Intel’s cosy relationship with Apple, supplying the microprocessors for its computer range, does not extend to the iPhone yet. But there may be a way into the hottest cell phone through Intel’s WiMAX technology.

The applications processor in the iPhone is supplied by Samsung and uses a core based on the ARM architecture for small devices, rather than Intel’s x86 architecture, which dominates the PC world.

Sriram Viswanathan, a vice president at Intel Capital, its venture arm, and head of its WiMAX programme, says the ARM processor limits internet access such as unfettered viewing of YouTube videos.

In an interview, he spoke about bringing the x86 world to smaller gadgets - mobile internet devices, as Intel describes them. This will be enabled by its ultra-low power, small form-factor Silverthorne chip, which will eventually have a WiMAX chip attached.

AT&T, the exclusive carrier for the iPhone in the US, is bidding for new spectrum here and could well choose to run a WiMAX next-generation network on it if successful, he says.

Although he did not make the connection, this could open the way for Intel to at least supply a WiMAX chip, and perhaps a Silverthorne microprocessor for future generations of the iPhone.

Intel’s WiMAX chips, which offer broadband connectivity over wide areas, will definitely be featuring alongside regular Wi-Fi chips in new high-end notebooks from the second half of next year - about the time that new WiMAX networks around the world will be going live.

Intel appears to have been behind the deal this month that saw Sprint and Clearwire team up in the US to create a national network, although Mr Viswanathan would only say: “We were very actively involved…it was obvious to us that there was tremendous benefit in them working together.”

Intel owns about 30 per cent of Clearwire, after putting more than $600m into the wireless provider, its biggest ever venture-capital investment.

“We are not investing just enough anymore, we are investing as much as we can to meet our strategic objectives,” he says of Intel Capital’s new tactics to open up fresh markets for the company’s chips.

“If we think we can drive the market, it makes sense to put as much money as we can into that area.”

A company that has helped workers circumvent their IT Departments turned enterprise-friendly today with the launch of a new suite of products.

For anyone who has loaded programs such as Firefox and Skype onto a USB memory stick to run on locked-down work PCs, RingCube uses virtualisation techniques to give you the same solution, but on steroids.

Its MojoPac software, launched almost a year ago, has won several awards. Shan Appajodu, chief executive of the Silicon Valley company, gave me a demonstration of its capabilities running it from a 40Gb Soyo drive plugged into the USB port of a computer that had a basic Windows XP installation.

The Mojopac software was installed on the external drive and created a virtual Windows desktop, on which appeared any programs installed on the drive, including video games that performed without any noticeable lag.

It enables anyone to take their familiar Windows environment, including programs, wallpaper and other settings, on the road and operate on it from any plain vanilla PC with a USB port.

This might concern IT departments whose rogue workers represent a security risk running unauthorised software. But Mr Appajodu says his enterprise suite represents a new paradigm for provisioning and supporting desktops and is a secure solution.

It consists of MojoStation, MojoDrive and MojoNet. MojoStation is a secured MojoPac image of a corporate desktop environment that workers can download from their company’s website and run on their computers at home or in the field, as if they were sitting at their PCs at work.

MojoDrive is a drive with the software, which can be built by IT staff to recreate the corporate desktop. MojoNet offers MojoPac over a secure corporate network, with offline and synchronisation capabilities.

RingCube says its solution has advantages over other virtualisation software, such as provided by Citrix and VMWare, because of its low-cost, small (30 megabyte) footprint, high performance and offline capability.

It also represents the next level compared to services such as Sandisk’s U3 software on USB sticks, which the company is phasing out. However, RingCube could face competition from a successor service being worked on by Sandisk and Microsoft, due in the second half of 2008.

In the meantime, RingCube would do well to partner with storage manufacturers on appealing combinations of its software with external devices. Mr Appajodu says he was initially rebuffed by the hard-drive makers, but they are now showing renewed interest.

Whether it’s the consumer or enterprise version of MojoPac that interests you, RingCube’s solution represents one of the simplest and most practical applications to date in the hot space of virtualisation.

Probably the biggest party of the year for the next-generation web crowd was held by Techcrunch last night at the offices of VC  firm August Capital.

Techcrunch, the blog creation of Michael Arrington, prides itself on getting the scoop on the latest start-ups and there were plenty on hand displaying their web wares on August’s terrace.

Among the emerging trends, the proliferation of social networks is leading to services that will centrally manage your identity for the different sites. Boyan Josic, founder of profilebuilder, demo’d to me his service profil.es.

As well as allowing users to create a profile on the site, it allows them to control how it is seen from other sites such as Facebook, MySpace and blogs where they have pasted the code for the profil.es icon.  Techcrunch itself has more on this.

I also met someone from a European site called Blymee, which had a similar pitch but isn’t expected to launch until the end of the year. Both expand on the common identity that OpenID offers and are appearing before Google’s take on unifying social networks in Socialstream.

Finding the Techcrunch party should have been easy with directions provided by Dial Dir-ect-ions, a service that allows you to dial a number, say where you want to go and receive an instant text message with a turn-by-turn guide.

Dash Navigation was also present. The Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins-backed company has a novel Dash Express product that supplements normal GPS satellite navigation with traffic information culled from other users in the Dash network. They automatically transmit route and speed to Dash’s central servers using a built in GPRS connection, which can also be used to carry out internet searches for nearest petrol stations, restaurants and other information.

There was a sizeable British contingent at the party, I met Pete Flint, chief executive of Trulia, and King.com’s Robert Norton, a veteran of the UK bubble, who compared the event to the old days of First Tuesday.

Alex Tew of Milliondollarhomepage fame was there as part of a first visit to the Bay Area and talked about the refreshing atmosphere and attitude to entrepreneurs he found here. He said he was currently working in London with two friends on some social networking tools.

Michael Birch, chief executive, of Bebo was upbeat about the prospects for his social networking site, which he said was now growing fastest in the US. He was also enthusiastic about a short-form video series Bebo was funding and featuring on the site from the lonelygirl15 team.

Kate Modern is about the life of a 19-year-old Londoner, but the Bebo chief said his San Francisco staff were already hooked on the show.

It certainly offers better entertainment than Michael Arrington and Om Malik in orange and green wigs.

Tech journalists can usually be relied on for sharply written assessments of new products, web apps and commentary on the latest trends, but taking their keyboards away can put them well outside their comfort zones.

The advent of podcasts and video has pressed many into trying new media, with decidedly mixed results.

Net radio show This Week in Tech or TWIT is one of the biggest podcast downloads on iTunes and enjoys its success thanks to the banter of tech hacks that are real characters - people like Leo Laporte and John C. Dvorak. Cnet’s Buzz Out Loud is another chatty, knowledgeable, popular podcast.

But it is hard to make tech and the web interesting to a general audience and the industry has yet to discover the equivalent of what Gordon Ramsay has done for catering or what Jeremy Clarkson and the Car Talk brothers can say about the automotive industry.

Established print journalists have been going to extremes in the medium of video – from David Pogue’s overproduced musical tribute to the iPhone for the New York Times to Kara Swisher’s jerky ramblings on the Wall Street Journal’s All Things D site.

Silicon Valley is not Hollywood nor New York and it is seriously lacking in its ability to tell stories in a watchable way with professional presenters. But that hasn’t prevented blogger Robert Scoble from joining PodTech to film the zeitgeist nor Kevin Rose, Digg founder, from setting up web TV network Revision3.

Revision3 and another rock-star blogger, Om Malik, announced a new online show at a party at San Francisco’s de Young Museum on Wednesday night.

After showing clips of other Revision3 shows that seemed to have the production values of Wayne’s World, The GigaOm Show did at least look professionally assembled. In Om, it has a real character, albeit minus his trademark cigar, and there was some kind of chemistry with co-presenter Joyce Kim.

Shows like this Vision Om version are around because online video is earning big advertising dollars right now, so even more of its ilk are likely. Viewers will just have to suffer as the Valley fumbles with the formula and hopefully gets it right in the end.

Microsoft seems to have a rare user interface hit on its hands. Called "Surface", and announced publicly in May, this was something whose business potential even Microsoft didn’t believe in - until now.

As the name suggests, Surface is a large table-top computer with a touch-sensitive screen. The user moves images around by touch, like a cross between the interface on the iPhone and something that Tom Cruise might have used in the movie Minority Report.

"Frankly, it had a lousy business case," says Steve Ballmer. "Bill was giving it mouth-to-mouth." As Microsoft saw it, the high cost of the machines meant that they were likely to be limited to niche industrial uses. Since unveiling Surface, however, the company says it has had a wave of interest, from retailers who want to stock it to an unnamed US government agency that sees a wide range of uses.

Microsoft executives now say they are putting investment behind the Surface machine to see if they can build a market. It’s a reminder that the company’s developers can indeed come up with hot products, though it also says a lot about its internal development process. You could never see Steve Jobs accidentally stumbling onto something in this way.

It isn’t a better search engine that will bring internet users flocking to Microsoft. It isn’t a hot social networking site, or indeed any other knock-out service that beats the rivals hands down. It is… integration.

What? Well, this is how Kevin Johnson, who runs a large part of Microsoft as head of the platforms and services group, sees it. Asked at the financial analyst meeting today how he is going to win a bigger slice of the online audience, he drew a parallel with the Office suite of applications. Stitching together a range of things online to give people a "seamless experience and deeper integration" is apparently what it’s all about.

This is the antithesis of the Web 2.0 vision of the world, one that sees the glue as being more important than the individual services themselves.

In its way, though, this is also the strategy that Google is now pursuing. Despite all its talk of never taking on anything new unless it can deliver something far better than what came before, Google has its own share of me-too services and has been intent on stitching together its own suite.

Properly executed, the Microsoft approach ought to help. With hundreds of millions of Hotmail and MSN users as a foundation, it should be able to draw more of that traffic to its in-house search engine. It already has reach, with a massive audience online - now it has to keep those users longer, so integration makes sense.

The biggest enemy is time. Even if successful, it may take Johnson years to overhaul Yahoo!, let alone make a dent in Google. So why not a big acquisition - say, of Yahoo itself - to get things moving faster? Without naming names, Johnson questioned the idea of paying up to buy a competitor in a business with very low switching costs, where users could quickly go elsewhere. But given his evident ambition and growing impatience, big deals have to be on the radar screen.

Visionary or foolhardy? Steve Ballmer clearly thinks there’s a moment when companies have to ignore what their shareholders are saying - and even what some of their customers are saying. Shareholders and customers aren’t in the long-term vision business.

That was the underlying message here in Redmond today as Ballmer and Bill Gates kicked off Microsoft’s annual gathering for big investors and financial analysts. This is Gates’ last year before stepping aside next June, but his total lack of interest in the ways of the financial world is still apparent. You could almost shut your eyes and imagine you were at Google.

It was left to Ballmer to throw down the gauntlet to Wall Street. Investors think that "long-term" means three years, but that’s not much more than a single product cycle in many of Microsoft’s businesses. Go back 18 years, and even customers were saying Microsoft would never make it as a enterprise software company that they would trust their corporate data to, it shouldn’t bother. Look at it now.

The same relentless approach is now being applied to online advertising and consumer electronics - even though Ballmer concedes that many investors question whether Microsoft should be in these consumer markets and whether it can master the different business models involved. To judge by the questions so far, the financial types who have made the trek to Redmond have yet to be convinced.

Consumer electronics companies are catching on to the quick-sharing habits of the YouTube generation, with everything from iPhones to internet televisions becoming online video enabled.

The camcorder market sees this as a major opportunity for growth. Unit sales have been stuck at around 4.7m in the US for the past few years but the Consumer Electronics Association is predicting a 20 per cent increase next year due to the growth of user-generated content on the web and high definition.

The $120 Flip video camcorder has led the way with idiot-proof recording and a USB connection that flips out. I’ve used the movie option on my Sony DSC-T100 digital camera to record and upload to YouTube and Sony’s "Net Sharing Camcorder" , which will also function as a webcam, goes on sale in September at $200. A Casio Exilim stills camera, out next month, even has specific YouTube uploader software.

Samsung have just showed me their MX-10 camcorder, also out next month and costing around $300.

It’s shaped like a soda can and has simple controls like the Flip’s, including a record button and zoom built into the flip-open display.

The MX-10 records on a standard SD flash memory card used in digital cameras. It comes with a 512Mb one, but 4Gb and even 8Gb cards are now becoming affordable, giving several hours of recording time.

In the demonstration, Samsung took the card out and slotted it into a notebook’s card reader, quickly uploading the footage to YouTube. The lightweight camcorder also has both TV and PC playback modes, recognising that many people are now hooking their devices to their computers rather than their TVs to review their home video efforts.

There’s nothing new about a CEO complaining about the stock market. When it comes to the bosses of some European tech companies, though, you sometimes have to feel a twinge of sympathy.

Case in point: Frank Dangeard, the head of French tech group Thomson, which has been through a wrenching change as it turns itself from a consumer electronics company into a concern specialising in digital video technologies.

Dangeard, who was brought up and spent much of his working life in Canada and the US, thinks French financial analysts – and the media, come to that – just don’t get tech. For a year after selling Thomson’s old TV business to the Chinese, he says, he met hostile questions from reporters asking why he had sold off a French technology treasure.

On a visit to San Francisco earlier this week, he exhibited equal disdain for French analysts who he accuses of being fixated on his company’s past. With 6bn euros of sales, Thomson is turning into pretty much a pure play on digital video technologies (though it still relies for a sizeable chunk of its cashflow on a declining DVD replication business, and it won’t be until next year that it starts to present a “clean” set of results unencumbered by the past.) Yet its shares still trade at about enterprise value, the same level as when Dangeard joined three years ago.

There seems to be external validation for Dangeard’s thesis that European and American investors are worlds apart when it comes to assessing technology companies. French shareholders have bailed out of the company, he says. From 50-60 per cent two years ago, the French holdings have collapsed to less than 10 per cent. In their place: US value funds, which now own more than half the shares.

This isn’t to say that Fidelity et al are necessarily right – but it does throw an interesting light on how much more in tune American investors are with tech stories like Thomson. If Dangeard hints darkly about one day taking the company out of France altogether, you can hardly blame him – even if it does sound, for now, like so much sabre-rattling from one more CEO in a funk about his share price.

Optimism about the video games industry at this month’s E3 conference seems well founded, based on the latest US sales from NPD.

The first-half figures are in and sales of $6.1bn so far this year are up 43 per cent on last year’s $4.25bn.

The biggest increase is in console hardware sales, up 98 per cent from $853.5m to $1.7bn. Of course, a year ago, there were no Nintendo Wiis nor PlayStation 3s on the shelves.

That continues to be the case for the Wii, which is selling out as soon as it arrives in stores. June sales were 382,000 units, compared to 198,000 Xbox 360s and 98,500 PS3s.

Sony continues to put a brave face on things - issuing a press release saying June’s figure’s were 21 per cent up on May’s 82,000 sales, which beats the Wii’s 13 per cent increase.

Sony also says sales of the PS3 are up 135 per cent in the two weeks in July since it announced a $100 price cut to clear out stocks of 60-gigabyte PS3s, ahead of the introduction of its 80Gb version in August.

The company has failed to make an impression in software sales in the first half apart from God of War II and Guitar Hero 2 appearing in the Top Ten in their PlayStation 2 versions. Nintendo Wii and handheld DS games take six of the Top Ten slots, while the Xbox 360 scores with Guitar Hero and Crackdown, which was boosted by an offer to try the upcoming Halo 3.