Wireless charging startup uBeam accused of being the next Theranos
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
And that difference is who gets hurt.
uBeam is going to hurt the VCs, Theranos hurt everyone who relied on the results of their tests.
See another power related investment scam: Steorn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steorn
I'm not going to make any comment on the intentions of the founders or even on the technology itself. The presentation itself however was comically childlike and questions were answered with a circularity that was amazing to witness. What I noticed, though, was that if you ask penetrating questions and if someone calmly and persistently fails to address the core of your question then other people eventually accept that your question has been answered!
orbo.com
You can buy a phone that has a battery that will never run out, apparently.
However it seems a lot of faults are found:
Doesn't everything cause cancer?
There is no cure. There us no answer.
Why would it cause cancer? Are they using electromagnetic radiation at a frequency high enough to cause deionization or are you joking?
I mean, we are dealing with life, health and death, serious stuff.
> I reached out to an investor in impossible startup I had talked about previously. Had a long phone call today, in which he explained to me he didn’t invest because he thought they’d ever be a viable business. He invested because he thought between their pitch/charisma and the names of the investors backing them they’d be able to get several rounds of funding, and he’d be able to cash out.
That is: for VCs in the present climate, "find a greater fool" counts as a business plan.
It's about now that front-end web devs who are good with JavaScript should be stocking up on tinned food.
(He's since deleted his Tumblr, but the text is still in my reply to him: http://reddragdiva.tumblr.com/post/129387704618/conversation... )
After some searching, it appears all his posts are archived here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwzdZTHqha9tQWFZdkw3QkRUbkU...
You don't say?
Seriously — uBeam's claims were always ridiculous. Anybody with any kind of engineering background should be able to feel it instinctively, and be convinced after spending a couple of minutes with pen and paper.
1) You can't run sound at over 1 atm of overpressure, because the troughs can't get to negative pressure. This limits the amount of power that you can physically get into a region using sound pressure.
2) Dispersion is a nonlinear effect that changes the frequency distribution of the sound, which has the effect of reducing the focus effect at greater range. (Also, affects the absorption losses).
3) Even in fully linear systems, phased arrays don't focus all the energy into one area, they have significant side lobes. You can monkey with the shapes and intensities, but TNSTAAFL.
The SPL that they're talking about is in the range of jet engines at close range. Yeah, it's ultrasonic, and yeah, it's focused. But I don't want to get anywhere near the thing.
The world is nicely linear, until it's not. You have to know where the simplifying assumptions end.
Some things are worth the risk. Spaceflight, experimental cancer research, assassination of despots, hazardous waste storage technologies. Sometimes you really do need to crack a few eggs to advance humanity.
But the 'advance' we're talking about here is the trivial convenience of not plugging in your phone.
So a honking great ultrasonic horn using 10,000 watts of power will transmit around 10 watts of usable power. The whole area will become an ultrasound cooker(you dare not walk through the beam = dead and cooked if you stayed for long, blood clots in a second or less. and for a large area bats will hate it and dogs howl
in this case it's the VCs to blame for blindly throwing their money.
It won't be the first nor the last vaporware.
Theranos was outright fraud in a regulated market.
(I didn't know about this... interesting case study, thanks!)
Now, the hard part is ensuring we really do learn the lessons Therac can teach us.
"Companies in the new tech area tend to be a little lax when it comes to doing things carefully - Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, tells us all to "Move fast and break things", which I have to agree is a great way to innovate and learn when your product does nothing of actual importance at all. It doesn't matter if you don't get your silly cat videos, or can't post pictures of your holidays, because your business payroll doesn't run on it, your medication isn't delivered by it, nor is your aircraft navigation based on it. Real consequences of a Facebook blackout are near zero."
"[...] In both these industries [generator manufacturing and medical ultrasound] the mentality was "we must make sure this is safe" and the idea of reducing or skipping safety is never considered, but I do not see the same thinking in many of these tech companies. I have literally heard "what's the minimum we have to do?", "we don't have proof it's a risk", "that sounds time-consuming and expensive. We should do <pointless but fast/cheap thing> instead", and "well if it goes to court our lawyers say they have good arguments"."
I think where everyone loses their cool is when the company purposely gets massive amounts of PR to glamorize themselves (and their founder) as if it's already a success [1]. IMO these guys should be keeping a low profile, like the people working on Jetpacks and similar things. Make some noise when you have a demo.
[1] - e.g. "Top 30 under 30". Seriously? Prove yourself first. http://www.forbes.com/pictures/mef45eldh/meredith-perry-foun...
[EDIT] Additionally, they accurately point out that, apart from the VP's rant, uBeam is actually persuing something more akin to cordless charging, within a few meters of a charging station.
That's still something of a pipe dream given the inverse law of power distribution. But rather than hitting the target perfectly to wirelessly charge my S7 it'd be nice to just set it anywhere on the counter. Not sure that's disruptive, but it's more possible than ubiquitous, in-home charging.
Are there similarities/differences between the two?
Who knows about all of these guys though. It makes you wonder if they are taking unresearched scattershot approaches to winning carnival games in the hopes of walking home with a few big prizes.
I'm assuming this means an additional 20%? If not that's a pretty great settlement for the sued party :P
I'm fairly certain that investors who focus on team and market over the product metric are the ones who will continue to get burned by this sort of scenario. This isn't the last company that will try to peddle vaporware and get away with it for an extended period of time.
But the idea that a startup even got funded millions of dollars by some very famous investors kind of makes you think about the concept of venture capital in SF. Are they really as "expert" as they say they are?
The claim of expertise comes from the idea that VCs can generate magnitudes better returns than the market. This is a true claim when talking about top firms, and I don't see how the fact of VCs making a bad bet disputes that -- unless your standard is that experts never lose money.
Expert is not always winning. It means not betting on outliers just for outliers sake. Can these VC firms go back to their shareholders and convince them that they did their due diligence?
Reading from these articles, its painfully obvious they were not being transparent with their investors. These companies have all been around for a few years, and the fact that none of them have seen a reliable working product is another surprise. Mark Cuban has said he has never even seen a working prototype from uBeam.
it's clear to me that this entire system is just one giant crazystorm.
It is a shame Theranos did some questionanable, unethical & likely illegal things. I wont hold them up as the Unicorn's gift of Zeus here, but I really could care less about red tape. 23andme had an injuction against them by these clowns(fda) so unless soneone here can say in 2008ish 5 years after Theranos was founded, you knew it was going to implode, then I would say would you still not want another company in the space to get funded? Nobody gets points for standing infront of Yahoo right now and sayibg they are in bad shape, shits obvious. However there are many companies succeeding where Theranos failed.
As for uBeam, I assumed this would fail. I just looked at it like a privately funded research project. Regardless, it seems like this space is actually succeeding (just not uBeam wireless inplementation) so I am excited about that.
tl;dr it's really easy to be negative with a decade or more of hindsight. sure these were collosol failures & that money could have been spent elsewhere, if nothing else these high profile companies likely inspired some competitors and interest in the space and many of them aren't doing something physically inpossible