A few years ago WiTricity’s former CEO, Eric Giler,
used a standard routine to show wireless charging could be safe. With
WiTricity’s prototype wireless charger in one hand and a lightbulb in
the other, he'd stand up in front of a crowd, put his head between the
two and turn on the light.
This year, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas
(CES 2015), dozens of companies are demonstrating wireless power
devices. Charging stations made by Powermat are in Starbucks stores nationwide. Last August, Markets and Markets predicted wireless power transmission would be a $17 billion market by 2020. Nobody worries about electrocution.
With no flagship product, few big-name consumer
partnerships and near-zero national brand recognition, you might peg
WiTricity as a classic case of a visionary startup that came along too
early. You’d be wrong--but when it comes to the top prize in wireless
power, the company's success remains a huge question mark.
Founded in 2007 using breakthrough technology out of MIT,
the Watertown, Mass., company has been quietly building a network of
Fortune 500 partners. Toyota is using its technology to develop wireless
electric vehicle charging. Intel is a partner, alongside companies in
health care and military technology.
WiTricity has staked all its chips on magnetic resonance,
in hopes the technology will one day be as ubiquitous as Wi-Fi. Unlike
other charging paradigms that require just-so alignment with a charging
device, magnetic resonance lets you set down the device anywhere on your
desk. Your office furniture also charges your laptop and your
smartwatch. Your garage floor can charge your car in the same way; a
factory floor can charge equipment.
WiTricity has 73 employees.* Most are engineers or PhDs.
Very few are in sales. Kaynam Hedayat, VP of product management and
marketing, told me WiTricity doesn’t plan to ever bring a product direct
to the consumer. It’s “all engineering services, consulting and
producer of reference designs and software tools that enable partners to
embed technology,” he said.
WiTricity aims to be the definitive technical expert for
wireless charging--sort of as Red Hat is to Linux. It's likely to find a
place in several sectors of the wireless power market, but it remains
to be seen who will claim the top prize and wirelessly charge the
world's 1.76 billion smartphones. That's the $17 billion question.
TOYOTA PARTNERS WITH WITRICITY
Some day you'll charge everything wirelessly -- phones, cars, graphing
calculators, all using the same basic technology. That's the sort of utopian vision Toyota had in mind when it formed the Wireless Battery-charging Alliance with WiTricity.
The young Massachusetts-based company is pushing "resonance"
technology, which charges electronics without contact and is supposedly
more efficient than induction-based charging -- a category that includes
the popular Qi standard.
This new partnership ups the ante, adding electric vehicles to the list
of chargeable devices, a vision of the future where Prius batteries can
be filled wirelessly, while sitting in driveways and parking garages.
Exxon's engineers are no doubt working to perfect the hose-free gasoline
transfer as we speak. PR after the break.
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