Boost Mobile rewards on-time paying customers with “Growing Data”

Boost Mobile, a subsidiary of Sprint Corp., announced a new way to reward its customers who pay on-time.  Customers who pay on time will be rewarded with free data upgrades without being charged a single penny more, an industry first for simply paying your bill on-time.

Every third on-time payment earns a customer 500MB of high-speed data on top of their current plan. After 18 on-time payments, customers can add up to 3GB of data which can more than double the base plan of 2GB per month.

“Boost Mobile is always rewarding customers for their loyalty, and the best way to say thank you is by offering plans with growing high-speed data. Our new $35 plan, or $30 with Auto Re-Boost, offers the best value now with 2GB of high-speed data and we’re offering our customers more value by slashing the prices on some of our latest smartphones to as low as $19.99. Now is the best time to be a Boost customer; you can get a premium smartphone at an affordable price and earn extra high-speed data just by paying on time.” Angela Rittgers, Vice President, Boost Mobile

Growing data is available on the $30 Unlimited with Auto-Re-Boost, $35 and $45 Unlimited plans. You can check out more details on their website.

As consumers become more educated on pricing models offered from big carriers, they are jumping over to plans like these. 5GB of data with unlimited texts and minutes for $30 dollars is cheaper than Google’s own Project Fi. Sprint, T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon continue to battle it out on the postpaid front, but the prepaid wireless space is a battleground that is picking up intensity rather quickly and quietly. Lets hope this trend continues as these battles help lower prices across the board.

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Tribeca and Lionsgate’s video-streaming service is now available

It took almost a year to get here, but Tribeca and film distributor Lionsgate have finally launched their paid video-streaming service. Shortlist, as the on-demand product is called, will have a $5 monthly subscription fee and give users access to over 150 “critically acclaimed” movies. Among them are Crash, City of God, Chasing Amy, Fargo and The Producers, to mention a few. Right now, Tribeca Shortlist is only available on the web and for iPad, although we’re told it’ll be available on the iPhone, Fire TV and Roku later this year, as well as Apple TV and Android in 2016. Tribeca, which is the company behind the Tribeca Film Festival, says the $5 price is set to stay until the end of 2015, but then it plans to increase it to $6. Nevertheless, if you’re interested in seeing what it has to offer, you can sign up for a free trial.

Source: Tribeca Shortlist

IBM unlocks the secret to carbon nanotube transistors

Following Moore’s law is getting harder and harder, especially as existing components reach their physical size limitations. Parts like silicon transistor contacts — the “valves” within a transistor that allow electrons to flow — simply can’t be shrunken any further. However, IBM announced a major engineering achievement on Thursday that could revolutionize how computers operate: they’ve figured out how to swap out the silicon transistor contacts for smaller, more efficient, carbon nanotubes.

The problem engineers are facing is that the smaller silicon transistor contacts get, the higher their electrical resistance becomes. There comes a point where the components simply get too small to conduct electrons efficiently. Silicon has reached that point. But that’s where the carbon nanotubes come in. These structures measure less than 10 nanometers in diameter — that’s less than half the size of today’s smallest silicon transistor contact. IBM actually had to devise a new means of attaching these tiny components. Known as an “end-bonded contact scheme” the 10 nm electrical leads are chemically bonded to the metal substructure. Replacing these contacts with carbon nanotubes won’t just allow for computers to crunch more data, faster. This breakthrough ensures that they’ll continue to shrink, following Moore’s Law, for several iterations beyond what silicon components are capable of.

“These chip innovations are necessary to meet the emerging demands of cloud computing, Internet of Things and Big Data systems,” Dario Gil, vice president of Science & Technology at IBM Research, said in a statement. “As technology nears the physical limits of silicon, new materials and circuit architectures must be ready to deliver the advanced technologies that will drive the Cognitive Computing era. This breakthrough shows that computer chips made of carbon nanotubes will be able to power systems of the future sooner than the industry expected.” The study will be formally published October 2nd, in the journal Science. This breakthrough follows a number of other recent minimization milestones including transistors that are only 3-atoms thick or constructed from a single atom.