to track their health and daily activities.

"The rockets are the first step in extending the Internet of Things to low earth orbit," said Tagami.

- - -

The next Space Hackathon is November 7 to 9 at UC Berkeley.

Was journalist Michael Hasting's car hacked? 

By Intel Free Press

Intel Research Scientists Hack Slot Cars to Illustrate Vulnerabilities and Security of IoT Hardware.

You're driving through downtown, heading to a new hot spot as your Internet-connected GPS gives you the best directions with real-time traffic updates, when suddenly your car veers out of control and accelerates onto the sidewalk. Were you just hacked?

As part of a demonstration, Intel research scientists oversimplify the risks of a world of Internet of Things (IoT)-connected devices as they remotely hack into the speed controls of a targeted slot car and force it to shoot off the track.

Sixty-nine percent of consumers plan to buy an in-home IoT device by 2019, according to the 2014 State of the Internet of Things study conducted by Acquity Group. By the end of 2015, an estimated 13 percent of consumers will own an IoT device.

As the world races towards the next embedded, IoT or wearable system, the checkered flag can potentially mean that shortcuts are taken and hardware security is overlooked according to some Intel Labs research scientists.

When systems on chips are micro-sized, they often have only functions that are dedicated to their core instruction sets, and not secondary functions like security. In the ongoing quest for miniaturization, larger components, previously dedicated to hardware security, are dramatically reduced or even eliminated.

"These resource-constrained platforms are 'naked' now," says Meiyuan Zhao, senior research scientist for security and privacy research in Intel Labs.

Zhao believes that as embedded systems become more common and critical in items such as medical devices and automotive systems, security architectures need to evolve to provide run-time security functionality at the hardware level.

Trust me to drive...

To tackle this problem, researchers at Intel are creating TrustLite, a general-purpose security feature for the so-called "naked" resource-constrained environments where tiny, self-contained computing systems often have limited space to hand non-critical functions.

TrustLite provides techniques and protocols at a hardware level that protect the control units within various modern system architectures, like the ECU  (engine/electric control unit) in cars, in order to prevent malicious execution of commands.

"The devices we are targeting with our technology typically have zero security features," says Patrick Koeberl, security architect in the emerging security lab within Intel Labs. "At these design points, security typically drops off the table because of cost concerns: 'We can't afford the extra transistors - or energy - we don't have the power budget.'"

Without protection, an ECU that governs speed, timing, valves, air/fuel mixtures and other controls of a vehicle can potentially be remotely breached by sending invalid sensor data. TrustLite, an Intel labs project, engages a failsafe protocol when unauthorized access is detected.

Remote speed control...

Zhao demonstrated how a vehicle's control systems, specifically its telematics, could be remotely breached to inject commands to the system (e.g., increase the speed of a vehicle remotely). Using TrustLite to create a trusted execution environment, the malicious commands are thwarted. Instead of speeding up, the vehicle shuts down - the preferred response to a hack.

"TrustLite uses the concept of a lightweight trusted module (LTM). This is a software component that we can protect with strong, hardware-underpinned security guarantees," explains Koeberl. "In the case of the demo, the LTM implements the throttle control functionality. The LTM concept is a general feature that could be anything: an attestation service, a third-party payment app, a sensor calibration routine, etc."

The labs scientists have designed TrustLite and execution-aware memory protection as a low-cost and energy-efficient way to enhance security of low-end platforms, systems, sensors and even resource-constrained IoT endnodes.

From toy to reality...

Moving from a simple slot car example to a vehicle hurtling down the road poses much more complexity. A toy is one thing to play with, security of real-world systems like vehicle control is another.

In August, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) released a report studying vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications titled "Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications: Readiness of V2V Technology for Application." Among its detailed analysis, the NHTSA discusses the importance of security of V2V - vehicles transmitting information from one to another - safety applications and their communications.

"The basis of a relevant V2V security system is 'trust' -- a requirement that thousands of data messages will be authenticated, in real time, as coming from a trusted (if unknown) source," states the NHTSA report.

Wearable tech, embedded devices, on-board systems and IoT-enablement depend on security being present and robust.

"If the vision of end-to-end security for IoT is to become a reality, we need to address the devices at the lower end of the compute continuum," says Koeberl. "Only then can we ensure security from the cloud all the way down."

By Intel Free Press

At events and trade shows like International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), exhibitors often have to bring in booth materials that require giant moving trucks. The cost to transport demo materials -- sometimes across thousands of miles at a time -- isn't cheap, and fuel costs are one area where modern automotive technology can help, while also leaving a smaller carbon footprint.

As an example, Intel uses three hydrogen fuel-injected trucks to ship trade show materials around North America, such as CES and the Intel Developer Forum (IDF). The trucks travel thousands of miles a year between conference centers, trade shows and Intel facilities, going coast-to-coast spanning from Portland, Oregon to Miami, Florida, and even across borders into Canada, packed full of booth parts, displays, furniture, electronics, demo kiosks, graphics and other critical show materials.

Non-hydrogen injected semi-trucks average between 5 to 6 mpg, whereas the Intel-branded hydrogen trucks average around 6.3 mpg. During a recent trip through California, an Intel hydrogen truck averaged 7.2 mpg representing a significant carbon footprint reduction.

The hydrogen-injected trucks are outfitted with an aftermarket supplemental hydrogen on-demand fuel system produced by Hydrogen Injection Technology, Inc. (HIT). Using a process of electrolysis, the generators produce hydrogen on-demand. Once the hydrogen is made, the hydrogen gas is sent through a dryer that extracts moisture before the hydrogen injector sends the proper amount of hydrogen gas into the air-intake of the engine.

Hydrogen injection has been in development since the 1970s and works by injecting hydrogen into a traditional combustion engine, which allows the engine to burn cleaner with more power and lower emissions. Hydrogen is injected into the air prior to entering the combustion chamber. Hydrogen burns 10 times as fast as diesel and, when mixed with the diesel in the combustion chamber, accelerates the rate at which the diesel burns.

HIT's system differs from fuel cell vehicles recently demonstrated by carmakers such as Chevrolet, Honda, Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz and Toyota, which use hydrogen to power an electric motor to drive the car. Instead, the system used in the Intel-branded hydrogen trucks supplements the diesel combustion engine, enhancing fuel efficiency.

Using calculations provided by HIT, a truck that drives 120,000 miles annually can cost over $80,000 in fuel alone, given an average semi-truck fuel economy of 6 miles to the gallon and the current price of diesel in California of $4.08 per gallon. According to HIT, depending on the product, companies can save between $10,000 and $16,000 per year in fuel costs. A typical HIT product costs $15,000, not including installation charges.

In 2013, Intel saved over 77,000 gallons of diesel through the consolidation of freight onto the fewest trucks possible. Over 600 gallons of diesel were conserved by using the hydrogen-injected trucks for four North American trade shows in 2013.

However, as part of a complex corporate sustainability initiative, simply having a hydrogen-injected or "green" truck would not be sufficient, said Lou Cozzo, manager, executive keynote group and sustainable events program at Intel.

"Most of the avoidance comes from shipment consolidation, rather than the 'green' technology, which is relatively small in terms of impact, but still very important," said Cozzo.

According to Cozzo, Intel's inbound and outbound event shipments are planned for efficiency where the highest number of packages are placed on the fewest number of trucks.

"When you consider different departments, staff and agencies are sending all kinds of materials to and from an event from and to various locales, this takes extra effort to coordinate and make sure everyone's items are ready and on time to go together on the same truck, as opposed to just letting people ship everything willy-nilly," Cozzo explained.

"It's important to contextualize this data as the estimated benefit of smart, sustainable planning processes," said Cozzo on the impact to the carbon footprint. "It compares two alternative scenarios -- separate shipments if no one took the time to thoughtfully schedule and plan flow-of-freight with using fewer trucks in mind, and the scenarios where improved consolidation is able to happen. The carbon avoided is the difference between the two scenarios."

In fact, S&M Moving Systems, the company that manages the hydrogen-injected semis and shipping in general for Intel events, reported a 917 metric ton CO2 emission reduction for 2013 by using the combination of shipment consolidation and hydrogen-injected trucks.

Intel has used the hydrogen-injected trucks since 2010.

By Intel Free Press

This is the life of professional video gamers: They train for hours each day, score lucrative endorsement deals, and get flown all over the world to compete in front of fans - sometimes at sold out venues - for big cash prizes.

Top players get recruited into professionally managed teams, not unlike how Ferrari and Red Bull have Formula 1 drivers who are on the same team but still compete individually. Such is the life of a professional athlete and it's the same for top video gamers.

So-called "e-sports" have emerged as very big business and are growing. Top players take home six-figure incomes, and some have even amassed total winnings of over $1 million. The money comes from tournament wins and endorsement deals, and some even get a salary from a professional team.

Grueling training...

Chris Loranger, better known as "HuK" among gamers, has been competing professionally for four years. At age 25--he'd been playing games long before that--he considered himself a professional when he earned enough from gaming to not need any additional sources of income. But being a professional gamer isn't just all fun and games -- in fact, many put in more hours at work than the average office worker.

"I basically just play as much as I can whenever I can," said Loranger, who trains for up to 80 hours per week. "I will generally try to practice three to four hours then take a one-hour break, and then go for another block over and over until I can't play anymore."

Loranger plays for Evil Geniuses, a professional gamer agency founded in 1999 and whose partners include Monster Energy, Kingston HyperX, BenQ and Razer, among others.

Major computer vendors have also jumped into e-sports. Team Acer, for example, manages a "StarCraft 2" roster of five players who come from four different countries. "StarCraft 2" isn't the only game played in e-sports, however, as teams manage players for "League of Legends," "FIFA," "Dota 2" and "Street Fighter IV," just to name a few.

Women are gamers

Team Acer's 20-year-old Sasha "Scarlett" Hostyn hails from Canada, but like many others in e-sports, she finds herself away from home often.

"Being a professional e-sport athlete is a huge deal in my life. It affects every aspect, like where I live right now in Korea and who my friends are," said Hostyn, adding that many of her friends are other pro gamers or event organizers. "And I get to travel everywhere; it's really exciting."

Even though competitive games are played over the Internet, professional gamers must travel the world to not only compete, but also to practice with the best. The tolerances at competitive levels are so tight that the lag introduced by practicing with someone geographically far away is unacceptable.

"The best players and pro gaming infrastructure are in Korea," said Loranger, after spending three years living there. "You won't get the same support in the West, and the practice partners are considerably worse. You have to play a better opponent to become better."

Reaction times...

Traditional athletes already recognize the parallels between e-sports and more established leagues. Chris Kluwe, a former NFL punter who spent eight seasons with the Minnesota Vikings, is an avid player of "League of Legends" and "World of Warcraft."

"The time that you have to put in to be that good at a videogame is the same amount of time that you have to put in to be good at a physical sport. This is a mental sport, but there are physical aspects. You have to be able to react," said Kluwe. "Your reaction times have to be right up there with a baseball or football player."

"Right now, pro gamers are right at the threshold of the sport exploding, something baseball did in the '50s and football did in the '60s and '70s, and there are a couple of key similarities. The first is coaching," explained Kluwe, drawing parallels between traditional sports and e-sports. "Pro gamers who know how to take coaching are clearly outperforming those who kind of wing it off on their own, which is something that happened in football and the other major sports when they started getting big. They went from hobbies to jobs, and once it's a job, you have to take it seriously if you want to get better."

Spectator sport...

And like other professional sports, it draws a massive spectator audience. Live streaming website Twitch.tv posts impressive viewership numbers. Twitch is no secret underground channel; it now ranks fourth in terms of peak U.S. Internet traffic, ahead of Hulu and Facebook. Amazon, another Internet giant surpassed by the gaming video company's Internet traffic draw, saw such a bright future in Twitch that it acquired the company for approximately $970 million in cash. In the announcement, Amazon revealed that in July, more than 55 million unique visitors viewed more than 15 billion minutes of content on Twitch produced by more than 1 million broadcasters.

Mario Priolo, a founding member of the nonprofit eSports Canada organization, heavily credits video stream services like Twitch and YouTube as being literal game changers by not only allowing gaming organizations, but also individuals, to broadcast to hundreds of thousands of people.

"There are a significant number of people who can sit at home and play games - some of them not necessarily at the world-class competitive level - and still get a consistent audience of 10,000 to 20,000 people. They're making very good money and contributing to the excitement of gaming," said Priolo.

"People are completely replacing recreational TV watching with game streams, especially in the younger generation."

Live gaming...

Although TV shows have found new life through services such as Netflix, the medium itself is passive. Live game streaming, on the other hand, is an interactive experience for the viewer.

"It was a complete game changer to be able to communicate with people who broadcast live. Viewers can chat with the broadcasters to directly communicate back and forth, to build a real connection," Priolo said, adding that social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, also allowed gamers to connect in ways that were not possible before.

High-profile matches bring together spectators in a social setting. Taking a page out of boxing and mixed martial arts, electronic sports leagues rent out full theaters where gamers gather to watch a stream on the big screen that is happening live, but could be taking place thousands of miles away.

Demand for coaching

In another scenario that closely mirrors sports, such as tennis and golf, going on tour and making a living through wins isn't the only money to be made in today's games. Recreational players can seek help from experts to better their game.

"Coaching is another thing that allows a lot of the semipros to support themselves. Once they build up a reputation, they can provide lessons and charge by the hour," explained Priolo. "People can make a name for themselves easier than ever with streaming and social media and can connect to anyone in the world."

Before becoming a gaming coach, Simon "Lowko" Heijnen created educational "StarCraft" videos on YouTube. As the videos gained popularity, he received requests for live coaching. Today, Heijnen offers his coaching services in his spare time for €35 per hour, but he doesn't consider himself a professional.

"I don't see myself as a professional coach. I see myself as a gamer first, and I love livestreaming and making YouTube videos. Coaching is something that can very quickly become work, and I don't want it to be," said Heijnen, who lives in the Netherlands but can coach anyone, anywhere via the Internet. "I want it to be fun for me and for the person being coached."

When asked why he doesn't apply his knowledge of the game to compete in tournaments like other pro gamers, Heijnen replied, "It's just not something I want to be. I know that I am not able to grind games for 10+ hours a day, every single day. What I do want to be is a YouTuber and livestreamer who has fun in playing videogames and helps others while doing so."

At Intel Extreme Masters, one of the most talent-stacked "StarCraft 2" tournaments of 2014, pro gamers from South Korea, Denmark, Norway, Canada, and the United States gathered in Toronto to compete for $25,000 in prize money. Twenty-two-year-old Lee "Flash" Young Ho won the top prize of $10,000, while his teammate Joo "Zest" Sung Wook, also 22, took home $4,000. Both play for a team owned by South Korean telecommunications company KT, mirroring the model in car racing where one team can finish in multiple positions.

The tournament, which was a four-day-long event in conjunction with Fan Expo Canada, drew 125,000 attendees. Thousands more watched online as the games were streamed live, and some of the replays have been viewed over 130,000 times on YouTube. What makes it even more compelling as a spectator sport is live commentary, mirroring traditional sports broadcasts with both play-by-play and color commentary - now a common feature of matches between two well-known players.

On December 6 and 7, Intel Extreme Masters will hold its biggest "League of Legends" and "StarCraft 2" competition yet in SAP Center, the home arena of the NHL's San Jose Sharks, which will host an expected crowd of around 12,000 for the tournament.

From 1995.

By Intel Free Press

A couple of decades before the Pebble Watch, the Samsung Gear, the Sony Smartwatch, the i’m Watch, the Moto 360 or the LG G Watch were a couple of other time pieces worn on the wrist and produced by two Silicon Valley natives.

In 1995, Apple had its own branded watch to help with a marketing campaign for its new operating system. And 20 years before that, Intel had the Microma digital watch.

In 1995, Apple aimed to lure consumers to upgrade their Macs to System 7.5, then the latest operating system, by offering either a free version of Casady & Greene’s Conflict Catcher, a program designed to help eliminate start-up issues or conflicts between application extensions, or an Apple Logo Watch.

The Conflict Catcher software had an estimated value of $99.95 at the time. It can be assumed that the Apple Watch had a similar street value. Recently, these vintage Apple watches have sold on eBay for over $120.

Later, wristwatch bands for the touchscreen sixth-generation version of Apple’s iPod Nano, which had a square form factor, were used to create the first Apple “smart watch.” 

Microma watches were the first with an LCD display. From the Intel Museum.

Intel's bad timing... 

Believe it or not, Intel had the idea for a smarter watch more than four decades ago. In 1972, Intel acquired digital watchmaker Microma, which had developed liquid-crystal displays (LCDs) for use in products such as digital watches.

The quartz crystal oscillator was used as a time base, proving to be more accurate than traditional mechanical watches. The integrated circuit found within the Microma watch was considered to be one of the first examples of a system-on-a-chip (SoC), an Intel 5810 CMOS, as it contained all of the electronic components including analog and interface circuitry.

In 1978, Intel sold the Microma name to a Swiss company and the watch designs to Timex.

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore said the company released the first watch with an LCD and hoped to do more.

“The thought at the time was that the wristwatch could become much more than just a watch,” Moore said. “You could add functions to it.”

In a report by Laura Sydell, at NPR, she says that,

Intel's efforts failed. The technology simply hadn't reached a point where chips were small and powerful enough to do much inside a watch other than tell time. Moore wore his watch for years afterward as a reminder to stay out of the consumer watch business. He says he called it "my $15 million watch," to remind himself how much the company lost in the endeavor.

Intel, acquired wearable maker Basis earlier this year.

[Lesson forgotten? It'll be interesting to see how Intel fares in consumer markets, it has had to dump many other digital products, and plans for others, over the past 20 years, from microscopes to TVs.]

Greg Leeming is the director of the Intel Technology Science Center for Visual Computing at the University of Washington.

By Intel Free Press

Have you ever wondered what you'll look like in 10, 20 years? The University of Washington and Intel Labs has embarked on a facial aging project using big data to analyze and predict the way people's faces age.

Demonstrated at Intel Developer Forum 2014, finding your predicted future face is exceptionally easy through the use of an iPhone app. All the user has to do is input some information relating to age, gender and ethnicity, then select or take picture of herself using the front-facing camera. The rest then appears like magic.

Behind the scenes, however, are big data and clever algorithms. Greg Leeming, director of the Intel Technology Science Center for Visual Computing at the University of Washington, explained that behind the curtain is a big data approach.

"We go out to the Internet and grab huge numbers of pictures and organize those pictures into collections of flows. For an individual flow, we would have pictures when a person was a baby, age 3, age 4, etc., and create sequences of how those people age over time," Leeming explained.

"We then apply computer vision to those sequences of pictures to track how pixels move in an optical flow pattern from one picture to the next, and with that you can predict how people are going to age over time."

"Once you average many of those sequences together, you get a sense of how people age. And it turns out people age in very predictable ways, and so now one can apply the algorithm to an individual's picture and show how that person is going to age very, very accurately."

The research team, Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, Supasorn Suwajanakorn and Steven M. Seitz of the University of Washington, released a research paper on this facial aging technology.

Besides serving as a looking glass into our future selves, the facial aging algorithms could prove to be an invaluable tool to supplement law enforcement sketch artists in the long-term search for suspects or missing children.

Foremski's Take: I can't imagine many, or any people want to see how they look in the future -- it's not going to be a pretty sight. But what if the app showed you how you would look if you lost 20 pounds? Or if you gave up smoking and drinking? Or you did yoga/gym more often?

Unfortunately,  there's no app that can stop the march of time.

Ten years ago I launched Silicon Valley Watcher with a story about the Intel Developer Conference in San Francisco. The post was tongue-in-cheek because I have a theory that Intel's health is best measured by a simple metric: the quality of the backpacks given out at its conferences.

Intel is a notorious penny pincher (except where it matters) and if it is having trouble meeting its quarterly numbers its budget cuts are instant. Intel will even shrink everyone's cubicle space, maybe in the theory that productivity per square foot increases. Co-founder Gordon Moore kept a large round table in his cubicle. He said it was there so that they couldn't shrink his cubicle further.

Ten years ago the Intel backpacks were decent but not as good as those from just six months ago, and signaled a leaner time for the world's largest chip company. This year there seems to be a marked improvement in Intel's fortunes because the backpacks were of a much better quality.

Here's some images from this year's IDF: 

Acrobatics and DJs at Intel's wearable booth.

Tim Bajarin, principal analyst at Creative Strategies.

The always-on Ken Kaplan — hard working pioneer of Intel Insiders, Intel Free Press, and now at IQ - Intel's cutting-edge magazine — look out for paper cuts!

Marcus Yam (top) and Michael Sheehan from Intel Free Press show me their smart watches. 

The Internet of Beer. A SteadyServe iKeg connected to the Internet.

Intel's maker lab.

Chip analyst Nathan Brookwood at Insight64.

Sans-torso in wearables...

The yellow brick road leads to the wizard behind the curtain...

Bryan Rhoads at Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.

Congratulations to Bryan Rhoads, at Intel Digital Media Labs, for winning the Content Marketing Institute's top award: Content Marketer of the Year for activities that, "inspire the industry to achieve more."

Rhoads work on Intel's joint venture with Vice Media called "The Creators Project" impressed the judges. The awards event was hosted by actor Kevin Spacey in Cleveland. Rhoads was busy at Intel's developer conference in San Francisco and wasn't able to attend. But he sent along a funny video.

Bryan Rhoads (center) with his Intel colleagues from IQ and other media projects.

I attended the Creators Project in April 2012 when it offered a two-day festival of music and arts for free. It was excellent. 

Please see: Intel's Ambitious 'Creators Project' - Can Great Curation Build Brand? -SVW

Intel Intern Aniket Borkar modeling the Smart Helmet

Students at Oregon State University and Intel interns collaborated 0n a smart helmet with life-saving features.

By Intel Free Press

For the past half year, a group of five undergraduate students from Oregon State University has been working with interns at Intel to create a smart safety helmet for cyclists. In a perfect world, the primary function of the helmet -- to detect a crash and communicate to emergency contacts -- would never be used.

The job of today's bicycle helmets is to provide protection to the head in a crash. The group of interns wants to extend this functionality, especially when used with smaller children, as well as provide tests to determine if a rider involved in a crash may have suffered a concussion and requires medical attention.

Viewed as a "smart helmet," which is connected to a smartphone, the prototype uses sensors (e.g., accelerometers) to detect a crash and communication hardware to automatically dial a predefined emergency contact. Built into the helmet are above-the-ear speakers, a microphone, an LED headlamp and a 3.7V, 2600mAh lithium-ion battery. The team also created a custom logic board that incorporates Intel Edison along with Bluetooth, magnetometer, gyroscope and two accelerometers.

A smartphone app, developed in Java parallel with the hardware, serves as the companion to the smart helmet's functions and features. The app enables a user's smartphone to record ride distance, speed and the path. It currently runs on Android but can easily be ported to other platforms.

Abhay Dharmadhikari, a technologist and architect in the Device Development Group for Intel, who has been at the company for over 17 years, mentored the interns working on the smart helmet. Dharmadhikari has a personal interest in the helmet project, as he has two children, ages 8 and 12, who are cyclists. Children are seldom good communicators and are often embarrassed to talk about problems or don't give the full picture, said Dharmadhikari.

The helmet knows all...and who to call

"If my kids get into a crash, we will never know what happened. Did they hit their heads? Did they get really injured? Because when they come back [after biking] they just say 'I got hurt,' so we aren't really sure how bad it was," said Dharmadhikari. "Could we build something that would help us understand; [and] if a crash happens, the helmet can act like a black box?"

The intern team behind the helmet likened it to the automobile assistance program OnStar, but for cyclists.

In the event of a crash, the smartphone application initiates communication with the bike rider through the helmet speakers and microphone to ask if he needs help.

If he says "yes" or does not respond, the app automatically will call and/or text the emergency contact (which can be 911) with location information. The rider can also be asked several medical questions to assess if he's suffered a concussion or other injury, such as asking the rider to read the current time on an analog clock displayed on the companion app.

The helmet also stores crash data that can be analyzed after the fact to better understand the incident, like a "black box" for bicyclists. The helmet will store sensor data, which is helpful in telling doctors which part of the head sustained the impact. T

The companion app can also connect to the cloud to upload and pool ride and crash data, so that the crowd-sourced data can be used to better understand head injuries as well as identifying dangerous intersections.

Because the interns developing the prototype wanted to extend the functionality to something useful beyond emergency situations, the microphone and speakers can be used for hands-free calling as well as streaming music. Because the speakers do not cover the ears, the bicycle rider can still hear the surrounding environment.

The helmet as a platform...

"We think of the helmet as a platform and there are many things we can do with it. We focused on the present features from a product perspective," said Dharmadhikari, adding that haptic feedback could be a future feature.

The smart helmet project is part of an extensive internship program that Intel has with university graduate and undergraduate students. The Intel Collaborators program is on its third year employing undergraduate and graduate students and Ph.D. candidates from around the country to participate in high-visibility, cross-functional mentored programs.

Contrary to traditional Intel intern programs, which are typically funded by individual business units at Intel, the Collaborators program receives support and funding from Intel Human Resources.

"We believe in this next generation of students and mentoring them and helping them become better engineers; that is our motivation," said Dharmadhikari. "I believe in working with the students where they really have energy and challenge the energy with the right problems and tools."

The smart helmet project started in December 2013 with the five selected interns initially devoting their free time to the project. Once school had completed, four of the five worked full time as official Intel interns. Three students are studying computer and electrical engineering and one is studying computer science.

Saving lives is an adrenaline rush...

Cam Tu Vo is a junior at Oregon State University studying computer science, and at her internship at Intel she works in web development. Vo extracted crash data from databases and visually represented it in a way that was useful to users or researchers.

"The tasks were fairly straightforward in the beginning, but it gradually became interesting after more feedback. My manager really focused on the user interface and meaningful information," Vo said. "From those expectations, I had the opportunity to work with graphics and 3-D model manipulation of our helmet."

The intern team finally got the chance to show off their smart helmet at an Intel Collaborators showcase.

"A camera man told us about a close friend's death. He said our smart helmet would have contacted emergency services after the bike accident and could have saved his friend's life," Vo said.

"The man expressed true appreciation, which gave me the sense that I am a part of something that can positively impact people's lives. It was such an adrenaline rush for me."

Interns across Intel campuses in Arizona, California and Oregon participated in a two-day hackathon weekend, where the theme was "code for good." Interns were tasked with creating a game that was both fun to play and taught mathematics.

By Intel Free Press

Every summer, students from around the world take part in Intel's highly sought after internship program, where students gain working experience at a major technology company and Intel taps into young, brilliant minds. It's also an opportunity to learn about Intel through training and networking events that supplement actual project work.

Math Jump

Created by Jennifer Qian and Carlos Reyes, Math Jump is a simple game inspired by the platformer genre. Players run along a side-scrolling plane and jump to catch numbers and operation signs, scoring points upon catching the correct answer.

A rising senior at Cornell University, Qian is majoring in electrical and computer engineering and minoring in informational science. At Intel's Hudson, Massachusetts, site, Qian is a pre-silicon validation engineer for DDRIO team, working with validation engineers and logic designers to solve test failures.

Reyes, a rising senior at Duke University studying computer science and chemistry, works in Intel's Internet of Things Group, writing software tools for generating PCI and MCA error injections on Simics models of next-generation platforms.

"I decided to look around at different styles of 2-D games and was playing a game called Temple Run when I got the idea for Math Jump. Temple Run is quite different overall, but the aspect that inspired Math Jump was the fact that you tap the screen and jump (while running) to collect items. This led to the jumping of the character in Math Jump to collect pieces of an equation," explained Reyes.

"From that point, I decided that it would be fun to have users string together their own equations and receive higher allocations of points when they solved equations involving bigger numbers (which are generally harder, think 7*8 vs 9+2) in addition to a base score of 10."

The term hackathon suggests a marathon of hacking, or coding, but producing a working model in a short amount of time requires teamwork and practical division of labor.

"We divided up the work by interest, where I am very interested in programming and [Jennifer] is interested in product management," said Reyes.

"We both work in the Hudson, Massachusetts, site so it was convenient to communicate. I liked working with Carlos on this project because we both respect each other's ideas and we have common interests in math games," added Qian. "Since our contributions to the project don't really overlap, it worked out well that we get full control on our parts."

"I loved working on the hackathon project. I do a lot of server-side JavaScript development, but I rarely get the opportunity to work on front-end JavaScript, which the hackathon allowed me to learn more about and open my eyes to," Reyes said.

"I thought that the theme was awesome and I developed Math Jump to help make learning quick arithmetic more fun. I plan on further developing Math Jump in the near future."

Graph to the Future

Two of the hackathon teams thought that graphing and equations would make for good grounds for gaming. Graph to the Future, developed by Steven Reed, Zach Schaffter and Victoria Worrall, laid stars on a four-quadrant graph and players had to collect stars scattered along the graph by inputting the correct equation.

Hero of Graphs

Hero(graphs), developed by Richard Li, Sami Mian and Daniel Roberts, kept its graphs to a single quadrant, but players are challenged with tricky obstacles that could block a direct path toward the target.

"Hero(graphs) (pronounced 'hero of graphs') came from the idea that graphing skills are often underdeveloped throughout grades K-12. Students often do not have access to graphing calculators and find it difficult to utilize the devices' graphing capabilities when they do have access to them," explained Roberts, a recent electrical engineering undergrad from Northern Arizona University, now in his second internship at Intel.

"Hero(graphs) is meant to help students develop an intuitive feeling of the concepts of continuous and piecewise linear and non-linear functions, and how mathematical equations translate into graphical behavior so that students can be better prepared to apply this kind of analysis as they progress into higher levels of math (where this kind of intuition becomes important)."

The hackathon is an optional activity for the Intel interns, but Roberts found it more than just another project to add to his CV.

"I thought the hackathon had a great purpose because I believe there is a lot of good that can come from the integration of technology into earlier stages of education. Intel's hackathon event gave me the opportunity to further develop my skills, to learn new skills, and to contribute positively in education," said Roberts. "Richard was the only one who had participated in hackathons before, so after finding out about the Intel hackathon, Richard got me and Sami excited to give it a shot.

"The event itself was great because although it was difficult work and permitted very little sleep, it just felt like working on a cool project with friends."

Dennis Carter, Intel's then-marketing chief commissioned the Intel "Bong" in 1994.

A three-second audio mnemonic composed in a Sherman Oaks garage helped Intel get inside just about everything...

By Intel Free Press

By some estimates, it's played once every five minutes somewhere in the world. A simple five-note mnemonic tune composed 20 years ago that, with the help of a clever marketing slogan, helped Intel become one of the most recognizable brands in the world.

To understand the story behind the Intel sound mark or 'bong' as it is known, you have to go back to the late 1980s.

 
Intel had a problem. A rapid development cycle meant microprocessor speed and capability were advancing quickly, but manufacturers weren't keeping up with the cutting edge. Manufacturers were reluctant to upgrade from the 286 chip to the 386, and consumers didn't know enough to care.

Listen to the Intel Bong

"Intel's whole reason for existence was to push technology as fast as you can push it and then help the world adopt it so that everybody advances. And then do it again," recalls Dennis Carter, Intel's then-marketing chief. "1989 rolls around and we've introduced the 386 several years before. It's a very successful product, but it's not displacing the previous generation and that's a concern."

Instead of continuing to market to manufacturers, the company decided on a new approach. In 1989, Carter led a pilot program in Denver that targeted consumers with a simple billboard campaign that became infamously known inside and outside Intel as the Red X campaign. It featured a crossed-out "286" with "386" written over it in graffiti.

As Michael Malone wrote in his new book, "The Intel Trinity," it was a big risk that paid off, ushering in a new era in marketing where semiconductor suppliers could communicate directly with consumers.  Before long, customers began asking for the 386 by name and manufacturers were forced to bake it into their products.

The campaign was a success, but Intel would soon need a way to replicate the results on a much larger scale, and for a newer medium.

The audio component

After a court ruling stripped the naming trademarks for the 386 and 486, Carter looked for ways to evangelize Intel itself rather than specific processors. This would lead to the genesis of the Intel Inside campaign, launched in 1991 with the now-famous Intel swirl logo.

Then in 1994, Intel was ready to expand to television, presenting a new set of challenges.

"Nobody was going to run a 30-second ad with the logo there the whole time, it would look stupid. An audio component seemed like it would work really well," Carter said.

That audio component would become  what might be the most iconic three-seconds of branded audio ever recorded: the Intel bong sound.

Five perfect notes

Walter Werzowa is an Austrian native who'd achieved a measure of fame in the '80s with the electronica band Edelweiss, which sold more than 5 million records. Following the group's disbandment, Werzowa moved to the United States to study film music at USC.

The Intel gig came by way of Kyle Cooper, a friend employed at R/GA LA, hired by Carter to turn the Intel swirl into the Intel spiral animation. Werzowa says he didn't get much direction to compose the accompanying jingle.

"The sound needed to convey reliability, innovation and trust," Werzowa said.

He says the "Intel Inside" tagline triggered a melody in his head, and those were the notes that became the Intel bong sound: D flat, D flat, G flat, D flat, A flat. The rhythm, he says, was inspired by the syllables of the tagline.

Werzowa then spent the following weeks refining the five-note sequence into the jingle that's since become so recognizable. Each of the five tones is a blend of various synthesizers -- mostly a lot of xylophone and marimba.

Interestingly, Werzowa and Intel discovered that the sound of the notes was at least as important as the melody itself. Among a 60-person focus group, researchers found only 80 percent of participants recognized the correct melody played on a violin, but 100 percent recognized it with the proper sound -- even when an incorrect note was added.

A bong by any other sound...

The original Intel Bong that debuted in 1994

Since the original jingle premiered in 1994, Werzowa says he's updated it every two to three years. Now that the sound is globally recognizable, Intel is much more hands-on. The chipmaker's in-house creatives, marketing team and legal counsel all provide input before any changes can be made.

It's hard to count how many versions the bong sound has gone through over 20 years, but while the visuals have changed and some bass has been added, the essential five-note sequence remains the same.

Even will.i.am's brief tenure as Intel's director of creative innovation hasn't had much impact, although the Black Eyed Peas frontman sampled the jingle for his 2013 track "Geekin."

Perhaps the most creative iteration so far is from a group of Intel engineers in Finland, who turned themselves into human cannonballs, and launched into a giant row of chimes -- likely with the aid of some video-editing wizardry.

While Intel has brought in a new chief marketing officer to revamp its brand image and marketing programs, it's not clear whether the tune will change, go away, or morph into something new. Whatever the jingle might sound like in the future, Werzowa says one thing is certain in his mind: It's not likely to be phased out any time soon.

"I cannot imagine that. The mnemonic is worth millions of dollars," he said.

By Intel Free Press

Over three years in the making, Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara will be the new home of the San Francisco 49ers this fall. Before the very first kickoff, Major League Soccer club San Jose Earthquakes will host Seattle Sounders FC on August 2 as the first event at the new venue.

Expected to draw 45,000 fans, the MLS match is viewed as a rehearsal for Levi’s Stadium and the city of Santa Clara before a 49ers game brings up to 75,000 into the city 40 miles south of San Francisco. During times of rising ticket prices and fans who don’t want to be without the connected and social NFL experiences offered at home, Levi’s Stadium’s high-tech amenities could be what brings fans back into the stands.

“We’re dealing with the home experience being so good we need to find ways for fans to come to the games,” said Brian McCarthy, the NFL’s director of communications. “Fans are sitting on comfortable couches while watching games on state-of-the-art TVs, but the at-home experience isn’t as exciting as being there in person. The question is how do we arm the fans with the best in-stadium experience?”

Jack Hill believes the next milestone for fan experience is sitting on 15 acres in Santa Clara, Calif. The head of stadium construction said the new 49ers facility will be “a showcase” of technology.

“Our goal is to be the new benchmark for the NFL,” said Hill, who considers the league’s two newest stadiums, MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., home of New York’s Giants and Jets, and Cowboys Stadium in Dallas, a prior project of his, to be the current standard bearers.

Both Hill and the stadium’s architect said fans will enjoy unsurpassed connectivity at the new venue.

“The fiber backbone will be very robust so that any present or future technology will be connected,” said Lanson Nichols, principal project manager with HNTB Architecture, the design firm behind MetLife Stadium and dozens of other major sports venues. “The telecom data rooms will be 25 to 30 percent larger than at any other NFL stadium and the rooms will be spread on different levels no more than 150 feet apart.”

Fans’ mounting expectations for technology and the stadium’s location are at the forefront of the builders’ minds.

“Technology doesn’t change any faster than in Silicon Valley,” Nichols said with no argument from Hill.

“Infrastructure is very important when more and more fans are on smartphones, and the smartphones, themselves are constantly getting smarter,” said Hill. “Our team is working on a distributed-antenna system (DAS) so that fans who want to take pictures, videos, text someone across the seating bowl or email their buddies at home won’t be frustrated.”

In our original 2012 interview, Hill said that 20 to 30 percent of fans are using personal technology in venues around the league. That number is no doubt greater today, especially when you consider the stadium’s tech-centric locale.

“We’ll be in the heart of Silicon Valley and even today a lot of our fans are from tech companies, and they want to use their devices and have a good fan experience,” Hill said.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell singled out technology as a key to tackling an attendance drop that saw crowds down 4.5 percent from 2007 to 2011, and only two-thirds of the league’s 32 teams sell out their 2012 home opening game.

In line with the league’s push to meet fan expectations, 49er President Gideon Yu promised at a press conference that the new stadium would be “the ultimate integration of technology and live sports to our fans.”

Although Hill wouldn’t disclose how much of the project’s budget is devoted to technology, he did say that “it’s a big chunk and it’s safe to say it’s more than anyone has spent before.” Since original budgeting, the costs amounted to a final total of $1.3 billion.

“We want every new stadium to be the smartest stadium, and led by [49er CEO] Jed York, the new Santa Clara stadium, particularly because where it’s located, will no doubt be that,” said McCarthy of the NFL.

Hill acknowledged that a stadium located in the heart of Silicon Valley could benefit by having numerous tech giants as neighbors. SAP AG, Yahoo Inc., Brocade Communications Inc. and Intel Corp. are just a few of the sponsors at Levi’s Stadium.

“One of the nice things about the Bay Area is you have such a wide array of technology partners to work with,” Hill said.

The NFL has league-wide standards for instant replay and camera angles as well as telecommunications for coaching and medical staffs, yet doesn’t explicitly regulate in-stadium technology according to McCarthy. “But we do push teams,” he said.

“The good thing about the NFL is that while the teams are very competitive, we all share best practices,” McCarthy said. “We have meetings about the latest the teams are doing on technology just as coaches will have meetings about games.”

“Sharing information is how we’ve become the best,” he added. “You need all 32 teams working for the best experience and with the newer generation of stadiums there’s an arms race to build the most unique experience for the fans, but it’s about refurbishing older stadiums, too.”

Levi’s Stadium is built to meet the tech needs of 2014 and beyond, with amenities such as a fantasy football luxury lounge with touch-screen terminals and device charging stations that can accommodate up to 1600 hardcore NFL fans. The lounge will also feature big-screen TVs, giving attendees the option to have a slice of home at the live event.

Technological innovations were a focus for the 49ers even while they were playing at Candlestick Park. For example, a team-created 49ers app gave fans access to video from various camera feeds.

Other teams offer similar apps and real-time highlights from every game in the league are available viaNFL Red Zone. Many older stadiums have upgraded video monitors above the field and in concession areas, and now fans attending games are shown the same replay that referees view under the hood.

“Looking ahead, under consideration is having selected players mic’d in some fashion for exclusive in-stadium audio,” McCarthy said.

Those who prefer not to call, text, tweet, Facebook, view or capture photos and video, check their fantasy team or order garlic fries from their iPhone haven’t been overlooked amid all the efforts to integrate hi-tech offerings.

“We’re considering a wide range of tech advances to meet the fans’ desire to be connected — that is, if they want it,” McCarthy said. “It could be the 3 to 4 hours not to be connected to a device. They want the more social aspect of being at a game with tens of thousands of other fans and get away from their technology.”

The San Francisco 49ers will play their first regular season game at Levi’s Stadium, hosting the Chicago Bears on September 14, 2014. Super Bowl 50 will be played at Levi’s Stadium on February 7, 2016.

MIT researcher Karl Iagnemma believes one of the biggest risks of self-driving cars is the Human-Machine Interface problem.

By Intel Free Press

Depending on where you get your news, the phrase "autonomous vehicle" can mean anything from a benign self-driving Prius to a sentient and rampaging four-wheeled Terminator. But this image of a machine may be rooted more in science fiction than science fact.

As with any nascent technology, the risks and benefits of autonomous vehicles are both poorly understood and at the same time overblown. To be sure, there are real dangers and challenges presented by self-driving cars, according to experts. But these concerns are not the stuff of action thrillers.

According to Karl Iagnemma, MIT's principal research scientist for the Robotic Mobility Group, the benefits of the technology are very real, but limiting its potential to that of a robotic chauffeur is a failure of imagination.

The Robotic Mobility Group at MIT is a think tank of sorts, for research into autonomous vehicles. As the group's head, Iagnemma is uniquely positioned to separate the real debates over driverless cars from the hyperbole.

In May, for example, Wired ran an opinion piece arguing that the algorithms being developed to mitigate injury and damage in the event of an autonomous car accident represent something sinister and insidious. What happens, the author asked, when a crash is inevitable and the car must decide between swerving into either a light sedan or a heavy SUV?

"Programming a car to collide with any particular kind of object over another seems an awful lot like a targeting algorithm, similar to those for military weapons systems," the writer argues. "And this takes the robot-car industry down legally and morally dangerous paths... [Autonomous cars] can make split-second choices to optimize crashes-that is, to minimize harm. But software needs to be programmed, and it is unclear how to do that for the hard cases."

Iagnemma said this "targeting" discussion is off point. "In a practical sense, it's probably difficult, if not impossible, to code to every possible contingency," he said. "It's not inconceivable to program something like this in a crude way, but that's not on the technical horizon. That's not the realistic goal of anyone who's serious."

The real dangers posed by robotic vehicles, Iagnemma said, have a lot more to do with the human element than the machine.

Here's a real question that bedevils designers of autonomous vehicles: What happens when an autonomous vehicle needs to cede control back to the driver? This sounds simple enough. But how does the vehicle determine when a human occupant is "ready" to take control?

"The primary challenge is the time that it requires for an operator to regain situational awareness. This is a significant unknown," Iagnemma said. "Ensuring safety and failure conditions are the kinds of things aircraft and spacecraft designers have had to worry about. In the automotive world, you've always been able to fall back on the human operator."

One of the approaches to this problem has been to design autonomous systems in such a way as to entirely eliminate the need for a driver to take control.

"Instead of ever requiring human intervention, you would have an architecture designed so you'd always have the possibility to come to a safe stop," he said.

According to Iagnemma, most of the components needed to move autonomous vehicles out of the beta phase already exist and simply need to be improved. Indeed, Google's fleet of robotic cars has already clocked some 300,000 miles without a single ticket. There was an accident with one of Google's driverless cars in 2011, but the company said the car was being driven manually at the time.

Iagnemma said that while perception algorithms still need to become more robust, the challenge now lies chiefly in bringing down the cost of hardware like LiDAR sensors by several orders of magnitude. This will enable cars to improve their sensing capabilities and overall performance without becoming significantly more expensive.

With Google leading the way, other technology companies are accelerating into the fast lane on autonomous driving, trying to increase the pace of innovation while driving down costs. Intel, whose processors powered Stanford's winning entry in the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005 and are rumored to be powering Google's self-driving cars, is pushing an open-platform approach with an eye toward interoperability versus competing sets of proprietary standards.

Intel is also investing in companies like ZMP Inc., a Japanese company developing robotic platforms, sensor systems, connected car informatics and other autonomous technologies.

Developers are working to make an autonomous car requiring zero human intervention, what the industry calls a Level 4 vehicle. (Google's driverless cars are considered Level 3, which means drivers must be ready to take the wheel if needed.)

"The good news is that the physics of the sensors doesn't require them to be expensive," he said. "We're at the point now where we have reasonably good solutions to all the building blocks, but there's sort of a fallacy in expectations that once a Level 4 vehicle is deployed, that technology remains fixed."

Once they prove out a Level 4 automobile, though, what can we do with it? Iagnemma believes the answer is a lot more intriguing than being able to nap undisturbed while we're shuttled between points A and B.

"Most people drive a car for one hour total each day. The rest of the time, it's parked taking up space. I'd rather own 0.3 of a car," he said. "Autonomous vehicles will enable fundamentally new modes of transportation. Car sharing. I think a lot of people are going to want that type of option either as an additional car or as the baseline form of transportation."

Intel missed the mobile market but it is determined not to miss out on wearables. Mike Bell, Intel vice president and general manager of the company’s New Devices Group; and Jeff Holove, now a general manager in Bell’s New Devices Group  discuss Intel’s strategies.

By Intel Free Press

In March, Intel announced it had completed the acquisition of Basis Science Inc., a privately held company specializing in wearable device technologies for health and wellness. With major industry players like Apple, Google, Samsung, Intel and others racing to grab a share of the expected $8 billion wearables market by 2018, the Basis acquisition was viewed as a move that would help Intel accelerate its wearable focus. 

Q. What is Intel’s wearable strategy?

Mike Bell: We’re not discussing the whole strategy because we want to surprise people. But at the end of the day, if it connects and computes, we want Intel inside. We want to produce the best platforms for wearables and have people build lots of wearable devices that show off the benefits of technology. It’s pretty straightforward.

Q. In other words, are you trying to build a PC-like ecosystem around Intel technology but for wearables?

Bell: Well, I actually think if you compare wearable stuff to PCs, it’s very different. For wearables, something that somebody has on their body potentially 24 hours a day, the level of integration and finesse and polish has to be so much higher. It’s a much harder thing.

Jef Holove: In order to make systems like this work, you have to have the expertise at the device level including the subsystems, chips and sensors in the device. You also have to have an understanding about what makes a good 24/7 user experience. At Basis, we’re still learning that even today, but we came into this with a particular thesis about what made a device wearable 24/7.

You’ve got to have the science, the algorithms to figure out: Okay, we can get sensor data, but how do you turn that into meaningful insight for consumers? You’ve got to have the software and the cloud expertise. We’re a really small team with even smaller teams in each of those areas of expertise. But it’s a little example of what Mike is talking about to scale this big.

Q. So develop most of the basic technology, and then customers can take it and put their own stamp on top. How does Basis fit into all this?

Bell: With Basis, we’re going to be showcasing what’s possible. We’re going to build best-in-class products to show what’s possible. A lot of people are more hesitant. They’re taking a wait-and-see attitude. We see great possibility in this space, and we want to get out there with something that shows the potential of what this stuff can do.

Holove: Because it’s wearables, the opportunity goes well beyond classic consumer electronics. The kinds of brands who will do wearables over time stretch way beyond the classic CE and computing brands. The further beyond that you get, the less they know about any of the things that we were just talking about: the cloud, and in some cases, even hardware design.

All of those are areas where Intel provides more and more value because the kinds of customers and consumers know less and less about all the things that we were just talking about.

Q. As Intel tries to catch up in smartphones and tablets, is this an opportunity to be on the ground floor?

Bell: There’s no established leader in the wearable space, and we’d like to be that leader. We really want to push the envelope with what’s possible, get a lot of know-how, get the right people onboard, and try to get so far ahead that we’re actually helping set the standards.

Q. Does Basis bring to Intel the ability to have a lead customer, similar to what Google does with its Nexus program?

Bell: Well, no. [Basis] has arguably the best product in the wellness wearable space. For us, it’s the chance to get great people and great technology quickly, and the chance to experiment with something that’s not the Intel brand. Plus we can showcase some of the best stuff we’ve had ruminating in the labs here and really control what’s possible with Jef and his team.

Q. How did Basis then become the company to acquire?

Bell: Before we decided to talk to them, all of us took a look at every one of the devices on the market. And what you find is a lot of them are glorified pedometers.

You shake your wrist and it goes, “Hey, look, you took 10 steps.” And you go to the website and it says, “Hey, you took 10 steps,” which is fun and motivating for a period of time, but what we find is people lose interest.

So, it’s not only the device, but it’s the work the Basis team did with having an engaging Web presence and the feature they call habits to encourage people to stay with what they do and to stay engaged with the Web portal. It makes the device more valuable, as opposed to some of the things where you go, “Hey, look. You took 20 steps today. Take more tomorrow.”

At some point, people go, “Yeah, I don’t really want to wear that anymore.” It’s really that understanding of how to keep people motivated and engaged that’s important—it’s an end-to-end solution. I think for wearables to become less about hype and more about reality, we’re going to need more devices like this where the whole experience is really good.

Holove: Some of the real breakthroughs that we had were not just on power management and form function and using LEDs to get heart rate. It was on behavioral science, thinking about the actual user experience and what makes this product truly valuable for someone in their everyday life.

What data can we get that’s actually relevant? How do you illustrate it in a way that’s understandable and interesting over time? And how do you keep them coming back?

We designed an algorithm where the difficulty, the routineness and the frequency that you have to do these habits automatically goes up and down based on the user’s actual performance, without them assigning a level of difficulty.

People typically get ahead of themselves. What happens in this space all the time is a user comes, especially if they get to set all their own goals, they’ll come in and set them for who they want to be versus who they really are. But their immediate experience is failure. Guess how motivating that is after a few weeks? Not very.

The point is it’s all these insights about not just how do you get the product done and on the shelf, but what actually makes it valuable.

We’re hoping to bring our experience—dealing with consumers directly, getting feedback through customer support, managing retail channels as a discrete brand under Intel’s umbrella, being on the front line—and leverage that intelligence, insight and wisdom times 10 within Intel.

Because there are all these other products and experiences that we can do well beyond health and fitness, which is what Basis is going to stick to doing.

Q. Jef, why team up and join Intel?

Holove: I think we were very excited about the existence of the New Devices Group and how important that was to Intel’s strategy. We felt like this is a bet we can make, where we know we’re part of the agenda that already exists. We do not have to convince a company that they should be investing in wearables or that this space is important.

The other thing was Intel from the very beginning made it clear that their intent was to get and to sustain the entire team. They valued this whole platform that we’ve been talking about. It’s not just the device. It’s the software. It’s the user experience. It’s all of that stuff combined.

The last piece for any deal is, what does this get to become under a bigger umbrella that we couldn’t accomplish on our own? We looked at the amount of science and R&D that’s already going around Intel, some of which is very relevant to stuff we were already working on or wish we were working on. We thought, “Where better are we going to be able to shape what the guts of this thing are capable of over time than here?”

Plus, Intel has a huge global reach into the same kinds of consumer channels that sell this stuff. We were on an interesting trajectory as a boutique, premium brand. But it all of a sudden puts that boutique premium brand on a worldwide stage. The amount of inbound interest we have on Basis now is already an order of magnitude above what it was on our own.

Q. How do you see this market playing out?

Holove: I don’t pretend to know anything in particular about what others are going to do. We have to operate with assumptions, and I believe that only the paranoid survive [laughter]. But historically, with Apple especially, they usually grow markets. That’s not all bad, right?

I think having a brand of that caliber with the amount of money they’re going to spend, in most cases they have blown categories up. They own a share of it, but mostly those categories have gotten huge as a result of their presence and their marketing. I’m fine with that dynamic in this space, particularly since what they’re going to do is just going to be different than what we’re doing. But more consumer awareness, more credibility for the space is a good thing.

In the meantime, I would say in wearables at large, on the one hand, yes, there’s a dozen micro-niches, but there’s one big fat obvious winner so far. And that’s the health and wellness category. That’s where most of the volume is today to the extent there is volume. There’s millions of units a year, and it’s growing very, very fast.

I think part of the question is: What other niches are going to explode into bigger obvious plays? I think there are several. And there’s also the question of, if [health and wellness is] the big obvious play right now, how does that evolve over time?

Nike’s announced they’re getting out of the hardware side of it. There’s been a number of challenges in that space. As Mike said, there’s no real obvious winner there yet. That’s pretty exciting, right? There’s plenty of evidence there’s a real category there and no obvious winner. That’s good for us.

Wireless power pioneer Nikola Tesla’s Wardenclyffe lab building, seen in 1904. (Image source: commons.wikimedia.org)

By Intel Free Press

If you’ve been keeping up with trade shows and tech blogs, you might think that some new breakthrough in wireless energy transfer has taken place in the past year. It hasn’t.

Intel and others have been talking about wireless charging for years. Intel’s former lab located at the University of Washington in Seattle had wireless charging as part of its charter. And in 2009 researchers were demonstrating a magnetic resonance project sending radio signals and power in the same transmission.

Today, the idea and the technology is gaining momentum.

Intel has said that it is working on a completely wire-free laptop by 2016 using WiGig to transfer video and graphics wirelessly, and with wireless charging. Kirk Skaugen, Intel’s PC client group SVP demonstrated how wireless technology could be integrated into a table that could simultaneously charge a laptop, phone, headset and tablet. The company also demonstrated a wireless charging bowl at CES in January.

The next few years will be interesting to watch if the industry can settle on a common standard. The Rezence standard, backed by the Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP) appears to be gaining traction according to A4WP’s marketing chair, Geoff Gordon, who not surprisingly says Rezence is the future of the industry.

“We are weeks or months away from commercialization, whereas other organizations like the Wireless Power Consortium (WPC), is just not starting to address this type of technology,” Gordon said. “So if they do decide to go down this path on their own, they’re looking at still 12, 18, 24 months to be what we are today.”

That doesn’t mean there aren’t interesting implementations in the works based on other standards such as Qi, backed by the Wireless Power Consortium. Among the most unique is Nokia’s promise of wirelessly charging pants and compatible with Lumia-series smartphones.

Intel and WiTriCity have recently teamed up on a licensing agreement that will allow Intel to integrate WiTricity’s wireless charging technology into its chips. Both companies support the Rezence standard.

An old idea...

Nikola Tesla pioneered some of the earliest attempts at wireless power transmission before the turn of the 20th century. In the late 1890s, he’d succeeded at wirelessly lighting lamps. Though Tesla never became a household name associated with wireless power, the inductive charging techniques he invented would see a renaissance some five decades after his death in 1943.

It Begins with a Toothbrush

Innovation is often born in unlikely places and when it comes to wireless charging. The Braun Company was perhaps well ahead of the curve. Since the early ‘90s, its rechargeable toothbrushes have utilized induction as a wireless (and waterproof) charging solution.

Other early iterations of wireless charging include transcutaneous energy transfer systems found in surgically implanted devices, such as artificial hearts. In the mid- 90s, Hughes Electronics released the Magne Charge interface, which used inductive charging paddles to power some of the first electric vehicles from General Motors and Toyota.

Arguably, the last major breakthrough in wireless charging occurred in 2006 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where a team led by Marin Soljačić discovered a method for transferring power between coils separated by a few meters. The MIT researchers found that the range could be extended even further through magnetic resonance.

Today, resonance-based wireless charging is fundamentally grounded in the same principles that Tesla pioneered more than a century ago, but incremental advances have enabled entirely new technologies with transformative potential, such as electrified mass transit systems.

“Mass-Bus-Transit is one of the most valuable transportation areas for wireless charging and could enable a complete fleet conversion to flexible, economical and environmentally friendly transport,” said Michael Austin, vice president for BYD America.

(image credit: Dennis Stachel for GDC Europe)

By Intel Free Press

When Asus announced its first Android smartphones several months ago, the top-five PC maker played up the product line’s range of sizes, a new interface called ZenUI and an array of striking pastel colors.

But the company’s announcement also included mention of a factory-installed feature that it didn’t even make — an app called Omlet Chat that was developed by MobiSocial, a startup comprising Stanford University computer science Professor Monica Lam and three doctoral students.

The deal meant “huge PR” for MobiSocial, Lam said. But she also sees the app as critical to the success of the launch: “They should pay us. It was a way to strengthen the company’s foothold in mobile by giving users a way to exchange messages and photos without joining an external network – a capability that’s particularly appealing to those concerned about privacy.”

It’s become a truism in the mobile world: An app ecosystem can make or break a device or an operating system. “Content is king when it comes to these devices because that’s how the devices come to life,” said Steve Augustine, manager of the Android developer initiative at Intel.

Developers have become, in the words of author and analyst Stephen O’Grady’s 2013 book, “The New Kingmakers”. The new development is that they’re increasingly being courted not only by the likes of Apple and Google, but also chipmakers such as Intel, who want more apps to run natively on their hardware.

Intel's app following...

At Intel, courting developers involves an extensive outreach program that’s designed to foster a relationship with the developer community at large, a diverse group that ranges from established players hunting for the next business opportunity to weekend hobbyists chasing a dream.

“You also have to capture the hearts and minds of those folks in their garage because you don’t know what’s going to be the next big thing,” Augustine said.

Intel has built an entire program around recruiting and supporting Android developers as the company seeks to get more of its x86 chips into smartphones and tablets running Google’s mobile OS. While Intel powers only a handful of phones today, including the Asus ZenFone, there are a growing number of Intel-based tablets available. The company recently said there are over 130 tablet designs either on the market or coming to market from multiple manufacturers. Many of these will run Android.

Despite the fact that most Android apps are not written natively to run on Intel, the company says the vast majority of Android applications run fine on Intel devices using a unique bridging technology. Still, Intel wants more developers to write native code for the company’s chips to eliminate the need for any bridging.

Augustine says developers need to know that Intel will offer support to help enable more and more applications optimized around Intel.

Intel’s effort to win over developers has come in the form of developer tools, code samples, technical support and meetups. Augustine said he was taken aback when a Saturday meetup in Santa Clara, California overflowed an auditorium. In organizing Silicon Valley meetups and sponsoring major conferences, as it did at AnDevCon in Boston over Memorial Day weekend, Intel is attempting to foster closer affiliation by sharing expertise.

“This group of people is extremely hungry to learn,” Augustine said. “They have this appetite that I don’t think people really understand.”

Selling tech to techies...

This desire for information also stems from an unprecedented level of competition that has led developers to seek new ways to simplify the process of producing mobile apps.

“It’s never been easier to self-publish software,” said Geoff Warren-Boulton, founder of Appt.ly, which produces apps that allow users to doctor photos with fake beards, vampire fangs and other facial features. “But the competition is insane.”

So while there are still examples such as Snapchat achieving a multibillion-dollar valuation based on its picture sharing app, more than 90 percent of apps are currently free, according to the market research firm Gartner. That number is only expected to increase in coming years. Of the apps that generate revenue, only 10 percent generate revenue of $1,250 per day, or roughly $450,000 per year.

Developers’ desire for an edge has given rise to a cottage industry of software development platforms and engines whose existence is also linked to the whims of the developers to whom they sell.

Warren-Boulton said software development platforms are directly courting developers to adopt their solutions through email, pitches at conferences and online ads. Appt.ly routinely talks to the major platform providers, as the good ones offer intuitive plug-and-play tools.

One visible impact of the drive of platform vendors to attract developers has been the decline of HTML5 as a development platform. Although it can be used to create apps across ecosystems, the number of developers who reported they were “very interested” in HTML5 declined to 59.9 percent in November of 2013 from a high of 72.7 percent in July 2012, according to the Q4 2013 Mobile Trends Report by Appcelerator and IDC that surveyed 6,698 mobile developers.

Vendors just don’t make supporting HTML5 a priority, preferring to push their own operating systems, according to the report.

Seeking an advantage in the gaming space, Appt.ly plans to build more apps on Unity, a cross-platform engine that allows developers to use a single batch of code to produce near-finished versions of apps compatible with numerous operating systems, gaming consoles and browsers.

Making life simpler for developers is a popular lure to get app makers to buy into different approaches to mobile computing. This tactic can have a snowball effect as developers who become early adopters do the hard work of resolving bugs and creating new workflows – tasks that developers in the next wave won’t have to worry about.

“They should love people like us,” Lam, the Stanford professor and developer, said of Intel.

Eighty-year old Boris Babayan was the chief designer of the Soviet Union's Elbrus supercomputer, a unique combination of real-time control and high-performance.

 By Intel Free Press

Babayan, 80, began his student career in 1951 doing some of the world's earliest work in computer science, including inventing one of the ways that computers execute calculations: carry-save arithmetic, which is still used today. He became one of the pioneers of supercomputing during the Soviet-era.

Based in Moscow, he joined Intel in 2004 when Intel acquired Elbrus MCST. He currently leads Intel's efforts in compilers, binary translation and security technologies.

The study of "machine mathematics"

Babayan was 7 years old when World War II broke out. Although the brutal Nazi occupation of the Soviet Union did not extend below the Caucasus Mountains into Azerbaijan where Babayan and his family lived, it was nonetheless, as Babayan recalled, "a very, very bad situation."

Not only was there not enough food, but "there wasn't good paper" for schoolwork, so Babayan and his fellow schoolchildren scribbled their facts and figures in between the lines of discarded newspapers.

In 1951 at age 18, Babayan moved to Moscow to attend the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, founded by two eventual Nobel Laureates, Pyotr Kapitsa and Lev Landau. There he became the first computer science student in all of Russia--a field so new it was originally called "machine mathematics."

"I am absolutely sure that I was the first in Russia, but I am curious whether it was a university discipline anywhere else in the world before 1951."

After his first year of studies, he became an intern at the Institute of Precise Mechanics and Computer Technology, led by Sergey A. Lebedev, whose 1958 BESM-2 computer was used to calculate satellite orbits and the trajectory of the first rocket to reach the surface of the moon.

Babayan currently serves as chair of the Institute and is a member of the Russian Academy of Science.

Lead designer of Soviet Elbrus supercomputers

While American processor designs were sometimes named after rivers, Soviet designs were often named after mountains. Mt. Elbrus lent its name to a series of Soviet (and later Russian) high-end mainframe computers that Babayan began working on while at the Soviet-era Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Technology.

According to the Computer History Museum, the Elbrus systems were intended for military-industrial purposes: "The combination of real-time control and high-performance computing is an unusual one; the resulting requirements were high performance, high reliability, and ease of programming."

The first two generations of Elbrus featured not only superscalar architecture but also had "very new technology in support of high-level languages," according to Babayan. "The technical name was 'capability system' and it was very successful," he added.

For the Elbrus 3, Babayan led the entire development of this 16-processor supercomputer, which used a newer VLIW (very long instruction word) architecture, with a compiler that ensured instructions being executed in parallel were not dependent on one another.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian computer scientists began to work with the United States. "Our technology success was very interesting for Western companies like HP and Sun Microsystems," says Babayan. Sun worked with Babayan to form the Moscow Center for SPARC Technology in 1992, which was acquired by Intel in 2004.

Recipient of two of the most prestigious Soviet prizes

In 1987, Babayan was awarded the Lenin Prize--the highest prize in the former Soviet Union--for his development of the Elbrus 2 supercomputer and its out-of-order superscalar architecture. Earlier, in 1974, he had been presented with the USSR State Prize at the Kremlin for his work on computer-aided design.

"Binary instructions used are sequential, but hardware is very parallel. So superscalar, at run-time, converts sequential notation to parallel notation to speed up execution." Babayan's Elbrus machine used this in 1978, and Intel began employing superscalar architecture circa 1995.

"In the Western world, Intel was first. After that, the golden age of Intel started, and they became ahead of everybody," Babayan remembered.

"But we built the first superscalar in 1978--many years before Intel. And for the second generation of this design I was awarded the Lenin Prize."

Champion mountain climbing...

In 1952, Babayan began mountain climbing. This was during the Iron Curtain period, which meant it was all but impossible to leave the USSR, so Babayan had to climb within the borders of the Soviet Union.

Babayan successfully climbed the very steep, 2-kilometer high walls of the Caucasus Mountains, and won a silver medal in the USSR National Championship of 1957 for ascending the peak of 26 Bakinskikh Komissarov (elevation 22,421 feet or 6,834 meters) in the Pamir--a range of mountains formed by the junction of the Himalayas with several other ranges.

Years later, when the first Intel Itanium 2 processor, code-named "McKinley" was being jointly developed by HP and Intel, Babayan conspired with some Russian climbers mounting an expedition up Alaska's Mt. McKinley (elevation 20,322 feet or 6,194 meters).

"We gave them an Elbrus flag. They put this flag over Mt. McKinley, and we proved Elbrus was better than McKinley," Babayan chuckled.

Too many projects...

After 60 years in the computer industry, Babayan says he has plenty of projects he wants to bring to fruition and has no plans to retire.

"I have many technical ideas. It is my opinion that without me it is very unlikely that these ideas will be developed well. So I am trying to continue. Maybe if I stop working it will be bad," he laughed. "Better to work!"

By Intel Free Press

Qinghua Li, (above) is one of Intel's most prolific inventors, he says some of his best ideas have come from informal "apple breaks" around the water fountain with a colleague.

Over the past 10 years, Li has contributed to more than 270 Intel patents and patent applications, including several related to essential Wi-Fi and 4G standards. He is one of Intel's top experts in multiple antenna communication techniques, which are often referred to as "MIMO" or "multiple input multiple output" communication processing, and he has contributed to almost every wireless standard, including UWB, WiGi, WiMAX, LTE and WiDi.

According to a 2013 study by the Brookings Institution, Intel ranked No. 3 in U.S. patents granted for the previous five years, behind only Microsoft and IBM and ahead of Apple, GE, Cisco and HP. Li is certainly not the only Intel inventor driving that, but he's been an important contributor especially on wireless front.

What childhood experience led Li to become an inventor?

It was a lathe--an extremely loud woodworking lathe--that his father used to make chairs and tables in the evenings at their home in Guangzhou, China. He recalls that the "low frequency rumbling" of the tool so irritated him that, at age 8, he vowed when he grew up he would work with quieter things.

And so he did. Li was recently honored as Intel's first-ever "Inventor of the Year." CEO Brian Krzanich was there to salute Li and other leading patent holders and filers at an event celebrating the people who may be the key to Intel's future. Some people are justifiably proud of a patent or perhaps even several they hold. Li has so many patents, or patents-in-process, he needs an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of all 270 and counting.

Li smiles and says the Intel patent lawyers might have a more current figure.

Li's very first patent, which he landed about two years after earning his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Texas A&M University and joining Intel in 2001, allowed multiple wireless devices to talk with a single wireless base station.

Since then, he has been busy -- with the bulk of his inventions related to wireless communications including UWB, Wi-Fi, WiGi, WiMAX, LTE and WiDi.

Li says many of his inventions and patents relate to "beam forming, interference mitigation, multi-access and ultrasound ranging." As Intel pushes forward on its mobile strategy, a broad patent portfolio is critical. Li spent the bulk of his Intel career working in the Intel Labs, but not surprisingly he now works in the Mobile and Communications Group.

So what's his secret? Li says he is lucky that his Intel managers have "given me the freedom" to work on solving problems that most intrigued him.

But there have also been his "apple breaks." Every day for about half a dozen years, Li and a fellow Intel inventor would meet at about 5 p.m. by the water fountain at his office. There, they'd each peel an apple and eat and talk.

For half an hour or so, they'd trade ideas, swap possible solutions to knotty problems, and look for the next problem to tackle. Li's "apple breaks" never appeared on Outlook, they were never formally scheduled. But today, he estimates that fully half of his 270 patents had their genesis in those end-of-day informal conversations with his friend.

What about his father? When he wasn't raising a racket at home making chairs with that lathe, he worked as a professor of mechanical engineering, as did his mother.

Are his parents at all disappointed their son strayed into the (much quieter) world of electrical engineering? Li laughs. Not at all. "They are very proud," he says.

Members of the Intel Open Bike Initiative at a recent event at the Portland Art Museum.

By Intel Free Press

A volunteer team consisting of members of the Oregon Transportation and Education Consortium, the Westside Transportation Alliance, the Bicycle Transportation Alliance, the Community Cycling Center, Intel employees and other volunteers is collectively spinning their cognitive wheels in hopes of developing the next generation of bike sharing.

The group is working to improve on previous bike sharing arrangements by reducing infrastructure costs, connecting riders via IoT devices, and removing traditional bicycle check-out “hub” requirements.

As it turns out, it’s also a little more complex and not yet ready for prime time, but that hasn’t dimmed the goal of advancing the bike sharing system functionality and ease of use.

Intel has an avid bicycling community at many of its campuses in Oregon, California and Arizona with an active online user group of over 450 members. Anything from bike part swaps to group rides, commuting recommendations, and rides supporting various non-profit organizations are discussed regularly within the groups.

Using funds from an Intel Sustainability in Action’s grant, the Open Bicycle Initiative (OBI) was formed in 2013 by a small group of Intel employees to evaluate ways to meld technology and bike sharing. The grant program started in 2009 and is designed to support employee initiatives such as this. Since its start, Intel has funded approximately 10 projects with an average of $13,000 awarded. Now, the initiative is expanding, with technology at the heart of a new generation of bike sharing.

A Primer on Bike Sharing

Community bike sharing has undergone a transformation over the years. With each iteration, efficiencies have grown.

• Generation 1 – Using a traditional “grab and go” model, Google has over 1,100 bicycles that employees simply take and peddle of down the road. This first-generation model is fairly successful but bikes are frequently stolen or returned in a damaged state.


• Generation 2 – The second generation of bike sharing models the airport luggage rack model where bicycles are “checked out” from a rack using some sort of payment or currency and then returned to a rack.


• Generation 3 – Third-generation sharing involves a check-out kiosk that can be expensive, with averages of $25,000 for ten bicycles.


• Generation 4 – Fourth-generation bike sharing represents a much more technologically advanced model. It is frequently kiosk-less, has either a smart lock or a smart dock, GPS integration and each bicycle can be tracked. This is the model that the Open Bicycle Initiative group targeted with their development work on OBI versions 1 and 2.

Engineering a New Bike Sharing Code

The first version of the Open Bicycle Initiative (OBI 1.0) was an SMS-based system consisting of 30 bicycles and 334 distinct employee riders who completed over 1100 rides, all located in Intel’s Hillsboro, Oregon, campuses not far from Portland, Oregon, which is known as one of the most bike-friendly cities in the United States. The company employs some 17,000 spread out at multiple campuses in Oregon so bike alternatives make sense. Under the initial program, riders registered for the program, then went to a rack that had a bike-sharing bicycle, and checked out the bicycle by texting the number of the bike to a central communication hub. Within 30 seconds, the rider received a text back with the combination to the bike lock.

During the initial pilot, 40 percent of riders said they used the bikes for exercise, 60 percent for lunch travel, 50 percent to visit another campus, 24 percent to visit off-campus appointments, and 29 percent to use for their “last mile” commute from various public transportation options, including bus and rail, to an Intel campus.

“Though designed to be a last mile option to get from the transit location to the office, the majority of the trips were intra-campus trips and trips off campus for lunch,” said Joel Morrissette, a staff technologist and one of the several co-founders of the Open Bike Initiative at Intel. “People are unpredictable and they kind of do what they do.”

Despite Washington County and the Intel campuses being bike-friendly, the only negative feedback from the OBI 1.0 riders turned out to be complaints about lack of bike infrastructure in the form of roads and bike trails around the Intel campus itself. Some employees also said Intel is still car-centric and could do more to support biking infrastructure.

The OBI group has also produced a detailed internal document outlining areas of improvement for bicycling around Intel’s Hillsboro campuses.

Bike Sharing Has Growing Worldwide Popularity but Not without Challenges

“The United States has seen nearly exponential growth of its systems over the last four years, and many cities in South America and Southeast Asia are poised to adopt bike sharing programs in the coming years,” says Susan Shaheen, co-director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center (TSRC) and adjunct professor in civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

An interactive Google Map created and managed by Russell Meddin depicting worldwide bike sharing programs representing 686 cities and 717,000 bicycles in 55 countries.

According to Russell Meddin who manages the popular Bike-sharing Blog, as of February 2014, there were bike sharing programs in 686 cities representing 717,000 bicycles in 55 countries with over 33,000 bike sharing stations. These numbers continue to grow and can be viewed on an interactive Google Map noting all of the worldwide implementations of third-generation bike sharing programs.

“The development of sustainable business models and creative funding mechanisms will be an important component of bike sharing’s next growth phase,” Shaheen says. “Corporate sponsorships will need to continue to help fund systems; non-profit organizations will need to provide operational services and advocacy, education, and outreach; and local governments will be needed for funding, outreach, and planning.”

Next Generation, Open Source, IoT Bike Sharing

OBI 2.0 is currently under development based on learning from the 1.0 initiative. The desire is to design and build a prototype “smart lock” device as the foundation for a generation 4 bike sharing system, and as an alternative to more costly generation 3 type of bike sharing systems.

Generation 3 bike sharing systems rely on expensive racks and kiosks as well as modified, customized bicycles.

The approximate cost per bike of the Intel-led, OBI 2.0 model (a generation 4 system) is targeted to be much lower than generation 3 programs according to Morrissette. The system is rack- and kiosk-less and uses commodity bicycles versus highly customized bicycles common to generation 3 systems. The flexibility of the system helps keep the costs low, and the technology deploys off-the-shelf electronics.

According to Morrissette, the OBI 2.0 system will employ an Internet of Things (IoT) stack:

• Box – contains accelerometer, GPS and temperature sensors, and communicates with the main server and back to the bike.


• Backend service – has an API, is a hosted service, and connects to any mobile device.


• Frontend service – is a mobile application that allows users to reserve or check out a bicycle.

The volunteers working on OBI 2.0 are building over 30 hardware devices that include a GPS, cables that go around the bike frame – complete with an alarm that triggers if the bike cable is cut – and communications circuits to connect with the software that manages the bike sharing. The box that goes on the back of the bicycle uses inexpensive parts including a car door actuator, and the circuit boards are made in China.

OBI 2.0 is not a fully functioning system yet as the team has encountered challenges with the communications devices within the circuitry and is working on software and hardware modifications to correct, but the goal is to pilot the OBI 2.0 system with 10 bicycles at Intel and 20 other equipped bicycles at two other locations in Oregon.

“Our hope would be that the maker community would pick up on the design and improve upon it,” said Brad Biddle, an Intel lawyer who helped found the OBI group.

“Ultimately we would like to change the world in our own small way,” said Biddle. “Our hope is that an open source generation 4 bike sharing system will mean that there is a cheaper, better way to do bike sharing, which means there will be more bike sharing in the world and ultimately that will mean environmental and social benefits, while giving people better transportation options.”

The company believes that it can take a long time to understand its corporate culture, and senior appointments don't have time to allow an outsider to get up to speed. This was the reasoning behind the appointment of insider Krzanich to the top job last year despite the board also considering outsiders for the first time.

However, with the appointment of Fund, who ran global marketing at the office supplies firm, Krzanich clearly believes that the Intel culture needs new blood.  

Fund's responsibilities will be: Intel's global marketing strategy, brand management, product positioning, market research, advertising, partner marketing, retail channel marketing, digital marketing, social media, and global communications.

Fund will have to be a quick learner in dealing with the "Intel Way." Or, he'll shake things up further by bringing in his own team.

Intel is trying to expand into the custom chip manufacturing sector and it is battling a decline in PC sales, plus it is far behind competitors Qualcomm and Broadcom in mobile sectors. Krzanich must figure out a way to improve sales and profits by winning in new markets -- markets that have lower profitability than in its mainstream microprocessor business.

Intel has the best semiconductor manufacturing technologies, which enable it to produce cutting edge chips at a lower cost than rivals. However, that edge provides only a small amount of breathing space for Krzanich to set Intel onto a better course. 

Hardware projects such as Pebble have been getting a boost from Kickstarter…

By Intel Free Press

Eric Migicovsky is watching Google’s moves into wearables closely and hoping that his company’s open platform approach will be a key differentiator amid the growing excitement around wearable computing. That was one of many observations from the Pebble CEO at an event sponsored by ReadWrite at Say Media headquarters in San Francisco.

When Migicovksy first started working on his initial “InPulse” smartwatch in 2008 as a student at the University of Waterloo, not many people were talking about smartwatches or wearables. Today, analysts predict the market could grow into a $30 billion industry by 2018 (IHS), with Apple, Google, Intel and many others joining the fray.

Migicovsky, 27, named one of the 35 Innovators under 35 by Technology Review in 2013, initially marketed the “InPulse” device as “the world’s first smartwatch for Blackberries.” They sold about 1,500 devices, but it wasn’t enough to attract bigger investments. They changed the company name from Allerta to Pebble Technology and went looking for investors on Kickstarter, hoping to raise $100,000 to develop a new smartwatch.

The campaign took off. It raised $1 million in just a little over 24 hours and $10.2 million over thirty days. Two years later, Pebble has 70 employees, an estimated $60 million in revenue and suddenly a lot of attention and competition. With a focus on customization, a community of nearly 15,000 developers, an app store and partners like Mercedes, GoPro and Yelp, Pebble is an early mover in the wearable movement that is taking Silicon Valley by storm.

Migicovsky spoke to ReadWrite’s editor-in-chief Owen Thomas about the prospects for his company in what is increasingly a hot market. He also talked about open platforms and how to survive against competition from Apple and Google, and how even the BlackBerry played a role in informing his current product.

Fashion vs. Function

Early criticism of smartwatches has centered on their shortcomings as a stylish accessory. A Wall Street Journal review said it “still isn’t the Cartier of smartwatches” and included an image of an on-screen text from writer Joanna Stern where she wished “they made a Pebble Steel for ladies.” While wearables are still in their infancy, companies like Intel are already looking to fuse fashion with function in wearable computing.

When asked about the influence of fashion on wearables, Migicovsky acknowledged that it was a legitimate connection. “Fashion is very important,” he said, “the focus is valid.”

Thomas, who has expressed reservations as to the connection acknowledged after the event that he agreed with Migicovsky. “Fashion and function are going to be increasingly indistinguishable.”

Growing into More

Migicovsky does not dismiss the significance of the learning experience with InPulse, and he believes the early mover advantage will help sustain a key position in the market. “At that time no one was making watches,” he said. “The optimistic way of looking at it is we had no one else to dethrone.”

“We wanted to create a product that meshes into your life instead of making you conform…Pebble started as a product that offered notifications and alerts on apps, and grew into something so much more,” Migicovksy told the audience of developers and technologists. “We started the company for ourselves.”

Eventually, Migicovsky sees Pebble as a platform for couples to share information, where it “becomes a really cool intimate connection with your partner. Technology shouldn’t change your personal habits.”

Competition

With competition and speculation looming from big companies like Google, Apple, Samsung, and Intel, Migicovksy points to his team’s heritage and early work with developers as a differentiation point. “Our goal is to spread the Pebble OS far and wide,” he said. “People and products are customizing Pebble.”

“Google’s Android Wear platform is the more credible competitor,” he said. “This is Google’s first attempt at a smartwatch and we’re playing close attention.” He said Pebble’s prospects remain strong as they are “focused on being more open; they’re proceeding with a more closed platform.”

The young CEO from Vancouver, Canada who wore shorts and flip-flops at the San Francisco talk, has generated a lot of interest and doesn’t seem to be flinching at the prospect of Apple and Google entering the space. With a lot of buzz and a thriving developer community, Migicovsky thinks the open platform and focus on customizable technology will sustain the product. Rather than rely on glossy marketing and advertising campaigns, he said Pebble’s focus is on simplifying the smartwatch experience and delivering features people want.

- - -

Please see: CultureWatch: The Fading Fashion Of Google Glass - Too Gauche For Social -SVW

Google claims that the low-cost notebooks can save schools as much as $5,200 per device over three years.

By Intel Free Press

Apple and Microsoft have long dominated the education market as the preferred computing platforms for grades K-12 in the US, but Google — and Samsung — are emerging as significant challengers with a new crop of Chromebooks for schools. Citing low cost, quick boot times, easy maintenance, and increasing use of web-based applications, schools throughout the country are increasingly looking to Chromebooks for their computing needs, according to analysts and school district IT managers.

According to Futuresource Consulting, one in four devices sold into K-12 schools in the US are Chromebooks, and the platform is emerging as a strong contender to Apple’s well-established market position. And there are signs the trend may not be confined only to the US

ABI Research, who has been tracking Chromebook shipments closely, said the government of Malaysia deployed over 100,000 Chromebook systems to schools last year, and as administrators overseeing that program learn from that initial implementation, ABI believes there is significant upside potential to grow the total area market (TAM).

All told, ABI says that Chromebook shipments hit 2.1 million units in 2013 and is expected to reach 11 million worldwide by 2019. According to a recent study sponsored by Amplify, a maker of an Android-based education tablet, Apple, and the iPad specifically, is still the most common type of mobile technology adopted by school districts. The iPad is followed closely by Chromebooks and other ‘mixed’ technology supplied by students, including the iPod Touch.

Chromebooks are low-cost laptops starting at around $279 that are built using Google’s Chrome OS and powered by chips from Intel, Samsung, and others. They launched initially in 2011 but picked up steam over the last year with several sleek new designs coming to market. Multiple PC makers have Chromebooks in the market today including Samsung, HP, Acer, Dell, Lenovo, and Asus.

According to Google, the systems can save schools on average $5,200 per device over three years. The company has also said more than 5,000 schools have deployed them, representing more than 20 percent of school districts in the US

So far, Samsung appears to be emerging as the clear leader in terms of systems deployed in US schools. But there are also systems coming into schools from Acer, Lenovo, and other computer makers.

Intel for its part has been actively supporting and promoting the use of Chromebooks for schools with a series of webinars, tips, videos and more on its K-12 blueprint website for teachers and educators. Acer and Intel recently offered K-12 schools the opportunity to pilot the Chrome OS with a free 30-day trial of its C720 Chromebook

According to ABI, a few examples of the largest deployments at US schools in 2013 include:

- 18,000 Samsung Series 3 Chromebooks at Cherry Creek Schools in Colorado estimated at just over $5 million.
- 5,100 Samsung Chromebook 550′s at Passaic Public Schools in New Jersey for about $1.5 million (plus an additional 8,200 units already this year).
- 4,500 Samsung Series 5 at Richland School District Two in Columbia, S.C., for about $1.4 million (the district also — deployed 14k Chromebooks in 2012).

Examples of initial deployments, pilot programs and even a second wave of purchasing this year are everywhere. Lombard Middle School in Galesburg, Ill., is rolling out 2500 Acer Chromebooks to cover its 6th-12th graders as part of the school district’s 1:1 Computer Program.

On a smaller scale, the Board of Education for the Kearney, Mo., R-1 School District recently approved the purchase of 300 Chromebooks at a cost of $110,120 for distribution within the district. In Hillsboro, Ore., the Hillsboro School District recently purchased 160 Chromebooks as part of a pilot program to investigate possible larger roll-out over time.

Shift Has Started

Jeff Orr, senior practice director at ABI Research, says there is definitely a shift happening and a lot of it is based on the web model.

“A parallel [to the Enterprise market] exists in the K-12 education market on the basis of increased choice of platforms and vendors, except for one distinct criterion: content,” Orr says. “For K-12, the stars and moon have aligned such that a lot of content applications and custom content development platforms for educators have moved to using the web as the delivery vehicle. This makes for an ideal setting for Chromebooks to deliver on affordability, manageability and usability without compromising the access to curriculum and tools needed by educators.”

Part of the allure of Chromebooks in addition to their low cost is a free suite of Google communication and collaboration tools including email, calendar, and documents that allow students and teachers to share and collaborate from anywhere even outside the classroom.

Bedford Public Schools in Michigan is a classic example. They recently started shifting away from Microsoft software and Windows-based hardware to Google Apps and Chromebooks. It’s no wonder Microsoft has publicly challenged Chromebooks with a series of advertisements as part of their ‘Scroogled’ campaign, seeking to paint Google as tracking users wherever they go in order to sell more advertising.

Jennifer Earl, director of instructional technology and who oversees the technology used by approximately 4800 students in the Bedford District, says the shift to Google Apps was a key part of their decision. They evaluated Chromebooks along with traditional laptops, netbooks, tablets and the Apple iPad.

“We just officially launched our Google Apps for Education domain at the beginning of the school year so this has been a year of learning for everyone, staff and students alike,” says Earl, adding that Google Docs is now the established platform for meetings, minutes, agendas and more.

380 Chromebooks were distributed to Bedford 6th graders in January and the plans are to deploy 800 additional Chromebooks in order to have a 1-to-1 ratio of device-to-student. According to Earl, all students in grades 3, 4 and 8 will have Chromebooks in 2015-16 and the high school will transition to Chromebooks in 2016-18. Chromebooks are actually assigned to individual students for use at school and home, she said.

Questions Remain

Many questions still remain about the viability of Chromebooks over the longer term, according to Orr. “Some privacy organizations have expressed concern that the inherently connected nature of Chromebooks makes them vulnerable to data integrity concerns and sharing of student information with Google and potentially other private entities without the consent of the students’ families, teachers and government,” he said.

And there is the question of whether Chromebooks are durable enough to withstand challenges of student use and classroom environments.

Shortly after Chromebooks were distributed within the Bedford schools, they started seeing large numbers of returns for the same type of repair — a missing OS. The district discovered a technical issue with some hard drives that weren’t properly attached, and slight jarring caused a disconnection. They turned it into a learning exercise with students, who opened the devices and deployed a fix to all of the Chromebooks within a few days.

What companies stand to win from Chromebooks? ABI’s Orr says to date, the contributions of Samsung, Intel and of course, Google, are the most notable, but he expects multiple solutions will still be deployed in schools.

“The companies least likely to feel the joy of Chromebooks would consist of Microsoft and Apple,” Orr said. “As with any existing market segment, K-12 education has grown using solutions from both vendors and will continue to. The difference is that the pool of choices available is continuing to expand and Chromebooks deserve a look alongside Windows OS, Mac OS and Linux-based computing solutions.”

The ‘Human Factor’ is often overlooked in wearable computing…searching for feelings and emotions amid the technology.

By Intel Free Press

Designers and engineers often create code or cool new hardware without thinking as much about the human side of the technology. At a recent Intel workshop that might be seen as counter-intuitive, engineers were being trained to think about real-world applications first, the technology itself second.

“Don’t build with technology just for the heck of building a piece of tech. Build for a purpose, for the user,” said Carlos Montesinos, a research scientist at Intel on collaborative design who co-sponsored the workshop. “Design with the user in mind and then technology will follow.”

For half a day, Intel engineers with no experience designing with Intel’s new Galileo development boards got a crash course on how the development board works and how it could be programmed. They then spent time designing simple wearable projects that solved real-world issues.

The second part of the day was hands-on tinkering work making a rudimentary version of the product they had conceptualized, using various sensors and inputs, actuators and outputs.

Wearables of All Types

Prior to working with the circuit boards or even brainstorming on the design, the workshop participants learned about the human factor involved in designing and understanding wearable devices.

“When we look for a solution, we look for the feelings and the emotions that a solution evokes in a person — what motivates people to wear technology,” said Ana Rosario, user experience researcher at Intel. “Once we understand the emotional feeling behind the things we wear, then we can design wearable experiences that people are going to be compelled to wear.”

From technology woven into fabric to prevent malaria to motion-detecting and haptic feedback-enabled Pilates active wear, wearables can take all shapes and forms. And this was the point of the workshop – forcing the design beyond the technology and into the human factor and what the user truly wants.

According to Rosario, sensors embedded within fabrics are design to “understand” and naturally interact with the body, and often the resulting wearable extends functions of your body, even beyond what you have. For example, this scarf-turned-airbag-helmet designed by Hövding provides additional protection beyond the skull.

“You cannot control user experience, but you can design for it,” said Rosario on the framework for the workshop.

The event was focused primarily on the conceptualization and design work of rudimentary wearable devices, and the Galileo board provided a quick and easy way to prototype designs.

Engineering Real-World Solutions

Workshop participants, ranging from server architects to software and hardware engineers, put away their engineering degrees and collaborated in groups of three, eventually producing the name and function of their wearable product as well as drawing an initial design based on their own wants and needs.

These concepts were presented at the end of the workshop and voted on by workshop peers. Only the product concepts were part of the voting, the Galileo board development results were not.

Among the designs were:

-“Well-belt” – a wearable for the elderly with built-in accelerometer sensors and communication outputs that detects when a fall has occurred and phones or texts a care provider.

- “Baby Galileo” – tackled the problem of the shopping parent needing to amuse their young child while also helping the child’s motor development. Using accelerometers and motion sensors, wristbands worn by young children issue spoken commands (e.g., “lift your left arm”) in a motion-centric form of interactive play.

- “Hush” – designed to measure how loud people are talking and give them an indication of volume. According to the team, this wearable could be particularly useful for noisy co-workers or yelling parents.

The winning concept was the “Fevometer,” which would use thermal sensors built into a baby’s outfit and cap to allow parents to be notified if their baby had a fever. As the makers of this design were parents, they pulled from real-world experiences to use technology to augment their lives.

This was similar to the Mimo Baby wearable prototype from Rest Devices that Intel showcased at CES earlier this year. Rest Devices bills itself as a company that “makes simple and human-centered devices that keep people healthy and relaxed.”

When event co-sponsor and application engineer at Intel, Afifa Tawil, was asked what wearable she would create, she immediately thought of nighttime Ultimate Frisbee.

“We currently use glow-in-the-dark Frisbees and colored glow sticks. Wouldn’t it be cool if the Frisbee changed colors so we knew which team has it,” says Tawil. “If the glow sticks could become ‘wearables’ that would be kind of cool.”

By Intel Free Press 

Though it has been more than a decade and a half since she left the “publish or perish” world of the university, Kelin Kuhn is still writing papers and award-winning ones at that.

Kuhn, who is an Intel Fellow for the company’s Technology and Manufacturing Group and director of advanced device technology, was recently presented with the IEEE’s Paul Rappaport Award. The award recognizes the best paper annually in a publication of the IEEE Electron Devices Society.

Kuhn says, her paper “Considerations for Ultimate CMOS Scaling” is about “all the intricate things we have to worry about when we build super advanced short channel devices.”

She’s also an IEEE Fellow, has received a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award for her work on strained layer III-V materials and has published numerous papers in technology journals. 

Some facts about Kuhn: 

Leaving tenure behind…

In 1997, after a decade at the University of Washington, Kuhn left her tenured position as an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering to join Intel.

Why leave a coveted job with the freedom to work on anything she wanted? Kuhn uses an analogy to explain the move.

“At a point in your life you find you have done all the things you wanted to do,” Kuhn explained. “It’s not a checklist really but a sense of achievement in that phase of your life, and you say, ‘I’ve done that; I’ve read that chapter. I need to go to a new chapter.’”

Pawn shops help teach students…

Kuhn’s favorite class she taught while at University of Washington was consumer electronics.

It used to be, Kuhn explained, that a kid could tear apart a consumer electronic device — a radio, for example — and the function of every piece could be understood. That experience largely dropped out of the culture by the time she started her faculty position in 1987 due to the widespread use of integrated circuits, which made the underlying technology all but invisible.

And yet to Kuhn, a fundamental part of being an engineer is the understanding that “everything is made of smaller things, and those things are made of smaller things yet.”

So the class was created to illustrate this, involving companies and consumer products of that era such as VCRs, DVD players and tape recorders — often obtained from local pawn shops. “We tore stuff apart for the first five weeks of the class, and as a project the students put something else together by repurposing it. Repurposing electronics is a great way to do development work.”

She added that engineers need to understand that technology is not mysterious. “People don’t think about how a cell phone works. They don’t think about what is behind the wall plug.”

She keeps sharp with a violin…

After hearing an Oregon neurologist lecture on the power of learning a musical instrument to keep the brain sharp, Kuhn was intrigued. “The brain constantly makes brain cells and constantly reconfigures. But if you don’t give it something new to do, it won’t do that. You have to always be learning,” Kuhn said.

The violin — or the fiddle, as she tends to refer to it — made sense, she jokes, since it was portable and wouldn’t damage her teeth. And it allowed her to learn to play the Irish jigs and reels she loves.

Kuhn related that beginning the violin as an adult has its challenges, “not the least of which is watching the 5-year-olds scampering around with their tiny violins, all playing better than I do.”

A flight for rocks…

Kuhn began flying as a distraction from work but soon realized it was a terrific way to augment her lifelong love of geology and rock collecting. “I found one of the things I really loved about flying was it was a way of seeing geology from the air,” she said. She flies a high-wing aircraft (a Cessna 152 II Sparrowhawk) because it is easier to see the ground.

On her most recent sabbatical from Intel, Kuhn began writing a book on the geology of the Pacific Northwest, which she sees as one of the most geologically diverse areas in the world, describing, “majestic stratovolcanoes, massive shield volcanoes, huge plateau basalts and fabulous fossils buried in ash hills.”

By Intel Free Press

Intel engineers have created a custom-built computer system for Stephen Hawking, the British theoretical astrophysicist, for his travels. He is completely dependent on his chair for communications, now, if there is a problem he can be quickly transferred to a backup chair. 

Intel engineer Travis Bonifield recently returned from Cambridge, UK, after delivering a new computer system to Hawking. He's been working with Hawking for more than a decade. 

While Hawking has always traveled with a lengthy list of backup hardware, the process of getting everything ready to go can be burdensome.

The computer itself is only one piece of the total system that includes a hardware voice synthesizer, a peripheral box filled with a range of devices including a USB hub, audio amp and hardware voice interface, the power modules and speaker.

Until recently, when Hawking went on a trip, his assistants had to remove the various pieces of the system from his main wheelchair, which he only uses in the UK, and mount them onto a folding travel wheelchair.

Over the 13 years he's been working on this project, Bonifield has always set up a single system for Hawking and then left behind a "bag of parts" in case something were to break or need replacing, including a backup laptop. On this trip, Bonifield and Rob Weatherly, an Intel technical marketing engineer based in Swindon, UK, delivered two complete systems, setting up one on each of Hawking's wheelchairs.

The latest custom system, a 2 in 1 based on a Lenovo ThinkPad x230t powered by an Intel Core i7 processor, combines a notebook with a 12″ tablet that has a daylight readable display.

The dual systems solve two problems, according to Bonifield. In past years, Intel engineers would interrupt whatever Hawking was doing to install a new system on his chair and he would wait patiently while it was mounted and configured. If something went wrong, the engineers had to tear it all off again, reinstall the old computer and go back to the drawing board.

This time they simply installed everything on the travel chair first. After it was ready and tested, they moved Hawking to the travel chair while installing everything on his regular chair. The process was less intrusive than in the past and gave the engineers time to work.

Chair to chair...

The second, and more significant benefit, is that with a full system installed on each chair, Hawking's assistants no longer need to dismantle and install the system on a different chair every time he travels.

Now they can simply unplug the laptop (without even shutting it down) and plug it into the other chair. Hawking can now be transitioned between chairs in just a few moments, and if something does break, he can be moved to the other chair while it is repaired.

The design of the system Hawking uses is pretty simple, according to Bonifield. There are a few USB devices attached to the computer along with four converter modules that run from the wheelchair battery and provide power to the various system components. Dave Rittenhouse, a mechanical engineer based at the Intel Folsom campus, designed the computer chassis and coordinated its manufacture.  

Rittenhouse only had to redesign the chassis for the hardware voice synthesizer card and added a few standard metal boxes for the peripheral devices.

Bonifield planned, assembled and tested the electrical connections in the system, which include the power delivery, synthesizer board, the audio amplifier and the computer itself. Peripherals include a USB hub that attaches to the synthesizer board via a USB serial dongle, an audio amplifier and speaker, and a USB hardware device that interfaces with an IR sensor on Hawking's eyeglasses, which he uses to control the computer by moving his cheek muscle.

Bonifield is often asked what it's like to work with Hawking and notes that the renowned physicist is simply "Stephen." Working with Hawking can be lively as there are at least two of his cheerful nursing or administrative staff nearby, while his voice synthesizer provides a constant level of white noise. Hawking is out of necessity, a person of few words and the words are direct and purposeful, but kind.

Her departure has nothing to do with the many other executive changes initiated by the new Intel CEO Brian Krzanich.

Intel Marketing Chief Deborah Conrad To Leave In April - Digits - WSJ

She is associated with some well-known advertising campaigns at the company, including “Sponsors of Tomorrow,” which celebrated the geeky culture of Intel’s engineers, and “Look Inside,” a return to the company’s strategy of trying to convince consumers to pay attention to the components inside their devices.

CMO of a large company is a very tough job because of the immense fragmentation in the media industry world wide. 

Here is a short video I shot of Sean Maloney, Intel’s former CMO and Chairman of Intel China, talking about the “fog” he faces in determining where to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing budgets.