Publicity has been building for the 2009 International CES, the world's biggest trade show for consumer electronics. It takes place at Las Vegas, 8-11 January.
This includes a new product called PowerBeam™, which will be "showcased there". PowerBeam Corporation's website has the motto "Cutting the power cord". Apparently they can send electricity wirelessly to equipment -- a concept called wi-tricity.
The company website talks of the technology being patented, but I could not find any patents in their name. I suspect that we are actually talking about a published application, Wireless power beaming to common electronic devices. It was published in January 2007. Here is the main drawing.
I deduced that it was theirs as the inventor, David Silliman Graham, also presumably appears, as David S. Graham, on two international patent applications by the company on other topics. It is not required to give a company name on published American applications, though some do. Many companies take advantage of this to hide their own work on an invention.
It sounds too good to be true. The concept is that electricity is converted into an "optical beam" (heat) which crosses an open space to a nearby piece of equipment where an adapted solar cell converts it back into electricity. If it works correctly as promised, indeed no more power cables, or recharging. I don't claim to know enough on the topic to be able to comment.
I haven't seen anything about how expensive it might be. The company says it has taken health concerns into account. There is a discussion of the invention on the VentureBeat website.
Interesting article Steve. I checked the publicly available records online at the patent office and discovered that this publication was assigned by the inventors to Powerbeam, Inc., and was subsequently assigned to a venture capital group. So this is indeed Powerbeam. Anytime a patent application is published, the entire file wrapper is available to the public online through USPTO's PAIR system. See http://portal.uspto.gov/external/portal/pair.
Posted by: Duncan Williams | 12 January 2009 at 10:21