大象传媒

300 seconds and counting...

• Darren Waters
• 8 Jan 08, 22:56 GMT

What do you do when you only have 300 seconds in which to interview someone?

That was my dilemma when I was offered an interview with Paul Otellini, chief executive of Intel, the world's most powerful chip company.

What do I ask? Where do I start? How many questions can we fit it?

The interview followed immediately after his keynote speech at CES, in which he laid out his vision for a more personal internet. You can read my report of his speech .

So a question about his speech was a given. In the week before the interview I considered many different questions but in the end my other questions were decided for me.

At the end of last week they were quitting the One Laptop Per Child scheme.

This was followed by a strongly-worded statement from OLPC, accusing Intel of failing to deliver on promises.

Needless to say, it was obvious I would have to ask Otellini about this.

But where to place the question; that was my dilemma. If I opened the interview with a question about OLPC and the row, and the question irritated Otellini, the interview could be over in much less than 300 seconds.

So in the end I decided to ask about OLPC second. Otellini politely answered, saying the row had not overshadowed his keynote.

But when I asked him if OLPC's assertion that Intel had failed to deliver on promises his answer was brief - in the extreme.

"Hogwash."

The interview never recovered from that point, although Otellini answered all my remaining questions politely.

Rory Cellan-Jones has today interviewed Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the OLPC scheme, to get his side of the story.

We'll be writing up Negroponte's answers, together with Otellini's comments, very soon.

• Permalink
• Comments

Day one over

• Darren Waters
• 8 Jan 08, 06:31 GMT

The first day of CES has passed and we've seen the usual range of the inspiring and the insipid.

We've seen Blu-ray in celebratory mood as it edges to victory in the next-gen DVD format war. We've seen Intel's boss unveil his vision of the future internet.

Actually, that was one of the more impressive demos I've seen in a while.

To show off how mobile devices might evolve with a more mature internet Otellini showed a device that could read signs and words in foreign languages and translate them in real time, pulling contextual information from the internet where needed.

The device was able to translate a Chinese reataurant's menu in Mandarin, in real time, and then display video clips of reviews and information about the place from the internet.

It was also used to translate spoken English to spoken Chinese in real time.

Sadly, it was only a vision - and not a reality. While the software to perform the tasks exists, it requires a lot of processing power. Behind the scenes a desktop PC with Intel's Core 2 Duo processor was doing the hard work - and not the mobile device.

Still, it gave a sense of what the future holds when the net is everywhere, when devices are location-aware and the processors inside them have enough "grunt".

OLED TVs are the latest development in TVs to hit the market, offering incredible rich colours and contrast on screens that are only millimetres thick.
But the future holds even more tantalising promise - how about watching Star Wars at home in 3D?

Mitsubishi demonstrated its laser TV system this evening - including 3D functionality. My colleague Jonathan Fildes was at the demo and returned impressed. He'll be writing about the technology soon.

And so on to day two.....

• Permalink
• Comments