I might have seen this one coming, but it was still great to witness. Pichai relinquished the stage to Vikas Gupta, one of the Google Chrome Product Managers on the payments team, who spoke briefly about the benefits of in-app web purchases to businesses, versus mobile. We've already seen a bunch of stats showing that web users (unsurprisingly) are more likely to make purchases in their browsers than on their phones, but the trick is to make the UX as seamless as possible so that "the rhythm" of their browsing experience does not get interrupted.

Vikas gave a nod to a really cool Chrome web application called Graphicly (which I have just installed on my Chrome as of the writing of this post) that helps users read and discover comics and graphic novels on the web. With 600,000 people viewing this Keynote, I can only imagine what this kind of publicity will do for Graphicly. Then again, you should all be reading more comics anyway.

How easy is it as a developer to implement in-app payments in your Chrome web-app? Try one line of code. Boom. Done. After Vikas made a thinly-veiled stab at Apple's developer-back-breaking in-app purchase rate of 30% (without actually naming Apple, but did anyone really not get the ref?), he announced that because Google loves their developers and they want to continue to foster their community.... *drum roll*.....the in-app purchase fee will always be a flat rate of 5%! Five percent? That is nothing! That's incredible. This goes way beyond "Don't Be Evil". This is incredible. And it's all open source, on top of everything else.

And now for the second day of Google I/O 2011, which of course brings another keynote speech to kick off the day. Yesterday we saw Android @ Home, Project Tungsten, and some pretty cool NFC demonstrations. Today Vic Gondutra started us off setting the stage (literally) for today's big topic: Chrome. After rehashing the awesome Samsung Tab that everyone in the audience received yesterday, he mentioned that they also came with Verizon Wireless Hotspots, capable of 20mps download.

He gave the stage over to Sundar Pichai, SVP of Chrome, who briefly spoke about how awesome Chrome is- the proof of which is that Chrome has doubled their user base since last year's I/O, 160 million up from 70. He gives the stage over to Ian Ellison Taylor of Chrome, who educates the audience on some of the cool dev features, like Speech, Javascript and GPU acceleration.

Chrome now runs javascript almost exponentially better than it, or other browsers for that matter did in 2008.In addition to the javascript improvements, Chrome's GPU acceleration allows it to run tons of objects before the frames per second drop below 60. Taylor showed the ever-popular Fish Demo, starting with a 100 fish and going to 250, 500, and then 1000 before the FPS even flinched. When he ran it on WebGL, the FPS stayed above 60 all the way up to 10,000 fish swimming around.

OCZ has put all of their eggs in one basket and that basket just happens to be the SSD market, that basket is also starting to pay off and the pay off comes in the form of some new SSDs with some impressive performance. The new line of SSDs include a 2.5-inch Solid 3 SATA III SSD and the Agility 3 SATA III SSD. Both of these drives are set to offer twice the performance of previous versions and are also more cost effective than current 6Gbps SSDs on the market.

Ryan Peterson, CEO of OCZ Technology Group says:

ASUS has felt some serious heat in its Eee PC line, mostly from tablet-based products like the iPad. ASUS sold just 350, 000 netbooks in April after tablets still "significantly impacted the demand". ASUS aren't taking this fight laying down, instead they're set to release a new "killer" Eee PC in June and also an ultra-budget model which should retail below $199.

No details of the new Eee PC have been made but rumors are that it might include a dual-core Atom N570 or an AMD Fusion-based processor. ASUS are hurting in sales and whilst notebook sales are still relatively strong (3.1 million shipped notebooks by the end of spring) it's nowhere near as good as the numbers we see from Apple. Netbook sales are set to drop below 1.3 million shipped in the winter and this is primarily because of the iPad.

ASUS of course have their amazing Eee Pad Transformer and this could well change the way we see ASUS as a company, but only shipping 300, 000 Transformers in June is sure to hurt. Once these numbers start pumping out, ASUS will have a definite one-two punch with both the pricing of the Transformer and it's Android-powered Honeycomb goodness.

Every time a company comes out with a wacky new controller offering dexterity tangential to the normal hum-drum controller (which by the way, worked fine for me for years), I'm always a little suspect. Remember the Nintendo Glove? Though way ahead of its time and a prophetic shoutout to the Wii, it was a disaster. Anyone remember the short-lived PlayStation Glove controller? The buttons from the regular controller were spread throughout the fingers and you could play one handed? Apocalyptically terrible. So when I heard about Razer and their new Hydra motion sensor PC controllers, I had my doubts. Until I saw the following video:

The dual interface looks amazing! It's like playing with two Wii controllers that talk to each other! Not only that, but this level is part of the Sixense Motion Pack DLC- levels specifically designed for the controllers! They're of course compatible with the regular Portal 2- as well as 125 PC games, right off the bat. And more DLC to come, promises Razer. I'm pretty psyched to (literally) get my hands on these and mess around with compatible games. All you WASD traditionalists should stop hating long enough to give these a try to. Check out their website in the links above for more info.

Google's Chrome Browser has a growing number of applications available on its web store and it's only logical that Google has devoted an entire schedule block to concentrating on the benefits and capability of a browser that now has 120 million users, and counting. Google gathered representatives of three different companies to tell their success stories regarding their Chrome web apps. First up was Jason Horman Chief Architect of Springpad, the online task tracker.

Springpad is a task application that tracks your tasks, movies, books etc. in order to compile databases for your life. It started off as a website service linked to a mobile application they released a while back. The success of their mobile app in contrast with what Horman described as a service that relied too heavily on the website led Springpad to develop a web app using Chrome. Horman noted how seamless the transition was between mobile and web, and that Chrome facilitated maintaining a similar UX. Springpad doubled its web app users for its first few months in just two months, and has seen a 500% increase in the amount of "saves" since its initial web app launch. 50% of daily time on the app altogether is spent through Chrome, with an average of 30 minutes a day.

Next up was San Francisco-based World Golf Tour, responsible for the game of the same name- the largest online Golfing game on the internet. Golf Tour went to chrome looking for new channels of user acquisition. After launching their Chrome app, they've found that Chrome users play their game 23 times more than all of the users on any of the other channels. Also, more importantly, they spend 147% more money than mobile users.

10:08 US PST:

I am floored. Absolutely floored. Engadget livebloggers were unnerved by the people weeping in the audience, but I completely understand it now. Joe Brit and Hugo just finished up the Keynote by giving everyone in the audience the new Samsung Tablet, but let's talk about what Joe Brit revealed: The new Android @ Home network, which allows you to use your house as an android accessory. We're not just talking TVs and communicating with wireless capable devices- in fact, the complete opposite. This is cutting-edge NFC that lets a CD talk to a box, or your phone to turn lights on and off.

I'm thinking thermostats, toasters, refrigerators-pretty much the sky is the limit right now. Google has partnered with Light Signs, a company that will be providing LED light bulbs controllable by Android by the end of the year.

Late last week GIGABYTE invited us to the fancy Miramar Garden hotel in Taipei where they were setup to shoot their own promo videos of its forthcoming Intel Z68 based motherboards launch.

We went along to check them out and snap some photos for our preview of the Z68 UD3H and UD7. Inside the hotel suite GIGABYTE had two identical systems setup with the Z68 UD7 platform with the only difference being that one was configured with an SSD using Intel's new Smart Response caching technology and the other just with a standard hard drive configuration.

What is Intel Smart Response Technology? In short since we can't go into extensive detail here, it is in my opinion a way of gaining some of the benefits of an SSD without blowing your bank account or having to settle for limited storage space. The idea is that you can pick up an affordable 20GB SSD, put it in a RAID array with your large spinning hard drive and regular data that is most often accessed is cached on the SSD for quicker access.

We all know hacking is a fact of life, be it for good or bad. However, I don't think the topic of this news relates all that much to hacking.

Colin Brix is a manager at GIGABYTE headquarters here in Taipei and someone I have worked with as a contact for product samples and tech questions for many years. From the information we have seen so far, he seems to be the victim of a fairly serious prank today and one that the Taiwanese motherboard maker is taking very seriously.

A website by the name of Rumor Pedia claimed to be have sent a screenshot by someone named Kirllos who managed to 'infiltrate' GIGABYTE's internal work network using "mega-d botnet". Mind you, this bot was disabled by security company FireEye back on November 6, 2009, according to sources on Wikipedia. This screenshot is filled with a vast amount of inconsistencies relating to 'leaked' details about an upcoming processor from AMD. It also showed benchmarks using popular tests such as Super PI and others. This type of leak by a company employee tends to have very serious consequences, as you can imagine.

Diablo fan? Want Diablo 3 real, real bad? Well, just close your eyes a little bit longer and make that wish and it may come true as soon as July of this year! External beta testing of Diablo 3 is set to start in Q3 of this year. It was revealed in Activision's first quarter investor call where president and co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment, Mike Morhaime, revealed the company-wide beta testing of Diablo 3.

Mike also gave some updates on the status of Diablo 3 saying:

GPU giant meets Baseband & RF superstar, and $367 Million later an acquisition is born. Everyone at both companies is clearly excited about the deal, but nothing will be set in stone until a conference call held between the two companies Thursday, May 12, at 2:00PM PDT. Anyone at all can listen in to the call to find out more details, just dial 706-679-2572- no password or meeting number required! NVIDIA and Icera will also webcast the call, and you can listen in here and here. More details below in the press release.

16:12 US PST:

UPDATE: Both of the LG Devices will offer Wireless content streaming!! That's right, no plug or HDMI out required (although it's available too).

Tony Curry, LG PR representative, just got up to tell everyone about how much LG loves the Tegra 2 processor. Shipping this week are both the LG G2x smartphone and the LG G Slate tablet, available exclusively on T-Mobile. Life is certainly good with these two devices, sporting 4G capability and optimized battery lives.

13:52 US PST:

Here at the lovely Intercontinental Hotel in San Francisco, I'm listening to Bill Rehbok, General Manager of Mobile Games at NVIDIA tout just how awesome and how important their TegraZone platform is to Android mobile gaming. Android recently surpassed iOS as the most used OS for game developers with over 300 million users. TegraZone is what Rehbok describes as a content curator, ensuring that the best mobile games (those that run on NVIDIA Tegra) are available.

BioWare's first steps into the MMO world will come in the form of Star Wars: The Old Republic. Star Wars: The Old Republic is a new MMO that is in development between BioWare and LucasArts where it pits players in a world that takes place 300 years after the events of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and thousands of years before Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader.

Players will have the choice of character roles such as Jedi or Sith and give context to their personal story with the option to follow the light or the dark side of the Force. EA has now reported that its total investment in the new Star Wars-based MMO has reached $80 million, in development alone. Michael Pachter, Wedbush Security analyst says:

Google's over-the-air updates are amazing, I love updating my phone without having to use something like iTunes. For Apple users, they can hear about a new firmware being released for their iOS-based device, yet have to be at a computer - plug it in, open iTunes and let it update. Where Android-based users can just do it from their phone - magic, huh?

Apple are finally catching up and it seems with iOS 5 there are claims that Verizon users with iOS-based devices might have the opportunity to do updates over-the-air instead of the traditional way I explained above. Right now, theres no news on whether this will extend to other carriers as most iOS updates are pretty large in size - roughly 600MB. Obviously carriers won't want millions upon millions of people downloading massive upgrades every however often.

This is where Wi-Fi networks step in of course, but there is no news for whether the OTA updates can be done via Wi-Fi yet or not.

For current iOS-based devices such as the iPad, iPod touch and iPhone, Apple use Samsung for their processors, this is set to change with Apple changing to Intel for their processing needs. At the moment Apple obviously are loving Intel as their Mac-based range of products are Intel powered, but now Apple is looking to have Intel power the iOS-based devices.

Analyst Gus Richard says:

We all knew this was coming but waiting for 100-percent confirmation is hard and now we're seeing a leak from a voice actor for the current two Modern Warfare titles, Craig Fairbrass. He did an interview with a UK radio station talkSPORT. Craig does the voice of Ghost and Gaz and has let slip that he's currently working on a big game that is costing $200 million to make.

That rounds it down to, well, just one title. Craig said during his interview:

Munich / San Francisco-based augmented reality solutions firm metaio have developed a nifty feature for attendees of this year's Augmented Reality Event

in Santa Clara, CA, May 17-18. Using their mobile augmented reality browser junaio to navigate the entire conference.

Attendees can download the junaio browser on their Android or iPhone and launch the experience from specifically and strategically placed Latitude, Longitude and Altitude (LLA) markers that will synchronize the indoor AR experience. Generally, AR navigation depends on GPS and geo-locational data to function, but GPS isn't yet precise enough to facilitate indoor navigation (things are just too close together). Metaio's technology however allows for a fairly seamless indoor directions and information (pending that you launch the application correctly).

Episode 3 of the web-series for Mortal Kombat is out and this one features non other than Johnny Cage. The description for Episode 3 is below:

But that's not all! Episode 4 is also out, which features Kitana and Mileena:

Cranberry Zero, a poster for IHEARTCHAOS, has taken it upon himself (literally) to be an anchor for the Nintendo 3DS suite of augmented reality games and experiences. Really literally- the dude went and tattooed the '?' design from the AR marker onto his forearm!

What goes through someone's head before he or she actually makes a decision like this? Well, Cranberry Zero solved that riddle for us: