The TeleInterActive Lifestyle

Powercast, which first came out of the closet at CES in January of this year, winning best Emerging Technology for 2007, has been getting some press this weekend [Engadget, CNN Money Business2.0, Ben Metcalfe - no not April's Fool].

While Philips was the first partner announced, the Business2.0 article states that over 100 companies have now signed-up. I'm hoping that one of these will come out with a cigarette lighter Powercast transmitter, filling the company car with energy giving rays of life for our cell phones, Palms and Bluetooth headsets.

Powercast is the first [I think] commercial application of an idea that has been around for a very long time: beaming electrical power over radio waves. While existing in science fiction and comic books for as long as I can remember, the problem of efficiency and loss has prevented a practical product until now. Powercast technology uses a transmitter, small enough to be plugged in just about anywhere, and a very small, relatively inexpensive receiver suitable for wireless sensors, mobile devices, cell phones and computer peripherals, with the result being the transmission of 6 VDC over about 1 meter between transmitter and receiver, automatically "trickle charging" the device whenever it is in range. Using very low power [wattage] making the FCC happy, the receiver regulates the input, providing a constant voltage as required by the device. This would be much more convenient than inductive rechargers, such as from SpashPower or the eCoupled technology, which haven't seen much uptake as yet by the device industry. With the inductive charging technology, also around since before the turn of the century before last, you must place the device to be charged within the magnetic field of the charger - perhaps a few millimeters, essentially touching, hence the SpashPad. With Powercast, you only need to be within one meter, and you can keep using the device whatever device is being charged.

While Powercast isn't the dream of having your smart phone powered by the cell tower, it will

• help road warriors trim down the number of power converters they need to carry about
• encourage the use of both Bluetooth and may even help bring actual UWB and Zigbee devices to market
• make life easier for medical implant users
• help us aging, forgetful types
• eliminate that old excuse "I can't talk right now, my battery is dying"

One question that must always be asked is what health risks may be posed by such a device. Powercast has a series of FAQs available as PDFs, including one on health and safety. Be warned though, that after asking the standard identifying questions of name, email, company, phone number, and address, you are not brought to a download site; rather, the PDFs are emailed to you. Somewhat annoying [I hate the practice of forcing email to do file transfer], but it does force one to provide a valid email address if you want to get the information. While I can understand the desire of a company to understand who is gathering information on them, this seems to fly in the face of current open marketing practices. For example, there isn't a link to their corporate blog.

OK, rant over, back to health issues. According to their FAQ, which while somewhat generic, discussing RF hazards as a class, seems reasonable. Powercast uses RF and is no more dangerous than any other RF device, such as TV, radio, Bluetooth, etc. Their range of commercial devices seem to put out 0.5 watts for a USB transmitter, up to 2 watts for an unspecified application. Powercast claims that most devices are well below that 2 watt max, which is half of the 4 watts produced by a CB radio and on par with devices such as cordless phones and walkie-talkies. I guess this means that the tumor I'm [not] likely to get behind my ear from my Bluetooth headset will just a grow a wee bit faster.

While no longer being frustrated by my Bluetooth mouse or cell phone dying at the worst possible moment would be great, I imagine that the real future for this technology will be empowering the ever increasing flow of data from wireless sensor networks, from active RFID and Zigbee to smartDust.

My take is that Powercast will be helping us live the TeleInterActive Lifestyle™ to its fullest, and fueling our data management consultancy as those terabytes become petabytes and the Googolplex of data being generated needs analyzing [no, not Googleplex, but almost].