Most people have one phone or handheld device for work, and maybe another one for play. But how about 14?

That’s how many devices Google’s vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra has. They make it “very hard to get through the airport,” he joked.

We asked him and other executives in the mobile advertising industry what devices they use, after about an hour of a panel discussion on where mobile advertising is going at the Fortune Brainstorm: TECH conference.

Gundotra said he had only a few of his 14 devices with him.

“I have an Android, a BlackBerry and an iPhone with me and another device that I can’t talk about,” he said, adding his company wants to make sure that consumers have a good Google experience with any device that they choose. His email and calendar are synced on all devices, but he has pictures only on the Android. “If you call Google Voice, all 14 phones ring,” he joked.

It’s an Apple iPhone and a Blackberry for Omar Hamoui, chief executive of AdMob, one of the largest marketplaces for mobile advertisers. “I carry two because I use them quite differently,” he said. The iPhone is for anything involved with data and applications and the Blackberry, for email and calendar.

Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice president and general manager of Intel Corp’s Ultra Mobility Group, said he uses a notebook, Blackberry for work-related applications and an iPhone for more personal use like Internet browsing.

“I don’t have a phone,” deadpanned Marty Beard, president of Sybase 365, a unit of business software maker Sybase Inc. Beard was the only executive on the panel who used only one device: an iPhone, which he chose for heavy Web usage, its text and multimedia capabilities and to get familiar with applications.

– Laura Isensee also contributed to this post

(Photo: REUTERS/Mike Segar)

Who says lightning never strikes twice? Conan O’Brien, famous for finding humor in the mundane, is set to revisit Intel Corp on Thursday’s “The Tonight Show” — two years after the talk-show host devised a memorable 2007 skit spoofing the Silicon Valley chipmaker.

An Intel spokeswoman declined to talk about the details but said the upcoming segment was part of a broader Intel sponsorship of O’Brien’s new show on NBC. O’Brien took over the Burbank, California-based show from Jay Leno on June 1.

Financial details of the sponsorship weren’t disclosed by Intel, which noted that “this partnership leverages O’Brien’s unique ability to humorously convey to his viewers Intel’s unique personality, cutting-edge technology and futuristic innovations.”

Not to mention all the bunny-suited engineers and office workers toiling anonymously in a sea of cubicles at Intel’s Santa Clara, California headquarters.

When O’Brien last visited Intel as host of NBC’s New York-based “Late Night with Conan O’Brien,” he joined a group of second-graders on a field trip at the site and asked them, “Can you say ‘cubicle’? Can you say ‘confined space’? Can you say ‘lifeless environment?’”

(Posted by Clare Baldwin)

Advanced Microchip Devices Inc is arguing that laptop battery life should be measured the same way as cellphone battery life: in terms of idle time and talk time.

AMD first raised the issue in a blog post in March, but is again making the rounds to convey its message that current standards, which it says measure the equivalent of standby mode in a cell phone, is misleading consumers.

Why exactly is this issue so important to AMD? Because under current standards, laptops based on arch-foe Intel’s chips demonstrate significantly better battery life. Under alternative standards, their battery life is roughly equivalent to AMD’s.

“Twenty-dollar cell phones give better information to the consumer about battery life than a $799 notebook,” AMD vice president Patrick Moorhead said in an interview with Reuters on Wednesday.

Moorhead said the current standard is based on dim screens (20 percent brightness), miniscule microprocessor loads (7 percent usage) and has WiFi turned off.

“That’s no Web browser, no audio like iTunes, no video, and no games,” he said.

Intel, which dominates about 80 percent of the PC market, was not available for comment but in March, executives told the Wall Street Journal it thought industry consortiums were a better forum to debate this issue than blog posts.

Netbook is a remarkably clear and memorable terrm as far as most computer industry jargon goes. Which is why, as with any hot product category, it’s hard for the computer industry to agree on exactly what it means.

Most people who started using the term over the last two years say it refers to a new class of tiny, low-cost, Web-connected computers.  That’s at least what Intel thought when it adopted netbook last year as a generic term.  

For this simple act of clarity, Intel must be punished. The ghost of Psion, the old handheld digital organizer maker, sued Intel for trademark infringement. It turned out Psion trademarked the term as far back as 1996 and sold a line of computers it called netBooks earlier this decade before discontinuing the line.

Microsoft Corp has never much liked the term, in part because the most succcessful early netbooks relied on Linux software rather than Microsoft’s own products. Microsoft is counting on its upcoming Windows 7 operating system to crush Linux-based models.

Just please don’t call them netbooks. This week, a Microsoft executive at the Computex trade show in Taiwan says it wants to abandon the term. Instead, we should all get used to calling netbooks ”low cost small notebook PCs” — LCSNPC for short — when referring to computers capable of doing more than watching Web sites. So says Steven Guggenheimer, Microsoft’s vice president in charge of relations with PC makers, speaking to DigiTimes.

Meanwhile, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison doesn’t want to be left out of the netbook game. He says there’s no reason Sun Microsystems won’t move into the netbook market, once Oracle completes its planned acquisition of the hardware maker. Of course, to Larry, the netbook is nothing more than the revival of his 1995 vision of the stripped-down “network computer.” I’ll let the Register.com explain the theological differences with yesteryear. 

On a happier note, it turns out Psion Teklogix just wanted a little attention. It recently settled its suit against Intel and released its trademarks on netbook. 

Now the industry is free again to get back to arguing about what netbook means.

 (Photo credits: ASUS, Psion, Microsoft)

New data from research group IDC shows Advanced Micro Devices gained on arch rival Intel in the first quarter PC microprocessor market. There is of course still a huge gap between the two — Intel earned a 77.3 percent unit global market share, a loss of 4.7 percent, while AMD held 22.3 percent, a gain of 4.6 percent — but it’s all the more interesting given the intrigue swirling around the two companies.

EU antitrust regulators are expected to issue a ruling Wednesday that Intel illegally paid PC makers to postpone or cancel the launch of products using chips made by AMD, sources have told Reuters. The European Commission believes the violations occurred during a period stretching back eight years, the sources said. Intel could be hit with a sizable fine.

Intel, with revenue of $37.6 billion in 2008, dominates the microprocessor market. AMD posted revenue of $5.8 billion in 2008.

Also of note in the IDC research is fresh data on Intel’s Atom netbook processor. Shipments fell 33% quarter-over-quarter, indicating that equipment manufacturers held plenty of Atom inventory coming into the new year, IDC said. The group estimates Atom made up 21 percent of Intel’s mobile PC processor shipments in the quarter and 6.5 percent of its mobile PC processor revenue.

Overall, PC microprocessor unit shipments declined 13 percent from last year, while market revenue slid 25.1 percent, IDC said.

Intel’s first-quarter results may have topped Wall Street’s expectations, but it was CEO Paul Otellini’s use of the B-word–as in “bottom”– that seemed to generate the most excitement. Although shares fell when the world’s top chipmaker chose not to provide a formal forecast for the current quarter, Otellini’s words on Intel’s conference call should provide some much-needed cheer for the IT sector:

“In terms of demand, we saw a few important trends play out this quarter. First, we are seeing signs that a bottom in the PC market segment has been reached. I believe the worst is now behind us from an inventory correction and demand level adjustment perspective. We saw order patterns strengthen throughout the quarter. Desktop sales appear to have hit bottom first and have followed a normal — more normal — pattern since early February.”

“In terms of end-user consumption, the consumer segment has held up much better than the enterprise. This is particularly true in consumer notebooks, which continue to be the volume driver in this segment. Netbook sales continue to grow as anticipated, and are clearly incremental volume for us in a difficult market.”

He continued: “We expect business conditions in Q2 to mirror those of Q1, with some gradual recovering of demand and replenishment of inventories occurring as the industry sees increasing signs of stabilization and a return to more normal seasonal trends.”

Of course, no one is yet expecting a full bounceback. The plunge in PC demand was too swift and precipitous for that sort of talk.

When asked about a possible timeline for recovery, Chief Financial Officer Stacy Smith told Reuters:

“Part of the lackof visibility going forward is what does the shape of this look like … over the next few quarters. The first step was to work through the excess inventory that was out there. I think that happened, it actually happened a bit more quickly then i was anticipating, that’s why my gross margin [45.6 percent} is a little better than what we forecast.”

“We’re watching carefully to see what the shape of this looks like as we get into the second half.”

The company forecast continued weakness in the enterprise market, which some say could be a roadblock to recovery.

“From the standpoint of profitability, the quicker enterprise recovers, the better,” said David Kanter, an analyst with Real World Technologies. “But from the standpoint of volume they are both are pretty important.”

Nvidia and Acer on Tuesday unveiled a low-cost, full-featured desktop computer the size of hardback book, the first device based on Nvidia’s Ion platform.

The new Acer AspireRevo features an Nvidia graphics processing unit along with Intel Atom microprocessor. (Although they might sit comfortably together in the new PC, Intel and Nvidia continue to be bitter rivals in the chip world and battle each other in court.)

Nvida says the AspireRevo uses one-quarter the power of standard desktops and is 10 times faster than comparably priced PCs.  The system can do most things a full-sized PC can, including play high-definition video and games, share digital pics and Web surfing.

Although Acer hasn’t yet announced a price for the PC, Nvidia says it expects Ion-based desktops to sell for less than $300. Ion-based notebooks are expected in the second half of the year, with price points expected to be below $500.

The rise in popularity of netbooks last year helped boost Intel’s already dominant position in the global microprocessor market, according to fresh data from iSuppli. The research group said Intel gained share in every quarter of 2008, partly due to the success of its Atom chip in netbooks, the small, inexpensive, stripped-down PCs that have become hugely popular with consumers.

Intel held a an 81.8 percent revenue share in the microprocessor market in the fourth quarter, up from 78.4 percent a year earlier, iSuppli said. AMD, Intel’s main rival, accounted for 10.6 percent of microprocessor revenue in the period, down from 14.1 percent a year earlier.

“Intel grew its share of microprocessor in every quarter of 2008 on a sequential basis, effectively using each quarter as a building block for the next,” said iSuppli analyst Matthew Wilkins in a statement. “During this time, Intel’s low-priced Atom has become increasingly popular as the netbook market has gained steam.”

ISuppli expects worldwide unit shipments of netbooks to rise 68.5 percent in 2009. Analysts are forecasting netbook sales of 20 million to 30 million in 2009, and the devices are helping to reshape the sagging overall PC market.

Earlier this year, Intel said it expects to sell at least 50 percent more Atom chips for netbooks and other mobile Internet devices this year than last.

It’s the question of the moment in the technology world: have we hit bottom?

Tech execs appeared at a bunch of investor events this week and gave their best guess on what’s going on in this murky economy of ours. Some said things seemed a bit better, while others said visibility is as bad as ever. Here’s a collection of their comments:

Yahoo Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen, who is leaving the company, said advertisers are “in shock” at the moment because of the economy, but cited the superior return on investments that they get online compared with traditional marketing mediums.

Cisco Chief Executive John Chambers said most people seem to expect the economic downturn to last “well into 2010″ but he is more optimistic and sees business conditions beginning to recover around the end of 2009.

Intel Chief Executive Paul Otellini said, “You’re starting to see a pattern of purchases emerge again that’s more predictable. I’m not saying we know where the bottom is or that we’ve hit the bottom (but) the predictability is starting to come back into the system.” He added, “I think you have seen the global shock and now people are starting to figure out how to work out of it.”

Applied Materials CFO George Miller Davis was asked whether things might be stabilizing at a low level in the chip equipment side of the business. “It’s hard to make that call yet because the falloff that everybody was reacting to happened so quickly and not only did it roll through the broader customer base far more quickly than we’d ever seen … I think everybody had to completely redo their sense of what their near-term forecast was. I think it’s premature to try and call a bottom.”

On a more positive note, Miller Davis was hopeful about the solar business and the new stimulus package, which provides a 30 percent investment tax credit for renewable energy and conservation. “I think the stimulus package and the investment tax credit actions are very important… for the U.S. to be relevant you’ve got to get the utilities bringing scale to investment in this area,” he said. “I think with the Obama administration coming in you have a real change and a real shift in the tone … we at least now have the investment tax setup … I think things are going to really shake loose over the next 2 to 3 years. You’re going to see some very big things happen. “

This is turning out to be an earnings season when all bets are off on how technology giants will perform. With tech earnings taking the market on a roller-coaster ride, it wouldn’t be surprising if investors are a little sick in the stomach already. 

The hits and misses so far among the biggest and brightest:

Intel: Missed expectations, profit fell 90 percent and they said they wouldn’t give a detailed quarterly forecast due to the economic uncertainty.

IBM: Beat expectations and gave an outlook above Wall Street estimates. Not only did IBM shares surge on the news, it even lifted major U.S. indexes.

Apple: Record quarterly earnings made Wall Street delirious. Can’t blame investors for feeling relief after all the worry about CEO Steve Jobs.

Microsoft: Didn’t want to hold on to the bad news until the appointed time, so the it reported earlier than expected on Thursday. Said revenue and profit would almost certainly drop over the next quarter or two. 

Google: Saved the day, kind of, by balancing Microsoft’s disappointing results with news of a quarterly profit that topped Wall Street expectations.

Google gave Jefferies & Co analyst Youssef Squali some hope that the tech sector continues to be more resilient than other sectors. “Although it depends on the severity of the recession,” Squali wrote in an e-mail yesterday. “Nobody is immune forever.”

Squali carried this ominous tone into his Friday morning research note as well, calling this earnings season a “mixed bag” and the 2009 outlook “unanimously poor.”

With Yahoo and Amazon set to report earnings next week and no guarantee what surprises might be in store there, we wonder if investors will just call in sick until next year’s earnings.

(Photo: Reuters)