Intel Has Acquired Kno, Will Push Further Into The Education Content Market With Interactive Textbooks

We had a tip about, and have now confirmed, Intel’s latest acquisition: Kno, the education startup that started life as a hardware business and later pivoted into software — specifically via apps that let students read interactive versions of digitized textbooks.

“I can confirm Intel has purchased Kno,” a spokesperson told us just now. The company is not disclosing deal terms but we’ll hopefully going to speak to John Galvin. Read more: Intel

Intel Steps Up E-learning Efforts With Kno Deal

A startup called Kno once made headlines by introducing an education-oriented tablet–just as Apple’s iPad was turning into a juggernaut. That idea didn’t last long, but its refashioned business became attractive enough to win over Intel. The chip giant late Friday said it is buying Kno and taking on its 95 employees, the latest step in bolstering an Intel sideline that includes designs for education-oriented laptops and a tablet aimed at the classroom. Kno, led by CEO Osman Rashid, was founded in 2009 and first showed off its hardware at a 2010 All Things D conference. The device, which started at $599 began shipping that December, featured a larger screen than the iPad and was announced along with an option for a dual-screen configuration that would be held vertically, like an open book.

  

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen–whose firm was a major Kno investor–says Rashid was among the first to foresee the impending tablet revolution and its impact on education. “He nailed the tablet phenomenon nine months before the iPad came out,” Andreessen recalls. Read more: INTEL

Intel’s Foundry Business Can Be Truly Exciting

Intel ( NASDAQ: INTC ) has some of the world's most valuable assets: leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing plants and a world-class technology research and development team. These assets have been utilized to great effect in the company's PC and server microprocessors, and they are likely to prove instrumental in doing battle in the low-power system-on-chip space. But Intel is also gearing up to utilize this to build chips for others.

This is quite possibly Intel's most exciting growth area, particularly as it will allow the company to indirectly participate in a number of semiconductor markets that it would not have otherwise been able to. Read more: Intel (NASDAQ: INTC )

Intel A Better Way To Grow

Which takes us to the mistake Intel made by focusing on “the numbers” when given the opportunity to build chips for the iPhone.  Intel was a very successful company, making key components for all Microsoft PCs (the famous WinTel [for Windows+Intel] platform) as well as the Macintosh.  So when Apple asked Intel to make new processors for its mobile iPhone, Intel’s leaders looked at the history of what it cost to make chips, and the most likely future volumes.  When told Apple’s price target, Intel’s leaders decided they would pass.  “The numbers” said it didn’t make sense.

The cost and volume estimates were wrong.  Intel made its assessments expecting PCs to remain strong indefinitely, and its costs and prices to remain consistent based on historical trends. Read more: Intel

Intel Investors Should Not Care About The 5s' Benchmarks

The burden of driving future growth has fallen on Intel's mobile processor division. Investors seemed optimistic about the prospects of Intel (INTC) making a successful entry into the smartphone and tablet market with their upcoming Silvermont Atom system on chip processors, but sentiment took a turn for the worse after the release of the iPhone 5s.

 To penetrate the mobile CPU market, Intel would need to make a processor that is significantly better than its competition, and there was Apple (AAPL) beating them in certain key benchmarks - Many Intel bulls, myself included, reacted badly to this. Read more.

Now Facebook Is Looking At Dumping Intel For ARM

Following on from the news that Google GOOG +1.39% is looking at dropping Intel’s chips for its server farms in favour of custom designed chips based upon the ARM design, we hear of something very similar from Facebook. Indeed, Facebook is sufficiently interested in the idea that it is already making sure that it’s code would be compatible with such a move:

Facebook has taken further steps in its quest to run production workloads on ARM-powered servers.
The smoking gun for this dramatic shift was a post by Facebook on the Hip Hop Virtual Machine blog on Thursday that indicated the team is implementing ARM processor support in its translation engine, which turns Facebook’s PHP code into 64-bit x86 instructions to execute on compute nodes. The HHVM is Facebook’s fundamental unit for running its mammoth PHP-based social network.

We had the speculation about Google making a similar move just a couple of days ago.. Read More: Intel

Intel Has Truly Come A Long Way

It never ceases to amaze me just how much fear, uncertainty, and doubt was spread with respect to Intel's (INTC) ability to compete in the ultramobile markets. While it is absolutely clear that Intel had to learn some very hard, painful lessons about building a highly integrated system-on-chip for smartphone/tablet applications, and while it is also clear that Intel really should have invested in this area much sooner.

Intel's lack of presence in the mobile markets has always been an issue of proper investment in the right products rather than some fundamental technical issue. While I may be somewhat hard on Intel at times, particularly as it is no fun to see the likes of Qualcomm (QCOM) hog all of the spotlight (although if you're a Qualcomm shareholder, you'll disagree with me), the truth is that Intel has really come a long way and with each passing day, Intel continues to close the gap in all relevant areas. Read more: Intel's (INTC)

Wearable Technology: A Technological Fashion Statement!

What if your watch, reading glasses and other accessories were intelligent devices whose capabilities went beyond their conventional use? That is the idea behind ‘wearable technology’, which tech companies are using to incorporate cutting-edge technology into everyday accessories like watches, glasses (Google Glass), wristbands, fabrics, fitness monitors (Fuelband and FitBit), etc.

The different applications of wearable technology were initially limited to the health, fitness and military sectors; but commercial manufacturers are rapidly catching up with their own ideas on how it can be applied in everyday life, as a result, wearable technology is increasingly being fused into chic accessories.
Read more: Wearable Technology