In today’s update of technology news: researchers create battery-free cell phone; Pokemon Go, hot or not? New Facebook campus will have 150 apartments, a grocery store and a retail street.

Researchers create cell phone that needs no battery

University of Washington researchers have invented a cellphone that requires no batteries — a major leap forward in moving beyond chargers, cords and dying phones. Instead, the phone harvests the few microwatts of power it requires from either ambient radio signals or light. So says Jennifer Langston in the University of Washington news.

“We’ve built what we believe is the first functioning cellphone that consumes almost zero power,” said co-author Shyam Gollakota, an associate professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the UW. “To achieve the really, really low power consumption that you need to run a phone by harvesting energy from the environment, we had to fundamentally rethink how these devices are designed.”

Using off-the-shelf components on a printed circuit board, the team demonstrated that the prototype can perform basic phone functions — transmitting speech and data and receiving user input via buttons.

Full story at: UW News

Pokemon Go: hot or not?

A year ago, you saw people waving their cell phones around playing Pokemon Go everywhere. Not so much anymore, but according to the game’s developer, 65 million people still play the game every month.

CNET points out that you have to look at “the most popular games in the world, like League of Legends (100 million), or apps as popular as Pandora (77 million) and Spotify (140 million) to understand Pokemon Go’s sheer scale.”

Nevertheless, we bet they aren’t playing every day the way they may have once.

Here’s CNET’s interview with John Hanke, founder and CEO of Pokemon Go developer Niantic.

Pokemon Go.

Facebook building campus with apartments and grocery store

Facebook moved into its new Frank Gehry-designed HQ in Melo Park, California two years ago, but needs to expand. This time it’s new “Willow Campus” is being designed as a mixed-use village with 150 apartments and a grocery store.

It will include 1.75 million square feet of retail office space. The entire campus will be open to the public. Completion of part of the villiage is expected by 2021.

It will be open to the public.

It will be directly behind Facebook’s current campus.

Facebook’s blog post