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You are here: Home / Archives for 6 - Culture

Wireless Electricity is Here

January 15, 2009 by Matt Perman

Fast Company reports that Wireless Electricity is Here (Seriously). That’s … incredible.

After more than 100 years of dashed hopes, several companies are coming to market with technologies that can safely transmit power through the air — a breakthrough that portends the literal and figurative untethering of our electronic age. Until this development, after all, the phrase “mobile electronics” has been a lie: How portable is your laptop if it has to feed every four hours, like an embryo, through a cord? How mobile is your phone if it shuts down after too long away from a plug? And how flexible is your business if your production area can’t shift because you can’t move the ceiling lights?

As the article mentions, the physics of how to do this has been understood for a while. But the ability to do this in a way that works well and is useful has not existed before. There are about three different approaches coming to market. Here’s how one of them works:

A powered coil inside that pad creates a magnetic field, which as Faraday predicted, induces current to flow through a small secondary coil that’s built into any portable device, such as a flashlight, a phone, or a BlackBerry. The electrical current that then flows in that secondary coil charges the device’s onboard rechargeable battery. (That iPhone in your pocket has yet to be outfitted with this tiny coil, but, as we’ll see, a number of companies are about to introduce products that are.)

For more detail, here’s a helpful summary from an article at Popular Science:

Scientists have known for nearly two centuries how to transmit electricity without wires, and the phenomenon has been demonstrated several times before. But it wasn’t until the rise of personal electronic devices that the demand for wireless power materialized. In the past few years, at least three companies have debuted prototypes of wireless power devices, though their distance range is relatively limited [see “Power Brokers,” next page]. Then last year, a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology set the stage for wireless power that works from across a room.

The key to wireless power is resonance. Think of a wineglass that shatters when an opera singer hits just the right note. When the voice matches the glass’s resonant frequency—the tone you hear when you tap the glass—the glass efficiently absorbs the singer’s energy and cracks. Using magnetic induction and two identical copper coils that resonate at the same frequency, the MIT scientists successfully powered a 60-watt lightbulb from a power source seven feet away. The team called their invention WiTricity, short for “wireless electricity.” Next up: sending the juice even farther and more efficiently.

You can also read more on wireless electricity at Wikipedia.

Filed Under: Technology

Web-Enabled TV Sets Not Too Far Away

January 9, 2009 by Matt Perman

You can already access the web on your TV through devices like the Apple TV and so forth, but this requires hooking up devices external to your TV. Now it looks like web-enbabled televisions are on the horizon, as Yahoo, TV Makers Unveil Deals to Webify the Tube:

TV and the Web are converging, but until recently most of the movement has come at the Internet end. Broadcast channels are increasingly putting current episodes online, and U.S. audiences for Web video were up 34% in November 2008 over the previous year, according to new metrics from comScore.

Now the other side of the equation is starting to move, with the announcement by Yahoo that it has lined up manufacturing partners who will build high-definition TVs that will let viewers access Yahoo online services directly from their big home screens.

At the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Wednesday Yahoo revealed that it would work with Samsung electronics, Sony, LG Electronics and Vizio to build TV sets that can access the Yahoo Widget Channel.

The new service will use factory-installed software and the Ethernet connections used to provide cable TV to connect viewers with Yahoo TV widgets, small applications they can click while watching programming to get news, weather and finance reports from Yahoo.

Another widget will let users browse through photo’s they’ve stored on Flickr, Yahoo’s photo-sharing portal.

Among non-Yahoo content, TV audiences will also be able to click on widgets that access eBay, Amazon, Twitter, Netflix, Blockbuster, music service Rhapsody and the Web sites for CBS, the New York Times, USA Today and Showtime.

Filed Under: Technology

Obama: The Economy Will Get Worse Before it Gets Better

December 7, 2008 by Matt Perman

“President-elect Barack Obama said the U.S. economy seems destined to get worse before it gets better and he pledged a recovery plan ‘that is equal to the task ahead,'” according to an article today on Fox News.

The part that scares me here is not that the economy will get worse before it gets better. The part that scares me is the pledge of a recovery plan “that is equal to the task ahead.”

Recovery plans can do good, if founded on sound free-market principles of tax cuts that spur investment (rather than tax cuts aimed to stimulate spending — the kind that Obama has been talking about as one part of his plan, where we all get $1,000 or so in the mail).

But when recovery plans are misguided, they do a lot of harm. A lot of harm. For more on this, see my previous posts Five Myths About the Great Depression and The Great Depression as We Know it Was Avoidable.

Filed Under: Economics

Congratulations

November 5, 2008 by Matt Perman

While I disagree fundamentally with the perspective Obama has taken on the three core issues of economic policy, foreign policy, and social policy, it is also important to acknowledge that he ran a very smart campaign and should be congratulated for that.

And far more important than that: It is not necessary to fully agree to also very gladly acknowledge the historic importance that, for the first time in our nation’s history, an African-American has become president.

Filed Under: Politics

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Matt Perman started What’s Best Next in 2008 as a blog on God-centered productivity. It has now become an organization dedicated to helping you do work that matters.

Matt is the author of What’s Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done and a frequent speaker on leadership and productivity from a gospel-driven perspective. He has led the website teams at Desiring God and Made to Flourish, and is now director of career development at The King’s College NYC. He lives in Manhattan.

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