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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.
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.
Solar is "practical" in Hawaii because the electrical grid there is powered by burning oil, which is shipped in from the mainland. Consequently Hawaii's electricity price is roughly 3x the national average. It's even higher if you're not on Oahu. So it's not really that solar is practical, it's that the other choices which work in most of the rest of the world are impractical due to geography.
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.
It's Perry's incredibly arrogant attitude and her incredible stupidity coupled with a big mouth that has gotten uBeam into this mess. She has no engineering or physics background and then says, over and over again, that the experts in *hard sciences* are full of shit and she is right. It has nothing to do with sexism and everything to do with karma.
uBeam will *never* be able to deliver a product that can transmit power wirelessly, efficiently, and *safely*.
And the idiot VC who says that if uBeam fails he'll fund Perry's next company.... Well, I hope his LPs are listening (reading) carefully. They should never give him any more money to invest because he's as stupidly arrogant as Perry.
Perry and Suster are the worst kinds of idiots: they actually think themselves to be smart and infallible.
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'
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.
Solar bids for Power plant in Dubai, recently fell below the cost per kw of oil fired generation, dubai has one of the shortest supply chains for oil, and the lowest internal cost to thier power generation.
http://www.apricum-group.com/d...
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.