IDF: Five tech predictions

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This week, we spent a few days in sunny San Francisco listening to all Intel had to say about its plans for the future at its Intel Developer Forum.

Many predictions were made, and while not all will prove true, Intel prides itself on being predictable.

Here’s a selection of crystal ball gazing from the chip giant - click here for all the news from IDF.

Web on TV

Intel has been pushing intelligent TV for a while now, so it came as no surprise that it spent the last day of IDF talking up its latest chip, the CE4100 (formerly known as Sodaville) designed for smartening up set-top boxes, Blu-ray players, TVs and more.

However, it was a bit of a mixed message. Intel kicked off one keynote with a demo of a TV system with social networking, video conferencing and other web 2.0 tools, all based on Adobe Flash.

Eric Kim, general manager of the company's digital home arm, told attendees: “Increasingly people want rich, immersive and social experiences on their television.”

The trick is that people don’t just want another PC. “People do not want to lose that relaxed kick back experience of television, even if you’re a geek,” he added. “Don’t make my TV act like a PC. Putting PC internet directly on a TV doesn’t work.”

So what will TV of the future look like? It’s hard to say how much people want to add the ability to share shows with friends, but advertisers would love to bring the data mining of social networking to the television space. Either way, we should get nicer, more interactive ways of finding what we want to watch from the billion channels on offer – as well as the internet.

As president of CBS Marketing George Schweitzer put it, people being able to watch what they want, when they want it may sound good in theory, but “in reality, people are overwhelmed.”

Smart grids will become smarter homes

Smart grids have long been a target for IT companies. The electrical grid around the world is the “world’s largest synchronised machine,” said Andrew Chein, vice president of research at Intel Labs.

But that machine is relatively dumb and inflexible. “When we talk about smart grids, we’re rally talking about a vision for grid infrastructure that really increases that flexiblity,” he explained. “That includes the capability to control and dispatch, route and direct supply, and of course, as we look forward, you fundamentally need to have the capability to add large scale cost effective storage to the grid.”

“It won’t surprise you to hear me say that of course IT is at the centre of that,” he noted.

However, the most effective starting place for smart grids may not be on such a massive scale. Chein said local grids could be the future.

These could be on a city-wide level, or even just a collection of homes. The idea behind it is that local knowledge and management can be more effective than a top-down approach, especially if local power generation is incorporated into the system.

“In many places where there aren’t stable electric grids today, this could actually be the route to bring reliable, robust electrical power to those kinds of areas,” he suggested.

At IDF, Chein demonstrated a simple system to monitor power use in a house. Using a few simple voltage transducers – small, cheap boxes which measure power – that communicate a digital signal, a household could accurately watch energy consumption, see which devices are using the most power, and even flick on lights from their own computer.

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