Business Weekly - Cambridge, UK

No strings attached: Splashpower's wireless charging technology

 Following six years of intensive work dotted with near misses and strategical restructuring, Splashpower Ltd is on the verge of launching its first product into the UK market, expected to hit shops in time for Christmas.

A prototype was demonstrated at 2008 CES. This ‘universal charger’ is an upright recharging dock – part of the SplashPad family – designed to handle one mobile device at a time. It will be manufactured in China and is expected to retail at £49.99.

Splashpower’s technology has been hitting headlines on a fairly regular basis since its incorporation in 2001 and though interest has continued to simmer over the years, imminent launches have failed to materialise into anything more concrete.

Not this time according to chief executive, Bill Campbell, Splashpower’s chief executive. “Back when I joined in April 2006 there had been issues on achieving the right cost point for functionality,” said Campbell.

“We had to take a fairly radical look at what we were doing and set the engineering team an ambitious target, which they met.”

Splashpower’s offering contains two elements: The SplashPad, a universal wireless charging platform which delivers power to mobile devices; and the SplashModule, a sub-millimetre thin receiver module which can be fitted to all the mobile devices so they are ready to receive wireless power from the pad.

The SplashModule is designed to seamlessly integrate into OEM devices, customised to the shape, size and power requirements of the device and can be easily integrated into the host device or add-on accessories.

Splashpower uses the principle of electromagnetic induction to safely transfer power wirelessly via an electromagnetic field from the SplashPad to the SplashModule. Devices typically charge at the same rate as if you used a traditional plug-in charger with no adverse effects on the product’s battery life.

The new wireless recharging device comes in the shape of an upright charger for single devices, but is capable of providing power for a number of products including PDAs, mobile phones and iPods, achieving a long-standing goal of producing a universal wireless charger.

It can also potentially be used to directly power desk fans, lamps, self-warming coffee mugs, toys, wireless mice and others and is designed to preserve the integrity of magnetic data stored on credit cards and other common storage media such as floppy disks.

Previous incarnations of the SplashPad have been able to simultaneously charge several different kinds of devices. Though this kind of functionality had to be reined back to meet its new price objectives, the technology is sound and still exists and Campbell hopes Splashpower will be able to exploit it in the future.

Splashpower raised funding through an “extremely cooperative” investment from Benchmark Capital in August 2007 and will look to raise more in the middle of next year.

“We have other deals in the pipeline and we hope to reach month-to-month profitability by mid-2009,” said Campbell. “We then want to produce a dual charger, capable of charging two products at the same time.

“The big thing is to get the device integrated into phones, which we need to do by reducing the size of the electronic coil.”

TrackBack URI for this entry

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed