INTEL HOUSE

To bolster education and experimentation in PC game development, Intel today announced sponsorship of the Dare to be Digital game development contest and Phase 3 winners of the $1 Million Intel Make Something Unreal Contest. In conjunction with the Intel Academic Community, Intel is sponsoring the University of Abertay Dundee's Dare to be Digital contest by providing hardware and software tools for the 10-week game development competition for students. Additionally, Intel and Epic announced winners for Phase 3 of the $1 Million Intel Make Something Unreal Contest recognizing breakout modifications for Unreal Tournament 3. Phase 4 of the contest closes on August 31. Get additional information on the Intel Visual Adrenaline program.

Intel said on Wednesday its venture capital arm invested a total of $10 million in five energy-related companies, giving a glimpse into the product areas that the chip giant considers promising.

In a first-time investment, Intel Capital backed CPower, a New York company which offers energy-efficiency services such as demand-response where commercial customers get paid to dial down energy use during peak times. Intel's money is in addition to the $10.7 million CPower raised in April.
Intel participated in a series C round for Grid Net, which makes network management software for utilities to manage energy flow to buildings with smart meters. The company has licensed its WiMax smart meter design to General Electric which is testing it with utilities.
In home energy management, Intel was part of the previously announced C-round investment in iControl, which is developing a system that combines home security services with energy tracking and automation.
Intel was part of a $24.5 million investment in Convey Computer in Richardson, Texas, which does energy-efficient high-performance computing with Xeon processors.
Limerick, Ireland-based Powervation got a second investment from Intel Capital to further build efficient power controllers for computers and communications equipment.
Intel Capital said it is seeking to fund new companies in efficiency, alternative power generation, storage, transportation, and materials. It developed Open Energy Initiative, a program for funding new companies, developing standards, and lobbying.

Can't donate your personal time to a good cause? Intel is providing what may be the next best option.
Intel teamed up with GridRepublic on Monday to launch a Facebook application that allows the spare processing power in a PC to be used to fight diseases and study climate change.
The massive amount of data crunching necessary for high level research is often extremely expensive or not readily available--or both. Intel's solution is Progress Thru Processors, a computing application built on the Facebook platform that allows people to donate their PC's available data processing capacity to research projects such as http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/, which uses computers to determine the 3-dimensional shapes of proteins that may ultimately lead to finding cures for some major human diseases.

GridRepublic application allows computers to work on public-interest research projects when the machines are not otherwise in use.(Credit: Intel)
In addition to Rosetta@home, Progress Thru Processors participants can choose to contribute processor power to the research efforts of Climateprediction.net and Africa@home. Climateprediction.net is dedicated to increased understanding of global climate change by predicting the Earth's climate and testing the accuracy of climate models. http://africa-at-home.web.cern.ch/africa-at-home/ is currently focused on finding optimal strategies to combat malaria by studying simulation models of disease transmission and the potential impact of new anti-malarial drugs and vaccines.
"By simply running an application on your computer, which uses very little incremental resources, you can expand computing resources to researchers," Deborah Conrad, Intel vice president and general manager of corporate marketing, said in a statement.
The application was launched Monday as a public beta and available to all Facebook users and is available for download here.
The application will activate only when a PC's performance is not being fully utilized. When the participant's computer usage demands more processor performance, the application defers and sits idle until spare processing capabilities become available again, Intel said. The application runs automatically as a background process on a PC and will not affect performance or any other tasks, according to Intel.
Progress Thru Processors does not require participants to leave their computers powered up unnecessarily. By keeping their PCs on only as they normally would, participants will still be contributing, Intel said.
Brooke Crothers is a former editor at large at CNET News.com, and has been an editor for the Asian weekly version of the Wall Street Journal. He writes for the CNET Blog Network, and is not a current employee of CNET. Contact him at mbcrothers@gmail.com. Disclosure.