See the rest of the article from Jalopnik here.The Freevalve engine gets rid of the camshaft and the throttle body, replacing it with pneumatic actuators on top of each cylinder. This is something that has also been toyed with for a long time with electromagnetic valve openers, some ships use them now. That means the concept is proven, but now it's about reducing that scale to something smaller and more usable than a huge ship.
What that does is give completely independent control over each cylinder and each valve. If you have four valves, sometimes it only opens two. You can't do that with a regular camshaft, since the lobes are set to open all the valves. In order to get that sort of variability that Freevalve has, you'd have to totally switch cams. Freevalve can also shut down one cylinder, two cylinders, three cylinders, etc. It has that square cam profile that makes engineers all wet in the trousers.
Read the article, it's worth it. Also, one of the pictures shows that their test Saab 9-5 Wagon is a manual.