Length does matter when it comes to tech shows

FROM WELL OVER a dozen fests year around and across the world, IDF has now kind of stabilised on three shows annually.

The yearly fun starts with the China-based global IDF Spring every April, alternating between Beijing and Shanghai. Next one is the main course, the IDF Fall every September – sometimes it's in August like this past one – the Fall name in this case symbolising the state of the economy more than the seasons, which in ole Frisco are always about the same anyway.

Finally, we get the only remaining 'regional' show, in Taiwan usually in October every year. Originally, the Taipei IDF was one of a dozen regional IDF's which included places like Japan, Germany, Israel, Russia, India and such.

Here we present a quick, burst-mode, high-bandwidth blast around the latest show.

Firstly, it's just a two day affair, noticeably shorter and more hurried compared to its 'global' brethren. The keynotes are squeezed into the mornings and afternoon of both days too.

Nevertheless, it was an interesting combination of IDF Frisco repetitions and some updated stuff. Some of our favourite faces, like Mooly Eden for notebooks and Kirk Skaugen (aka John McCain Jr - the facial resemblance is just too much to ignore) for da enterprise, were there. Stephen Pawlowski (pronounced Pulaski by some of Intel US staff, no names mentioned) covered his Nehalem babies, where the Gainstown DP one seems to be going through quite a protracted and complicated birth, it seems.

Pankaj Kedia, the Intel Atomic man who managed to out-talk even yours talkative truly at the last CeBIT, helped entertain the curious press with his visions of future trips to Moorestown and the usual "Only IA runs full Internet on the move" wise words, yet to be proven fully one day when the above township-named CPU fits into at least some Wide Iphone type device.

Some interesting stuff from the show...

Since our Sylvie peeped into Derek Perez' most intimate thoughts on his beloved boss at Nvision, the PR peeps worldwide were extremely cautious with us INQ hacks - the proximity of any us seems to raise the Red Alert, as Intel's PR guru Dave Dickstein quickly proves in the below pictures:

Yeah, the LCD cover on that Thinkpad laptop does help there a bit.

Talking about laptops and such, this IDF happened at the same time as Asus announce their brand new eeePC S101 - the Asus head honcho Johnny Shih was there to proudly show it on the stage to Intel's Anand Chandrasekher, with another Intel-enhanced fuel guzzler right behind them.

Since we mention Anand's speech, it is of the utmost importance to highlight the dethronement of pr0n as THE leading Net traffic creator. Social networking replaced it at a whopping 27 per cent of total net traffic last year. Well, can't exactly complain about that: instead of lonely self gratification, the online geeks are finally trying to find someone to share it with, through the only method they know - online. At least the population is going one way up on the sociability scale.

Nehalem DP isn't out yet, but the uni socket extreme desktop variety is out any moment - look at this wall of 37 supposedly ready Nehalem mobos, all with uni or dual variants of the Tylersburg chipset. The Asus Rampage Extreme also boasts - or should I say unfortunately has - the NForce 200 PCI bridge.

Talking about Nehalems, here's our Haifa friend Mr Eden carrying a working Calpella notebook. You can alo see the Clarksfield / Havendale mobile Nehalem debug mobo running eight threads, as well as the UrbanMax, a new tablet cum notebook cum media player which should be ready for low power mobile Calpella Nehalems with integrated graphics on the, yes, CPU.

As usual, plenty of technical sessions were there, obviously hardware dominated as this is Taiwan, but with a bit of software stuff nevertheless. In my mind, Intel should adjust a few things: lengthen the show to three days to accommodate more in-depth hardware focus beyond even the IDF Frisco, since this is the hardware mecca of the world.

Then, match it with an expanded Tech Showcase resembling a mini-Computex to embrace more Taiwan, mainland China, Korea, Japan and Singapore vendors - after all, they are all within a few hours flight.

Then, move it to early November, for more time space between the Frisco and Taipei rounds - that way, at least some real news could be in by the conference time.

Finally, how about another venue rather than TICC? It is kinda old and boring, frankly - a newer, shiny spanky place would help further uplift the show... µ