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An Inventor Wants One Less Wire to Worry About
21–30 of 99 posts
Re: An Inventor Wants One Less Wire to Worry About
#22Did she have a hard time finding investors because it was a hardware business, or because she was a woman? Did she ultimately get investment because she was a woman, in spite of the hardware business? According to a friend's college thesis, there are lots of concrete reasons VCs don't invest in women.[0] In summary, VCs don't take a girl very seriously. The thesis makes the case though that there's real opportunity f…
Lady Gaga's manager is very active in the startup/tech community and is a known angel investor.
Re: An Inventor Wants One Less Wire to Worry About
#23I wonder about the health aspect of this. It seems there is very little known about long-term exposure to high intensity ultrasound.
Also, there could be a risk of ear damage if a non-linear material came into the sound field, and producing distortion artifacts in the audible frequency range - given that about 1W/m^2 can be enough to cause damage.
Re: An Inventor Wants One Less Wire to Worry About
#24Did she have a hard time finding investors because it was a hardware business, or because she was a woman? Did she ultimately get investment because she was a woman, in spite of the hardware business? According to a friend's college thesis, there are lots of concrete reasons VCs don't invest in women.[0] In summary, VCs don't take a girl very seriously. The thesis makes the case though that there's real opportunity f…
"Still, it would be wrong to accuse of sexism the "hundreds" of the investors who declined her project. She's an astrobiologist who wants to run a mass-manufacturing business. I'm not a venture capitalist, but I can see aversion to hardware manufacturing risk generally being the biggest factor here."
As physics as generally understood means this is 99% likely to be nonsense, another reasonable application of Ockham's Razor would be that the VCs passed because it's snake-oil.
Re: An Inventor Wants One Less Wire to Worry About
#25Did she have a hard time finding investors because it was a hardware business, or because she was a woman? Did she ultimately get investment because she was a woman, in spite of the hardware business? According to a friend's college thesis, there are lots of concrete reasons VCs don't invest in women.[0] In summary, VCs don't take a girl very seriously. The thesis makes the case though that there's real opportunity f…
Lady Gaga's manager is very active in the startup/tech community and is a known angel investor.
Corrected, I didn't notice his name in the article. Still, he invests in a disproportionately high number of women-founded/co-founded companies, 4/16 as opposed to an average of 1/14 (by 2010 figures). See edits.
Re: An Inventor Wants One Less Wire to Worry About
#26Founders Fund on PR role with this and the Forbes article on Palantir.
Re: An Inventor Wants One Less Wire to Worry About
#27I'd be curious to see a graph of transmission efficiency vs. distance. The technology here is almost certainly acoustic beamforming, and that large square under wraps in the image is an array of small ultrasonic piezo speakers. Beamforming will give you better than 1/R^2 relationship between power and distance, but probably nowhere close to linear. I'd be hard pressed to imagine this working over distances larger tha…
Seriously. Given the existing levels of waste in our society and the associated environmental consequences, do we have any business switching to less efficient methods of power transmission?
Unless this transmits as well as a cable, I'm not interested.
Re: An Inventor Wants One Less Wire to Worry About
#28Here's what I've been wondering. A transformer provides very efficient wireless power transmission but on a few centimeters. Has anyone considered scaling up a transformer? Would that increase the range?
What if we made a house sized one and buried it under the house? Could that provide wireless electricity to the whole house?
Re: An Inventor Wants One Less Wire to Worry About
#29At first I felt awful because I was thinking like part of the establishment: there's no way she came up with something that will replace power cords. I've got a degree in physics, and have always been interested in acoustics, and sound in air has some amazing properties, including the ability to transfer non-trivial amounts of power, especially at nodes, and especially when focused with, say, a parabolic reflector..…
I think that the reason this new idea came from someone outside of Physics or Electrical Engineering is because its poor efficiency is obvious to people with a background in those fields.
Sometimes it takes an outsider to challenge assumptions and achieve a breakthrough, but I don't think thats going to happen in this particular case.
Re: An Inventor Wants One Less Wire to Worry About
#30Did she have a hard time finding investors because it was a hardware business, or because she was a woman? Did she ultimately get investment because she was a woman, in spite of the hardware business? According to a friend's college thesis, there are lots of concrete reasons VCs don't invest in women.[0] In summary, VCs don't take a girl very seriously. The thesis makes the case though that there's real opportunity f…
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