The Board of Awesomeness is now advising grocery shoppers at a Whole Foods in Austin, Texas.

Last month, Chaotic Moon Labs' Board of Awesomeness was one of the stars of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It's a motorized skateboard tricked out with a Samsung tablet and Microsoft's Kinect so that it can be steered by hand gestures and voice commands. But it turns that the Moon Lab had more on its mind than just skateboarding.

The Board of Awesomeness – or Project Sk8 as it's called by the Chaotic folks – was really just a prototype for a more ambitious project that could change the face of shopping. It's called the Smarter Cart, and as GeekWire first reported, Microsoft demoed the thing on Monday at its Redmond, Washington, headquarters.

Microsoft didn't say who built the device, but Wired.com learned about the Chaotic Moon connection from a source who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with press.

Three weeks ago, Whole Foods let lab researchers from Chaotic Moon, a maker of mobile applications, into one of its Austin grocery stores to test out the Smarter Cart. The cart comes with a Windows 8 tablet – attached right around the cart's handlebars – and a UPC scanner. Using Kinect, it can follow shoppers around the store and even guide them to the products that they're trying to find.

Using RFID, (Radio-frequency identification) the tablet can read items off of a smart-card shopping list, and then make recommendations to shoppers, using a speech and voice recognition as the interface. Smarter Cart can even offer up recipes and catch shopping mistakes (did you want low-fat or no-fat yogurt?).

So far, about 30 lucky Austinites have had a run with the test cart, but that number will soon get a boost. Starting on April 1, Chaotic Moon will begin testing more than one cart at a time at the grocery store.

Mobile devices and Google Maps have changed the way we get around city streets, but once you step indoors, it's not yet clear what mobile technology can really do.

But Cisco Wireless Networking Chief Technology Officer Bob Friday thinks that that could change soon. "We're working with a whole bunch of little startups now around this indoor mobile experience," he said in an interview conducted on Friday, before the Smarter Cart demonstration. "The question is what's going to become this iconic indoor mobile app."