Ina Fried

Recent Posts by Ina Fried

Aiming to Get Into Smaller Devices, Intel Announces Big Push Into Arduino

Intel’s latest effort to expand beyond its PC roots involves reaching out to hobbyists.

At Maker Fair in Rome, the chipmaker is announcing plans to partner with open-source hardware specialist Arduino. Intel is creating a custom board that pairs one of the company’s new Quark processors with the other hardware necessary to build Arduino-based devices.

“It comes back to the basic premise, if it has computing inside of it, it should have Intel inside of it,” Mike Bell said in an interview.

Even as Intel has struggled to get its chips into phones and tablets, the company is working to land in even-smaller devices. At last month’s Intel Developer Forum, the company announced its Quark effort for wearables and other small computing uses. The Arduino effort will make the first commercial use of Quark.

The company said it will donate 50,000 of its Galileo development boards to 1,000 universities in the coming year and a half. It also plans to sell them through distributors for around $60 or less.

Bell, a former Palm and Apple executive, had been co-leading Intel’s mobile push before shifting to his current role. Bell, whose new products unit is looking at wearables and other devices, says his goal is to get Intel’s chips anywhere they are not yet, as well as into the many new areas where computing is entering.

“My group and I are chartered with helping figure out what’s next for Intel,” Bell said.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald