7 of the world’s most powerful tech companies have been accused of forming an antitrust conspiracy to suppress the compensation of their employees by entering into “no poach” agreements. Today, a San Jose judge heard a motion to dismiss a class action civil lawsuit in which former employees seek damages from defendants Apple, Google, Adobe, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, and Lucasfilm.

The damning evidence against the defendants from a 2010 Department of Justice investigation that I first uncovered last week, as well as the plaintiffs’ opposition statement indicate there is more than sufficient evidence for the dismissal to be denied and the case to proceed towards trial. If the defendants lose to or settle, tens of thousands of full-time employees with the companies between 2006 and 2009 could be compensated.

[Update 4:30pm PST 1/26/2011: Judge Lucy Koh says "This case is moving forward...this case is going to survive the motion to dismiss." That means the defendants' motion to dismiss the case will almost surely be denied when the judge files her official ruling soon. Koh said she may dismiss some specific claims but the plaintiffs will be allowed to amend their complaint. She mentioned "It's hard to make the inference that there was no conspiracy". Read on to find out why and what that means for the companies. More details from the hearing at the end.]

Specifically, the senior executives of the defendants, including Apple’s Steve Jobs and Google’s Eric Schmidt, are accused of entering into a network of identical, interconnected illegal agreements not to recruit each other’s employees. Each agreement by itself may be a violation of antitrust laws including the Sherman Act, the Cartwright Act, and other California laws.

The plaintiffs also claim the agreements constitute an overarching antitrust conspiracy because each was made with knowledge of the other agreements, and relied on the other agreements to achieve a common goal of reducing compensation and mobility for highly sought-after skilled tech employees.

According to the plaintiffs’ statement (PDF), the chronology of some of the  agreements is as follows:

• January 2005 – Pixar senior executives (which include Steve Jobs) draft written terms for a no-poach agreement and send them to Lucasfilm
• May 2005 – Apple and Adobe make agreements
• 2006 – Apple and Google make agreements shortly after Eric Schmidt joined Apple’s board of directors
• April 2007 – Apple and Pixar make agreements
• June and September 2007 – Google enters into agreements with Intuit and Intel that are identical to the agreements between Apple and Google, Apple and Adobe, and Apple and Pixar

Additionally, Steve Jobs personally contacted Palm’s CEO Edward T. Colligan to propose an unlawful agreement, writing “We must do whatever we can” to stop competitive recruiting efforts between the companies.” Colligan declined Jobs’ offer, writing “Your proposal that we agree that neither company will hire the other’s employees, regardless of the individual’s desires, is not only wrong, it is likely illegal.”

The plaintiffs request “The Court should deny the motion, lift the stay of discovery, and permit Plaintiffs ‘to secure the just, speedy, and inexpensive determination’ of this action.”

The defendants claim that the agreements were isolated and not interconnected. They claim the agreements were pro-competitive parts of legitimate collaborations between the companies, many of which had executives on each other’s boards or started as the same company as with Pixar and Lucasfilm.

The defendants also claim “The alleged bilateral arrangement provide no support for the overall conspiracy that plaintiffs have alleged in order to name the defendants in a class action”. They motion for continuation of the partial stay of discovery and for the case to be dismissed.

However, my research and sources indicate the defendants’ claims are false, the plaintiffs case is plausible, and so there are no grounds for dismissal. Furthermore, the only reason more evidence about the interconnection between the agreements isn’t available is because they were made so secretively.

The case should be allowed to proceed because the plaintiffs have produced “smoking guns” indicating a deep conspiracy. Specifically, “Do Not Cold Call” lists which defendants used to implement the agreements, and the written terms of Pixar’s agreement with Lucasfilm. These signal that today’s joint motion to dismiss the case should be denied because if discovery is permitted to continue, there’s a reasonable expectation that evidence of illegal activity will be revealed.

Finally, the precedent is that motions to dismiss are “viewed with disfavor and are properly granted only in exceptional cases…A complaint satisfies Twombly [is only eligible for dismissal] if the allegations, taken as a whole, are not ‘facially implausible’” according to the plaintiffs’ statement. Therefore, it would take a very strong presentation by the defense for Judge Lucy Koh to dismiss the case.

If the defendants’ motion to dismiss the case is denied, the case will move towards a trial by jury in June 2013. Rather than leave an assessment of damages to the judge and jury, the defendants may try to settle the case, similar to how they settled with the Department of Justice’s federal case in 2010. In the defendants lose or settle, full-time employees of the defendants could be compensated for the 10-15% of lost wages estimated by the plaintiffs’ law firm Lieff Cabraser.

Update 4:30pm PST 1/26/2012: The judge has lifted the stay of discovery, saying “This case is moving forward…this case is going to survive the motion to dismiss.” Though her official statement hasn’t been filed, she’s likely to deny the defendants motion to dismiss the case. She also ordered Google to produce draft emails in addition to sent emails, and designate which are drafts and which were sent.

During the hearing, the defense argued against the conspiracy accusation and joint liability. It stated that plaintiffs don’t deserve compensation from companies they never worked for and that their employers didn’t have agreements with just because they were part of the so-called conspiracy.

The judge seemed somewhat sympathetic to this, and asked if the plaintiffs would consider breaking up the case to focus on each unlawful agreement separately. The plaintiffs maintained that the agreements were all interconnected.

Afterwards, The head attorney representing the plaintiffs, Joseph R. Saveri of Lieff Cabraser, told me the plaintiffs were comfortable moving forward with their single, joint antitrust conspiracy complaint. The plaintiffs will file an amended complaint that removes any claims dismissed by the forthcoming judge’s statement.

Next, another Case Management Conference is set for April 18th, where that amended complaint from the plaintiff will be reviewed. On June 28th, the court will convene to hear class certification to define what employees are eligible to be represented by the class action lawsuit. The plaintiffs plan to assess evidence surfaced during discovery and determine if only software engineers, software engineers and scientists, or all of the defendants’ employees will be represented by the class action lawsuit.

Following the hearing, Saveri gave reporters a conservative calculation of the possible damages that employees could be compensated for. He said software engineers make $100,000 a year (they make more), their compensation was “suppressed between 5 and 10%” and “tens of thousands of employees were affected”. That means for each year an entry-level full-time software engineer worked at one of these companies, they might be entitled to damages of $5,000 to $10,000. Higher paid veteran engineers could be entitled to much more. The total damages could therefore be at least $150 million if just 10,000 entry-level engineers were affected.

Intel is to buy “a significant number” of patents (approximately 190 patents and 170 patent applications) and video codec software from RealNetworks for a purchase price of $120 million. Under the terms of the deal, RealNetworks says it retains certain rights to continue to use the patents in current and future products.

Says RealNetworks president and CEO Thomas Nielsen:

“Selling these patents to Intel unlocks some of the substantial and unrealized value of RealNetworks assets. It represents an extraordinary opportunity for us to generate additional capital to boost investments in new businesses and markets while still protecting our existing business.”

In addition to the sale of the patents and software, RealNetworks and Intel agreed to collaborate on future support and development of the video codec software and ‘related products’.

Intel is announcing an acquisition today—the company has acquired the InfiniBand business from networking and hosting company Qlogic. Intel says a significant number of the employees associated with this business are expected to accept offers to join the company. The acquisition amount was $125 million in cash.

InfiniBand is a fabric technology that provides the communications links for data flow between processors and I/O devices. The scalable technology is used to connect servers in high-performance computing (HPC) environments.

Intel saus the acquisition is designed to enhance Intel’s networking portfolio and provide scalable high-performance computing (HPC) fabric technology as well as support the company’s vision of innovating on fabric architectures to achieve ExaFLOP/s performance by 2018. An ExaFLOP/s is a quintillion computer operations per second, a hundred times more than today’s fastest supercomputers.

Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Data Center and Connected System Group said of the acquisition: “The technology and expertise from Qlogic provide important assets to provide the scalable system fabric needed to execute on this vision. Adding Qlogic’s InfiniBand product line to our networking portfolio will bring increased options and exceptional value to our datacenter customers.”

Next week a class-action civil lawsuit will be heard in San Jose to determine if Google, Apple, Pixar, Lucasfilm, Adobe, Intel, and Intuit conspired to eliminate competition for skilled labor. In anticipation of the hearing, TechCrunch has obtained evidence from the Department of Justice’s investigation in 2010 which was made public this evening for the first time. It appears to support the plaintiff’s case that the defendant companies tried to suppress employee compensation by entering into “no poach” agreements.

Previously, only the DOJ was privy to the evidence, so there was no way for the public to know whether the settlement came out the defendants’ fear they would lose. Now we know the C-level management at these companies did enter into anti-competitive agreements.

Below you can see the redacted Exhibit Joint Case Management Conference Statement attained from Pacer.org. Filed today, it contains evidence from the DOJ investigation pertinent to the upcoming civil case.

The evidence states that the defendants agreed not to poach employees from each other or give them offers if they voluntarily applied, and to notify the current employers of any employees trying to switch between them. They also agreed not to enter into bidding wars and to limit the potential for employees to negotiate for higher salaries.

In one particularly juicy piece of evidence from May 2005, Adobe’s CEO Bruce Chizen emailed Steve Jobs regarding “Recruitment of Apple Employees”. In the message, Adobe’s SVP for human resources writes “Bruce and Steve Jobs have an agreement that we are not to solicit ANY Apple employees, and vice versa.”

Additionally, documents state that there is “strong evidence that the companies knew about the other express agreements, patterned their own agreements off of them, and operated them concurrently with the others to accomplish the same objective.”

For example, Lori McAdams of Pixar wrote an internal email to others at Pixar  in April 2007 stating, “I just got off the phone with Danielle Lambert [of Apple], and we agreed that effective now, we’ll follow a Gentleman’s agreement with Apple that is similar to our Lucasfilm agreement.”

The defendants ask for the case to be dismissed, stating that the DOJ found “no overarching conspiracy” and that these bilateral agreements were separate. The DOJ announced in September 2010 that it had settled with the companies, establishing that they would cease such illegal hiring practices, even though they never had to admit to wrongdoing. The DOJ currently has the right to check on the companies for compliance.

The plaintiffs seek damages for any salaried employee who worked for one of the defendants during a 4-year period in the late 2000s. That means a lot of Silicon Valley tech workers could receive a payout if the defendants lose or settle the case. The civil case will be heard by Judge Koh in San Jose starting January 26th, 2012, and we’ll have continuing updates on its progress.

[Image Credit: Shutterstock - Bioraven]

Intel knows a thing or two about technology and innovation. Hey, that’s why they hired Will.i.am as “director of creative innovation”. (Wink.) Really, in the same way that it’s catalyzed change in the computing industry (and helped bring modern microprocessing to life), in December Intel launched a platform designed to give young entrepreneurs the opportunity to bring their own innovative ideas to life.

Thus, the company launched “Intel Innovators” to be two things: First, it’s a platform built on top of Intel’s Facebook community that allows young entrepreneurs (specifically, 18 to 24-year-olds) in the U.S. to share their business ideas, grow a fanbase, and receive realtime feedback. Second, it’s essentially a pop-up accelerator — a program that offers $100,000 each month to the best ideas to come out of its Facebook community.

Finalists each month receive some cool Intel schwag (like Ultrabooks, etc.), and winners get Venture Lab training from the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA). Not bad.

The program began taking submissions in November, launched its platform on December 1st, and Intel plans to run the program for three months, with rounds of judging and prizes at the end of each month. (The deadline for submitting ideas for the third round is January 16.) If Intel Innovators gets enough traction, it will likely be rolled out internationally later this year. And thus far the activity on its platform has been impressive, as the team told us that they’ve received hundreds of “high-quality” ideas for each round and have seen “hundreds of thousands of visits” to its Facebook platform over the last month.

So how does it works? Basically, young entrepreneurs can head over to the Facebook app, where they can submit their ideas for startups. Once approved, they enter the big pool. A selection committee (made up of professors, executives, and entrepreneurs) selects the 20 best ideas. Fans and entrepreneurs are given social capital (points) that they can invest in their favorite ideas.

The five that receive the most capital move onto the final round, where they do a live pitch to a panel of four judges (Chief Financial Officer of betaworks Joshua D. Auerbach, Managing Director Intel Capital’s Consumer Internet Sector Mike Buckley, SV Angel’s Topher Conway, and Collaborative Fund’s Craig Shapiro), who award their favorite idea with $50K. The top fan then gets to give the other $50K to their favorite finalist.

Interested in what kind of ideas the crowd favors? December’s winners included Alex Adelman, a 22 year-old from North Carolina for “Cosmic Cart”, a product tagging system that allows users to buy merchandise from any video online. And the second winner (chosen by the panelists) was 24-year-old Virgil Hare from Detroit for LoginWill, a social networking website where people can designate beneficiaries to receive all of their online login information in the event that they pass away. (More here.)

It’s a great program, although it does seem like they didn’t have to include the 18 to 24 age restriction. What about the rest of us? According to Intel, it’s illegal to award financial prizes to people under 18, so there’s that, and, really, they want to tap into tap into college-aged entrepreneurs — to help the young Mark Zuckerbergs of the world take a step forward. (And, hey, Mike would probably agree with the age cap, too.)

While I might balk at that suggestion, it’s hard to argue against giving young entrepreneurs a resource to bounce their ideas off each other and cash to jumpstart their business. Intel has always claimed it’s all about fueling innovation, and programs like this, its Global Challenge at UC Berkeley, and the AppUp Fund show Intel wants to put its money where its mouth is.

Entrepreneurs and their startups are, really, the engine of job creation. In the U.S., companies less than five years old created 44 million jobs over the last three decades and, over that time, accounted for all net new jobs created in the U.S. — this according to the White House.

What’s more, for a stagnant economy, keeping technology and manufacturing jobs in the U.S. is a must, and Intel is doing its part to help create them, and keep them here.

But now I want to see them turn Intel Innovators into a full-blown accelerator. The more, the better.

And for the young entrepreneurs reading, now is the time to submit your idea for a shot at $100K, as the program is currently accepting submissions for the next round — and is doing so until 12 p.m. EST on January 16. Check it out here.

Today at Intel’s CES 2012 Keynote, the firm announced a strategic partnership with Nuance. If you’ve forgotten, Nuance is a voice recognition company, so yelling at your new ultrabook may be a closer reality than you thought.

You’ll have voice commands for checking in on notifications, and the processing never has to go through the cloud since ultrabooks will provide enough processing power to begin with.

According to the Nuance boss, responses will be spoken back in natural language and the program will provide for up to nine different languages, including English, French, German Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, Portuguese, and Mandarin.

They also mentioned that the power is there to eventually enable real-time language translation.

In addition to some new form factors, Intel showed us some interesting new Windows 8 interface ideas. Keep in mind that these are proofs-of-concept rather than working devices, so they may or may not actually appear on the market.

The most interesting new UI demo was the Nikishki notebook, a clamshell with a big transparent trackpad below the keyboard. The trackpad works as a traditional trackpad and then “disables” when you press your palms on it to type. Then, when you close the laptop, some of the screen is visible and you are able to see and use the Windows 8 tiles available through the transparent portion.

This could trickle into the current Intel ecosystem (but it might not) but it was a very cool concept.

Another concept was a Kinect-like gesture control for laptops that lets you make gestures in the air to control the system.

It’s a bit goofy but, in addition to gyroscopic controls and the new Nuance voice controls, you’re looking at what amounts to a few new ways to control your PC.

Intel opened with that goofy guy from “Evolution of Dance,” which wasn’t very encouraging. However, things got better quickly.

Intel is coming down hard on the ultrabook this year, showing off a number of interesting 2+ GHz laptops with Intel processors that can do much more in a package the size of a Macbook Air. These new machines are slim, small, and based on Intel’s Ivy Bridge architecture.

[We are streaming this press conference live right here]
The demos included a super-fast render of a cute photo sharing app including lots of hi-res photos stuffed into a slideshow as well as a clever demo involving a train going over a bridge. The bridge, made up of hundreds of individual parts, is blown up and each part rendered in real time using 50% the processing power of the current chipset, Sandy Bridge.

In addition, the new system allows for secure NFC connectivity. For example, you can “tap” your credit card on the laptop to make a purchase, provided you have NFC capabilities built-in. Each machine manages “correct” cards to ensure that your card won’t work if your card falls into the wrong hands.

Most important, this chipset allows for a much thinner machine. Most laptops go from 9.5mm to 6.5mm with socketless chips that are soldered right into the motherboard (something hackers will hate) as well as improved heat dispersion.

Intel is serious about ultrabooks. They’ve already announced a $300 million dollar investment to reduce the price of thin components and prices are all ready at a commodity price. Interestingly, I suspect that these laptops will become the de facto standard, eventually pushing the standard, inch-think laptop to the side. They couldn’t pull off netbooks, but I think the ultrabook is the new hotness.

Chip maker AMD this morning announced that it has recruited Rajan Naik to become part of its management team.

Formerly a senior engineer at the company’s main rival, Intel, Naik was most recently a partner in McKinsey & Company‘s Technology practice, where he worked for the past 11 years.

Naik, 40, will become senior vice president and chief strategy officer of AMD, where he will be responsible for helping out with strategy development, partnerships, M&A and investment decisions. He’ll report directly to AMD president and CEO Rory Read.

Naik has a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Cornell University and a PhD in engineering from MIT.

His hiring follows that of AMD’s appointment of Mark Papermaster as senior vice president and CTO.

“If at first you don’t succeed, try try again.” It looks like LG and Intel have taken that old adage to heart, if a new report is to be believed. The Korea Times reports that LG will debut an Intel-powered smartphone at CES 2012, but the bigger question is whether or not the device will ever make it to market.

LG and Intel’s first mobile partnership yielded an Android smartphone running on Intel’s Moorestown chipset for CES 2011, but the device was ultimately scrapped. The reason for its premature demise? As the story goes, the device died because of it’s “lack of marketability.”

LG’s brass certainly thinks their Intel smartphone is viable — according to one of the Times’ executive sources, the device could be released as soon this March. Still, the original LG-Intel phone was pegged with a 2011 release date, so take those claims with a grain of salt for bow.

Hopefully LG’s second swing at an Intel-powered phone fares a little better — it’s said to run on Intel’s next-generation Medfield system-on-a-chip, and early tests have yielded some pretty impressive benchmarks when compared to NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon MSM8260 SoCs.

Of course, the real competition is yet to come, as nearly every player in the mobile chipset market is hard at work on their next-generation platforms. Intel has a lot of brand recognition when it comes to PCs, but their lack of presence in the mobile market to date could mean that Medfield could drown in a sea of established ARM-based chipsets.

That’s why the partnership with LG is so critical — despite their handset division spending a few quarters in the red, LG is still the number two handset OEM in the U.S. Having a major hardware vendor taking a chance on their new platform could establish Intel as a real player in the mobile space, and right now Intel’s mobile efforts could use all the visibility they can get.

We’ve been waiting for Intel’s promised smartphone effort for a long, long time now. The few desultory pushes by the likes of Acer and niche OEMs has done little to dent the dominance of rival ARM, whose low-power chips have become an indispensable part of smartphone architecture.

Just last week, though, Intel gave a private showing of a smartphone prototype that appears to be more or less feature complete and ready to be established as the basis for a platform. The device was running Gingerbread (Android 2.3), but funnily enough actually resembles an ice cream sandwich.

The choice of OS is probably just indicative of the test environment; Intel has professed their interest in the newest version of Android, and will likely want their debut to involve it. Look at that phone, though, the similarity really is uncanny. Anandtech has a few more pictures like the one above.

In addition to showing off the reference design, which is just a starting place or example for manufacturers and may not be representative of future products, Intel showed some stats that indicated the new “Medfield” systems powering the phones was no slouch:

These are all Intel’s internal measurements, of course, and as you can see there are no model numbers or actual statistics shown. But we can probably trust the general indication that the Medfield platform is competitive with shipping devices running fairly new ARM and NVIDIA designs. MIT’s Technology Review also noted a few interesting features in their hands-on: a burst mode on the camera that shoots 10 full-size shots at 15 FPS (!), hardware acceleration of certain web and app tasks, and wireless casting of HD video to a TV. We know they have also invested in custom Android distributions, but none were present at the event.

Medfield is a die-shrink and redesign of Moorestown, a redesign of the Atom series, which as you remember was mostly found in netbooks. But although its pedigree might not sound like the best for mobile devices, it seems like Intel has truly focused on making the platform handset- and tablet-friendly.

Speaking of tablets, they also showed a reference design for a tablet:

No, not the most beautiful device we’ve ever seen, which is why it’s at the end of the article here. They showed it running Windows 8 in the slide deck but presumably it would run Android just as well.

Intel expects the first Medfield-based devices to be revealed in the first half of 2012, and hinted that we might see some at CES in January. We’ll be sure to drop by Intel’s booth to bring you pictures and video as soon as we can in that case.

There can be no doubt that Japan is the country of vending machines, and this newest model is perhaps the most advanced yet. Developed by Japan-based tech companies Sanden and Okaya (and Intel), this “vending machine 2.0″ features a 65-inch see-through display with full HD resolution as the biggest selling point.

When there are no potential customers around, the display shows a digital clock and various animations to attract people. Once a person is standing in front of the machine, a facial recognition system determines the gender and approximate age and serves up personalized ads.

Maker Sanden says the machine’s display can produce text, pictures or animations in HD quality.

The company commands a 30% global market share for vending machines and is also active in the US, meaning this prototype could also make its way over to North America one day.

This video, provided by Diginfo TV, shows how the vending machine works (in English):

Intel has just announced that its fourth quarter results are expected to fall below the company’s previous outlook because of hard disk drive supply shortages.

Intel now expects fourth quarter revenue to be around $13.7 billion, plus or minus $300 million, on both a GAAP and non-GAAP basis, which is $1 billion lower than the previous expectation of $14.7 billion, plus or minus $500 million.

Intel explains that while sales of personal computers are expected to be up in the fourth quarter, the PC supply chain is reducing inventories and microprocessor purchases (this is where chip maker Intel is hurt) as a result of the hard disk drive supply shortages. So basically, PC makers aren’t making as many computers, which is cutting into Intel’s revenue when it comes to supplying chips to these device makers. Intel expects hard disk drive supply shortages to continue into the first quarter, followed by a rebuilding of microprocessor inventories as supplies of hard disk drives recover during the first half of 2012.

Intel just came off a strong third quarter, in which the company had its most profitable quarter ever.

Well, it looks like Intel is really putting its money where its mouth is when it comes to mobile. Intel’s global investment and M&A branch, Intel Capital, today officially announced the creation of its new “AppUp” Fund — a $100 million fund that will be used to invest in startups and enterprises developing apps and software tools for mobile devices and PCs.

At the Intel Capital Global Summit in Huntington Beach today, Intel also revealed that Urban Airship and 4tiitoo were the first two companies to receive investment from the AppUpp fund.

As we wrote last week, Urban Airship recently closed a $15.1 million series C round of financing, close on the heels of its acquisition of SimpleGeo, which was once referred to as the “Amazon Web Services” for location-based products. According to Urban Airship, Intel invested in the company’s Series C raise out of its new AppUp Fund; however, it seems that the investor wanted more, as Urban Airship today announced that it has entered into a business collaboration agreement with Intel Software and Services Group as well.

Essentially, this means that Intel’s software and services group will be licensing Urban Airship’s software to embed into Intel offerings, allowing developers to create smart, context-rich apps that take advantage of the startup’s core services, namely: Push notifications, in-app purchasing, subscriptions — and now, thanks to SimpleGeo — geo-location.

For Urban Airship, this is yet another interesting strategic move, as its collaboration with Intel will give it access to the Ultrabook, netbook, and tablet markets through enabling app developers to integrate their services.

Of course, not to be forgotten is the second recipient of Intel’s new mobile fund, 4tiitoo, a German OSV and tablet developer. 4tiitoo’s own “WeTab OS” is an operating system that is optimized for tablets and mobile devices and supports apps from multiple platforms and technologies, including Linux, Java, HTML5, Adobe AIR, Flash, and Android.

As one might guess, Intel said today that its new AppUp Fund is designed to advance innovation (read: mobile technologies) based on Intel architecture, specifically in digital media consumption, context-aware computing, and infrastructure apps. The end goal here is to ramp up development and build out the ecosystems surrounding Intel’s push into Ultrabooks and netbooks.

And to that point, the new AppUp Fund is a complement to Intel’s recently announced $300 million “Ultrabook Fund”, by which the company showed that it is making a big bet that Ultrabooks, the hybrid between laptops and tablets, will be the future of mobile computing.

Intel hasn’t been able to make much of a dent in the smartphone or tablet markets, but they’re not about to give up just yet. ComputerWorld reports that Intel is working to make Ice Cream Sandwich-powered devices a part of their future.

The mobile space represents a huge opportunity for Intel, which is made all the more maddening because they’ve never really been able to crack it. Less than a handful of Intel-powered Android tabs ever saw the light of day, and most (like the Cisco Cius, which ran Froyo of all things) were geared heavily toward enterprise use.

Meanwhile, if you were to peer into the innards of nearly any smartphone or tablet on the market, you would likely see an ARM-based processor. It’s a reality that can elude some, as processors can bear ostentatious names like Snapdragon and Hummingbird that obscure the nature of their architecture.

Now, it looks as though Intel is about to roll their sleeves up and fight ARM’s onslaught. Intel showed off some frankly impressive smartphone and tablet reference designs at a developer event back in September, both of which ran on Intel’s Medfield plaftorm. The company has also promised that the first Intel-powered smartphone would see the a release sometime next year, so it’s apparent they’re beginning to get the lead out.

Given that Intel has their eye on both the smartphone and tablet markets, their apparent zeal for Ice Cream Sandwich makes complete sense. Ice Cream Sandwich is intended to be Google’s unifying OS, one that will bridge the experience gap between smartphones and tablets alike. If Intel can ensure that Ice Cream Sandwich will run without a hitch on whatever mobile chipset they go with, they stand a serious chance at popping up in your next tablet.

For the time being though, Intel is stuck playing the waiting game. According to an Intel spokesperson, Ice Cream Sandwich “includes OS optimization for x86,” so the actual work of getting ICS running may not be too difficult. Still, a concerted effort can’t begin they actually get their hands on the software, so Intel still has a little while to go before they get cracking.

Intel has released their Q3 financials, and for the most part it’s good news for their investors. Their revenue (GAAP) was a record $14.2bn, up $3.1bn from last year’s Q3. Gross margin is down by 2.6%, but net and operating income are both up quite a deal, $3.5bn (16%) and $4.8bn (17%) respectively. Their CFO reports that it was their most profitable quarter ever.

The source of this prosperity is, according to intel, “double-digit growth in notebook PCs” and “strength in the data center fueled by the ongoing growth of mobile and cloud computing.”

The PC Client group saw a 22% increase in revenue to $9.4bn, attributable to the growth in notebook PCs, many of which sported Intel’s new Sandy Bridge Core processors. Their biggest competitor in this space, AMD, only last week released their response to Sandy Bridge, and in addition to being late to market it is reported to be under-performing compared to Intel’s line. So growth in this area is likely to continue unabated for the time being, apart from erosion of the PC market by tablets, phones, etc.

Intel’s Data Center Group is up $2.5 billion in revenue, a 15% increase, though competition here is likely greater and margins smaller per processor. The field itself is growing quickly, however, and for every smartphone Intel isn’t powering, there’s a new server they are powering.

But all is not well in Santa Clara: their Atom group is down 32% to $269mn, a tiny fraction of what it was during the netbook rush of 2009 and 2010. And of course no data is reported for mobile chipsets (other than wireless chips for WiMax and so on), because Intel has almost literally no presence in that sector. CEO Paul Otellini has said on the record, however, that they intend to bring x86 to phones in 2012. Whether that’s part of their intended $4.3bn in R&D spending isn’t clear — and anyway, that wouldn’t include the cost of the sweetheart deals they’d have to cut with handset makers.

One little piece of trivia: they’ve added around 3400 employees this quarter, bringing them to almost exactly 100,000. Congratulations to Intel on this milestone.

The rest of the results, along with commentary and extra information, can be found here at Intel’s Investor Relations page.

It’s no secret (at least, not anymore) that Samsung is scrambling to diversify its mobile platform offerings. Bada, while smart, is kind of a bust, and Android is currently hanging in the balance until everyone figures out just what Googorola‘s plans are.

In the meantime, Samsung’s been a busy little bee, signing a deal with Microsoft to cross-license patents in exchange for Android royalties and collaboration on Windows Phone. But that’s not all. In conjunction with Intel, Samsung is backing the launch of a new open source Linux-based OS called Tizen, which will inevitably replace the recently abandoned MeeGo platform.

Hosted by the Linux Foundation, Tizen is meant for smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, netbooks, and ICE systems, and should be ready to go (both in OS and SDK form) by the first quarter of 2012. Big name members of the Linux Foundation include Fujitsu, Panasonic, NEC, Motorola, and ARM, though it’s unclear who will play a major role outside of Intel and Samsung.

With the new Tizen OS being open source and based on Linux (just like MeeGo), Intel’s Director of Open Source Technology Imad Sousou brings up a wonderful question: “Why not just evolve MeeGo?” In a blog post on the matter, he goes into detail.

We believe the future belongs to HTML5-based applications, outside of a relatively small percentage of apps, and we are firmly convinced that our investment needs to shift toward HTML5. Shifting to HTML5 doesn’t just mean slapping a web runtime on an existing Linux, even one aimed at mobile, as MeeGo has been. Emphasizing HTML5 means that APIs not visible to HTML5 programmers need not be as rigid, and can evolve with platform technology and can vary by market segment.

A question worth asking is what happens to new owners of the only MeeGo-powered phone out there, the Nokia N9. The answer, however, is a bit unclear. First, Intel promised to continue the development of MeeGo with updates already in the pipeline. But early this month, reports circulated that Intel would indeed kill MeeGo development “temporarily.” But Sousou has a response: “Over the next couple of months, we will be working very hard to make sure that users of MeeGo can easily transition to Tizen, and I will be working even harder to make sure that developers of MeeGo can also transition to Tizen.”

Another question is what happens to Bada? Samsung already has Android, Windows Phone 7 (which should become more prominent to the phone maker after the aforementioned licensing deal) and now Tizen. Diversity is a great thing, but no one ever benefited from spreading themselves too thin.

Intel clearly has a hit on its hands. Mooly Eden, vice president and general manager of the PC Client Group, took to the IDF 2011 stage today and announced several things including that, as this posts headline states, the company’s current crop of Core CPUs, codenamed Sandy Bridge, is Intel’s fastest selling platform yet with more than 75 million chips shipped. This major milestone comes as Intel’s next big thing, ultrabooks, are about to hit retailers.

Eden went on to state that by Intel estimates approximately 1 million computers are sold each day with emerging markets leading the growth. Intel likely hopes ultrabooks will spur a revival and bump that number up even higher.

Of course more Sandy Bridge chips will ship before its successor hits computers. The first generation of these ultraportable notebooks will sport Sandy Bridge chips, further extending the sales record, but later versions, will feature 3rd generation chips built around a new 22nm architecture.

Intel has invested heavily in Ultrabooks. Per Eden the first phase is currently underway with the first products hitting retailers this holiday season and phase two comes when Ivy Bridge chips bow in 2012. But then in 2013, phase 3 starts with the power-friendly 22nm “Haswell” processor, which was demonstrated on stage today and is said to allow for unprecedented battery life. By then Windows 8 will be out and the two will likely team up for the next phase of personal computing — or at least I hope.

If the meek capitulation in the headline sounds uncharacteristic of Nvidia’s infamously outspoken CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, it’s probably because he’s bitter. Though the GPU-focused company announced way back in 2008 that it was going to “open a can of whoop-ass” on Intel, very little has happened, at least on the consumer side. Intel and Nvidia have had some major differences, and remain fierce competitors, but it’s been made clear that Intel won’t tolerate anyone making a grab at its x86 treasure hoard.

But Nvidia isn’t going quietly. Or rather, they’re going quietly just so they can sneak around the back. While Intel is cracking its whip at anyone who wants a piece of x86, Nvidia and ARM, among others, are performing a flanking maneuver in the mobile sector.

Intel itself has expressed contrition regarding its mobile and tablet efforts. When you’re shipping a couple hundred million processors every year, things like the iPad get lost in the shuffle, apparently. But the power level of tablets and mobiles is growing, and Intel has not provided that growth. They promised an x86 handset in 2012, but at this point they’re playing catch-up. Only an tiny fraction of tablets and phones sold use Intel hardware — mainly the Windows-running ones. Meanwhile Nvidia is getting lean and focusing on blowing up their graphics and mobile divisions.

The next couple years might see some interesting partnerships, however. The ARM-Nvidia alliance might go up against something like an Intel-Microsoft-Nokia conglomerate, while team Apple watches from the sidelines. It’ll be a hell of a battle, but the winner will really be the consumer, whom every company will be going out of their way to please. Faster, smaller, and cheaper chips and phones. Sounds like a good deal to me.

MeeGo is up in the air.

Nokia turned its back on MeeGo a while ago. Intel, meanwhile, promises to continue to support the open-source community, but reports claim that it has decided to temporarily suspend development of the platform. And so begins the rotation of a mighty rumor mill.

Mobiledia reported on Tuesday that Samsung was interested in purchasing MeeGo, citing unidentified industry sources. It’s true that Samsung does need to diversify in the OS department. The Googorola deal should have that affect on all of the major Android partners. Plus, there’s that whole “Microsoft cashing in on Android” thing to worry about.

But Samsung has even more to worry about. The company is Apple’s favorite litigation target (as well as one of its biggest competitors) and Android is Apple’s greatest obstacle on the path to mobile domination. A new OS would go a long way to get Apple off of Samsung’s back. But MeeGo? While it’s kind-of-sort-of-maybe plausible that Samsung would grab MeeGo, it’s a long shot.

Samsung has its own software platform up and running: Bada. If the company really wanted to partially split from Android, why not just work on the platform it already owns and make it perfect? Plus, even MeeGo’s co-creator Nokia isn’t all that fond of the platform. And as I mentioned earlier, Intel seems to be kind of over it, too. Why would Samsung run to snatch up a platform that has already been dropped by its makers?

Rather than dump on the platform, Samsung took the diplomatic route with its response: “Meego is an open source project which can not be a target of acquisition,” Samsung representative James Chung told CNET.

As far as software acquisitions go, all eyes have been on Samsung. When webOS was partially ditched by HP, rumors also circulated that Samsung may be interested in picking it up. Samsung denied those rumors about as quickly as they denied these.

Chung mentioned that “Samsung has been investing significantly in its own software, solutions, and content to differentiate its product offering and to provide a richer experience for consumers.” In other words, it sounds like Sammy will be sticking with Android for the time being, while continuing to tinker with Bada as a backup project.