Brian Krzanich, who was recently named chief executive, said that although Intel has been slow to respond to the rapid rise of tablets and smartphones, the company is well-positioned to participate going forward.

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Taking to CNBC’s airwaves in another one of his candid phoned-in afternoon rants (the last was an epic 28-minute on-air slugfest with hedge fund investor Bill Ackman in January) with host Scott Wapner during the closing half hour or so of the network’s “Fast Money Halftime Report” show, Icahn revealed that on Monday he will nominate a slate of 12 new directors and, if successful, he’ll see to it that Michael Dell doesn’t remain CEO. “He will not be running the company,” Icahn said.

“It’s not that I have anything against [Michael] Dell. I’m sure he’s a very nice guy,” Icahn said. “But it’s a new world out there.”

Icahn has had a busy day on the Dell front. First he reported in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that his stake in Dell amounts to 4.52 percent. He also joined Southeastern Asset Management, Dell’s largest outside shareholder, in making a joint bid for the company. (The Wall Street Journal’s Moneybeat has the full text of the joint Icahn-Southeastern letter to Dell’s board here.)

The special committee of Dell’s board has in the last several minutes issued a statement saying it is “carefully reviewing” the Icahn-Southeastern offer.

“Mr. Icahn and Southeastern have outlined a potential leveraged recapitalization transaction that they want the Dell Board either to recommend at this time or to consider if the existing going-private transaction is rejected by Dell shareholders. They have also proposed replacing the Board with a slate of new directors who they say would approve such a transaction. Consistent with the Special Committee’s goal of achieving the best possible outcome for all shareholders, we and our advisors are carefully reviewing the potential transaction to assess the potential risks and rewards to the public shareholders.”

In his televised jeremiad, Icahn blasted Dell’s board and said that Dell shareholders will “literally get screwed” by the $24.4 billion Michael Dell/Silver Lake offer to take the company private in a leveraged buyout. His offer, he said, would leave existing shareholders with a publicly traded stub that would allow them to make more money than the $13.65 per share Dell and Silver Lake have offered.

Below, two video highlights. The second one focuses more on Wapner’s fascination with Icahn’s opinion of the legendary Wall Street short-seller Jim Chanos, who has previously publicly stated that he has been shorting Dell shares. “I’ve made a lot of money going against Chanos,” Icahn said.

Of course it goes without saying that all the attention on Dell caused the shares to trade upward during the half hour or so that Icahn was on CNBC. Ahead of 1 pm ET, Dell shares were trading as high as $13.51, or up more than 1 percent. After Icahn hung up (and apparently called BloombergTV to make a similar on-air speech), its price settled back down. Here’s a screen grab I took of Dell’s share price via Yahoo Finance.

Dubbed “Silvermont,” the new design sets its sights squarely on devices like smartphones and tablets, which obviously have limitations on battery life and require system-on-a-chip specifications made with energy efficiency in mind.

The design incorporates Intel’s “tri-gate” 3-D transistor technology first introduced in 2011, which essentially lets the company create smaller, faster processors which can perform at a lower voltage with less power leakage. Intel claims an improvement of around five times lower power consumption over its current Atom core mobile chips, with three times more peak performance.

“We have the ability to monitor what the power delivery characteristics of the platform are,” said Belli Kuttanna, Intel fellow and chief architect, in a briefing with reporters and analysts. From there, “we can change the limits to where the CPU cores are performing and dynamically adjust the power budgets.” In other words, it’ll help decrease battery-life consumption.

The update is yet another move in Intel’s move toward mobile, a space the company has sorely lacked. Historically, Intel’s core strength (so to speak) has been building beefy, high-power processors for desktop computers — chips that have no business in mobile devices.

But as the industry has shifted to mobile over the past few years, competitors like ARM Holdings and Nvidia — which specialize in designing and licensing low-power architecture designs for systems-on-a-chip — have gained solid ground in the chip space, leaving Intel struggling to catch up.

Intel has continually promised to deliver better mobile results soon. At the Consumer Electronics Show in January, the company announced that it will debut new chips aimed at the high and low ends of the Android market.

“We’ve done a lot of work on Android over the past few years,” Dadi Perlmutter, Intel executive VP and chief product officer, said at the briefing. “We’ve shipped 12 different phones to market.”

And as Mike Bell, the head of Intel’s mobile chip efforts said in an interview at D: Dive Into Mobile last month, Intel is getting the hang of building chips for mobile, and claimed that its chips match and in some cases exceed ARM-based chips in certain performance and power-consumption comparisons.

Mobile is clearly a growing priority for Intel, especially as sales of personal computers, a market it dominates, have crashed to historically low levels. The decline has started to hit Intel where it counts: In its quarterly results, which last month showed a year-on-year decline of 25 percent.

Intel’s incoming CEO Brian Krzanich — tapped by its board of directors last week to succeed Paul Otellini, who is retiring — is said to have won the job in a joint pitch with incoming president Renée James that includes using Intel’s world-leading manufacturing capabilities to push chips into emerging product categories like wearable devices.

Intel plans to introduce the new Silvermont technology later this year. Shares of Intel were trading down a penny at $23.95 midday.

The new details about the decision to name Krzanich as the successor to retiring CEO Paul Otellini emerged in a brief report by CNBC’s Jon Fortt (video below) after he talked with Chairman Andy Bryant, who led the board’s search.

The joint pitch initially threw the board for a bit of a loop if only because it’s a highly unusual — and, one would presume, risky — move, in so delicate a matter as CEO succession at one of the world’s most influential tech companies. While the conclusion, at least as far as Krzanich goes, certainly appears to have been a predictable one — every Intel CEO since Andy Grove has been COO first — outsiders were still in the running until the very end.

Also a key selling point, though there are as yet no particulars about this, was Krzanich and James’ vision for pursuing the mobile market where Intel is as yet not participating significantly. Expect more noise on that subject once the pair starts their new jobs after May 16.

In November, when Paul Otellini announced his surprise retirement, I pointed out in a piece covering all the major contenders to succeed him, that every Intel CEO since Andy Grove was COO first. Krzanich will be Intel’s sixth CEO.

And while a lot was made of the fact that Intel’s board of directors was willing to look outside the company, and a lot of people rooted for Intel to name an outsider to run it, the board, led by its chairman, longtime Intel CFO Andy Bryant, decided to stick with established practice.

It’s not as though outsiders were not considered. I’ve heard reliable chatter that the headhunter Intel hired reached out to several people who turned the opportunity down. They include: Oracle President Mark Hurd; VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger, an Intel veteran once considered a likely successor to Otellini, but who was recruited away by EMC CEO Joe Tucci; and Michael Daniels, the former head of IBM’s services business, who retired on March 31.

Krzanich was promoted to the COO job in a surprise shake-up last January. He had run worldwide manufacturing, and as COO he took over some IT and human resources functions that had previously belonged to chairman Bryant. He joined Intel in 1982, and has been an on-the-ground plant manager at Intel’s complex in Arizona. During 2001-2003, he oversaw a complex transition in Intel’s manufacturing technology across its entire global footprint of factories.

Patrick Moorhead, head of research firm MoorInsights, said Krzanich’s naming is a deliberate signal that at a high level much of its strategy will remain the same: “The strategy that has kept Intel running for the last 20 years will remain unchanged: Fab first.”

That means that Intel’s factories — the sprawling multibillion-dollar facilities known in chip industry lingo as “fabs” — will continue to be filled in the most efficient way possible. Intel is at its core a manufacturing company, and is indeed one of the few major chip suppliers left — Samsung is another — that owns its own fabs.

Since they’re so expensive to build, and equally expensive to equip, and since they need to be retooled every few years, Intel’s business model is probably one of the biggest exercises in managing depreciation over time.

The move is also a signal that pushes back against the people who have argued that Intel needs a strategic shake-up. At a moment when PC sales are sliding at a historic rate in favor of tablets and smartphones, Intel has largely been absent from those markets. So it’s no surprise that Intel’s earnings results have suffered in recent quarters.

Meanwhile, phone makers and tablet makers have been using chips from companies like Qualcomm, Broadcom and Nvidia that use designs licensed from the British firm ARM Holdings. ARM-based chips are in practically all the world’s smartphones. Apple uses them in the iPhone and iPad, and they appear in most Android-based phones and tablets, as well.

As Mike Bell, head of Intel’s mobile chip operations, told me in an interview at D: Dive Into Mobile in New York last month, the company has made some strides in the mobile space, landing its chips in some phones and tablets, but they haven’t caught on in huge numbers yet.

There’s another important signal to consider. Renée James, the head of Intel’s software business, was named president. She has been chairman of the McAfee division that Intel acquired when it bought out that security software company last year, as well as of Wind River Systems, another software acquisition. For several years she has also been Intel’s point person in its dealings with Microsoft. While she was officially mentioned as a contender to be CEO, she is, at 48, still in contention for the post. She also sits on the boards of Vodafone and VMware, and for a time was Andy Grove’s chief of staff. (And, as I like to point out for fun, like me, she’s a University of Oregon graduate, and finished her MBA there the same year I was wrapping up my BA.)

But James’s elevation to president also sends an important signal about the rising importance of software at Intel. While Intel is at its core a manufacturing company, it has recognized the importance of software and acted accordingly. As Moorhead put it: “Intel once said it is the third-largest software company in the world, and I can’t prove, but I believe it. Intel is sending a really important message here. It sees software as where the puck is going.”

Other investors in the round include Kernel Capital and ACT Venture Capital (two Irish VC firms) and Enterprise Ireland, a government-backed development outfit. Cloud software company VMware is also an investor.

FeedHenry specializes in providing a cloud-based platform-as-a-service for developing and deploying mobile applications aimed at large organizations. It also runs what it describes as a “backend as a service” that helps get mobile apps working with existing enterprise applications. Its partners include Rackspace, Telefonica, Hewlett-Packard and VMware’s open source platform service, Cloud Foundry.

It’s also a would-be rival to Parse, the mobile development firm that was acquired by Facebook last month.

The San Francisco-based company has built a demo app called MindMeld that shows some of what its “anticipatory computing” can do, but what it really wants is for partners — like, say, Intel, Samsung and Telefónica — to include support for its work in their own products and services.

The funding doesn’t come with a guarantee that will happen, but it’s a pretty good start. Along with previous investor Google Ventures, said CEO Tim Tuttle, Expect Labs now has buy-in from “one of the largest players in each vertical: devices, software, hardware and carriers.”

Next up for Expect Labs is hiring and improving its understanding of a wider range of what people can say. That includes new languages and subject matters, like cooking and recipes, according to Tuttle.

And from venerable technology newsletter Microprocessor Report, come two intriguing technical articles today discussing some of the technology advantages of the chip giant.

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As if you needed another indicator about how much the old Wintel world of PCs has flipped in the last couple of years, take a look at the earnings results of the British chip designer ARM, which just reported quarterly earnings this morning.

Sales rose by 29 percent year on year to north of 170 million pounds (or $260 million), which was better than expected. Earnings on a per-share basis were five pence versus the expected four pence, amounting to a beat of a penny per share. Its shares are rising by 9 percent both in the U.K. and on the Nasdaq in the U.S.

ARM, you’ll recall, is the company behind the designs that go into building the chips that land in most smartphones and tablets. Rather than make the chips, ARM licenses its blueprints to companies like Qualcomm, Broadcom and Nvidia, which then make their own chips. And since phones and tablets are growing a lot faster than traditional PCs (come to think of it, PCs actually aren’t growing at all), ARM is looking a lot healthier than traditional chip companies like Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. Here’s a pretty good indicator: Royalty payments for processors rose in the quarter by 33 percent versus a processor industry that’s up about 2 percent.

ARM is quickly turning out to be the company to watch in the chip space. Chips sporting ARM designs are everywhere these days, and there has been a lot of chatter of late about them heading into the data center.

Hewlett-Packard offers ARM processors as an option on its radical new server design, called Project Moonshot. Dell offers ARM-based servers, too, and there are even more plans for ARM chips in servers. I talked with CEO Warren East about this last year. (East is retiring this summer, by the way, and Simon Segars will be ARM’s new CEO, starting in July.)

The basic argument that ARM makes coming in is that its chips are good at managing power consumption, in part because they were designed from the beginning for mobile applications. And power consumption continues to be a huge problem, especially in data centers where thousands of servers are crowded together in one place.

Intel, the king of the chip world, has responded and created its own line of low-power chips called Atom. And as we learned from Mike Bell, head of Intel’s mobile chip business at D: Dive Into Mobile last week, it has gotten off to a slow start but is starting to get a little traction in mobile.

Another version of Atom, announced the week before last, will also defend Intel’s interests in the server space. But keep an eye on this, because there’s eventually going to be a rumble.

Now we know where one of the pieces has gone: Intel’s TV-over-the-Web project. Intel Media has picked up five members of AdBrite’s core engineering team, according to a person familiar with the move.

In what was essentially an “acqhire,” Intel grabbed AdBrite’s CTO, along with four other former employees; I’m told they will work on data and analytics projects, which will include everything from ad systems to content recommendations.

Intel Media is a small but very ambitious project from the chipmaker, which is trying to do something that tech/media heavyweights like Google and Apple have yet to attempt. Intel Media head Erik Huggers says he plans to start selling pay TV, delivered over the Internet, sometime later this year, in conjunction with an Intel-built set-top box.

In order to do that, Intel has to clear a lot of hurdles, including getting programming deals with all or most of the big TV networks. So far we haven’t heard any of them say that they’re on board, but Intel keeps insisting that it is making progress.

Here’s a highlight reel of Huggers’ interview with Walt Mossberg and myself at D: Dive Into Media earlier this year, where he first outlined his ambitions in public:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130418/shuttered-ad-tech-startup-team-lands-at-intels-web-tv-project/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130418/amd-shares-fall-after-earnings-report/ http://allthingsd.com/20130418/amd-shares-fall-after-earnings-report/#comments Thu, 18 Apr 2013 20:50:13 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=313670 Shares of chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices fell by nearly 6 percent after hours after it reported quarterly earnings that were slightly ahead of expectations and which included guidance for revenue that was slightly higher than expectations. AMD reported a 13-cent per-share loss versus the 17 cents analyst had expected. Revenue was $1.09 billion, slightly ahead of the $1.05 billion expected.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130418/amd-shares-fall-after-earnings-report/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130417/intel-acquires-api-manager-mashery/ http://allthingsd.com/20130417/intel-acquires-api-manager-mashery/#comments Wed, 17 Apr 2013 19:57:21 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=313314 Marking another move in its ongoing shift toward playing a bigger part in software, chip giant Intel is acquiring Mashery, a cloud-based manager of Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs.

First reported by ReadWrite, the deal will bring Mashery’s 125 employees into Intel’s services division. APIs are the keys to working with different cloud services and software. For developers, access to an API is usually the first step to building enhancements and ancillary services and features, or getting two services working together.

Mashery had raised more than $34 million, according to Crunchbase, the most recent of which was a $12 million venture round led by OpenView Ventures and Cisco Systems. Prior investors include First Round Capital and Formative Ventures. Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

The deal represents another example of Intel’s shift toward software development and away from a pure focus on building chips. In 2010 Intel acquired the software security firm McAfee for $7.7 billion. The idea behind that deal was to marry Intel chips that go into PCs and servers and other devices with McAfee’s various security capabilities.

The software and services group, which includes both McAfee and Wind River Systems, which Intel acquired in 2009 and which is run by Renée James, is a relatively small unit within Intel. In 2012, the company reported sales just under $2.4 billion, or about 4.5 percent of revenue. The group reported an $11 million operating loss according to Intel’s latest 10-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130417/intel-acquires-api-manager-mashery/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130417/whatsapp-snapchat-and-the-real-second-screen-10-things-you-missed-at-day-two-of-dive-into-mobile/ http://allthingsd.com/20130417/whatsapp-snapchat-and-the-real-second-screen-10-things-you-missed-at-day-two-of-dive-into-mobile/#comments Wed, 17 Apr 2013 07:13:50 +0000 Eric Johnson http://allthingsd.com/?p=313038

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

And that’s a wrap! After Monday’s half-day kickoff to D: Dive Into Mobile — Global Edition, Tuesday saw a full day of great speakers on topics ranging from messaging to activism to driverless cars. In case you missed it, here’s a good place to start:

1. Starting at the end: “We’re big believers that this [phone] screen is the first screen,” said Bob Bowman, president of Major League Baseball’s Advanced Media, in the conference’s final interview. “Anybody that doesn’t believe that is living on another planet or doesn’t have children. Reality is the second screen.”
2. “Our goal with Android is to reach everyone,” Google chairman Eric Schmidt said. “We’ll cross one billion Android devices in six to nine months. In a year or two, we’ll hit two billion.” Schmidt also talked about Google’s self-driving cars and the company’s new gadgets.
3. Intel said it is getting the hang of mobile — which is good, because the company also reported bleak Q1 earnings today, with a 25 percent drop in profit as demand for PCs declines.
4. WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum said his messaging app is now bigger than Twitter, which officially claims 200 million monthly active users. WhatsApp has eight billion inbound and 12 billion outbound messages per day, Koum said.
5. Meanwhile, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel said his photo- and video-messaging app has grown by three times in four months, and that users are now sharing 150 million ephemeral photos per month, versus 40 million permanent pictures per month on Instagram.
6. A mobile app called Better launched onstage, promising to provide 24/7 concierge medical care to paying users. Better’s offerings include the ability to directly contact doctors and nurses, through a partnership with the Mayo Clinic.
7. Twitter’s VP of Product Michael Sippey said the site is heavily investing in and focusing on improvements to Twitter’s once-poor search and discovery experience.
8. Microsoft’s Terry Myerson said Windows Phone is a global competitor, because it has had stronger momentum in markets where carriers do not subsidize phones. He also aimed more than a few potshots at the likes of Android and Facebook.
9. Nonprofit activism organization DoSomething’s Nancy Lublin announced that the company had reached one million teens via weekly text messages, with a 97 percent open rate.
10. And lastly — mobile security provider Lookout demonstrated how phones can be hacked via phishing emails with phony app-download links, urging users to be wary of unfamiliar download sources.

These 10 blurbs only scratch the surface, though. For more, please check out our full list of stories from D: Dive Into Mobile.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130417/whatsapp-snapchat-and-the-real-second-screen-10-things-you-missed-at-day-two-of-dive-into-mobile/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130416/intel-says-its-getting-the-hang-of-mobile-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20130416/intel-says-its-getting-the-hang-of-mobile-video/#comments Tue, 16 Apr 2013 20:57:03 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=312839 Intel has been playing catch-up in the mobile market for a long time. Mike Bell came on board three years ago to help speed up the process. At D: Dive into Mobile, he gave Arik Hesseldahl a status report.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130416/intel-says-its-getting-the-hang-of-mobile-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130416/intels-profit-falls-25-percent-amid-pc-woes/ http://allthingsd.com/20130416/intels-profit-falls-25-percent-amid-pc-woes/#comments Tue, 16 Apr 2013 20:39:01 +0000 Kristin Jones http://allthingsd.com/?p=312913 Intel Corp.’s first-quarter profit fell 25 percent as the chip maker continued to suffer from declining demand for personal computers.

Intel, which supplies chips for most of the world’s PCs, has been grappling with a stark decline in PC sales. Data released last week by two research firms fed pessimism; one of the steepest year-on-year drops in global PC shipments was read as another sign that the growing use of smartphones and tablets is sapping demand for desktops and laptops.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130416/intels-profit-falls-25-percent-amid-pc-woes/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130416/amid-pc-sales-slide-all-eyes-on-intels-quarterly-results/ http://allthingsd.com/20130416/amid-pc-sales-slide-all-eyes-on-intels-quarterly-results/#comments Tue, 16 Apr 2013 13:28:12 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=312382 When the chipmaker Intel reports its quarterly results today after markets close in New York, no one is expecting especially good news, nor much of a positive outlook.

Intel shares have traded lower since last Thursday, when the market research firms IDC and Gartner said they had tracked one of the largest year-on-year declines in sales of personal computers since records have been kept. Intel is the largest supplier of microprocessors to PC manufacturers like Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Apple, and it’s hard to see how much good news it can possibly bring to the table today.

Analysts are expecting Intel to report a profit of 41 cents per share on sales of $12.6 billion, and missing either would be seen as more or less proving that the PC market is in a state of permanent decline. So would a weak outlook for the current quarter, for which analysts currently expect earnings of 40 cents on $12.9 billion in sales.

There are other aspects to Intel’s business. It has a healthy data center business selling chips for use in servers, but out of more than $53 billion in sales last year, $34 billion, or more than 61 percent, was in its “client,” or PC, unit, while the data center group accounted for about $10.7 billion.

In the past, Intel executives have quarreled with the analyst firms, and said it was seeing more promising conditions in emerging markets. Indeed, in prior years there has been a disconnect between the dour pronouncements of Gartner and IDC and the peppier market conditions that Intel would later describe in its financial results in places like Brazil, Indonesia and Russia. In more recent quarters, the differences between their views have narrowed.

Aside from PCs, Intel has some new ideas that it hopes will kick its data center business into a higher gear. And it certainly has higher hopes about selling more chips for use in phones and tablets, but as yet they’re only hopes. It also plans to launch a TV product later this year.

Aside from the numbers, expect some questions — and maybe even some answers, but probably nothing conclusive yet — about the search for a replacement for CEO Paul Otellini. The smart money says the choice will be an internal one (here’s a rundown on the contenders), though there’s a slim chance that Intel’s board might be in the mood to surprise everyone and name an outsider. But don’t bet any money you can’t afford to lose on that.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130416/amid-pc-sales-slide-all-eyes-on-intels-quarterly-results/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130415/maendeleo-intel-bring-solar-powered-tech-education-to-rural-uganda/ http://allthingsd.com/20130415/maendeleo-intel-bring-solar-powered-tech-education-to-rural-uganda/#comments Tue, 16 Apr 2013 00:30:25 +0000 Eric Johnson http://allthingsd.com/?p=311822

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

One of the most important themes of this year’s D: Dive Into Mobile conference is that mobile is about more than just apps that solve our first-world problems. To understand what “global mobile” means, consider the example of Asia Kamukama, who spoke Monday afternoon in the first of three “Global Voices” sessions.

Kamukama is the co-founder of the Maendeleo Foundation, with the goal of “promoting information communications technology in rural Uganda” and in places that otherwise would have limited or no access to computers.

About 57 percent of Uganda has access to electrical power, Kamukama said, but only 15 percent can afford it nationwide. In rural areas, that number drops to 2 percent.

And that’s the problem: Having the technology is one thing, but powering it is another. Maendeleo has incorporated solar panels in its classrooms since it began in 2007, but Kamukama said their low-cost desktops had a rough time being ported around with the panels in a specially modified RAV4.

“Sometimes we would drive about 400 kilometers with five desktops, and halfway through, they would die, full of dust,” she said.

So Maendeleo hooked up with Intel and began using its (also low-power) Classmate PCs. A month of testing with the same solar panels and SUV were successful enough, Kamukama said, that Maendeleo bought 15 of them.

The Maendeleo Foundation has consequently been able to give 28,000 people their first taste of tech, Kamukama said, and plans are under way to expand the schools’ programs into remote libraries. She said those library partnerships would help keep Ugandans interested in and engaged with computers after her group drives away.

Check out video from Kamukama’s appearance below:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130415/maendeleo-intel-bring-solar-powered-tech-education-to-rural-uganda/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130415/mobile-goes-global/ http://allthingsd.com/20130415/mobile-goes-global/#comments Mon, 15 Apr 2013 18:11:10 +0000 Ina Fried and Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=312042

Around the globe, mobile technology is reshaping lives. For the affluent, the smartphone and the tablet have emerged as the dominant means of communication. The introduction of the iPhone six years ago forever changed what was imagined possible, and Apple now faces stiff competition from Google’s Android and such would-be rivals as Microsoft and Mozilla. On the device side, the pioneers of computing are pitted against traditional phone makers as well as startups that have emerged in the smartphone era. Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, the rise of sub-$100 smartphones means that billions more will have their first connection to the Internet. And the basic cellphone not only delivers communication but also provides a channel for previously unavailable information about health care, weather and crops.

Like the signature D: All Things Digital event, D: Dive Into Mobile, running today and tomorrow, pointedly avoids the usual slides and speeches, instead spotlighting candid interviews with an array of the most interesting and outspoken execs in the business.

The first D: Dive Into Mobile event, held in 2010, explored the dawn of the smartphone era. This year’s Global Edition will look at the broader impact mobile technology is having on how day-to-day life is carried on across the world. This event was originally slated for last October, but Hurricane Sandy forced a sudden change in plans. We are immensely grateful to all of the speakers, sponsors and attendees who stuck by us. We promise that things will be even better than what we originally had planned for last fall.

D: All Things Digital founders Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher will spend time in the red chairs, to be sure. But they have graciously allowed much of the conference programming to be crafted by the two of us, Ina Fried and Liz Gannes, who spend much of our time reporting on and writing about the world of mobile. Together with Walt, Kara and the growing AllThingsD staff, we look forward to bringing you the stories and strategies behind this global mobile shift. Over the next two days, you’ll hear from some of the biggest names in mobile technology. Fresh from his travels to North Korea and beyond, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt will be able to address Google’s wide-ranging mobile efforts, from Android and Chrome to AdMob and YouTube. Long dominant on the desktop, Microsoft and Intel have each had their own struggles in mobile. Intel’s Mike Bell and Microsoft’s Terry Myerson will appear separately to make the case why their company shouldn’t be counted out.

Facebook’s newly minted Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer will address the challenge — one that’s now closely watched by Wall Street — of following the migration of his company’s users from Web to mobile. Meanwhile, browser maker Mozilla is trying to shake up the phone market like it did the Web browser market, by introducing an open alternative to dominant operating systems. You will also hear from a range of speakers who will talk firsthand about how mobile is changing the lives of the young, the poor and those in crisis. We’ve invited Nancy Lublin from the teen activism organization DoSomething.org, along with Juliana Rotich, the Kenyan founder of open source crisis-information service Ushahidi.

Our Global Voices segment will give a place onstage to individuals whose lives have been personally transformed by mobile technology. This is a new project for D that aims to share some of our business and tech spotlight with the real-world people who are the reason all this technology is created in the first place.

And, of course, D: Dive Into Mobile will bring together some of the smartest people in the industry — in the audience. Our hope is that the talks onstage will be the start of a dialogue that continues into the breaks, over the meals, and long after the red chairs have been hauled away.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130415/mobile-goes-global/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130412/how-hard-will-weak-pc-sales-hit-intel/ http://allthingsd.com/20130412/how-hard-will-weak-pc-sales-hit-intel/#comments Fri, 12 Apr 2013 18:21:16 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=311509 The reports by market research firms Gartner and IDC earlier this week showing what appears to have been one of the worst year-on-year contractions in the personal computer market since records have been kept is having repercussions up and down the supply chain.

As it happens, the report came a week before chipmaker Intel is due to report quarterly earnings on April 16. In a research note today, Stacy Rasgon of Sanford Bernstein sized up its prospects for the quarter and the rest of the year.

There’s a chance that the actual on-the-ground results may yet be worse than what the research firms detected. Relying on data from Taiwanese notebook manufacturers including Compal, Quanta and Wistron, sales were down in the first quarter by more than 18 percent, worse than the 11 percent to 13 percent drop reported by Gartner and IDC.

So what does that mean for Intel, the world’s largest supplier of computer chips and long considered an important bellwether of the overall tech economy? Nothing good, Rasgon argues. He expects Intel to report revenue of $12.43 billion, nearly $200 million below the consensus expectation of $12.6 billion. He expects earnings on a per-share basis to be 41 cents.

“Given the recent atrocious PC numbers, we believe investors may not be hugely surprised by weak outlook at this point (at least, they certainly shouldn’t be now),” he wrote.

Other key questions for Intel: Who will be the next CEO? And will Intel say anything about it on the conference call after earnings are announced? If you haven’t been keeping track, here’s a good rundown on who’s likely to be in the race, both internal and external. (Here’s a hint: It’s going to be an internal contender; Intel has never hired an outside CEO.)

“It is rapidly approaching high time for the company to provide color on a replacement,” Rasgon wrote. “While it appears they are actively vetting both internal and external candidates, we do not expect significant strategic changes regardless of the eventual choice as they have started the ball rolling on several initiatives that would be difficult to stop. … We would hope (but do not necessarily expect) that the company could provide additional information on the succession plan.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130412/how-hard-will-weak-pc-sales-hit-intel/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130411/how-bad-is-the-pc-market-analysts-count-the-ways/ http://allthingsd.com/20130411/how-bad-is-the-pc-market-analysts-count-the-ways/#comments Thu, 11 Apr 2013 22:13:22 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=311308 Shares of companies involved in various parts of the PC industry did about as well as you might expect today, in the wake of two reports yesterday showing that the first quarter of the year produced the largest market contraction since records have been kept — that is to say, they didn’t do well at all.

Here’s a quick rundown: Hewlett-Packard fell more than 6 percent to $20.88. Dell fell more than 1 percent to $14.04. Apple fell slightly to $434.33. Intel fell 2 percent to $21.83. Advanced Micro Devices fell 3.5 percent to $2.52. Microsoft fell almost 4.5 percent to $28.93. Hard drive manufacturer Seagate fell 3 percent to $36.53. Western Digital fell 2.5 percent to $17.53. All told, they fell by an average of about 2.85 percent.

It was that kind of day, and the financial analysts who track the stocks of the PC makers had to jump in with their own assessments.

“We ultimately don’t believe that tablets are ‘replacing’ PCs (very few people we have met have actually retired their PC because of a tablet),” analyst Toni Sacconaghi of Bernstein wrote in a note to clients today, “but they are contributing to PCs being used less — which, in turn, is pushing out the replacement cycle for PCs. This is a big deal.”

He also said that HP in particular, which according to IDC’s reckoning saw a decline in PC sales of more than 23 percent year on year in the first quarter, may miss sales estimates by more than $700 million as a result. “A key question is whether the contraction in volume (potentially $1 billion in revenue) will have a material impact on PC margins,” he wrote. “We suspect that some of HP’s share loss was the result of increased pricing discipline and a focus on margins in the quarter.”

Shaw Wu, analyst with Sterne Agee, placed at least some of the blame for the market’s poor performance at Microsoft’s door. “We frankly believe Microsoft’s strategy of forcing user interface changes that nobody wants has proven to be a disaster,” he wrote in a note issued today. “Not to mention the customer confusion with too many choices with multiple form factors.” He now expects the PC market to contract in 2013 by 5 percent, down further from his earlier 2 percent guidance.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130411/how-bad-is-the-pc-market-analysts-count-the-ways/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130411/shares-of-pc-companies-and-their-suppliers-whacked-on-sales-decline/ http://allthingsd.com/20130411/shares-of-pc-companies-and-their-suppliers-whacked-on-sales-decline/#comments Thu, 11 Apr 2013 13:35:44 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=311068 By all indications, it’s going to be a rough day on the stock market for any company exposed to the personal computer business.

Yesterday’s reports from the market research firms IDC and Gartner showed conclusively what pretty much anyone paying attention had already suspected — that the bottom has finally fallen out of the PC business. During the first quarter of 2013, the combined shipments showed their worst year-on-year decline ever.

Reversing that trend is probably not an option, which means that a fundamentally new chapter in the history of the personal computer industry is unequivocally here. Shareholders in those companies will start making value judgments accordingly. That was in evidence in the premarket trading this morning.

With a few minutes to go before the opening of markets in New York, shares of market leader Hewlett-Packard were down by nearly 6 percent. Dell, still the subject of an ongoing fight over its proposed $24.4 billion plan to go private in a leveraged buyout transaction, was down only slightly.

Chipmaker Intel was down nearly 3 percent. Advanced Micro Devices, Intel’s one remaining rival, was down 2.7 percent. Microsoft, the primary supplier of operating system software to the world’s PCs, was down 3.5 percent.

Apple, the maker of the iPad, which arguably has disrupted the PC industry, but is also North America’s third-largest supplier of PCs, was down by $2, or less than half of a percentage point.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130411/shares-of-pc-companies-and-their-suppliers-whacked-on-sales-decline/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130410/intel-wants-to-redesign-your-server-rack/ http://allthingsd.com/20130410/intel-wants-to-redesign-your-server-rack/#comments Wed, 10 Apr 2013 13:56:49 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=310688 A few days after tech giant Hewlett-Packard unveiled its idea for a fundamental rethink of the server, chip giant Intel, which often has a way of setting the agenda on these things, has floated a concept for a rethink of the server rack.

In comments at the Intel Developer Forum in Beijing overnight, Diane Bryant, senior vice president and head of the Datacenter and Connected Systems Group, described a rethink of how data centers might be designed. Currently, individual servers, each with its own computing and storage, are being packed tightly together in a rack, and in turn packed into a room with other similar racks.

Intel sees a world where all the computing and storage portions are separated. CPUs would be grouped together so they could be cooled together. They would in turn be linked to storage infrastructure by screaming-fast optical connections running as fast as 100 gigabits per second.

Eventually, Intel sees everything being separated into its own section of the rack: CPU, memory, storage and power. The point is that you’ll be able to upgrade one — swap out older memory modules for newer ones, or upgrade the CPUs, or replace a bad hard drive — without interfering with the operation of any of the other parts.

Intel’s play, Bryant said, is to offer a reference design — essentially a basic recipe for building the concept — to the big server manufacturers. And at least some portions of this concept are already operating in China. Intel has been working with Web commerce giant Alibaba, Web search concern Baidu, Chinese Internet company Tencent and China Telecom on something they call Project Scorpio. The idea is to centralize all the cooling and fans within the rack, and to demonstrate that you can save on operating costs.

There were new Intel chips disclosed, too. A chip code-named Avoton is due in the second half of this year. It’s a version of Intel’s lightweight Atom processor, aimed at small servers — not unlike HP’s Project Moonshot — that will be built on Intel’s latest 22-nanometer manufacturing process, and with a new design. In Intel’s recent “tick-tock” parlance, where it delivers a new design — a tick — then shrinks it with an new smaller manufacturing technology — a tock — this is effectively both.

Another chip, code-named Rangeley and also due in the second half of the year, is a 22-nanometer variant of Atom that will be aimed at networking devices, routers, switches and whatnot.

There were also three versions of the Xeon chip discussed. The next E3 will get some new tricks to support video analytics workloads. The next Xeon E5 will move to the 22-nanometer manufacturing process (that’s a tock), and will be available in the fall. Finally, a new Xeon E7 will be available in the fourth quarter. Its newest trick is that it can address three times the memory of its predecessor — up to 12 terabytes.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130410/intel-wants-to-redesign-your-server-rack/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130408/intels-next-gen-thunderbolt-will-leave-usb-in-the-dust/ http://allthingsd.com/20130408/intels-next-gen-thunderbolt-will-leave-usb-in-the-dust/#comments Mon, 08 Apr 2013 22:50:50 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=310097 By 2014, USB 3.0 will see its data-transfer speed of 5 gigabits per second increased to 10Gbps. And even then, it will still be just half as fast as Intel’s Thunderbolt standard.

Intel said Monday that the next-generation version of Thunderbolt will support bidirectional data transfers of up to 20Gbps — double that of the current standard and the forthcoming update to USB 3.0. Intel said that speed enhancement will allow for the simultaneous transfer and display of 4K video, which is impressive to say the least.

This is Intel’s first big transfer rate improvement to Thunderbolt since the technology’s introduction in early 2011, and the company says it expects to roll it out by year’s end, with volume production beginning in 2014. The additional transfer speed this update brings could do much to bolster Thunderbolt’s market penetration, which has so far been disappointing despite early incorporation into Apple’s Mac portfolio.

Speaking of Apple, Thunderbolt’s new 20Gbps throughput paves the way for some potentially significant improvements to the company’s external displays, which haven’t been updated since the debut of the Thunderbolt Display in mid-2011.

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