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Quantance Inc. said it has raised $12 million in Series D funding from TD Fund, Granite Ventures, InterWest Partners and DoCoMo Capital. The company manufactures 4G/LTE power supplies.

PRESS RELEASE

Quantance Raises $12 Million Series D Funding to Ramp Up Mass Market Production and Expand Fast Power Supply Technology

Key Wins for Quantance Envelope Tracking Set Stage for Volume Production of Q845, Roadmap Enhancements and Better Integration with a Wide Range of PAs

SAN MATEO, Calif., April 11, 2013 /PRNewswire/ – Quantance Inc., manufacturer of ultra-fast, 4G/LTE envelope tracking (ET) power supplies, today announced it has raised $12 million in Series D funding. Investors include TD Fund, Granite Ventures, InterWest Partners and DoCoMo Capital.

The funding will be used to support production of the company’s flagship product, the Q845 qBoost™ ET Power Supply, and planned product innovations and enhancements. The Q845 has been selected for several baseband/transceiver reference designs, and is being ramped to mass market production to support the market shift toward ET as a definitive requirement in 4G/LTE smartphones, tablets, mobile hotspots and other mobile devices. Additionally, Quantance has continued filing core ET patents along with product enhancements, and plans next-generation ET products and tighter power amplifier (PA) integration later this year, including both GaAs and CMOS PAs.

“The high traction our Q845 has gained with chipset and handset providers since mid-2012 is driving our plans to scale for mass market production,” said Vikas Vinayak, Quantance’s CEO and co-founder.  “So many big players have firm plans for deploying ET solutions that we expect ET to be ‘table stakes’ by the end of next year. To maintain our leadership role in this fast-moving market, we are planning several performance enhancements and seamless operation with all 4G PAs, ranging from legacy PAs designed primarily for older Average Power Tracking (APT) technology to the latest trends in CMOS PAs.”

Quantance’s patented qBoost ET technology is a unique boosting ET architecture that enables PA efficiency to reach theoretical limits, and at the same time, dramatically increases PA transmit power. This architecture delivers the response time equivalent of a 400MHz switcher for ET systems – making the Q845 more than 100 times faster than any other mobile ET power supply solution available today. This ultra-fast performance, along with a standards-based interface and tiny application footprint, sets the industry standard for performance, size and integration simplicity.

“Quantance is well positioned to win a large portion of this explosive ET market, and will be at the leading edge of ET innovations as it is adopted in LTE platforms starting later this year,” said Eric Zimits, managing director at Granite Ventures.  “But what excites me most about the company is the potential that Quantance’s fast power supply technology has in a number of markets, such as enabling 4G CMOS PAs, applying ET to audio amplifiers and improving the performance of application processors.  Quantance will make major announcements in some of these areas within the next year.”

About Quantance

Quantance, a venture-backed semiconductor startup based in Silicon Valley, was founded to build the industry’s fastest power supplies. Investors include TD Fund, Granite Ventures, InterWest Partners and DoCoMo Capital.  For more information, please visitwww.quantance.com.

The post Quantance Raises $12M From Granite, InterWest, DoCoMo, TD Fund appeared first on peHUB.

Samsung has started mass producing 128GB flash memory chips that feature the highest density in the industry, and are made with a 10nm process. Such high-capacity flash memory chips already exist in the marketplace, and the South Korean company is looking to not only bring smaller flash memory chips to mobile devices, but also replace traditional hard drives. These new flash memory chips are rated for 400Mbps throughput and according to Samsung, will be utilized in its high-capacity microSD cards, as well as solid-state drives with over 500 GB of storage. For consumers, this introduction of new flash memory chips means lower prices for current high-capacity, flash-based storage that is still out of reach for many.

Come comment on this article: Samsung Begins Mass Producing 128GB Flash Memory Chips Using 10nm Process

In January, President Obama proposed a series of executive actions to help keep our kids and communities safe, and put forward a set of commonsense proposals for Congress to consider that can make a real difference in protecting our citizens from gun violence. But they are only going to act on them if they hear from the American people.

You can make your voice heard by joining the White House call for action on social media. Here's how it works:

1. Sign on to share a tweet or Facebook message through our action page here: wh.gov/nowisthetime/action
2. We'll gather as many voices as we can, then post all the messages and tweets simultaneously for maximum impact
3. The more people who sign up, the louder our collective voice will be, so after you sign on, encourage your friends and family to participate. 

Learn more about the President's proposals here, and keep the conversation going on your social networks with the hashtag #NowIsTheTime.

Microsoft announced GeoFlow at the SharePoint conference in November 2012 and today rolled out a public preview of the 3-D mashup that combines the Office spreadsheet app Excel with Bing maps to allow you to plot geographic and temporal data visually.

Microsoft Research claims that GeoFlow “enables information workers to discover and share new insights from data through rich, 3-D data on a globe and fluid, cinematic guided tours—virtual cinematography moving through data”. The app evolved out of the WorldWide Telescope project. “We built a gigantic virtual telescope, but to do so, we had to build an engine that could visualize the universe. If we can visualize the universe, we can visualize almost anything else”, Microsoft Research principal researcher Curtis Wong explains.

Wong says that with GeoFlow the goal was to bring dynamic and interactive data visualization to the business world. “We wanted to explore new tools that could help us understand the large-scale temporal and geospatial trends that affect businesses” Wong says.

The project was greenlighted way back in June 2011, but has taken some time in development. “Sometimes research requires a long-term view”, Wong states.

Now every users can begin experimenting with GeoFlow, but you will need to be running either Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2013 or Office 365 ProPlus in order to give it a test run.

After a very public defense of rumors about the next Xbox’s always-on Internet requirements, a new report claims that Microsoft creative director Adam Orth is no longer with the company. In a series of Twitter posts, Orth defended the move by countering that “every device” is now constantly connected, and then delivered a low-blow when someone responded suggesting always-on connectivity might not work great for customers in rural locations, responding snidely, “Why on earth would i live there?”.

According to Game Informer, which confirmed reports from unnamed sources via a call direct to Microsoft that Orth was no longer employed there (we also contacted Microsoft for official confirmation, but a spokesperson simply said ““We are not commenting further on this issue”), it’s likely that incident led to his resignation or removal. And based on Microsoft’s public apology, it likely is the case that this wasn’t the venue. But the real problem here might be that defending a decision to embrace an always-on Internet connection requirement is bound to devolve into personal arguments, since logical ones that don’t involve owning up to a simple “we want to lock down our product and better control piracy” aren’t readily available.

The original report of how the next Xbox would work included a requirement that a user be connected to the Internet to even begin playing games or apps on the console, along with a 3-minute time out for a connection loss before said games or apps are suspended pending the resolution of the network connection issue. For users who have been burned by the always-on requirements of recent PC gaming titles like Diablo III and SimCity, this rumor (which Microsoft neither confirms nor denies, despite its apology) probably sounds like a total nightmare scenario.

It’s not making things better that a report surfaced this week from the Verge which claims that the next Xbox will interact with your cable box, hence the need for an always-on connection. The timing of that report smacks of Microsoft trying to do some subtle damage control based on these recent leaks, without giving away anything official ahead of its own planned Xbox events, the first of which is reportedly taking place late in May.

Of course, even that doesn’t justify an always-on connection requirement, not for isolated functions like single-player gaming which should have no problem running without an active connection, even if a player has to give up some features like achievements and leaderboard ranking to make that work (you know, exactly the way it works now).

The problem with trying to come up with a coherent argument for why a device or game needs an always-on connection without saying those three dreaded letters (D-R-M) is that it’s impossible to do convincingly. Companies like Microsoft and EA, which have very savvy PR professionals on staff, know that trying to do so without a proper feint like a connected TV service is fruitless. Aside from strongly suggesting that the leaked info was correct, taking to Twitter also meant venturing away from the party line that always-on is value add, not consumer punishment, and that’s not something any company mulling this kind of sensitive and major change to the way it delivers services can afford.

Google wants to know what you want it to do with your stuff when you die. The company has launched a new feature called Inactive Account Manager (not as grim as it could have been, I guess).

“Not a great name, we know,” product manager Andreas Tuerk even admits.

Google Death would probably raise a few eyebrows.

With the feature, you can tell Google what you want it to do with your Gmail messages and data from other Google services.

“For example, you can choose to have your data deleted — after three, six, nine or 12 months of inactivity,” says Tuerk. “Or you can select trusted contacts to receive data from some or all of the following services: +1s; Blogger; Contacts and Circles; Drive; Gmail; Google+ Profiles, Pages and Streams; Picasa Web Albums; Google Voice and YouTube. Before our systems take any action, we’ll first warn you by sending a text message to your cellphone and email to the secondary address you’ve provided.”

This really is an important issue that more web companies should be dealing with as more and more aspects of our lives go digital. For more on what happens to you online when you die, check this out.

Continue reading…

A team of African and North American scientists led by the U.S. Geological Survey and NatureServe, a conservation non-profit organization, has created a series of continent-wide ecosystem maps that offer the most detailed portrayals of Africa’s natural setting yet produced. The new maps and related data on landforms, geology, bioclimates, and vegetation can be used across Africa for conservation planning and resource management, as well as for impact assessments of climate change and changes in land use, such as agriculture, deforestation, and urbanization. 

“This was a multi-organizational, international collaboration to create new earth science datasets for the entire continent at finer resolutions than ever before,” said Matt Larsen, USGS Associate Director for Climate and Land Use Change. “An added benefit is that this information about ecosystem conditions can be put to many different uses. It will have tremendous utility beyond ecosystem assessments.” 

USGS and NatureServe researchers collaborated with the Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD), based in Nairobi, Kenya. RCMRD hosted two workshops where invited experts from many African nations developed a new classification of African ecosystems and provided location data for the newly classified ecosystems.

Overall, a total of 37 experts from 18 countries worked together to formulate the ecosystem classifications (126 distinct ecosystems were mapped) and produce the maps at a base resolution of 90 meters. 

“This much improved baseline of Africa’s ecosystem conditions has the potential for more accurate carbon assessment studies in Africa,” observed USGS scientist Roger Sayre, lead author of the publication. 

Determination of biological carbon stocks in ecosystems is an emerging science. Currently, carbon stocks are assessed in general biome categories like forests, grasses, shrublands, wetlands, deserts, and agricultural lands. The increased classification resolution supplied by the new African ecosystems maps will facilitate a more robust assignment of carbon inventories to a greater, more precise number of biological sources. 

The Association of American Geographers (AAG) provided key support for the final publication. The publication is available in digital form from the USGS.   

Citation

A new map of standardized terrestrial ecosystems of Africa

2013, Sayre, Roger; Comer, Patrick; Hak, Jon; Josse, Carmen; Bow, Jacquie; et al.

African Geographical Review 

Learn more

• USGS Global Ecosystems
• Ecosystems of the United States (map)

The state of Louisiana is looking to crack down on another activity that threatens the safety of its commuters: Facebooking while driving.

Really, this includes any sort of social networking while driving like tweeting or posting photos to Instagram.

The bill, Senate bill 147, has passed committee without objection.

Louisiana already bans texting while driving, but this bill would extend the banned activities list to posting to or even viewing content on any social network.

No person shall operate any motor vehicle upon any public road or highway of this state while using a wireless telecommunications device to access, read, or post to a social networking site.

The bill goes on to define “social network” as “any web-based service that allows individuals to construct a profile within a bounded system, articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and communicate with other members of the site.”

You would think that this is a unnecessary addition to current anti-texting while driving laws, which already exist in the state. But the bill’s sponsor, Senator Dale Erdey, says that police have actually cited cases where they’ve pulled someone over for texting while driver only to be told “Hey, I’m not texting…I’m Instagramming!” Or Facebooking, or tweeting, or any other social network activity.

He says the current law isn’t comprehensive enough to cover these loopholes.

Sorry, drivers. We know that bumper sticker on the truck in front of you is absolutely outrageous. But your Twitter followers can wait to see it.

This isn’t the only smartphone activity outside of texting that’s getting challenged around the country. Earlier this week, a California judge upheld the illegality of using a mapping product while driving.

[Louisiana Senate bill 147 via The Daily Dot]

Keyboard task switching under Windows normally means repeatedly pressing Alt+Tab or Win+Tab, cycling through your running applications until you find what you need. But this is a more direct way. If you see you required program is, say, the 7th button on the taskbar, then pressing Win+7 will launch it directly.

When your taskbar is cluttered then of course it may take a moment to figure out exactly which number any particular button might be. But that’s where the free 7+ Taskbar Numberer comes in. The program can add number overlays to each of your taskbar buttons, helping you identify them at a glance.

If this is sounding familiar, then you’re right, we covered the first version of the program last year. But the latest build has two interesting improvements.

First, it introduces an option to hide the numbers until the Windows key is pressed. If you didn’t like the number overlays then this may appeal, as normally your taskbar will look just as it always did.

(Unfortunately the numbers will also reappear whenever you press the Windows key for some other reason — Win+R to open the Run box, say — which can be distracting, but on balance we think it’s a useful addition.)

And second, 7+ Taskbar Numberer is now fully compatible with Windows 8, which may help you launch regular Windows programs from the Start screen.

If you’re at the desktop, say, having 7+ Taskbar Numberer will help you see that Firefox is, perhaps, button 9 on the taskbar. If you later want to return to Firefox from the Start Screen, there’s no need to use Alt+Tab, or click the desktop tile, then the Firefox taskbar button: just press Win+9 and the browser will reappear immediately. (Win+number is a standard task switching hotkey, of course, but 7+ Taskbar Numberer just makes it a little easier to use.)

One small down side here is that getting 7+ Taskbar Numberer set up and working as you’d like still requires a little work. There’s no automated setup, so you’ll need to save the program somewhere safe, set up a shortcut, give it the correct command line arguments, and so on.

It’s not difficult, though – the program’s readme.html file has everything you need — and on balance7+ Taskbar Numberer makes it notably easier to switch to and launch running and pinned applications.

Photo Credit: Liv friis-larsen/Shutterstock

The LG Optimus G Pro is an answer to Samsung’s Galaxy Note II, and offers rock solid specs at a similar price point. Starting April 12, the Optimus G Pro will receive a “Value Pack” upgrade which brings Smart Video, Dual Camera, and Pause & Resume. Smart Video utilizes eye-tracking technology and if a user is watching a video and looks away, the video will pause. Once the user looks back at the screen, the video will then start playing again. Dual Camera uses the front and rear-facing camera at the same time when taking photos. Pause & Resume is very similar to Vine functionality where you hold to record and release to stop recording, creating videos with very simple edits. You can watch the LG Optimus G Pro “Value Pack” upgrade video and catch the full press release below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

LG Optimus G Pro Value Pack Upgrade

(SEOUL–Korea Newswire) April 11, 2013 — The Optimus G Pro, LG’s first Full HD display smartphone launched in Korea in March, will get the Value Pack upgrade with new and improved UX features on April 12.

New features include:

[Smart Video]

Recognizes the position of the viewer’s eyes and automatically plays or stops the video without any manual input from the user. When the viewer’s eyes are no longer focused on the smartphone display, the front camera recognizes this and immediately pauses the video. Once the user’s gaze returns to the smartphone, the video resumes playback from the point last viewed.

[Dual Camera]

Extending the Dual Recording function, LG is introducing Dual Camera through this Value Pack upgrade. The world’s first Dual Camera function simultaneously captures photographs of both the subject and the shooter using both the front and back cameras for a picture-in-picture composition.

[Pause & Resume Recording]

The Pause & Resume Recording feature allows the user to pause and start in record mode for one continuous video file. Until now, a new video clip would be created when recording restarted, which resulted in multiple video files.

In addition to these new features, some current functions will receive upgrades. Magic Remote Pad will be added to the existing QRemote function to work specifically with LG Smart TVs. Similar to the touch pads of most notebooks, Magic Remote Pad turns the Optimus G Pro into a remote control for LG Smart TVs. What`s more, Text Keypad, another new addition to QRemote, will make typing on a Smart TV easier than ever before by turning the Optimus G Pro into a convenient input device.

News Source: LG Electronics Inc.
Web Site: http://www.lge.co.kr

Come comment on this article: LG Optimus G Pro To Receive ‘Value Pack’ Upgrade April 12

sUAS Recently Evaluated for Wildlife Management Applications

Colorado Parks and Wildlife and the U.S. Geological Survey will work together to evaluate whether a small unmanned aircraft can save state wildlife managers time, money and offer a safer and enhanced alternative to gather greater sage-grouse data.

During the media-only event, a USGS crew will field launch the aircraft and media will have the opportunity to take photos, video and get a first-hand look at the system. 

Representatives from Colorado Parks and Wildlife, the USGS, and the Bureau of Land Management will be available for interviews.

When:          Friday, April 12 – 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. (Please be punctual)

Where:           Kremmling, Colo.  

General map from Denver 

• From the intersection of Hwy 9 and Hwy 40, travel north towards Steamboat Springs for approximately 10 miles.
• At the intersection of Grand County Road 25 and Hwy 40, north of Wolford Reservoir, look for a Colorado Parks and Wildlife vehicle parked on the right side of the road. Receive further instructions from there.

Please consider:

• Access and event will take place along a dirt road.
• Dress for variable weather.
• Restroom facilities are not available.
• Bring food, water and other supplies.
• Proper operation of the sUAS requires concentration from the flight crew. Please follow instructions given on-site at all times.

How to participate: By 5 p.m. Thursday, April 11, please confirm your attendance with one of the Media Points of Contact:

• Heidi Koontz, 303-202-4763 – [email protected]
• Mike Porras, 970-210-3768 – [email protected]

If confirming by email, please include your contact information. If the demonstration is cancelled or postponed due to inclement weather, we will notify you as soon as possible.

Additional information about the USGS sUAS program, including video of the aircraft in flight, can be found at online.

For more information about greater sage-grouse, visit the Colorado Parks and Wildlife website on greater sage-grouse studies.

To put it mildly, Lindsay Lohan has had a rough few years. While dealing with criminal charges, arrests, probation, and rehab, her once fast-moving career has come to a screeching halt.

There are signs, though, that the ginger actress is improving both her health and acting prospects. Lohan starred as Elizabeth Taylor in last year’s poorly reviewed Lifetime TV movie Liz & Dick, and more recently guest-starred in the Charlie Sheen Network TV show Anger Management.

This week, Lohan appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman to talk about

Unfortunately for Lohan, Letterman did not slow-pitch the interview, joking about the star’s past before grilling her about her future. In the end, the interview ended up being a mini-intervention on national television.

Letterman began by reading a few of the monologue jokes he has made about Lohan in recent years, and moved on to being serious, asking her about her upcoming rehab and her addictions. Lohan will be heading for a long stint in rehab (three months) starting May 2nd.

“To be honest, I’m the happiest when I’m working and the healthiest,” said Lohan. “I think this is an opportunity for me to, you know, focus on what I love in life, and I don’t think it’s a bad thing. I think it’s a blessing.”

Lohan tried to steer the interview onto the topic of Scary Movie V, which Lohan was there to promote, but Letterman didn’t let up, pulling out a list of Lohan’s past convictions. Lohan ended the interview tearing up, dabbing at her eyes while Letterman complimented her on her poise and “spine” in showing up for the interview.

Following the Letterman interview, Lohan tweeted out her thanks to all of the fans who support her:

Follow @lindsaylohan

Lindsay Lohan
@lindsaylohan

Thanks to all for the kind words and overwhelming support #blessed

 Reply  ·  Retweet  ·  Favorite
1 day ago via Twitter for iPhone · powered by @socialditto

Dropbox announced “Dropbox for Business” on Wednesday. The company says that it’s making a lot of changes to make Dropbox better for companies of all sizes, so it’s rebranding “Dropbox For Teams” as “Dropbox For Business”.

One of the upcoming features is single sign-on (SSO). Dropbox’s Anand Subramani explains:

SSO works behind the scenes to let users sign in just once to a central identity provider, like Active Directory, and securely access all their business apps, like Dropbox. With SSO, companies can put their existing trusted identity provider in charge of the authentication process.

For users, SSO means ease — one fewer password to remember and one fewer step to get to your work. Once logged in to your system, there’s no need to sign in to Dropbox separately. For IT admins, SSO means additional security and administrative management. Single sign-on gives you complete ownership of the authentication process and works with your company’s existing password policies. It also easily ties into the existing Dropbox provisioning and de-provisioning API to provide further Active Directory integration.

The company is working with various identity providers on single sign-on. These include Ping Identity, Okta, OneLogin, Centrify, and Symplified. The feature is coming next month. It will take advantage of the industry standard Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML).

Dropbox claims to be used by 2 million businesses and 95% of the Fortune 500.

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Natural gas power plants can use about 20 percent less fuel when the sun is shining by injecting solar energy into natural gas with a new system being developed by the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The system converts natural gas and sunlight into a more energy-rich fuel called syngas, which power plants can burn to make electricity.

“Our system will enable power plants to use less natural gas to produce the same amount of electricity they already make,” said PNNL engineer Bob Wegeng, who is leading the project. “At the same time, the system lowers a power plant’s greenhouse gas emissions at a cost that’s competitive with traditional fossil fuel power.”

PNNL will conduct field tests of the system at its sunny campus in Richland, Wash., this summer.

With the U.S. increasingly relying on inexpensive natural gas for energy, this system can reduce the carbon footprint of power generation. DOE’s Energy Information Administration estimates natural gas will make up 27 percent of the nation’s electricity by 2020. Wegeng noted PNNL’s system is best suited for power plants located in sunshine-drenched areas such as the American Southwest.

Installing PNNL’s system in front of natural gas power plants turns them into hybrid solar-gas power plants. The system uses solar heat to convert natural gas into syngas, a fuel containing hydrogen and carbon monoxide. Because syngas has a higher energy content, a power plant equipped with the system can consume about 20 percent less natural gas while producing the same amount of electricity.

This decreased fuel usage is made possible with concentrating solar power, which uses a reflecting surface to concentrate the sun’s rays like a magnifying glass. PNNL’s system uses a mirrored parabolic dish to direct sunbeams to a central point, where a PNNL-developed device absorbs the solar heat to make syngas.

Macro savings, micro technology

About four feet long and two feet wide, the device contains a chemical reactor and several heat exchangers. The reactor has narrow channels that are as wide as six dimes stacked on top of each other. Concentrated sunlight heats up the natural gas flowing through the reactor’s channels, which hold a catalyst that helps turn natural gas into syngas.

The heat exchanger features narrower channels that are a couple times thicker than a strand of human hair. The exchanger’s channels help recycle heat left over from the chemical reaction gas. By reusing the heat, solar energy is used more efficiently to convert natural gas into syngas. Tests on an earlier prototype of the device showed more than 60 percent of the solar energy that hit the system’s mirrored dish was converted into chemical energy contained in the syngas.

Lower-carbon cousin to traditional power plants

PNNL is refining the earlier prototype to increase its efficiency while creating a design that can be made at a reasonable price. The project includes developing cost-effective manufacturing techniques that could be used for the mass production.  The manufacturing methods will be developed by PNNL staff at the Microproducts Breakthrough Institute, a research and development facility in Corvallis, Ore., that is jointly managed by PNNL and Oregon State University.

Wegeng’s team aims to keep the system’s overall cost low enough so that the electricity produced by a natural gas power plant equipped with the system would cost no more than 6 cents per kilowatt-hour by 2020. Such a price tag would make hybrid solar-gas power plants competitive with conventional, fossil fuel-burning power plants while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The system is adaptable to a large range of natural gas power plant sizes. The number of PNNL devices needed depends on a particular power plant’s size. For example, a 500 MW plant would need roughly 3,000 dishes equipped with PNNL’s device.

Unlike many other solar technologies, PNNL’s system doesn’t require power plants to cease operations when the sun sets or clouds cover the sky. Power plants can bypass the system and burn natural gas directly.

Though outside the scope of the current project, Wegeng also envisions a day when PNNL’s solar-driven system could be used to create transportation fuels. Syngas can also be used to make synthetic crude oil, which can be refined into diesel and gasoline than runs our cars.

The current project is receiving about $4.3 million combined from DOE’s SunShot Initiative, which aims to advance American-made solar technologies, and industrial partner SolarThermoChemical LLC of Santa Maria, Calif. SolarThermoChemcial has a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement for the project and plans to manufacture and sell the system after the project ends.

More information about PNNL’s concentrating solar power system for natural gas power plants.

REFERENCE: RS Wegeng, DR Palo, RA Dagle, PH Humble, JA Lizarazo-Adarme, SK, SD Leith, CJ Pestak, S Qiu, B Boler, J Modrell, G McFadden, “Development and Demonstration of a Prototype Solar Methane Reforming System for Thermochemical Energy Storage — Including Preliminary Shakedown Testing Results,” 9th Annual International Energy Conversion Engineering Conference, July-August 2011, http://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/6.2011-5899.

The 7-inch tablet is the new 10-inch tablet. Consumers have stopped wanting the best instead opting for the cheapest, which explains why the Nexus 7 and iPad Mini are so popular. It would seems that Microsoft is finally catching on.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft is now in the planning stages of a 7-inch Surface tablet. The interesting part is that a 7-inch tablet wasn’t initially part of Microsoft’s Surface strategy, but the popularity of smaller tablets have reportedly forced the company to reconsider.

Microsoft already hinted that it was working on a 7-inch tablet last month when its newly updated OEM guidelines said that Windows 8 now supported a minimum resolution of 1024×768. The resolution is perfect for cheap 7-inch tablets. At the time, Microsoft said the new resolution rules were for “partners exploring designs for certain markets,” but it seemed pretty obvious that Microsoft would be making a 7-inch Surface tablet of its own.

A smaller, cheaper tablet could be just what Microsoft needs as Windows 8, and Surface tablets, have failed to capture much of the mobile market. Most of the problems stem from the high cost of Surface tablets with the Surface RT starting at $499. A 7-inch Surface could probably come in under $300, which would allow Microsoft to undermine the price of the popular iPad Mini. If Microsoft was truly crazy, it could even price it below the Nexus 7 at $200. Such a scenario is highly unlikely though.

All of this is just a rumor for now, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see it become reality sooner than later. It only makes sense for Microsoft to build a 7-inch Surface, and its own efforts may lead other OEMs to create cheaper 7-inch Windows tablets to help Windows 8 gain a little more marketshare.

Over the past few years, humanoid robot technology has gotten better and better at, well, making robots seem more human. We’re talking the look, the feel, the movements, and the AI. And this technology is only going to get better in the coming decades.

Of course, if there’s anything we can count on humanity to do, it’s sexualize things. And naturally (unnaturally?), the evolution of androids means that eventually, people are going to start having sex with robots. Duh.

It’s not like this isn’t already happening, but the future could open up so many more opportunities for robot sexy times. The Huffington Post and YouGov recently conducted a poll about Americans’ attitudes toward the future of robots, and our interactions with them.

And the results concerning sex robots tip my bullshit meter all the way to maximum bullshittery.

When asked if they would use a sex robot for its (his/her’s?) designed purpose, only 9% said yes. Nine. As in less than one in ten. Ok, sure.

18% said that they think sex robots will be available by 2030.

Last year, a New Zealand study published in Futures magazine painted an interesting picture of the pay-for-sex world in the next few decades. Researchers envision a version of Amsterdam’s red light district that’s completely run by android prostitutes by the year 2050.

“[They] are clean of sexual transmitted infections (STIs), not smuggled in from Eastern Europe and forced into slavery, the city council will have direct control over android sex workers controlling prices, hours of operations and sexual services,” they said.

These sex robots could be fully customizable and offer a wider variant of body type, ethnicity, age, language, and various sexual features. In their future, it’s goodbye sex trade and hello clean, safe, sex robots.

And there’s obviously no emotional toll to be taken on sex robots, that is of course until they become sentient. But we don’t have to worry about that for at least a few hundred years. Probably.

HuffPost’s poll also asked about whether or not sex with a sexbot is considered cheating. 42% said that it would be. And the younger the respondent, the more likely they were to say it’s not cheating.