Jeff Haydock, a spokesperson for Best Buy, said he couldn’t comment on the correlation of end cap- promoted products and actual sales, but he said there had been a lot of interest in the Yoga.

“We don’t comment on specific products, but I can tell you that it [the Lenovo Yoga] has been one of our best sellers from a Windows 8 perspective. There’s been a ton of interest. It’s a really cool form factor and product and it’s one you really need to see in person to understand what it can do for you.”

Haydock said they were working to increase inventory in time for the holidays. “We’re doing everything we can in terms of working with Lenovo to increase inventory in stores.”

“All the screens in our lives, from the smallest smartphone to the biggest smart TV, are now video consumption devices. There are times when you can actually have a better viewing experience watching video on a tablet than you do on that TV on the wall. This is changing the way we consume entertainment because we can do it anywhere.”

— Jim Louderback, CEO of San Francisco-based Internet television company Revison3, which was recently purchased by Discovery Channel for $35 million.

Louderback talks about this multiscreen world and the video-savvy generation in The Future of TV is Everywhere.

“We are now seeing that the cost of sensors is coming down to a price point that they can be densely deployed and that data can be scooped up and used to help you in your daily life. We’ve seen these virtual overlays from Nokia and others where you hold your phone up to a building and you see what’s in the building — if there’s a sale, what the exhibits are [at a museum] and so on. That’s all sensor information combined with analytics to give you denser information about what’s going on in the physical world. This will open doors that people didn’t even know were doors.”

Rich Green, Enlighted senior vice president of products and technology. Green was previously CTO of Nokia and executive vice president of Sun Microsystem’s software division. Enlighted, a venture-funded company that includes Intel among its investors, is one of many startups and established companies vying for a piece of the burgeoning intelligent building systems market. Green was a speaker at the Verge @ Greenbuild conference Tuesday in San Francisco. During an interview at the event, Green discussed what combining sensor data with analytics can make possible and how sensors can make our world a calmer place.

The scientist known as Microsoft Research employee No. 1 took to the stage in Silicon Valley and told entrepreneurs and technology enthusiasts that investing in talented people is the key to developing problem-solving innovations.

Rashid talked about the innovations that went into the Microsoft Tablet PCs introduced a decade ago. He said that although the timing wasn’t right for that first tablet, many lessons learned from it are now in the company’s Surface products. By contrast, Microsoft Kinect, a motion-sensing input device, was a hit from the get-go and continues to grow.

“Kinect came out of our computer machine vision work,” he said. “It changed how people could use ‘gesture vision’ to interact with computers.”

Rashid also addressed the challenge of finding and retaining talent, especially women scientists.

“Eighteen percent of our researchers are women, which is in line with national levels,” he said. “But our national numbers are dropping because we’re doing a poor job in schools and in companies describing what computer science is really like … and how it is a field where you can help solve real problems.”

After leaving the stage, Rashid sat down for an interview with Intel Free Press and discussed advances in computer learning and speech recognition technologies, the impact of sensors and Microsoft’s ability to change and innovate. Here’s the full Q&A: Talent, Collaboration Key to Innovation.

Today’s mobile apps, from games to media editing and sharing, are often designed first for smartphones or tablets. But Twisted Oak Studios, with support from Intel, is taking a different approach by releasing its latest app first through Microsoft’s Windows Store. The launch of Element, an app designed for touch-enabled Windows 8 Ultrabooks, is a shift for the cooperative of computer scientists that has previously designed a series of Zombie Wonderland games for Apple and Android stores.

“Ultrabooks are moving ahead of the curve to where the laptop needs to be in a world populated by smartphones and tablets,” said Twisted Oak co-founder Devin Horsman. “We designed Element to take advantage of the lightness and thinness of Ultrabooks, the accelerometer, compass and gyro sensors built inside, and the touchscreen so you get fast, kinetic control of songs while having enough compute power to render visualizations that respond to music.

Full story: Touchscreen Sensors Bring Music App to Life.

Sensors are enabling a new era of computer learning and awareness. Rich Rashid, chief research officer at Microsoft, talks about the new era of computer learning and awareness as more sensors are built into computing devices, allowing them to see, hear, react and interact more naturally to human input. 

As with smartphones, tablets and Ultrabooks, employees participating in corporate Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) programs, are bound to start using convertibles at work, particularly as IT departments support the Windows 8 operating system.

Convertibles are already in the enterprise, according to David Buchholz, director of consumerization and principal engineer at Intel IT.

In Convertibles Coming to the Enterprise, Buchholz says:

I carried multiple devices and used them all separately. I now do everything I used to do with those devices all on this one. Also after getting used to the Windows 8 interface I am using touch much more on this convertible than I ever did on the traditional clamshell Ultrabook. Also, I tend to use the Windows 8 [touch] interface as my ‘consumer’ area and the traditional desktop as my ‘corporate’ workspace.”

With the rapid increase in use of personal mobile devices for work purposes, the importance of using discretion when downloading applications is even greater. Defrauders are clever and know how to take advantage of mobile capabilities. For example, malicious applications purporting to be from a major bank are not uncommon and often difficult to identify. They might appear to be legitimate, but they could put your personal information and any sensitive company data stored on your mobile device at risk.

Full story: How to Guard Against Mobile App Security Threats

Microsoft Chief Research Officer Rick Rashid talks about how Microsoft brings change to every new product including Windows 8 and Surface (by IntelFreePress)

It’s widely reported that Ultrabook sales remain slow due to high prices. A closer look revealed several Ultrabooks at leading online dealers in the $599-$699 range and some new touchscreen models expected to hit the market at around $1,000.

Now with enormous amounts of storage we can use advanced machine learning techniques to really understand the underlying data in a way we couldn’t do before. A great example of this is machine translation. The old machine translation systems were all rule-based and they were awful.  It was a parlor game: you put something in you see how funny it is coming out the other end or even better you put in a sentence, translated it into Italian and back into English and everybody’s laughs hysterically (at the results).

— Rick Rashid, Microsoft Chief Research Officer

Full story: Talent, Collaboration Key to Innovation 

Artist Shubhada Sahasrabudhe creates granular beauty with silicon and light.

Sand art by night and sand engineer by day, where she develops mathematical models and simulation tools as a reliability engineer for Intel’s Corporate Quality Network in Chandler, Ariz. The native of India came to the United States in 1999 to pursue a master’s degree in mechanical engineering. Upon graduating in 2001, she joined Intel, where her husband, Shridhar Bendre, is also an engineer.

Full story: Intel Engineer Express Herself Through Sand.