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Former Employee Accuses Wireless Charging Startup uBeam of Being a Sham (ieee.org)
uBeam, a startup which has raised over $25 million for its transmitter that can charge phones, tablets, and other devices wirelessly, is under attack. Paul Reynolds, former VP of engineering at the company has accused the company of making false promises. Reynolds, who has more than 20 years of experience working on ultrasound devices, says uBeam has overstated its technology's capabilities, and there's no way it can deliver anything close to its claim in a working prototype later this year. In fact, he went all the way to call uBeam "the next Theranos". For the uninitiated, uBeam plans to create a charging station which utilizes sound waves to beam power to devices in the same room. The company, which has a team of more than 30 engineers and physicists, has been working on the product since 2011. Some of its investors include Marc Andreessen, Marissa Mayer, and "Shark" Mark Cuban. From an IEEE report: Physicists have long questioned the practicality of uBeam's plans to deliver electricity to mobile devices using ultrasound. Mark Suster, a prominent venture capitalist and uBeam investor has defended uBeam. IEEE report adds: In his article today, Suster writes that when Reynolds was at uBeam, the engineer gave no indication that he had any problems with the company's direction -- implying that the issues raised in Reynolds' blog were essentially out of the blue. uBeam itself has yet to respond to anything Reynolds has written. "Throughout my time working with him he reassured me we could solve the technical challenges and our approach was viable," Suster writes. But Reynolds told IEEE Spectrum that is simply not the case. He says that he was rarely allowed to communicate directly with Suster, on account of Perry's (Editor's note: Meredith Perry is the Founder and CEO at uBeam) management preferences. But Reynolds said that in two meetings with Suster during the summer of 2015, he voiced concerns about what the company was telling investors and reporters it could do.
Today's startups wouldn't exist if there hadn't been products in the past that seemed impossible at the time but were later able to become reality and make it to the market.
Today's startups wouldn't exist if there hadn't been products in the past that seemed impossible at the time but were later able to become reality and make it to the market.
If only there isn't the long history of startups by promoters who didn't let technical input temper their enthusiasm - with intent ranging from blind belief to outright intentional scam.
Have you heard of this thing called isotropic gain?
Wireless power is like the three shell game. It's been popular since 1891 and it's scam 99.9% of the time. Funny how people keep falling for the same scam for hundreds of years - technology changes, but we don't.
Heck, half of Slashdot is STILL falling for the "free electricity" scam, mostly the variety that's been popular since 1960. Practical solar- electric has been "just around the corner" for 55 years.
This is typical of startups. One startup I worked for went so far as to use press releases to gauge customer interest. They would announce new features and capabilities in press releases and engineering (where I was) had no idea what management was planning until hours before the press release went out, usually in the form of a company-wide email announcing our "new direction." Meanwhile, I'm sitting there trying to keep management's previous half-baked, rush-implemented feature from grinding to a halt in production. On the other hand, I have seen engineers tell management a feature was "impossible" and get fired when management then comes to me and I have a prototype working in 30 minutes.
I bet the same fuss wouldn't be made about Theranos if its CEO was a man. But there are lots of men who can't wait to discredit Elizabeth Holmes. They're already trying to discredit Meredith Perry, too. It's sexism in technology at its worst.
Too bad you can't fix inadvertant bad mods
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Today's startups wouldn't exist if there hadn't been products in the past that seemed impossible at the time but were later able to become reality and make it to the market.
That doesn't mean that every stupid idea is possible.
The idea is not specifically impossible. But there are some basic laws of physics that have to be adhered to that make it 100 percent pointless. The amount of power needed to make an acouctic charging system work is so unlikely to be useful that even if not impossible, it isn't remotely practical. You have to transmit a helluva lot of power to transmit power.
I'm expecting kilowatts to charge phones reliably. Now just imagine a person sitting in a room bombarded with that level of sound. I suspect that without incredible filtering, people would still be blasted by harmonics of the ultrasound. Just the physical effects on us meatbags woulf be pretty scary.
When wealthy people actually think that this is ever going to be a practical system, it sheds light and insight on why there are creationists and denialists in the world.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Hell, I worked at one. After a few months there I quickly realized we were basically peddling snake oil. The company is still floating along, but I don't think they'll survive to see 2017.
Today's startups wouldn't exist if there hadn't been products in the past that seemed impossible at the time but were later able to become reality and make it to the market.
Enthusiasm in fine and even admirable in some cases. However, one must be careful not to allow enthusiasm for a product or service that one is promoting to cross the line into fraud. Many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs run awfully close to that fine line and it tends to bring out the worst in them, making them arrogant, narcissistic and in the worst cases megalomaniacal too.
Except when it's a scam. In a lab you can get a good transmission rate, but in practice the losses of such a transmission method are abysmal. Plus blasting yourself with 180 db of inaudible "ultrasound" will set your hair on fire.
Please let me know when they actually release a product, otherwise this is what it has always looked like a marketing major playing inventor.
Why is this news? We already knew it would never work.
An interesting question would be why this company got any funding when it has always been known it would not work.
What does ubeam leadership have in common with the other fraud theranos I wonder, lol.
The real puzzle to me is how easily VCs part with scads of money without, apparently, bothering to hire a couple of decent physicists (or mathematicians or security experts, as appropriate, in the case of security snake oil) beforehand. I have been hired in the past to point out the obvious "this can't work", but only when alarm bells have begun to ring -- after VCs had parted with ~$40m. Somehow, it seems that a dynamic CEO, expert in public relations and putting together cool Powerpoint, causes the parts of brains responsible for skepticism to shut down, to the point that spending a tiny fraction of the requested money on a professional independent opinion somehow seems like a silly idea.
Guess you don't want to be in a room when this US energy transfer happens and your dog will cringe up and escape into the furthest corner in the room wishing to die.
They laughed at Galileo, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
Some of the things that are considered impossible are actually impossible, just not all of them.
"Life is too short to spend all your time trying to lengthen it."
It's a good thing no one listened to you back when they started finding out about bacteria, vaccines and washing hands before surgery...
The things you take for granted like indoor plumbing and refrigerators that make your life longer also wouldn't exist, I guess.
Whoosh. If you didn't get it, I'm talking about the pointless life extension of demented or terminally ill people. Like my mother in law, who was still on blood pressure medicine, cholesterol meds and other maintenance drugs long after she no longer had a mind. I'm more than happy to take care of normal things.
Although you should check - you might be in the same shape she was gauging from your response to my sigline.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I think what we're seeing in cases like this is that VCs like to gamble just like other people do. I know a guy who takes a short road trip to a casino once a month: his bills are all paid, he's living a perfectly comfortable life, and he takes a couple hundred bucks to feed into slot machines. If he loses the money, it doesn't hurt him any. And there's a chance, however infinitesimal, that he'll hit some progressive jackpot and win a few million dollars.
Whatever Mark Cuban has invested into this project is likely on the magnitude, to him, of the $200 my buddy blows at the casino every month. If it evaporates, he's not feeling any pain. And I'm sure he knows this technology isn't likely to pan out. But if - really big if, of course - it winds up working, he stands to make scads of return on his investment.
If their research makes for inexpensive, large ultrasonic cleaners, count me in for one. Otherwise, meh. I'm not much of a fan of cavitation in my blood vessels.
It's not just VCs. Solyndra managed to scam the entire government. Their "innovation" was to use cylindrical solar panels (half-cylinder) to increase time-averaged production as the sun's position changed during the day. Anyone with a half-decent grasp of geometry could tell you what's wrong with that. The amount of sunlight hitting a surface depends only on the projected surface area perpendicular to the sunlight. Doesn't matter if you use a flat panel, cylinders, triangles, origami, whatever. The only thing that matters is how big your panel appears in a 2D snapshot if you're riding a sunbeam as it's coming in.
So the most efficient collector is always a flat panel. Any other shape simply increases the surface area of the panel with no gain in sunlight collected. Yet these scammers managed to get our government to fork over a half billion dollars.
The real puzzle to me is how easily VCs part with scads of money without, apparently, bothering to hire a couple of decent physicists (or mathematicians or security experts, as appropriate, in the case of security snake oil) beforehand.
I think it is a case of "I am successful, therefore I am smart, therefore any decision I make is smart." It isn't trying to be sarcastic on my prt. I've just seen too many people who had some measure of success in their lives, start making stupid decisions based on not much more than thinking they were right a few times, so they'll always be right.
Coupled with this weird idea going around today that all you have to do is want something hard enough, and you can make it happen.
But didn't these people stop for a minute to think that any device that could spray out enough power to charge a phone that is in your pocket or purse isn't going to be spraying out a serious load of power onto everyone in the room? Especially considering that we live in a worl where there are people who fear leaving near microwave towers, with minuscule irradiation of people, so everyone is going to be fine with constant immersion in the near field of a low frequency charger?
I mean I'm not terribly smart, yet I could figure out that this is a non-starter.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
If their research makes for inexpensive, large ultrasonic cleaners, count me in for one. Otherwise, meh. I'm not much of a fan of cavitation in my blood vessels.
Good point.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
n electromagnetics, an antenna's power gain or simply gain is a key performance number which combines the antenna's directivity and electrical efficiency. As a transmitting antenna, the gain describes how well the antenna converts input power into radio waves headed in a specified direction. As a receiving antenna, the gain describes how well the antenna converts radio waves arriving from a specified direction into electrical power. When no direction is specified, "gain" is understood to refer to the peak value of the gain. A plot of the gain as a function of direction is called the radiation pattern.
Now tell us what "isotropic gain" has to do with ultrasound or beaming power reliably using sound waves.
"Isotropic gain", eh? Directionality-dependent: what's gonna make the charger track your phone/chargee so the beam is pointing where it's located?
Will there be a single axis of location where the directional gain is effective?
How far off-axis does the chargee have to be for this looney-tunes scheme to fail?
etc.
Inverse-square over distance still applies to directional charging sound "beams".
Will they supply a portable fence to protect your pets from walking into the beam path?
Ya know how gallstones are vibrated into shards these days, right?
Sounds (PTP) like just more 'shake' oil. Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!
(T)he (O)ld (M)an
That was a plain and simple (scam/kickback to campaign contributors). Nobody (except true believers) expected Solyndra to do anything but take the government's money and run.
Don't mistake corruption for incompetence. The people involved in Solyndra were very competent, everything went exactly as planned.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Don't you know the truism? If they laugh at you, you will inevitably win.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
At that level of intensity, there is no linear medium.
Fuck ultrasound, fuck batteries, fuck former employees, fuck Slashdot, and fuck YOU!
Couple things. I know the guys who worked on the technology part.
The technology is real. Ish. It works, but was still in very early alpha stage. The power loss is high, the equipment is large, thermal issues, and there's a lot of other problems. The acoustic waves are highly directional. Otherwise, you'd need kilowatts to give microwatts of power to a device. So you need a number of steerable beams to transfer power. That's not easy. Big enough and it's not a problem. Getting it down to realistic consumer sizes takes serious engineering talent. Ironically she had it on hand. It's definitely possible, but admittedly with the level of funding it'd be hard. Possible, but very hard.
Problem is, Meredith either fired all the competent engineers or drove them out. Anyone that stayed did so because they were more agreeable than their technical merits. Meredith also had an issue with overstating capabilities of the technology. The theoretical maximums became the baseline. That's a niche engineering field. The engineers are not replaceable cogs, but Meredith gambled that they were. It's a very small field, and word spreads fast.
Essentially Meredith is a CEO without significant experience or engineering knowledge. The company will crater in two or three years, someone will buy the IP for pennies on the dollar, look up the actual names on the patents, cut them consulting checks, and you'll see functional equipment two or three years after that. The investors already know this. But they can't yank the funding or can the CEO over PR issues. Better to take a loss than be unsupportive of women in STEM. It's only $20 ish million, so probably the right call. Meredith won't change. She definitely won't retire, step aside for more experience leadership or somehow mend things with the original engineers she drove away.
Pulling a Shockley/Chomsky: Being good at one thing, then talking out your ass about unrelated things you know nothing about.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
completely insanely impossible. energy generated by capturing sound waves is orders of magnitude less than required. never gonna work.
I have as well, what the fuck. Though I was one of the few...
An interesting question would be why this company got any funding when it has always been known it would not work. What does ubeam leadership have in common with the other fraud theranos I wonder, lol.
How did Meredith go about getting her initial funding? Was it by hitting the street and making pitches to many VCs, or was it by having a friend/neighbor who was a VC? I understand that Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos was from a Silicon Valley neighborhood with family friends who were VCs, so she talked up her idea to them and they gave her funding because they believed in her as a person rather than on the merits of the business. Theranos' initial funding is an example of how VCs fund the people, not the business model.
What about uBeam?
I normally dont like them so chunky but after a few drinks I'd probably do that Meridith woman. Mayer is all stretched out now.
Ohh... pushing the plug into a socket is so... hard... ohh... it hurts. Umm.... that's what she said.
Anyway, plugs aren't broken. There is almost no loss of power at the plug-outlet interface. There is scads of power loss with any radiated power delivery system. There are questionable health impacts of radiated power delivery. The only upside is that you don't have to lift your poor little lazy fingers to put the plug in the fucking socket, or make sure that they mate compatibly.
That's what she said.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
There is an infinite number of things that are technically possible but which cannot be manufactured and and sold at sufficient numbers and at a sufficiently high price as to cover both the manufacturing and development cost. I would really like to know how they raised $25 million.
Their whole concept has problems, not even taking into account the nonlinearity. In order to get the gain they need, they need large arrays, but those arrays only work in the far field; several array dimensions away, so their gain is limited by target distance. Maybe they could get it to work with arrays on the walls and ceilings forming standing waves at the targets.
I couldn't; her mouth was full.
Damn you physics! ... ..
You win this round, but I'll be back to take uneducated peoples money again!
Mwahahahah!
.
Yes, it's me again, and I just wanted to say that although I think the idea is intriguing, there's no way it would operate even close to the efficiency levels they were talking about. I was surprised that anyone was getting duped by it. And that's not a joke.
How large is the receiver going to be? (After all, those soundwaves aren't magically picked up and converted to electricity by a normal phone or laptop.)
CPU Magazine was taken in by such a product a few years back. It was a wallwart with a little antenna on it, and a USB dongle...somebody had published it as a joke, and their "new products" editor totally fell for it.
Remember, the CPU name stood for "Computer Power User"...
Not another dead beautiful unicorn, led by a beautiful blonde, er...um...yeah.
Video or it never happened.
No, really. I want to see 180dB ultrasound light someone up. I already know uBeam is bullshit.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Touché...I tried that but she swallowed it all then back to horse laughing.
180dB speakers would have to be water cooled, perhaps something with a higher heat capacity (melted metal or salt?) or a boiling water cooling system.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Are you an idiot?
Of course. Just why in the living shit are you worried about it Coward? If you are someone that has a bone to pick with me, use your real pseudonym. Then again, you think ultrasound will generate harmonics in a linear medium... quite a trick in itself...
There's a thing though. There will be people in the room. And unless ultrasonic imaging doesn't work, there will be lots of interesting reflections and harmonics as watts of power are bouncing into and out of people, and other objects. http://www.physicsclassroom.co...
http://www.asecho.org/files/EF...
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
As a physicist I've always wondered this too. I also wonder how a supposedly intelligent tech website like /. has all of these people promoting ideas with little technical (or physics based) merit. But then I wonder why movies don't also. I guess from work experience it's a matter of getting the people with the money to trust the right people who know what they're doing.
It had to have been something like that. This was proven in my first semester freshman engineering class when everyone was supposed to group brainstorm ideas (brainstorming is when you come up with ideas with no regard to their technical efficacy or feasibility) then later on evaluate them. Solar power was the topic of that class that particular semester and every semester there would be a different topic like dams or garbage dumps, just happened to get solar power so studied it in depth.
You can get large cleaners now, as the place I work has on the size of a family refrigerator. It isn't cheap for a hobbyist, but the cost is dominated by the stainless steel and generic power electronics, leaving not too much cost savings to be squeezed out of ultrasonics research.
1. Most startups fail, even if they have a valid idea
2. This is really very obviously not possible except maybe with extreme effort. Sound carries almost no energy and is very hard to focus. It is also extremely dangerous at higher energy levels.
The people that fell for this have no clue about elementary physics. And yes, it is that obvious.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
So basically electro mechanical "sun trackers" are the best solution, which is exactly what nature and a very large number of plants and flowers have known for millenia.
Use infrasound instead. You hook up these giant subwoofers to your 500 watt amp, see, and shake the bejesus ...it was so simple. Just a matter of frequency. I will now bask in the applause of all,
out of the building. Then, a mechanically resonant magnet inside your cell phone vibrates sympathetically
back & forth inside a a coil hooked to some fullwave rectifier diodes.
Many products were created without the need of startups or the mentality of startups. We used to have actual companies with reputations design new things, not a bunch of college drinking buddies who don't understand what they're doing selling vague ideas to investors who don't understand what they're doing.
Yes but an adequate science education has the twin benefits of sowing the seeds for being able to progress and being able to detect con-artists who try to take money for things that still remain impossible.
Wireless power with sound waves and peizo-electric crystals - fair enough at the milliwatt range but jet engine noise is still not loud enough for what they claim.
Not really all that accurate with regard to increasing the efficiency of solar panels. So for a given horizontal area exposed to sunlight, you could split the light frequencies and reflect specific frequencies onto specific frequency adapted vertical solar panels, with much greater area than the original horizontal area and substantially increase efficiency. The problem with this, does the substantial increase in capital cost with the more expensive panel provide sufficient return compared to a plain simple cheap panel, taking into account customer resistance to higher cost and storm risk factors. So the Solyndra system does improve efficiency just not enough to justify the substantial increase capital cost, engineers looking at their power output numbers without considering other factors, like the rapidly reducing price of plain, simple, everyday solar panels and other design efficiencies coming in at much lower cost. So quite simply if you have enough roof space to run a greater area of panels at a lower price, than say much more expensive and efficient panels that use say, half the space but at double the cost, what do you gain. So most houses have sufficient roof area to cover their power needs with much cheaper panels, so they buy the cheaper panels. Basic failure, designing for yesterday, rather than designing for tomorrow.
As for the sound thing, look you might have some sort of chance transmitting the sound through a solid (say concrete slab floor or wall) but through atmosphere pretty much none at all, unless the receiver fully encapsulates the sound being emitted by the atmospheric pressure modulation device (sounds like they had the whole idea of sonar on the brain, delusions about some sort of acoustic laser but if you don't point it in exactly the right location it could never work even if you get it to somehow work). Even pushing the sound through a solid would be terribly inefficient. By some miracle they get it to work, it still collapses with cheaper batteries and much less frequent recharging cycles ie imagine a battery you only need to charge once a week, nobody would give a crap about chargers any more (somewhere in that week you would be able to drop it in various docking stations for varying amounts of time to keep up the charge without impacting use).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Same mechanics as cupping your hands over your mouth when shouting or over your ear.
Next dumbass question?
Except that Chomsky is good at both linguistics and political commentary.
I suspect the issue there was the cost of the PV area (and the energy return for it, as opposed to the same area in a planar form with a fixed orientation), not the size of the total unit. Now of course, the cheaper your PV technology gets, the less reasonable proposition it is to make it non-planar, and the same thing holds if you're going for a higher area fill factor. And it also might turn out not advantageous for other reasons as well. But I'm quite sure the original idea was not to violate any laws of physics or anything like that.
Ezekiel 23:20
Not anymore. The best solution is to simply make it a non-moving machine and throw a lot of panels onto the problem. Much less maintenance this way.
Ezekiel 23:20
Are you an idiot?
Of course. Just why in the living shit are you worried about it Coward? If you are someone that has a bone to pick with me, use your real pseudonym. Then again, you think ultrasound will generate harmonics in a linear medium... quite a trick in itself...
There's a thing though. There will be people in the room. And unless ultrasonic imaging doesn't work, there will be lots of interesting reflections and harmonics as watts of power are bouncing into and out of people, and other objects. http://www.physicsclassroom.co...
http://www.asecho.org/files/EF...
And, therein lies my problem with any real wireless charging. Watts of power flooding an area. Not a Luddite, but I am reasonably sure that can't be good.
It's not the years, honey, it's the mileage. - Colonel Henry Walton Jones, Jr., Ph.D.
And, therein lies my problem with any real wireless charging. Watts of power flooding an area. Not a Luddite, but I am reasonably sure that can't be good.
The effects of high volume sound - even if you aren't hearing it, or high powered EM radiation, are well known and well documented. The oddballs that think that a cell phone tower with antennas 100 plus feet above them are kooks, but being in the near field of any of those things can be an issue. Your being reasonably sure is correct.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Being in any energy field of any real strength is generally bad. When's the last time you had a sunburn?
It's not the years, honey, it's the mileage. - Colonel Henry Walton Jones, Jr., Ph.D.
Name one "scientific" break though please? As far as I can see most products lend what other far greater people have accomplished and only has then later been comericalised. uBeam is an interesting concept but this has to represent the first wave of the "lets challenge science" dept to begin as a commercial business. Prior to this it was simply innovation, not invention.
Solyndra managed to scam the entire government. Their "innovation" was to use cylindrical solar panels (half-cylinder) to increase time-averaged production as the sun's position changed during the day.
Maybe someone edited Wikipedia since you posted your link, but it does not match your claim at all. They made some claims which may or may not be true, but one not the stupid one you made.
He's a somewhat skilled propagandist.
But only true believers pay him any attention. Being a holocaust (Cambodian) denier does that to a person's reputation. It's kind of hard to recover from saying things that stupid.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The solar panels developed by the company were claimed to be unlike any other product ever tried in the industry. The panels were made of racks of cylindrical tubes (also called tubular solar panels), as opposed to traditional flat panels. Solyndra rolled its CIGS thin films into a cylindrical shape and placed 40 of them in each 1-meter-by-2-meter panel. Solyndra designers thought the cylindrical solar panels absorbed energy from any direction (direct, indirect, and reflected light).[6]
Second paragraph of the Technology section. Perhaps your reading abilities aren't up to snuff?
The last edit was April 26, so it wasn't changed in the past few days.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?