$500k "Energy-Harvesting" Kickstarter Scam Unfolding Right Now

New submitter FryingLizard (512858) writes For a while I've been following the saga of the Kickstarter "iFind" Bluetooth 4.0 tracking tag. Nothing new about such tags (there are many crowdfunded examples; some have delivered, some have disappointed), but this one claims it doesn't require any batteries — it harvests its energy from electromagnetic emissions (wifi, cell towers, TV signals, etc). The creators have posted no evidence other than some slick Photoshop work, an obviously faked video, some easily disproven data, and classic bad science. So far they've picked up half a million in pledges. With six days to go until they walk off with the money, skeptics abound (10min in) including some excellent dissections of their claims. The creators have yet to post even a single photo of the magical device, instead posting empty platitudes and claims that such secrecy is necessary to protect their IP.

Using just their published figures, their claims are readily refuted, yet still backers flock in. Kickstarter appear uninterested in what can only be described as a slow-motion bank robbery, despite their basic requirement to demonstrate a prototype. It seems self-evident that such scams should not be allowed to propagate on Kickstarter, for the good of other genuine projects and the community at large. Skeptics are maintaining a Google Doc with many of the highlights of the action. Bring your own popcorn and enjoy the show."

Comments

Thanks for the tip!

[jtownatpunk.net]

I pledged $120.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Anonymous Coward]

Matched FTW! Pair this up with the Canadian scheme to convert all their garbage to diesel fuel and the world's problems will be solved!

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[thaylin]

Or maybe he thinks that when people post no proof of their claims, all data they have provided have been refuted by pretty much all sources, and the people post nothing to contradict those sources it probably is a scam.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Charliemopps]

Or maybe he thinks that when people post no proof of their claims, all data they have provided have been refuted by pretty much all sources, and the people post nothing to contradict those sources it probably is a scam.

Or not. I'm sorry, I don't trust kick starter campaigns. I don't donate to them, nor would I ever. But, to say what they're claiming to be able to do is impossible? That's clearly wrong. I could build an EM harvester in my livingroom in an afternoon. This isn't even that complicated technology. Can they fit in something the size of a dog tag? I dunno, I'm not a miniaturization expert. Attach that to a small battery, the bluetooth locater thing are in IC's everywhere. The only question in my mind is the size thing, so to claim this is an obvious scam is patently false.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Mr D from 63]

To not see the glaring red flags of scamminess is patently blind.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[jythie]

Thing is, it is being called a scam by people who are familiar with miniaturization and physics.

A classic element of pseudoscience and scams like this is to take something that has some small connection with physics but the numbers are so far off the engineering actually is impossible. This particular one is actually a pretty old 'free energy' thing, with people claiming you can collect usable amounts of energy from ambient signals. But the numbers, even though yes they are non-zero, are so tiny as to be useless.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[NotDrWho]

I suspect that many scammer Kickstarters have a mass of pledges just as fake as yours--only not intended for humor, but rather "self-giving" to create buzz and give the impression of legitimacy. I doubt very seriously that most of that $500,000 they've raised on this particular campaign is real.

But this does raise a real point. Kickstarter needs some basic donor protections and means of reporting scams. Otherwise they'll just devolve in a feeding ground for con men and no one will take any project posted there seriously.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[plover]

From your link: "RFID works by rectifying a strong local signal (not ambient RF) " [emphasis mine.] The scam in TFA is that they're ignoring the same laws of physics you apparently didn't bother to read.

Pro tip: If you're going to cite a source for your argument, you probably want to make sure it's not refuting the argument you're trying to make.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Deadstick]

...and I'll bet the filthy infidel doesn't believe we're gonna get flying cars, either.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Mr D from 63]

This is also a kick in the nuts to the SEC's proposed rules for crowdfunding startup companies, but its a great example why it has not been allowed to this point.

You could just decide to let people get scammed, some would learn and be more selected, some would never invest again, some would get fooled again. Or, you can regulate the crap out of it and make it hard for everyone. Not an easy answer.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[leonardluen]

i know you were joking.

but we never will get flying cars, and it has nothing to do with the technology, but entirely to do with the FAA/Govt.

just look at the issues they are having with civilian operated drones right now as an example.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Jason Levine]

Forget civilian operated drones. Look at civilian operated cars. Take a glance at the kinds of drivers you see on the road every day and then ask yourself: "Do I really trust these people with a flying vehicle moving in three dimensions?"

Once we get self-driving cars, we might stand a chance of self-flying cars. Until then, though, flying cars would be a safety nightmare!

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Anonymous Coward]

As somebody familiar with RF engineering, I'd say this is obviously a scam. And it's not a miniaturization issue. It's a power density issue. Yes, I could build something that would gather energy like they're saying. And with the power draw of a BT device, I bet every 10 days or so, I'd have harvested enough energy to run it for an hour.

Fact is, the RF energy needed to be harvested to do even small amounts of work would cook you if you got in the way. The amounts that are just free floating around you from cell phones for example is around -60dBm. Or -90dB. 1dB is 1 watt, -10dB is .1 watt, -20dB is .001 watt, so the typical cell phone signal is .000000001 watt by the time you receive it. And if anybody is going to try to tell me that you're going to power anything off of that sort of energy....yeah, but no. Just no.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[DutchUncle]

Flying a car under manual control in a populated area is grounds for being sent to the organ banks. Larry Niven said that YEARS ago.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[JWSmythe]

It sounds like the formula for an urban legend.

Take a little bit of truth. Just enough to be believable. Build up that truth with whatever lies you can tie to it, get enough suckers to believe it, and you'll have the next Snopes entry.

I could build an inductive receiver. Given enough time, it could charge a small battery. Believers will see "enough time" as being minutes or hours. People analyzing it will see it's really centuries. The whole time, I never lied. I just let their misconceptions carry it along.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't a question of whether you can fit an EM harvester in something the size of a dogtag, you absolutely can.

But an EM harvester in something the size of a dog tag is limited by its size to harvesting energy that is impinges on that dog tag sized harvester. It is therefore simple to determine the maximum EM energy that can be harvested by a dog tag sized harvester. When you compare that maximum amount of energy with the energy requirements of those commercially available bluetooth chips and assume everything is 100% efficient you end up with something that doesn't harvest enough energy to do what it says it can do.

When you put more realistic constraints on the device, such as the inability to harvest 100% of the energy that impinges on the device, leakage currents and the like then you don't need to wonder any longer whether or not the device can work as advertised, it can't.

Does that make it a scam or the product of someone who sincerely believes, despite the laws of physics, that it will work? That would be a legal question but to the purchaser it makes no difference, they aren't going to get what they paid for.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[flyingsquid]

I'm in complete agreement here. We desperately need some way to tell legitimate Kickstarter campaigns from frauds. For that matter, the entire internet is full of scams and con-men waiting to take your money. That's why my team has developed iScam, the revolutionary new fraud-protection device.

Inside every iScam is a tiny induction coil that is powered by negative energy. When negative energy released by a scam such as this one activates the device, it generates a current which in turn activates a blinking LED, with the frequency of the blinking being proportional to the negative energy field. Simply aim the device at your computer screen, or hold it up to the phone when you get that too-good-to-be-true offer, or even point it at your lover... if there's any deception in the area, iScam will be activated and you'll be alerted!

Pledge just $15 and we'll send you one device. For $25 we'll send you two. For $100, we'll send you an improved prototype with even more sensitive scam-detection algorithms. And for the especially gullible-those of you who have lost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to scammers before- you need the top-level security provided by iScam Pro, which has a more powerful induction circuit, both increasing the range of the device and allowing it to detect even the tiniest fib! Pledge just $999 and we'll send you an iScam Pro. With our patented technology, you'll be safer than ever. And best of all, it's all environmentally friendly and fair-trade, with 10% of all proceeds going to benefit orphaned pandas.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[thedonger]

Or not. I'm sorry, I don't trust kick starter campaigns.

Right? I gave Toad the Wet Sprocket $50 for their new record. Then it arrived as double LP with four bonus tracks! If I wanted bonus tracks I would asked for freakin' bonus tracks! And don't get me started about that photo essay book I bought into. It was so good I almost cried. If I want to feel stuff I'll give to an Indiegogo campaign!

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[bitt3n]

I pledged $120.

Same here. I don't know what this tinfoil hat wearing idiot who came up with the conspiracy theory in the summary is thinking. After all, dowsing rods have been working since biblical times, and I can't recall swapping out the double A's in mine recently, can you? Similarly, the ADE 651 bomb detector, which contains no power source, and relies on a similar principle, has been protecting troops in Iraq and Pakistan for years. Do you really think already impoverished governments would spend tens of millions of dollars on something so vital to the lives of its armed forces if it didn't work? OP should remove this libelous screed before he finds he's on the wrong side of a lawsuit.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[rotaryexpress]

Why are you so against Levar Burton?

https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...
If there's one worthy kickstarter out there, it's this one.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[TheCarp]

I think part of the problem is RFID works and can be so small. If you completely ignore the details of the readers an RFID being energized and read and a device "talking bluetooth" don't seem, on their face to an uneducated observer, to be all that different.

Even as I read their page my own filter just replaced "energy harvesting" with "rfid-like", it wasn't until I noticed that they were talking about connecting with the phone via bluetooth that it started to seem highly implausible.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Charliemopps]

Thing is, it is being called a scam by people who are familiar with miniaturization and physics.

A classic element of pseudoscience and scams like this is to take something that has some small connection with physics but the numbers are so far off the engineering actually is impossible. This particular one is actually a pretty old 'free energy' thing, with people claiming you can collect usable amounts of energy from ambient signals. But the numbers, even though yes they are non-zero, are so tiny as to be useless.

Useless? It's bluetooth. It hardly uses any power to begin with.
I'm not saying this isn't a scam... I'm saying they don't provide enough details to refute it, and the people trying to refute it have even less evidence other than "Well, I couldn't design this so it's not possible"

I know one thing though, give me $500k and I betcha I could figure it out. I might go with mechanical power generation though. Especially if this is going on a keyring or pet collar.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[N1AK]

But this does raise a real point. Kickstarter needs some basic donor protections and means of reporting scams. Otherwise they'll just devolve in a feeding ground for con men and no one will take any project posted there seriously.

A mechanism for reporting scams, and some investigation of heavily reported scams is fine. Donor protection is just going to add more costs to all the projects. If these guys are running a scam then there's already a way to deal with this: The courts. As has been shown before crowdfunding doesn't mean you can't be sued for fraud. Kickstarter is fine as it is and throwing more regulation and costs at because of the odd abuse is just as stupid as the security theatre at airports to protect against the almost imaginary risk of attack.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Khyber]

"people who are familiar with miniaturization and physics"

Familiar but not experts.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Anonymous Coward]

It hardly uses any power to begin with.

Have you tried quantifying that? If you are complaining others are not giving any reasoning, maybe you should look at actual numbers yourself instead of just saying "hardly any." For a few 10s of mW needed for bluetooth communication or more depending on what chip you use, work out how far you have to be from an RF source to get that type of power. You can even assume it is only active some small fraction of the time, and see that the power available is off by orders of magnitude unless you assume it is only going to be used within a meter of a wifi base station (even then being generous on the size and efficiency). If you don't feel like doing the math, it looks like it was already done on comments further down.

When back of the envelope calculations using simple geometry given generous allowances say you are still several orders of magnitude from useful, there is something fundamentally wrong with the design that won't be made up by just fine tuning or applying a little more engineering.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Mr D from 63]

What? Where? You're saying its a scam, what's your argument?..

I said it has glaring red flags. You don't even have to be technically savvy to see them. If you can't see them in the "bio" post from "Dr. McArthur", then you might want to work on your critical analysis skills.

https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Pope]

Or not. I'm sorry, I don't trust kick starter campaigns. I don't donate to them, nor would I ever. .

I've donated to a bunch of Kickstarters, and received what I pledged for each time. What's the big deal?

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[SuricouRaven]

Don't waste your money. Once the solar roadways hit mass production we won't need diesel any more.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Charliemopps]

Ok,
So I actually looked up the components you'd need to do this.
Here's the first low power Bluetooth chip I came across... the FIRST:
https://www.csrsupport.com/dow...
It needs 16mA while transmitting.
1mA while idle
900nA while in sleep mode
The size is well with their specs.

The we have the harvester:
Again, the first IC I could find:
http://www.powercastco.com/PDF...

It's about 1/2" square, so it's a little big.
But it's already designed to power sensors.

The first chip already has a capacitor in it.
This even has use cases in the whitepaper describing something very close to what this kickstarter wants to do!
So the reciever charges the capacitor. When the capacitor gets enough charge to transmit, the Bluetooth chip does exactly that. So it's not a continuous connection. Based on the amount of RF in the area, it will transmit more or less often.
It appears, based on my back of an envelope math, it would have enough RF energy to operate continuously at at least 5meters from your typical Wifi AP or router. The further away you got, the fewer pings you'd get. But given our almost ubiquitous wifi coverage now, I'm pretty sure it would work.

Since your most likely device for connecting to it would be your cellphone, it's a pretty simple use case to say it would work like this:
You put the tag on your keys or cat
You install their "Find my tag" app
When you can't find the keys or cat, you open the app
The app TURNS ON the wifi in your phone, to power the tag.
You walk around looking, when you get near the tag, the wifi FROM YOUR PHONE will charge it.
All the tag does at that point is start beeping. That's it. You follow the sound.
The "I've lost you" signal is likely incredibly tiny.

This is all assuming they are even using the real Bluetooth standard. Who knows.
I do not know if this is a scam or not. It very well maybe. But the premise is entirely plausible if you just think about what they're really trying to do.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Immerman]

In fairness you *can* collect usable amounts of ambient radio energy - cover a few acres with antennas an you can power your lights no problem, so long as you don't have too many. And RFID tags are completely built on the idea that you can power a transmitter on nothing more than a focussed feeder signal, and these things are big enough to collect probably 10-100x the radio energy of your average RFID tag.

The problem of course is that they're claiming to be able to send a relatively high power Bluetooth signal detectable at 60m by non-specialized omnidirectional hardware without a feeder signal. I'm no expert, but I would imagine that such a thing *might* be possible, especially in a radio-loud urban environment, but only if you assume that basically the whole tag is a capacitor, and it only transmits for a few seconds between multi-hour charging periods.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[serviscope_minor]

I don't trust kick starter campaigns. I don't donate to them, nor would I ever.

Why not? I've contributed to two. One to do a documentary by a filmmaker and co-film people with known track records and one to a friend's effort.

The first got done. The second only closed recently (would not expect anything yet), but it's someone who is a friend who I wish to help out.

Not all kickstarters are for wild-eyed ideas from anonyomus people on the internet.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Immerman]

Actually I think we might eventually get flying cars, we just won't be allowed to drive them ourselves. Instead they'll be equipped with extremely competent autopilots - I would imagine that the AI behind a mature driverless car could be fairly easily extended to navigate the much more forgiving and pedestrian-free aerial environment. Especially if you assume that virtually all other air traffic is similarly controlled, and unlike with human operators every vehicle obeys all traffic rules to the letter except in the most extreme emergency situations.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Immerman]

So rectify ambient RF, store it in a compact supercapacitor, and hope that you don't need more than 1/2 second of transmissions per week to find your keys.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Zalbik]

I was going to pledge, but I can't find my wallet.

If only there was some amazing small, cheap battery-less way of tracking my wallet...maybe run it on magic fairy dust or ground pixie wings....

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[rebelwarlock]

It's pretty much like this

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[tlhIngan]

But this does raise a real point. Kickstarter needs some basic donor protections and means of reporting scams. Otherwise they'll just devolve in a feeding ground for con men and no one will take any project posted there seriously.

Why?

Part of Kickstarter's success and the whole "crowdfunding" thing is that people make an "investment" (in quotes since there's no real financial benefit) is that people need to be able to decide for themselves.

It doesn't matter if you're buying stocks, bonds, foreign currency, microloans, Kickstarter projects, whatever. You, as the source of money have to do your due diligence. If it seems scammy, well, close the tab and move on. Or invest only the money you can afford to lose.

It doesn't matter if you're investing in this, a blue-chip company, Apple/Microsoft/Google, or whatever. You invest as much as you're willing to lose.

On the whole risk thing, well, Kickstarter is a bit riskier, and there are many non-scams that simply failed to deliver as well. Just like there are tons of companies out there with interesting technology that also fail to deliver.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Zalbik]

But, to say what they're claiming to be able to do is impossible? That's clearly wrong
...
Can they fit in something the size of a dog tag? I dunno, I'm not a miniaturization expert.

Your sentences need to have a little conversation with each other....

That's exactly one of the points. You can't fit a device that does what they claim in something the size of a dog tag. There's not enough space for the antenna. There's no way you fit an accelerometer, BT chip, speaker, magic energy harvester, magic battery and antenna in there. So yes, they are claiming to do the impossible.

There is not enough energy available to harvest to do what they are claiming.

There is no way they could fit all the different antennas they would require to harvest phone, television, wifi, radio, etc EM energy.

There is no way a BT antenna that size would operate at any orientation over the distances they claim.

There is no way this device could also have a speaker in it loud enough to hear from within the same room, never-mind throughout your house.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Zalbik]

You're saying its a scam, what's your argument?

They claim in their technical brief that the energy harvestable from a typical home wi-fi is 10dBm.

This is off by at least 3 orders of magnitude (i.e. they claim at least 1000 times more than is actually available).

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[LordLimecat]

After all, dowsing rods have been working since biblical times,

Not unless you consider the 15th century to be "biblical times", they havent.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Zalbik]

I'm confused. I have one of your early prototypes, and when I aim it at your post it blinks like crazy!

That means your post is a scam. But if your post is a scam, my device shouldn't be blinking. But my device is blinking...so your post must be a scam.....but...

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Anonymous Coward]

It appears, based on my back of an envelope math, it would have enough RF energy to operate continuously at at least 5meters from your typical Wifi AP or router.

5 meters from a maximum 1 W transmitter gives you 3 mW / m^2. The chip you selected runs at least 1.8 V, so it needs ~30 mW when active.... hence you would need an antenna with an area of 10 m^2 to get that type of power to run continuously off a Wifi AP. When idle, you would still need an antenna with ~0.5 m^2, so like 70 cm on a side square. Heck, if your device was an inch square, it would barely be able to power the bluetooth in sleep mode, with no power left over to charge up to allow it to briefly transmit.

And this is ignoring things like the antenna not being able to capture 100% of the power going through it, and that your harvesting chip isn't 100% efficient. The harvester chip gives a minimum RF input of -10 dBm, which means you would still need an antenna 20 cm square to work at that level 5 m from a wifi AP. And this is assuming your AP is working at full 1 W power continuously (In EU they would be limited to 100 mW, for example). If you are trying to power it off the bluetooth of a cell phone, most are class 2 with a maximum power of 2.5 mW, which wouldn't be enough. You have the main cell transmitter which can be up to a watt, but it isn't typically running at full power and has a small duty cycle when not making calls. This also assumes your tag is out in the open, with nothing on top or even behind it that would attenuate the signal, in which case making it brightly colored might be all that is needed...

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[bwwatr]

I remember building a crystal radio when I was a kid - using just the energy from the radio broadcast, the earpiece played audio loud enough to hear. Does that however, mean that I could build something with a miniscule antenna coil, able to store enough energy to transmit Bluetooth and blare a 95 dB piezo? That'd be up to the experts to decide, but it looks like the answer is a big fat "no".

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[asavage]

Here is an example with fake pledges: http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/exatogames/day-one-garrys-incident-0/#chart-daily. If you look at the day 2 stats, $26,720 raised from 34 backers or almost $800 per backer. Someone put in a few large fake pledges to try to "kick start" the funding.

This game creator also tried to remove a bad youtube review with copyright infringement request even though they gave a license key to that reviewer.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm.. hate to break it to you, but the U.S. government *IS* bankrupt.. The world just hasn't called us on it yet..

The world will never really call on that debt. Because the debt is in dollars, an american-controlled currency. If pressed hard, they can simply print a 17 trillion bill and hand it over. After this, american government is free of debts and so is anyone else who deals in the now zero-valued dollars.

The natural next move then, is a currency reform in order to restore normal trade. Be very happy that your debt is in your own currency - and not someone else's currency.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Charliemopps]

As somebody familiar with RF engineering, I'd say this is obviously a scam. And it's not a miniaturization issue. It's a power density issue. Yes, I could build something that would gather energy like they're saying. And with the power draw of a BT device, I bet every 10 days or so, I'd have harvested enough energy to run it for an hour.

Fact is, the RF energy needed to be harvested to do even small amounts of work would cook you if you got in the way. The amounts that are just free floating around you from cell phones for example is around -60dBm. Or -90dB. 1dB is 1 watt, -10dB is .1 watt, -20dB is .001 watt, so the typical cell phone signal is .000000001 watt by the time you receive it. And if anybody is going to try to tell me that you're going to power anything off of that sort of energy....yeah, but no. Just no.

Keep in mind, the user is walking around broadcasting RF via wifi and cellular while they are looking for the tag. All the tag has to do is pick up enough stray power to make the bluetooth handshake and start beeping. It's basically dormant 24/7 waiting for the "I lost you" signal to start beeping.
It would need the most power when you were first setting it up and syncing it with your phone. Notice they tell you to put the tag right next to your phone when doing that?
Now that I think about it, why does it even need bluetooth to start beeping? Perhaps bluetooth is only used to set it up. Once the phone has the tags serial number it may just broadcast an analog radio signal or something. Making it far less energy intensive to trigger.

It's plausible... what's more suspicious is their lack of response to questions. I don't know if it's a scam or not, but this isn't technically impossible. There are ready made, VERY low power ICs out there now thanks to cellphones. They use less and less power all the time.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[puppetman]

I'm embarrassed to say that I pledged $70. I thought being on Kickstarter provided some level of protection against this, and that no one would be so brazen as to hijack people's names and credentials, and post them a popular website to promote their claims.

Thanks, Slashdot. I promise I'll be more careful next time.

If someone tells me the PowerUp 3.0 remote-controlled airplane is a hoax, I'll be devastated...

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Gazzonyx]

I'm in complete agreement here. We desperately need some way to tell legitimate Kickstarter campaigns from frauds. For that matter, the entire internet is full of scams and con-men waiting to take your money. That's why my team has developed iScam, the revolutionary new fraud-protection device.

Inside every iScam is a tiny induction coil that is powered by negative energy. When negative energy released by a scam such as this one activates the device, it generates a current which in turn activates a blinking LED, with the frequency of the blinking being proportional to the negative energy field. Simply aim the device at your computer screen, or hold it up to the phone when you get that too-good-to-be-true offer, or even point it at your lover... if there's any deception in the area, iScam will be activated and you'll be alerted!

Pledge just $15 and we'll send you one device. For $25 we'll send you two. For $100, we'll send you an improved prototype with even more sensitive scam-detection algorithms. And for the especially gullible-those of you who have lost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to scammers before- you need the top-level security provided by iScam Pro, which has a more powerful induction circuit, both increasing the range of the device and allowing it to detect even the tiniest fib! Pledge just $999 and we'll send you an iScam Pro. With our patented technology, you'll be safer than ever. And best of all, it's all environmentally friendly and fair-trade, with 10% of all proceeds going to benefit orphaned pandas.

Seems legit.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[SourceFrog]

What makes it obvious to me it's a scam is that if they really had this technology, they would hardly be limiting themselves to crap like "oh it'll help you find your keys" ... the potential applications for such technology are huge and could make them millionaires multiple times over in various domains, and if they had this tech, they would know that ... if I had this tech I wouldn't even be thinking about key-finders - I'd be talking to many different device manufacturers to license the tech for the many different products it has potential applications for. They wouldn't even need a Kickstarter.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[SourceFrog]

Scams aren't limited to crowdfunding systems .. investors are scammed by traditionally structured BS companies all the time too.

A good way to help limit fraud would be jailtime if you're caught creating such a scam, but then, that would go against our cultural tradition of letting white-collar financial fraudsters get off scott-free on anything they do.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[SuricouRaven]

I remember harvesting energy to power a radio receiver before. Gave me enough power to demodulate and drive the earpiece.

Very quietly.

The antenna ran from the house to the end of the garden.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[SourceFrog]

Ground cars are already a "safety nightmare": Globally, they kill over a million people a year. The reason we tolerate such low safety is because it's something we know; humans have a reasoning error whereby they have a lower safety tolerance for new things. Know that it's a reasoning error.

Flying car tech is already so "fly by wire" that they may actually be safer than ground cars, but the problem is the uncertainty around the regulatory environment is killing investment in developing and bringing products to market ... nobody wants to invest much to take the risk, because nobody knows how strict the laws are going to be etc.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[SourceFrog]

Sorry, just to add to the above, adding flying cars to the mix may actually improve overall travel safety - it sounds counter-intuitive, but think about it this way: Roads are highly congested, where over a million people are killed in traffic accidents a year. If half of road travellers took to the skies, it would significantly reduce the congestion on the roads - and therefore the road fatalities - because it opens up many more "virtual lanes".

Think about it this way: If your'e on the highway and a drunk driver goes head-on into your lane, you're f-scked. If you're flying above him in a virtual lane, you're safe from him ... and with less traffic on the road, he's more likely to just run into the ditch.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[NotDrWho]

It was before the Book of Mormon.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Wycliffe]

But the numbers, even though yes they are non-zero, are so tiny as to be useless.

I remember making a batteryless FM radio receiver as a kid. If you can build a radio that is powerful enough
to be able to hear it then a batteryless locator tag is definitely in the plausable category. Google
"batteryless FM receiver". There are plenty of schematics for working radios that don't require a power source
other than the FM signal.

I also lived in a dorm in college where you could hear the local station thru your speakers with the radio unplugged.
People would leave their radios on with the volume turned down just so they wouldn't hear it.

Whether this particular kickstarter is valid is the only real question. Creating a locator tag that doesn't require
a battery should in theory be completely possible.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Registered Coward v2]

I suspect that many scammer Kickstarters have a mass of pledges just as fake as yours--only not intended for humor, but rather "self-giving" to create buzz and give the impression of legitimacy. I doubt very seriously that most of that $500,000 they've raised on this particular campaign is real.

But this does raise a real point.

What about the cut KS takes? That could dwarf any real funds they get if they have too many fake pledges. A better approach is to keep adding early adopter deals and then unleash the fake ones at the end when you need to make your target. That limits your loses to KS' cut and still gets you the real funds.

Kickstarter needs some basic donor protections and means of reporting scams. Otherwise they'll just devolve in a feeding ground for con men and no one will take any project posted there seriously.

Which is why I wonder if the model is sustainable. Either they take steps to police projects, which may open them up to liability if they miss one; or they become a sewer of cons and fade away.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[cellocgw]

Nice, but no thanks: I'll wait for iScam-II, with a built-in Sarcasm Detector.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Jason Levine]

True, but if a drunk driver collides with someone (not you), your main impact to worry about would be traffic. An inconvenience, sure, but not life threatening.

If a drunk flying car driver collides with someone (not you), you might have to worry about raining debris. Every car accident would create a ripple effect of additional damage as car parts rained down onto other flying cars, pedestrians, non-flying vehicles, houses, businesses, etc.

I don't know about you, but I'd rather deal with traffic than raining debris any day.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[egranlund]

Why?

Because if it happens enough people will lose faith in all Kickstarter projects and then Kickstarter will go out of business.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Ravaldy]

It's not bankrupt. You don't understand what it means. There are other ways to pay back a debt other than to take tax dollars from citizens. The country isn't at the point of bankruptcy.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Charliemopps]

Again, the thing only needs to charge the battery to send a pulse to the speaker. Antenna sizes are... screwy... to say the least. There are plenty of ways to increase surface area via the geometry of the antenna. This is a ready to go IC that includes the antenna... that you can order and have to your door in a few days. So maybe it's filled with magic leprechauns, I don't know. I believe the whitepapers I find on Mouser.com more than random anon posts however.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[maliqua]

truer words have never been spoken.

when a car finds itself in someones living room these days its surprising shocking even, when they're flying around over head, it will be common place

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[LordLimecat]

The book of mormon is not the bible.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Wycliffe]

but rather "self-giving" to create buzz and give the impression of legitimacy. I doubt very seriously that most of that $500,000 they've raised on this particular campaign is real.

Kickstarter takes 5% and credit card processing takes about another 5% so it would take about $50k to self-fund a project to a half million dollars.
That's not counting that you need the $500k to give yourself. Not impossible but a pretty expensive cost for a scam.
They could always cancel or reduce their pledge before the funding deadline but this would be easy to spot and self-funding is against kickstarter rules.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[fredprado]

Exactly. We don't need regulations, we need consequences.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[sysrammer]

Ah, a crystal set, then? I remember those. I was mildly amazed when I learned that you could have a "self-powered" radio.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Lord Lemur]

Don't waste your money. Once the solar freaking roadways hit mass production we won't need diesel any more.

ftfy

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[samerpav]

Your unit conversion is wrong. 0 dBM = 1 mW = 0.001 W http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Cederic]

Flashbacks to Lady Vengeance.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Rakarra]

I really need to shave my stache off now.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Jarik C-Bol]

Exactly. The whole point the critics of this project have is not that it is patently impossible to do, but rather the claim that they are able to cram all this technology into something barely larger than a guitar pick. There are other examples of bluetooth item trackers out there. There are examples of energy harvesting tech out there. The problem is that both of those things are, individually, much much larger than the form factor of the item this company claims to have shoehorned BOTH devices into. Couple that with the complete lack of evidence they have actually done it, and things start to look pretty suspicious.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[angel'o'sphere]

If it was so easy, you had shown us the formulas you use and the basic numbers ;)
Perhaps you like to read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
and put your post into perspective with it.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Darinbob]

The first evidence of the scam is having a groundbreaking new technology that's never been used in production anywhere outside of some labs being first used with a completely fluffy and silly product.

Next tip, the kickstarter goal was $25,000. Which if used in a first world country (Plano Texas) is not enought to fund any practical development much less manufacturing costs. Sure, they exceeded that amount but it's unrealistic to assume that their initial goal was enough to fund their claim and provide enough product to ship to the funders.

Now they may be able to get some products but it is amazingly unlikely it will operate as implicitly claimed (though it may be able to work with a lot of provisos, as in making sure you store your tags close to your wifi router or next to the phone). But overall something just smells here.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Algae_94]

If you can't come back with at least one example of a red flag you might want to work on your communication skills.

Seriously, a guy asks you what you are seeing that are red flags to a scam, and all you basically say is that if he can't see them that's his problem.

I don't really see much in that link you posted. Other than his odd explanation for not having much of an online presence it sounds legit.

Re: Thanks for the tip!

[HornWumpus]

More then a century.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Rakarra]

Ground cars are already a "safety nightmare": Globally, they kill over a million people a year. The reason we tolerate such low safety is because it's something we know; humans have a reasoning error whereby they have a lower safety tolerance for new things. Know that it's a reasoning error.

I think you need to modify those numbers by the SHEER AMOUNT of cars, and the frequency with which they will be used. I don't think they're a safety nightmare given their ubiquity.

Flying car tech is already so "fly by wire" that they may actually be safer than ground cars, but the problem is the uncertainty around the regulatory environment is killing investment in developing and bringing products to market ... nobody wants to invest much to take the risk, because nobody knows how strict the laws are going to be etc.

I don't think they will ever be safer than ground-based cars. When a ground-based car has a failure, it sits on the road or the side of the road. When a flying car has a failure, it's a death sentence for the occupants and a nightmare for any houses/buildings/etc underneath.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Mr D from 63]

A guy that starts with excuses about why you can't find a trace of him online. A guy who talks about his degrees but won't mention what school they are from. A bio littered with vagueness on every single item. How about "My career path has taken me through some of the best companies in the industry such as Freescale, Philips, Olympus..", of course, he doesn't say he actually worked for any of those.... give me a break.

My bullshit detector went off-scale.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[skaralic]

Or not. I'm sorry, I don't trust kick starter campaigns.

Right? I gave Toad the Wet Sprocket $50 for their new record. Then it arrived as double LP with four bonus tracks! If I wanted bonus tracks I would asked for freakin' bonus tracks! And don't get me started about that photo essay book I bought into. It was so good I almost cried. If I want to feel stuff I'll give to an Indiegogo campaign!

Rex Stardust, lead electric triangle with Toad the Wet Sprocket has had to have an elbow removed following their recent successful worldwide tour of Finland. Flamboyant ambidextrous Rex apparently fell off the back of a motorcycle. "Fell off the back of a motorcyclist, most likely," quipped ace drummer Jumbo McCluney upon hearing of the accident. Plans are already afoot for a major tour of Iceland.

So excited!!

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[HornWumpus]

I've invested in bunker building companies as a hedge against flying cars.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[HornWumpus]

They've already exchanged goods and services for worthless pieces of paper (Euros or dollars, it's equally true). Now they are also looking for takers.

If one party defaulted by printing money all other over-leveraged currencies would also be rendered near worthless. Economic MAD. Hence nobody goes to open economic war. Just smiling, economic war; exchange rate peg is countered by printing presses etc.

The real action is in the exchange rates. China's peg has to go. We're using it against them now.

Poor hapless India, doesn't understand the game they are in. Handcuffed by domestic politics. Still better then Africa.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[FryingLizard]

What you say is not plausible; how do you think any radio-activated device receives the "I lost you" signal? In practice it's far from "dormant 24/7"; it's completely deaf to any signal until it turns on its high gain radio which takes typically 10-15ma. The tag must be constantly waking up and consuming power (even if, as with BTLE, it's possible to set the gaps to e.g. 5-10seconds and the "on" time is very short).

Without trying to be unduly rude, you're 25% informed yet 75% confident in your knowledge, which I suspect comprises large portion of backers of this project.

Either do a little research (e.g. look up the math and/or read the datasheets for BTLE chips - all provided in the RTFA's google doc) or... go order a pack of 10 iFinds. . :-)

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[HornWumpus]

Some of it is. Right down to the translation errors in Joe's copy.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[MattskEE]

Do you understand that EM energy harvesting power will be directly proportional to size? It's not a matter of being a "miniaturization expert" it's a matter of physics and how much radiated WiFi power you can harvest with a given antenna aperture.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[FryingLizard]

The thing also needs (most of its) power to run a Bluetooth receiver (+accelerometer), which typically uses 10-15ma @ 2V (=20-30mw) when in _receive_ mode. The duty cycle is short but waking up every 5 seconds to see if the tag is being pinged isn't typically something you'd power with leprechauns (unless they were made of lithium).

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Algae_94]

Much better examples of red flags.You're right those are all bad signs. I also think it's interesting that he mentioned Freescale first and it didn't come into existence until 20 years after he started in the field.

I certainly wouldn't give him any money, but then again I don't give money to any kickstarter projects. I think its best use is for more arts and media focused projects. Movies, games, and other consumable content. People have been trying to use it as a replacement for angel investing for technical products and that is ripe for scamming.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Mr D from 63]

I intentionally did not point out the specific items in question in hopes that a few would think about it a little more and exercise their own critical thinking. Nothing wrong with giving to Kickstarter campaigns, but its certainly a tread carefully situation. If someone has a game-changing technology or patent, they won't be on kickstarter, they'll be getting bigger bucks via other channels.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[volvox_voxel]

I was really impressed several of the kickstarter projects I backed, like the Nuand software defined radio, and the Red Pitaya open instrument. They delivered and worked as advertised, and had the open-source software posted on git. They did all the right things. They had pictures of working prototypes, trace plots and videos from real test equipment,etc. By the time they posted their products to kickstarter, the products essentially worked. They were the equivalent of a demo you'd expect from a series-A fund-raiser at a normal tech start-up. There is nothing quite like a live demo. As an engineer, nothing speaks to management better.. Some products look and smell very much like the real-deal.

I like kickstarter.. It allows engineer/hobbyists to play with hardware that otherwise be cost prohibitive. Radios that have the software-defined coverage of Nuand cost about 6x.. There is at least one other board that is even cheaper., albeit with 8 bits instead of 12..

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Anonymous Coward]

1dB is 1 watt, -10dB is .1 watt, -20dB is .001 watt

You're not familiar with RF engineering, why did you say you are.

1dB is not 1 Watt, it's not even a unit of power, it's a unit of gain. common units of radiated power are dBW and dBm, meaning decibels relative to a Watt and decibels relative to a milliwatt (and dBu, relative to a microwatt). 0dBW is 1 Watt,

The scale you give there isn't even remotely correct. If 1dB (of your AU) is 1 Watt, then -9dB is .1 Watts, and .001 Watts is not -20dB but -29dB (of your AU).

Here is a device that does the sort of energy harvesting they claim. Note that the operating input power is (only) down to -11.5dBm, so you would have to be waving your phone less than a meter away from the tag in order to detect it. Perfectly suitable for it's intended applications: Wireless sensors and asset tags, but it won't do what the iFind is claiming.

-puddingpimp

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[plover]

Look at it this way: one of those Saturday courses on just about any money-making topic would have cost you over $100.00. So really, you learned the lesson for a pretty reasonable price.

That said, I wish you luck in getting a working product.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Areyoukiddingme]

Plans are already afoot for a major tour of Iceland.

So, one stop in a bar in Reykjavík?

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[SpammersAreScum]

This of course assumes they can get in the door to see the necessary people and convince them it actually works. I remember an old SF short story about a guy who stumbled onto a way to cheaply build an anti-grav device. He was unable to get anyone who mattered to believe him. He was in despair until inspiration struck: he advertised the gizmo in comic books and made a mint. So... Kickstarter is today's comic book ad page?

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Travis Mansbridge]

When passé became a cliché.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Travis Mansbridge]

Most RFID tags are passive; the power is provided by a base-station or reader of some sort, and simply reflected off the tags in the same way roadsigns are illuminated by your own headlights.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[AmiMoJo]

Email KIckstarter and ask them to take your pledge back. Email Amazon and ask them to cancel the payment. Contact your credit card company and ask them to do a chargeback. Don't just accept being ripped off, fight back!

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[AmiMoJo]

The problem is that charging up enough to transmit a packet is going to take some time. Realistically if their antenna is extremely good (and all the extremely good ones are patented, BTW) they might be able to get one ping per minute out. Keep in mind that wifi does not transmit continuously, so even if it is sat next to the router it won't receive a constant stream of energy.

So, if you power up your phone and walk around you would need to stand near every random drawer, cupboard, shelf, bag and box where the tag could be for a minute or two so it can charge up. Clearly that is unusable.

Worse still the range of a BlueTooth device that uses only 16mA to transmit is 10m in free air. Once buried in a box under a load of other stuff you are going to have t be standing almost on top of it before your phone see it.

If the tags were much larger and used more constant, stronger signals like broadcast radio or TV, and they used 433MHz instead of 2.4GHz to broadcast the ping they might have a hope.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[spydir31]

There's no need to Email anyone, Since the funding isn't over he can just cancel his pledge.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[david_thornley]

The problem with that is the lack of reliable information. If I can get information I can trust, I can make my own decisions. Having people blatantly lie messes that up, since I can't trust that channel. If I can't trust that channel, it gets much riskier to invest. If I want to invest in a company, I can read reports that have been made by people who are looking at prison if they lie too badly. What about Kickstarter?

If Kickstarter wants to thrive, they can crack down on dishonest scams. I'll filter out the honest ones for myself.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[david_thornley]

And to think the TSA still isn't buying my terrorist-detecting rocks, which glow red when a genuine terrorist intending to do harm to or with an aircraft tries to pass the boarding gate. Even when I guarantee 99.99999% accuracy. At a hundred thousand dollars each, they're a bargain!

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[skaralic]

Plans are already afoot for a major tour of Iceland.

So, one stop in a bar in Reykjavík?

One stop at the bar in Reykjavík!

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Marxist Hacker 42]

A lot of non zero can add up to something greater than one. But you are never going to miniaturize it into a keyfob tag.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Marxist Hacker 42]

You'd find the cat, but it would be dead from a heart attack after it's collar suddenly went BLEEP for an extended period very loudly.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[bitSmiter]

You've got me wondering... If you shipped a push-button LED device with a random on/off switch inside, such that you never know if it would actually blink when "turned on" by the user's button press... How many suckers would SWEAR it works as advertised? "Because I know she was lying and the light blinked that time!".

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[uninformedLuddite]

This of course assumes they can get in the door to see the necessary people and convince them it actually works.

This is an extremely valid point. Many years ago I worked out and mocked up a working model of a device capable of containing oceanic oil spills. It is easy, relatively cheap and all of the recovered oil can be easily sold as it is in no way tainted by its experiences. I couldn't find a single person anywhere who was prepared to listen.

Re: Thanks for the tip!

[semi-extrinsic]

I went to a bar in Reykjavik a month ago. Was promised "grungefunk" concert, but alas there was none. The local microbrewery stuff was good, though.

Re:Thanks for the tip!

[Forthan Red]

It was an obvious scam. Their web page was just a series of magical wish-fulfillment statements, with nothing but hot air to back it up. Fortunately, Kickstarter has pulled the plug, and no one will be losing their money.

But it's green! It works through magic!

[tp1024]

Everybody knows that green tech works without regard to laws of physics. Give them your money, they are green! They know how to make magic work!

Re:But it's green! It works through magic!

[MrBingoBoingo]

For a while I've just assumed kickstarter and scams went hand in hand. Actual VC funding might go to shitty causes, but with something like this you'd expect a VC could at least ask an engineer acquaintance.

Re:But it's green! It works through magic!

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, everyone knows magic is not green. It is a limited, non-renewable energy source. Seriously, when was the last time you saw an elf, a werewolf, or a lich? Maybe your grandfather told a story about his grandfather who knew a guy that had a great uncle with a magic ring that made him invisible. But the days of peak-magic are well in the past. And don't get me started on the carbon footprint. Do you know how much CO2 your typical dragon put out in a year? Be glad those days are far behind.

Re:But it's green! It works through magic!

[Mr D from 63]

A VC would be able to actually see the product, the patent, and the actual people producing it before he invested.

Re:But it's green! It works through magic!

[rossdee]

I don't think there are many VC's (recipients of the Victoria Cross) left alive these days
(Its the British and Commonwealth equivalent of the Medal of Honor)

Re:But it's green! It works through magic!

[GameMaster]

You're right, but not for the reason you list. Charlie disbanded in '76 after the fall of Saigon and unification of the North and the South.

Re:But it's green! It works through magic!

[imikem]

Not too many venture capitalists either.

This fake too?

[0dugo0]

http://abc.cs.washington.edu/

Re:This fake too?

[OzPeter]

http://abc.cs.washington.edu/

Just because harvesting of RF energy is a legitimate field does not mean that this product is genuine.

Or to give you a car analogy, just because internal combustion engines are used to drive cars does not mean that you can run a 4 litre V8 engine at full power and get 100 miles to the gallon.

Re:This fake too?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, because WA U have published peer reviewed data to back up their claim. Unlike this kickstarter, which has published random data that doesn't even stand up to the most cursory checks. Hopefully you can spot the difference.

Re:This fake too?

[OzPeter]

ok, WHY is it disingenuous? What about their claims don't make sense then? They plan to make a product that is clearly possible, so why is it a scam?

Take a look at the google doc. It has a lot of technical information as to why the claims of *this* kickstarter project are suspect.

Re:This fake too?

[AmiMoJo]

Look at the size of the antennas they are using, and compare them to the size of the iFind tags. Note how the legit project is going for much lower frequencies where there is much more energy available (hence the larger antenna), while iFind are trying to harvest intentionally low power wifi on a band with poor propagation. Look at the size of the PCBs and the size of the energy storage available in each design.

Wireless energy harvesting is an exciting field, but it can't do what these guys are claiming I'm afraid.

Re:This fake too?

[Rei]

Or to give you a car analogy, just because internal combustion engines are used to drive cars does not mean that you can run a 4 litre V8 engine at full power and get 100 miles to the gallon

Sure you can, if you run it in pulse-and-glide mode or use it as an intermittent generator, in a very light / streamlined vehicle. Even if you want to add on a requirement that it has to be run continuously, you could probably pull it off by going to extremes with your streamlining (going for a Cd of 0,1 or less and a cross section of under 0,5m... basically a little teardrop 1-man reclined capsule going at incredible speeds, thus quickly racking up those "miles" to compensate for the fast fuel consumption) and/or using an electrolysis cell to regenerate hydrogen fuel using whatever power your engine has in surplus (wasteful, but better than throwing away the surplus power from your full-throttle requirement for no purpose). Hmm, that's another thing one could do to game your challenge, one could mess with the fuel mix and the fuel-air ratio; some fuels or fuel progenitors are a lot denser than gasoline (more energy per gallon) - for example, using aluminum powder to generate hydrogen for the V8, a gallon of aluminum powder contains 2 1/2 times more energy than a gallon of gasoline, even with the losses in hydrogen generation it'll still leave you way ahead of the game. And there's all sorts of other possible ways one could tweak the engine, too, to reduce both its consumption (and correspondingly, power output) at full power. Including the easiest one, just tweak the throttle control so that full throttle is actually a very low power output. You could also get some small efficiency gains by sabotaging the pollution controls.

Re:This fake too?

[jareth-0205]

Not really sure why you seem to think that proof needs to be from the doubters. The Kickstarter are asking for money on trust, so it's up to them to provide a decent argument as to why they are genuine, not the other way round.

Re:This fake too?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't have audio at the moment, but just looking at the video without sound, it appears that the range on their device is measured in inches (the ipad doesn't appear to detect the 2 devices until they are just a few inches apart). On the other hand, the kickstarter item is talking about full blown bluetooth communication at a range of 200+ feet (note the part where they mention letting you know when your keys are 200 feet away from you).

Re:This fake too?

[N1AK]

What about their claims don't make sense then?

The calculation for how much energy you could harvest in a 100% efficient item the size of a dogtag is already on here and easy to calculate. The energy required to run devices like this (including very efficient ones) is well known. There is a considerable shortfall of energy provided and energy required even if everything is 100% efficient. It's quite literally like me saying that I can build a 3' by 3' solar panel that can run everything in your house. It doesn't take a genius to work out that the solar energy available couldn't possibly power anything like a normal (or even ultra energy efficient) house.

Re:This fake too?

[coinreturn]

Or to give you a car analogy, just because internal combustion engines are used to drive cars does not mean that you can run a 4 litre V8 engine at full power and get 100 miles to the gallon.

It can - down the side of the Washington Monument.

Re:This fake too?

[retchdog]

He doesn't need your 'physics'. He's a capitalist, you see, and understands that the market makes things work!

Re:This fake too?

[naughtynaughty]

Who said their device is "clearly possible"? Here are some rough numbers to chew on. There are a number of other similar devices already on the market that run off of batteries. The typical battery is a CR2032 which has about 240mAh @ 2V of capacity or about 500mWh. Those devices are reported to last about 2-6 months before the battery dies. There are about 720 hours in a month, 6 months is about 4500 hours Therefore the devices are drawing an average of 500mWh/2500h = .2mW of power or 200 uW Their device is about 4 cm^2 in size, an overly optimistic efficiency of energy harvesting would be 10%. That is an effective area of 0.4 cm^2. To get 200uW of energy would therefore require an energy field of approximately 200uW/0.4cm^2 or 500uW per cm^2 Even their own field measurements directly against the door of an operating microwave oven showed a field 1/5th of that. A 500mW router at a distance of 1 meter has a field strength of 500mW/12566 cm^2 of only 40 uW per cm^2 So even 3' from a 500mW router that is unlikely to really be radiating 500mW of power we are short by a factor of 10. If they are able to overcome that factor of 10 then they should be able to produce a battery powered equivalent that lasts for 5 years on one battery. And even if they are able to overcome that factor of 10 that is only for a tag within 1 meter of a high powered router. Great if you have a habit of losing something within a meter of your router but if the device is 4 meters away (12 feet) then you have a factor of 160 to overcome. So you tell me why battery powered tags aren't made that work for 5 years (or 40 years) if these guys have a design that can live on 200 uW of power.

Re:This fake too?

[Alioth]

They plan to power a dogtag sized Bluetooth device by harvesting typical WiFi signal power.

The antenna will be at most about half an inch on each side (0.0125 meters, for a total area of 0.00015625 square meters.
Near a wireless network station used in homes and offices, the field intensity is typically below 0.5 mW per square meter.
Further upthread, someone posted the power required by a modern, low power Bluetooth chip, in its lowest powered sleep mode it requires a current of 900nA and 1mA when idle. Let's say it operates on 1 volt (it's probably 1.2v) so we will actually underestimate its power requirements by saying in its lowest powered sleep mode it requires only 900nW (that's 0.0000009 watts).
At 0.5mW (or 0.005 watts) per sq. m, the maximum energy a dogtag sized device, assuming 100% efficiency (not possible) will be able to harvest is 0.005 * 0.00015625 watts of power. This will work out to about 780nW.
780nW is less than 900nW. QED.

And that's giving them the benefit of the doubt (100% power efficiency, and a lower working voltage for the Bluetooth chip that it probably uses, and only considering the chip being in sleep mode, its lowest possible power mode, and not considering at all any other circuits the device will need - it will need more than just a bluetooth module, it'll need at least a minimal microcontroller of some sort).

Re:This fake too?

[SourceFrog]

> does not mean that you can run a 4 litre V8 engine at full power and get 100 miles to the gallon

Thanks, you've given me an idea for my next Kickstarter campaign.

Re:This fake too?

[Jarik C-Bol]

That one pinged my "what the hell?" radar also, because my brand new, powered bluetooth headphones start losing signal at about 20 feet and 1 cinder block wall. I was curious what sort of witchcraft could push that distance out to 200 feet without a battery, and promptly found a stack of BS so deep, you could bury a tractor trailer in it.

Re:This fake too?

[Jarik C-Bol]

Ah, audio makes all the difference. She is looking for her keys, and activates the "find me" on the phone, and the keys start beeping. The part where they are only a few inches apart is the 'pairing' to add a new device to the system. (which brings up the popular critics point, that the bluetooth on the phone screen is OFF, so its obviously faked, but that is a whole other ball of wax)

Re:This fake too?

[angel'o'sphere]

The proof needs to come from the one who is accusing (doubters as you call them) _always_, it is a core principle of our civilization since several millennia that the accused one is not guilty unless YOU proof it otherwise!
Regarding this kickstarter project: it seems the guys behind did not provide all the math, no idea, did not check it. However it is a no brainer that it is plausible and would in principle work. I would not be surprised if you even can craft such a thing with off the shelf parts.
So if you believe otherwise, why don't YOU do the math?

Re:This fake too?

[angel'o'sphere]

3' x 3' is 3 feet squared right? That is nearly a square meter. Under optimal conditions that is roughly 1kW electric power: so yes it basically can power my whole house, as long as not accidentally to many consumers are switched on at the same time.
E.g. the fridge just started up and I activate my hair dryer.
So with some 'juggling' I certainly could power my house over daytime, and no, it is not a low energy house, but I use shades instead of an AC ...
So perhaps you should start to put in real numbers into your claims and start to make some wild guesses about the real numbers of said project?

Re:This fake too?

[FryingLizard]

I did, see Google doc. So did others (better than me). Results posted in doc.

You say: "no idea, did not check it".

Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Re:This fake too?

[angel'o'sphere]

I did not check the kickstarter project, however I did check the google doc. And I don't see anything in it that is solid. It is just a list of unverifiable claims ...

Re:This fake too?

[HornWumpus]

Power stations are perfectly human safe in normal operation from a RF field perspective (obviously in places humans are, they do contain high voltage). Not only that, they are old technology. Power station techs have been followed to the grave. The RF didn't give them cancer. (they can statistically see the cancer from the asbestos and solvents).

Re:This fake too?

[FryingLizard]

err... whose claims are unverifiable?

Wetag's? Sure, they're pretty sketchy. Practically no hard info except two wack pseudo-science documents and some nice photoshop work. No pics, no demo, no nothing (so far).

Mine? Errr... well, there's a ton of links to source material throughout, there's links to other people who think the same way (and did the math also), there's facts, figures, references, etc.
If you didn't click any of the links, do any Google searches, look at the iFind site or pay attention in math or physics class in highschool, then.. yes I suppose you find them unverifiable. Tell you what, I promise, cross my heart, it's all true. Does that work?

Re:This fake too?

[angel'o'sphere]

Sorry, if someone gors so far to put a document on google docs, I expect a summary in math and formulars in said doc. Not in links leading elsewhere.
Cant be so hard to show the most efficient energy harvester, amplifier and blue tooth chip set in three lines of text with three links and then giving the relevant formulas in another 4 or 5 lines of text.
Thinking about it, all the information necessary to debunk this kickstarter project would fit into the little text box I'm typing into right now without any need to scroll.
However: no one came up with that info ... (and I'm to lazy to google for it ... I don't care if the kickstarter project is fraud. But I do care that the people claiming so do a very very misserable job in proofing it)

In a rush..

[Anonymous Coward]

...so only scan read the article, but that sounds great. I've just pledged $100. Looking forward to it arriving.

Weren't these guys advertising on slashdot?

[bangular]

I swear I remember a period of a few weeks where I'd see ads for this product on slashdot...

Re:Weren't these guys advertising on slashdot?

[Mr D from 63]

If you want a chuckle, read the Dr. Paul McArthur "bio" post.

https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...

Re:Weren't these guys advertising on slashdot?

[NotDrWho]

The best part is

Some people have wondered why I do not have a robust presence online. Well, unfortunately, my identity was once stolen. And when that happens, you think twice about posting anything online. I have not even created a LinkedIn profile.

I think I had a Nigerian prince write me last week with the same story.

Re:Weren't these guys advertising on slashdot?

[ebcdic]

There are ads on Slashdot???

Re:Weren't these guys advertising on slashdot?

[Jason Levine]

I had my identity stolen once. (Name, address, SSN and DOB were used to open a credit card in my name. Thanks a lot, Capital One, for not validating Mother's Maiden Name!) I still post online, though. Why? Because the things I post online won't result in my identity being stolen again. I'm more at risk of my doctor's office's computers being hacked into causing my personal information to leak out than I am at risk of all of my online posts combined causing my identity to be stolen.

If they walk away with this money...

[Kensai7]

Game over for Kickstarter. This will bite them hard...

Re:If they walk away with this money...

[governorx]

Kickstarter will be fine. I mean 'Solar friggin roadways!'.

Re:If they walk away with this money...

[Rei]

Hey, at least they're technologically feasible. Anti-slip glass exists, LEDs exists, resistive heaters exist, solar cells exist, etc. The complaints with that one were always over the economics, in particular, their ridiculous snow-melting idea, which would take about a dollar at average US prices per square foot if you assume 100% efficiency to melt just a couple inches of snow (the crazy thing is, there are better snow-prevention/removal solutions that don't waste that much energy... but the people running the program didn't even take the time to do the simple energy requirements calculation for melting to realize that their particular solution is a non-starter)

This case is even more ridiculous because what they're claiming here isn't even technologically possible.

Re:If they walk away with this money...

[pauljlucas]

Hey, at least [solar roadways are] technologically feasible.

Oh, they are so not.

Re:If they walk away with this money...

[Khyber]

Uh. We built a solar walkway in my old warehouse project back in Memphis. It worked just fine. This was like 2004, a decade ago. It generated about 95kWh every hour of full sunlight in a total 7,000 square foot area using 15% efficient PV, and after conversion losses, roughly 80kWh every hour.

So what youtube nonsense are you posting about? Youtube is not a reliable scientific source.

Re:If they walk away with this money...

[Khyber]

Uh, yea, his assumption is that there are cars on it every single freaking moment.

Traffic doesn't work that way and any basic civil engineer can poke holes in that nonsense all day.

Re:If they walk away with this money...

[pauljlucas]

Care don't have to be on it constantly. Once the glass breaks, it's stays broken. Debris will scratch the glass making it more translucent rather than transparent reducing its effectiveness. Roadways don't track the sun making solar cells much less efficient. LEDs aren't visible in direct sunlight especially at shallow angles. The glare from any reflected light will blind drivers. As he rightly points out, putting the solar cells NEXT TO the road works much better. There's simply no reason to put them IN THE road even if it did work.

And the idea of putting it in parking lots is even dumber. Yeah, parking lots where cars are parked on it during the day (this blocking the sun) and empty at night (where there's no sun).

But if you want to donate money, go right ahead.

Re:If they walk away with this money...

[Khyber]

" Once the glass breaks, it's stays broken"

Modular construction. Been around for ages for PV.

"Debris will scratch the glass making it more translucent rather than transparent reducing its effectiveness"

A simple lesson from Moh's Hardness scale might change your mind on that, assuming you even know what that is. We've got transparent glass harder than anything used in nearby construction or even car construction.

"Roadways don't track the sun making solar cells much less efficient"

We've got optics that can focus from any angle, no need to track the sun.

" LEDs aren't visible in direct sunlight especially at shallow angles"

Absolutely wrong. We've got LED-lit crosswalks here in Riverside that flash very brightly, covering roughly half a sphere of incidence, and can be seen several blocks away in broad daylight. Bear in mind this is practically the southern side of the MOJAVE, not many more places get as much sun as we do.

" The glare from any reflected light will blind drivers."

As if that doesn't already happen with heat-mirrors made on the road surfaces.

" As he rightly points out, putting the solar cells NEXT TO the road works much better. There's simply no reason to put them IN THE road even if it did work. "

He's very obviously not an engineer.

"And the idea of putting it in parking lots is even dumber. Yeah, parking lots where cars are parked on it during the day"

And now you're taking his same and stupid assumption that cars would be there all the time.

Protip: Most parking lots usually run about 1/2 capacity, excepting holidays. Oh, and you forgot incidental reflection of sunlight from car bodies. There's still a MINIMUM umol of 400 even under the shadow of a vehicle in a parking lot (I've measured this with a quantum meter at high noon) which is still plenty of harvestable energy.

Quit listening to someone that doesn't even have the proper equipment to test out his nonsense, and obviously hasn't even been out in the actual field to conduct real on-site research.

Re:If they walk away with this money...

[Kielistic]

We have extremely expensive and extremely brittle glass that has a high hardness. That sure sounds like it would work great for a road...

Optics don't magically direct more sunlight! What are you even talking about. That has to be one of the most ignorant things posted as authority I've ever seen.

Are you saying your LED-lit crosswalks are inset into the ground? Or are you talking about the indicators with the huge shades on them to block the sun?

Re:If they walk away with this money...

[Rei]

Oh, god, Thunderf00t, thats who your videos are from? Yeah, I've ran into that guy before, he's a moron.

Once the glass breaks, it's stays broken.

Which can be said about any road surface. What point are you trying to make? Are you trying to claim that glass will break easy under pressure? News flash, the glass glazing on some skyscrapers actually holds up their own collective weight. Glass has superb compressive strength. It's very poor in dealing with flexural loads, which is why you have to have panels that can flex between individual panes. And gee, remind me again, what's the proposal here for the road? Oh, yeah - panels.

Debris will scratch the glass making it more translucent rather than transparent reducing its effectiveness.

Which is why you use a scratch-resistant coating like is used on countertops, bar code readers, and thousands of other glass products; they're not even that expensive, for a basic level of protection (if you want to get all the way to something like gorilla glass, that's rather pricey, but also totally unnecessary). Why did you not even consider anti-scratch coatings? And FYI, just like greenhouses continue to work when scratched, so do scratched solar panels. It's not the end of the world.

To prevent scratching, your surface simply has to be harder than what's rubbing against it. Few materials in the natural world are harder than quartz (Mohs hardness 7), so a Mohs hardness 7.5 coating is sufficient. It's not like people are going to be scratching rubies against the road.

And lastly, just like it's far easier to mount panels on a flat surface on the ground than some pre-existing home where you have to worry about structural integrity, leaks, etc, it's also far easier to maintain them on the ground.

Roadways don't track the sun

Neither do rooftops. Only a small fraction of PV installations are on heliostats, they're mainly used for solar thermal. The cheaper PV gets, the less sense heliostats make (the cost of the actual solar cell material itself is on the road to irrelevance, more and more it comes down to installation costs).

As he rightly points out, putting the solar cells NEXT TO the road works much better.

If you're talking about the shoulder, I'd call that "part of the road". If you're talking about building a whole new structure, no, that's idiocy. The point of this is to minimize land use and to eliminate the need to build two separate structures (a road and a solar panel farm). Labor costs dominate both of these, so eliminating half your labor is A Big Deal(TM).

Not that I think this team has approached things in the right order. "Solar freaking walkways" are much lower hanging fruit. And their focus on winter climes is a stupid way to start as well. But yours (and Thunderf00t)'s arguments are just stupid.

And the idea of putting it in parking lots is even dumber. Yeah, parking lots where cars are parked on it during the day (this blocking the sun) and empty at night (where there's no sun).

Except that even the idiot team that ran the kickstarter wasn't focusing on the parking spaces themselves. Seriously, stop what you're doing, right now, and go to Google Maps, pick a random spot in the country (don't bias it), zoom in, find the nearest road, and look at it. Observe how little of the road is shaded by cars. The answer will be, "virtually none".

Okay, let's try to bias it. Pick a city of your choice. Now pick a random spot in it and zoom in, not biasing your zoom in more than that. Look at the nearest road and observe how little is shaded. Again, "very, very little"

Okay, bias to your heart's content. Pick out the

Re:If they walk away with this money...

[Rei]

We have extremely expensive and extremely brittle glass that has a high hardness.

Wrong on all parts except for the last one. Look, you clearly know nothing about glass, so stop pretending to be an expert and talking down to everyone. There are scratch resistant coatings that cost as little as a couple dollars per square foot, and you can apply them to whatever glass you want, not "extremely expensive and extremely brittle glass". You're literally just making properties up out of thin air for glass.

Optics don't magically direct more sunlight!

Uh, by the definition of optics, they're structures that direct light.

Are you saying your LED-lit crosswalks are inset into the ground?

I don't know what the other poster is familiar with, but I'm familiar with the LED "Smart Crosswalks" - google it. Yes, you can see them fine in the day.

Re:If they walk away with this money...

[Kielistic]

If we had glass that was hard and robust enough to support a road that maintains optical clarity enough to be useful for a PV then why the hell are so many people walking around with smashed iPhone screens? We don't have this magic glass you say we do. There is very little that takes as much wear and tear as a road. Which is why we make them out of rock and concrete and not out of glass.

They can only direct light that hits them smart guy. If the light is already hitting the solar panel why would you redirect the light through more glass (which will reduce its efficiency)? So unless you are suggesting putting magnifying glasses over the roads (which is pretty stupid suggestion) optics are not going to do anything to counteract the loss of efficiency from placing solar panels flat on the ground where they are getting less sun.

So I looked these "Smart Crosswalks" up and as far as I can see they are shrouds that stick out of the road to direct the light toward the car. Which is exactly how these solar friggen roadways don't work. They can't work that way because road lines have to be visible to people other than the car stopped at the "stop here at red signal" line. Large LED directional shrouds would also get in the way of a solar panel I would tend to think.

These things are bunk and you know it. If you have to grasp at straws to say "it might be possible" then it is fairly safe to assume that it is not.

Re:If they walk away with this money...

[Khyber]

"Optics don't magically direct more sunlight! "

Do you know how a focusing or waveguide optic works? It would seem not.

"Are you saying your LED-lit crosswalks are inset into the ground?"

Yes. You press a button, and the crosswalk starts flashing, which tells vehicles in broad daylight to slow the fuck down. It uses a green-yellow LED (since our eyes are fairly sensitive around that range.)

http://honolulu.legalexaminer....

Now then, you were saying?

Re:If they walk away with this money...

[Khyber]

" If the light is already hitting the solar panel why would you redirect the light through more glass"

Because angle of incidence to ensure proper exposure to photons, duh. Problem with most solar panels is - wait for it - they're reflective. By using a focusing waveguide optic, you can eliminate that reflectance and guide MORE LIGHT to the panel - thus increasing the efficiency overall.

"So I looked these "Smart Crosswalks" up and as far as I can see they are shrouds that stick out of the road to direct the light toward the car"

No, the shrouds do not direct light. The LEDs are mounted facing outwards and protected with a plastic cover to keep them from getting wet - that's it. It's an IP rating thing, not a stop sunlight thing. Sunlight efficiency is ~93 lumens per watt, LEDs can hit well the fuck over that, thus they can easily be seen in daytime.

And by the same principle, a properly-angled LED inside the panel would be perfectly fucking visible in broad daylight. If they weren't, we'd not be using LEDs in DAYTIME RUNNING LIGHTS and BRAKE SIGNALS.

Re:If they walk away with this money...

[Kielistic]

Let's use state of the art optics technology and then drive transport trucks over it. There's a winning strategy.

Those LEDs are directly aimed at the cars so that they are visible! Directly aimed and shielded from direct sunlight! Now lay them under glass under the road- how are they going to be visible from all directions? They won't. That's what I am saying. LEDs have to be aimed to be visible. They also don't like to get hot but that's a whole other problem with this nonsense.

Re:If they walk away with this money...

[Kielistic]

So now your solution is to use a magic type of glass that you assert exists that will stand up to the wear and tear of traffic and also make it into a state of the art, finely tuned lens? That sounds realistic.

The LEDs are angled and directed at the vehicles that have to see them. Otherwise they would mount them like pot-lights and they would look much nicer.

How do you properly angle an LED that has to be visible from every direction? Notice how headlights and brake lights are pointed directly at the people that need to see them? Maybe you think it would be a good idea to mount them into the roof? That way you'd only need one brake and one headlight and everyone around would see them easily.

Even if you crank up the power in the LEDs to overpower the sun it is still a losing scenario. You are trying to overpower the light-source that you are using to power your light-source. Like using a windmill to power a fan to blow a sailboat.

Re:If they walk away with this money...

[Rakarra]

Modular construction. Been around for ages for PV.

So we're going to replace every module every week? Because those things will get scratched up FAST. Most cities and rural areas simply can't afford to repair the low-cost roads until years down the line. How on earth are they supposed to be able to repair the high-cost ones?

There will always be a lot of crud on the road. There will always be a lot of crud on tires. Crud will always be ground into the roadway throughout the day. In the winter water will freeze in those cracks and cause more erosion. They will sit there not generating power because no one will be able to afford to replace them.

Re:If they walk away with this money...

[Khyber]

"Let's use state of the art optics technology"

Try 35 years old, at minimum. Not even state of the art.

"Those LEDs are directly aimed at the cars so that they are visible! Directly aimed and shielded from direct sunlight! Now lay them under glass under the road- how are they going to be visible from all directions? "

Are you even aware of this thing called viewing angle? Most SMD LEDs have 160+ degrees of viewing angle, meaning you could be lying on the ground, and still see it when it illuminates.

"They won't."

I've been working on LED designs since 2008, they most certainly can.

"LEDs have to be aimed to be visible"

Not even close.

"They also don't like to get hot "

Depends on the LED type. Smaller half-watt ones won't really give two shits about typical road temps (we're talking Mojave desert, here) and they can operate at roughly three times that temperature in the junction and still be visible.

Re:If they walk away with this money...

[Khyber]

"So now your solution is to use a magic type of glass that you assert exists that will stand up to the wear and tear of traffic and also make it into a state of the art, finely tuned lens?"

You keep using state of the art. I don't think it means what you think it means, especially in context of date of invention of these things (some over 30 years ago.)

That magic glass? Easy. Transparent aluminum. We've been able to manufacture it in bulk for at least half a decade with ease.

"Even if you crank up the power in the LEDs to overpower the sun"

You failed to read the part where I mentioned that LEDs are far and above efficiency of the sun, didn't you? You also failed to think about the color choice of yellow-green, which our eyes are most sensitive to.

"You are trying to overpower the light-source that you are using to power your light-source. "

Given the purpose of a solar panel would be to ABSORB the light, overpowering it would not be a problem, as much light shouldn't be reflecting off for the most part.

You are certainly not paying attention to what people are writing and saying. Perhaps you should step back and, oh I dunno, actually obtain a degree in this kind of field so you might be able to understand what we're talking about?

Re:If they walk away with this money...

[Kielistic]

You keep acting condescending as if you think it will make your position stronger. I'm sorry you got conned by these solar friggen roadways but digging yourself deeper isn't going to help.

Every time there is a problem brought up you just heap some other advanced technology on top as if that's going to fix everything. Now we're on to transparent aluminum (you know Star Trek was just a movie right?). As if that's so "easy" to manufacture we can just use it to replace all road surfaces. I will reiterate, read this very slowly if you have to. If not even Apple can afford to use this mystical material to stop their $700+ cellphones from smashing and cracking then how the hell are we going to afford to use it for road construction? Noting that currently we use basically recycled waste material to keep costs down.

If I mention how much soot builds up on roads what is your solution to that? "Well duh, automatic windshield wipers have been around for decades"? This is just so obviously a bad idea.

I am paying attention to what you are saying. What you are saying is just stupid. LEDs are just not that visible in sunlight- even ambient sunlight usually overpowers them. Which is why they are absolutely always directed and shrouded from direct sunlight when used outdoors. Even LED stop lights are nearly impossible to see if the sun hits them directly and they're pointed right at the driver. Why aren't they using these magic low-power, high-heat tolerance, long-lasting, super-mega-OVER9000-bright LEDs?

I am not failing to take anything into account. You are just grasping at straws and they're getting shorter and shorter.

I'm going to go sum just the top layer that you have admitted they need:
"transparent aluminum" (we'll just assume for a second this works and will stand up to real-life traffic)
As close to fully transparent as possible so light can get to the PV
Must be textured (hurts transparency but friction is important for a road surface)
Must be a specially crafted lens to counteract the poor horizontal placement of solar panel
(subnote 1: how well does a textured lens work?)
(subnote 2: no more mass-production if each panel must be tuned exactly to its position)
(subnote 3: how exactly does a textured lens affect the LED markers shining up through it?)
Must be cheap enough to replace asphalt

How can you possibly think that that sounds reasonable? It sounds like a bad Hollywood movie trying to explain technology.

Re:If they walk away with this money...

[Khyber]

"Every time there is a problem brought up you just heap some other advanced technology on top as"

None of this is advanced by any stretch of the imagination. That you think it is advanced only betrays your ignorance of the subject entirely.

"If I mention how much soot builds up on roads what is your solution to that?"

Wind, vehicle friction, and precipitation. The solution was already built into your problem by its very nature. Do you even engineer?

" LEDs are just not that visible in sunlight-"

Which is why I can see the LED traffic signals perfectly fine despite the sun being right in my face for my morning and afternoon drives to/from work? Which is why despite blinding glare from idiots with chrome-painted vehicles I can still see their LED headlights and brake lights in BROAD DAYLIGHT?

Sun - 93 lux/w.

LED - 200+ lux/w.

You are not paying attention, listening, or even thinking critically.

Re:If they walk away with this money...

[Kielistic]

If something is not being used in any other consumer technology it is not a far stretch to consider it "advanced". Just because we have working models does not mean something is not advanced. In fact you might say if it's not in my cheap Chinese knockoff it is pretty advanced for this area. Roads have to be wildly cheap to produce.

"Wind, vehicle friction, and precipitation"? That is an extremely stupid thing to say. Put on a white shirt and go roll around on a concrete road surface and tell me how clean that wind keeps it. Cars constantly spew a lot of crap all over the road. A lot of heavy, sticky crap. The part of the road affected by "vehicle friction" will actually be more dirty. The rubber should lose in the friction war or your surface is going to get worn away pretty darn quickly.

You are not paying attention, listening, or even thinking critically.

Projecting much? You are obtusely trying to defend this moronic idea with more fervor than a fundamentalist Christian.

All the LEDs you keep listing are pointed directly at the viewer. How many times do I have to repeat this? All the LEDs you keep listing are pointed directly at the viewer. Viewing them through several centimeters of glass at a very high angle and in direct sunlight will not make them magically easier to see. You know what the most easily visible marker in direct sunlight is? Paint. It is also orders of magnitude less expensive, lasts longer, doesn't require laying down a whole new road to replace, and causes less eye-strain. Sweet.

Kickstarter/Amazon still get their cut

[EmagGeek]

This is why there is zero oversight from Kickstarter/Amazon - they get their 20% cut if the projects gets funded. There's no way Amazon.com is going to walk away from $125,000 in free money when they have absolutely no risk.

(We've heard this song before - from ISPs back in the day who claimed they were "common carriers" and "only providing a network" to avoid being charged as accessories to piracy).

They'll take their 125k, and if questioned, simply state they were providing a platform, and that they are not responsible for what users do with it.

Re:Kickstarter/Amazon still get their cut

[Neil Boekend]

If they are wise than that is NOT what they'll do.
If it is a scam and word gets around that they didn't care then the income from Kickstarter would stop quite fast.
Even if they don't care for the platform itself but only the revenue stream from it they should actively block scams.

Re:Kickstarter/Amazon still get their cut

[jythie]

Maybe this is why they 'opened up' the process and removed the requirement for review. Now they can plausibly say they were not aware of projects like this.

Re:Kickstarter/Amazon still get their cut

[Mr D from 63]

I think its more of removing the risk of a scam getting through the initial review, which would provide a liability path.

Re:Kickstarter/Amazon still get their cut

[jellomizer]

There's no way Amazon.com is going to walk away from $125,000 in free money when they have absolutely no risk.

No Risks except from legal action, possibly a class action suite. Distrust in the service and decline of its brand name. Lack of repeat customers and new projects being posted as they are afraid they will be considered a scam project as well.

Re:Kickstarter/Amazon still get their cut

[necro81]

This is why there is zero oversight from Kickstarter/Amazon - they get their 20% cut if the projects gets funded

I gotta make some correction there - it's not a 20% cut. Kickstarter get 5%. Amazon get 3-5% depending on several factors. Granted, it's still a lot of money, and provides a powerful incentive for them to have as many projects funded as possible, but you're overstating it by 2x or more.

Re:Kickstarter/Amazon still get their cut

[mwvdlee]

Being legally right does not mean being morally right in the eyes of those who pay your bills.

Re:Kickstarter/Amazon still get their cut

[SourceFrog]

It's not that simple; if the public don't trust these systems then there is less money coming in overall, across the board. So there is some incentive to have a system people can trust. What makes it difficult is how to rate products ... scams like this require advanced knowledge to rate as scams or not, and on the bleeding edge of innovation it might not even be possible to distinguish a clever scam from a real innovative product in some cases. (And the last people on Earth who can do that are the SEC, never mind Kickstarter/Amazon. E.g. a product like this requires a high degree of knowledge of physics even just to analyze the claims.)

Me, I think the solution is to prosecute scammers as fraudsters to discourage them - put them in prison if found guilty (but keep the bar of proof just high enough that you don't put genuine innovators in prison, of course).

Re:Kickstarter/Amazon still get their cut

[Cederic]

Most people are however merely stating that the evidence doesn't support the claims, and that it is only sensible to treat this as a scam without further evidence.

That's a very supportable and legally defensible statement, particularly when there is no attempt to refute it.

Re:Kickstarter/Amazon still get their cut

[HornWumpus]

You always put a charismatic idiot up to head these kinds of things.

He's not a scammer, he just failed physics but thinks hes an unrecognized genius; so he invented a PhD and a few more credentials (they never go half way, it's always doctor/lawyer/PhD/MBA/Doctor of Divinity-pick 3). The world is full of them. Some tell good stories. The guy behind the true believer is the true scammer. But his name isn't on the paper.

What do you do with the idiot who honestly thinks he invented perpetual motion? My answer; laugh at him, don't fund him, laugh at the 'Journalists' who report it as straight news.

Re:Kickstarter/Amazon still get their cut

[HornWumpus]

Cheap education for anybody scammed.

Kickstarter doesn't put it's credibility on the line for each project. The number of well documented kickstarter scams reflects using openness as a defense.

Re:Kickstarter/Amazon still get their cut

[qeveren]

I've noticed that the "report this kickstarter" links that the support pages refer to no longer exist, either. :p

Re:Kickstarter/Amazon still get their cut

[david_thornley]

Being legally right also doesn't reassure potential customers, who realize they might be fleeced in ways that have no legal redress.

Some Public Records ... You Know ... Just in Case

[eldavojohn]

So a whois.net domain name lookup on their site yielded nothing. And there are suspiciously no patents mentioning "wetag" or "ifind" and the names they listed (Dr. Paul McArthur) are in patents but for cold fusion BS in California.

Surely, though, they must have registered the "iFind" trademark? And if you search on TESS we find:

Owner (APPLICANT) WeTag, Inc. CORPORATION TEXAS 3309 San Mateo Drive Plano TEXAS 75023

With an attorney listed as "Richard G. Eldredge" which corresponds to a local attorney. Before you deploy the door kickers to lynch somebody, that address is just somebody's $200,000 house and could possibly be a random address used by a jerk. Remember that it's entirely possible that this is all a front by some other actor and someone was paid western union/bitcoin to register this trademark through this attorney without realizing they were just being used by literally anyone in the world ... of course, kickstarter should have even better transaction details (hopefully).

so how is Kickstarter not liable?

[gbjbaanb]

If they allow projects to float their rules,and yet still take pledges?

There's a lawsuit waiting to happen here, it could be as lucrative as posting a dodgy kickstarter campaign!

hmm..

1. post obviously crap kickstarter
2. pledge yourself
3. complain vigorously when you "lose" your money
4. start a class-action suit against kickstarter for not checking things out
5. profit!!!

no need for ??? on this one!

Re:so how is Kickstarter not liable?

[wbr1]

I am just gonna start a kickstarter to pay a lawyer to sue kickstarter.

Re:so how is Kickstarter not liable?

[wisnoskij]

Do people who are defrauded out of money often make a profit in court? I would think that at absolute best you would make your money back + lawyer's fees.

Why would you even be awarded more than you lost?

Re:so how is Kickstarter not liable?

[The MAZZTer]

4 needs to be "start a class-action suit against the ACTUAL fraudsters". IIRC there was a story floating around the internet about such a lawsuit recently and the backers won.

Of course, this is because the kickstarter was a scam. If the actual product isn't delivered but the company was acting in good faith, you have no case. You're not guaranteed to get anything out of a kickstarter; it's an investment, and some investments fail.

Re:so how is Kickstarter not liable?

[QuasiSteve]

The basic defense from them is.. how ARE they liable?

Kickstarter's claim is that they're merely providing a platform, that they conditionally charge for the use of that platform, but that what it's actually used for is not really any of their concern. They also carefully word that backers aren't really investing, that they're basically just throwing money at a person at the hopes of getting something - while at the same time saying that getting that something is required, but that they're no party in it and that backers will just have to fall back to plain ol' contract law with the contract being between the backers and the project creators.
( Also keep in mind that recently they actually dropped a bunch of their rules - though that's more from pressure of other crowdfunding sites and all the bad press Kickstarter has gotten lately for actually policing their rules, than that they wanted to. )

I can think of 3 lawsuits that have happened that involved KickStarter in one way or another:

1. Hanfree - a sort of iPad stand, in which a backer who also happened to be an attorney sued on principle because the project creator burnt through the money (on what? no idea), stopped communicating, and then buggered off. I don't think Kickstarter was named as a defendant. If I recall correctly, that lawsuit also went nowhere fast because the project creator defaulted into bankruptcy.
http://venturebeat.com/2013/01...

2. The WA AG's case (complaint handling) against a project creator. That's ongoing, but as far as I know Kickstarter hasn't been named a defendant there either.
http://www.pcworld.com/article...

3. The 3D Systems case. This was a patent case brought against Formlabs, but initially also named Kickstarter as a defendant because Kickstarter took a 5% cut and promoted the project through their site. Kickstarter was later dropped as a defendant, however.
http://www.insidecounsel.com/2...

So I'm afraid your 5-step program probably isn't going to work on account of Kickstarter absolving themselves from any responsibility, and apparently having the law on their side (until proven otherwise).

On the up side, your 5-step program really only needs to be 3 steps.
1. post not entirely obviously crap Kickstarter but just something that's popular.. like wallets, multitools, iThing covers, 3D printers, custom pens, etc. for which you already know there exists an eager audience.
2. make goal (helps setting it to a realistic level)
3. run off with the money aka profit!!!

Or even two steps, if you don't mind setting up a crowdfunding website and going head-to-head with Kickstarter/indiegogo/rockethub/etc.

Re:so how is Kickstarter not liable?

[wagnerrp]

You pledge money to your own Kickstarter, so you're not out any money. You then sue Kickstarter, and get that money back. You've now doubled your money.

Re:so how is Kickstarter not liable?

[ModernGeek]

3.5 Pass the bar exam.

You still have to sit through law school pretty much everywhere now. No more passing the bar and becoming an attorney. I've looked at this, changing it would be hard. Considering sitting through law school, but I'd rather not if it could be avoided. Just remember, if your small business is incorporated, it is a person, and you can't represent another person in court. One lawsuit could ruin your company and you'd be stuck watching the ship go down, trying to fight for it would be futile as you'd just be thrown out of the courtroom.

Re:so how is Kickstarter not liable?

[gbjbaanb]

meh. The real kickstarters will have run off with all the cash if they have any sense whatsoever.#

No, much easier to go after the easy target.. that's what American justice is all about, right?

Re:so how is Kickstarter not liable?

[HornWumpus]

Just get him to sue himself on contingency.

Raw lemon

[BlackPignouf]

https://www.indiegogo.com/proj... also was a scam, purportedly concentrating diffuse radiation.

Re:Raw lemon

[bluefoxlucid]

The Internet says "rawlemon scam" is a revolutionary new technology. Everywhere. Provide that this is a scam, because I can't find any such evidence, and there is a lot of tech that looks stupid because I don't understand it but is actually brilliant and awesome.

Re:Raw lemon

[BlackPignouf]

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
They should prove that they can "produce electricity from moonlight" and "concentrate diffuse radiation" before they write it everywhere on their website.
They actually tried to prove it and contacted http://www.zsw-bw.de/en/starts....
This is well respected German solar research center, and its answer was "raw lemon is utter bullshit, you cannot concentrate diffuse radiation, and surely not with this design".
Raw lemon now writes "Certified by ZSW" everywhere, and ZSW isn't happy about that.

Re:Raw lemon

[bluefoxlucid]

ZSW doesn't have a statement on their site about this. Nothing online I can find by googling copiously says anything about this.

Re:Raw lemon

[BlackPignouf]

True, I suppose you'll have to believe me on this one.
I work with ZSW regularly and one member explained me the situation while drinking coffee.
ZSW contacted Raw Lemon a few months ago, and (AFAIK) are still waiting for an answer. They wanted to give Raw Lemon some time before making a public statement or going to court.
Anyway, I also work at a solar research center, and my bullshit detector almost exploded when reading "produce electricity from moonlight" and "concentrate diffuse radiation". And I'd rather trust a renowned german research center than an architect looking for a quick buck.
BTW, I'm not saying that their small chargers don't work, just that they surely don't work at night, and aren't particularly efficient at concentrating direct sunlight.

I'd rather crowdfund a Star Trek movie.

[Z00L00K]

I'd rather crowdfund a Star Trek movie - at least there are some nice ones already made that way.

Re:I'd rather crowdfund a Star Trek movie.

[Opportunist]

Just don't clean your glasses for a few days and look at the sun and you'll get the same amount of lensflares, why do you need crowdfunding for that?

How this works...

[Anonymous Coward]

They start with 100k, spend a few days on presentations, make a marketing splash and start donating their own money to give credibility to their scam. "Look, loads of people are investing, surely they're not idiots."

Simple,

[danknight48]

Too many people in the world with far too much money to burn, and, no common sense.

To begin with, iFind tag doesn’t have a battery. Instead, it uses our patent pending EM Harvesting technology and stores the energy in a uniquely designed power bank

I smell BS. Unless, these guys have invented a new power source system unknown to NASA/Goverment and billion dollar tech companies? Yep, bullshit.

Re:Simple,

[bluefoxlucid]

Or it's an RFID.

Re:Simple,

[ArcadeMan]

Not to mention that if they store the energy in a bank, they're going to lose most of it to transaction fees.

Re:Simple,

[gweihir]

The problem is that their tech is in theory feasible (and used in some very low-energy swarm sensors), but that the numbers do not work out for their application at all. One problem is that bluetooth requires way too much power for this and a smartphone does not have a low-energy receiver. And doing anything audible with harvested energy? There are several orders of magnitude missing in what you can harvest and store.

Re:Simple,

[CaptainLard]

Its your lucky day because I feel like showing everyone I know how RFID works.

RFID tags consists of an antenna, diode, charge pump and controller. A comparatively HUGE external source lights up the tag with radio waves. The tag's antenna collects power for the charge pump to boost it up to a useable voltage for the controller. This type of "power bank" was developed not long after capacitors, diodes, and switches were simultaneously available. Then of course the controller broadcasts its data right? Well sorta. Since there is not nearly enough power to transmit in the traditional sense, all it does is toggle a PIN diode, shorting the antenna to ground.

What the hell good does that do for the external transmitter? Well, when the antenna is active, a tiny bit of power is absorbed and when it's shorted out that tiny power is reflected back. The external transmitter is sensitive enough to tell the difference allowing a super low bandwidth ID code to get through. Kinda like you shining a flashlight on your computer screen and a single pixel blinking back a message. Wild eh?

This would never work for modern bluetooth. The baud rates and overhead involved currently require powered transceivers on both ends. This kickstart isn't RFID, its a fake.

Re:Simple,

[bluefoxlucid]

It's either fake bullshit or it's bullshit in the form of shit we've already seen all over the place being peddled as new. Apparently the former.

Re:Simple,

[Pope]

Unlike Bitcoin, which is totally anonymous and has no fees!

Re:Simple,

[Megane]

That's okay, we can just get the Federal Reserve to print more energy.

Re:Calling it iFind

[skovnymfe]

Apple doesn't own iNames.

Give Kickstarter a break, they're busy

[drainbramage]

Give Kickstarter a break, they're very busy protecting us from conservatives.

Re:Give Kickstarter a break, they're busy

[frank_adrian314159]

Well, there's that, at least.

False Hope is the Easiest Sell

[Andover Chick]

From Snake Oil in the Old West to weight loss scams, baldness fixes, male vitality enhancers, or Breatharians, the easiest thing to sell is false hope since it tricks the buy into thinking about only what they want, not what is actually possible.

Wait for the kneejerk of the kickstarter

[MrKaos]

And so ends what was once a good way for ideas to find funding. Trust some asshole to come in and fuck it up for everyone.

Why not this one?

[jythie]

Strange thing is, I see free energy or alternative physics projects pop up on Kickstarter now and then, and usually they are shut down pretty quickly. I am curious why this one was allowed to continue when normally they are pretty good about not allowing them.

Will they get away with this?

[GameboyRMH]

If (when) they just take the money and run, are they legally in the clear? If so, I think I'm about to switch careers...

Re:Will they get away with this?

[wisnoskij]

considering that their is only 6 days to go, yes they will probably get the money.

Considering that if they have any sense they are now citizens of Nigeria, and additionally have maintained and will continue to maintain a layer of anonymity, they will walk away in the clear.

Re:Will they get away with this?

[GameboyRMH]

So basically it's about as legal as a bank robbery, but easier to pull off from a safe distance?

Re:Solar roadway?

[GameboyRMH]

The technology for the solar roadways is completely legit, it's the business case for it that's total BS.

Re:Some Public Records ... You Know ... Just in Ca

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, according to Zillow, the house was rented for $1,250 in May 2013. It isn't even an owner-occupied house.

Re:Big deal

[queazocotal]

Cars exist, right? Foldable bikes exist, and there are quite a number of them out there.
Buy my foldable 400MPH 400 miles to the gallon car which folds up into a suitcase, only $1K.

$500K is not enough to develop custom silicon for the task. They're using someone elses chip.
The format can't capture enough power, due to unfortunate laws of physics to do bluetooth pairing.
Batteryless NFC RFID tags work with a comparatively huge field to power them. (millions of times as
strong as a nearby wifi router)

Re:Calling it iFind

[ArcadeMan]

They're going to rent the Apple suite? If it's at the Hilton, then it's obvious they'll need all the money they can get!

Nice, 1/2 mill for a few pieces of plastic

[gweihir]

And no, they cannot do what they claim. It is possible to build locators like they describe, but they would need to be passive. There is just no way to harvest and store enough in something this small. RFID tags derive all their energy from the sender that queries them, and with good antennas you can go up to, say 30m with them. But that is the limit these days and it is for a passive device that has its energy specifically and targeted beamed to it by the sender. For a harvesting device, you get very low power radio, almost no computing power and a few meters in reach and that is with a specialized receiver, not a general-purpose cell-phone.

Re:Solar roadway?

[gweihir]

Indeed. The business case for these locator tokens is completely clear and seems to be working: Take the money and run.

EIEIO

[JimDempsey]

A long time ago a farmer discovered that the bailing wire he was using to tie his rickety silo together was electrified by the RF from the overhead power lines. Not wanting to let a good thing go to waste, the improved the hookup and started drawing power. When the power company found out, they sued... and won. Therefore, legal precedence has been established that you cannot siphon off power without permission of the producer of that power.

If you're an adult and you haven't figured out how

[mark_reh]

to keep track of things like your wallet and keys by habitually keeping them in a single place, you probably shouldn't be walking around with either anyway. You should probably be holding a real adult's hand when you cross streets, too. Using technology to enable people to continue to be dopes is not a good idea.

I can see where this would have value for people with dementia. If would help caregivers locate personal items that may be needed.

When I think about how many airheads are walking around, I can't help but think that if it works the project will make phat stax. I wonder if their target market will be able to find their credit cards to place an order...

Not half as bad as videogame kickstarters

[timrod]

Videogame kickstarters have (from experience) more false claims than any other Kickstarter type I've ever seen. For instance, there was one that Retsupurae covered on Youtube yesterday, where a person claiming to be a "former Square-Enix employee" was trying to get people to crowdfund a remake of Chrono Trigger... made entirely in RPG Maker. Apart from the fact that said "former employee" didn't have the rights to Chrono Trigger, it was pretty clear that he had never actually coded anything before. In comparison, there have been several groups attempting to remake the game, all of whom were doing it for free. They were all sent C&D letters and stopped - but this guy didn't have to because his Kickstarter came nowhere close to getting funded.

There was also the guy who tried to make a 3D version of Monster Girl Quest. Compared to the Chrono Trigger guy he was a little better off rights-wise: he didn't own the rights to the real Monster Girl Quest, which hadn't even released its third and final installment when the Kickstarter went up, but MGQ wasn't registered in the United States yet and was only purchaseable through Japanese websites. The developer of MGQ is small enough that I don't think they would have the resources to sue, but they didn't have to - the guy didn't make funding, which was probably for the best, seeing as he featured his family (including his son, who was like five years old when he made the Kickstarter) in a pitch video for a "clean" version of an h-game.

If Kickstarter can't catch basic things like these, where they're clearly an infringement of copyright that could be discovered in a matter of seconds (both of the Kickstarters I mentioned had the names of the games they were stealing from clearly listed in their summaries) there's no way they're going to catch bad science.

Re:Not half as bad as videogame kickstarters

[Honclfibr]

And let's not forget the tragic story of John Videogames: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2012/05/04

Re:Lets list other free energy communication scams

[gweihir]

They do not have the antenna and storage for what they claim they can do. There are limits what you can capture in something this small and they are rather low. and way below what Bluetooth needs.

Money Laundering

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't make sense that despite the evidence against them, people would continuing pledging funds.

Seems like an attempt to clean a few thousand stolen credit cards.

Actual PhD students getting slandered?

[Anonymous Coward]

Before the witch hunt begins, someone should kindly ask this guy, one of the listed affiliates:
http://www.ifp.illinois.edu/~zwang119/
whether he knowingly has his name on this project. From the looks of his research, he does nothing with hardware. And so someone may have just listed him.

If it actually is him, this can be roped in really fast by either contacting his academic advisor and if necessary, the chair of the department or a Dean. This would create such horrible publicity for U. Illinois that action should be swift and decisive.

Look, if people really doubt the science (and I do: wireless electromagnetic power transission is really only a near field phenomena because those contributions to the E and B fields that can drive currents usefully drop much harder than 1/r).

Now go and be nice, he's probably a victim too.

Re:Actual PhD students getting slandered?

[ldbapp]

Similarly: Wotao Yin, according to google, is a mathematician working on the mathematics of optimization. Yet, he is listed as a biz.dev. guy who, "leads the business and marketing strategy development". That's a leap right there. I'd guess his name has also been used without his knowledge.

Re:Actual PhD students getting slandered?

[FryingLizard]

Wotao popped up (long ago) on the KS comments thread and basically said "I'm an investor but I can't really talk about anything". He also replied to direct emails to his uni email, confirming his involvement. One person who contacted him, reported him (not seen the email) as admitting he's not yet seen a working device.

I think he probably got pulled in as an investor (and to add credibility) and probably now rues the day he said yes. We'll see. Either way, at this point Google searches won't forget his involvement.

Re:Actual PhD students getting slandered?

[ldbapp]

After my post mentioning my skepticism about his involvement, I had an email exchange with him where he confirmed what the KS page says.

Re:Actual PhD students getting slandered?

[FryingLizard]

Did he say if he'd seen a working device, or confirm anything other than that it was him that appears on the KS page? Verifiable details from the creators are exceedingly thin on the ground. If you'd like to screencap your email and post a link to the image, that would be great. Thanks.

Re:Actual PhD students getting slandered?

[ldbapp]

He did not confirm a device, though I didn't ask. He confirmed his involvement in biz.dev, and said it was only part time. He expressed personal confidence in the project, but that's all.

There was one odd thing. I sent email to him @ucla. He replied from wetaginc.com explaining that it is because iFind isn't related to UCLA. Then he offered to send an empty message from the UCLA account. I glanced at the headers of his email and found references to eigbox.net, which seems to be implicated in SPAM related stuff. It could be innocent. He may just be being careful to separate his professional activities, and his email provider/ISP may use eigbox. Or there could be a MITM thing going on. A group looking to KS scam $1/2M could certainly be savvy enough to impersonate the people who's names were stolen.

My level of curiosity isn't high enough to pursue any further. ;)

Re:Big deal

[gweihir]

Not NearFC and not RFID. These actually work but do not harvest energy. RFID also needs a specialized, pretty powerful sender and you do not have anything suitable in a smartphone.

Re:Some Public Records ... You Know ... Just in Ca

[Anonymous Coward]

US Patent 6788199

Re:If you're an adult and you haven't figured out

[mark_reh]

A classic example- old people in assisted living facilities frequently misplace their dentures (i know, what the hell?). They often take them out to eat (if they don't fit properly), wrap them in a napkin and leave them sitting on a table. The napkin containing the denture gets scooped into the trash with food waste and the denture has mysteriously disappeared. If WeTag's stuff works and the tag circuits could be embedded in dentures it would be great!

Re:Some Public Records ... You Know ... Just in Ca

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.google.com/patents/US6788199

22. The system of claim 1, wherein the transceiver module is powered by radio frequency energy.

Inventors Timothy L. Crabtree, Reza P. Rassool, Michael F. Wells, Gregory J. DelMain, Peter White, Paul McArthur

Great Product!

[robstout]

I'll use it in my car, which gets 100 MPG due to the fuel line magnets. Too bad I can't afford the conversion kit so it can run on water :)

Why is that not good enough?

[sirwired]

Why is "Well, it wouldn't get enough power from the air" not good enough? This is basic physics here... broadcast RF has a certain total power level over any given antenna area based on the power of the transmitter(s) and the distance from the broadcast RF source(s); this device, in order to meet Bluetooth tx power requirements for their required transmit interval, along with the power for the chips, etc., requires more than that. Done.

The math and physics required here are not complicated nor do they take much space to explain. What exactly are you looking for?

Freedom! Speech wants to be free!

[DutchUncle]

And I say, with my freedom of speech, "Caveat Emptor" - let the buyer beware. Is this any worse than the dot-com bubble? I am surprised to see so much call for regulation and oversight here on /. where I would have expected to see more focus on the decentralized crowd-based DEBUNKING that this article itself represents. Many technological items were impossible, then impractical, then suddenly commonplace, so distinguishing between "bad science" and "immature technology" is harder than it used to be. Add a generation of insistence that "everyone's opinion has validity" and it's no wonder that science is having such a hard time.

you know who protected his purity of essence?

[Thud457]

But... but... TESLA!



deathray...

Re:Keep an open mind

[Rhywden]

"But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

- Carl Sagan

Re:Solar roadway?

[Rei]

Agreed. The people involved clearly never did an economics calculation in their lives. Or a physics calculation for that matter (see their whole "melting snow") thing. And some of the ideas they had were just dumb, like the whole piezo thing - "Yeah, let's have our road surface deflect to get piezoelectricity, thus making the cars work harder to overcome the deflection, burn more fuel and pollute more - it's brilliant!"

They didn't even start with the low-hanging fruit. I guess "Solar freaking sidewalks!" doesn't have quite the same ring to it. And I get that they live in the north, but they could at least plan on *starting* in a sunny, hot climate where snow isn't an issue.

I don't think the whole concept is inherently a bad idea. There are some things about it that absolutely are correct, such as that one can buy anti-slip / traction glass, that typical roads spend very little of their time shaded, that by combining road laying with solar panel laying you eliminate half of the installation costs (which for solar PV are now the majority of the cost), etc. There are even some potentially workable solutions to the snow problem, such as using periodically-placed fans to pressurize their rain drainage pipes/drainage holes during snowfall to create a mild air cushion over the surface, encouraging snow to drift to the sides (just not enough pressure to levitate cars!), and as a side benefit, facilitating cell cooling/higher efficiencies when run in reverse during the summer. Or one could use vibration in the panels when there's no cars present to move loose snow (and debris) to the side. Or god forbid, one could even make use of regular old snow plows to get rid of snow. But as a whole, the concept that they've made is just so half-baked and their operation so fly-by-night, it's just ridiculous.

I'm sold!

[Overzeetop]

Wow, only $1000? That's AWESOME! For a foldable car I'd be willing to pay, like $10,000, but if you're going to do a kickstarter and I can get in at the $1000 level, I'm TOTALLY in!!

And that's probably exactly how these charlatans have managed to get that many supporters.

Atlas Wang

[jjshoe]

Seems to be involved https://www.facebook.com/atlas...

Re:Lets list other free energy communication scams

[Graydyn Young]

My rule of thumb is, if it were a real source of free energy, I would be hearing about it on the news, not Kickstarter. It's just like with Viagra back in the day. For a thousand years people were advertising dick pills. But when a legit one was invented, it was all anybody on TV talked about for a year.

Barnum was right

[RogueWarrior65]

And so was George Carlin when he said "You nail two piece of wood together that have never been nailed together before and some schmuck will buy it from you."
Green energy is on a lot of people's minds in far more a religious way than a practical one. A lot of people believe in global warming...I mean global climate change...I mean global climate disruption so much that they will buy anything to satisfy their need to continue believing it in the same way that people keep buying the latest fads in diet and exercise products. I'll make a prediction: in about 4 years, solar power will fade away once the subsidies disappear and people find out that it's really not cost effective if they have to pay for the whole thing.

Re:Barnum was right

[dave420]

You clearly don't have much knowledge of climate science, hence your awkward, kind of childish attempt to ridicule it by purposefully confusing different (but similarly-sounding) terms. I can help. Earth's climate changes. We know this because there have been ice ages and periods of great heat. That is called "climate change". Sometimes the climate cools (global cooling) and sometimes it gets warmer (global warming). Climate disruption refers to the problems changes in the climate can cause for mankind (and usually means in an economic sense), such as increased droughts, more severe storms, etc. So, to sum up, they are three related, but different, terms.

On to the topic at hand: Lots of people want to use green technologies as they know they will not be at the whim of some external factor (such as the source of certain kinds of fuel, or regulation against a messy technology which affects everyone). They also know that the more that is invested in these technologies, the cheaper they will become, and the benefit of using them will increase. That is why lots of governments are bankrolling lots of research and deployment of these technologies.

But go ahead and claim global warming doesn't exist, or that it isn't predominantly caused by human industry, and then compare green technologies to fad diets. It lets those who have a bit more knowledge of these issues than you tell you really don't care to learn, and so ignore what you have to say on the matter, as you have substituted "learning" for "opinion", which leads to the idiocy contained in your post.

P. T. Barnam is reported to have said:

[bobbied]

"There is a sucker born every minute!"

Things like this prove him right. "A fool and his money are soon parted...."

Re:Solar roadway?

[stoborrobots]

Yeah, my take on the difference is that the solar roadways idea is technically possible, but it's a stupid idea when you think through the details.

But the iFind is a great idea, but technically impossible when you think through the details...

What about solar figgin' roadways?

[AndyKron]

What about solar figgin' roadways? Even the government was duped on that one for about $700,000.

There's also the price...

[denzacar]

At $14-16 it's not too expensive.

Which is where argument to moderation fallacy kicks in. Followed by a dose of loss aversion.
"Sure, it may not work as advertised, but it may still work. And at this price, it's a bargain."

Seriously, I'm reading the description and I find myself thinking "Maybe they'll just slap a battery in it and it will work for a couple of months... I could live with that..."
And I KNOW that it's a scam.

And I am clearly not alone in this way of thinking. From the google doc list of reasons why it is fake:

5) At the very, very least the iFind will have to be "recharged" by placing it next to a strong wifi signal once a week or month. In retrospect, this would be fine. Yet WeTag has not brought this up when asked.

Sure, it's fake. But dammit wouldn't it be nice if it wasn't?

Re:There's also the price...

[afxgrin]

Broadband rectifying antennas aren't anything new really, sure the background RF from towers, other sources is quite significant, and most experts would point out that you can't power a bluetooth chipset on a few microwatts of harvested power - but you could use it to charge a capacitor and periodically power the chipset. An update every 30 seconds instead of continuous monitoring of an item still works for me. The only problem with making the tag so small is you don't have much space to make an antenna for longer wavelengths.

Re: This just in: Solar panels do not work!

[naughtynaughty]

It is as simple to show how much PV energy can be harvested from a PV panel. The answer us a lot because you are working with a 1000w per sq m energy source and very large panels on the other of 2 sq m in size. The wetag device only has a surface area on the order of .01 sq m and the energy field it harvests is on the order of a billion times weaker than sunlight on a PV panel. So while it us true that the engine in your car, powered by gas, works, that doesn't mean an engine the size of a pea powered by cow manure works.

Re:Big deal

[gsslay]

Take my money now, dammit!

I'm getting a foldable car. It's going to be sweet! It must be true because it's on teh internet.

Everyone knows magic is not green!

[denzacar]

It' octarine.

Re:Lets list other free energy communication scams

[Anonymous Coward]

Bluetooth communication chips require on the order a of a few 10s of mW to communicate. This would be like a crystal radio being able producing an audio level of 140 dB into your ear (10 mW/cm^2 -> 200 Pa sound wave using standard air impedance), as loud as sticking your head into a jet engine exhaust. Sound contains very little energy typically, and when you get to something beyond a few microwatts you are either talking about something very loud, or something over a very large area (And still loud if from a single source).

Re:Big deal

[danceswithtrees]

After enough scams like this, "kickstarter" might become the punchline to a joke. Sort of like April fools, but good year round.

Dude1: Buy my foldable 400MPH 400 miles to the gallon car which folds up into a suitcase, only $1K.
Dude2: Wow, that sounds great. I could totally use that. Take my money!
Dude1: Kickstarter!
Dude2: You (**%$)hole.

What Bankruptcy Means

[sjbe]

Umm.. hate to break it to you, but the U.S. government *IS* bankrupt.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. [/InigoMontoya] Our debt to GDP ratio isn't even the highest it ever has been. Back in the 1945s we had a debt to GDP ratio of around 113%. Right now our debt to GDP ratio is about 101%. Not good but we've literally seen worse. That number could easily be drawn down if we had some leaders who were interested in actually leading.

Furthermore ALL of the debt the US has is denominated in US dollars. Though it would be a terrible idea, the US can essentially print the money if they wanted to. People make a big deal about the fact that the US owes China (and Japan too) a trillion dollars. However think about that. China can't dump the debt, they can't demand repayment or foreclose on anything, and there isn't even anyone who is willing or able to buy that much debt. They are stuck with it at least for quite a few years. They've bought it to protect their currency and to maintain their low exchange rate to support their export economy. China can't really do much about the debt without screwing themselves in the process.

If you don't call 17+ TRILLION DOLLARS in the hole, and not to mention an uncountable number of trillions in unfunded "entitlements" bankrupt, I don't know what to tell you...

I call it irresponsible. I don't call it bankrupt because it isn't. Bankrupt means you are UNABLE to pay your debts. The US government is perfectly able, it is just unwilling. We have a bunch of irresponsible leaders (on both sides) who put ideology and power above all else and we keep electing them for some reason. The problem could be solved by some combination of reducing spending and raising taxes. Pick the combination that makes you happiest, but the only items that truly matter are the military, medicare/medicaid and social security since together they account for around 3/4 of the budget. I'd start with the military since we spend WAY too much on "defense" for no sane reason and it accounts for close to a quarter of government spending. Any budget that doesn't address military and medicare spending/revenue is nothing more than political propaganda.

Re:What Bankruptcy Means

[Anonymous Coward]

It is irresponsible. However "bankrupt" also applies because one of the definition of "bankrupt" is "overleveraged". The definition of GDP is "the market value of all officially recognized goods and services produced within a country." The problem here being that the amount of money the government spends and the GDP are not coupled. The GDP does not describe the amount of money or goods owned by the government. They have no claim on GDP, which is owned by the citizens of the United States. The only legitimate measure of the government's ability to spend money should be revenues.
The problem will never by solved by any plan which requires increased taxes because the federal government has never shown any inclination to apply revenue generated by increase taxes to debt reduction. New taxes always go to new spending.
Defense spending is less than 18%, hardly a quarter of government spending, and it is already going down. Is it too much? Probably. However since along with establishing a currency, running the post office and regulating interstate commerce national defense is one of the few things the federal government is suppose to be doing 18% of a reasonable budget is probably not out of line. Especially when considering that Non-defense discretionary spending is 17%. Since none of the Non-discretionary spending is in conformance to what the Constitution says the Federal Government should be doing I'd say lets address that first. When its down to zero we can see about reducing defense.

Re:What Bankruptcy Means

[Comrade Ogilvy]

The problem will never by solved by any plan which requires increased taxes because the federal government has never shown any inclination to apply revenue generated by increase taxes to debt reduction. New taxes always go to new spending.

Not only are you moving the goal posts, but you are using provably untrue assertions to make your case.

Whether a country is bankrupt or not depends on its ability to control its deficits. If the deficits are "small" and well managed, then economic growth and modest inflation can take of the long term debt.

The HBush and Clinton tax increases were a big help in bringing the US into the black for a few moments, it just took some years to do their work. You should look at the world as it is, not as you remember it in 1978.

Re:What Bankruptcy Means

[angel'o'sphere]

Erm, ofc China and Japan can force the USA to pay their depts.
First: international law.
Second: trade embargoes.
Third: war.
Oh, you meant the USA can simply ignore point one, are nod afraid of point two and simply doubt China would go to war over such a thing?
Well, then in the end you might be right.
However with so much debts China simply can ruin your economy. Ah, then the USA would go to war against China? Good luck.

Re:What Bankruptcy Means

[HornWumpus]

We never were in the black; not for a second. They had a single projected surplus, (but only if you ignored the SS trust fund scam) but that went away when .com popped.

Of course none of the increased spending (budgeted against the surplus the never happened) got rolled back. That would be fascist.

Re:What Bankruptcy Means

[HornWumpus]

1. WTF part of international law? Be specific, they bought non-callable bonds. The only thing they can do with them is sell them on the secondary market. Which would hurt them more then us. They still end up with dollars in their hands. Where are they going to put the money, the euro? They will put the money into American land, same as they have been for 5 years now that they aren't buying American bonds anymore.

2. They can embargo their biggest market and the worlds biggest manufacturer, good luck to them. We get more stuff (in dollar terms) from Mexico then China.

3. Nobody goes to war with a trading partner. That's what got them the deal in the first place. Duh.

The good parts of China's banking reserves are US debt. The rest is more or less non-performing. China has busted it's ass for decades for average 1% profits, then put a good chunk of that into US debt. Chumps.

The fact is everything wrong with the US dollar is even more wrong with the English Pound. It is the canary in the coal mine. Most leveraged, most unbalanced tax structure, worst national growth, most broken society, most wankers, most upper class twits. When the Pound goes pop, then the euro and dollar need to wake-up.

Re:What Bankruptcy Means

[sjbe]

Erm, ofc China and Japan can force the USA to pay their depts.

They cannot force the US to do anything.

First: international law.

Which law? Who is going to enforce it? This isn't like the bank foreclosing on your house. You can't force a nation state to do anything they are unwilling to do. You especially cannot force the country with the largest economy and the most powerful military to do anything they don't want to do. The only thing that can pressure the US is to make borrowing more expensive and nobody is doing that. Countries buy US debt because it is still considered safer than all of the other alternatives.

Second: trade embargoes.

Are you familiar with the phrase "cutting off your nose to spite your face"? China and Japan depend heavily on exports so anytime they embargo anything they are simply hurting themselves in the process. China needs the US more than the US needs China. Same with Japan. Nobody wins in a trade embargo but the smaller economy generally looses more than the bigger one.

Third: war.

Are you stupid or just a troll? What nation do you think is going to go to war with the US? The last country that tried to fight the US directly was Iraq and that didn't work out so well for them militarily. China isn't so stupid. If there is one military in the world you don't want to fuck with, it is the US military. We spend WAY too much money on it and our military is ridiculously effective as a result.

However with so much debts China simply can ruin your economy.

And their own in the process. There is nothing China can really do that wouldn't hurt China more than it would hurt the US. Sure, China could tank the world economy if their leaders were feeling suicidal but I'm pretty confident that isn't likely to happen.

Re:What Bankruptcy Means

[angel'o'sphere]

It is not the point if China is hurting themselves, should have been plain obvious from my post.
The point is that you and my parent, that China can't do anything if the USA refuse to pay the depts, is simply wrong.

Especially the idea that China would be dependend on the US trade is rather amusing.

Re:If you're an adult and you haven't figured out

[Anonymous Coward]

That works 99% of the time. The problem comes when, for some stupid reason, you decide to deviate from your normal plan. Like you are holding your wallet in your hand rather than putting it back in your pocket because you know you will need it in a minute. Then something distracts you, you set it down without thinking, and now you've screwed up.

I do a similar thing around the house, where I have certain places where things should always go, but for some reason I'll occasionally put something somewhere else because, at the moment it makes sense and is totally obvious where it is. Later when I go to find it, I realize it was only obvious at the moment because I knew where it was and thus it "made sense". Of course, unlike the wallet example above, these sorts of things would not be candidate for locator tags. I'm just explaining how it happens to adults.

Vampire Energy. . . and Beyond!

[Lienlaw]

Set aside the bad science, the ignorance of physics and the lack of EE knowledge. One of the key aspects of this project is that the iFind people were only seeking $25,000 in the beginning. Their goal for this $22,000 (subtract KS & Amazon fees and the bad credit cards) would not fund even the molds for the plastic housing. There is no mention of any funding source other than Kickstarter, so how could they possibly have succeeded? Another issue are the stretch goals. Most projects set the stretch goals a short distance from the original and add a minor upgrade or color. This project funds at $25,000 and has three stretch goals of $100,000, $150,000 and $500,000. Now for the science part: The first stretch goal - a user programmable rope function that is "adjustable in length"? A reliable EE would be thinking "duration or interval" not length. But they really mean "length" as in a lineal distance. They write the product will allows you to set "any range distance" to alert the tag. So on $22,000 they were producing a energy vampire tag and at $115,000 you get a vampire tag with unlimited range.

Re:Lets list other free energy communication scams

[L4t3r4lu5]

free energy claims are 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999% likely BS,

Your numbers are almost as questionable as the ones posted by the iFind developers.

Almost.

Re:Lets list other free energy communication scams

[naughtynaughty]

Nobody disputes that you can extract energy from around you. Nobody disputes that you can take 30 ft of wire as an antenna and harvest enough energy to power a crystal radio that generates audio that can be heard if you put earphones into your ear canal. What people are questioning is whether you can harvest enough energy from a 2 sq cm area to power a blue tooth locator and buzzer. Do the math, get back to us.

Re:Keep an open mind

[Mr D from 63]

Bozo was a genius, in his own way.

Its Only Sudden if You Never Knew About It.

[Lienlaw]

Your argument - Many technological items were impossible, then impractical, then suddenly commonplace - tends to resonate with some people. Who is to say that will not happen again? But in using this argument we avoid an unpleasant historical truth; the scientists of that field, the technologist of that field, the experts in that field, were by and large not surprised by the breakthrough and impossible was never part of the equation. Once electricity was understood the light bulb was never seen as Ãoealmost impossibleà by the experts in the field. It was not a Ãoemiracleà at all, rather the logical outgrowth of a systematic and scientific search. There was nothing "sudden" about it. EdisonÃ(TM)s patents and breakthroughs amazed the common person and headline writers because of the implications on society, not the technology itself. Nobody in the business saw it as a sudden event. The technology was the outgrowth of prior systematic research and studies. It was the average commentator, uninformed investor and Ãoeman-on-the-streetà who were shocked and then delighted. Look at quantum computing today. Researchers, physicists and mathematicians in that field have been hard at work since Feynman proposed it in 1982. When it is enabled those in the field will not be amazed and commonplace use by these people will have been assumed long before we see it.

Re:Its Only Sudden if You Never Knew About It.

[DutchUncle]

You make valid points. But: Ask normal people - not engineers, not in technology fields - how sudden the cellphone revolution seems to them. How fast did we go from rare and very expensive mobile radio-telephones to "everyone in the room is holding more computing and communications power than their grandparents saw in a lifetime"? I was working in telecom and it was *still* amazing how fast it happened. To people not in the field, it seemed overnight. And right now children are growing up without any concept of what a "phone cord" means, let alone a "dial".

If someone had been kickstarting a cellphone in 1980, would most people have believed in it or thought it to be a fraud? . . . Oh, wait, there was no general-access Internet in 1980, and I was accessing BBSes on a CPM Z80 because there were no IBM PCs either, so no Kickstarter yet. People still didn't believe in personal computing yet!

Re:Its Only Sudden if You Never Knew About It.

[Lienlaw]

That's my point. Many people complaining about this are experts in the field. iFind and WeTag don't even have a EE on board, and they have no published papers to their name in this field at all. There is NOBODY in the industry that has examined these claims and has come forward to say they are possible as stated. Don't you think at least one bought and paid for consultant with a degree in this field of work could have been found?

But you can't regulate it!

[plopez]

That would interfere with the Free Market, ever be it praised. What about innovation? What if it crushes the entrepreneurial spirit!?

Re:Patent pending?

[ray-auch]

Someone called Paul McArthur does, in fact, have a bunch of patents in this area:

http://www.google.com/patents/...
https://www.google.com/search?...

if it's the same Paul McArthur, then the answer is "yes they do have a patent".

Whether you can actually build what is in the marketing or the patent is another matter entirely.

Re:Some Public Records ... You Know ... Just in Ca

[DerekLyons]

Zillow's accuracy varies.... wildly.

Solar Dryer Emerges Again

[JimSadler]

This reminds me of the clothes dryer scam where people sent money and got a clothes line. Harvesting stray energy is real enough. But harvesting meaningful amounts is another kettle of fish. And the con men may just be planing their way out of court by demonstrating that stray energy actually can be harvested. Hold a neon tube under a power line and the tube will glow. Long insulated lines strung in the air will build up enough charge to keep an LED lit. But how many people have a ten mile long wire in the air?

The REAL free energy

[Tim485]

Obviously there IS Real free energy - since so much effort is put into scamming people with the fake ones (Thrive, etc.) If it were not for these scams, WITTS would already have what it needs to get the real working devices into the hands of the masses.

Use the card number in their video?

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

Is it still a scam if I pledge money using the debit card number in their video?

Re:Use the card number in their video?

[Jarik C-Bol]

was wondering If i was the only one who saw that. Only a maximum of 999 guesses required to get the security number from the back!

Re:Use the card number in their video?

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

was wondering If i was the only one who saw that. Only a maximum of 999 guesses required to get the security number from the back!

Oh yeah - I forgot about the security code! Damn!

Re:Lets list other free energy communication scams

[Walter White]

I didn't check your link. I just wanted to let you know that when I was a kid, I had a crystal radio that produced sound in the earphone solely off the energy captured in the RF received. It had no batteries or external power source.

Re:Lets list other free energy communication scams

[istartedi]

free energy claims are 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999% likely BS

Yes, but I've found a way to capture and concentrate the 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000001% that isn't likely BS, and turn it into real useful products. Donate to my kickstarter...

Fuck that, check this out

[nitehawk214]

Quantum Energy Generator. Now that's the stuff.

I skipped around the video and the best part is at 9:20:
"When I stand in that lab, I can feel the magical presence of the QEG."

I hope that they are using the money to go beat everyone who donates to it with a stick.

Re: Fuck that, check this out

[lienlaw4958]

Best part is when they talk about precision engineering while on the video some guy with a hand drill is grinding away.

Kickstarter/Amazon still get their cut

[doctor_subtilis]

Problem is, this affects Kickstarter's credibility as everyone who gets burned on this will think twice about supporting Kickstarter projects in the future. Services like Kickstarter seem to forget that even though their revenue is coming from the creators, their primary user-base is still those pledging and when you want people to plunk down large sums for (degrees of) unknowns, then you better have user trust as a primary company value.

Re:Solar roadway?

[GameboyRMH]

The energy involved in snow melting is questionable, but the glass they use is strong and grippy enough to drive on, and LEDs use a tiny amount of power, much less than one of those panels could collect.

Re:Some Public Records ... You Know ... Just in Ca

[Jarik C-Bol]

I found a business licence for WeTag Inc, https://mycpa.cpa.state.tx.us/... registered at an address in Houston TX , which, on Street View, is a little office block in the middle of a residential neighborhood. I also found a PO box in Plano TX suposedly attached to WeTagInc.com, but thats of little use. I find it odd that there is a business licence in Houston, but they claim to be in Plano. WeTag Incorporated PO Box 261956, Plano, Texas, 75026.

Re:Solar roadway?

[Jarik C-Bol]

You know, You made me wonder about the thousands of miles of roadway in the southern US that never see's snow, but gets hot enough to boil the tar in asphalt. What if you embedded tubing in the roadway, and circulated something through it to absorb the heat, and then used that to produce steam to spin turbines. (you know, thermal solar power style). Kind of the exact opposite of the glass solar roadway idea.

Third Party verification

[tribeca.kaji]

Per the comments about using crowd-funding for start up companies-- the best solution on the table is to have third party verification systems like www.crowdtrust.com. The market can't police itself. It would be quite difficult if platforms like kickstarter and those interested in equity crowd funding spent all their time doing background checks.

Re:Big deal

[Darinbob]

Note that the kickstarter target goal was only $25,000. $500,000 was their highest stretch goal. So how much design work do they get for only $25,000, even if there are off-the-shelf components?

Pet Tags?

[FredFididdle]

Not much different than these: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Engrav... Or like the perpetual energy machine or a magic pill - impossible. Please do not fund and if you did, take back your pledge!

Re:Some Public Records ... You Know ... Just in Ca

[HornWumpus]

IIRC Plano is the HQ of EDS. Perhaps they are fool enough to think something good, reputation wise, might rub off EDS onto them?

If that's the case, they are clearly not technical.

Re:And so it goes

[HornWumpus]

They were lucky to get together in the first place.

Re:If you're an adult and you haven't figured out

[mark_reh]

When I am home my keys are in a box next to the door where I put them each time I come in the door. When I am away from home my keys are in my pocket or in my desk. It is NOT difficult to keep track of important things. It merely takes developing good habits. Good habits includes putting things away in places that make sense. I'm going to need my keys when I leave the house and get into my car, so the keys are kept at the garage door. It would be silly to keep my keys in a cabinet in the kitchen, for example, unless I entered and exited the house through the kitchen.

Obviously you can't keep keys in a single place at ALL times. Your airport security line is a good example. But how am I going to lose my keys in an airport security line? I put them through the machine and I pick them up on the other side and put them back into my pocket. Here's a simple tip that will save you a lot of panic at airport security lines: after you pick up your stuff, run through a simple mental checklist- keys, wallet, passport, tickets, boarding passes and then anything else you had to let go of for the security check, such as a laptop, phone, etc. To help remember, think about what you need for your trip- passport, ticket, boarding pass, wallet, and what you need if you don't go- wallet and keys. There, that wasn't so hard, was it?

I admit that I didn't always have such good habits,. When I was much younger I spent a fair amount of time searching for things that I should have known the locations of at all times. I learned from the time I wasted how not to be such a dope. I know of other people who seem to be incapable of learning such lessons. For them the device described might be good, if it works.

Uh-oh!

[SpammersAreScum]

I'm confused. I have one of your early prototypes, and when I aim it at your post it blinks like crazy!

That means your post is a scam. But if your post is a scam, my device shouldn't be blinking. But my device is blinking...so your post must be a scam.....but...

... backing slowly away from the imminent head explosion as the logic circuits overload ...

Upgrade To PRO!!!

[EETech1]

You definitely need to get yourself on the waiting list for the upgraded PRO version with the quantum solvers then...

Perfect for exactly these chicken and egg type problems, where both sides are seemingly full of shit simultaneously!

(and the upgraded blue LEDs are friggin' awesome)

Where are Their Experts?

[Lienlaw]

There is something missing and this points to scam. Where is the WeTag expert in this field? They don't even have a captive consultant that will put his or her credentials on the line and say, "I have reviewed the material, the prototypes and the math. This will work if (insert disclaimer here)." There has to be a person who developed the idea available. There is always an "inventor" of a new application for technology who can speak to the concept. But not here. Many of the people complaining about the science, technology and math have experience in this field. The only critical studies done to this point have been by critics. The "technology papers (2)" put out by WeTag are embarrassing on so many levels so as to be worthless. There are no parameters stated, no means and methods, no math, no measurement standards, no identification of material, location or conditions. So how can anyone conclude that this is anything but a mash up and scam?

Re:Keep an open mind

[david_thornley]

And they should have laughed at Columbus, with his ridiculously small value for the circumference of the planet. The only thing that saved him was unexpectedly running into land he had no way of foreseeing.

A truly great navigator, but he made a truly glaring scientific mistake and more or less succeeded by sheer dumb luck.

Re:Dayum.

[nitehawk214]

That comment does give some sort of insight into the insanity of these people. Something he saw on TV makes him think Dr Kaku is a proponent of magical healing energy?

So ?

[ToddInSF]

Really stupid people are going to waste their money, regardless of what laws you pass to protect them, or what you tell them. They are going to do it. Let them.

Why should I feel pity for such a creature that is too lazy and stupid in this age of having thousands of libraries literally at your fingertips instantly ?

All you asshats that think people need to be protected form such an obvious scam - consider it a public service that money is not being used for some political ends !

This is an awesome amazing golden opportunity to educate people that have self-identified as in the most need of education. If you want to help them, help them.

Re:Dayum.

[Areyoukiddingme]

Hello my name is Scott,If i could i would donate more.At this time i'm financially broke but I really believe in what you and your family is Doing.

Inappropriate use of capitalization. Always a sign of a deranged mind.

They closed the mental institutions a little prematurely. They should have waited a little longer, until the Internet was available. It's the perfect mechanism for keeping people who have trouble with reality out of circulation.

I'm confused

[MA179]

OK this may be a scam. But passive RFID devices have been around for a while now. They get their power from a transmitted signal and then reply. These are common. Why wouldn't this work on the Bluetooth frequencies? I'm sure the Bluetooth transmitter has a much lower output but that's a matter of sensitivity not possibility.

GOOOAAALLLL!!! SUSPENDED!

[FryingLizard]

Kickstarter shitcanned it in the last days!
As The google doc puts it (http://bit.do/ifs)

SCIENCE: 1 SCAMMERS: 0
Thankyou Slashdot, your informed skepticism (and humor) was a great help.

Energy harvesting works, sort of.

[Animats]

Energy harvesting technology is real, but you don't get much energy unless there's a transmitter nearby, or a really big one in the area. There are now ICs which slowly accumulate energy in a capacitor, and when they have enough, power up some device and run it for a few milliseconds. Depending on RF levels in the area, you may get some useful output several times a second, or several times a day.

Now if you had something like a microwave flashlight (an low power oscillator and horn antenna) you could wave it around and wake up RFID tags, which could then report back. That could be a viable commercial product, more for industrial and commercial than home use. ("Where's a carton of P/N xxxxx-xxxx parts? Oh, there it is, behind that other box.")

I may swim against the flow here, but ...

[gmyuriy]

Actually I didn't see anything outrageously scammy in this incident, neither the linked reports were whitewash and bad science any more then the "excellent dissection" of the claims.

So the "dissector" did some back-of-the-envelop order-of-magnitude calculation and found that 1 minute "rope" function cannot be sustained unless the tag is within 50cm of a router. I thought the matter of fact here is not 1 minute "rope", but 5 minute "rope", which would supposedly require 5 times less energy and can be placed 2 times further away. Using the same number the dissecting article uses, their tag in 5 minute rope uses just about 2-3 microW of power, as much as the counter article itself calculates is available at 4 m distance.

What more, the second linked report openly shows how tag can sort off maintain its energy at 1-2 m from emitters, but looses charge at 3m, which maybe very sloppy experiment, have to give it that, but IN NO WAY CONTRADICTS with anything the "critics" say, actually.

I can agree that 1-2m range in lowest ping mode is not practical, as the critics seized upon, however, people THIS IS A PROTOTYPE not a final product. If they had already polished and awesome device, why the fk would they need a kickstarter campaign???

That said, I can see a ton of ways they can try and improve their product to be more practical after collecting the funding: they can try to further reduce power consumption of the circuit, if they just used off-the-shelf components now, the possibility of this is quite quite plausible; they can try to work out some software tricks, such as remembering the location of the tag the last time it handshake'd; they can try to register a freq band and sell dedicated RF charging stations for charging their tags at home; they can ask people to re-charge their tags every two weeks by placing them in 1-2m radius of a wifi router -- any one of these is better than having a batteried device that needs change of battery or be plugged into a charger every time.

As for Dr Paul McArthur identity, it is clearly stated that he is a research professor at U of Utah, and he may not in fact have a sizable footprint on the "internet". I know a ton of professors who do not use LinkedIn or FB, or even if they do have such account, keep in nominally. That's because these people are too busy with teaching, advising students, doing research, and managing universities to also deal with the self-masturbation called social networking. Besides, they already have an outlet to connect to the people they need, it is called peer-reviewed journals and academic publications. So it is quite possible the guy wouldn't have a ton of blogs, twitter streams and yada yada. Where his footprint should be searched is in academic journals and patent office, where he does have hits as some people here already pointed out.

I agree that the project description is overly optimistic and may not quite correspond the final product they will be able to put out, but to call it a complete scam it is just another mass hysteria driven by know-it-all nerds feeling empowered by self-published blogs and modern social networking, who think they know it all but but really don't know shit.

Re:Some Public Records ... You Know ... Just in Ca

[Samizdata]

Took a look at the address in Earth's Street View. (Yes, I know I could have done it in Maps, but Earth is just so much more fun.) An ordinary house in an ordinary residential neighborhood.

Re:Some Public Records ... You Know ... Just in Ca

[Samizdata]

I have had to work with EDS before. What was that you said about reputations?