The Pioneer Studios group that created the concept behind the double-sided Courier tablet appears to have closed its Seattle office.

The founders of Microsoft’s Pioneer Studios, which created the concept behind the double-sided Courier tablet, have scattered and the group’s office, located in a Seattle neighborhood full of startups, has closed.

The changes come a year after J Allard, Microsoft’s former top designer who is credited with starting Pioneer Studios, left the company.

Lithium ion batteries are nearing the limits of their possible power capacity, while the power requirements of mobile devices are increasing quickly. Something’s got to give. If your awesome new smartphone is to have any hope of lasting longer than a day on one charge, it's going to need more power than a typical lithium ion battery can deliver. Used to be, you could forget your feature phone’s charger at home, go on a long-weekend vacation, and--assuming that you didn’t use it to play hours of Snake--still come home with enough battery life left on it to call a cab. Today, though, we’re wedded to our chargers, and glare hawkishly at people who hog airport and coffee-shop outlets for too long. Switching over to superfast 4G networks, as many smartphones will in 2011, is only going to exacerbate this problem; and reports already indicate that 4G devices tend to have pitiful battery life. In fact, the power requirements of the technology being built into mobile devices is growing at twice the pace of battery-capacity increases, according to one Verizon executive

Smart, strategic, and frequently inscrutable, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt's comments must often be closely analyzed. Sometimes they're discounted as regrettable, off-the-cuff remarks. Other times, his statements are a window into what is really going on inside his company.

On Wednesday, Schmidt shocked big media conglomerates, federal lawmakers, and apparently even executives within his own company when he told reporters in London that Google would defy U.S. government attempts to remove sites from the Web that are accused of trafficking in pirated goods. Schmidt, who was at Google's helm during an unprecedented decade-long run of online-advertising success, was referring to a bill introduced in the U.S. Senate last week called Protect IP.