Wolfram Alpha Pro can decode pictures of graphs

ZDNet - Wolfram|Alpha is launching the Pro version of Wolfram Alpha.

The NY Times reports how the system could decode tables and some pictures.

The new version handles data and images. In a recent demonstration, Dr. Wolfram, using his computer mouse, dragged in a table of the gross domestic product figures for France for 1961 to 2010, and Wolfram Alpha produced on the Web page a color-coded bar chart, which could be downloaded in different document formats. He put in a table of campaign contributions to politicians over several years, and Wolfram Alpha generated a chart and brief summary, saying that House members received less on average than senators.

Dr. Wolfram dragged in a 3-D image and after a few seconds it rendered the image — a guitar — and reported the number of polygons (2,253), among other characteristics.

The Wolfram data-deciphering engine, however, was flummoxed by a table of occupational income figures plucked from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Web site. Dr. Wolfram suggested that it was confused by all the periods used to separate columns of numbers in the table.

The output features include:

* Being able to generate interactive output using CDF (computable document format)
* Support for downloading graphics in other forms (i.e. 3D geometry, vector graphics, formats for immediate use)
* The ability to customize the output of images that Wolfram|Alpha produces (i.e. changing the input, title, frame, size, color)
* Raw data downloads

iRobot shows off tablet headed AVA bot at CES

EETimes - iRobot’s AVA, whose swivel head, perched atop its articulating torso and holonomic base, is an iPad.

iRobot's AVA is a system that Nextbigfuture believes will start having a huge impact later this year or next year.

Unlike the complex robotic SDKs available for hardcore robot developers, AVA’s tablet driven brain makes her much easier to program for, using iRobot’s API.

The tablet interface also allows AVA to leverage in-built cameras, gesture recognition algorithms, connectivity, and access to the cloud for higher level applications.

At CES, iRobot was demoing AVA driving herself around between points on the show floor, chosen by her controller, also using an iPad.

For now, sadly, AVA is just a "concept car" and development platform, but iRobot, whose tagline is “Robots that make a difference,” is hoping that one day she’ll be a lot more. The firm is even partnering with InTouch Health to try to bring remote presence into health institutions.

This remote presence could include robots acting as interfaces for doctors making rounds remotely, or bringing outside medical specialties to remote hospitals.

Leaked ad shows Black Friday sale discounts for iPad 2 and other Apple products

9to5mac - Details on Apple’s Black Friday (November 25th) 2011 sale are revealed. The sale is very similar to Apple’s offerings in past years, but does give better discounts to higher capacities of the iPads and iPods.

* iPad 2 will go from $41-$61 discounts depending on capacity (16GB, 32GB, 64GB)
* iMacs will be $101 less
* iPod nano will shave off $11 for both 8GB and 16GB storage sizes
* iPod touch discounts will range from $21-$41

The biggest break is the base level MacBook Air which will now start at $898, a dollar less than MacConnection‘s current promo.
Best Buy currently has $200 Promo on the base 13″.

iPad 2 has several options ($30-100) for cases with wireless keyboards.

Nvidia Kal-El quadcore procesors will be in Asustek tablet on November 9

Nvidia Corp.’s Kal-El quad-core SoC will emerge November 9 in Asustek Computer’s Transformer Prime tablet, Asus CEO Jonney Shih has revealed. Kal-El, the codename for the third generation of Nvidia’s Tegra mobile processor, was due out by the end of summer or early September, but will now emerge early next month in Asus’ new 10-inch, 8.3 mm thin tablet.

The Asus Transformer Prime tablet, announced on stage at the AsiaD Conference in Hong Kong last week will purportedly boast 14.5 hours of battery life and include both USB and mini-HDMI ports as well as an SD card reader. It will be the first device to boast Nvidia’s Kal-El chip, but is not thought to include the latest iteration of Google’s Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, which has been optimized in its early days for Texas Instruments’ Omap 4 processor.

Google Conversation mode voide to voice translation now works for 14 languages

Oct 13, 2011, the Google translate app now can translate among 14 spoken languages. Along with English and Spanish, the app now translates between Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Russian and Turkish.

The number of languages supported for text and text-to-speech translations continues to grow, with 63 languages supported for text, speech-to-text in 17 languages and text-to-speech working in 24 languages.

iPhone and Google Android Compatible Ava Robot has navigation Apps

Forbes - iRobot (maker of the Roomba) has a new robot, called Ava. iRobot made it compatible with applications written for Apple’s iOS operating system and Google’s Android platform. “To truly accelerate the robot industry, we need more people developing for it,” said iRobot Chief Executive Colin Angle in an interview. “Now, if you can develop for Android or iOS, you’re a roboticist.”

Ava has an adjustable three to five-foot-tall “torso” atop a sturdy, triangular set of wheels, utilizes either a tablet computer or a smartphone as its head. The tablet/phone, which doubles as the robot’s brain can be either iOS or Android-powered, such as an iPad, iPhone, Motorola Xoom or Samsung Galaxy Tab. Ava, which runs on an iRobot Linux-based software platform called AWARE is also designed to be controlled remotely with a corresponding tablet or smartphone.

Third-party Ava apps have yet to emerge; iRobot still considers the robot a prototype. But the company has created several apps that it plans to offer to Ava users and outside developers when the robot becomes broadly available, likely some time in 2012.

Robot's mobile robotics platform Ava can run Apple (iOS) and Google Android apps.

Steve Jobs ensured there was four years worth of iPad, iPhone, iPod and Macbook product pipeline

The Daily Mail reports that Jobs left behind plans for at least four generations worth of iPads, iPhones, iPods, and MacBooks.

Steve Jobs had also been overseeing the development of the delayed iCloud project, which will allow Apple users to store their music, photos and other documents remotely and masterminding updated versions of the iPod, iPad, iPhone and MacBooks, ensuring at least four years’ worth of products are in the pipeline.

Batteries, Capacitors, low energy usage processors and smartphones and Cyborg-lite

The iPhone 4 has a battery with 3.7 V at 1420 mAh. This is 5.25 watt hours

* Amp-hours multiplied by battery voltage will give you watt-hours. Divide by 1000 for kWh.

* The energy density of lithium-ion batteries varies from chemistry to chemistry. The specific energy density can range from 100 wh/kg to 125 wh/kg, and volumetric energy density from 240 wh/L to 300 wh/L (double of the Ni/Cd, 1.5 times of Ni/MH) , which has not reached the maximum energy density in theory of 150 wh/kg or 400 wh/L.

* A 1-farad capacitor can hold 1 amp-second of electrons at 1 volt.

* A standard alkaline AA battery holds about 2.8 amp-hours All battery sizes with standard storage statistics is at wikipedia

* To store one AA battery's energy in a capacitor, you would need 3,600 * 2.8 = 10,080 farads to hold it

* There are various claims of batteries being able to achieve ten or even twenty times the energy storage of current batteries. Prieto Battery is working on nanowire batteries that could get 20 times better storage. silicon and seaweed anodes could get eight times better storage.

Back in March, 2011 Elon Musk indicates that would bet on ultracapacitors instead of batteries as power storage for electric cars. The original reason Musk came out to California years ago was to do research on advanced, high energy density capacitors at Stanford, and to try to leverage what Musk said was tens of billions of dollars of R&D that’s been applied to capacitors for advanced ship making. But then, that whole Internet thing and PayPal happened. And then Tesla (and SolarCity and SpaceX).

India has $35 Tablets Made by DataWind

India rolled out what it is calling the world's cheapest tablet computer Relevant Products/Services on Wednesday. The government is aiming the tablet, called Aakash, at college students and will offer a subsidy to drive the price down to $35. There are plans to sell it at retail for $60

EETimes - Called "Aakash" (or sky), the gadget will have Wi-Fi connectivity, cloud-based storage, 256 MB of RAM, a 32-GB expandable memory slot and two USB ports.

Both versions of the tablet will run on the Android 2.2 (Froyo) platform. Both will feature a 7-inch resistive touch screen with 800x480 resolution, weigh about 350 grams and include Wi-Fi connectivity for internet access and cloud storage.

The tablet supports formats such as DOC, DOCX, PDF and PPTX and has a standard 3.5-mm headphone jack.

Adapteva Delivers Multicore processor with 70 GigaFLOPS per Watt

Chip startup Adapteva has taped out a 64-core version of a multicore design on the 28nm process node, delivering 100 gigaFLOPS of performance at under 2 watts of power.

Adapteva's Epiphany Benefits

• Out-of-the box floating point C programs enables significantly faster time to market and lower development costs

• 10-100X advantage in energy efficiency compared to traditional multicore floating point processors

• Up to 5 TFLOP sustained effective performance on a single chip, enables a new set of high performance applications

• Low latency zero-overhead inter-core communication simplifies parallel programming

• Scalable architecture allows code reuse across a wide range of markets and applications

According to Adapteva founder and CEO Andreas Olofsson, this latest silicon, officially known as Epiphany-IV (it's the fourth generation of the architecture) runs at 800 MHz and is expected to achieve 70 single precision gigaFLOPS/watt, twice the efficiency of their previous design. Their fab partner, GLOBALFOUNDRIES, is expected to start churning out samples of the 64-core wonder in January 2012.

Kindle Fire compared to iPad and other tablets

PC World has a comparison of the Kindle Fire with most of the other major tablets.

Barnes and Noble is also rumored to be launching a 10-inch version of the Nook Color before the end of 2011. It is expected to sell for $349, and will give Barnes & Noble a head start against a larger Kindle tablet for users who prefer the 10-inch tablet form factor.

$199 Kindle Fire, $99 Kindle Touch unveiled

CNET - Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos has unveiled a $99 Wi-Fi only, no-button Kindle Touch e-reader and a $149 Kindle Touch 3G--both designed to rival the Nook Touch. He also showed off a redesigned basic, non-touch Kindle e-reader for $79. And the big news of the morning...the $199 Kindle Fire tablet. The 7-inch, 14.6-ounce tablet--Amazon's first foray into tablets--features a simple black border, color touch screen, a dual-core processor, wireless syncing, free Amazon Cloud storage, and Amazon's new Silk browse

The Kindle Fire will be available on November 15 and is available for preorder now.

Apple will have the high-end tablets. Every tablet maker in the middle is screwed. Amazon will own the lowend of the tablet market

Amazon Will Unveil the Kindle Fire Tablet tomorrow

Techcrunch - On Wednesday morning in New York City, Amazon will unveil the Kindle Fire. It will be a 7-inch backlit display tablet that looks similar to the BlackBerry PlayBook.

It will use a Texas Instrument dual-core OMAP chip. This is the same chip used inside many newer Android devices.The clockspeed will probably be 1.2 GHz. This will make it significantly faster than the rival Nook Color, which uses a single core 800 MHz OMAP.

Barnes and Noble is on the verge of launching the Nook Color 2 next month.

The Nook Color 2 will also be built on top of Gingerbread, Android 2.3.
The Kindle Fire is believed to be based on Android 2.1.

Nvidia Tegra 3 Kalel chip will have a fifth CPU core for lower power usage

Nvidia - Variable SMP – A Multi-Core CPU Architecture for Low Power and High Performance (16 pages)

Project Kal-El (Tegra 3) works with a new Variable Symmetric Multiprocessing technology, also known as vSMP. As NVIDIA notes today for the first time, vSMP includes a fifth CPU core called the “Companion” core that’s built using a “special low power silicone process” which works on tasks at a low frequency – this works well for active standby mode, music playback, and video playback. The other main four cores are made in a more standard silicone process which is able to reach much higher frequencies. Each of these five cores is an identical ARM Cortex A9 CPU that’s individually enabled and disabled based on work load.

China opened an unlicensed Angry Bird theme park

The Window of the World park recently welcomed visitors into the Angry Birds section of its Changsha-based attraction, offering them a chance to slingshot plush birds at green pig balloons ensconced in toy brick castles. Angry Birds is a very popular video game on smartphones and tablets.

However, the park set up its exhibit without consulting Angry Birds maker Rovio, which would allow the Finnish company to file an intellectual property infringement lawsuit.

China Daily shows that the park is using the Angry Bird name

New Nvidia Roadmap with Kalel+, Wayne and Grey chips

Germany-based Heise Online, (translated) NVIDIA will follow Kal-El with the release of Kal-El+ sometime in 2012, and then the Tegra system will break off into two business lines. Project Wayne will largely target the tablet and superphone market near the end of 2012, and Project Grey will focus on the more basic smartphone market.

Early 2013, Nvidia will launch the "Grey" chip. Nvidia acquired the company Icera in May 2011 for 367 million U.S. dollars. So that Nvidia wants to conquer the smartphone market and present while also its own operating system.

Samsung Galaxy Note is the rumored 5.3 inch display smartphone

Samsung showed its new Galaxy Note smartphone today at IFA. It is the rumored 5.3" supersized smartphone.

It has a stylus and 1280×800 high-resolution Super AMOLED screen. It is a thin Android phone additional functionality by way of both sketching and note-taking. It is powered by a 1.4 Ghz dual-core processor, 1GB RAM and more. The Galaxy Note will also have an 8 MP camera with LED flash, a 2 MP front camera for video chat. Being ultra-portable even though we have a large display it will only be 9.65mm (0.37″) thin and weigh 178 grams while boosting the battery to a whopping 2500 mAh

Will tablets be sold like video game consoles ? Bundled loss leaders ?

Forbes - After more than a decade of battles with Sony and Nintendo, Microsoft sits atop the console business, where its entertainment and devices unit squeezed out operating income of just $32 million on $1.5 billion in sales for the quarter ending June 30. And that’s a success story.

Now analysts are betting Amazon will take the same approach, predicting the online retailer will sell a tablet computer for hundreds less than Apple’s iPad, making money by stuffing the tablets full of links to its music, video, software, and electronic book stores.

HP announced on one of its blogs that it will be building another run of the profit-sucking machines and selling them for $99. Presumably HP’s has already paid for the parts, so it might as well clear them out?

Samsung GT i9220, Apple iphone 5 and other smartphones

1. The Samsung GT-I9220 with a 4.3 inch Super-Amoled-HD Display is real. The Super-Amoled-HD Display has 326ppi and a resolution of 1280×720 pixels. Some other features are Android 2.3.3 Gingerbread, dual core CPU with 1,4 GhZ, a camer with 8 megapixel. There are rumors that Samsung want to introduce a Galaxy Tab 7.7 inch with a Super-Amoled Display.

2. Samsung is also rumored to be seriously considering buying WebOS from HP.

3. Rumored - Samsung Galaxy S II Plus will use 5.3-inch screen and 720p resolution. Previously the GT-I9220 was rumored to have a 5.3 inch display. It is rumored to have 1.5 GHz dual-core processor (Qualcomm), a Super AMOLED Plus capacitive touchscreen, and the latest version of Android.

Android, Amazon tablets and Nvidia news and rumors

1. Inquirer - Nvidia has secured a 34.4 per cent share of the non-Ipad tablet market in the first quarter of 2011. Apple's market share at 61 per cent, meaning that Nvidia essentially has a third of the remaining 39 per cent.

2. Nvidias quad-core Tegra mobile processor called the Kal-El will ship with high-end smartphones and tablets. The Kal-El is more powerful and actually consumes less power than the Tegra 2, Huang said. The company is also working on a unified chipset that includes both a modem and an application processor that will go into lower-end smartphones.