Technology in the service of humanity seems a better description because all the 15 laureates chosen, communicated a quiet humility, patience, and a stubborn purpose in making a big difference in the lives of people. It was awe inspiring.

Many of the ideas were simple but powerful: distributing camping lamps with rechargeable batteries and recharging them every day at a central location so that kids can do homework and parents can read or work; attaching a code to medicines to check their validity through a simple text-message; and much more.

Unfortunately, only five of the laureates won a prize yet each of them deserved it and more.

Country-sized GDP ballroom

The Tech Awards are grand affairs, full of Silicon Valley “royalty” with some 2000 people decked out in black-tie and glittering gowns. If that ballroom were a country, it would vault into the top 100 in terms of GDP, for that evening.

Which is why it always strikes me that $50,000 per prize is a bit stingy, it hasn’t changed since 2001. But I have a solution:

- Place a pen and paper at every dinner place setting and play a game of picking the laureate you think will win.

- You get to see a short video focused on each laureate, you tick the box next to the one that’s your favorite.

- If you pick all five correctly your table congratulates you and you take home the central flower setting.

- At the end of the awards, you then have an opportunity to make a contribution to your favorite laureates. You fill out your credit card number, fill in the amount of your contribution and the money is divided among the laureates.

It’s a great opportunity to raise money because everyone is emotionally moved by the story of the laureates. The organizers are literally letting money walk out the door when it could be left on the table, collected, and donated. That’s my 2 cents.

The rest of the evening wasn’t as good as hearing the stories of the laureates. The presenters of the awards, big names like Michael Splinter, CEO of Applied Materials, which founded the Tech Awards, were tedious attempts at inspirational speeches. All the right words but lacking in anything else.

The worst of the lot was former vice-president Al Gore, who received the Global Humanitarian Award.

First, he thanked superstar VC John Doer and his other pals at Kleiner Perkins, before mentioning the Tech Award winners. He then launched into a very long speech that sounded like he had literally taped-together hundreds of well-meaning phrases that were meaningless when heard together.

I tried to concentrate and listen to what he was saying but it all sounded like a typical politician’s speech. He sounded like a parody of someone imitating Al Gore give a speech about global warming. It was awful. He got a standing ovation.

Afterwards, I checked around and asked if others had a similar experience. Everyone said yes.

All the laureates gave far better speeches. Al Gore should give his prize and appearance money to the laureates that went home without any “cash prize” money. (All the presenters emphasized the “cash prize” constantly, so often that it became the catchphrase for the evening.)

I enjoyed the evening and I support the work of the Tech Awards and I hope that more money can be raised for the incredible work that the laureates are doing in some of the poorest regions of the world.

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SFGATE- Tech Awards recognize innovation

San Jose Mercury - awards honor social entrepreneurs

Tech Awards Recognize Science in Service to Humanity - Tonic

Also, Al Gore will recieve the James C. Morgan Global Humanitarian Award.

You can watch it live at 6.45pm this evening: The Tech Awards 2009 | NBC Bay Area

These are the The Tech Museum Awards - Technology Benefiting Humanity | Press Room“>winners:

The Tech Awards Laureates 2009:

Intel Environment Award

Dr. Joseph Adelegan, Cows to Kilowatts (Nigeria): Slaughterhouse waste is one of the most significant sources of water pollution and greenhouse gases emissions in most developing economies. The anaerobic fixed film reactor used in the Cows to Kilowatts project decontaminates the waste stream from slaughterhouses and turns this organic waste into methane that can be used to generate electricity or as inexpensive cooking gas.http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/publications/africa_casestudies/kilowatts.pdf

GRUPEDSAC (Grupo para Promover la Educaci�n y el Desarrollo Sustentable), Eco-techniques Toolkits for Self-Sufficiency (Mexico): Poor quality of life in rural Mexico includes loss of soil fertility, lack of access to clean water, adequate shelter, nutrition, and health resources. Customizable Eco-techniques Toolkits for Self-Sufficiency combine old and new sustainable technologies-from cisterns to solar ovens-to fit the needs of each community. http://www.grupedsac.org/

Sean White, Electronic Field Guide (USA): Plant species are disappearing at an alarming rate; mobile identification and classification of plant species may aid in conservation and cataloguing. The Electronic Field Guide uses photos to identify leaves with mobile, hand-held and augmented reality visualization of information. http://herbarium.cs.columbia.edu

BD Biosciences Economic Development Award

Alternative Energy Development Corp. (AEDC), Alternative Energy for Empowerment (South Africa): Fuel cell use largely avoids the lead-acid waste of solar or wind installation batteries. Inexpensive, zinc-air fuel cells can be used in poor communities lacking access to grid power. Fuel cell anodes can be removed manually in about 15 minutes and zinc oxide waste recycled as fertilizer. www.aedc.co.za

Solar Ear (Botswana, Brazil): Standard Western hearing aids cost an average of $750, with battery costs typically $1 per week. Solar Ear, an inexpensive hearing aid, suited to local conditions and manufactured by deaf workers who train one-another, costs $100 and is paired with a solar recharging unit for the batteries. www.solarear.com.br

Driptech (India): Hundreds of millions of people in the developing world face water shortages in crop production; drip irrigation delivers precisely the right amount of water and not more. Driptech’s unique laser technology drills holes in one main line, thereby reducing the number of parts and the cost of a drip irrigation system. www.driptechnologies.com

Microsoft Education Award

Akshaya Patra Foundation, School Meals Program (India):
High quality, nutrient rich meals are key to the education process in poverty stricken areas. The School Meals Program uses integrated and adapted high-performance kitchen technology and food delivery systems to serve millions of Indian children a nutritious daily meal. http://www.akshayapatra.org/

GeoGebra (International): Dynamic Mathematics for Everyone is a free, open-source software to display and practice geometry and mathematics that will help achieve rapid diffusion of information and quicker comprehension. GeoGebra created web-based, open-source software to visualize and practice geometric-based mathematics. http://www.geogebra.org/

The Khan Academy (International): High school students around the world need informal, clear explanations that can be reviewed at a leisurely pace to supplement their formal learning. The Khan Academy created hundreds of free educational videos in math, statistics, physics, and finance using drawing software. The “blackboard” style videos are accessible via the internet and hosted on YouTube.http://www.khanacademy.org/

Katherine M. Swanson Equality Award

World of Good Development Organization (International): Handicraft workers around the world are generally paid per piece, often at low hourly rates. World of Good Development Organization’s Fair Wage Guide Software provides localized pricing evaluation of handmade goods to improve wages of informal workers. The free web-based platform encourages ethical trade by comparing wages worldwide. http://www.fairtradecalculator.com/index.php

kiwanja.net (International): kiwanja.net’s FrontlineSMS allows for SMS technology to be used by hundreds of NGOs worldwide, for activities as diverse as election monitoring and dissemination of agricultural prices. This free software for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) deploys two-way SMS messaging and provides easy-to-use communications infrastructure for outreach in rural and urban areas. http://www.frontlinesms.com/

SuryaHurricane: Electrification for the Landless (Bangladesh): Providing mobile solar lighting can alleviate health problems due to smoke and CO2 emissions while establishing social enterprises. Retrofitting existing kerosene hurricane lanterns with CFL or LED lights can provide lighting for transient settlers in flood and hurricane-prone areas. SuryaHurricane also establishes infrastructure for women establishes women-oriented infrastructure for recharging lantern batteries using boats equipped with PV modules. http://www.shidhulai.org/afftechnology.html

Nokia Health Award

mPedigree (Ghana): Counterfeit drugs are ubiquitous in the developing world; up to 80 percent of drugs in pharmacies are fakes with little or no active ingredients. Pharmaceutical manufacturers label packages with an alphanumeric code, which is later confirmed when consumers send free text queries in to the mPedigree database. This low-cost, instant method for reducing drug counterfeiting is expanding from Ghana to Nigeria, Rwanda, and India. http://www.mpedigree.net

PATH, Ultra Rice (India, Brazil, Colombia): More than a billion people in developing nations suffer from dietary deficiencies in crucial micronutrients, including iron, zinc, folic acid, and vitamin A. Ultra Rice is an affordable, nutrient-fortified additive to standard rice, tailored to satisfy deficiencies common in the region where it is distributed. http://www.path.org/projects/ultra_rice.php

Village Reach, Management Information System for Vaccine (Mozambique): Poor countries bear the greatest burden of infectious diseases, and have the least infrastructure for public health programs. Village Reach worked closely with the Mozambique Ministry of Health to implement supply chain logistics management systems, utilizing portable USB drives to automatically update and share information to improve the delivery of vaccines, drugs and critical medical supplies to rural clinics.http://www.villagereach.org/

This is a very significant announcement because it shows that there is a problem in using search algorithms to discover new content. The problem is that there isn’t enough linking happening between web sites (except by spammers).

Techmeme has been a staple of the tech news scene for many years. Gabe Rivera ran it by himself, relying on his search algorithm that monitored a fixed number of influential blogs and news sites.

He told me that to get the best results within a sector, you needed a large enough pool of blog/news sites otherwise the results would be unreliable.

The Techmeme algorithm counts the links to other blog posts coming from this core pool of influential sites. And thus Techmeme could run fairly well all by itself with occasional tidying up by Gabe.

I noticed about a year ago that blogs were linking less and less to each other, they were becoming a lot like old media, which hated to link to other sites. I asked Gabe about this.

I ran into Gabe last week at an event at the St. Regis in San Francisco and asked him about the state of the blogosphere. I pointed out that there seem to be few “real” bloggers left. Original bloggers such as GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch, etc now all seem to be just online news sites and they read like an “old media” news site.

Gabe agreed, he said:”Techcrunch and the others used to link to each other and now they don’t–they only link if they have to.”

…And with fewer links, that means he has had to continually tweak his algorithm.

“I get around the problem by looking in many places for links or references to news stories, in places you might not normally look.”

It looks as if Gabe ran out of places for his algorithm to look, because he has had to double his human editors to help find interesting new content.

Microcosm of search…

Techmeme is very much a microcosm of the search world. If Techmeme has had to go from 1 human editor (Gabe) and now to 6 in about a year, then this signals that all other search engine algorithms are in trouble, especially the biggest one of all: Google and its groundbreaking PageRank.

PageRank lies at the heart of the secret Google algorithm. It is named after Larry Page, co-founder, and it also describes how it works.

PageRank counts the links to a web page and computes its relevance by assessing the importance of the linking site. If a page gets links from a high-ranked site that already has lots of links to it from reputable sites then that assigns a high rank to that page in Google results.

It works great. But only as long as people are linking to other relevant pages. It breaks down if people link less or not at all.

And that’s what has been happening. I don’t have any research to prove it but I have noticed over the past few years a large drop in the number of links on a web page to outside sites. I think it is a function of not having enough time to create the links; and also it isn’t as fashionable as it once was, to pepper your content with dozens of links.

So, this means that Google’s foundation for its search algorithm, PageRank is far less effective today than at any other time. It must roam further and look for signals of importance, and look for human help such as Twitter. But with Twitter, Google can’t easily assess the importance of the “link-giver” because it is an individual, not a web site with history.

Google cannot do what Techmeme has done and hire editors to help surface the best search results. It would be impossible to cover the range of queries that Google handles every day.

This has to be GOOG’s Achilles Heel. It will ultimately lose out to a horde of smaller search engines, such as Techmeme, using human editors to sort through the cache of links collected by algorithms.

But the algorithms, by themselves, won’t be able to provide the same quality of results that they once did.

Techmeme doubling its editors to six is a watershed moment in search.

And the trend is growing. The influence on business decisions by online communities is at its highest in three years.

The research was conducted by Don Bulmer from SAP and Vanessa DiMauro.

Here are some key findings from this survey 365 business professionals:

- Professional decision-making is becoming more social - enter the era of Social Media Peer Groups (SMPG)

• Traditional influence cycles are being disrupted by Social Media as decision makers utilize social networks to inform and validate decisions
• Professionals want to be collaborative in the decision-cycle but not be marketed or sold to online; however online marketing is a preferred activity by companies.

- Professional networks are emerging as decision-support tools

• Decision-makers are broadening reach to gather information especially among active users

- Professionals trust online information almost as much as information gotten from in-person

• Information obtained from offline networks still have highest levels of trust with slight advantage over online (offline: 92% - combined strongly/somewhat trust; online: 83% combined strongly/somewhat trust)

- Reliance on web-based professional networks and online communities has increased significantly over the past 3 years

• Three quarters of respondents rely on professional networks to support business decisions
• Reliance has increased for essentially all respondents over the past three years

- Social Media use patterns are not pre-determined by age or organizational affiliation

• Younger (20-35) and older professionals (55+) are more active users of social tools than middle aged professionals.
• There are more people collaborating outside their company wall than within their organizational intranet

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These are all very interesting findings. Especially the high level of trust that decision makers have in regards to their online communities. It’s good to have some real data to match the anecdotal stories and observations.

Also, the finding that age is NOT a factor in social media use is very interesting. There is a myth that younger people are heavier users or have mastered social media to a greater extent. This shows that age is not an important factor and it should encourage people to become involved in social media regardless of age or experience.

There is more survey data here on Don Bulmer’s blog: Everyday Influence: SNCR Research Reveals Social Media’s Impact on Business and Decision Making

[I'm a Founding Fellow of SNCR - a Palo Alto based think tank focused on research into emerging media technologies.]

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The methodology for this study involved a mixed methods approach supported by quantitative data gathered via online survey of 356 professionals to understand their perceptions and experiences with social media in support of their decision-making. Select interviews of 12 professionals were also conducted using a semi-structured interview guide as part of the second phase of the study.
Key demographics of the research include:

• Close to a quarter (23%) of respondents identified themselves as CEO of their organization; 50% as “Director” (24%) “Manager” (24%)
• Company size ranged from less than 100 to over 50,000 full-time employees
• Age was well distributed with the greatest proportion in the 36-45 range
• 25 countries were represented, with 58% of respondents living in the US
• All respondents were either the decision makers or influenced the decision process within their company or business unit

Real-time IT systems have moved beyond the trading floors and into the data centers of most large companies in many sectors. The focus for Tibco now is looking at what’s next after real-time, and that’s literally ‘what’s next?’

Welcome to the world of predictive IT, business systems that run in real-time and use predictive analytics to immediately respond to business events. Events such as customers using an ATM and being offered custom offers on loans; or a casino that tracks customer losses and can offer free tickets for a show to cheer them up; a cell phone company that responds to multiple dropped calls with free minutes.

“Companies need to move beyond real-time and start using predictive, rules-based business processes. This is what I call Enterprise 3.0,” says Mr Ranadivé.

Enterprise 1.0 was characterized by the mainframe and batch-processing software; Enterprise 2.0 is the era of the client/server and software tied to the database; Enterprise 3.0 is where the software is liberated from the database, it runs in memory; and where predictive analytics and business process software can pick out any event from a hundred million others, and respond with a pre-determined business process that can be customized on-the-fly.

Mr Ranadivé believes that this Enterprise 3.0 phase will be dominated by a different set of IT vendors and that this where Tibco’s fortunes will be made. Oracle dominates the Enterprise 2.0 world because it is a database-centric IT environment but that world is changing.

“People don’t realize that companies such as Amazon are already event-driven. Vodaphone deals with more than 1 billion events a day.” Business applications tied to a central database would be too slow to respond to that volume of events. It requires real-time IT systems implementing rules-based business processes.

This is also where companies can distinguish themselves from competitors. “If you have a little bit of knowledge about the future, if you know how your customers will behave, you then have the ability to improve services, and you have opportunities to up-sell and cross-sell.”

Adding Enterprise 3.0 capabilities doesn’t have to be a big venture for a company. Mr Ranadivé says enterprises typically do it in stages and projects can be implemented in three to six months.

In an Enterprise 3.0 world, innovation, and the competitive distinction between companies, becomes expressed through the predictive analytics and business processes developed within each enterprise. And there are potential business opportunities for startups to develop predictive analytics targeted at specific industries.

But will businesses embrace this Enterprise 3.0 view? Mr Ranadivé believes they will, and he believes that they will be motivated by that traditional maxim of the business world “if you don’t do it, then your competitors will.” Some already are doing it.

But is that really true?

These are some of the facts:

- The value of Google search traffic to the newspapers is low. Its loss wouldn’t make much difference to the newspapers’ already poor online revenues. They can’t monetize the traffic anyway so its loss makes no difference to their future.

- Wouldn’t the damage to Google be much greater?

If it is locked out from being able to index a large part of the Internet, it would be very bad for business. It would strike at its very core of its mission: “To index all the world’s information.”

Google users would question what else is missing?

Google’s index is its Achilles’ heel. It will do everything it needs to do to protect its ability to index content.

And itt doesn’t matter if the content is free or not. As Google’s Josh Cohen recently told SearchEngineLand: “…people will say … ‘I have to make this content free or Google won’t index it,’ and that’s not the case.”

So, who has the most to lose if News Corp and other large publishers block Google?

Newspaper online revenues won’t be affected much at all.

But Google’s reputation as having the best index would be seriously harmed. It would have a large hole in its index.

And that hole would be made up of missing content - new content - the most valuable thing for search engines. People search for new content. That’s what brings them back to Google.

Surely Google has far more to lose than the newspaper publishers from being blocked.

And that’s why it will do whatever it needs to do in order to preserve its index, including possibly paying for access.

Rupert Murdoch may have very well have found the weak spot in Google’s business plan..

Because criticizing Google results in a lot more publicity. Because Mr Murdoch has an agenda, he is most probably laying the groundwork to negotiate a deal with Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and others, where they will pay to index News Corp content and also content from other publishers allied with News Corp.

Take a look at these points:

- By collecting a package of other publishers, Mr Murdoch can avoid the problem caused by what I call “first mover disadvantage” in that the first publishers with paywalls, risk losing audience to rivals that wait to build their paywalls. That’s a much larger business risk than the traffic lost from blocking Google. That’s a risk all news publishers face not just News Corp. Better to be in a collective.

- Mr Murdoch is emerging as a champion for other news publishers in his criticism of Google. That’s an excellent opportunity to become the rallying point for the newspaper industry as a whole and to recruit publishers into a common basket of content.

- Mr Murdoch and his top executives are masters at using the media to manipulate others to get what they want — in this case Google is the target.

- Why would competitors join with Mr Murdoch? A better question is why wouldn’t they? They would all still compete on writing the news first, that wouldn’t change in either scenario. The advantage would be better revenues from subscriptions using a collective approach. Mr Murdoch and his allies could offer packages consisting of local, regional, national and even foreign publications for one monthly fee. No need for micropayments by readers — the payments could be divided up within the group transparently, the readers pay one fee.

- Would readers pay for content? They already do. Revenue from subscribers has already overtaken revenue from advertising at many publications. In its most recent financial quarter the New York Times said revenues from readers overtook advertising revenues for the first time — a watershed moment. That’s a trend that still has a ways to go and will be helped by new ways to collect subscriptions for online content.

- Would GOOG et al, pay for access to index content? Yes, GOOG already pays for content from the AP and for TV shows to show on YouTube.

- Google would pay because search engines need novelty. They need to index new content. Otherwise why do people use a search engine? To find what they already know is there, or to look for new content? It’s mostly the latter.

- If users know that a search engine is blocked from new content then that is a very negative psychological strike against it — what else doesn’t it have? Google, and others need to maintain an impression that they “index all the world’s content.” Index is their prime goal, rather than to serve up free content.

Josh Cohen at Google News made this very point “there is still a lot of those discussions that take place where people will say … ‘I have to make this content free or Google won’t index it,’ and that’s not the case.“

- Google is open to working with publishers in a variety of ways. Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineLand interviewed Josh Cohen at Google News. He said that Google already has a large number of different programs to offer publishers and will work on custom programs too.

Here are a couple more quotes from Google’s Josh Cohen:

“We want to be in a situation where the best content wins, not the best SEOed site.“

“You can allow us to crawl content and show a preview to the user and label it as a subscription.“

Mr Murdoch and his allies will be able to have their cake and eat it in the sense that they can have Google index their content, and also have a paywall.

Plus, they have many business levers to pull in that they can continue to make some content free; to place less content behind a paywall; and to optimize their landing pages for Google and other traffic to make for better ad conversions (as Jonathan Mendez points out in SVW comments).

And potentially get a payment from Google and other search engines in addition to everything else.

This will be one of the ways the media industry halts the decline in its fortunes. Overall, the media industry will need to adopt what I call a “Heinz 57″ business model, with multiple revenue streams, there won’t be just one or two magic bullets.

The challenge for publishers will be in managing multiple sources of revenue. But that’s an opportunity for startups to offer the admin tools, and help aggregate the revenues streams for large publishers.

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Please see:

The Dirty Little Secret About Search Engine Traffic…

VerticalResponse, which offers surveys and email marketing services, polled 831 small US businesses about the effect of public healthcare on their business.

Theron Kabrich the CEO of The San Francisco Art Exchange, was one of the small businesses surveyed. He made an interesting comment and it is one that is very applicable to Silicon Valley.

“A public offering of healthcare unburdens small businesses and entrepreneurs alike, as it allows them to focus on core parts of their business such as innovations and new products. It also removes an unfair competitive advantage for small businesses when trying to attract the best employees, and levels the playing field.”

Will Silicon Valley startups cut their current healthcare plans? They might.

High healthcare costs are a large burden for Silicon Valley startups. The availability of public healthcare should lead to lower costs for startup companies and make more capital available for investment in development.

VCs might demand a provision that their startups not offer healthcare plans. But would this harm recruitment?

Probably not because startups have fairly young staff and the attraction is not getting a safe job with benefits, but a chance to build a valuable business.

It’ll be interesting to see how the availability of public healthcare affects Silicon Valley businesses. If it helps them succeed by lowering their startup costs then this will lead to lots of new jobs.

Surely, they chorus, all that traffic that Google sends to the Wall Street Journal is the equivalent of sending a fire hose of cash straight into his pocket. Why would he want to turn off that traffic?!

The answer is that he wouldn’t, if that were indeed the case.

The ugly truth is that Google traffic is hard to monetize. It’s not the bonanza that people think it is.

Google traffic is low quality, it is people who stumbled upon the article. Usually, about one-half is new to the site, it had never been there before. The other half already knows who you are. For well established brands this offers incremental value.

More importantly, Google traffic doesn’t help the newspaper advertisers much because they are trying to buy a specific sector, a specific readership. For example, the Wall Street Journal advertisers are very business and stock trade oriented. For other newspapers, the advertisers want that particular local metro. Having random readers brought in by Google from all around the world, doesn’t do much for the advertisers or the newspapers.

Yes, you can get away with selling those extra pageviews to your newspaper advertisers but they get to see the metrics too, and it doesn’t take them long to figure out that much of the Google traffic isn’t the traffic they want. That, in turn, lowers the amount of money they will pay for all the pageviews that a newspaper brings in.

Mr Murdoch knows his businesses much better than the Google traffic supporters. He can run the numbers and see if the revenue from subscriptions will outpace relatively weak revenues from Google traffic.

He can selectively use Google and other search engines, and news aggregators, to pull in traffic to “free” content and then shut it off. He has lots of levers to pull in terms of figuring out an optimum for running his business.

In contrast, Google doesn’t have any levers to pull. It relies heavily on access to new content. After all, why use a search engine to find what you already know?

Novelty is extremely important to Google. Yet its only answer to content producers has been “we bring you lots of traffic.” The dirty little secret is that that traffic is very difficult to monetize, it has a low value. Even Google has trouble monetizing its Google News traffic.

Google is very much at the mercy of all the Internet’s content producers and whether they let it in, or leave it outside.

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WSJ chief criticizes news aggregators - creators carry cost burden

Google to Congress: We can help news publishers - if they embrace opportunities

“Google Devalues Everything It Touches” - Wall Street Journal Chief

Murdoch may block Google searches

Google may lose WSJ, News Corp sites

Has Rupert Murdoch Finally Lost His Mind?

Now it’s Murdoch vs. the World as He Threatens to Sue the BBC | BNET Media Blog | BNET

The Intel Reader features a camera with built-in text-to voice software for reading out loud any text placed under the device. [About the Intel Reader]

The form factor of the Intel Reader is very close to that of Mobile Internet Devices, which offer similar size screens, an Atom microprocessor, a camera, and wireless connectivity for about $500. The Intel Reader does not have any wireless connectivity yet costs 3 times more.

I attended a briefing on the device yesterday and Intel said it did a lot of research into usability. It has also partnered with organizations that are active in helping the visually-impaired such as Lighthouse International.

The product comes out of a relatively new Intel business group focused on developing healthcare related products and technologies. The goal is to aid people to deal with health and aging issues in their homes.

The potential market size for the Intel Reader is 55m people just in the US. Next week it is being launched in the UK and Intel says it will be easy to produce versions for other languages.

Is this the right strategy?

Intel is a good technology evangelist for product sectors because it makes the chips, chipsets, and flash memory that are used to create a huge number of digital devices, PCs, mobile devices, smart phones, and servers.

Yet in this case, it is developing and selling products rather than seeking to seed markets and let other companies deal with product development, marketing, and all the other aspects of selling products to consumers.

Intel has a terrible track record in producing consumer products. It has tried several times and pulled out. It used to sell MP3 players, kids toys, and it announced it would sell large screen TVs. [Commentary: Intel gears up in consumer electronics push - CNET News - January 2001]

Intel’s work in healthcare is commendable but puzzling why it wants to be in a business that isn’t about making chips. It would seem it could achieve just as much by developing FDA approved reference designs and licensing its technologies to others with specialist experience in manufacturing, design, distribution, and after-sales support.

Intel is very sensitive to its investors and boosting its share price is a very important goal. This is a very important category of products. It would be tragic if it were forced to pull out because Wall Street didn’t like the profit margins, which by the way are much lower than for its core business.
(I am a member of the “Intel Insiders” advisory group.)

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Please see: Intel introduces a digital book reader that reads aloud to the blind | VentureBeat