Despite his Irish sounding name, Sean Maloney is a Brit and a long time Intel employee. At one time he was personal assistant to Andrew Grove, Intel's most famous CEO, and currently he heads up sales and marketing at the firm. During his time at Intel, he's been involved in many of its projects.

Maloney was brought up in London Docklands and then, in South East London, he said: 'Everything was grey”. His grandfather worked as a docker on the Royal Docks. South East London is far from grey these days, he said.
Maloney talked exclusively to the IT Examiner for our launch issue, and ranged far and wide over a number of topics.

Four years ago in London we met Maloney when he was showing us a WiMAX broadband unit that Intel had just created. The promise of WiMAX is that it can provide broadband connectivity over a wide area, unlike wi-fi, which is restricted to a small active footprint.

We asked why the WiMAX rollout had been so slow. That, he said, was a fair question.

WiMAX, he explained was originally seen as a plan that would take 10 years to complete and the reason why we're not seeing more implementations, is a lack of spectrum. Intel already promises chipsets which support WiMAX as well as wi-fi, probably available in the middle of this year, so the technology is in place, but governments worldwide are dragging their feet on releasing spectra.

He said 'a fat chunk' of the spectrum that WiMAX requires is currently used by TV stations. The encouraging news, at least in Europe, is that in the next three years we'll see spectrum auctions, with the UK being one of the first. He said that 60MHz, 80MHz and 100MHz spectra will come up for auction, which will help enable WiMAX.

Which brought him to the subject of TV itself. More and more people are using their PCs to watch TV, the British Broadcasting Corporation's Iplayer is one of its success stories. Without spectrum, said Maloney, the 'Internet will grind to a halt'.

The big buzz this year is about mobile internet devices (MIDs) and portable internet devices (PIDs). When we were in Shanghai for an Intel Developer Forum earlier this year, Intel was gung-ho about the promise they held. A MID is basically a device with a five inch screen, while a PID has a seven or eight-inch screen, which runs a standard operating system and takes advantage of cell, 3G, wi-fi and we guess eventually WiMAX connectivity.

Intel has designed a low powered microprocessor to power such devices but there's inevitably an overhead in terms of functionality. Both Intel and its Taiwanese competitor Via have suggested that, perhaps in a couple of years, such devices might cost around $250 or so.

But by that time, the price of reasonably well specificed notebooks could be as low as that, with larger screens and with better functionality than a MID.

Maloney said that the idea of a low cost MID is 'probably overstated' and there's more talk about this than the subject probably merits, although in the second half of this year, he said, we'll see many Netbooks on the market.
He said the real question is whether people want or will buy these type of machines, and the jury is still out on that question. We asked what effect a large take-up of MIDs would have on Intel's core market - microprocessors for desktops, servers and notebooks.

He said that Intel still focuses on its core areas of desktops, servers and notebooks. The question, he said is whether people want low cost or fully functional machines. While the mature market, by which we guess he means Western Europe and North America, is in stasis, there's the potential for large growth for such chips. He said that countries such as India, China, Brazil, Russia and the middle East are exhibiting the same type of behaviour as the more mature markets. 'To the degree to which these countries are growing, consumers are behaving like consumers used to in London,' he said.

The next one billion market is in these countries and in all of these emerging and growing markets. And, he said: 'In all of these places, the notebook is the hot item, whether it’s in Columbia or Peru.'
While he agrees that in terms of cost, entry level notebooks have fallen in cost, but for better notebooks, the features have “walked up” as well. He said people are demanding more from their notebooks. An example of that, he said, was that in France the 17-inch widescreen notebook is the best seller.

India and China are prime examples of markets Intel can exploit in the future, he said. “Shanghai,' he said as an example, 'is equivalent to New York in the 1890s”. And in India, malls are opening up all over the country. The number of TV channels available in India, and the promise technology offers is aspirational, and such things will fuel Intel's growth.

Maloney closed by saying that he thought an online magazine like the IT Examiner will help bridge levels of understanding between the mature markets and the emerging markets. There remained a real job to explain globally the swift progress countries such as India and China were making. X