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New Toys
(Dick Selwood)
When you are exposed to around 40 companies presenting their latest and greatest products or philosophy, it is sometimes a little difficult to keep the b……t filter in full-on mode. On your behalf, I tried to be as cynical as possible at the Globalpress World Summit in San Francisco, trying to see through each professional presentation and slick use of PowerPoint to establish whether there was a grain of truth in its heart. (Of course all of us at Techfocus are experts in finding that grain of truth – but normally we get more than a few minutes between presentations to restore our sense of perspective.)
There were enough grains of truth amongst the chaff to make it worth giving you two reports: this one will look at some of the new gizmos or technologies that seem to be fun or whose impact on the world is still a little way out, while the next one will look at some of the more serious stories and those that will have a more immediate impact.
One of the threads running through the next report will be the broader issues of reducing power consumption both in electronic devices and in the world at large. (Hamster power, anyone?) However, it looks as though one of the mirages in power is finally coming closer to reality. Fuel cells have been coming “any time now” for a very long time; today we generate most of our power by burning fossil fuels to heat water to create steam to drive turbines to turn generators to create electricity, which is then transmitted along miles of energy-burning wires before being inefficiently stepped down from kilovolts to hundreds of volts and distributed to an outlet close to you, after which you step it down still further, usually to single volts, through an inefficient charger and store it in an inefficient battery. Battery manufacturers have made significant strides in getting small format cells with reasonable lives and power outputs: just look at the size of the battery in your cell phone today, with standby and talk times moving to days rather than hours, and compare it with those massive early designs where the batteries were the size of house bricks and weighed even more, but were very short on stamina. However, the battery guys are running into barriers. Even moving to explosive lithium ion batteries (you have seen the footage on You Tube) has given them only a short breathing space before they will have to try again to met the demands of battery-chewing applications, like You Tube, on the handset.
Fuel cells generate electricity through an electro-chemical reaction, right where the electricity is needed. The big barriers to fuel cell adoption so far have been firstly that the cells have been very big for the current they produce and secondly that the cells need regular supplies of fuel. Traditionally, much of the effort has been on hydrogen-based cells, but the last few years have seen a significant increase in research in the use of methanol, so much so that the airline regulatory bodies have agreed to permit small quantities of methanol to be carried on planes.
MTI MicroFuel Cells is a company working on developing methanol fuel cells, and they claim to be getting very close to the power / form-factor ratios that lithium ion has reached. Rather than trying to replace batteries in portable devices immediately, MTI is first filling an intermediate role. One prototype they showed was a charging unit designed to replace the bag full of chargers and plugs that a traveller needs today with a single fuel-cell-based unit. CEO Peng Lim also showed a replacement for the battery-filled hand grip units used for professional and semi-professional cameras, and a concept smartphone.
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