Facebook released its own photography-focused app on Thursday. Image: Alexandra Chang/Wired

Facebook’s first camera app for iOS, aptly and simply dubbed Facebook Camera, highlights the company’s commitment to its mobile business. But considering Facebook’s recent purchase of the photo-sharing app Instagram, it’s hard not to compare the two.

Facebook wants to make clear that Facebook Camera, which it released Thursday, and Instagram are two separate entities. Facebook Camera functions more like the Facebook Messages app — it’s a standalone offering that is closely tied to the social network, making it easier to use one of the site’s most popular features.

Since Facebook is the largest photo-sharing site, it makes sense that the company would release an app for that sole purpose. If our initial hands-on with Facebook Camera is any indication, the app will be a hit with Facebook fans.

Image: Alexandra Chang/Wired

“We’ve been working on [Facebook Camera] for a while,” said Dirk Stoop, Facebook Photos product manager. “The big problem that we were trying to solve was that if you are in the middle of an experience and you want to share your photos, it’s often too much of a hassle to go through the whole process.”

To that end, the Facebook Photos team opted for a design that leads with your iPhone’s Camera Roll photos. When you launch the Camera app, you’ll see three thumbnails of your phone’s photos. Tap them and you’ll see all of your Camera Roll photos. You can select multiple images and share them all as a single status update — a feature unique to the Facebook Camera app. This could be handy at a concert, where you could take photos and select a few to share. Photos will upload to your “Mobile Uploads” album, but appear on your Timeline as a multi-photo status update. (The only way to share multiple photos as a status update on Facebook.com is to create an entirely new album.)

“The most exciting thing is the value [the app] will create for users further down the line,” Stoop said. “When you take photos they tend to get lost and dusty in your Camera Roll. If you share things and make an effort to wrap it up into a nice little story, sometimes an unexpected thing will be important to you later.”

Still, Facebook has learned — or borrowed — a lot from Instagram. First, unlike the main Facebook app, Facebook Camera is fast. And it has plenty of filters you can use, giving your pics that oh-so-popular lo-fi look.

Facebook Camera’s home page also features a feed of photos your friends have uploaded or been tagged in. The overall layout is not unlike Instagram’s. Photos are presented in square format, and you can scroll endlessly through the feed. One nice feature that is missing from Instagram: You can tap on a photo to enlarge and zoom.

Naturally, the Facebook Camera app focuses on the site’s sharing and feedback experience. Each photo features a Like icon and a commenting feature. You also can see all of the Likes and comments already posted to each photo.

“It all sounds really obvious in hindsight,” Stoop admitted.

But why did Facebook release a Facebook Camera app so soon after buying Instagram for a cool $1 billion? And where exactly does Instagram fit in Facebook’s growing portfolio of mobile apps?

“The Instagram deal hasn’t closed yet,” Stoop said. “I can’t say much, but we’re committed to building Instagram independently. There’s overlap in the functionality, but [Facebook Camera and Instagram] have very different personalities. I see these products as separate and serving slightly different purposes and audiences.”

While Instagram has a huge user base, at 40 million users, Facebook is vastly larger at 900 million. Facebook Camera caters to this audience and feeds directly to the social network’s website. According to Facebook spokesman Derick Mains, Facebook Camera is as much an extension of Facebook.com’s photo experience as it is a mobile experience.

“This is really about making the Facebook experience better on mobile,” Mains said. “All that work that we’ve done on Facebook.com, you see us really working on improving that experience here.”

And what Facebook Camera offers over Facebook.com is a fast, on-the-go photo-sharing experience.

“We really hope that we can help people share stuff more in the moment and create better stories for their friends and themselves. And a year later they just have this treasure trove of memories and we can help them relive it,” Stoop said. “Photos become a lot more relevant when you’re able to share them in real time.”

Sharing photos on Facebook Camera. Image: Facebook

Game developer Glu, which makes the app Frontline Commando, is among the first to use Google's in-app subscription feature for Android apps. Image: Google

Google launched in-app subscriptions for Android apps on Thursday, copying, and in some ways improving on, a model carved out by Apple.

The feature is available to publishers and media companies, just as in Apple’s App Store.  But Google is also makings its in-app subscription service available to any app that wants to use it.

And that move is a win for game developers in particular, said Adam Flanders, the senior vice president of business development at San Francisco-based Glu.

“In-app subscriptions allow us to offer entirely new types of products, things that just weren’t possible before,” Flanders told Wired. “This is huge for us and game developers in general.”

Along with the roll-out Glu announced its Glu VIP Club on Android, which will run between $4.99 and $9.99 a month, and give avid mobile gamers access to new content in popular games. The subscription will also offer users bonus Glu Credits, a digital currency that can be used across the company’s games.

Flanders said about 3.2 million people play Glu games each month, across both Android and iOS. The  publicly-traded company doesn’t share user numbers specific to each operating system.

Google said in a statement that 23 of the 24 top-grossing items in its Google Play store use in-app billing. The Mountain View company is expecting subscriptions, which can be offered either monthly or annually through Google Play, will be just as successful.

Qello, a company that makes concert video streaming apps for Android, iOS, Google TV and Samsung TVs, is looking to update its Android apps in about the next 48 hours with subscriptions.

“We’re a niche business, but being able to offer the same product on both platforms should allow us to pull in people we might not have been able to reach before,” Matthew Carona, Qello’s vice president of product, told Wired. “Subscriptions are a lot easier to deal with than having to make a bunch of smaller in-app purchases every time you want to watch a video.”

Qello has been offering subscriptions through its iOS apps since Apple introduced its equivalent about a year ago. The price on Android or iOS for Qello’s subscription will be the same, $4.99. The apps offer access to about 500 high-definition concert videos and the company is working on bringing about 1,200 more videos to subscribers over the coming months, Carona said.

“Our whole business model is built on subscriptions,” he said. “Being able to offer subscriptions on Android could be a game changer for us.”

The Mindwave Mobile headset lets you play games using your mind powers. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

When you think of mobile gaming, you probably imagine Cut the Rope or Angry Birds — tapping, flicking and touching your device’s capacitive screen. But now there’s a new way to play: with your mind.

The Mindwave Mobile Brainwave Headset is a $130 EEG headset that’s compatible with iOS devices, Android phones, and, yes, even desktop computers. The headset measures brainwaves from your forehead — changes in electrical activity, really — which it then filters with complex algorithms to eliminate any interference from other electronic sources, and narrow down what those brainwaves really mean. Currently, the system can detect concentration, meditation and blinks, and uses these cues to control simple iOS and Android games.

When you put on the headset, you look like a dork. I don’t think even Brad Pitt could make this thing look cool. It’s definitely not the sort of thing any sane person is going to wear in public, but it actually works.

With the system properly situated on your head, you begin your Mindwave experience by pairing the headset over Bluetooth with your mobile device’s free MindWave Mobile Tutorial app. If the headset isn’t correctly positioned, an alert switches from “Connected” to “Check fit.” It took me about 20 minutes to get the fit just right.

Get a hang of focusing or relaxing with the MindWave Mobile Tutorial.

Once it’s on, it’s (theoretically) pretty easy to use. With the tutorial app loaded, you can focus on a math problem or an image onscreen, and watch your concentration levels rise via in-app meter. Conversely, if you relax and take deep breaths, you can monitor how well you can control your meditation levels. The system can also track blinks of different intensities. You can then use these techniques to play one of around 100 compatible desktop and mobile apps via mind control.

I checked out a few games, and overall the system was intriguing but not a replacement for other forms of gameplay control. Yes, the technology does work. It’s just not very fun.

Within the MyndPlayer app, there’s a product-placement title for Red Bull (the future of advertising, perhaps?) where you have to focus just enough to open up the can. If you focus too much, the can blows up. I blew the can up. MyndPlayer also includes a game of Tug of War, in which different opponents can be defeated by either relaxing or focusing as much as possible. Another app, W.I.L.D., offers a variety of different brain-controlled mini-games and challenges, all focused on “navigating waking dreams using the powers of meditation and attention.”

Put out a fire using your mind in the W.I.L.D. app.

Although many of the compatible apps cost money, they look robust enough to justify their prices. Plus, you have to justify the cost of your headset, right?

The headset itself weighs about 3 ounces, plus the weight of a AAA battery, which it uses for power. It’s mostly made of plastic, with an approximately three-quarter-inch-wide band that fits across your head, a rubber “loop” that slots behind your ear, and a rotatable arm that houses the EEG sensor on its tip. A second sensor is housed in a plastic clip below your left ear. You clip it onto your ear to act as a ground and reference for the EEG sensor.

The headset is adjustable, but it’s still tricky to keep it properly positioned on you head — especially if you’ve got hair. And once you do establish the correct fit, the headset sometimes slips from its position, which can be both frustrating and uncomfortable.

The Mindwave Mobile has potential — there are a lot of different games available, and many have varying levels of difficulty to keep you on your toes. After a stressful day of school or work, I could possibly see coming home, sliding the headset on, and playing a few games to relax my mind.

And who doesn’t enjoy pretending they have telekinetic powers? The hardware-fit issue can make the experience a bit annoying, but it’s not a deal breaker. Still, considering you have to fork up $130 for the headset, plus the cost of the apps, we don’t think something like this will catch on until the price drops.

Or until you don’t feel like a complete fool wearing the headset, even alone, in private.

Meet Motorola Mobility's new head honcho, Dennis Woodside. Image: Motorola

At first glance, Dennis Woodside, the Google executive who was named Motorola Mobility’s CEO on Tuesday, has a resume that doesn’t quite jibe with his new gig.

Woodside has never worked on a hardware project, and he’s never held a job in the consumer electronics or mobile industries. He’s never been an engineer, a designer, a supply channel manager, or even a telecommunications wonk.

Rather, Woodside is a former mergers and acquisition lawyer who has overseen multibillion-dollar revenue growth in Google’s businesses, particularly on the advertising side, in more than 30 countries. So what value could a lawyer and advertising executive — albeit a good one — bring to the helm of one of the world’s most storied cellphone manufacturers?

“Woodside was able to grow overseas revenue for Google. He knows how to integrate companies with his mergers and acquisitions background, and he understands Google’s ad business, and knows how to launch ad products,” Kim Forrest, a senior equity research analyst at Fort Pitt Capital Group, told Wired. “I’m not buying the idea that Google wants to be an Apple ‘mini me’ and make its own phones. And this is about more than patents, too. Google needs to figure out how to make money selling ads on mobile devices, and this guy just might be the guy to do it.”

Woodside as Mobile Ad Code-Cracker

Forrest and other analysts who closely follow the mobile industry say that Woodside’s appointment to run Motorola Mobility is likely a play by Google to finally crack the mobile ad market — a goal that has so far eluded not only Google, but also Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and other rivals.

“The majority of the money Google makes right now on the mobile side is from online search and a good chunk of that still comes from the iPhone,” said John Jackson, the vice president of research at the analyst firm CCS Insight. “Android has not been a significant money maker for Google, either directly or indirectly. While Android is a platform, for Google, AdWords is still the platform because Google has not been able to monetize Android in a way that is satisfactory.”

Most recently, Woodside oversaw Google’s sales and operations in North and South America, a job he held for two years. As Google’s Americas president, Woodside’s team “drove revenue from $10.8 billion to $17.5 billion in under three years,” Motorola said when announcing its new CEO. Before that, Woodside led business development and new ad product launches in more than 30 countries.

Woodside joined Google in 2003 after working as a consultant at the firm McKinsey & Company. Before that, the Stanford Law School alum was an M&A lawyer at the Los Angeles-based firm Munger, Tolles & Olson. He also has an industrial relations bachelors from Cornell.

After Apple CEO Tim Cook reportedly attempted to hire Woodside away from Google, the lawyer was tasked with overseeing Google’s takeover of Motorola. The purchase, at $12.5 billion, is by far Google’s most expensive acquisition to date, and could help define Larry Page’s legacy at the search company he co-founded.

Now Woodside finds himself running Motorola in what is not only his biggest challenge yet, but also Google’s most expensive gamble.

“The biggest disappointment for any smartphone and tablet maker today has to be that they aren’t able to sell mobile ad space in a meaningful way yet,” Forrest said. “This is likely less about managing the supply chain — Motorola probably has people who can do that — and more about directing how to finally crack the mobile ad space open.”

Indeed, Motorola already employs people who know how to build and design competitive hardware. But what the company didn’t have, until Woodside, and what no other hardware maker has at this point, is an in-depth understanding of the online ad business, Forrest said. Woodside has that understanding, and Google is the world’s largest seller of online ads, Forrest notes.

“The smartphone market isn’t a knock down, drag out, ‘My phone is faster than your phone’ kind of thing,” Forrest said. “People don’t buy phones based on hardware alone. This market could be won by whomever can finally get those mythical local dollars to flow through the mobile phone.”

Woodside as Ecosystem Relationship Builder

But Woodside’s value to Motorola (and thus Google) might extend far beyond cracking the code of mobile advertising. His experience in M&A — getting disparate groups to work with each other, identifying both redundancies and strengths — could pay dividends too. Now that Google owns Motorola, it has a unique opportunity to rally members of the Android ecosystem into a unified machine working toward common goals — whether that’s building better, more profitable hardware or selling ads on phones and tablets.

“If you look across the base of Android licensees, you see a bunch of sick guys, and the majority are paying fees to Microsoft after losing patent disputes,” Jackson said. “They’re not happy. This isn’t a healthy situation. And then you see Samsung, which is doing quite well, but sees itself as a platform player, open to taking on other operating systems that could try to challenge Google someday.”

If Woodside were to use Motorola Mobility as an innovations center — sharing advancements in power efficiency, display technologies, and integrating hardware with Android software — it could help provide a boost to Google’s partners, Jackson said. While it remains to be seen whether Google will share its Motorola expertise with other Android licensees, the company has already publicly said that research and development will be a focus under Google ownership. To this extent, we might see Google spend some capital on building Android reference devices in the same manner of Intel and Nvidia.

Regina Dugan, who ran the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency before joining Google, will head up a new R&D division of Motorola Mobility dubbed ATAP, or the Advanced Technology and Projects Group.

Google’s rumored plan of expanding its Nexus program to as many as five hardware partners could also help rejuvenate the fortunes of those challenging Apple and Samsung.

“This might be a good position for [Woodside], at least in the short term, since Google is integrating Motorola into its company as quickly as possible and they’re all still trying to figure out how Motorola will work alongside Samsung, alongside HTC and other hardware partners,” Carolina Milanesi, a mobile analyst at Gartner, told Wired.

While Google, its Android licensees, and its rivals are trying to figure out how to make money selling ads on mobile devices, each is taking a different approach toward finding a solution, Jackson said. While it’s unclear how Google/Motorola synergy might go about solving that problem, finding a solution would help strengthen the overall business fortunes of Google and its hardware partners — one more reason for Google buy Motorola other than simply spend it on just patents, CCS Insight’s Jackson said.

“Serendipitously enough, this happens in a week when Facebook’s IPO has flopped,” Jackson said of Woodside’s appointment as Motorola CEO. “One of the principal risk factors that was talked about among the analyst community for Facebook was its admission that it has so far been unable to monetize on the mobile side. Facebook’s working on it. Apple is working on it. Everyone is. And Google knows it needs to figure this out before somebody like Facebook comes and does it for them.”

Yahoo wants you to see what you get when searching. Photo: Yahoo

Searching the internet is still a very text-heavy endeavor. You type in a search term and wade through pages of text links — hoping the one you finally click is what you’re looking for. Yahoo aims to fix that.

Yeah, Yahoo.

Yahoo’s Axis visual search app and browser extension replaces text-based search results with visual representations of pages. The results appear in a carousel similar to Apple’s Cover Flow navigation in OS X, and can be synced between multiple devices on the same account. For example, a search that begin on an iPhone can be continued on a Windows computer with the Axis browser extension installed.

Devices on the same account also share favorites, bookmarks and items to be read later. Yahoo offers three ways to sign into Axis. Users can choose between a Yahoo account, Facebook, or Google+.

The native iOS app is a full browser. In addition to the shared Axis features, the browser includes tabs for multiple pages, and the ability to share content on Twitter, via e-mail, or Pinterest. The app also has a shared URL and search field — something Chrome users will welcome.

On the desktop side, the extension manifests itself as a black box in the lower left-hand corner of a browser. Click in the search field or on the Home or Favorites icon, and the interface springs up from the bottom of the browser.

While the interface is slick on the desktop, the search box at the bottom of the browser can be a visual distraction. On the iOS side, the screen renderings of the search results tend be a bit fuzzy, but don’t detract from the app’s ability to help you quickly find what you’re looking for visually.

For users looking for a new and quicker way to search, it’s a worthy download for iOS, and warrants look-see as a browser extension.

Axis is available now for iOS and as a browser extension for Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer. Yahoo told us that Android and Windows Phone versions of the app are currently being developed.

The finger-tracking Leap. Photo: Leap Motion

On Monday, Leap Motion wowed technology enthusiasts with a video of its new gesture-control platform. The video showcased a system of incredible speed and precision, but controlled demos can sometimes oversell a technology’s real-world capabilities.

Would the Leap 3-D gesture device disappoint us during a real-world hands-on? No — far from it. We were somewhat surprised to discover the Leap is everything portrayed in the Leap Motion video. You can see everything we observed in our own video below.

Like the Kinect, the peripheral tracks human body gestures, and translates this movement into corresponding motions on a video display. According to Leap Motion, its input device is 200 times more precise than Kinect or anything else on the market. It’s a bold claim that’s difficult to test. So we sat down with Leap Motion co-founders Michael Buckwald and David Holz to wiggle our fingers at the new device.

The first thing we noticed is the system’s lack of latency. If you’ve ever drawn on a touchscreen tablet, you’ve noticed the lag between quick finger strokes and the tablet’s slower registration of those strokes. But the Leap’s lag is imperceptible. Finger movements, swipes and taps in mid-air instantly registered as onscreen movements. For example, a spirited Fruit Ninja session delivered nearly real-time fruit cocktail-building action.

According to Buckwald, the system’s latency is so low, it’s effectively imperceptible. As for any latency the system does suffer (however imperceptible it may be), Buckwald says half results from the refresh rate of the connected display, and a quarter comes from the hardware’s USB 2.0 interface. The final quarter of system latency comes from the Leap itself.

During our hands-on testing, Leap Motion showed us a demo in which the system was able to track all the individual fingers of our hands. The system could even perceive the angles of our fingers in relation to the display as we pushed our hands into 3-D space. Grabbing, poking, swiping — all of it was tracked by the Leap.

The system can register and follow as many items as can be placed within the 3-D space it tracks. We placed three hands (and their 15 fingers) into the tracked area, and all body parts were recognized by the system. An air-hockey demo showcased a two-person gaming environment, but developers could no doubt come up with something even more impressive that pushes the limits of gaming.

Users of the Kinect and similar systems are accustomed to using sweeping arm movements to control gameplay. For example, on the Xbox 360, jumping from one interface tile to the next involves moving your entire arm in a fluid motion. It’s a big, sweeping gesture. But the Leap condenses this interaction into an 8-foot cubic space.

Now, 8 cubic feet may sound like a huge area, but it’s not. The result is a system that allows user control with much finer, less demanding gestures. Instead of sweeping your arm to get something done, you can sweep your finger. And movements like the simple flick of a knuckle can be used to navigate and interact.

The system is so precise, in fact, we were able to draw tiny circles within a 1-centimeter area. And at this level of precision, the system could even register our post-energy-drink jitters as we motioned in front of the screen. It wasn’t enough to detract from the experience, but we had to second-guess our beverage choices.

We also found that gesturing with only one’s fingers cuts down on all the fatigue that’s suffered in a system that requires large movements. That said, without something concrete to place one’s hands and fingers on, there’s the potential for fatigue after using the system for an entire day. To this end, the system seems more like an additional input device than a hardware controller replacement.

The Leap keeps you reaching. Photo: Leap Motion

The Leap looks to be a clever, novel input device for gaming, design and 3-D modeling. But even at its slated $70 price point, we can’t see it replacing the mouse and trackpad. It will be a secondary input device for most people, and a primary input device for just a few hardcore users.

But this shouldn’t diminish the incredible technology powering the Leap, or the potential uses of the device once developers start building apps based on the device’s SDK, or use Leap Motion’s APIs to add Leap functionality to applications already on the market.

In person, the pre-production version of the Leap is as impressive as the demo video. Once we have the production model in our hands, we’ll be able to determine if Leap Motion transfers all the magic of its demo unit into the final shipping product.

The Leap is available for pre-order right now and will ship sometime during the December-through-February time frame. Leap Motion will make an SDK and APIs available to developers, and plans on shipping the first batches of the hardware to developers as well. An application to sign up to be one of the first coders to work with the the Leap is on the company’s site.

The Clueful app clues you in on how apps use your data. Image: Christina Bonnington/Wired

When you install a new mobile app, you expect it to use your data according to the permissions you’ve allowed. So, when an app suddenly uses your information in an unexpected way — who can forget Path’s address-book-sharing saga? — it can feel like a betrayal.

Clueful, which made its debut at TechCrunch Disrupt today, is an app designed to prevent surprises. Clueful helps you identify “misdemeanant” apps on your iPhone — software that’s transmitting your data in ways you weren’t aware of.

Created by antivirus software developer Bitdefender, the app is simple enough. It gathers information on what apps are running in your iPhone’s memory and submits it anonymously to the “Clueful Cloud” for analysis. Using its own database of app behaviors, it then tells you what your software could be up to: whether an app uses GPS, whether an app is a battery-draining risk, or if an app can use address book information, among other things. The results are neatly listed, albeit in what appears to be random order, and you can tap an app listing to get more details on the possible risk areas of that app.

It’s not all fire and brimstone, though. The app also reveals “Things you might appreciate” for each app, such as information on whether it uses an anonymous identifier or encrypts stored data. (Foodspotting, for instance, does both of these things.)

It can be surprising to learn which apps do and don’t have solid security practices, and which apps are quietly tracking usage information for advertising purposes — something most apps do not openly reveal when you download them.

The app has several major pitfalls, though. For one, it can only provide information on free apps, so that sketchy $1 Angry Birds ripoff you got last week could be having a field day with your personal info, and you’d still never know it. And although it launches with a database of thousands of apps, there are more than 600,000 apps in the App Store, according to Apple’s Q2 earnings report. Clueful lets you search to see which apps are in its database, and we found some relatively big names were left out: Clear, Mint and Evi to name just three.

Also, Clueful doesn’t drill down into exactly what data is being transmitted from an app. Instead, it just generally reports what an app can and could be sending. (“Can” and “could” are differentiated.) Strangely, Clueful also “found” apps on my phone that I’ve never used or downloaded, like FlickFishing HD in the image above, and apps called Scoops and Quizarium. I’m sure they’re fine apps, but I’ve never downloaded them.

At $4 in the App Store, I can’t rightly recommend this app as a must-download. But if you’re completely anal about how your data is being used, or just curious, the download could be justified.

Nvidia revealed its $199 Kai as a part of its future tablet strategy. Image: Nvidia

Lest any Android device manufacturer be confused about how to bring a low-cost, quad-core tablet to market, Nvidia has an answer. At an annual meeting for company investors, Nvidia VP Rob Csonger unveiled Kai, a $199 Android tablet powered by the company’s quad-core Tegra 3 chip.

Make no mistake: Nvidia is not jumping into the tablet-manufacturing business. Kai is reference hardware that’s been built to show manufacturers what they can do with the Tegra 3 processor. Nvidia has a long history of building reference designs for its desktop videocard partners, and now the chip maker is following suit in the mobile space.

Nvidia says partners are already using Kai to build shipping products, but wouldn’t reveal the specific names of the manufacturers on board.

“Kai is our low-cost Tegra 3 reference platform that allows tablet makers to build low-cost, quad-core Android tablets targeted at the $199 price point,” Bruce Chan, Tegra PR manager, told Wired. “It uses power-efficient Tegra 3 technologies to help reduce display power and bring lower cost devices to market.”

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a quad-core tablet targeted at such a low price-point. At CES 2012 in January, Nvidia showed off a $249 7-inch Asus tablet called the MeMo 370T that ran on the same Tegra 3 chip. Asus hasn’t committed to a MeMO release date in the U.S., and it’s unclear whether the tablet showcased at CES will ever arrive stateside. This makes Nvidia’s Kai unveiling all the more interesting — perhaps Kai will pave the way for an affordable, powerful Android tablet competitor sometime soon.

In his reveal, Csonger specifically referenced the Kindle Fire, stating that it has great price point, but disappointing performance. According to Csonger, the Kai tablet will run on Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich), the latest version of Android’s mobile platform.

“Our strategy on Android is simply to enable quad-core tablets running Android Ice Cream Sandwich to be developed and brought out to market at the $199 price point, and the way we do that is a platform that we’ve developed called Kai,” Csonger said in the investor meeting. “So this uses a lot of the secret sauce that’s inside Tegra 3 to allow you to develop a tablet at a much lower cost, by using a lot of innovation that we’ve developed to reduce the power that’s used by the display and to use lower cost components within the tablet.”

Csonger also mentioned that Nvidia plans on taking advantage of the future Windows RT platform.

“The most exciting opportunity for us is a discontinuity and disruption that is going to occur in the PC world, which is the end of the Windows and Intel monopoly,” he said. “The ability to run Windows on ARM is a very big opportunity for Nvidia.”

Nvidia didn’t make any announcements on how much a Windows RT tablet might cost. Regardless, a $199, quad-core tablet from any manufacturer not named Amazon would be an exciting addition to the Android hardware ecosystem.

[via: The Verge]

Sir Jonathan Ive poses for pictures with his Knight Commander medal at Buckingham Palace, London, on May 23, 2012, following an investiture ceremony hosted by Princess Anne. Photo: Rebecca Naden/AFP/GettyImages

Apple’s design guru Jonathan Ive was knighted on Wednesday at Buckingham Palace by Princess Anne. And in a rare interview with the UK’s Telegraph, Ive revealed some intriguing insights into what he thinks is his most important contribution to the company.

Ive has been working at Apple since 1992. He’s been head of design since 1997, and was honored with a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) ranking in 2005. Ive credited his interest in design to his father, who was a craftsman. He also gave a nod to his home country’s history in design and industry. “I’m very aware of an incredible tradition in the UK of designing and making, and so to be recognised in this way is really wonderful,” Ive said.

When asked about what he’d most like to be remembered for, Ive gave a tantalizing response: “What we’re working on now feels like the most important and the best work we’ve done, and so it would be what we’re working on right now, which of course I can’t tell you about.”

Well, Sir Ive, we can’t say we’re not duly intrigued.

The new knight also spoke to Apple’s design philosophy. “Our products are tools and we don’t want design to get in the way. We’re trying to bring simplicity and clarity.”

Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs reportedly almost scored a knighthood back in 2009 for introducing revolutionary products like the iPhone and iPod to the world.

One of the Wave Gliders leaves Hawaii on the next leg of its epic ocean journey. Weather and wave sensors sit high on a pole above the vessel's surfboard-like surface. Image: Liquid Robotics

HAWAII — Twenty-two feet below the surface, the robot glider towed me slowly through clear Hawaiian seas. The day before, a similar glider named Benjamin had arrived in these same waters. Benjamin and three companion gliders had traveled all the way from San Francisco — more than 3,000 miles — powered by only the motion of ocean waves.

Before they left California, Liquid Robotics VP of Operations Graham Hine blessed the gliders by smashing a bottle of champagne on one of their frames, asking nature for assistance: “Neptune, god of the seas, and Aeolus, god of the winds, we ask for your blessings upon these vessels that are going to transit from here to parts formerly unexplored by this kind of robot.”

The gliders had endured an epic journey from California to Hawaii, but they were on a mere layover — they’re in the middle of an attempt to cross the entire Pacific. There’s a world record for “greatest distance by an autonomous wave-powered vehicle” at stake, and on Monday four of the gliders left Hawaii to resume their quest to cross the world’s largest body of water on mostly wave power. The next leg of their trip will take them some 5,000 more nautical miles to the coasts of Australia and Japan.

The Wave Gliders’ journey is more than just a title grab for a machine that was first created as a modest tool to track whale songs. And the journey is more than just an endurance test for the machines, which are capable swimmers.

For Liquid Robotics, the gliders’ long-term mission is to get as much data from the ocean as possible.

The Liquid Robotics Wave Gliders are taking divergent paths as they leave Hawaii for the Far East and Australia. Image: Google Maps

Over the course of their journey, Benjamin and its three Wave Glider companions — Piccard Maru, Fountaine Maru and Papa Mau, all named after famous ocean explorers and mariners — will capture about 2.25 million data points on the ocean’s physical characteristics. Liquid Robotics is making this data free to the public. In fact, the company is holding a contest to seek out novel proposals on how to use the data — the one with the most scientific potential wins. And the winner of the contest, called PacX, will receive six months of Wave Glider use as a prize. That, plus BP — yes, that BP — is throwing in a $50,000 research grant for the winner.

The first leg of the trip took Benjamin — named after Benjamin Franklin, who had studied the gulf stream — more than three months to complete. This is roughly 15 times longer than it would take a very fast sailboat.

The author swims with a Wave Glider off the coast of Hawaii. Photo: Brian Lam

I could see why.

To bystanders, a Liquid Robotics Wave Glider looks like a buoy, hardly moving at all. But I found that while swimming with a glider, if I looked down to adjust my dive mask for only a few seconds, it was already hastily swimming away.

The subtle, slow-but-steady, wave-powered drive of the Wave Glider is at the heart of what makes this technology so special. Machines that are passive enough to benefit from ocean power generally drift. But pilots can steer Wave Gliders using solar-powered electronics and satellite communication equipment, while all of the locomotion (the most energy-expensive element of any robotic vehicle) comes from the ocean itself. There’s no such thing as a perpetual motion machine, but these machines can nearly rove the oceans until they break.

Eric Brager, Test and Evaluation Manager at the Liquid Robotics R&D lab, says, ”Even when it appears flat at sea, there’s enough ocean energy that the Wave Glider can still always be moving forward.”

The Wave Glider’s design is simple: A surfboard-sized float bobs on waves, big or small. That motion is transferred through a streamlined, 7-meter, rubber-and-steel cable to a submarine that cruises in the deeper, calmer waters. “In the rough open ocean, seven meters down, there’s virtually no up and down wave motion,” Brager says.

Indeed, oceanography teaches us that wave turbulence greatly diminishes below the surface of the water. For example, if you have a wave with a 20-foot length trough to trough, the waters underneath will be only 5 percent as turbulent 10 feet below the surface. The Wave Glider exploits this simple fact of physics to transform wave energy into forward motion.

A skin diver inspects the submarine portion of a Wave Glider off the coast of Hawaii's Big Island. Notice the pivoting wings -- they provide about two knots of forward thrust for the entire apparatus. Photo: Brian Lam

Here’s how it works: When the floating, surface-skimming portion of the Wave Glider attempts to force the submarine portion to flow with a wave, the sub is forced to carve upward through its relatively still waters. As this happens, an array of pivoting wings on the submarine lock into diagonal angles, transforming the bobbing wave motion into zig-zagging forward thrust at around 1 to 2 knots.

Because the solar array on top of the Wave Glider only has to power the rudder, satellite communications and whatever sensors are plugged into the modular payload, the glider, powered by the ocean’s endless undulations, can theoretically last much longer, and travel much farther, than any other ocean-going unmanned vehicle. That means a Wave Glider can go where a boat can — albeit slowly — but with the longevity of a buoy. This makes a Wave Glider an ideal platform for oceanic data collection.

During their pit stop in Hawaii, the gliders have been circling near Liquid Robotic’s R&D lab a few miles north of Kona on the Big Island. The lab, which sits on a dock, has on its wall the original prototype of the wave glider — it includes a wing-like whale tail and a surfboard. Another room is filled with crates containing Wave Gliders soon to be delivered into seas all over the world, and experimental next-generation gliders.

The building also houses a two-story-tall scaffolding set-up that simulates the strain of thousands of hours at sea on the Wave Glider’s mechanical drive components. This is where the engineers learned how to build an umbilical cord that can withstand hundreds of thousands of waves, big and small.

The lab is also where engineers apply wisdom gained from the California-to-Hawaii leg of the foursome’s journey. During their four-month voyage, the gliders encountered a storm with 26-foot waves and winds that maxed out the on-board sensors at 60 knots. A sailboat belonging to a Canadian family, only a few hundred miles away from the path of the gliders, needed to be rescued when their mast broke in the foul weather. But the Wave Gliders and their tethers held — just as they did in past storms.

Brager says the team wasn’t worried: “As fragile as they might look to some, I felt fairly confident that the things would stay together since we’ve been through storms like that before. We’ve done quite a bit of rough-water testing.”

Conventional wisdom tells us that larger boats survive much better in the open ocean, so there’s something to be said for an ocean craft that lets the water rush about it to do what it will. When explorer Thor Heyerthal took the Kon Tiki, a balsa raft of traditional Peruvian design, to sea in 1947, he observed that waves would come onto the deck, then harmlessly pass through the floor of the boat. This design stands in stark contrast to a modern hull, which would have taken on water and sunk without a bilge pump to swiftly remove the flood. And this speaks to the brilliance of the Wave Gliders: They don’t resist the flow of water, but rather exploit this very motion in the high seas.

Despite their seaworthy design, sometime during the first leg of their journey from San Francisco to Hawaii, half of the gliders suffered malfunctions that affected their ability to steer. Piccard, in fact, stopped turning without explanation. When the Liquid Robotics engineers recovered the glider, they found it had been scratched up all over. And then they found a tooth stuck in the umbilical cable.

The cause of failure? The glider was “seriously savaged by a major shark,” reads a statement on the PacX Liquid Robotics blog.

The Wave Glider Benjamin shows barnacle growth in areas not covered by a chlorine-based, anti-biofouling paint that's applied to most flat surfaces. The growth occurred during 120 days at sea during the California-to-Hawaii leg of the Pacific crossing. Photo: Brian Lam

Sharks have chewed on the Wave Gliders before. And, normally, sharks present far less of a threat to a Wave Glider than even a storm. Some researchers believe that sharks, using their electromagnetic sensing Ampullae of Lorenzini, sometimes become curious about metallic objects and may bite them. But the sharks normally bite the glider’s wings, doing no more harm than scratching off the anti-fouling paint that keeps the hull clean of microorganism growth so it may slipstream through the water. (When Benjamin was removed from the water, barnacle growth only occurred on the sections where this special paint had come off, or on areas left unpainted. This fouling is a major concern for the longevity of a glider at sea, as a dirty sub can lose up to half of its already meager speed.)

But in the case of Piccard, the glider suffered significant shark damage when the shark bit down on a particularly vulnerable section of the umbilical tether. The engineers took care to reinforce the vulnerable part of the cable before deploying it for the second leg of the Pacific crossing. They have yet to identify the kind of shark by the tooth fragment it left behind.

The gliders, moving slowly through the ocean for long stretches of time, also attract wildlife that mistake the vessels for flotsam. In the pelagic regions of the sea, often referred to as deserts, tiny fish will sometimes take refuge under the gliders, much as as they would under a floating palm leaf or tangle of kelp. Those fish attract predators, and some Liquid Robotics clients have been known to toss fishing lines near the gliders when they visit them for service.