11 ms·

Putting $10M into UBeam illustrates what is wrong with tech investing

303 points by tacon 12y ago

malanj 12y ago
When I read the investment announcement I thought "Hmm, there must be something big/new I'm missing." If this author is correct, then there is nothing new here. Just the insanity of thinking you can transfer power efficiently with sound. How could you make a $10M mistake on such a fundamental issue though?
- minimaxir 12y ago
  Michael Arrington, who funded uBeam's seed round through CrunchFund [0], wrote about a sneak peek of the product [1] two years ago: "She then performs the closest thing to magic I’ve seen in a long time." Investors fund things because they don't understand it. (Although, two years to a Series A is pretty slow in today's climate.) [0]: http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/11/disruptive-defined-ubeam-lands-750k-to-let-you-charge-gadgets-without-plugs/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/11/disruptive-defined-ubeam-la... [1]: http://uncrunched.com/2012/05/23/serendipity/ http://uncrunched.com/2012/05/23/serendipity/
  - notatoad 12y ago
    Don't investors do some sort of due diligence before dumping money on things though? Surely Michael Arrington or Marc Andreesen has a guy who can tell them when some crazy idea violates the laws of physics, even if they don't understand it themselves.
    - wyclif 12y ago
      The analogy I like to make here is The Beatles and "Magic Alex." A cautionary investment tale: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Alex http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Alex
      - afro88 12y ago
        Wow, you think you know pretty much all there is to know about The Beatles and then someone posts this. Very interesting read, thanks!
  - 7Figures2Commas 12y ago
    From Arrington's blog: > In a year or so when this thing is productized you’ll be hearing a lot more about Mary. As you note, that was written on May 23, 2012, more than 2 years ago. According to this article[1], the company is now aiming to be selling "by 2016." This suggests there was either a misunderstanding about the time required to develop a commercial product, or developing a commercial product has taken a lot longer than anticipated. What's interesting to me is that the recent photo from the New York Times[2], which Mark Suster also included in his blog post[3], doesn't on the surface seem to show substantial progress from what was being demoed back in 2011[4][5]. Charging a single phone from a couple of feet away is not what's being promised. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/ubeam-raises-10-million-2014-10 http://www.businessinsider.com/ubeam-raises-10-million-2014-... [2] http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/06/ubeam-technology-will-enable-people-to-charge-devices-through-the-air/ http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/06/ubeam-technology-wi... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8541674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8541674 [4] http://allthingsd.com/20110618/how-to-charge-your-iphone-over-the-air-ubeams-d9-demo-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20110618/how-to-charge-your-iphone-ove... [5] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoHxyweJcZI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoHxyweJcZI
    - DanBC 12y ago
      Does the lawsuit between Dweck and Perry account for the time? http://www.businessinsider.com/college-roommates-founded-hot-tech-startup-and-sued-each-other-2014-8 http://www.businessinsider.com/college-roommates-founded-hot...
  - 001sky 12y ago
    Arrington may have been making an oblique literary referance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws & Investors tend to invest to things they can sell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory So they are interested in ideas that have good "pitch". The technology is only a means to an end here.
- theVirginian 12y ago
  Be Mark Cuban and have something to say about everything that you know nothing about. Start there.
fillskills 12y ago
I am not a physicist, and this is not an excuse for due diligence, but investing in this problem is certainly better than investing in the next app that sends messages or brings you beer. I feel there is a lack of initiative, money and publicity towards inventors solving real physics problems.
- andrewstuart2 12y ago
  That probably has to do with the fact that most of the real physics problems are being solved by theoretical physicists.
- aaronbrethorst 12y ago
  > solving real physics problems. Except the author says: crazy ideas that are physically impossible [with] dishonest PR [are raising lots of capital] while great ideas that have huge potential are sitting by the wayside trying to rise above the noise. A couple more well-capitalized total flame-outs will sour investors on this entire space, meaning that the companies that obey the laws of thermodynamics will be even more screwed than they are today. I'd rather this entire space be ignored than see top-tier VCs sour everyone on the industry.
  - new299 12y ago
    >I'd rather this entire space be ignored than see top-tier VCs sour everyone on the industry. Agreed. However, if they don't know how to do DD a better one option would be just to fund more companies at a lower level. With a more realistic valuation that reflects the risk involved. However I don't think they like spreading their cash out like that. Overall, it seems like there's probably not enough seed level funding for science/basic tech startups.
    - mboer 12y ago
      I'm with you on that, but I don't know if it's a question of enough/not enough seed-level funding. I worry that there's an ever-increasing attempt being made to substitute in credentials for careful evaluation of actual ideas. I understand why relying heavily on pedigree is so attractive, but I wonder if startup failure rates would decrease and startups' overall quality would increase if that metric shifted.
andrewstuart2 12y ago
Because with a can-do attitude, who needs your fancy equations and negative attitude? You just need to look at it from the right angle. With your eyes closed.
vonklaus 12y ago
Putting the physics and this product aside, let's go to another core "law": make something people want. What do people want? Better battery life. What are you doing? Finding a worse way to charge a battery. Quick recap Problem: Battery life is much shorter than consumers would like. >Solution: Make better batteries that last longer, are more durable, and can be recycled into new batteries (to keep costs down in the future)
- ForHackernews 12y ago
  Radically improving battery life may prove to be a more difficult physics problem than wireless charging. Lithium-ion batteries were introduced in the early 1990s, and for 20 years nobody's been able to come up with a better technology. Since the early 90s, CPUs have gotten about 1,000 times better. Batteries have gotten about twice as good.
  - jwilliams 12y ago
    Yea. Batteries are a tough problem. A battery with the energy density of TNT would be great. Not sure I'd want it sitting on my lap...
    - ISL 12y ago
      You already do. Lithium-ion batteries have 25-50% the energy density of TNT. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density (to fill in the missing volumetric density entry, you need to know that TNT has density 1.7 g/cc)
      - jwilliams 12y ago
        Think you're referencing Lithium (non-rechargeable) batteries. Lithium Ion is much lower. Even then, they still occasionally overheat and very occasionally catch on fire. I think my original point still stands.
    - brohee 12y ago
uniclaude 12y ago
We could say: This article illustrates what is wrong with tech blogging. Taking a media story of a funded startup and running with this sort of conclusions is short sighted at best. There might be much more than this, the probability for funds like a16z to invest $10M without a bit of research sounds rather low to me.
- DodgyEggplant 12y ago
  > the probability for funds like a16z to invest $10M without a bit of research sounds rather low to me Well, it's a probability, and it's greater than zero. It could happen.
jaredklewis 12y ago
The criticisms seem valid, but I'm surprised by the extreme negative reactions. VCs have a lot of money to play with, which they usually pump into the latest photo sharing/email organizer/whatever app. I'd prefer mistakes like this to getting more yo like apps funded. Plus, who knows. we will probably never have ultrasonic iPhone chargers but maybe ubeam will pivot or stumble upon other unrelated ideas or uses for their technology, as often seems to happen with startups.
- mkagenius 12y ago
  Plus, pg says do things that don't scale initially.
  - Ecio78 12y ago
    do things that don't scale =/= do things that don't work
    - yen223 12y ago
      What they lack in effectiveness, they'll surely make up for in volume!
ISL 12y ago
I'm also a physicist, though not in the world of ultrasound, and had similar concerns when I saw uBeam turn up on HN today. I thought about writing up my concerns (power loss, inadvertent heating of the wrong thing, cranky animals, etc.), but decided to hold my tongue. If you have $10M to invest in a startup, then you certainly have $10-20k to contract someone knowledgeable in the field for a week to vet an idea for sanity. As a skilled but low-paid academic, I'd jump at that gig, as I'm sure many others would. If the investor's done their homework, then perhaps there's a clever trick of which uBeam makes use. If not, then perhaps the investor will lose money. Either way, it'll sort itself out.
- sitkack 12y ago
  I have a bag of gaussian spheres I could rent out for just such a project.
- kngspook 12y ago
  To listen to Mark Suster's post, it sounds like they did a very comprehensive vet, so I would presume someone ran the basic math like you were thinking and like the link above runs through. And with just a lay-person's knowledge of physics, my first thought was "Isn't there a lot of energy loss using sound-through-air as a medium of energy transfer?". On the other hand, all they say is "we talked to these people and those people and those other people over there", so who knows what the actual tests were. A lot of the discussion here is about Arrington/Crunchfund, and while I find him interesting to read and good at getting information out of people in a blogging context, I don't really have an opinion on his competency as a VC. But A16Z's investment record is pretty solid, and Mark Suster has always struck me as a reasonable guy. As TechCrunch's post pointed out, Silicon Valley is littered with the corpses of better-device-charging startups, but now I just have no clue what to think. :P But if they get it working, it'll be pretty awesome.
- harmegido 12y ago
  10-20k might not sound like much compared to $10million, but remember that was the total amount raised, so any one investment is likely around 500k. Sorry for taking your post a bit too literally, but 10-20k then represents an added cost of 2-4% (or more if your investment isn't that much). I guess my point is that if you have 100 investments, you would maximize returns by balancing return on investment with cost of investment. From the skeptical posts here, it sounds like that 10-20k (or whatever sum) may have been worth it in this case, but in general it probably is not.
msoad 12y ago
Investors invest in people not ideas. She is a great entrepreneur and will make a successful company with that money. Doesn't matter if their initial prototype isn't working. Instagram was a check-in service while Twitter was a sound sharing website when they started. There is no thermodynamics law for social apps so nobody could blame investors for their investment back then.
- ohashi 12y ago
  That seems wildly optimistic. Color got 41M in funding and was a complete waste. Nothing says a good team and lots of money will yield a successful company.
slagfart 12y ago
It's my humble role in life to stand in front of a manager and tell them that their tech idea is garbage. For $10M a year, you could buy a hundred of me. I think the real problem is that they're not investing their own money, and are just looking at buying some great PR to write off as a tax deduction.
jnaglick 12y ago
That was a great analysis of their technology, but I don't think this is everything wrong with tech investing. I think there are larger implications about how VC driven start-ups could be changing society for the worse. Whether the infringements upon the rights of lets-not-call-them-employees in 2-sided markets, or $1B valuations given to free apps whose users are [perhaps unknowingly] paying with their personal information, there is quite a lot to unpack to say the least. A great tech writeup but I think he misses the mark on "everything wrong."
DanBC 12y ago
But they plugged it into a multimeter and "the dial went up" http://allthingsd.com/20110602/demo-at-d9-ubeam/ http://allthingsd.com/20110602/demo-at-d9-ubeam/ I've never seen a Radio Shack meter before - I have no idea what that meter is measuring or what it's set to. It could be set to read micro volts, but it would be odd for them to take a close-up photo if it was reading a tiny number. But then maybe that's why they went with an analogue meter - big needle swing is psychologically persuasive. And Dweck is no longer involved - http://www.businessinsider.com/college-roommates-founded-hot-tech-startup-and-sued-each-other-2014-8 http://www.businessinsider.com/college-roommates-founded-hot...
enraged_camel 12y ago
Actually, what's happening is pretty obvious: they are investing in the founder, not the idea. Think about it this way: $10 million is pocket change for VCs. Even if they lose all of it, it would barely make a dent in their yearly metrics. However, the potential gain is huge: they see in Ms. Perry someone who can identify a big demand in the market, take the initiative to try to do something about it and find a clever and catchy way to market it ("WiFi for energy"). So spending $10 million to let her gain more experience in business and build a deeper relationship with the VCs is a pretty good investment.
- leeber 12y ago
  What experience is she going to get by working on a product that never even makes it to market? Don't try and tell me they spent $10M knowing full well that the idea was physically impossible. That's BS and you know it. Many entrepreneurs today seem to think they've made it because they secured large investments from VCs. Very few know what it takes to actually become profitable, reach liquidity, and create real value.
cperciva 12y ago
This reminds me of my favourite VC story from the height of the dot-com bubble. A few months prior, I had announced my distributed computation of the quadrillionth bit of Pi, and the concept of doing computations using unused CPU capacity from around the Internet was getting a lot of attention. A VC asked me to look at a company they were thinking of investing in and give my opinion as someone with experience in the field. Stripped down to its core, the company was pitching technology which would allow it to do "useful" internet-wide computations once global communication latency dropped below a certain threshold. Going along with this was a graph showing how internet round trip times had been steadily dropping for the past two decades, and projecting into the future that some time around 2006 the latencies would become short enough to make their solution work. Unfortunately, their projection had communication becoming faster than the speed of light in 2004. I pointed this out to the VC in question. They decided to invest anyway. My understanding is that the company raised $10M before going bankrupt.
- sgt101 12y ago
  I had a wonderful discussion about reducing latency in about 2003 where I pointed out that there was a bound on everything imposed by the speed of light; I remember the investor attempting to use his MBA... "Ok, let's challenge that - how can we go about changing that assumption". You can do anything if you try is a good moto for 4 year olds, but seriously, business schools should set traps for folk that still believe it in their 30's and empty those traps into [[horrid but funny slasher movie imagery removed to protect the innocent]] ^B^B somewhere where they can't do any more damage.
  - pixelcort 12y ago
    This is where we get issues where software engineers are expected to do things that are difficult to impossible (DRM, safe crypto backdoors, accurate copyright infringement detection, accurate censorship) and are told to just "do their magic" and make it work perfectly.
    - kybernetyk 12y ago
codeN 12y ago
Was wondering if this is instead transformed into a wireless "near-fieldish" charging solution. Where you keep your phone on top of a speaker, then realized that the article assumed only 50% loss because of air, and in fact you can't even physically focus a 1m^2 speaker at near field.
- solistice 12y ago
  That seems like an awfully Rube Goldberglike way to charge you phone though. If you're putting it on top of a speaker, why not ditch the speaker assembly and just keep the coils and there you have an inductive charging mat.
Animats 12y ago
If only I could short the stock on these guys... Short-range electrical wireless charging is a perfectly good technology. The problem is that there are three proposed systems, all incompatible, each with shipping products but little volume. Somebody needs to kick some butt, get everybody to agree on one system, and get those charging pads in every business hotel room, and every Starbucks in the developed world. This isn't a technical problem. It's Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD, which held up high-definition discs for about two years.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- pshin45 12y ago
  You make a perfectly valid point, but I don't think it addresses the issue at hand. I think what concerns people about uBeam is that they might be the next Clinkle i.e. a case of VCs getting overly excited by a highly charismatic young founder who talks a great game and has an extremely bold-sounding idea that could make them a lot of money. Clinkle was able to raise the biggest Silicon Valley seed round in history ($25 million) in June 2013 with a non-working demo for a mobile payments app that had an admittedly beautiful UI and could be used to pay retailers with high-frequency sound technology, the type of technological concept that probably looks/sounds like magic to a lot of non-experts. Lucas Duplan the founder was a Stanford CS student and probably had a lot of VCs thinking "next Mark Zuckerberg!!". Smash cut to September 2014, and the product they launch is a debit card for college students that allows users to amass rewards and share those rewards with friends via a mobile app. Pretty big letdown. In the case of uBeam, they have a confident young female founder trying to tackle a very technical problem. She talks a great game and is able to wow the press and investors with a demo that is very impressive to a layman. It's worth noting that despite Andreesen Horowitz's great reputation, it just so happens that they were one of Clinkle's investors as well and so that can't be used as evidence that all necessary due diligence has been done and the tech/physics all check out.
andyidsinga 12y ago
some of the comments here and the article remind me of clinkle - see http://www.businessinsider.com/inside-story-of-clinkle-2014-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/inside-story-of-clinkle-2014-...
aaron695 12y ago
"Move Fast and Break Shit." The tech industry seems to earn a lot of money, employ a lot of people and have us on an unparalleled rate of change. Their current theory is, 1 in 100 things pan out and when they do they make up for all the fails. This article doesn't really provide evidence this high risk approach is not worth it. Who knows, perhaps other applications might pop out of the technology. Perhaps it's a more obvious 99% in the fail basket. But being overly cautious can also cripple you. But a good write up on why the tech sucks.
tzs 12y ago
Any IEEE members here who could take a look at the following paper, which may shed some light on what is and is not possible here, and then summarize it for us? ---------- Roes, M.G.L.; Hendrix, M.A.M.; Duarte, J.L., "Contactless energy transfer through air by means of ultrasound," IECON 2011 - 37th Annual Conference on IEEE Industrial Electronics Society , vol., no., pp.1238,1243, 7-10 Nov. 2011 doi: 10.1109/IECON.2011.6119486 Abstract: An alternative approach to the wireless transfer of energy is proposed, employing acoustic waves in air. Unlike conventional methods, acoustic energy transfer is able to achieve energy transfer at high efficiencies over distances that are large in comparison to the dimensions of the transmitter and the receiver. This paper gives an overview of the principle and explains the different loss mechanisms that come into play. A theoretically limit on the achievable efficiency is calculated. It exceeds that of a comparable inductively coupled system by an order of magnitude. First preliminary measurements indicate that AET is feasible, although the measured efficiency is lower than the predicted theoretical limit. URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6119486&isnumber=6119266 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6119... Update: I was able to get a 5 minute preview of the paper from DeepDyve.com [1]. They got 53% efficiency at 1 meter, but that was at very low power (something like 37 uW). They weren't using particularly high powered transducers, though, so could have gotten more power if that had been what they were aiming for, but probably still a long way from charging a phone. They say that the challenge for acoustic energy transfer will be in developing the high power transducers that will be needed. [1] For those who have not heard of DeepDyve, they provide access to a very large number of journal articles for prices that are much lower than what the journals charge for individual articles. Yes, I know that ideally all of this stuff should be available to the public for free, but until that happens DeepDyve is worth considering. They have a "Freelancer" plan that costs nothing up front, and gives you 5 minute full previews of articles. You can purchase "tokens" in packs of 5 for $20. You can rent an article for 30 days for one token. They also have a $40/month subscription plan that lets you read unlimited articles, and gives a discount if you want to buy a PDF. You can cancel the monthly plan at any time, and your account converts to Freelancer, and you can switch back to the subscription plan at any time.
beloch 12y ago
To get as basic as possible, an iPhone 5S has a ~6 Wh battery that Apple claims will operate the phone for up to 250 hours on standby. So, if your phone is sitting on your desk doing nothing in an area with good signal, it will require a mere 6/250 = 0.024 Watts just to keep the battery from running down further than it already has. Delivering even this tiny amount of energy to a phone-sized traducer that may be tens of meters from the emitter and oriented randomly is going to be very difficult. An omnidirectional emitter would likely require more power than a Megadeth concert and heaven help anything with a millimeter scale resonant frequency that's in the room! Tracking the phone's position and delivering a tightly focused beam is probably the only realistic way to go about this. That means you will need some very cutting edge focused ultrasound beam transducers (not cheap) that can mechanically track phones (not cheap) which must be pointed by something like a kinnect (not cheap) and a clear line of sight to the phone (completely unlike WiFi). It's probably going to have to let the user know when there isn't a clear LOS too, because it would suck if your phone died because you set it down behind a plant. I can't say all this is outright impossible to do at a competitive price. Danny didn't convince me that it's impossible. It is probably pretty close though. So, why is this company being funded to do something that's probably impossible? Well, Danny is right about one thing: Investors often invest in impossible things. Just google "over unity" generators (better than perpetual motion devices basically) if you don't believe me. Earlier this decade Steorn suckered millions of euros out of investors with a lot of talk and a few cheap parlor tricks. UBeam might not break the laws of thermodynamics, but Steorn literally scoffed at them. People still lined up to invest. Whether Steorn and his co-workers were/are truly insane or con-artists has not been determined to this day. Their website is still live so, against all reasonable expectations, Steorn is still viable! Personally, if I wanted to scam investors I'd choose something that has a direct impact on the layman's life and theoretically has the potential to be big. Simultaneously, it would not obviously break the laws of physics but would be difficult enough for a company to spend years working on it only to fail. UBeam would be a pretty great setup for a scam actually.
- tzs 12y ago
  > That means you will need some very cutting edge focused ultrasound beam transducers (not cheap) that can mechanically track phones (not cheap) which must be pointed by something like a kinnect (not cheap) and a clear line of sight to the phone (completely unlike WiFi) Note: I'm not in any way in the following saying uBeam will work. I'm just speculating on ways that one might work around some of the objections that have been raised. Here's an idea that combines the tracking and the pointing and I don't think uses anything expensive. One way to do focused ultrasound beams is by using a phased array of transducers. That reminded me of a phased array demo I saw a film of at Caltech in the early '80s. I was taking the introductory optics class, which was taught by William Bridges [1]. Before he came to Caltech, he worked at Hughes Research, where he did such interesting things as invent ion lasers. After he came to Caltech, he split his time between Caltech and Hughes, and when I took his class he showed us a film of something his Hughes group was working on. (Note: I saw this film once over 30 years ago. The description below of what I saw is correct. I may not have the technology exactly right) It had an array of optical radiators whose phase could be varied. If you got the phase right, you could get constructive interference at a target, and destructive interference off the target, and so deliver your energy to the target. Get the phase wrong, and you just deliver a bunch of light to a large area in the general direction of the target. In the film, you saw a black background, and you saw a bunch of of vague overlapping blobs of light moving around. Someone then dangled a shiny model of the starship Enterprise in front of the background. Then they started modulating the phases of the radiators, with each being modulated at a different frequency. They had a light sensor pointed toward the target area, so that it picked up light reflected from the Enterprise. The signal from the light sensor was sent through a set of parallel filters, one for each of the frequencies being used to modulate the radiators, and the output of those filters was used to control the phase of the radiator associated with that frequency. It was designed to try to set the phase to minimize that frequency in the reflected flight. The idea is that if a given radiator is contributing to a maximum at the target, then slight changes in the phase of that radiator won't make much difference, and so the modulation frequency of that radiator should be weak in the reflected light. If, on the other hand, a given radiator is contributing toward a minimum, slight changes in phase will make big changes, and so the modulation of that radiator should be strong in the reflected light. When they turned on this feedback circuit that filtered the reflected signal and adjusted the phase, those drifting blobs all pretty much instantly disappeared, replaced with a beam that was focused on the Enterprise, and tracked it as they waved the Enterprise around. Could something like this work for an ultrasonic charger? Suppose the transmitter uses a phased array of transducers in order to get a focused ultrasonic beam. Suppose we include in the receiver some kind of wireless communication mechanism, such as ZigBee (IEEE 802.15.4). Now perhaps we can modulate the phases of the transducers, and have the receiver report back on how strong the modulation is at its end, and then we can adjust the phases back at the transmitter side to focus the beam on the receiver and follow it, doing with ultrasound what Bridges' group at Hughes was doing with light. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_B._Bridges http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_B._Bridges
Blackthorn 12y ago
I am not a physicist and have no clue about the viability of the startup. What I do know is that an awful lot of the comments here are begging the question. They tend to be of the form: "Since they were invested in, they must be good/viable/work!" What the fuck, folks? Have you lost your collective minds? You should know better than this.
- waterlesscloud 12y ago
  It's more along the lines of: "Smart groups gave them money, so they must at least have a response to the first objections that pop into everyone's head." Whether those responses represent approaches that will work or not is unknown, but I feel quite safe in assuming they have some sort of plan for them. It's insanely arrogant to assume otherwise.
  - eli_gottlieb 12y ago
    Smart people are often irrational when reasoning about something outside their domain expertise. If it sounds like uBeam is physically impossible or unwise, then I'd rather bet against them than simply assume that other investors have done the scientific vetting.
    - waterlesscloud 12y ago
      What I'm saying is that it's crazy to assume the investors didn't ask the questions that popped into the heads of every Tom, Dick, and Harry on HN in 10 seconds. Therefore, it's safe to assume the company team must have had some kind of response to that. Was it valid? Did it snow the investors and their vetting teams? Who knows? But certainly that first level of conversation must have taken place.
  - gfodor 12y ago
    Exactly. The claim isn't that ubeam is viable, it's that investors like a16z with competent technical staff are more than capable of doing back of the napkin physics before investing, so there is surely more to the story here-- either the company tech can be argued to be viable with more non-public info, or the investors are aware of the impossibility of their current claims but decided to invest anyway.
Animats 12y ago
I've been looking closely at the UBeam demo video at http://on.aol.com/video/ubeam-wireless-power-demonstration-at-d9-517342543 There's a lot of information one can get from that video if you turn the resolution up to 720p and look at still frames. The meter is reading voltage, on what appears to be the 10 VAC scale. (Someone wrote it was on ohms, but it's not.) About 4V is coming out. We don't know what, if anything is the load, and there's no current measurement, so we can't compute power. It's interesting that they're measuring AC voltage while supposedly charging a DC device, a phone. The ultrasonic transducers seem to be common hobbyist-level range sensors as used on small robots. Like these: https://www.futurlec.com/Ultrasonic_Sensors.shtml https://www.futurlec.com/Ultrasonic_Sensors.shtml At 00:31 into the video, there's a good view of the back of the board holding the ultrasonic receivers. If you take a screenshot of this and enhance it, you can see the wiring. There are just two wires coming out of the receiver, and it looks like all the sensors are just wired in series. That maximizes voltage at the expense of current, of course. The transmit array has 10 transducers in a hexagonal pattern, which helps focus the beam. (That transducer is a rather broad-beamed device.) The transmit end is powered by a hefty looking power supply, so those transducers are probably being driven hard. With that setup, they should be able to get a few volts out of the receiver end, using the same kind of off the shelf transducer at both ends. This is something you could put together in a day or so after ordering the parts. There doesn't seem to be anything new here at all in the demo version. The efficiency is probably a few percent. That's for this ideal case - transmitter pointed directly at receiver. The Wireless Power Consortium inductive wireless charging people report 60% efficiency, and they're trying to get to 80%. The patent application talks about steering and focusing the beam, but you're still going to need line of sight, and a big emitter array.
- KaiserPro 12y ago
  You might be able to beam form a bit more efficiency, however one thing you can't escape is the angle at which the receiver is pointing. All microphones have polar patterns. There are areas that are more sensistive, areas that are less. So not only does it need line of sight, it'll need to be pointing at transmitter. It's also interesting to note that we've had wireless charging for at least 5 years, but none of them yet are long distance. they are all mats that you put the device on.
mikeyouse 12y ago
If I may critique his critique, changing one single assumption completely changes the story. He starts with the assumption of 100dB as the max power but OSHA's ultrasonic recommendation[1] is actually 145dB which is 31,000x more power.. Even if you use 130dB, it's still 1,000x more power than he assumes. Another big assumption is that the performance should match a 5W iPhone charger. Why? The whole point is at you won't need to worry about charging. If you have 8 hours at your desk to charge rather than 20 minutes plugged in, you can get by charging at 1/20th the speed. So try putting a requirement of 0.25W and 130dB in his formulas and see if you'd 'gamble' $10M on this idea... I'm on mobile so excuse the lack of units, but I followed his calcs for a 25cm x 25cm transmitter at 130dB: http://m.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10+*+%284pi%29+*+.25%5E2+*+50%25&x=0&y=0 http://m.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10+*+%284pi%29+*+.25%5E2+... So it should deliver ~4W. Obviously there will be losses, etc but even at 25%, 1W should be sufficient to passively charge your phone. Note that all of the same assumptions but with 140dB would instead give you 10W, which is only slightly less than the rapid charger for the new iPads. [1] - https://www.osha.gov/dts/osta/otm/noise/health_effects/ultrasonics.html https://www.osha.gov/dts/osta/otm/noise/health_effects/ultra...
- sharpneli 12y ago
  At 130 and 140dB air is starting to behave rather nonlinearly. That means you will actually start hearing it. Remember that the OSHA ultrasonic recommendation is more about "Will it permanently harm you" than comfort. At 140dB you'd hear probably rather substantial audible whine due to first and second order harmonics. On the other hand a brutal whine at 15kHz is perfect for keeping those kids off my lawn when I charge my phone! Edit: I tried to find some information about the receiving end transducer losses. I bet they're going to be insane as it basically any impedance mismatch with air is going to cause the power to just reflect away, the bigger the mismatch the bigger the wasted power.
- cowsandmilk 12y ago
  actually, for 20 kHZ, the frequency in his article, the OSHA recommendation is 105dB. And if you dig into the OSHA regs, the 115+30 standard for higher frequencies only applies for 15 minutes of exposure per day or less. So, if you only want your charger running for 15 minutes, have at it!
vladtaltos 12y ago
as we require more and more power every year does it make sense to charge your phone with a few percent efficiency instead of walking 3 steps to a damn wall socket? is it that difficult for people? I hope there will be a regulation preventing stupidly wasteful technologies that will impact everyone globally. thank god we can charge our phones from 3 meters - we need another war to support this energy though.. .
Pengtuzi 12y ago
An honest question: Are we heading towards a new dot-com bubble? I feel like a lot of companies have been bought/sold for ridiculous amounts, e.g. Mojang, as well as these crazy investments devoid of critique. I'm far from a biz man but it makes me a bit worried. Should I be worried?
- dkfmn 12y ago
  One of the biggest signs of the bubble were the lack of sanity on exits and IPOs for unproven businesses and technologies. In this case there is certainly (some) irrational exuberance for funding, but unless you start seeing lots of minimal revenue IPOs it's not the same animal. In short - lots of startups may die, but it's probably more things that wouldn't have otherwise been funded. It's unlikely to crash the stock market again at current rates.
- no_future 12y ago
  According to Mark Cuban(who I'm pretty damn sure knows what he is talking about), it isn't remotely a bubble, because in the dot com bubble everyone was investing - regular working people quit their jobs to become day traders, you would hear people at the coffee shop talking about the prices of stocks they bought, etc. Then when the bubble burst those who hadn't got out while they could lost everything and more. Now its VCs that are throwing money at everything, and they've got more than they know what to do with, and will be just fine if companies they invest in fail.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
blahblah12 12y ago
UM doesn't this use piezoelectric crystals that are vibrated by ultrasound?
blahblah12 12y ago
Um doesn't this use piezo electric crystals that vibrate with sound?
bdickason 12y ago
I would much rather see 10 million put towards an idea that most people think is impossible but could dramatically change the way we experience the world than another photo sharing network.
lateguy 12y ago
I am quite unsure about the entire concept, but I went to Facebook and a lot of people who are/were not getting investor funding was sharing this :).
highCs 12y ago
Actually, I wouldn't even do the math. For any tech, the question is: does it work (right now)? I beleive people made that mistakes with occulus rift too for example. Does it work? no. It's maybe promising, but it don't work. Period.
venomsnake 12y ago
I have even better solution. For a couple of million dollars less. Standardize batteries. Make them replaceable. When your battery dies - pop new one. Loan one. You can charge them in bulk. We have been using that with AA for couple of decades with awesome results. Now can I get my funding please?
s_q_b 12y ago
Meredith Perry is no fraud. She was in a Penn graduate program before this venture, and has worked at NASA. It's directional transmission technology. The power loss is minimized as the ultrasound is directed and focused at a particular location. There's no inverse square law here, and it's easily within the bound of known physics. As far as I know, (indirect relationship with the a good friend of the founder, that I won't say anything more about to protect his privacy) Meredith is actually genius-level and a relentless work horse. I'd bet big on this one. If I could work for any one company it would be uBeam. And I just started a great position, and I'd do it despite the press. This is a "First they dismiss you. Then they laugh at you. Then you win" scenario.
- DanBC 12y ago
  She was an astrobiologist. But so what? There are plenty of real engineers who are tinkering with over-unity nonsense. While this ultra-sonic charging isn't as dumb as perpetual motion it does appear to be dumb.
  - s_q_b 12y ago
    She's also worked for NASA, in additional to being a wet work astrobiologist. Meaning she has a high level of intelligence, experience working with technology, and the ability to improvise tools. Those all sound like great credentials. Honestly Computer Science used to be so open to outsiders, now it's "If you don't have a degree we don't believe you." That's really bad. Especially considering the alternative theory involves her pulling the wool over the eyes of both AH and Marissa Mayer for ten million dollars.
    - DanBC 12y ago
      So what if she worked for NASA? I can probaly find NASA ex-employees who believe in homeopathy. What's she's doing has nothing to do with computer science. You're right that people shouldn't be dismissing her work because of her qualifications and previous work experience but that works both ways - she doesn't magically gain credibillity just because she used to work at someplace or other.
serve_yay 12y ago
Investors decided to invest in a dumb project. Here's the thing: so what?
sunshinerag 12y ago
I am surprised nobody has thought QE with it's lot of paper money floating around as reasons for the market distortion. Maybe somebody should disrupt fiat and centralised money supply.
cdixon 12y ago
VCs almost always bring in outside experts to diligence ideas that they are qualified can't diligence themselves. That happened extensively here.
- vasilipupkin 12y ago
  So, your experts concluded the tech works or at least could work ? Are we calling bullshit on the naysayers then ?

303 points by tacon 12y ago

When I read the investment announcement I thought "Hmm, there must be something big/new I'm missing." If this author is correct, then there is nothing new here. Just the insanity of thinking you can transfer power efficiently with sound. How could you make a $10M mistake on such a fundamental issue though?

minimaxir 12y ago
Michael Arrington, who funded uBeam's seed round through CrunchFund [0], wrote about a sneak peek of the product [1] two years ago: "She then performs the closest thing to magic I’ve seen in a long time." Investors fund things because they don't understand it. (Although, two years to a Series A is pretty slow in today's climate.) [0]: http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/11/disruptive-defined-ubeam-lands-750k-to-let-you-charge-gadgets-without-plugs/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/11/disruptive-defined-ubeam-la... [1]: http://uncrunched.com/2012/05/23/serendipity/ http://uncrunched.com/2012/05/23/serendipity/
- notatoad 12y ago
  Don't investors do some sort of due diligence before dumping money on things though? Surely Michael Arrington or Marc Andreesen has a guy who can tell them when some crazy idea violates the laws of physics, even if they don't understand it themselves.
  - wyclif 12y ago
    The analogy I like to make here is The Beatles and "Magic Alex." A cautionary investment tale: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Alex http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Alex
    - afro88 12y ago
      Wow, you think you know pretty much all there is to know about The Beatles and then someone posts this. Very interesting read, thanks!
- 7Figures2Commas 12y ago
  From Arrington's blog: > In a year or so when this thing is productized you’ll be hearing a lot more about Mary. As you note, that was written on May 23, 2012, more than 2 years ago. According to this article[1], the company is now aiming to be selling "by 2016." This suggests there was either a misunderstanding about the time required to develop a commercial product, or developing a commercial product has taken a lot longer than anticipated. What's interesting to me is that the recent photo from the New York Times[2], which Mark Suster also included in his blog post[3], doesn't on the surface seem to show substantial progress from what was being demoed back in 2011[4][5]. Charging a single phone from a couple of feet away is not what's being promised. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/ubeam-raises-10-million-2014-10 http://www.businessinsider.com/ubeam-raises-10-million-2014-... [2] http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/06/ubeam-technology-will-enable-people-to-charge-devices-through-the-air/ http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/06/ubeam-technology-wi... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8541674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8541674 [4] http://allthingsd.com/20110618/how-to-charge-your-iphone-over-the-air-ubeams-d9-demo-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20110618/how-to-charge-your-iphone-ove... [5] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoHxyweJcZI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoHxyweJcZI
  - DanBC 12y ago
    Does the lawsuit between Dweck and Perry account for the time? http://www.businessinsider.com/college-roommates-founded-hot-tech-startup-and-sued-each-other-2014-8 http://www.businessinsider.com/college-roommates-founded-hot...
- 001sky 12y ago
  Arrington may have been making an oblique literary referance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws & Investors tend to invest to things they can sell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory So they are interested in ideas that have good "pitch". The technology is only a means to an end here.
theVirginian 12y ago
Be Mark Cuban and have something to say about everything that you know nothing about. Start there.

fillskills 12y ago

I am not a physicist, and this is not an excuse for due diligence, but investing in this problem is certainly better than investing in the next app that sends messages or brings you beer. I feel there is a lack of initiative, money and publicity towards inventors solving real physics problems.

andrewstuart2 12y ago
That probably has to do with the fact that most of the real physics problems are being solved by theoretical physicists.
aaronbrethorst 12y ago
> solving real physics problems. Except the author says: crazy ideas that are physically impossible [with] dishonest PR [are raising lots of capital] while great ideas that have huge potential are sitting by the wayside trying to rise above the noise. A couple more well-capitalized total flame-outs will sour investors on this entire space, meaning that the companies that obey the laws of thermodynamics will be even more screwed than they are today. I'd rather this entire space be ignored than see top-tier VCs sour everyone on the industry.
- new299 12y ago
  >I'd rather this entire space be ignored than see top-tier VCs sour everyone on the industry. Agreed. However, if they don't know how to do DD a better one option would be just to fund more companies at a lower level. With a more realistic valuation that reflects the risk involved. However I don't think they like spreading their cash out like that. Overall, it seems like there's probably not enough seed level funding for science/basic tech startups.
  - mboer 12y ago
    I'm with you on that, but I don't know if it's a question of enough/not enough seed-level funding. I worry that there's an ever-increasing attempt being made to substitute in credentials for careful evaluation of actual ideas. I understand why relying heavily on pedigree is so attractive, but I wonder if startup failure rates would decrease and startups' overall quality would increase if that metric shifted.

andrewstuart2 12y ago

Because with a can-do attitude, who needs your fancy equations and negative attitude? You just need to look at it from the right angle. With your eyes closed.

vonklaus 12y ago

Putting the physics and this product aside, let's go to another core "law": make something people want. What do people want? Better battery life. What are you doing? Finding a worse way to charge a battery. Quick recap Problem: Battery life is much shorter than consumers would like. >Solution: Make better batteries that last longer, are more durable, and can be recycled into new batteries (to keep costs down in the future)

ForHackernews 12y ago
Radically improving battery life may prove to be a more difficult physics problem than wireless charging. Lithium-ion batteries were introduced in the early 1990s, and for 20 years nobody's been able to come up with a better technology. Since the early 90s, CPUs have gotten about 1,000 times better. Batteries have gotten about twice as good.
- jwilliams 12y ago
  Yea. Batteries are a tough problem. A battery with the energy density of TNT would be great. Not sure I'd want it sitting on my lap...
  - ISL 12y ago
    You already do. Lithium-ion batteries have 25-50% the energy density of TNT. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density (to fill in the missing volumetric density entry, you need to know that TNT has density 1.7 g/cc)
    - jwilliams 12y ago
      Think you're referencing Lithium (non-rechargeable) batteries. Lithium Ion is much lower. Even then, they still occasionally overheat and very occasionally catch on fire. I think my original point still stands.
  - brohee 12y ago

uniclaude 12y ago

We could say: This article illustrates what is wrong with tech blogging. Taking a media story of a funded startup and running with this sort of conclusions is short sighted at best. There might be much more than this, the probability for funds like a16z to invest $10M without a bit of research sounds rather low to me.

DodgyEggplant 12y ago
> the probability for funds like a16z to invest $10M without a bit of research sounds rather low to me Well, it's a probability, and it's greater than zero. It could happen.

jaredklewis 12y ago

The criticisms seem valid, but I'm surprised by the extreme negative reactions. VCs have a lot of money to play with, which they usually pump into the latest photo sharing/email organizer/whatever app. I'd prefer mistakes like this to getting more yo like apps funded. Plus, who knows. we will probably never have ultrasonic iPhone chargers but maybe ubeam will pivot or stumble upon other unrelated ideas or uses for their technology, as often seems to happen with startups.

mkagenius 12y ago
Plus, pg says do things that don't scale initially.
- Ecio78 12y ago
  do things that don't scale =/= do things that don't work
  - yen223 12y ago
    What they lack in effectiveness, they'll surely make up for in volume!

ISL 12y ago

I'm also a physicist, though not in the world of ultrasound, and had similar concerns when I saw uBeam turn up on HN today. I thought about writing up my concerns (power loss, inadvertent heating of the wrong thing, cranky animals, etc.), but decided to hold my tongue. If you have $10M to invest in a startup, then you certainly have $10-20k to contract someone knowledgeable in the field for a week to vet an idea for sanity. As a skilled but low-paid academic, I'd jump at that gig, as I'm sure many others would. If the investor's done their homework, then perhaps there's a clever trick of which uBeam makes use. If not, then perhaps the investor will lose money. Either way, it'll sort itself out.

sitkack 12y ago
I have a bag of gaussian spheres I could rent out for just such a project.
kngspook 12y ago
To listen to Mark Suster's post, it sounds like they did a very comprehensive vet, so I would presume someone ran the basic math like you were thinking and like the link above runs through. And with just a lay-person's knowledge of physics, my first thought was "Isn't there a lot of energy loss using sound-through-air as a medium of energy transfer?". On the other hand, all they say is "we talked to these people and those people and those other people over there", so who knows what the actual tests were. A lot of the discussion here is about Arrington/Crunchfund, and while I find him interesting to read and good at getting information out of people in a blogging context, I don't really have an opinion on his competency as a VC. But A16Z's investment record is pretty solid, and Mark Suster has always struck me as a reasonable guy. As TechCrunch's post pointed out, Silicon Valley is littered with the corpses of better-device-charging startups, but now I just have no clue what to think. :P But if they get it working, it'll be pretty awesome.
harmegido 12y ago
10-20k might not sound like much compared to $10million, but remember that was the total amount raised, so any one investment is likely around 500k. Sorry for taking your post a bit too literally, but 10-20k then represents an added cost of 2-4% (or more if your investment isn't that much). I guess my point is that if you have 100 investments, you would maximize returns by balancing return on investment with cost of investment. From the skeptical posts here, it sounds like that 10-20k (or whatever sum) may have been worth it in this case, but in general it probably is not.

msoad 12y ago

Investors invest in people not ideas. She is a great entrepreneur and will make a successful company with that money. Doesn't matter if their initial prototype isn't working. Instagram was a check-in service while Twitter was a sound sharing website when they started. There is no thermodynamics law for social apps so nobody could blame investors for their investment back then.

ohashi 12y ago
That seems wildly optimistic. Color got 41M in funding and was a complete waste. Nothing says a good team and lots of money will yield a successful company.

slagfart 12y ago

It's my humble role in life to stand in front of a manager and tell them that their tech idea is garbage. For $10M a year, you could buy a hundred of me. I think the real problem is that they're not investing their own money, and are just looking at buying some great PR to write off as a tax deduction.

jnaglick 12y ago

That was a great analysis of their technology, but I don't think this is everything wrong with tech investing. I think there are larger implications about how VC driven start-ups could be changing society for the worse. Whether the infringements upon the rights of lets-not-call-them-employees in 2-sided markets, or $1B valuations given to free apps whose users are [perhaps unknowingly] paying with their personal information, there is quite a lot to unpack to say the least. A great tech writeup but I think he misses the mark on "everything wrong."

DanBC 12y ago

But they plugged it into a multimeter and "the dial went up" http://allthingsd.com/20110602/demo-at-d9-ubeam/ http://allthingsd.com/20110602/demo-at-d9-ubeam/ I've never seen a Radio Shack meter before - I have no idea what that meter is measuring or what it's set to. It could be set to read micro volts, but it would be odd for them to take a close-up photo if it was reading a tiny number. But then maybe that's why they went with an analogue meter - big needle swing is psychologically persuasive. And Dweck is no longer involved - http://www.businessinsider.com/college-roommates-founded-hot-tech-startup-and-sued-each-other-2014-8 http://www.businessinsider.com/college-roommates-founded-hot...

enraged_camel 12y ago

Actually, what's happening is pretty obvious: they are investing in the founder, not the idea. Think about it this way: $10 million is pocket change for VCs. Even if they lose all of it, it would barely make a dent in their yearly metrics. However, the potential gain is huge: they see in Ms. Perry someone who can identify a big demand in the market, take the initiative to try to do something about it and find a clever and catchy way to market it ("WiFi for energy"). So spending $10 million to let her gain more experience in business and build a deeper relationship with the VCs is a pretty good investment.

leeber 12y ago
What experience is she going to get by working on a product that never even makes it to market? Don't try and tell me they spent $10M knowing full well that the idea was physically impossible. That's BS and you know it. Many entrepreneurs today seem to think they've made it because they secured large investments from VCs. Very few know what it takes to actually become profitable, reach liquidity, and create real value.

cperciva 12y ago

This reminds me of my favourite VC story from the height of the dot-com bubble. A few months prior, I had announced my distributed computation of the quadrillionth bit of Pi, and the concept of doing computations using unused CPU capacity from around the Internet was getting a lot of attention. A VC asked me to look at a company they were thinking of investing in and give my opinion as someone with experience in the field. Stripped down to its core, the company was pitching technology which would allow it to do "useful" internet-wide computations once global communication latency dropped below a certain threshold. Going along with this was a graph showing how internet round trip times had been steadily dropping for the past two decades, and projecting into the future that some time around 2006 the latencies would become short enough to make their solution work. Unfortunately, their projection had communication becoming faster than the speed of light in 2004. I pointed this out to the VC in question. They decided to invest anyway. My understanding is that the company raised $10M before going bankrupt.

sgt101 12y ago
I had a wonderful discussion about reducing latency in about 2003 where I pointed out that there was a bound on everything imposed by the speed of light; I remember the investor attempting to use his MBA... "Ok, let's challenge that - how can we go about changing that assumption". You can do anything if you try is a good moto for 4 year olds, but seriously, business schools should set traps for folk that still believe it in their 30's and empty those traps into [[horrid but funny slasher movie imagery removed to protect the innocent]] ^B^B somewhere where they can't do any more damage.
- pixelcort 12y ago
  This is where we get issues where software engineers are expected to do things that are difficult to impossible (DRM, safe crypto backdoors, accurate copyright infringement detection, accurate censorship) and are told to just "do their magic" and make it work perfectly.
  - kybernetyk 12y ago

codeN 12y ago

Was wondering if this is instead transformed into a wireless "near-fieldish" charging solution. Where you keep your phone on top of a speaker, then realized that the article assumed only 50% loss because of air, and in fact you can't even physically focus a 1m^2 speaker at near field.

solistice 12y ago
That seems like an awfully Rube Goldberglike way to charge you phone though. If you're putting it on top of a speaker, why not ditch the speaker assembly and just keep the coils and there you have an inductive charging mat.

Animats 12y ago

If only I could short the stock on these guys... Short-range electrical wireless charging is a perfectly good technology. The problem is that there are three proposed systems, all incompatible, each with shipping products but little volume. Somebody needs to kick some butt, get everybody to agree on one system, and get those charging pads in every business hotel room, and every Starbucks in the developed world. This isn't a technical problem. It's Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD, which held up high-definition discs for about two years.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

pshin45 12y ago
You make a perfectly valid point, but I don't think it addresses the issue at hand. I think what concerns people about uBeam is that they might be the next Clinkle i.e. a case of VCs getting overly excited by a highly charismatic young founder who talks a great game and has an extremely bold-sounding idea that could make them a lot of money. Clinkle was able to raise the biggest Silicon Valley seed round in history ($25 million) in June 2013 with a non-working demo for a mobile payments app that had an admittedly beautiful UI and could be used to pay retailers with high-frequency sound technology, the type of technological concept that probably looks/sounds like magic to a lot of non-experts. Lucas Duplan the founder was a Stanford CS student and probably had a lot of VCs thinking "next Mark Zuckerberg!!". Smash cut to September 2014, and the product they launch is a debit card for college students that allows users to amass rewards and share those rewards with friends via a mobile app. Pretty big letdown. In the case of uBeam, they have a confident young female founder trying to tackle a very technical problem. She talks a great game and is able to wow the press and investors with a demo that is very impressive to a layman. It's worth noting that despite Andreesen Horowitz's great reputation, it just so happens that they were one of Clinkle's investors as well and so that can't be used as evidence that all necessary due diligence has been done and the tech/physics all check out.

andyidsinga 12y ago

some of the comments here and the article remind me of clinkle - see http://www.businessinsider.com/inside-story-of-clinkle-2014-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/inside-story-of-clinkle-2014-...

aaron695 12y ago

"Move Fast and Break Shit." The tech industry seems to earn a lot of money, employ a lot of people and have us on an unparalleled rate of change. Their current theory is, 1 in 100 things pan out and when they do they make up for all the fails. This article doesn't really provide evidence this high risk approach is not worth it. Who knows, perhaps other applications might pop out of the technology. Perhaps it's a more obvious 99% in the fail basket. But being overly cautious can also cripple you. But a good write up on why the tech sucks.

tzs 12y ago

Any IEEE members here who could take a look at the following paper, which may shed some light on what is and is not possible here, and then summarize it for us? ---------- Roes, M.G.L.; Hendrix, M.A.M.; Duarte, J.L., "Contactless energy transfer through air by means of ultrasound," IECON 2011 - 37th Annual Conference on IEEE Industrial Electronics Society , vol., no., pp.1238,1243, 7-10 Nov. 2011 doi: 10.1109/IECON.2011.6119486 Abstract: An alternative approach to the wireless transfer of energy is proposed, employing acoustic waves in air. Unlike conventional methods, acoustic energy transfer is able to achieve energy transfer at high efficiencies over distances that are large in comparison to the dimensions of the transmitter and the receiver. This paper gives an overview of the principle and explains the different loss mechanisms that come into play. A theoretically limit on the achievable efficiency is calculated. It exceeds that of a comparable inductively coupled system by an order of magnitude. First preliminary measurements indicate that AET is feasible, although the measured efficiency is lower than the predicted theoretical limit. URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6119486&isnumber=6119266 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6119... Update: I was able to get a 5 minute preview of the paper from DeepDyve.com [1]. They got 53% efficiency at 1 meter, but that was at very low power (something like 37 uW). They weren't using particularly high powered transducers, though, so could have gotten more power if that had been what they were aiming for, but probably still a long way from charging a phone. They say that the challenge for acoustic energy transfer will be in developing the high power transducers that will be needed. [1] For those who have not heard of DeepDyve, they provide access to a very large number of journal articles for prices that are much lower than what the journals charge for individual articles. Yes, I know that ideally all of this stuff should be available to the public for free, but until that happens DeepDyve is worth considering. They have a "Freelancer" plan that costs nothing up front, and gives you 5 minute full previews of articles. You can purchase "tokens" in packs of 5 for $20. You can rent an article for 30 days for one token. They also have a $40/month subscription plan that lets you read unlimited articles, and gives a discount if you want to buy a PDF. You can cancel the monthly plan at any time, and your account converts to Freelancer, and you can switch back to the subscription plan at any time.

beloch 12y ago

To get as basic as possible, an iPhone 5S has a ~6 Wh battery that Apple claims will operate the phone for up to 250 hours on standby. So, if your phone is sitting on your desk doing nothing in an area with good signal, it will require a mere 6/250 = 0.024 Watts just to keep the battery from running down further than it already has. Delivering even this tiny amount of energy to a phone-sized traducer that may be tens of meters from the emitter and oriented randomly is going to be very difficult. An omnidirectional emitter would likely require more power than a Megadeth concert and heaven help anything with a millimeter scale resonant frequency that's in the room! Tracking the phone's position and delivering a tightly focused beam is probably the only realistic way to go about this. That means you will need some very cutting edge focused ultrasound beam transducers (not cheap) that can mechanically track phones (not cheap) which must be pointed by something like a kinnect (not cheap) and a clear line of sight to the phone (completely unlike WiFi). It's probably going to have to let the user know when there isn't a clear LOS too, because it would suck if your phone died because you set it down behind a plant. I can't say all this is outright impossible to do at a competitive price. Danny didn't convince me that it's impossible. It is probably pretty close though. So, why is this company being funded to do something that's probably impossible? Well, Danny is right about one thing: Investors often invest in impossible things. Just google "over unity" generators (better than perpetual motion devices basically) if you don't believe me. Earlier this decade Steorn suckered millions of euros out of investors with a lot of talk and a few cheap parlor tricks. UBeam might not break the laws of thermodynamics, but Steorn literally scoffed at them. People still lined up to invest. Whether Steorn and his co-workers were/are truly insane or con-artists has not been determined to this day. Their website is still live so, against all reasonable expectations, Steorn is still viable! Personally, if I wanted to scam investors I'd choose something that has a direct impact on the layman's life and theoretically has the potential to be big. Simultaneously, it would not obviously break the laws of physics but would be difficult enough for a company to spend years working on it only to fail. UBeam would be a pretty great setup for a scam actually.

tzs 12y ago
> That means you will need some very cutting edge focused ultrasound beam transducers (not cheap) that can mechanically track phones (not cheap) which must be pointed by something like a kinnect (not cheap) and a clear line of sight to the phone (completely unlike WiFi) Note: I'm not in any way in the following saying uBeam will work. I'm just speculating on ways that one might work around some of the objections that have been raised. Here's an idea that combines the tracking and the pointing and I don't think uses anything expensive. One way to do focused ultrasound beams is by using a phased array of transducers. That reminded me of a phased array demo I saw a film of at Caltech in the early '80s. I was taking the introductory optics class, which was taught by William Bridges [1]. Before he came to Caltech, he worked at Hughes Research, where he did such interesting things as invent ion lasers. After he came to Caltech, he split his time between Caltech and Hughes, and when I took his class he showed us a film of something his Hughes group was working on. (Note: I saw this film once over 30 years ago. The description below of what I saw is correct. I may not have the technology exactly right) It had an array of optical radiators whose phase could be varied. If you got the phase right, you could get constructive interference at a target, and destructive interference off the target, and so deliver your energy to the target. Get the phase wrong, and you just deliver a bunch of light to a large area in the general direction of the target. In the film, you saw a black background, and you saw a bunch of of vague overlapping blobs of light moving around. Someone then dangled a shiny model of the starship Enterprise in front of the background. Then they started modulating the phases of the radiators, with each being modulated at a different frequency. They had a light sensor pointed toward the target area, so that it picked up light reflected from the Enterprise. The signal from the light sensor was sent through a set of parallel filters, one for each of the frequencies being used to modulate the radiators, and the output of those filters was used to control the phase of the radiator associated with that frequency. It was designed to try to set the phase to minimize that frequency in the reflected flight. The idea is that if a given radiator is contributing to a maximum at the target, then slight changes in the phase of that radiator won't make much difference, and so the modulation frequency of that radiator should be weak in the reflected light. If, on the other hand, a given radiator is contributing toward a minimum, slight changes in phase will make big changes, and so the modulation of that radiator should be strong in the reflected light. When they turned on this feedback circuit that filtered the reflected signal and adjusted the phase, those drifting blobs all pretty much instantly disappeared, replaced with a beam that was focused on the Enterprise, and tracked it as they waved the Enterprise around. Could something like this work for an ultrasonic charger? Suppose the transmitter uses a phased array of transducers in order to get a focused ultrasonic beam. Suppose we include in the receiver some kind of wireless communication mechanism, such as ZigBee (IEEE 802.15.4). Now perhaps we can modulate the phases of the transducers, and have the receiver report back on how strong the modulation is at its end, and then we can adjust the phases back at the transmitter side to focus the beam on the receiver and follow it, doing with ultrasound what Bridges' group at Hughes was doing with light. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_B._Bridges http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_B._Bridges

Blackthorn 12y ago

I am not a physicist and have no clue about the viability of the startup. What I do know is that an awful lot of the comments here are begging the question. They tend to be of the form: "Since they were invested in, they must be good/viable/work!" What the fuck, folks? Have you lost your collective minds? You should know better than this.

waterlesscloud 12y ago
It's more along the lines of: "Smart groups gave them money, so they must at least have a response to the first objections that pop into everyone's head." Whether those responses represent approaches that will work or not is unknown, but I feel quite safe in assuming they have some sort of plan for them. It's insanely arrogant to assume otherwise.
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  Smart people are often irrational when reasoning about something outside their domain expertise. If it sounds like uBeam is physically impossible or unwise, then I'd rather bet against them than simply assume that other investors have done the scientific vetting.
  - waterlesscloud 12y ago
    What I'm saying is that it's crazy to assume the investors didn't ask the questions that popped into the heads of every Tom, Dick, and Harry on HN in 10 seconds. Therefore, it's safe to assume the company team must have had some kind of response to that. Was it valid? Did it snow the investors and their vetting teams? Who knows? But certainly that first level of conversation must have taken place.
- gfodor 12y ago
  Exactly. The claim isn't that ubeam is viable, it's that investors like a16z with competent technical staff are more than capable of doing back of the napkin physics before investing, so there is surely more to the story here-- either the company tech can be argued to be viable with more non-public info, or the investors are aware of the impossibility of their current claims but decided to invest anyway.

Animats 12y ago

I've been looking closely at the UBeam demo video at http://on.aol.com/video/ubeam-wireless-power-demonstration-at-d9-517342543 There's a lot of information one can get from that video if you turn the resolution up to 720p and look at still frames. The meter is reading voltage, on what appears to be the 10 VAC scale. (Someone wrote it was on ohms, but it's not.) About 4V is coming out. We don't know what, if anything is the load, and there's no current measurement, so we can't compute power. It's interesting that they're measuring AC voltage while supposedly charging a DC device, a phone. The ultrasonic transducers seem to be common hobbyist-level range sensors as used on small robots. Like these: https://www.futurlec.com/Ultrasonic_Sensors.shtml https://www.futurlec.com/Ultrasonic_Sensors.shtml At 00:31 into the video, there's a good view of the back of the board holding the ultrasonic receivers. If you take a screenshot of this and enhance it, you can see the wiring. There are just two wires coming out of the receiver, and it looks like all the sensors are just wired in series. That maximizes voltage at the expense of current, of course. The transmit array has 10 transducers in a hexagonal pattern, which helps focus the beam. (That transducer is a rather broad-beamed device.) The transmit end is powered by a hefty looking power supply, so those transducers are probably being driven hard. With that setup, they should be able to get a few volts out of the receiver end, using the same kind of off the shelf transducer at both ends. This is something you could put together in a day or so after ordering the parts. There doesn't seem to be anything new here at all in the demo version. The efficiency is probably a few percent. That's for this ideal case - transmitter pointed directly at receiver. The Wireless Power Consortium inductive wireless charging people report 60% efficiency, and they're trying to get to 80%. The patent application talks about steering and focusing the beam, but you're still going to need line of sight, and a big emitter array.

KaiserPro 12y ago
You might be able to beam form a bit more efficiency, however one thing you can't escape is the angle at which the receiver is pointing. All microphones have polar patterns. There are areas that are more sensistive, areas that are less. So not only does it need line of sight, it'll need to be pointing at transmitter. It's also interesting to note that we've had wireless charging for at least 5 years, but none of them yet are long distance. they are all mats that you put the device on.

mikeyouse 12y ago

If I may critique his critique, changing one single assumption completely changes the story. He starts with the assumption of 100dB as the max power but OSHA's ultrasonic recommendation[1] is actually 145dB which is 31,000x more power.. Even if you use 130dB, it's still 1,000x more power than he assumes. Another big assumption is that the performance should match a 5W iPhone charger. Why? The whole point is at you won't need to worry about charging. If you have 8 hours at your desk to charge rather than 20 minutes plugged in, you can get by charging at 1/20th the speed. So try putting a requirement of 0.25W and 130dB in his formulas and see if you'd 'gamble' $10M on this idea... I'm on mobile so excuse the lack of units, but I followed his calcs for a 25cm x 25cm transmitter at 130dB: http://m.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10+*+%284pi%29+*+.25%5E2+*+50%25&x=0&y=0 http://m.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10+*+%284pi%29+*+.25%5E2+... So it should deliver ~4W. Obviously there will be losses, etc but even at 25%, 1W should be sufficient to passively charge your phone. Note that all of the same assumptions but with 140dB would instead give you 10W, which is only slightly less than the rapid charger for the new iPads. [1] - https://www.osha.gov/dts/osta/otm/noise/health_effects/ultrasonics.html https://www.osha.gov/dts/osta/otm/noise/health_effects/ultra...

sharpneli 12y ago
At 130 and 140dB air is starting to behave rather nonlinearly. That means you will actually start hearing it. Remember that the OSHA ultrasonic recommendation is more about "Will it permanently harm you" than comfort. At 140dB you'd hear probably rather substantial audible whine due to first and second order harmonics. On the other hand a brutal whine at 15kHz is perfect for keeping those kids off my lawn when I charge my phone! Edit: I tried to find some information about the receiving end transducer losses. I bet they're going to be insane as it basically any impedance mismatch with air is going to cause the power to just reflect away, the bigger the mismatch the bigger the wasted power.
cowsandmilk 12y ago
actually, for 20 kHZ, the frequency in his article, the OSHA recommendation is 105dB. And if you dig into the OSHA regs, the 115+30 standard for higher frequencies only applies for 15 minutes of exposure per day or less. So, if you only want your charger running for 15 minutes, have at it!

vladtaltos 12y ago

as we require more and more power every year does it make sense to charge your phone with a few percent efficiency instead of walking 3 steps to a damn wall socket? is it that difficult for people? I hope there will be a regulation preventing stupidly wasteful technologies that will impact everyone globally. thank god we can charge our phones from 3 meters - we need another war to support this energy though.. .

Pengtuzi 12y ago

An honest question: Are we heading towards a new dot-com bubble? I feel like a lot of companies have been bought/sold for ridiculous amounts, e.g. Mojang, as well as these crazy investments devoid of critique. I'm far from a biz man but it makes me a bit worried. Should I be worried?

dkfmn 12y ago
One of the biggest signs of the bubble were the lack of sanity on exits and IPOs for unproven businesses and technologies. In this case there is certainly (some) irrational exuberance for funding, but unless you start seeing lots of minimal revenue IPOs it's not the same animal. In short - lots of startups may die, but it's probably more things that wouldn't have otherwise been funded. It's unlikely to crash the stock market again at current rates.
no_future 12y ago
According to Mark Cuban(who I'm pretty damn sure knows what he is talking about), it isn't remotely a bubble, because in the dot com bubble everyone was investing - regular working people quit their jobs to become day traders, you would hear people at the coffee shop talking about the prices of stocks they bought, etc. Then when the bubble burst those who hadn't got out while they could lost everything and more. Now its VCs that are throwing money at everything, and they've got more than they know what to do with, and will be just fine if companies they invest in fail.

deleted 12y ago

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blahblah12 12y ago

UM doesn't this use piezoelectric crystals that are vibrated by ultrasound?

blahblah12 12y ago

Um doesn't this use piezo electric crystals that vibrate with sound?

bdickason 12y ago

I would much rather see 10 million put towards an idea that most people think is impossible but could dramatically change the way we experience the world than another photo sharing network.

lateguy 12y ago

I am quite unsure about the entire concept, but I went to Facebook and a lot of people who are/were not getting investor funding was sharing this :).

highCs 12y ago

Actually, I wouldn't even do the math. For any tech, the question is: does it work (right now)? I beleive people made that mistakes with occulus rift too for example. Does it work? no. It's maybe promising, but it don't work. Period.

venomsnake 12y ago

I have even better solution. For a couple of million dollars less. Standardize batteries. Make them replaceable. When your battery dies - pop new one. Loan one. You can charge them in bulk. We have been using that with AA for couple of decades with awesome results. Now can I get my funding please?

s_q_b 12y ago

Meredith Perry is no fraud. She was in a Penn graduate program before this venture, and has worked at NASA. It's directional transmission technology. The power loss is minimized as the ultrasound is directed and focused at a particular location. There's no inverse square law here, and it's easily within the bound of known physics. As far as I know, (indirect relationship with the a good friend of the founder, that I won't say anything more about to protect his privacy) Meredith is actually genius-level and a relentless work horse. I'd bet big on this one. If I could work for any one company it would be uBeam. And I just started a great position, and I'd do it despite the press. This is a "First they dismiss you. Then they laugh at you. Then you win" scenario.

DanBC 12y ago
She was an astrobiologist. But so what? There are plenty of real engineers who are tinkering with over-unity nonsense. While this ultra-sonic charging isn't as dumb as perpetual motion it does appear to be dumb.
- s_q_b 12y ago
  She's also worked for NASA, in additional to being a wet work astrobiologist. Meaning she has a high level of intelligence, experience working with technology, and the ability to improvise tools. Those all sound like great credentials. Honestly Computer Science used to be so open to outsiders, now it's "If you don't have a degree we don't believe you." That's really bad. Especially considering the alternative theory involves her pulling the wool over the eyes of both AH and Marissa Mayer for ten million dollars.
  - DanBC 12y ago
    So what if she worked for NASA? I can probaly find NASA ex-employees who believe in homeopathy. What's she's doing has nothing to do with computer science. You're right that people shouldn't be dismissing her work because of her qualifications and previous work experience but that works both ways - she doesn't magically gain credibillity just because she used to work at someplace or other.

serve_yay 12y ago

Investors decided to invest in a dumb project. Here's the thing: so what?

sunshinerag 12y ago

I am surprised nobody has thought QE with it's lot of paper money floating around as reasons for the market distortion. Maybe somebody should disrupt fiat and centralised money supply.

cdixon 12y ago

VCs almost always bring in outside experts to diligence ideas that they are qualified can't diligence themselves. That happened extensively here.

vasilipupkin 12y ago
So, your experts concluded the tech works or at least could work ? Are we calling bullshit on the naysayers then ?