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Apple is working with Energous on wireless charging

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Re: Apple is working with Energous on wireless charging

#61
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.

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.

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.

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) http://www.energous.com/ http://www.ossia.com/

Also from R&D point of view my prof (Dr. Rui Zhang) from NUS is still pursuing how to do wireless energy transfer5

Reference 1. http://www.slideshare.net/arunabh010/fluxcharge-wireless-cha... 2. http://witricity.com/ 3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12508409 4. http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/portable-devic... 5. https://www.ece.nus.edu.sg/stfpage/elezhang/publication_SWIP...

Re: Apple is working with Energous on wireless charging

#62
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.

Re: Apple is working with Energous on wireless charging

#63
post #59
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People complain that they don't innovate and also complain that they don't use standards, you can't innovate while using standards I think

Of course you can. Look at the web.

Indeed. Microsoft broke with standards, and introduced the non-standard IXMLHTTPRequest API for their browsers. It later became a standard, but it certainly wasn't when it first happened.

Major innovation doesn't come from standards bodies, it comes from operational implementation and later opening up the implementations for standardisation. Unfortunately, Apple has not demonstrated a lot of interest in the latter part in technologies where it would be really really nice for end users (FaceTime, iMessage), but has in other areas that may benefit developers (Swift).

Who knows what'll happen in future.

Re: Apple is working with Energous on wireless charging

#64
post #59
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People complain that they don't innovate and also complain that they don't use standards, you can't innovate while using standards I think

Of course you can. Look at the web.

No you can't. Look at the web.

Re: Apple is working with Energous on wireless charging

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true only if your home is running an electric heater. Burning hydrocarbons like natural gas, oil, and wood to heat your home directly is more efficient than using them to run a turbine to generate electricity, then run that electricity many miles to your home, then turn it into heat.

Teleporting heat. Got it.

District heating[1] has been around for a long time. At least here in Finland most people in cities use it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heat

Re: Apple is working with Energous on wireless charging

#67
post #62

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.

True. To be part of Homekit you also need to go through compliance testing. It doesn't say anything over a close relationship with Apple. I wish I had, because I think how Homekit works can be improved considerably!

Re: Apple is working with Energous on wireless charging

#68
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waste is relative. A smartphone uses around 1% the electricity per year of a refrigerator; I don't know if upping that even to, say, 10% would make all that much difference in the grand scheme of things.

Because I'm slow at work.. If we say the new generation iPhones have a 3,000mah battery, batteries are charged fully once per day, and that 100 million people in the US have iPhones: 3,000mah x 3.8v = 11.4 watt-hours to fully charge a phone -- at $0.15/kWh, this equates to a daily expense of ~$0.002 to charge your phone. Annually, this is $0.62. If wireless charging were 50% efficient, it would still cost under a dol…

How much to make up for all the cancers people would get with increased radiation all around them?

Re: Apple is working with Energous on wireless charging

#69

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. [1]: http://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.co.nz/2016/04/those-other-g... [2]: http://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.co.…

Planning on doing 'Apple compliance testing' is a zero cost thing to do, and has no effect on getting a deal with Apple. People seem to read into this statement what they want it to say - given Energous is a publicly traded company and their statements are covered by SEC rules, then take what they say at absolute face value, no more and no less.

Re: Apple is working with Energous on wireless charging

#70
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I'm slow at work.. If we say the new generation iPhones have a 3,000mah battery, batteries are charged fully once per day, and that 100 million people in the US have iPhones: 3,000mah x 3.8v = 11.4 watt-hours to fully charge a phone -- at $0.15/kWh, this equates to a daily expense of ~$0.002 to charge your phone. Annually, this is $0.62. If wireless charging were 50% efficient, it would still cost under a dol…

How much to make up for all the cancers people would get with increased radiation all around them?

Non-ionizing radiation does not cause cancer
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