Whatever happened to wireless electricity?
Marc Abramowitz recently pointed to Splashpower, a wireless electricity company that supposedly has a working product. The term “wireless electricity” means just what it sounds like — electricity delivered without wires. Wikipedia has a little background on Splashpower with some details on how it all works.
The funny thing is that in November 2003 (in my old InfoWorld blog), I pointed out something similar from a company named MobileWise (a company whose home page is now blank). I never actually saw MobileWise’s product in action, though it seemed legit. Here’s an old News.com story that mentions both Splashpower and MobileWise (”Another start-up, MobileWise, has been developing a similar technology and has announced that Acer plans to release notebooks and handhelds incorporating it in the first half of 2003.” Hmmm — not sure if they shipped).
I’m a geek and hang out with a lot of geeks, so I think I would have seen this wondrous technology at some point if it actually existed. That being said, I have just one burning question: can this wireless electricity power the ignition on my personal jet pack? (heh heh)
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Comments
I was just thinking the same thing… as I forgot my damn power supply to my laptop. Batteries don’t cut it.
I have been thinking about this for a while now, ever since I started running out of phone battery charge on my cellphone. Am sure the technology exists - has actually been around since Tesla. These people dread the word ‘free’. They must be trying to figure out how to deliver it in a ‘chargeable (pay-per-use) manner! I think big money, and not user convenience, is once again the bigger consideration here. We all still pay for electricity, don’t we?
Proving once again that Nikola Tesla was way ahead of his time!
http://www.unmuseum.org/tesla2.htm