It's the data, chump! is a mantra being heard at more computer conferences these days. That, at least, seemed to be the consensus among the 400 participants at the Mobile Insights 99 event held in Palm Springs, Calif., recently. In its fifth year, this two-day confab is a venue for executives from notebook and handheld computer companies to hobnob in a comfortable ambiance and pick one another's brains about the mobile-computing landscape while scoping out the latest gear for the corporate road warrior. Unlike the previous four years, however, when the "wow" factor accompanied every discussion of high-technology or industry issues, this year's show-goers were much more sober about what really matters today.
Portable devices are only as effective as the task they are designed for: to provide access to remote info. All the bells and whistles in notebooks are only as good as their ability to let users dip into corporate data or retrieve consumer-interest information efficiently.
Concurrently with MI99, at the Palm Springs convention center, some 1,800 software and hardware developers for Intel's X86 architecture were gathering for three days of intensive workshops and design labs at the Intel Developer Forum. The mantra there was simple: execute, execute, execute. At the end of each of the many parallel sessions, attendees were given their marching orders via the last slide in each presentation, simply titled "Action Items." Developers were tasked with executing specific items that fell in the realm of their expertise. And, for the first time since these forums started, besides the expected PC, server and high-performance sessions was one on "Embedded Technologies and Platforms."
Mind you, embedded was a somewhat neglected word until recently in the corridors of the PC-microprocessor behemoth. But this year's forum tackled, among other things, application platforms in communications systems. And guess what the action items were? Increase and enhance the capability of legacy systems using application cards and network appliances; implement Intel architecture-based solutions in same; and port the best of PC technologies onto your communications systems.
I think Intel has finally got it: It's not the device, it's the network; and it's not data retention, it's access to data. Access from all kinds of information appliances, not just PCs and notebooks, but gizmos spanning smart display phones to portable intelligent Web browsers. In this brave new world, "Intel Inside" becomes "Intel Embedded."
I expect that next year's Mobile Insights 2000 will zero in even more on these embedded portable devices, with discussions centered on various wired and wireless communications options. And that will largely be attributable to what developers have taken away from the embedded sessions at this year's Intel do.
-Nicolas Mokhoff is editor of EE Times Online.
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