AFTER The Internet

Last two weeks I had a chance to attend two of the best conferences ever. Highly visionary Telecosm 2008 and highly business oriented Intel Capital CEO Summit 2008. Both giving fantastic insight on trends and technologies driving our future. And both concentrated on the Internet. Paul Otellini presented a fantastic keynote, rejecting my “default” view on big companies. Intel is different. The difference comes from the top, from the visionary CEO who certainly is a right – brainer, implementing the six new senses of the Conceptual Era: design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning (more on this in the upcoming posts). Intel is also doing a phenomenal job with its VC arm, the Intel Capital. They ferociously dig up for talent and ideas worldwide. And the payback they have is hard to overestimate.

Intel might have been late on some trends (like vector processing mastered by GPU guys or performance per watt mastered by ARM) or even missed some of them (like 3G telephony and probably even 4G in form of LTE that will again crown Qualcomm driving WiMAX to just a few niches). But their leadership and focus aligned with synthetic approach will help them close the gap. Larrabee, the next multi – core chip from Intel will accommodate both standard IA (x86) and vector processing, practically zeroing the advantage the GPU guys enjoy now. Of course the game here will move to software. NVIDIA’s CUDA versus Intel’s Ct (high – performance multithreaded C++ - based language). Again the question is which of the two will be supported by Microsoft and Java vendors (we may expect another approach to vector processing by Sun Microsystems...). Paul even went to the point they (Intel) will be sooner on the market with the hardware, than the software (algorithm parallelization) issue will be solved. Hard to disagree... With multicore / multithreaded designs and vector processing capabilities the new software taking advantage of the new architecture is radically different compared to what we write today. The issue is even more serious when we look at graduate software engineers – many (even most) of them have never written multithreaded code. This is also the reason why companies like Jules Urbach’s will be so valuable in the future, as they are the champions of significantly shifted programming skills...

But as I was lintening to the Paul Otellini's keynote, I realized the vision of the CEO goes as far as the Internet goes... So a question kept on bubbling up to the top of my head... "What is NEXT?... What is the next big thing AFTER the Internet?". When Paul finished and there was silence at the Q&A mikes, encouraged by his comments "the questions may be off limits", I asked...

I was obviously asking myself the same question a week earlier listening to the Telecosm presenters. And it seems there is a small company that may have the answer. Seldon Technologies specializes in nanotechnologies, with focus on millimeter - long ones (that means extremely long ones). What Chris Cooper (one of the Seldon founders) has discovered is the nanotubes are excellent as an extreme - high pressure hydrogen storage tanks, and this can lead to Nano Confinement Fusion. Probably the current holy grail we look for... and a revolution bigger than the Internet coming towards us.

What does it mean in practice? We will be able to store extreme amounts of energy in very small volumes. That means most of the devices you buy will be charged for it's lifetime. A notebook computer charged for 10 years. A light bulb with its internal energy source, enough to keep it lit for 5 years. Or a car fueled to drive 1 million miles without visiting a gas station. What does that mean in practice? No gas stations... no refineries... no power plants... no electric grid... no power transmission lines... We are still far from reaching that point... But we will get there... This way or the other we will find a way to run fully controlled nuclear fusion reaction in a micro (or nano) scale... This is not a fundamental problem... this is just engineering problem... Maybe Intel can bring us faster to the solution? Seldon is looking for an investment round... seems like a good match to the Intel Capital... :)