The Future of Wireless Power: A Game-Changing Technology

One of the main challenges of wireless power technology is that it needs a direct line-of-sight to work. However, if this technology becomes the standard, household items like furniture with transmitters could become common, leading to a mesh network in homes. This would result in smaller power sources being needed to achieve reliable and fast coverage throughout the home. The idea of a wireless power network is not far-fetched, and it's already being explored by companies and innovators.

A potential turning point for wireless power technology is closer than you think. In 2021, Apple is rumored to release its first iPhone with new ports, which could signal a shift in the market. Apple has the power to guide the market, as seen with its bold decision to ditch the headphone jack in its 2016 iPhone. This move led to an explosion of true wireless earbuds, which were once considered niche products but have now become ubiquitous. If Apple follows suit with wireless power technology, it could create a new market and drive innovation in this area.

The economics of wireless power are crucial to its widespread adoption. Depending on which companies acquire the tech, it could be sold through various channels. However, one direction that's gaining traction is subscriptions. For example, if T-Mobile acquired all the wireless power companies, it could create a package that includes mobile signal and power. Power could become a sort of currency that can be shared, traded, and even generated. Imagine being able to line your house with solar panels and using the energy generated to provide charging in nearby areas while earning money from it.

The implications of wireless power go beyond personal use. If this technology becomes available, information can also be sent wirelessly using light. This is how fiber-optic internet works, where light carries data through glass tubes until it reaches its destination. In a world where wireless power is widely available, even non-smart devices like traffic lights could become aware of their surroundings and communicate with other devices. Imagine traffic lights that can receive information from road cameras, constantly figuring out the best ways to manage traffic flow.

However, the future of wireless power technology is far from certain. There are almost an infinite number of paths it could take, and which technologies ultimately become dominant depends on many tiny factors that we can't predict or control. In today's world, finding the time to sit down and learn new things can be challenging due to the numerous distractions around us.

To overcome this hurdle, there's a valuable resource that can help: Blinkist. This app takes the best insights from thousands of non-fiction books and condenses them into 15-minute parcels that you can either read or have read to. For example, I was told to read "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" by Stephen Covey, but I never got around to it. With Blinkist, I could understand the key messages in just a few minutes while doing a quick workout one evening.

As one of the first 100 people to try Blinkist, you'll get unlimited access for a week and can cancel at any time during that period. The link to sign up is below, and it's completely free. With Blinkist, you can finally start reading and learning more than you thought possible, without sacrificing your busy schedule.

The idea of wireless power technology is exciting, and its potential applications are vast. As we move forward in this space, it will be essential to stay informed and adapt to the changing landscape. By exploring the possibilities of wireless power, we can unlock new innovations and improve our daily lives in ways we never thought possible.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enI'm just gonna say it wireless charges kind of suck the way they work is your phone has a coil these wireless charging pads have a coil and putting them close to each other create an electromagnetic field but your phone turns into power and people say it's simpler but by the time you put your phone on it and by the time you've lined up the two coils in my opinion you might as well have just plugged a phone in you can't even lift your phone without interrupting this Wireless charge which you can with a cable but anyways I see this not-so-great wireless charging as a necessary evil a first step leading towards something that actually is game-changing something so big that I think the very concept of a charging cable even the concept of a battery will at one point be extinct also a massive thanks to blinka store sponsoring this episode so I mentioned in a video some time ago a device called the mother box it's a transmitter announced in 2017 that allowed for true wireless charging it would fire out radio frequency waves in all directions and any smart device around it could pick up those waves and convert them back into power this is wildly cool but it has one main floor as long as your phone was right next to it you'd be charging with ten watts of power which is still considered fast wireless charging but as your small phone starts to move away this speed Falls rapidly 10 watts quickly becomes 4 watts at just 10 inches away and a measly 2 watts as 16 inches now this is a bit of a simplification but just to give you an idea having my phone on right now with its screen on it's Wi-Fi on it's Bluetooth on I'd need about a 2.5 watt charger just to keep the battery level constant and so even if I was sitting just to 16 inches away from my phone that would be far enough such that I would still be losing charge albeit slower than usual but now this tech has been somewhat one-upped by using light to charge your phone it still starts with a transmitter but it's now a two-stage process first the transmitter scans its environment identifying the devices that need to be charged before sending precise invisible beams of infrared light unlike radio frequencies which lose power very quickly this does not and it's close to 100% efficient because it's not just spraying waves in all directions all of the energy that gets let out by the transmitter ends up at the receiver aka your device now this has its own issues right now you have to clip an external receiver onto your device to turn the lights back into power and if you have a block the flow of light charging stops but there are five distinct reasons why I think this tech has got incredible potential so first of all let's start with Hawaii why do you want wireless power well if you ask an average person who uses a smartphone or their main problem is there's a good chance they will tell you it's the batteries batteries are bulky and they degrade over time the main reason phones become almost unusable after a few years a future where wireless power is available everywhere the same way mobile data currently is is a future where it's not just a case the batteries are gonna become more efficient it's a case that we can actually remove them we can start to engineer devices from the ground up to be built without batteries and that changes what we can do all of a sudden with wireless power devices like truly smart rings or even smart contact lenses become possible there's also the fact that put simply our modern technology looks really cool it's probably about to look even cooler in the future but cables don't I think it's only a matter of time before people will look back on phone cables the same way we look back on traveling via horse-and-carriage thinking it could have been so much better the second thing is how you'd get to the stage the transition to truly wireless power is not going to happen overnight there is a company called white charge which currently has a couple of different products for example the tiny power Park transmitter that plugs into a main socket and sends energy but this only has a power output of 100 milli watts so a tenth of a watt you need 25 power parks just to keep one of your small phones at a constant level of battery so it sounds pretty lame but I'm confident it's about to get better they already do have larger products that can send out 750 megawatts and one that can even do 2.25 watts and this technology taking off will be a case of a finding ways to send more power and B being able to shrink these larger transmitters into a smaller form factor so that leads us onto when and to reiterate I don't think batteries will disappear in the next few years wireless power will start with low-power devices like I could see a situation where TV remotes will start to be powered wirelessly by the TV they come with they might then slowly transition to light bulbs and then of course smart phones obviously even if wireless power becomes readily available and even when phones start to have built-in receivers they probably will still need to have batteries in them as but I could see the size of these batteries get smaller and smaller over time as we've become more and more reliant on power in the air one of the main challenges of this tech is that the light needs a direct line-of-sight to work but it's very possible that if it becomes the standard then household items like furniture like lumps could ship with transmitters so you'd end up with a sort of mesh network in your home lots of smaller power sources leading to all over coverage that's reliable and fast and that leads me on to the fourth thing so as of right now this sounds like some long windy path that'll probably never happen and if it does it's super far in the future but I could see a potential turning point and it's sooner than you expect it 2021 is when Apple is rumored to release the first iPhone with new ports and to start with you might be thinking what on earth does that have to do with anything Apple has the power to guide the market we've seen this happen once already their bold decision to ditch the headphone jack in their 2016 iPhone led to two things a Android manufacturers also feeling like it was okay for them to start ditching their headphone jacks and be an absolute explosion in true wireless earbuds in just the last three years these otherwise super niche products have become prolific and it's because of the economics of it Apple and the subsequent companies who also ditch the headphone jack created a new market of people who all of a sudden wanted wireless earbuds and whenever there is a large demand for something you can bet your bottom dollar that there are companies out there working hard to try and serve it and so what I'm saying here is that this 2021 iPhone this port --less device could do the same thing for wireless power that the iPhone 7 did for wireless earphones and that leads me onto the economics of wireless power depending on which companies acquire the tech it could be sold in many ways but I think the direction most things are headed in now is subscriptions I could see for example if t-mobile acquired all of these wireless power companies and started rolling out something nationwide they could create a package that sells not just mobile signal but power and power essentially becomes a sort of currency that can be shared traded and even generators I could line my house with solar panels and use the energy generated from that to provide charge in radius nearby and I would earn from it it is a super interesting future and if for a minute we think beyond the smartphone there's an even bigger because we're not just limited to sending power with infrared or other types of light you can also send information this is how fiber optic internet works light carries the data and it's sent down these massive glass tubes till it reaches the other end and then the data is transferred in a world where this light has become readily available even at non smart devices let's say like a traffic light could all of a sudden become aware of what's around them imagine if traffic lights could receive information from Road cameras and so they could constantly figure out what the best ways to send cars are to avoid traffic on a different note you could have completely cordless virtual reality headsets with each not just lusting infinitely but able to communicate with others all around you for shared virtual realities like we've never seen before okay I realize I went a little sci-fi towards the end and it's worth practicing this might happen but it also might not there are almost an infinite number of paths that technology could head down in the future and which technologies actually end up becoming dominant depends on lots of tiny factors that we can't really predict or control now in today's age it can be tricky to find the time to sit down and just learn there are millions of distractions and you might be the kind of person who loves the idea of reading a book but hates the fact that they never get around to it blink estoy see it is reading for the modern era it's the only app that takes the best insights just the info you need from thousands of non-fiction books and it condenses them into these 15 minute parcels that you can either read or have read to so for example I've been told to read this book the seven Habits of Highly Effective People I'm gonna say buy more than ten people but I just never got around to it whereas through blinkers I'd understood all the key messages whilst doing a quick workout one evening there was another book called do breathe and I probably wouldn't have picked it up if I just seen it in a bookshop but I gave it a go because it's only a 15 minute investment it was all about taking you back to a more simple mindset that can give you happier the first 100 people to go to the link below are gonna get unlimited access for one week to try it out and this trial is completely free and you can cancel at any time during that period so check out plinkus now and without being said I'll catch you in the next oneI'm just gonna say it wireless charges kind of suck the way they work is your phone has a coil these wireless charging pads have a coil and putting them close to each other create an electromagnetic field but your phone turns into power and people say it's simpler but by the time you put your phone on it and by the time you've lined up the two coils in my opinion you might as well have just plugged a phone in you can't even lift your phone without interrupting this Wireless charge which you can with a cable but anyways I see this not-so-great wireless charging as a necessary evil a first step leading towards something that actually is game-changing something so big that I think the very concept of a charging cable even the concept of a battery will at one point be extinct also a massive thanks to blinka store sponsoring this episode so I mentioned in a video some time ago a device called the mother box it's a transmitter announced in 2017 that allowed for true wireless charging it would fire out radio frequency waves in all directions and any smart device around it could pick up those waves and convert them back into power this is wildly cool but it has one main floor as long as your phone was right next to it you'd be charging with ten watts of power which is still considered fast wireless charging but as your small phone starts to move away this speed Falls rapidly 10 watts quickly becomes 4 watts at just 10 inches away and a measly 2 watts as 16 inches now this is a bit of a simplification but just to give you an idea having my phone on right now with its screen on it's Wi-Fi on it's Bluetooth on I'd need about a 2.5 watt charger just to keep the battery level constant and so even if I was sitting just to 16 inches away from my phone that would be far enough such that I would still be losing charge albeit slower than usual but now this tech has been somewhat one-upped by using light to charge your phone it still starts with a transmitter but it's now a two-stage process first the transmitter scans its environment identifying the devices that need to be charged before sending precise invisible beams of infrared light unlike radio frequencies which lose power very quickly this does not and it's close to 100% efficient because it's not just spraying waves in all directions all of the energy that gets let out by the transmitter ends up at the receiver aka your device now this has its own issues right now you have to clip an external receiver onto your device to turn the lights back into power and if you have a block the flow of light charging stops but there are five distinct reasons why I think this tech has got incredible potential so first of all let's start with Hawaii why do you want wireless power well if you ask an average person who uses a smartphone or their main problem is there's a good chance they will tell you it's the batteries batteries are bulky and they degrade over time the main reason phones become almost unusable after a few years a future where wireless power is available everywhere the same way mobile data currently is is a future where it's not just a case the batteries are gonna become more efficient it's a case that we can actually remove them we can start to engineer devices from the ground up to be built without batteries and that changes what we can do all of a sudden with wireless power devices like truly smart rings or even smart contact lenses become possible there's also the fact that put simply our modern technology looks really cool it's probably about to look even cooler in the future but cables don't I think it's only a matter of time before people will look back on phone cables the same way we look back on traveling via horse-and-carriage thinking it could have been so much better the second thing is how you'd get to the stage the transition to truly wireless power is not going to happen overnight there is a company called white charge which currently has a couple of different products for example the tiny power Park transmitter that plugs into a main socket and sends energy but this only has a power output of 100 milli watts so a tenth of a watt you need 25 power parks just to keep one of your small phones at a constant level of battery so it sounds pretty lame but I'm confident it's about to get better they already do have larger products that can send out 750 megawatts and one that can even do 2.25 watts and this technology taking off will be a case of a finding ways to send more power and B being able to shrink these larger transmitters into a smaller form factor so that leads us onto when and to reiterate I don't think batteries will disappear in the next few years wireless power will start with low-power devices like I could see a situation where TV remotes will start to be powered wirelessly by the TV they come with they might then slowly transition to light bulbs and then of course smart phones obviously even if wireless power becomes readily available and even when phones start to have built-in receivers they probably will still need to have batteries in them as but I could see the size of these batteries get smaller and smaller over time as we've become more and more reliant on power in the air one of the main challenges of this tech is that the light needs a direct line-of-sight to work but it's very possible that if it becomes the standard then household items like furniture like lumps could ship with transmitters so you'd end up with a sort of mesh network in your home lots of smaller power sources leading to all over coverage that's reliable and fast and that leads me on to the fourth thing so as of right now this sounds like some long windy path that'll probably never happen and if it does it's super far in the future but I could see a potential turning point and it's sooner than you expect it 2021 is when Apple is rumored to release the first iPhone with new ports and to start with you might be thinking what on earth does that have to do with anything Apple has the power to guide the market we've seen this happen once already their bold decision to ditch the headphone jack in their 2016 iPhone led to two things a Android manufacturers also feeling like it was okay for them to start ditching their headphone jacks and be an absolute explosion in true wireless earbuds in just the last three years these otherwise super niche products have become prolific and it's because of the economics of it Apple and the subsequent companies who also ditch the headphone jack created a new market of people who all of a sudden wanted wireless earbuds and whenever there is a large demand for something you can bet your bottom dollar that there are companies out there working hard to try and serve it and so what I'm saying here is that this 2021 iPhone this port --less device could do the same thing for wireless power that the iPhone 7 did for wireless earphones and that leads me onto the economics of wireless power depending on which companies acquire the tech it could be sold in many ways but I think the direction most things are headed in now is subscriptions I could see for example if t-mobile acquired all of these wireless power companies and started rolling out something nationwide they could create a package that sells not just mobile signal but power and power essentially becomes a sort of currency that can be shared traded and even generators I could line my house with solar panels and use the energy generated from that to provide charge in radius nearby and I would earn from it it is a super interesting future and if for a minute we think beyond the smartphone there's an even bigger because we're not just limited to sending power with infrared or other types of light you can also send information this is how fiber optic internet works light carries the data and it's sent down these massive glass tubes till it reaches the other end and then the data is transferred in a world where this light has become readily available even at non smart devices let's say like a traffic light could all of a sudden become aware of what's around them imagine if traffic lights could receive information from Road cameras and so they could constantly figure out what the best ways to send cars are to avoid traffic on a different note you could have completely cordless virtual reality headsets with each not just lusting infinitely but able to communicate with others all around you for shared virtual realities like we've never seen before okay I realize I went a little sci-fi towards the end and it's worth practicing this might happen but it also might not there are almost an infinite number of paths that technology could head down in the future and which technologies actually end up becoming dominant depends on lots of tiny factors that we can't really predict or control now in today's age it can be tricky to find the time to sit down and just learn there are millions of distractions and you might be the kind of person who loves the idea of reading a book but hates the fact that they never get around to it blink estoy see it is reading for the modern era it's the only app that takes the best insights just the info you need from thousands of non-fiction books and it condenses them into these 15 minute parcels that you can either read or have read to so for example I've been told to read this book the seven Habits of Highly Effective People I'm gonna say buy more than ten people but I just never got around to it whereas through blinkers I'd understood all the key messages whilst doing a quick workout one evening there was another book called do breathe and I probably wouldn't have picked it up if I just seen it in a bookshop but I gave it a go because it's only a 15 minute investment it was all about taking you back to a more simple mindset that can give you happier the first 100 people to go to the link below are gonna get unlimited access for one week to try it out and this trial is completely free and you can cancel at any time during that period so check out plinkus now and without being said I'll catch you in the next one\n"