KEY POINTS:
As the world's biggest semiconductor company, Intel Corporation is one of a handful of IT industry behemoths wielding huge power in the tussle to shape the future of technology.
It's not enough for Intel to simply churn out faster, smaller chips. To grow effectively the business needs to
think up new markets for the silicon wafers it produces, and that means getting consumers and the industry excited about new technology.
At the company's latest innovation love-in, the Intel Developer Forum in Taipei this week, the prophesying was in full swing.
Here are six technology-driven changes Intel is backing:
1. Now it's all about the kids
With the IT industry celebrating the connection of a billion computers to the internet, attention now turns to how it can quickly sell its next billion devices. It has the world's 1.2 billion school-aged children in its sights.
"We still haven't tapped into the largest opportunity that is out there in the world," Anand Chandrasekher, an Intel vice-president, told the audience.
"So there's a huge opportunity to expand our market by serving that next generation of consumer."
Initiatives to tap this market include Intel's low-cost Classmate PC, one of a number of IT industry products aimed at helping to improve the educational prospects in developing countries.
Intel joined the One Laptop Per Child initiative this year after earlier scrapping with programme founder Nicholas Negroponte.
"1.2 billion is a big, addressable market and just taking a small piece of that can drive growth for us collectively and not only that, we can do good at the same time," said Chandrasekher. "It's just goodness all around."
2. Expect more intimacy
Computer marketing to adults is about to get more intimate. Another Intel vice-president, Mooly Eden, brought examples of seductive French advertisements to the forum which translated as: "Looking for the perfect companion for every moment".
What were they advertising? "It's not your boyfriend, it's not your girlfriend, it's not your husband, it's not your wife, it's your notebook, baby," Eden explained.
And he can understand the marketing. "I'm spending more time with my notebook than I spend with my wife, so it better be smart, slim and sexy."
3. We're becoming more social
Business users have traditionally driven the IT market but that is changing as the world becomes obsessed with "social networking" through sites like MySpace and Facebook.
Intel says social networking internet traffic leaped from about 7 per cent of total internet traffic to almost 25 per cent during the first half of this year, a phenomenon that can only be good news for laptop makers.
Eden says his wife complained that despite having four laptops in the house she couldn't ever send emails because he and their three children monopolised all the machines. So he bought the family's fifth laptop.
4. Game playing serious business
There were a lot of demos of the latest shoot-em-up PC games flashed on the giant screen at IDF, not because Intel-ites are necessarily big gamers, but because the graphic-intensive programs are the best way to show off the processing power of the company's new chips.
PCs tweaked for gaming remained a niche market, Eden explained, but gaming geeks' insatiable thirst for the fastest machines to power their hobby drives technology innovations which end up in use in other products.
5. The web is turning 3D
Some of that gaming innovation will help power the morphing of the web into a three-dimensional experience. Intel senior fellow Kevin Kahn said online 3D fantasy worlds like Second Life were just the start. Brace yourselves for "para-verses" - mergings of real and virtual worlds which could be the setting, say, for "virtual surgery" to train surgeons without the need to practise on real patients.
"We need to continue to work on how all these pieces get put together.
"If we do all of that, I think we are right at the edge of a revolution in how the computing network environment interacts with human beings that is at least as big as the one we saw in the early 90s when the worldwide web first arose. It's an exciting time."
6. Keyboards and coffee mix
The biggest prediction of all, perhaps, was that one day coffee and laptop keyboards may happily co-exist. Intel demonstrated an under-keyboard film through which circuitry-cooling air can flow but which is impervious to liquids, meaning delicate internal electronics are safe from spilt drinks.
Even better, if you do spill coffee on the keyboard it can be rinsed clean with another dousing of water.
* Simon Hendery travelled to IDF in Taipei as a guest of Intel
