Memjet printers finally and Aptera 300 mpg carmaker goes bankrupt

Memjet Technologies was awarded the prestigious 2011 “Best of What’s New” Award in the Computing category by Popular Science magazine. One of the top technology innovations of 2011. They have partnered with Lenova and other printer makers.

The Memjet reference color office printer honored by Popular Science means incredibly fast color productivity, cost efficiency, and high impact documents for less money. The magazine describes how Memjet printers crank out photo-quality pages in a record-setting one page per second, four times the rate of the average laser model and much more quickly than your standard inkjet: “The 8.77-inch fixed print head covers the width of a letter-size sheet of paper. As the paper passes underneath, 70,400 nozzles—17 times as many as in an inkjet—deposit 774 million dots of ink per second.”

Memjet-powered office printers print high-quality color at incredibly fast speeds of 60 pages per minute (the fastest desktop printer speed in the world), while consuming considerably less energy than competing technologies of inkjet and laser. Around the world, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) use Memjet technologies to power printers and printing solutions far beyond what traditional markets have come to know and expect. In addition to the office market, Memjet provides technologies and components to OEMs and partners in the labels, wide format and photo markets.

Back in 2007, Memjet Technologies was listed as a technology to watch in 2008 by Nextbigfuture.

2007 claim –

The 2008 versions of the memjet printers are expected to be 60 page per minute. Memjet’s plan is to develop a 120-KHz cycle head in two to three years, increasing the print speed sixfold to 180 pages per minute at photo quality, 360 pages per minute at normal color quality, and 720 pages per minute in draft mode.

In 2008, Memjet was delayed to 2009. Apparently there was a very tiny product launch in 2009. So if there is significant impact in 2012 that would be about a 3-4 year delay.

Aptera electric cars were also listed as a technology to watch but they never produced their super efficient electric and hybrid cars.

However in December 2011, Aptera Motors Inc., an electric-car company that had Republican Representative Darrell Issa’s support for a U.S. loan, said it’s shutting down because it couldn’t get private financing.

Aptera, based in Carlsbad, California, said in an e-mailed statement yesterday that it had received a “conditional commitment letter” for $150 million from the federal Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing loan program based on raising matching funds, which it was unable to do.

Aptera, which never produced a car, had planned to make a five-passenger sedan priced at less than $30,000 that would run on electric power. Electric cars made by General Motors Co. and Nissan sell for about $41,000 and $33,000 before a $7,500 U.S. tax credit.

“We were so optimistic that the company would move forward that we were in discussions to reactivate a mothballed automotive plant in Moraine, Ohio,” Paul Wilbur, Aptera’s chief executive officer, said in the statement.

Other hybrid and electric car makers did succeed and the entire class was a technology to watch.

Other technology to watch from 2007 also had delays. The Inertial electrostatic fusion device from EMC2 and the Dwave Systems quantum computer had delays. However, the Dwave systems did have a commercial sale ($10 million) for its 128 qubit device and is progressing to 512 qubits in 2012.

The Nvidia GPGPUs and higher communication speeds were the most successful technologies from the 2007 list. The high speed communication has not gotten much faster for consumers than 50-100 mbps in the USA. There has been 1 gbps speeds in Hong Kong, South Korea and fast speeds in some other countries like Japan and some European countries.

Additive manufacturing devices have made incremental progress. Reprap is still a relatively small project, though they have been able to have one device replicate another that is not the main way they are produced.

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