Right? Which product is going to win the Product of the Century award Because Century is only 17 years old. So oh, it's a lot of contenders. isn't there? you know, batteries, a solar, freakin' roadways, and all sorts of stuff. But this one I think takes the cake, the sheer number of the dollars that have been invested in this, and just the sheer ridiculousness of the idea.

Let's take a look, shall we? The winner is Drumroll You Beam. Now if you haven't seen, I've done a blog post two years ago debunking the U beam concept as have many others including the former Vice President of Engineering at U. Beamers even debunked this is how bad it is. Okay, now if you don't know what it is, it is a ultrasonic wireless power transfer.

It's like Wi-Fi for charge in wool that gets all the investors juiced up, doesn't it? Yeah, it's going to be the energy infrastructure of the future. Oh by the way, twenty eight million bucks. They sucked out of the investors for this boondoggle. Unbelievable.

They reckon it's safe. They reckon it can be used in buses, trains, planes, cafes, gyms, hotel, then stadiums. You can sit in a stadium. If I had my phone here it is.

Sit in a stadium and big huge stay in. your phone magically charges. What's that? Yeah. Unbelievable And all power.

TVs Without wires you can see TVs in the middle of the room and eyes magically work. Whoo Pixie Dust! Um now they were very secretive for a couple of years and then they finally revealed some stats. I've been working on this for like five years. Okay, and they finally said, oh, we can do a four meter radius and out and we can charge a phone at one point five watts.

Yeah, it's not nearly as good as USB can do. Especially USB C These days you can wonder why anyone needs wireless charging at all really with how fast modern charges can actually go. and they release their specs for how much what their transmit power is. a hundred and forty five DB to 155 dB at 60 Kilohertz SPL sound pressure level Now we'll talk about that in a minute.

now. look the power with ultrasound in air. Different mediums have different things. It drops off with a square of the distance approximately 3 DB per meter.

Nice round number. That's actually what it kind of is in here. So it even if you're a 1 meter away just with the air alone no other losses, you lose 50% It's only 50% efficient and so 2 meters the efficiency is already 25% right off the bat before you start including. and that's assuming 100% efficient transducers.

no nonlinearities at 100% focus. By the way, if you have, if they've got an array like this, it's actually slightly bigger. bit bigger than this, then they can actually turn on only parts of it and get a smaller aperture size and that will have a better, naturally different natural focus distance and I believe. With roughly the size of the what transmitter they've got, it's about maybe a meter and a half.

Guesstimate is the natural focus distance that it's been forming as well. So they can do electronic beam forming to follow your phone. So they've got some very cool tech actually to locate where your phone is and then be inform. It's about a half second lag which you can see in their video.

A For granted they've got some cool text, but let's just look on it and well actually let's not. This has to be sure. I can go into the numbers here. 145 D be 155 SPL is like it gives.

We can basically get maybe my estimate at a meter. you know, 2 meters you might. you can get that one and a half. What? It's not a problem and there's two ways to analyze.

This One is with a continuous a fixed transmit power and the other one is with a variable transmit power where they change the size of that transmit aperture and pump more energy in to maintain 1.5 watts at every distance. For example, that's their figure. If they could charge quicker, they'd be boasting about it. But that's the best they could boast 1.5 watts.

It's getting down towards charging and it drops office square distance. but it doesn't matter. This thing. No, it does not violate the law of physics.

Yeah, yes, it does work. This thing can work. You can charge a mobile phone using ultrasound at several meters. It is possible, but the efficiency is down in the single-digit percentage and in practice it's going to be possibly sub one percent efficient because things: it's affected by temperature pressure which is altitude, humidity.

There's nonlinear effects. the saturation in the air because you're pumping in so much pressure, sound pressure level. the atoms just molecules are going and they cut. doing it like them, but they die.

They saturate poor little things and you know you can't get your each a saturation point anyway. we could go through there is it doesn't matter, The numbers do not matter with this. I'll show you a whole bunch of stuff on another way board where I've got some major points that just blow this thing right out of the water. Let's go.

And by the way, I'll link in a video of the CEO of U beam. I Challenge you to try and sit through all 15 minutes of it. It's really bad. Take it away.

Meredith For each technological hurdle deemed insurmountable by the experts, I Would spend just a few hours thinking about the problem from a variety of approaches. so I was able to solve problems when the PhD experts could with just a few hours of really simple research. Every single argument over why the technology couldn't work has been indisputably wrong. Just taught me to be skeptical of experts, but expertise represented a narrow way of looking at things.

Engineers are inherently linear thinkers and tend to take a very binary approach to solving problems. As a non expert, I had an advantage because I could look at a problem from different angles because I just didn't know it was possible. By thinking outside the box. by thinking around corners, you can out thank the top thinkers.

And now eight months later I have four of the top ultrasonic engineers in the world working for me. We're working with me. It's going to work and it's going to be awesome And I can't wait to give the middle finger and smiled. All the engineers criticise the crap out of me.

This is why you beam. It will never work on any ultra sonic charging technology. Why it's not practical. Let's go to number one: the efficiency.

It's going to be bad. As I said, if it's 1% I'll eat my tinfoil hat at 4 meters like give me a break. It's the worst efficiency charging technology by an order of magnitude on the market. And remember, it's going to be very bad for the planet.

If everyone implemented this, the planet would be screwed. Energy Usage Energy consumption is one of the biggest problems we have on this planet. You might know of the Energy Star legislation where it's actually against the law to sell products in some countries that have aren't very efficient. Charges mobile phones and things like that.

They need a certain standby power. They need a certain efficiency. Otherwise, you know, men selling the Mips regulations, all that stuff. So right there off the bat, this thing shouldn't have even made it past the first concept.

It's just the efficiency. Who's going to want this? It's just ridiculous for the planet. Unbelievable. Anyway, cost the cost.

You need Hundreds of these transducers that can do 145, 255 DB SPL in this thing. And for the transmitter. Hundreds and hundreds of them. And you need maybe a hundred of them for a phone size thing.

We've got like a hundred of these things on the back of a phone and these are already sold in massive volume at seven. For the automotive industry, they're several dollars each year. You might be I'll pick them up on Aliexpress for like 50 cents or something, but there's no way that Willy Wonka's transducer factory is going to churn out transducers of this. You know, capability and efficiency anywhere near a practical consumer.

Cost is just ridiculous. You need so many of them. Uh, and it will compare that with the competition in a minute. sighs.

how thin can you make these things Really? You can't look at their design. They've spent five years on this. tens of millions of dollars in development. And they've got a brick.

An actual a big brick which they you know you have to hold in a certain direction like it's going to be flat on of theme. There's a reasonably hold it like that crazy nobody's going to want that. There's no way it's ever going to get thin enough thinner than a Qi charger that we'll look at. It's just right off the back.

There, it's gone. And safety and legality. Let's have a look at that. But on their website, it's all about safety.

And but most countries actually have either legislation or recommended safe levels of 110. DB SPL So UB is up to three thousand times higher than what almost every country recommends as a safe limit fault. Restonic Sounds like it's ridiculous. Don't let them convince you otherwise on the website.

It's just and waffle Now five. And this is the facepalm. This is where it should never have made it off the bloody napkin. you come up.

the idea or ultrasonic phone charging. Okay, let's on the back of the napkin. Let's see how pretty feasible this is. People put and use phones face up, on a surface see Gonorrhea receiver transducers on the back and in a cafe, which is one of their big usage scenarios.

Things Not going to charge at all Zero. It's ridiculous and people hold them in their hands at odd angles like that. Once you tilled it like that, you'll notice that they hold them in there demo perfectly. Like that with their fingers.

Wow Course it's going to work, but when you note people hold them like that at angles and wince their hands on the back, you've lost half your transducer area. Anyway, it's ridiculous and people store them in their bloody pockets. Bloody modern, huge phones barely fits in my pocket. They store them in their pockets, their bags where it's absolutely useless.

There is right there off the bat. should not have been funded or made it off the back of a bloody napkin. It's just not a practical charging environment. Let's compare it with the competition: the Qi charger.

My phone has a Qi charger already built-in wireless charging it's already built into. most are good lot of them phones on the market. It's called Qi and it's already built-in and it's very efficient. upwards of 50 percent efficient.

Pretty good order of magnitude, better than you beam will ever be, and best. And it's cheap. You can buy one of the charging pads for five bucks on eBay delivered delivered to your home. Like it said, there is no competition.

There's no way that Willy Wonka's transducer factory is going to churn out these things for anywhere near the cost of what. the Qi charger and the thinness of a Qi charge. with the coil in there, tiny little sliver of a coil and just the controller charge a chip to go with it, you'd be dispensed to every one of these points is a showstopper. It's just dumbest idea ever.

Anyway, that wins. You're product of the century, decade, year, whatever. It's pretty dumb and just a quick follow-up to this. I Just found a video from USA Today that actually shows a close-up detail of the Realtek.

Now let's actually take a look at: I Didn't realize this, but they seem to have two different prototypes. This one. look, there's over it. Like 1,100 transducers on there to transmit this thing.

anyway. this one. this little compact white desktop one, does not seem to be beamforming. Check out the pattern on the lid, it's just.

it's not following at all. it's just outputting like that. And then down in the basement, here is this gigantic beast. Look at it.

and this is their beamforming one. So they've got two different prototypes and this is the one that does all the tracking. You can see the Nvidia Jetson I think it is board up there which is doing the camera visual tracking to actually track these phones. How's it doing that? Is that like got an infrared transmitter on there? I'm not sure, but look at the size of the brick they've got.

It's absolutely huge. But I Granted, this is good tech. they're actually you know it's written is really cool tech. But they've got two different prototypes there.

So that one, the massive, probably massively huge, and inefficient Lookit, there's the size of the brick. Wow Wow So it's just enormous, but yet two different types. They've been forming one and then this. you know, dog and pony show desktop one.

So yeah, they're just. even if all of this worked, they have just got no hope. So this is, after all, thirty million bucks in investment, five years or whatever it's been now, and they're not even close to making this practical. Not that it can be practical as I've explained and the Qi charge has been around forever, it is dirt cheap.

It's infinitely many orders of magnitude cheaper to build a Qi charger into a Starbucks coffee table than it is to have this boondoggle a hot transmitter up on the ceiling on the wall to discharge a coupler phones that cost thousands and thousands of dollars at minimum just because of the transmitters and all the tech and even it wouldn't work as the phone sitting on the table like our and you know, the Starbucks and all the other cafes and stuff haven't even implemented the cheap and simple Qi charger. So if they haven't implemented those yet, or you're on a very small scale, that this thing has absolutely no chance. it is dead in the water. These investors have been sucked out of their money.

They'll never see a cent in return if they love us and they would have been. They should have realized this years ago and they should have pivoted to some other niche tech as they got some cool tech right. And no doubt they've got some you know, interesting stuff, but it's no use for the application that they're talking about. the wireless consumer, phone or other gadget charging it.

There's a zero zero percent chance not even a slight chance 0% chance this will ever make it to market I Should have just pivoted I like some niche tech I was unbelievable. But no, they had a vision. you.