>This is fascinating!  Talk about money for nothing!  Harvesting 
>what's already there.



><URL:
>http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/04/01/8403349/index.htm?postversion=2007033007 
>
>
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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.
>
>
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