At today’s keynote of the Intel Developer Forum 2011, Intel CEO Paul Otellini presents Intel’s vision about the future of computing. It came by surprise to see Google’s Senior Vice President of Mobile Andy Rubin get on stage during the keynote. Paul Otellini and Andy Rubin announced a strategic partnership between Google and Intel for delivering x86 phones and tablets running Android. So that raises the question: what is going to happen to Intel’s own Linux platform for tablets and phones MeeGo? Paul Ottelini reassured the audience, that Intel will keep the collaboration with industrial partners utilising MeeGo on embedded devices.

Furthermore for laptops the trend goes towards Ultrabooks says Paul Otellini. Intel focusses on making them lighter, faster, cheaper, less power consuming and more responsive. A few Ultrabooks are exhibited on stage. A demo computer shows in which direction mobile computing may go: an ultra low voltage cpu prototype powered by a solar cell and executing Windows.

Cisco shows the next generation office phone. It looks like their current line of IP phones, however it’s color screen is actually a detachable android tablet powered by an atom cpu, I guess.

For a seamless collaboration of mobile and stationary gadgets, Paul Otellini presents Intel Pair & Share, which enables phones, tablets, computers and TVs to connect to each other and show notifications and messages on the currently used device.

References:
IDF: http://www.intel.com/idf/
Android on x86: http://intel.com/software/android

My photo story of today:

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For full details about Google I/O, check out their excellent online session catalogue: Google I/O 2011.

Below you find my personal picture story:

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AquaChem

Research in Motion announced: everyone who submits an application for the BlackBerry PlayBook by March 15, would receive a free PlayBook tablet. Since I am very excited about the BlackBerry PlayBook, it’s Hardware, and it’s underlying QNX realtime operating system and I am waiting for it to appear on the market, a free Tablet is enough incentive to look into how to code for the PlayBook as an early adopter. I implemented AquaChem – an Adobe Air application – from scratch, after spending a couple of hours going through a comprehensive tutorial with Source Code.

Links:

• Free BlackBerry PlayBook Tablet Offer
• Flex for the BlackBerry PlayBook in 90 Minutes

AquaChem is based on the idea of iChem. The purpose of the application is to bring Aquatic Chemistry on modern Handheld devices to the classroom. AquaChem has just been submitted to the BlackBerry App World.

Technology Enthusiasts and Roboticists all over the world picked up a Kinect to see what they can do with it. My personal motivation is to improve Perception for my Service Robot. Shortly after the publication of the Kinect Hack, Microsoft and PrimeSense decided to release an official SDK: the OpenNI Framework.

• The OpenKinect Project – http://openkinect.org
• OpenNI – http://www.openni.org/

Below are the first Depth Images and User Tracking Images, that I took with the official SDK. 

http://codebutler.com/firesheep

This is scarily easy!

I hope social network providers start implementing end-to-end encryption via https soon. Until then, be careful from where you access your social networks. On the other hand easy identity stealing brings social networking to a new level.

iChem

iChem is a case study to bring aquatic chemistry calculations on the iPhone to the classroom. The computational nature of aquatic chemistry lends itself well to the iPhone platform and by providing students with a simple means of performing laborious calculations, the underlying chemistry of the problem being studied can be the primary focus rather than the calculations.

The application features Activity Coefficient, Ionization Fraction and Equilibrium Constant computations. The goal is to provide a user friendly tool for chemistry students, which enables them to quickly solve standard computations on their fingertips. The tool will be made available to the public, soon.

iChem Screenshots

[1] Martin Wojtczyk, Mark A. Nanny, and Chetan T. Goudar. Aquatic Chemistry on the iPhone: Activity Coefficient, Ionization Fraction and Equilibrium Constant determination. In 239th American Chemical Society National Meeting & Exposition, San Francisco, USA, March 2010.

My favourite presentation during this event was “Sal on Automation” with system wide services. His website contains very valuable resources on automation Tasks with Mac OS X. Check out:
http://www.macosxautomation.com and
http://www.macosxautomation.com/services/index.html