Last week at CTIA, we sat down with Lixin Cheng -- CEO of ZTE USA -- for a candid discussion about the company's future in the US. The conversation started with ZTE's current portfolio in the US, which consists of 18 SKUs -- primarily inexpensive Android smartphones (most with LTE) for the prepaid market. Mr. Cheng mentioned that the company's doing quite well in the US thanks to an 85.7 percent year-to-year growth in market share. ZTE is now in third place among prepaid handset manufacturers with a market share of 17 percent. He explained that carriers are seeing revenue growth from prepaid services which now account for 22.5 to 29 percent of revenue. This puts the company in a strong position for the future, despite last year's investigation by Congress. So we asked Mr. Cheng if and when ZTE would bring flagship phones like the Grand S or Grand Memo to the US in partnership with the four major carriers. His reply:
I have promised you at CES that we're going to bring the Grand S or Memo series into [the] US, and we are working on that, and I think that very soon we will announce some good news.
That's good news indeed. Hit the break for more, including our video interview and full transcript.
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile
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Facebook Home and the First phone to ship with it on board were revealed just over a month ago, and in the time since, the Home team has been hard at work improving the platform. Today at Facebook HQ we got to check in with Cory Ondrejka, Director of Mobile Engineering and Adam Mosseri, Director of Product to see how Home has been doing since its debut, and to hear what's in store for Home moving forward.
Thus far, Home's been installed on almost a million phones, which has given Facebook some clear insight about the ways it needs to be improved. Most complaints thus far have centered on Home's failings as an app launcher -- when you install Home on any phone, it rearranges your apps because there's no folder support and no app dock. Well, Mosseri and Ondrejka feel your pain and assured us that those two features will be rolling out in the coming months, and they plan to continue to iterate to make Home a robust launcher. Facebook also has plans to roll out a new buddy list feature that'll show up as an overlay on top of Cover Feed with a simple swipe. This lets users start conversations directly from Cover Feed instead of having to open up the messenger app to start chatting. That's not all Facebook has in store, however, so join us after the break for more.
Filed under: Software, Mobile, Facebook
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Neuron Controlled Clemson University engineer Kumar Venayagamoorthy with his neuron-controlled power plant simulation. Clemson University
Living neurons are coming up with better solutions for electricity distribution than people can.
Talk about a mind meld. Researchers have hooked up living brain cells, grown in a petri dish, to a computer.
The computer runs a simulation of a power plant and sends the neurons problems about electricity distribution. Scientists then take the solutions the brain cells come up with as possible equations for controlling the U.S. electrical grid in the future. (Actual solutions for controlling electricity around the U.S. wouldn't use living neurons; they would just use computer code written after scientists studied what the neurons came up with.)
"In a lab, in simulation studies, we have shown that we can intelligently control a power plant with such biologically inspired neural networks," Kumar Venayagamoorthy, one of the project scientists, tells Popular Science. Venayagamoorthy is an engineer at Clemson University in South Carolina. A lab-grown network of neurons, he says, "learns the dynamics of the power plant and based on the learned dynamics, it's able to predict future states."
Venayagamoorthy and his colleagues, including engineers at Clemson and neuroscientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology, are trying to create new equations that will make the U.S. more energy efficient. Right now, power plants around the U.S. are linked to each other and to buildings and houses. That whole network is called the power grid.
That infrastructure is getting old, however, and many researchers are hoping to replace it with more sophisticated connections that can do things like go around a transmission line downed by a storm, or give homeowners more detailed stats about their hour-to-hour electricity use. Such sophisticated features will need complex computer code to control them.
Venayagamoorthy says he's specifically looking for equations to control power generation and transmission. He and his colleagues started their research into neuron-controlled power plants in 2008.
He thinks he'll have a system ready to demonstrate to utility companies in two or three years. After that, if the companies like what they see, the scientists will have to do more research to make it commercially viable before it goes into the actual grid that hooks up to Americans' homes-a process that may take more than a decade.
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Blooming Oceans Courtesy Sitbon Architectes
Tackling rising oceans with style
Scientists estimate that the sea level will rise 9 inches or more by 2030, up to more than 6.6 feet by 2100. In anticipation of a far wetter world, French architecture firm Sitbon Architectes designed this pod concept for a habitable, eco-friendly phytoplankton farm in the Indian Ocean.
Phytoplankton are microscopic organisms that form the foundation of the aquatic food chain. They use chlorophyll to turn sunlight into energy, absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen like land plants. They can have explosive population growth, known as a bloom, expanding over hundreds of square kilometers in the ocean.
Moored to the ocean floor, the farm, called Bloom, would be a 5-story, partially-submerged center where scientists could live and grow phytoplankton, reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and releasing oxygen. In the process, it could serve as an alert system for rising waters in the event of a tsunami. (Though it doesn't look like the best place to actually ride out a tsunami, with its many air holes.)
The project was a finalist in Architizer's 2013 A+ Awards. The firm envisions that "every factory would have its own bloom allowing it to absorb the CO2 that it created." Plus, it looks like it could involve a lot of fun water sports.
[plusMOOD]
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