I was in a meeting last week where both of the staff from my client had a strong affinity for the word “layman”. Whenever I strayed into territory they preferred to find too technical, they would say “well, I’m just a layman…”. I’m thinking of a particular conversation about their server hard disk running out of space. “What” they asked “you mean the memory? We bought some more of that, didn’t we?”

I despair of the whole concept of the “layman”  - they seem to stop being laymen and turn into the copyright-smashers from hell when it comes to downloading the illegal copies of movies that make up the bulk of the space consumed on their file server, after all.

Now, I’m sure we all have our stories about wilful ignorance in pursuit of a bit of nerd-baiting, but this particular BBC article caught my eye, because it implies that the “layman” state of mind is doing a good deal more damage.

Yet, even when you’re roaming in a foreign country, it’s not as if the voicemail storage is moved from your home phone company onto a different server

In short, Jude Law is alleging his phone was hacked while he was in New York. Apparently this means that because the phone was passing through a US cellular network at the time, it makes the illegal activity subject to US law.

Astute readers of the PC Pro site may well be ahead of me here, but let me summarise our mobile expert’s take on the matter. Paul Ockenden quite rightly pointed out that the hacking consisted of taking a guess that a phone user hadn’t changed their default voicemail PIN, as used for picking up messages when not on one’s home cellular network, or when calling in from a landline.

Yet, even when you’re roaming in a foreign country, it’s not as if the voicemail storage is moved from your home phone company onto a different server. Nor is it the case that the phone is where the voicemail is stored, or recorded – I’m sure that when Mr Law was flying over to New York, to take the case in point, any voicemails left for him while his phone was turned off in the plane wouldn’t have been lost or rejected.

So when the News of the World “hacked his phone” all they were doing – as has been established already – was to make a UK domestic link to a UK domestic voicemail server. The country the phone was in is immaterial.

The only incident of real “phone hacking” I’ve personally handled was that of a chap whose phone was cloned while he was at a business convention in New York. His bill hit £1,200 in three days – a charge that his network provider and the forces of law and order in the Big Apple seemed to be indifferent to pursuing.

I guess this particular kind of technically blind justice depends on whether you hit the mood of the moment. In the case of Mr Law (what a great pun) and News International, I would personally prefer that they make a case that is less dependent on a basic misunderstanding of a technical cloud-computing matter.

Relax – when I say Microsoft’s “connecting you to the cloud” this isn’t the long-predicted release of a brain implant chip worthy of Cronenberg at his finest. It’s a bit more straightforward, though describing it to those not already in daily contact with the cloud produces furrowed brows – not because it’s hard to understand, but because systems designers considering a cloud rollout in their business can’t believe it’s not included already.

It is now. Robert Wahbe was the main presenter in the TechEd keynote, and he laid out a toolkit for linking your internal servers to your Windows Azure cloud instances. There’s Azure Connect, which is all about the TCP/IP pipeline between the inside of your organisation, and the inside of your cloud presence: and there’s Concero (not Concerto, before the subeditors shoot me), which is a data synchroniser, so you can have an internal server and a cloud server and keep the two in step.

Before the hawks jump on me, I haven’t found out at this early stage what granularity Concero has – whether it’s de-duplicating, or data atoms, or block sized, or any of the other options in what’s becoming an amazingly versatile and interesting field. All you really need to know at this point, is that Microsoft has realised that most of its faithful are faithful for good reasons, and there’s every reason to go through a fleshing-out process with cloud toolkits.

Microsoft has realised that most of its faithful are faithful for good reasons, and there’s every reason to go through a fleshing-out process with cloud toolkits

It seems a little disappointing to talk about “fleshing out” in the context of a show with lots of announcements – all of us at PC Pro love a big headline or the chance to use the term “game-changing” but the fact is, most people want to see long-term improvements in the tools they are using in projects they can’t just flip about the marketplace at whim.

TechEd 2011 is definitely for them, with a slew of announcements as broad as this: clever code tricks to flip your status updates to Windows Phone 7, Hyper-V support for CentOS as a guest, Exchange Clustering features added to Hyper-V, 3rd-party SAN management interfaces included in System Center Virtual Machine Manager.  It’s pretty clear that the challenge for Wahbe and friends isn’t about stealing market share from anyone else: it’s about stealing market share from previous versions.

There were two products that bucked the trend. The first is the early signs of legitimate, non-cracked and hacked uses for Kinect. Wahbe introduced a video from a Canadian liver cancer surgeon who was able to do wobbly, bloodstained T’ai-chi inside the operating room to run an Xbox with Kinect as a cursor manipulator for a CAT scan data set. No illuminated fingertips or Tron-style neon armpits required – Kinect watched his hands and the middleware on the Xbox translated the movements into rotations and (pardon the gory analogy) drill-downs through the patient. That struck me as a lot more wow-worthy than a lightsaber emulator.

The other product, which I will be covering in a lot more depth at a later date, is Windows Multipoint server. This is a resource-sharing server, aimed squarely at education, charities and the Third World, where there are more eyeballs and screens than there are computers to power them. Dean Paron demonstrated the wide variety of ways that Multipoint can give small groups of people Windows 7 desktops without running multiple machines.

Only as the demo progressed and he started using phrases like “I wanted to include, but”… or “I’m going to see if we can…” that the penny dropped: TechEd was his first demonstration of the product to a non-internal audience, and he wasn’t a sales professional: he was the head of the development team. Contact like that is what makes these events worth the jet-lag.

Eagle-eyed surfers will already have spotted my bumbling efforts as part of the Cloud Power initiative, and those who didn’t can now go and have a bit of a giggle, come back, and say whatever comes to their mind in reaction to the footage.

I thought I’d do a bit of a behind-the-scenes account here for interested parties, and also explain why I’m happy to take the risk of being an idiot in a video that exists purely because a single vendor – Microsoft – wanted to make it.

First off: Tim and I didn’t rehearse. I believe I get worse with each rehearsal, starting from a pretty low base in the first place. We had a set of basic questions but we didn’t have any set conclusions we were expected to work towards. Given the breadth of the questions being asked, this was something of a relief.

The Microsoft guys didn’t rehearse for this event specifically either, but on the other hand they are presenting on these topics almost all of the time. If there was going to be a difference of opinion across the panel it would be because we were coming in from different perspectives – well, to my mind, that’s the point of making the video in the first place.

Probably the strongest criticism I know will come in from the “balanced comment” faction. That’s the kind of guys who want the most glancing aside to encompass the entire of human civilisation, and woe betide any commentator who leaves out a name-check for this or that. Yes, we made a video with Microsoft. No, we didn’t set out to encompass the whole planet, much less the whole of computing, or the whole of cloud, or even the whole of the topics that our questions raised.

When Jon Honeyball and I were caught on the hop by tough questions during a client meeting, we managed to dive into the subjects raised for almost four hours

I don’t think it detracts from the video to say that when Jon Honeyball and I were caught on the hop by tough questions during a client meeting, we managed to dive into the subjects raised for almost four hours: very beneficial to that client (we think!) but not a practical proposition when making a web video.

Also, making every possible outing as perfectly balanced between market players as possible is, I would propose, a bit of an insult to the intelligence of the audience. We expect you guys to be able to remember things we’ve said, from one piece to the next. We positively invite you to think through the issues raised – in print or as video – and come back with “so that means” questions.

Secondly, everyone benefits when players say what they want to say. Tripping them up or sniggering at them about Vista doesn’t help to understand what they are doing (or in this case, thinking) about a particular topic. That doesn’t mean I won’t be doing a bit of sniggering in the future – it seems that a large part of Microsoft’s appetite to enter into this kind of co-operative venture is driven by our reputation for taking no nonsense from anyone – but I would say that the topic here produces a bit of suspension of the usual rules of combat.

Cloud (as the video shows) makes me wave my arms about a lot and try to find reasonable metaphors for how people need to approach a thoroughly abstract subject: I think that Tim, me, Simon and Planky were joined in a common task of interpretation, which to the credit of the Microsoft guys stayed pretty abstract, except when I decided to clear up a few things I’d heard about Office 365.

I don’t mind sharing the thought that I was scared of being asked to think away from the keyboard; and I’m reasonably convinced that my topics gain a bit of fresh perspective from being handled this way. It’s not just “aren’t we clever, we can do video” – I think this is a useful thing to do.

All the potential suppliers look like a random collection of logos to the consumer: dipping into the attendee list at Parallels Summit here in Orlando this week we have MigrationWiz, R1Soft, Smarsh, Tilera, Apptix, BobCares, Comodo (that last one is an old friend to PC Pro, so maybe they’re not quite as random as the others).

And I don’t mind confessing: I accepted the invite out here out of utter ignorance of what Parallels does that has to do with cloud. I knew them mostly as a supplier of virtual machine software for Apple users wanting to run Windows.

Don’t worry, I didn’t manage to stretch one small product out for a couple of days of face-to-face interviews: as it turns out, about 75% of the Parallels revenue stream comes from products that help cloud service providers automate the actions that result from setting up a new user.

The chart that details the entire lineup is an A2 fold-out, so I’ll move past all that and get down to what was for me the most interesting question (and not just because I asked it) of my time with Birger Steen and Serguei Beloussov, the two-man team who are the driving force behind Parallels.

Who are you like?

What I wanted to know (as a way of hiding my preceding complete ignorance of their product range) was, what company did they most want to emulate in terms of how people think of them?

Beloussov, who has that slightly excessive intellectual candour typical of a lot of post-Perestroika Russians, immediately said: “Intel”.

I wasn’t the only person in the room blinking in shock at that answer. Berger Steen is Beloussov’s number two, now promoted to CEO so Beloussov can focus on strategy, and he was clearly waiting for Serguei to back that up with a few justifications.

The point about “doing an Intel”, apparently, is that Parallels wants to stick to its knitting, and focus on the code they produce.

The way they incorporating billing in their hypervisor and site control package means that Parallels has essentially no competition in the market, and has at least a good shot at turning itself into the de-facto benchmark standard for that job.

A bit like Microsoft

That was the explanation I had been struggling to find for most of this week, for the singular presumption of the scope of the event here. A bit like Microsoft, they are inviting some distinctly non-techie types along to present their view of the market and the potential size of the business over the next five years.

They even had a demo which solved another cloud conundrum for me: in saying that their products were especially handy for hosting companies targeting the small business sector, they hauled up on stage an Australian chap from a small Japanese hosting firm, Tsukaeru.

He singlehandedly bridged a divide I’ve been wondering over for a year or two now, between the “business-hosting, toe-in the water” types and the “single enthusiast” types. Parallels demonstrated their beta release control panel application, with a Tsukaeru host that they could successfully slice into a 1-core, 300Mhz 128Mb RAM web server.

The demo (being a beta) crashed a bit here and there, but this is the first time I have seen any cloud or virtualisation vendor approach the kind of guest-to-host denisty that the plain HTML web-hosting business has been predicated on for the last decade and a half.

So could Parallels succeed in making themselves a widespread enough standard that they can think of themselves like Intel? Only if they can get themselves noticed by the right people, like you.

I see from the news that Twitter has been forced to bend over and succumb to a thorough data rogering by the US Government.

It appears that some foreign nationals are up in arms about this.

Can I say “I told you so”? For over two years, I have been raising the question of the territoriality and legal framework of data held by US companies, especially when the data is held on US territory.

There are even considerations and worries about data held on EU-hosted servers owned by US corporations. As I reported a month or so ago, at least Bob Muglia, president of servers and tools at Microsoft, was honest enough to admit that Microsoft would hand over data to the US authorities if so instructed, because they would have no choice but to comply.

Frankly, I feel a lot happier about Microsoft’s cloud solution now in the light of knowing what would happen. Confusion and obfuscation has no place in this matter.

So you can imagine my reaction to another Very Well Known cloud vendor from America, with facilities in the UK, who, when asked by me to clarify their legal position on EU hosted data and attacks by US government, said: ”At this time we’re not able to comment on this question.”

When I followed up by asking: “To be clear, the CTO has no comment on whether the data of his customers would or would not be taken out of the EU against the wishes of his customers?”, I received the reply: “We cannot comment on this at this time.”

Now please answer me this question: is this a company that you feel comfortable doing business with?

This week I have been getting unpleasantly confused by a pre-Christmas present of cloud computing hype. Take the CEBR 2011 Cloud Dividend report, commissioned by EMC, which joyfully predicts that the cloud will benefit the European economy by as much as £148.9 billion per year by 2015. Other highlights include the creation of 289,000 jobs in the same timeframe, although the UK could apparently lag behind the rest of Europe courtesy of our relatively poor broadband infrastructure.

As regular PC Pro blog readers will know, I’ve already suggested that there is such a thing as free cloud computing for the small business. OK, the free lunch option is restricted to the very small end of the small business scale, and even then we are talking more Google Mail than a fully blown data centre in the cloud, but it’s a start. The smaller your business, the bigger the benefits of the free cloud rings true as far as I am concerned. What’s more, I would contend that it’s a damn site more relevant to most small businesses than reports of some notional global economic value of cloud computing sponsored by a company pushing the cloud as hard as it can.

And yet more so when the methodology behind that value is about as clear as mud to anyone without an economics degree. I’m sure that the Centre for Economics and Business Research knows what it is doing, but I’m not so sure that too many people out here in the real world really care.

Seriously, does “the Cloud Dividend report identified the cost savings (CAPEX and OPEX) made by companies adopting cloud computing services and measured these against macro and business variables such as business development opportunities; business creation; indirect gross value added (GVA); tax contributions; as well expenditure on cloud services to determine the Euro value of the technology in each country” make sense to anyone out there?

Back in the real world, I would venture to suggest most small businesses couldn’t give a rat’s arse about predictions of how much the cloud will add to the national, European or global economy, regardless of how that prediction was arrived at.

What your average small business (heck, any business at the end of the day) is really interested in is the bottom line: what will investing in the cloud cost the business, what return will it bring on that investment, and how long will it take to realise it?

The questions I hear being asked include, for example, why should I buy into cloud data storage when storage hardware is so cheap I can have all the onsite and offsite data backup I want, for a sum that is not only a fraction of the yearly cost but a one-off investment at that?

Most small businesses couldn’t give a rat’s arse about predictions of how much the cloud will add to the national, European or global economy

It’s a bloody good question when you come to think about it, and if all you are looking at is the plain vanilla value-for-money equation (and forget the data security, access, ease of use, outsourcing all that jazz arguments), one that is very hard to counter with a cloud-based response.

Or how about questions relating to cost savings on power (servers are cheaper to run if someone else is paying the electricity bill) and support (ditto) which need to be worked out before any move into the cloud is considered? How does the balance sheet compare between purchasing and maintaining an IT asset such a server compare to the ongoing cost of outsourcing that requirement to a cloud provider?

The cost of securing cloud data is often ignored, especially at the small business end of the scale, but that’s definitely a false economy as the Data Protection Act doesn’t care too much how big your business is, just how you protect customer data. Push it out into the cloud and your worries are not necessarily transferred to the cloud service provider, it all depends upon the exact wording of your service agreements.

So I guess what I am saying here is that small business needs to get its calculator out and do some very real world sums before jumping into the cloud with both feet and all associated data, to ensure that it’s not just throwing money into the ether.

No matter how much those who would extoll the virtues of cloud computing as the future of IT try and bombard and befuddle us with macro-economic predictions on a global scale, it’s the here and now that is of concern to the average small business which has its feet planted firmly on the ground.

Here’s an interesting question to ponder: is the cloud good for your small business but bad for employee relations? The question started to form some weeks back after I penned a piece here entitled free cloud computing for your small business in which I concluded that the smaller your business, the bigger the benefits of the free cloud.

I was somewhat taken to task for making this assumption, both publicly and particularly in private via email where, using language that would shock an Irish builder, it was explained in no uncertain terms that I was talking out of my posterior again. The main argument being that free cloud services suck because free service support always sucks on the one hand and any business which entrusts its data to the cloud, free or otherwise, is bereft of common sense. I disagreed then, and still do now. The cloud is, inherently, good for business. Period. But whether it is good for staff relations could well be another matter.

A newly published Populus Poll, commissioned by cloud service provider Keboko, which suggests that cloud computing could save UK businesses a staggering £104 billion per year. This research, consisting of interviews with 1,117 adults, calculated that with the average UK worker tied to their desk for 37 days a year just to carry out basic admin tasks and an average hourly wage of £13.04 multiplied by some 29.02 million people in employment that the cost of ‘red tape’ was £104 billion a year.

The point being, I think, is to suggest that this money could be saved by streamlining business processes which are non-billable, non-core and generate no additional income. Data entry, for example, accounts for some six hours a week for 18% of workers and a fortnight a year just updating reports. The report discovered, unsurprisingly, that workers would rather focus on new business activities at work: meeting prospective clients, supporting existing ones and promoting the core business activities.

It took me a while to figure out just what the hell this had to do with ‘the cloud’ of course, as to be honest it wasn’t really that obvious to me. It’s obvious to Charlie Cowan, Keboko CEO, who explained that many companies “still use outdated, badly-designed software that can only be accessed in the office” and, it’s all becoming clearer now “by adopting cloud-based applications that can be accessed via a web browser, organisations could work much smarter”.

Translated, this means that staff could reduce ‘dead time’ travelling between meetings by updating reports on the go, leaving them more time to do the billable work in the office. But it also means employees can do such work from home, leaving meetings for when they’re in the office.  Far better to do that boring stuff at home, eh chaps?

Keboko, which launches its cloud services today, was founded by Cowen to make business applications in the cloud more accessible for small businesses, and that’s a commendable thing. I have no qualm with the concept of the cloud reducing operating costs, increasing business agility and improving productivity by virtualising business applications. However, I am wary whenever I read something that implies, however subtly, that employees working from anywhere, at any time, is the cloud-driven future. What about the negative implications for the workforce?

If all that admin is costing British business so much, there will be precious little saving to be made by paying staff to do it at home. Which implies that workers will be expected to do it at home for nothing, just because the technology means they can. And workers have already kind of shown they are not up for that, even the thought of a free iPad didn’t seem to incentivise them much.

When I’m the boss, I expect to be sitting up in bed at midnight writing up a report and then checking my email at 6am in the morning. It’s par for course when running your own business, after all. If I had any staff, other than my wife who doubles as my personal assistant and office secretary, I certainly would not expect them to do the same.

Funnily enough, my secretary has just joined me in bed as I type this, and the look I am getting is not straight out of a slightly dodgy adult movie, believe me. So, yes, by all means virtualise applications and move their day-to-day management into the cloud but please don’t expect me, or any other boss of a small business for that matter, to ask our already overworked staff to take their work home with them. My marriage, and my business, could depend upon it.

I have been using free or open-source desktop software for some time now, and know many a small business which does exactly the same. However, transferring that concept of ‘free is good’ to incorporate cloud computing for business has been a much harder sell.

I recall one small business client literally laughing in my face when I suggested that a ‘free cloud infrastructure model’ might be the way forward for his just-the-two-of-us company on a limited budget. He stopped laughing when he received my invoice, of course, but that’s a different story altogether.

The point being that this guy, like many others, missed the point: low-cost and no-cost does not have to equate to doing business on the cheap. Which led me to thinking, isn’t it time we stopped automatically adopting a ‘you get what you pay for’ mentality and instead seriously started considering that a free lunch might not taste so bad after all?

The real beauty of using a free online infrastructure such as the Google cloud is that as well as being inexpensive, it’s also as simple to set up and maintain as you can possibly get. Ticking two out of the three ‘most important requirement’ boxes for the majority of my consultancy clients in one easy strike: cost and simplicity. The third, by the way, is security.

Aha! I hear you cry, we have found the Achilles’ heel of your argument. But, I’m not sure that’s the case. Your level of security does not automatically increase with the amount of money you throw at the problem. At the smallest of small businesses level, the part-time and working from home loner, the installation of a completely free internet security come antivirus solution can work just as well, if not better, than a fully blown commercial offering. They keep the computer free of infection without impacting upon system performance courtesy of a lack of bells and whistles. However, moving up to slightly larger small businesses, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t let someone else throw money at the security issue and then benefit from that investment for nothing.

That is, essentially, what happens when you take advantage of something like Google’s cloud implementation with services such as Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Sites. With a ‘Standard’ Google Apps account all these are free, for up to 50 users, yet your data isn’t stored in creaky shed out the back while ‘Premier’ customers only get into the tightly locked-down data centre.

Google has invested big time in both physical and process-based security, meaning the data centres are nicely hardened using things such as biometric access controls and multi-tiered security perimeters. A multi-layered security process protocol is used to protect your data, and these processes are audited to ensure data confidentiality, integrity and availability. Google applies synchronous replication of data activity across apps so as to simultaneously preserve that data in multiple secure data centres – meaning if one is unavailable another kicks in as a fallback.

As someone who talks to numerous small businesses about their data security arrangements, I am starting to come to the conclusion that storing data in the cloud is less of a concern than storing it on a series of unsecured thumb drives or netbooks, which almost inevitably get lost at some point. Think of it as putting your money in the bank rather than under the bed at home.

The free cloud isn’t for everyone, I readily admit, but it’s one of those things to which the newly invented (by me) online law of inverse business benefit applies: the smaller your business is the bigger the advantages become.

Oh, and just to ramp up the excitement, I’ll take you through my top seven in reverse order.

7. Location Awareness with LED Visible Lighting

This is one of those ideas whose appeal lies in its sheer simplicity. In short, it’s a system that warns you when you’re too close to a car in front – or when a car is too close behind you. The clever part is that it works out the distances involved by triangulating the beams from LED headlights and tail-lights.

It’s a fast system, and accurate – the showcase stand included a live demo with some toy cars, tracking their locations in real time to a precision of under an inch. It can even track multiple cars at once.

Sadly, there’s one big catch. Just watching regular headlights is apparently too imprecise, so Intel’s system requires them to pulse on and off at a rather alarming 20MHz. The effect is invisible to the human eye – it would need to be about half a million times slower for you to see it – so it doesn’t directly affect safety. But it does mean the system is effectively useless until everybody in the world fits a 20MHz modulator to their headlights. That’s a pretty tough sell, especially for a benefit that you don’t actually experience yourself (having your headlights adjusted only helps other people to see you, not vice versa).

It’s also worth noting that this isn’t actually a problem that many people would admit to. Reverse parking, yes, that’s an area where some electronic guidance can be very helpful. But when you’re out on the open road, one would hope you can detect the cars around you without the aid of a high-tech sensor. Still, it’s a fun demo.

6. Energy-Efficient, Scalable I/O

It’s a bit of a mouthful, but EESIO is another simple idea. At present, the high-speed buses that ferry information around inside a PC can consume up to 10W before the system’s done a single calculation. For a low-power PC or notebook, that’s not small change; and as transport speeds ramp up, I/O power demands will continue to rise while other components become more energy-efficient. The likes of QPI and PCI Express could thus end up being among the most power-hungry parts of a system.

What’s the solution? Well, on Tuesday Mario Paniccia suggested Light Peak could be used as an internal high-speed bus – and the idea does have some merit. But converting every bit into laser light and back again is hardly an energy-efficient approach.

Enter EESIO, a technology which does away with all such back-and-forthing. It appears as an unobtrusive grid of contacts on the outside of a chip package, which can be connected, via a ribbon cable, to another EESIO-compatible chip. The two units can then communicate directly, without having to involve the motherboard at all. It’s a seamless way to link a CPU to a GPU, to a bank of DIMMs or even to another CPU in a multiprocessor system.

In truth, EESIO isn’t quite as straightforward as it sounds. You can’t simply hard-wire chips together, not least because they probably won’t be running at the same speed. The chips therefore require integrated EESIO controllers, and that incurs a certain cost in terms of complexity and power consumption. Happily, Intel engineers claim a 10Gb/sec EESIO link still requires only 10% of the power used by current internal buses.

Since EESIO requires support inside the CPU package, it will probably take a degree of investment to get it off the ground. Sooner or later, though, some sort of high-speed, low-power bus is going to be needed, and once EESIO is in place the overheads are attractively low.

5. Simple Energy Sensing

I don’t know about you, but every time I get an electricity bill I take a stiff drink, then solemnly determine that I must find a way to reduce my power consumption. Then I take another drink and somehow lose interest in the idea. The fact is, getting to grips with your energy usage is a difficult, boring project.

That’s where Simple Energy Sensing comes in. Simply plug the device into a socket and it’ll keep track of how much energy your various appliances are consuming, along with a running tally of your electricity bill.

Now hold on, you’re probably saying. That’s not innovative at all. Indeed, it’s not. What is innovative, and terrifically clever, is that it can identify individual appliances by their electrical signatures. For example, turning on a lightbulb causes a distinctive fluctuation on the power line, which the system can identify as a lightbulb-type pattern. Turning on a television produces a much more complex pattern, as its various components kick in at slightly different rates, which again can be recognised. The system can thus keep track not only of your total consumption, but of exactly which appliances are contributing to it at which times.

I must confess, at first I was sceptical as to whether this system could really distinguish between, say, a toaster and a hair-dryer. But the sampling resolution is extremely high, enabling it to catch tiny fluctuations lasting for a thousandth of a second or less, and the developers seem certain that this is more than sufficient to distinguish between the range of appliances in an average home.

Perhaps the cleverest bit is the interface. Yes, you can monitor your usage on a computer, as above, and see which appliances ought to be unplugged, replaced or used only in the dead of night when electricity is cheaper.

But Intel realises that only geeks will do that on a regular basis; so they’ve also put together a stylish tablet-type console that would look at home in any kitchen or hallway. Suddenly the idea goes from a nerdy proof of concept to an attractive lifestyle upgrade that could quickly pay for itself.

4. Oasis: Smart Computing on Everyday Surfaces

On the podcast, we recently commented that the idea of having a touchscreen computer in the kitchen is a nice one… but that it would immediately get covered in flour and grease. Intel’s Oasis project uses a projector and a 3D camera to turn your work-surface into a large, virtually indestructible tabletop touchscreen.

It’s a 3D camera because that allows Oasis to tell when your fingertip touches an icon, without getting confused when you simply move your hand above the surface. The shadows cast by your arms as you use the “screen” can be a little intrusive, but you can’t have everything.

And it gives Oasis an impressive ability to recognise not only fingertips but any sort of physical object. When Intel’s Beverley Harrison (the mastermind behind the system) placed a green pepper on the work-surface, a context menu automatically appeared next to it, enabling her to view recipes involving peppers or add peppers to her shopping list. Adding a piece of steak to the work-surface brought up a recipe for steak with green peppers, while setting down a tub of ice cream caused an automatic countdown to pop up, warning us against leaving it out of the freezer for too long.

These, of course, are just demonstrations. The system has huge potential beyond the kitchen, and to be honest the next challenge is probably working out what to make of it. The ability to work with physical objects is cute, but it doesn’t seem to open many doors: you can’t back up a pepper for later, or email some steak to a friend. But even if that part of the project is a dead-end, the combination of a 3D camera and a projected display could make Oasis an affordable and extremely robust alternative to large-scale touch-screen displays.

3. Wireless Energy Resonant Link

Call me a nerd, but the idea of domestic wireless power gets me excited – I love the idea that my phone could be charging whenever I’m at home, even while it’s in my pocket. Without power cables trailing everywhere my home would be a lot tidier, and it would be cleaner too as I wouldn’t have to remember to plug the Roomba in.

Intel’s latest breakthrough doesn’t make all of that a reality, but it’s a step in the right direction. Currently, near-field wireless power systems (such as you’d use in the home) typically work by generating a magnetic field which induces a current in a remote receptor. The problem is that the receptor has to be directly in front of the induction coil to get the benefit.

Intel’s new system, demonstrated to me by Josh Erickson, is able to sweep the “focus” of the induction coil across a wide area – without physically moving the coil – and automatically lock on to locations at which the energy is absorbed, indicating the presence of a receptor. This expands the usable scope to almost 180°, effectively turning wireless power from a directional technology into an ambient one – though if two devices are discovered at widely different locations the system can’t power them simultaneously but must pan between them.

Erickson explained that the system was currently able to send a charge of two watts over a distance of around four feet, which ought to be just about enough power to charge a mobile phone. For the time being, though, the size of the coils is a stumbling block: the coils in the demonstration each had a diameter of around nine inches, but if you were to shrink the receptor down to the size of a pocket device, it seems the induction coil would need to be several feet across.

Full disclosure: I’m not an expert in this field, so forgive me if I’ve got the terminology slightly wrong. But the basics of what Intel has achieved are easy to understand, and it’s clearly a very promising step.

2. Resilient Computing

Most processors are capable of running above their stock speeds. A 2.2GHz processor might in fact be able to run at 3GHz, but it’s deliberately throttled back to provide what Intel calls a “guardband” – a generous degree of tolerance that guarantees error-free performance even at high temperatures and heavy load.

The Resilient Computing project has no truck with guardbands. Their project statement declares that running CPUs at such cautious speeds “leaves performance and power on the table.” They run their chips at the very limits of their abilities, achieving an advertised 40% improvement in performance from the same execution cores.

Surely, you would think, this leads to horrifically unstable systems? Well, it probably would if these were ordinary desktop processors. But the team has modified them to detect when the execution pipeline has been unable to keep up with the overclocked core, and to cleanly resume processing at the next clock cycle. This eliminates the most common cause of overclocking-related failure, at the cost of a few wasted ticks.

In fact, “a few” is an understatement: a demonstrator showed me that a “1GHz” chip running at 1.4GHz was in fact losing more than three million clock cycles per second (it’s the meter at the top of the pile in the picture) to pipeline misses. But that still translates to an overall performance benefit of 39.7% with no loss of stability. Going the other way, it’s also possible to cut the power going into the CPU by as much as 20%, and use the same resilient logic to keep the system stable.

The thing I love about the resilient approach is that it simply makes more effective use of a capability that’s already there – much like the Turbo Boost technology in Core i5 and Core i7 processors. Since it gives such a large benefit, at such a low cost, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it appearing in real products sooner rather than later.

1. Single-chip Cloud Computing

In truth we’ve seen this project before, but it’s still my favourite of Intel’s current research projects. Remember how Larrabee was supposed to combine 32 x86 cores into one all-powerful parallel computing card? Well this project – informally referred to as Rock Creek – has 48 cores on a regular CPU die. And, unlike Larrabee – gosh, I seem to be saying that a lot lately – it actually works.

The difference in approach is simple. “The idea with Larrabee,” explained Intel’s Jason Howard, “is that all those cores were supposed to be fully cache coherent. And we said, that’s a stupid idea, because making that happen is almost harder than doing the actual computations.”

“So for this chip we manage cache coherency in software. Yes, there is an overhead, but it’s just a lot easier to do.”

In reality, the overhead seems very small: Mr Howard demonstrated multi-threaded benchmark scores scaling almost linearly as he permitted them to run on more and more cores.

Surprisingly, he revealed that the execution cores are based on the Pentium design – not the Pentium 4, but the “classic” Pentium, launched in 1993, shrunk down from the original 0.8µm process to 45nm. (Foolishly, I neglected to ask whether Rock Creek therefore suffers from the notorious FDIV bug.) The choice, he said was simply because the Pentium core can run more or less all modern code, while remaining compact enough to etch 48 times onto a single die.

Does the whole thing therefore run at 60MHz, I asked? Apparently clock speeds haven’t been decided – always a hazard with prototype hardware. Mr Howard did reveal, though, that they’ve had chips working in the laboratories at speeds from 125MHz all the way up to 1.3GHz.

You’d imagine that running 48 cores at 1.3GHz must eat up a lot of power, but with all cores active the processor idles at around 75W, and even at full tilt draws only around 125W.

“And we can shut down cores in blocks of four when they’re not needed,” added Howard. “That’s done in software too – the whole thing is designed to be managed in software.”

It’s fair to ask what practical use there is for Rock Creek. After all, most desktop applications benefit more from single-core speed than multi-core parallelism. Howard himself didn’t suggest a killer application for it, though the official project title obviously hints at the idea of offloading tasks to a “cloud” of local CPU cores.

But with its native x86 support, one possible role for Rock Creek is to provide an accessible alternative to stream processing, as popularised by Nvidia’s CUDA – and Intel has certainly aimed it at the same markets.

“We’ve already given a hundred of these to researchers and academics,” Howard revealed. “You know, just so they can start considering how they might program for it.”

Unlike most of the other cloud announcements you might hear, Microsoft is ready to acknowledge the true basics of cloud computing: you might have a cloud all of your own, you might have a trusted supplier, but none of that matters unless you can make a choice during a normal working day to pick up your work and make use of the servers up the line, at your supplier’s hosting centre.

The early adopters of this kind of ability have been on platforms that naturally lend themselves to that process: and Microsoft’s Bob Muglia drew everyone’s attention to the new parts of Visual Studio and Server 2008 R2 which, so far as this humble network person can tell, permit internal developers well versed in the delights of presenting SQL data in web pages to carry on doing that, while making use of the (suitably compatible) cloud.

And it is as a humble network person that I spotted the elephant, this time not in the room. There have been three demos – two in the admittedly bleeding-edge Reviewer’s Preview session, and one in front of all 8,000 attendees – in which it became very obvious that, while absolutely no blame for failure could be laid at Microsoft’s door,  there was definitely something amiss in the bandwidth department.

I suspect the fault is more local than remote: when this number of nerds descend on a town, any weaknesses in wider area connectivity are going to get a merciless pounding, and it didn’t matter where I went, both the convention centre and the hotel were enjoying (if that’s the word) slower connections for the average user than I am used to seeing from my 3G data stick in the UK.

Couple this with dire warnings not to connect to any offered Wi-Fi base stations around the hotel and a consistent picture starts to form: the Demo Gods for cloud applications have moved, into the net.

Let me be perfectly clear: the concepts presented by Microsoft are well-aligned with what the average business that writes its own software will want to achieve. It’s plain that Microsoft see a lot of benefit in keeping third-party specialists involved in setting up clouds – which is a more open way to make this happen, than by just dragging the whole planet into one giant, undifferentiated grey lump (yes I am thinking here about Google).

However, all of that will fall on stony ground unless the network piece, inside the company and outside, is built with the actual demands of these super-duper applications in mind. And in a literally graphic demonstration of what happens on a worst-case peak-load day, the Microsoft Communications Server demo stuttered through a combination shared-whiteboard and HD-video call – with both ends of the call being inside the convention centre.

Part of me is itching to reprise Bruce Willis’ role in the original Die Hard, make fists with my toes and start crawling barefoot through the ducts and services of the convention centre to identify the bottleneck; but the other part of me is wondering why Microsoft is clearly not addressing the consequences of bandwidth profligacy. (Just when we are all getting to grips with the lap-dancer style of marketing being taken up by ISPs: see a little more, pay a little more; bounce over your cap, pay through the nose).

TechEd is a developer’s show, and there’s no especially strong reason for network companies to try to sell to developers – but some of us are going to have to make this stuff work.