Major change at Intel

Intel Chairman Craig Barrett will retire in May. The company announced that independent director Jane Shaw, who joined the Intel board in 1993, has been elected by the board of directors to replace Barrett as non-executive chairman.

Barrett joined Intel in 1974 and has served in many capacities including CEO. In recent years, Barrett has been active in Intel’s World Ahead Program bringing information technology to emerging economies. Barrett is the current chair of the UN Global Alliance for Information and Communications Technology and Development.

The announcement of Barrett’s retirement came just two days after Intel put forward plans to consolidate manufacturing operations and to halt production at older factories. While there are no plans to make cuts at facilities in Israel, the Muslim world will be hit with the closure of an assembly test facility in Penang, Malaysia. A similar facility will close in Cavite, Philippines. Production will also be halted at Fab 20 in Hillsboro, Oregon and wafer production operations will end at the D2 facility in Santa Clara, Calif. The actions at the four sites, when combined with associated support functions, are expected to affect between 5,000 and 6,000 employees worldwide. Not all employees will leave Intel; some may be offered positions at other facilities. The actions will take place between now and the end of 2009.

More connectivity needed

With much fanfare, comScore, a company that measures the digital world, reported that in December, the total global Internet audience, age 15 and older using home and work computers, surpassed 1 billion. The report is based on data from the comScore World Metrix audience measurement service.

The Asia-Pacific region accounted for the highest share of global Internet users at 41 percent, followed by Europe (28 percent), North America (18 percent), Latin-America (7 percent), and the Middle East & Africa (5 percent). Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! sites were the most visited. Top countries by Internet population were: China (179.7 million), the United States (163.3 million) and Japan (60.0 million).

There is a conflict with comScore’s numbers, because back in June 2008, Internet World Stats had claimed there were nearly 1.5 billion Web surfers globally. The World POPClock Projection estimated that this month the world’s population was 6.756 billion. No matter which numbers you use, note that less than a quarter of the world’s population is connected.

No layoffs at MS Saudi Arabia

Despite reports in other Saudi media, Microsoft has no plans to layoff employees in Saudi Arabia. Last week Microsoft announced that it would cut 5,000 jobs worldwide over the next 18 months beginning with 1,400 immediate layoffs. Executives at Microsoft Saudi Arabia were surprised at the inaccurate reports in the Saudi press and put out an official statement about the issue:

“Microsoft in Saudi is not directly impacted by the job eliminations announced by the Company. We expect that the global economic environment will continue to be challenging and we will continue to evaluate our business to ensure that our investments are aligned to current and future revenue opportunities. We continue to believe in the strength of the company, our ability to continue delivering value to Saudi customers and our approach to long-term growth.”

Radical mobile handset changes

In the next five years, the nature of cell phones will change radically, reports In-Stat (www.in-stat.com), a high-tech market research and consultancy firm. According to In-Stat, increasing availability of mobile broadband, operator support for data-intensive devices and improvements in usability for mobile devices brought about by the influence of the Apple iPhone will result in an evolution in the designs of handheld devices.

“Consumers are nearing their limits adjusting to the added complexity of converged devices,” said David Chamberlain, In-Stat analyst. “Feature proliferation is impinging on usability. Handset vendors and mobile operators must carefully evaluate the drive toward increasingly converged devices with features and functions that add direct value to consumers.”

A report from In-Stat, “Future Cell Phones: Diverging the Converged Device 2008-2012” found the following:

*Wi-Fi will become increasingly available in handsets; In-Stat forecasts more than 300 million Wi-Fi-enabled cell phones will be sold in 2012.

*Annual smartphone sales will double over the next five years.

*By 2012, annual sales of handsets able to receive video content will exceed a half-billion.

*According to a survey of over 1,500 individuals from In-Stat’s technology adoption panel, almost 60 percent of respondents indicate some level of interest or already use Wi-Fi for VoIP using a cell phone.

Firings rise in January

It’s not your imagination. During January the numbers laid off in the global IT industry were worse than at any other time. According to the TechCrunch Layoff Tracker, 80,076 job eliminations were announced or completed since the beginning of the year. The total number of tech layoffs since TechCrunch began tracking in late August is 195,856. Check it out at www.techcrunch.com/layoffs.

OLPC donates laptops to Gaza

One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a nonprofit organization whose mission is to provide every child in the world access to a modern education, is donating 5,000 XO laptops to the United Nations Relief and Workers Agency (UNRWA) for Palestinian refugee children in Gaza. XO laptops are rugged, solar-powered, and connect to other XOs and the Internet.

The organization emphasized that this donation represents OLPC’s renewed commitment to reaching children living under extraordinarily difficult circumstances such as in the midst of war and poverty and in unacceptable conditions of extreme and abhorrent deprivation.

“Given the recent damage done to schools in what is already a very poor and very isolated part of the world, it is more important than ever to give these Palestinian children access to rugged, connected laptops that will open up worlds of knowledge and hope to each of them,” said Nicholas Negroponte, founder of One Laptop per Child. “It is our hope that this small but important donation will spur others to act now.”

Giving children in Gaza connected laptops that can be operated without the need for electricity will provide them an opportunity to connect beyond their confined environment and end their isolation. UNRWA runs close to 800 schools for Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, Gaza, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, and is uniquely equipped to deploy and implement the use of the XO laptops.