Eric Giler demos wireless electricity

87,642 views ・ 2009-08-31

TED


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Early visions of wireless power
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actually were thought of by Nikola Tesla
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basically about 100 years ago.
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The thought that
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you wouldn't want to transfer electric power wirelessly,
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no one ever thought of that.
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They thought, "Who would use it if you didn't?"
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And so, in fact, he actually set about
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doing a variety of things.
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Built the Tesla coil. This tower was built
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on Long Island back at the beginning of the 1900s.
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And the idea was, it was supposed to be able to transfer power
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anywhere on Earth.
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We'll never know if this stuff worked. Actually, I think the
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Federal Bureau of Investigation
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took it down for security purposes,
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sometime in the early 1900s.
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But the one thing that did come out of electricity
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is that we love this stuff so much.
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I mean, think about how much we love this.
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If you just walk outside, there are trillions of dollars
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that have been invested in infrastructure around the world,
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putting up wires to get power from where it's created
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to where it's used.
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The other thing is, we love batteries.
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And for those of us that have an environmental element to us,
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there is something like 40 billion
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disposable batteries built every year
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for power that, generally speaking,
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is used within a few inches or a few feet
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of where there is very inexpensive power.
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So, before I got here,
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I thought, "You know, I am from North America.
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We do have a little bit of a reputation in the United States."
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So I thought I'd better look it up first.
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So definition number six is the North American
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definition of the word "suck."
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Wires suck, they really do.
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Think about it. Whether that's you in that picture
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or something under your desk.
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The other thing is, batteries suck too.
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And they really, really do.
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Do you ever wonder what happens to this stuff?
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40 billion of these things built.
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This is what happens.
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They fall apart, they disintegrate,
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and they end up here.
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So when you talk about expensive power,
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the cost per kilowatt-hour
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to supply battery power to something
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is on the order of two to three hundred pounds.
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Think about that.
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The most expensive grid power in the world
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is thousandths of that.
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So fortunately, one of the other definitions
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of "suck" that was in there, it does create a vacuum.
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And nature really does abhor a vacuum.
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What happened back a few years ago
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was a group of theoretical physicists at MIT
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actually came up with this concept of transferring power over distance.
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Basically they were able to light a 60 watt light bulb
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at a distance of about two meters.
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It got about 50 percent of the efficiency --
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by the way, that's still a couple thousand times
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more efficient than a battery would be, to do the same thing.
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But were able to light that,
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and do it very successfully.
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This was actually the experiment. So you can see
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the coils were somewhat larger.
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The light bulb was a fairly simple task, from their standpoint.
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This all came from a professor
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waking up at night to the third night in a row
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that his wife's cellphone was beeping
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because it was running out of battery power.
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And he was thinking, "With all the electricity that's out there in the walls,
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why couldn't some of that just come into the phone so I could get some sleep?"
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And he actually came up with this concept
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of resonant energy transfer.
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But inside a standard transformer are two coils of wire.
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And those two coils of wire are really, really close to each other,
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and actually do transfer power
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magnetically and wirelessly, only over a very short distance.
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What Dr. Soljacic figured out how to do
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was separate the coils in a transformer
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to a greater distance than the size of those transformers
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using this technology, which is not dissimilar
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from the way an opera singer shatters a glass on the other side of the room.
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It's a resonant phenomenon
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for which he actually received a MacArthur Fellowship Award,
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which is nicknamed the Genius Award,
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last September, for his discovery.
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So how does it work?
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Imagine a coil. For those of you that are engineers,
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there's a capacitor attached to it too.
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And if you can cause that coil to resonate,
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what will happen is it will pulse
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at alternating current frequencies --
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at a fairly high frequency, by the way.
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And if you can bring another device
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close enough to the source,
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that will only work at exactly that frequency,
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you can actually get them to do what's called strongly couple,
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and transfer magnetic energy between them.
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And then what you do is, you start out with electricity,
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turn it into magnetic field, take that magnetic field,
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turn it back into electricity,
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and then you can use it.
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Number one question I get asked.
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I mean, people are worried about cellphones being safe.
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You know. What about safety?
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The first thing is this is not a "radiative" technology.
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It doesn't radiate.
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There aren't electric fields here. It's a magnetic field.
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It stays within either what we call the source,
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or within the device.
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And actually, the magnetic fields we're using
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are basically about the same as the Earth's magnetic field.
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We live in a magnetic field.
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And the other thing that's pretty cool about the technology is
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that it only transfers energy to things that work at exactly the same frequency.
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And it's virtually impossible in nature to make that happen.
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Then finally we have governmental bodies everywhere
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that will regulate everything we do.
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They've pretty much set field exposure limits,
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which all of the things in the stuff I'll show you today
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sort of sit underneath those guidelines.
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Mobile electronics.
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Home electronics.
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Those cords under your desk, I bet everybody here
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has something that looks like that or those batteries.
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There are industrial applications.
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And then finally, electric vehicles.
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These electric cars are beautiful.
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But who is going to want to plug them in?
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Imagine driving into your garage -- we've built a system to do this --
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you drive into your garage, and the car charges itself,
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because there is a mat on the floor that's plugged into the wall.
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And it actually causes your car to charge safely and efficiently.
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Then there's all kinds of other applications. Implanted medical devices,
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where people don't have to die of infections anymore
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if you can seal the thing up.
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Credit cards, robot vacuum cleaners.
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So what I'd like to do is take a couple minutes
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and show you, actually, how it works.
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And what I'm going to do is to show you pretty much what's here.
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You've got a coil.
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That coil is connected to an R.F. amplifier
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that creates a high-frequency oscillating magnetic field.
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We put one on the back of the television set.
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By the way, I do make it look a little bit easier than it is.
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There's lots of electronics and secret sauce
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and all kinds of intellectual property that go into it.
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But then what's going to happen is, it will create a field.
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It will cause one to get created
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on the other side.
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And if the demo gods are willing,
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in about 10 seconds or so we should see it.
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The 10 seconds actually are because we --
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I don't know if any of you have ever thought about plugging a T.V. in
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when you use just a cord.
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Generally, you have to go over and hit the button. So I thought
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we put a little computer in it that has to wake up
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to tell it to do that.
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So, I'll plug that in.
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It creates a magnetic field here.
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It causes one to be created out here.
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And as I said, in sort of about 10 seconds
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we should start to see ...
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This is a commercially --
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(Applause)
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available color television set.
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Imagine, you get one of these things. You want to hang them on the wall.
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How many people want to hang them on the wall?
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Think about it. You don't want those ugly cords coming down.
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Imagine if you can get rid of it.
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The other thing I wanted to talk about was safety.
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So, there is nothing going on. I'm okay.
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And I'll do it again, just for safety's sake.
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Almost immediately, though, people ask,
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"How small can you make this? Can you make this small enough?"
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Because remember Dr. Soljacic's original idea
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was his wife's cellphone beeping.
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So, I wanted to show you something.
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We're an equal opportunity designer of this sort of thing.
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This a Google G1.
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You know, it's the latest thing that's come out.
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It runs the Android operating system.
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I think I heard somebody talk about that before.
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It's odd. It has a battery.
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It also has coiled electronics
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that WiTricity has put into the back of it.
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And if I can get the camera --
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okay, great --
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you'll see, as I get sort of close...
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you're looking at a cellphone powered completely wirelessly.
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(Applause)
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And I know some of you are Apple aficionados.
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So, you know they don't make it easy at Apple to get inside their phones.
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So we put a little sleeve on the back,
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but we should be able to get this guy to wake up too.
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And those of you that have an iPhone recognize the green center.
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(Applause)
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And Nokia as well.
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You'll see that what we did there is put a little thing in the back, to do that,
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and it probably beeps, actually, as it goes on as well.
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But they typically use it to light up the screen.
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So, imagine these things could go ... they could go in your ceiling.
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They could go in the floor. They could go, actually, underneath your desktop.
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So that when you walk in or you come in from home,
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if you carry a purse, it works in your purse.
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You never have to worry about plugging these things in again.
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And think of what that would do for you.
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So I think in closing,
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sort of in the immortal visions of The New Yorker magazine,
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I thought I'd put up one more slide.
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And for those of you who can't read it, it says,
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"It does appear to be some kind of wireless technology."
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So, thank you very much.
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10:03
(Applause)
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