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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Paul Engel who wrote (64077)	9/8/1998 2:16:00 AM
From: Paul Engel	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 186894

Intel Investors - New Killer Apps Require High Power PCs The new "Killer Apps" may be Childrens' PC games with heavy 3D utilization ! Now ain't that a kick ! Paul {==================================} techweb.com Kids' Software Moving To High-End Machines (09/07/98; 11:07 a.m. ET) By Aaron Ricadela, Computer Retail Week As publishers of children's software add sophisticated features that increase the computing power requirements of their titles, chip giant Intel may capitalize on the trend with targeted marketing campaigns. PC edutainment titles from IBM, Lego Media, Lucas Learning and Ubi Soft Entertainment boast 3-D interactive environments and enhanced sound, and promise to deliver a richer experience to young users whose expectations have been raised by high-end games. Intel's interest has been aroused by the potential of these titles to spur sales of higher-end systems to parents, and the company is considering featuring the Lego and Lucas titles as part of a retail and consumer marketing campaign this fall, according to industry sources. "More and more families are getting high-performance PCs, and developers are starting to get more comfortable developing for the high end, including features like 3-D graphics and great sound," said Wendy Hafner, marketing manager for Intel's content group. Whereas the majority of kids' software is designed to run on 486 PCs or older Macintosh machines to court a wider potential audience, new Windows titles such as Star Wars DroidWorks, due from Lucas Learning in October; Lego Media's Lego Creator and Lego Chess, planned for November release; and IBM's Crayola 3-D Castle Creator, which shipped in July, harness more of a PC's processing power to deliver their 3-D worlds. Most require Pentium 133MHz or 166MHz systems, but yield better performance on Pentium II PCs. Many are optimized for enhanced graphics and sound cards. In March, Ubi Soft plans to ship a pair of high-end children's titles as well. The titles fall into a new sub-genre enabled by a technology that Hafner called "build and play." The software lets kids construct virtual worlds, then play within them. DroidWorks, for example, uses code from sister company LucasArts Entertainment's Jedi Knight action games to let kids assemble robots that obey physics and send them on strategic missions. Lego Creator lets kids build sprawling cityscapes and fantastic vehicles of virtual bricks, then pilot their creations through 3-D environments. Hafner said some kids' titles may appear in Intel's new content Showcase program, which will use retail marketing, print, TV and Internet ads to spotlight software and Web sites that push demand for better-performing PCs. "The more great kids' content that's out there that takes advantage of enhanced processing power, the more opportunity there is to showcase it in one of our programs," Hafner said. According to publishers, consumers with older machines aren't buying many CD-ROMs, so software makers are willing to trade potential lost sales at the lowest end of the market for the opportunity to position themselves as leaders. "We realized that if we designed something that would run on a 486, we'd have a hard time competing for kids' attention," said Jon Blossom, senior programmer for Lucas Learning. "A lot of people are complacent about saying kids' titles are always two years behind the current technology. We wanted to push that forward." For Humongous Entertainment, converting to CD-ROM the popular Nickelodeon program "Blue's Clues," which mixes live action and animation, meant pushing up system requirements. According to producer Jonathan Maier, the next horizon for kids' developers is moving from 8-bit color to 16-bit environments. This would explode titles' hues from 256 shades to thousands of colors. "In another year, the 486s aren't going to be worth our while," he said. For now, most kids' software is compatible with older systems. Irena Rogovsky, Intel's children's software program manager, said Intel is trying to change that. "We did see resistance with some companies that were set in their ways," she said.