We’re a cord cutting society these days, and one cord we look forward to being liberated from is the wire that charges our cell phones. Charging stations and platforms are nice, but you still have to set your phone aside to a specific location to allow it to power-up. What if there was a wireless charger that sent electricity flying through the air and the minute you walked into a room it automatically – without a cord -- charged your phone while you were using it?
uBeam has had a starter-fund of $26 million drawn from very successful business entrepreneurs to develop cutting-edge technology that allows just that. Using ultrasound and optical lasers it promises to someday charge multiple devices at a distance of 10-feet. Think coffee shop. They hope to have it available next year.
As game-changing as the technology promises to be, columnist John Quain, tech writer for FoxNews.com, says many companies, including Tesla, have been working to develop it for years, unsuccessfully. “No one’s ever been able to make it work outside a laboratory,” he moans. “Most of it loses so much energy in trying to wirelessly beam electricity, or translate it, the loss of energy has just been prohibitive.”
So we’ll keep an eye out but not hold our collective breathes just yet.
There are some new technological innovations on the horizon that sound pretty cool. Noelle St. Andrews with Best Buy says options for smart homes are growing in leaps and bounds, including a smart sprinkler system for the yard that goes way beyond just scheduled start times. “It will know intuitively whether or not it’s going to need to turn on,” she says. Scary when your sprinklers are smarter than you are! But even more exciting for Houston with our high humidity and stifling summer heat is a smart lawnmower. Effort will still be required for the weekend chore – you’ll have to open an app. “It just pulls out of the garage and with GPS technology just goes out and does its thing. It’s kind of a like a Roomba for your yard.”
Christmas can’t come soon enough.