Paul Reynolds, who worked at uBeam, demolishes Energous planned business model through physics [1] [2]. My opinion (and a lot of other investors) is that Energous is a scam [3] [4]. Their device cannot get FCC approval to transmit at the levels that they need to to send power, so it's a complete non-starter.<p>[1]: <a href="http://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.co.nz/2016/04/those-other-guys-pt-1.html" rel="nofollow">http://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.co.nz/2016/04/those-other-g...</a><p>[2]: <a href="http://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.co.nz/2016/04/those-other-guys-pt-ii.html" rel="nofollow">http://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.co.nz/2016/04/those-other-g...</a><p>[3]: <a href="http://seekingalpha.com/article/3964405-wattup-mini-will-save-energous" rel="nofollow">http://seekingalpha.com/article/3964405-wattup-mini-will-sav...</a><p>[4]: <a href="http://seekingalpha.com/article/3960298-stunning-admission-energous" rel="nofollow">http://seekingalpha.com/article/3960298-stunning-admission-e...</a>
My understanding, though, is that all of these wireless charging solutions are significantly less efficient that wired power. Even if it's, say, 10% less efficient, that's a huge, huge waste of energy on a large scale if this technology becomes popular.
My favorite is still the cradle with contact pins that were on the original nexus one phones, no need to plug anything in, no need to align with magnetic grippers, just drop it in the cradle and it worked. Why did that ever go away?
What a bullshit article. The "proof" that Energous is working with Apple is that they claimed in a 2014 SEC filing to be undertaking Apple Compliance testing... which they would need to do to make a charging adapter for an iPhone (mfi program), which is 60% of the addressable market for their supposed technology. So there's no smoke here.
Ossia's Cota technology is a direct competitor to Energous' WattUp, but its transmitter device seems to be <i>huge</i> - I don't know if Energous' transmitter device also has to be that big:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEfPgx51cas" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEfPgx51cas</a>
I remember reading about this tech years ago in Business 2.0 magazine and thought it was the future, it would be nice to see someone bring it to market on a large scale. I also wondered a lot about the health implications, are there any?<p><a href="http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/04/01/8403349/" rel="nofollow">http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2...</a>
Work on wireless power transfer has been going on over 100-years, even Tesla worked on it:
<a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_power_transfer" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_power_transfer</a><p>Hard to imagine this being mainstream anytime soon. Is there any reason to believe this will become mainstream in the near future?
They didn't quite do their homework, see update below article:<p>"The SEC filing statement from 2014 blankets any future anticipated testing and is not indicative of specific partners."
The real issue is that our devices discharge much too quickly, and take too long to recharge.<p>By increasing battery capacity, improving the efficiency of our devices, and lowering charging time, the inconvenience of charging during the middle of the day when heavy use is likely simply wouldn't happen nearly as much.
Back in 2012, I picked up energy harvesting as one of my major project for wireless communications masters at NUS. Towards the end of masters I came up with a commercial idea of using energy harvesting for charging. Thus for summer that year, I ended up attending founders institute with idea of somehow commercializing wireless energy transfer. We got a team of friends, with my roommate PhD in physics, and a friend from electronics, and another friend from MS- mechatronics.<p>I proposed using wireless charging at short distance, after meandering for weeks with best use case, we ended up pursuing wireless charging for robots. Thus FLUXCHARGE1 came into existence.<p>When we realized that patent would be a major issue, which at that time was with Witricity2, we had to give up on the idea.<p>I did a quick homework of the situation and things haven’t changed much in four years. There are two major companies now pursuing it, (as mentioned here)
<a href="http://www.energous.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.energous.com/</a>
<a href="http://www.ossia.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ossia.com/</a><p>Also from R&D point of view my prof (Dr. Rui Zhang) from NUS is still pursuing how to do wireless energy transfer5<p>Reference
1. <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/arunabh010/fluxcharge-wireless-chargers-for-mobile-robotics" rel="nofollow">http://www.slideshare.net/arunabh010/fluxcharge-wireless-cha...</a>
2. <a href="http://witricity.com/" rel="nofollow">http://witricity.com/</a>
3. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12508409" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12508409</a>
4. <a href="http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/portable-devices/is-real-wireless-phone-charging-nearly-here" rel="nofollow">http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/portable-devic...</a>
5. <a href="https://www.ece.nus.edu.sg/stfpage/elezhang/publication_SWIPT.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.ece.nus.edu.sg/stfpage/elezhang/publication_SWIP...</a>