David Berube’s OLD Blog

A company out of Pennsylvania called Powercast is trying to revolutionize the world of wires. They are setting out to get rid of power cords completely. That’s right, imagine a clutter free world with no wires, now your laptop can truly be wireless.

I thought up this idea about 4 years ago and not being a scientist of any sort, I couldn’t think of a good way to do it and I didn’t think it was feasible. Powercast has seemed to figure it out though, and it sounds very tricky.

You’ll need to plug the transmitter into the wall socket and it will turn radio waves into DC voltage that a small, cheap receiver will then pickup. The receiver will capture around 70% of the radio signals energy and convert that into DC electricity.

They are saying that this will only work for small consumer electronics, for now. They plan on releasing their first product in 2008 which is an LED light that is wireless. The biggest use of this product will be for portable consumer electronics like cell phones. Imagine coming home and placing your cell phone on your desk and it automatically starts charging up, you should never have to worry about it’s battery dieing again.

Powercast has agreements in place with more than 100 different companies, mostly consisting of makers of small portable electronics devices. The profit potential with this company is great. Take just the cell phone market last year, it sold 1 billion devices, if Powercast can get it’s technology in a small percentage of those sold they will reap huge benefits.

If you’re a venture capitalist I would be knocking on their door trying to buy up some equity while you still can.

consumer electronics, dc voltage, portable electronics, powercast, power cords, radio signals, radio waves, venture capitalist