Is through-the-air charging a hoax? - Yahoo Finance

In June 2015, in my Yahoo office, I watched a demonstration of the most amazing new technology I’d seen in years: distance wireless charging.

Steve Rizzone, CEO of a company called Energous (WATT), turned on what looked like a WiFi router—and several feet away, a phone in my hand started charging. The transmitter contains an array of small antennas. They focus their radio waves on your phone.

Your phone, tablet, smartwatch, hearing aid, and fitness band will be charging all the time, as you go about your day. You won’t take them off. You won’t plug them in. And you’ll never worry about making it through the day on a charge.

A product’s battery life, in fact, will become irrelevant.

Rizzone said that all of this is completely safe. The transmitter is sending out RF (radio frequency) signals—the same kind transmitted by WiFi or cellphones.

We posted the story and the video. We were excited; the readers were excited.

Well, all but one.

I began to get email from an independent investor who identified himself as Todor Mitev. (We couldn’t verify his identity.) He was suspicious of the demonstration.

David: I have some questions about the Energous demo…I saw some unexplained turning on and off of the green “charging” circle of the phone display, but Steve wasn’t doing anything, so somebody else must have been controlling the transmitter…

But that didn’t satisfy Mitev. Over the months, he kept writing, finding flaws in Energous’s public statements, critiquing its science, flagging misspellings in its filings, and insisting that I needed to dig deeper.

Mitev also sent me articles from an investing website that cast doubt on whether Energous could get FCC approval for its technology. Without that approval, it can never go on sale in the U.S. And he suggested that I’d been manipulated:

It has been about a year since the fake Energous demo. Energous is using your quote on its website (“I don’t say this often, but I think we are looking at the future of technology.” — David Pogue, Yahoo Tech). Effectively, you are facilitating the fraud perpetrated by Energous.

Facilitating fraud!? Them’s fightin’ words. No journalist wants to be anybody’s pawn.

If Energous is a hoax, I’d rather expose it than play along with it. So I decided to visit Energous’s headquarters in San Jose, California, to get to the bottom of this.

Many of Mitev’s concerns seemed nitpicky, but a few were solid. For example:

And so, for the second time, I sat down with Steve Rizzone, the CEO.

Two reasons, Rizzone said. First, Energous has partnered with a big U.K. semiconductor company called Dialog. “They are the world leader in Bluetooth and power-management chips,” Rizzone said. “Their customers are our customers.”

Dialog will handle the operational aspects of Energous’s business: testing, supervising manufacturing, shipping, inventory, and sales. “We transferred all of our back-end operations over to Dialog. And it took time to do that,” Rizzone says.

The second reason for the delay: Energous is now working on three products. There’s “near-field,” or contact charging (like those Samsung Galaxy charging pads), midrange transmitters (three-foot range), and the original 15-foot transmitter.

“We changed our vision,” Rizzone says. “When we talked about two years ago, the near-field was not part of the vision. This is a very opportunistic, significant revenue opportunity for us. So it made sense, as a company, for us to do a slight left turn, and to move forward with this technology.”

Despite these course corrections, “we think that Dialog will be shipping chipsets to our early adopters next quarter, and those will be incorporated into consumer-facing products that we should see the end of Q3, the beginning of Q4 of this year,” Rizzone says. (Energous sells its tech to other electronics makers, which can embed it into their products.)

In other words, Energous now says it will ship this fall—2017.

The FCC question

What about that Part 15/Part 18 business? How will Energous get FCC approval if its technology doesn’t fit either category?

“We’ve been working for quite some time now with the UL [what used to be Underwriters Laboratories, an independent certification company] and other agencies,” Rizzone says, “to perfect a process that will allow for testing of these devices that will meet the requirements as mandated by the FCC. And we’re very close to that.”

Energous is trying to persuade the FCC that its products already fit within Part 18. Here’s the argument: Energous’s multiple antennas focus on a tiny spot in your phone. So the power is, in effect, localized, just as though it were on a charging pad.

Even so, Energous has been working with the FCC for a year to develop a testing protocol for this new world of wireless power.

“Prior to this to test, as an example, there’s [been] no way [to measure] SAR, or the amount of energy that’s being absorbed by the skin, at a distance. And so not only did we have to work with the agency, we had to work with laboratories to actually develop a mechanism to test this,” Rizzone goes on.

“It’s taken us, what, 16, 18 months to reach this point. But we have a very thorough understanding of what the expectations are for results, and the methodology to test, and we’re well down the line with actually completing these tests.”

Rizzone points out, too, that these new tests don’t just serve Energous; its rivals will be able to seek approval, too.

The charging pad

Gordon Bell, Energous’s VP of marketing, demonstrated all three of the Energous products for me: the near-, middle-, and far-field transmitters.

First, charging pads. Energous had set up sample charging pads and charging bowls; when I put specially equipped Fitbits and Bluetooth headsets on them, they began charging on contact (in fact, slightly before contact). We put two and even three of them on a single pad; they all charged at once.

This technology, Bell said, is ideal for charging phones, Bluetooth earbuds, GoPros, and so on.

The Energous near-field transmitter prototype, shown charging three things at once.

So how is this any different from those Qi chargers, the ones the Samsung Galaxy can use?

“Number one, the ability to charge at a 90 degree angle,” Bell said. “And being able to move around and not have to put it in one specific location. If it jostles in the car or something, you don’t lose charging.”

Bell also said the cost for the Energous technology (both transmitter and receiver) is much lower than Qi—and the size is better, too. “Our antennas and ASICs [circuit boards] can go inside a very small, in-the-ear hearing aid. You’ve not seen that type of charging in the older wireless charging, because they just can’t get that small,” Bell said. “Imagine just taking your hearing aids out at night, putting them next to your clock radio, and you wake up the next morning, they’re fully charged. You never have to fumble around with batteries again.”

Energous’s pad also runs cooler, he says. “This is key for solutions that reside on keychains like Bluetooth trackers and car remote key fobs.”

Finally, the big one: Any gadget that can charge on the pad will also charge from the mid- and far-field transmitters, once they’re available. It’s all the same technology.

The FCC has already approved Energous’s contact-charging technology. Bell says that at least six companies have announced that they’ll incorporate it into their products, and other companies are committed but haven’t announced it yet. “You’ll see our customers including this near-field technology inside the box. We anticipate that coming before the end of this year,” Bell says.

The desktop transmitter

Next, he showed me what looks like a mini TV soundbar—mounted under an iMac’s screen. “It gives you the function of charging devices [with a] two- to three-foot range. It could be in the bezel of a small television, the bezel of your computer monitor, the bezel of your laptop screen. It could also be on something that’s already on your desktop. Maybe it’s a Bluetooth speaker. It could be the front seat of your car,” he said.

This keyboard has been rigged to light up while charging from the charging bar, which peeks out just under the Apple logo.

He showed me a wireless keyboard and mouse. Both lit up to show that they were charging when they were within a couple of feet.

Or at least they did when an assistant turned on the transmitting power.

Energous transmitters, it turns out, are not constantly sending power. “The transmitter speaks to different devices via Bluetooth, and identifies, number one, what’s the battery level?” Bell explained. “A transmitter might say: ‘This desktop keyboard, I’m going to charge that on September 14th. And this mouse, I’m going to charge on December 8th.’ But for demo purposes, we have to manually do it.”

Bell stressed that it’s a “very, very small amount of power. We’re not charging a car, for instance. It charges over time.” But he doesn’t think consumers will care.

“It’s the same sort of thing as what we had with Ethernet versus Wi-Fi. If I told you 15 years ago that I had something really cool—compared to Ethernet, it’s super slow, and it’s going to cost a lot of money to install, and it’s not as secure as Ethernet. But Wi-Fi has the flexibility to let you roam around the room. And that’s what this does.”

The far-field transmitter

Finally, I saw again the Holy Grail: the whole-room charger, with a 15-foot range, capable of charging up to 12 gadgets simultaneously. It was a box mounted above a wall TV.

The far-field transmitter (inset, lower right) is also the farthest from being ready.

“What will come to market, actually, won’t even look like that. It might be in the speaker bar underneath your TV. Or it could be on the front of a dorm-room refrigerator.”

And yes, he said, this would allow your phone to receive a charge in your pocket as you move around. “As long as you’re in that 15-foot range, you’ll be charging. Small, small amount of energy. It’s not charging super fast, like you would be plugged in the wall, but a

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