Intel has earmarked $15 million to be spent over the next 5 years researching how people interact with their machines.  They will be focusing on the social aspect as opposed to hardware and software; trying to discover how people interact with their machines, from cell phones to servers as well as investigating how people would like to interact with their machines.  The Register believes that this is an attempt to work on the next generation of patents and to avoid the fate of Xerox's PARC.  While they invented many of the communications technologies which we take for granted today they never managed to capitalize on them successfully enough to survive in the market.  Since Intel has the money to invest in research and a demonstrated ability to capitalize on their intellectual property this expenditure makes sense and should help Intel remain at the top of the technological heap for quite a while.  In the mean time, it sounds like a great project to be working on.

"The new Intel Science Technology Center is a $15m program funding five years of research into social and anthropological research into how people use technology. Rather than focus on how hardware and software are used, the new center will be looking at how human wetware interacts with the resulting data."

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