[real-eyes] Re: Powercast
- From: "Kim Morrow" <morrowmediakc@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <real-eyes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 31 Mar 2007 18:58:28 -0600
Okay--so let me get this straight. The only difference is that you don't
have to physically plug in your cell phone. It's not like you have a
completely battery free phone. So where is the great innovation here????
Kim
-----Original Message-----
From: real-eyes-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:real-eyes-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of & Ruthie
Sent: Saturday, March 31, 2007 5:58 PM
To: real-eyes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [real-eyes] Powercast
<URL:
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/04/01/840334
9/index.htm?postversion=2007033007
CNNmoney
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Death of the cell phone charger
A Pennsylvania entrepreneur has developed technology that gives you
all the battery juice you need directly from the air. Business 2.0
reports.
Business 2.0 Magazine
By Melanie Haiken, Business 2.0 Magazine
March 30 2007: 7:08 AM EDT
(Business 2.0 Magazine) -- How much money could you make from a
technology that replaces electrical wires? A startup called
Powercast, along with the more than 100 companies that have inked
agreements with it, is about to start finding out. Powercast and its
first major partner, electronics giant Philips, are set to launch
their first device powered by electricity broadcast through the air.
It may sound futuristic, but Powercast's platform uses nothing more
complex than a radio--and is cheap enough for just about any company
to incorporate into a product. A transmitter plugs into the wall,
and a dime-size receiver (the real innovation, costing about $5 to
make) can be embedded into any low-voltage device. The receiver
turns radio waves into DC electricity, recharging the device's
battery at a distance of up to 3 feet.
Picture your cell phone charging up the second you sit down at your
desk, and you start to get a sense of the opportunity. How big can
it get? "The sky's the limit," says John Shearer, Powercast's
founder and CEO. He estimates shipping "many millions of units" by
the end of 2008.
For years, electricity experts said this kind of thing couldn't be
done. "If you had asked me seven months ago if this was possible, I
would have said, 'Are you dreaming? Have you been smoking
something?'" says Govi Rao, vice president and general manager of
solid-state lighting at Philips (Charts). "But to see it work is
just amazing. It could revolutionize what we know about power."
So impressed was Rao after witnessing Powercast's demo last summer
that he walked away jotting down a list of the industries to which
the technology could immediately be applied: lighting, peripherals,
all kinds of handheld electronics. Philips partnered with Powercast
last July, and their first joint product, a wirelessly powered LED
light stick, will hit the market this year. Computer peripherals,
such as a wireless keyboard and mouse, will follow in 2008.
Broadcasting power through the air isn't a new idea. Researchers
have experimented with capturing the radiation in radio frequency at
high power but had difficulty capturing it at consumer-friendly low
power. "You'd have energy bouncing off the walls and arriving in a
wide range of voltages," says Zoya Popovic, an electrical
engineering professor at the University of Colorado who works on
wireless electricity projects for the U.S. military.
That's where Shearer came in. A former physicist based in
Pittsburgh, he and his team spent four years poring over wireless
electricity research in a lab hidden behind his family's coffee
house. He figured much of the energy bouncing off walls could be
captured. All you had to do was build a receiver that could act like
a radio tuned to many frequencies at once.
"I realized we wanted to grab that static and harness it," Shearer
says. "It's all energy."
So the Powercast team set about creating and patenting that
receiver. Its tiny but hyperefficient receiving circuits can adjust
to variations in load and field strength while maintaining a
constant DC voltage. Thanks to the fact that it transmits only safe
low wattages, the Powercast system quickly won FCC approval--and $10
million from private investors.
Powercast says it has signed nondisclosure agreements to develop
products with more than 100 companies, including major manufacturers
of cell phones, MP3 players, automotive parts, temperature sensors,
hearing aids, and medical implants.
The last of those alone could be a multibillion-dollar market:
Pacemakers, defibrillators, and the like require surgery to replace
dead batteries. But with a built-in Powercast receiver, those
batteries could last a lifetime.
"Everyone's looking to cut that last cord," says Alex Slawsby, a
consultant at Innosight who specializes in disruptive innovation.
"Think of the billion cell phones sold last year. If you could get
Powercast into a small percentage of the high-end models, those
would be huge numbers."
Could Powercast's technology also work for larger devices? Perhaps,
but not quite yet. Laptop computers, for example, use more than 10
times the wattage of Powercast transmissions.
But industry trends are on Shearer's side: Thanks to less
energy-hungry LCD screens and processors, PC power consumption is
slowly diminishing. Within five years, Shearer says, laptops will be
down to single-digit wattage--making his revenue potential even more
electrifying.
Ruthie &
Programming just with goto's is like swatting flies with a sledgehammer.
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