Fudo, Mad Mike pucker up

THE SECOND DAY at IDF is for international hacks and hackettes and, these days, the Intel executives are very, very careful not to spill any beans because the non-international journalists from the US used to get very mad in the early days, arriving on a Tuesday to find we'd written up the show before anything had started.

This is not to say the second day wasn't interesting.

The first guy to speak talked about Intel and healthcare and as far as we understood what he was saying, Chipzilla is inventing technology which will erode the few civil liberties we have left. His talk certainly eroded the English language - it was so full of words like focus, solutions and issues that our pen couldn't keep up with it. Others in the room were furiously snapping pictures of the guy, and apparently writing reams of copy probably full of words like issues, solutions and the rest.

This was so interesting that we took multiple shots of the hacks writing feverishly.

The high point of this guy's speech was his revelation that Intel's new buzzphrase is Personal Awareness. It is obviously a very different religion than Buddhism but it is unclear what the core philosophy is apart from the fact that it means Chipzilla will sell more chips.

The second guy, Mario Paniccia, was way more interesting than the first because he is the director of Intel's Photonics Technology lab. We asked him about the worldwide shortage of polysilicon that is preventing solar panels from being more widespread in this new brave world of Personal Awareness.

He said there isn't a shortage of polysilicon to the best of his knowledge. Really, we were trying to winkle out of him whether or not Intel was getting into the solar cell business, which is highly lucrative. We failed miserably. We took another snap of the hacks looking incredibly interested and scribbling furiously.

A guy came on to talk for an hour about sales and marketing. We couldn't take this any more, went out to the waiting area and bumped into Fudo.

The theme of this IDF - and IDF is 10 years old now - is to multiply your connections and maximise your mobility. What can this mean?

After Fudo and I had lunch, we listened to Arvind talking about Intel Capital. He wouldn't take questions after his spiel - we wanted to ask him about the yields on Intel Capital, a division of the firm that acts like a VC.

The thing ended. There was supposed to be a dinner for the international journalists at the gruesome Metreon, just down the road. We got there bang on time, asked the security guys where the Intel event was and told to go to the fourth floor. The fourth floor was like a building site, which is quite the flavour of the day inside buildings here in San Francisco. We couldn't fathom it out. We gave Fudo a friendly peck on the cheek, came home and had a long long nap.

Some hacks have been to see AMD - they sported rather nice looking bags. AMD doesn't seem to want to talk to the INQ after Charlie spilled the beans about its cunning three core system while the others were under something called a non disclosure agreement. We don't do those. µ