If you're frustrated with the poor battery life of your devices, and you're always hauling cords around to charge everything, Nectar could be your solution. Developed by the team at Lilliputian, Nectar will charge any of your USB 2.0 compatible devices on the go - giving you two weeks to a month of power in one portable, recyclable power pod. In other words, you no longer have to search for wall plug-ins at cafes, or disable apps on your phone to save battery life. With Nectar, you are completely self-reliant.
We spoke with Mouli Ramani of Nectar about the product's exciting future, the technology behind the device and the impact Nectar will have on consumers.
Q&A With Mouli Ramani, VP Marketing and Business Development at Lilliputian How did you get involved with Nectar?
I actually had sold a company, previously, called Polychromix (we sold that to Thermo Fisher), that made optical telecommunications equipment. The company's specific area of expertise was a type of processing called MEMS, microelectromechanical systems, and because I had done a lot of work with MEMS (and the core technology over at Lilliputian was, in fact, MEMs-based), they reached out to me. They pushed me pretty hard to join Lilliputian. I actually wanted to spend a good year skiing and playing tennis, but it didn't work out that way. You sort of regret those moments sometimes because you don't get those opportunities all the time. But it was a great move.
When I came on board to Lilliputian - and maybe it's a subtlety to the question - one of the things I didn't like about the company was its branding and its marketing, if you will. So I was part of the key drivers to lead, name and reshift the company to Nectar rather than Lilliputian Systems. We are in the process, basically, of going from Lilliputian to Nectar. That's how I joined them. That's how the name kind of came up.
Can you explain the silicon power cell technology that is behind Nectar, in layman's terms?
Absolutely. Think about something a littler smaller than the size of a nine-volt battery - that gives you a pretty good concept of the size of our silicon power cell. In that really small package, you literally have a power plant. The way we accomplish that is by using what is called a solid oxide fuel cell. 'Silicon power cell' is our term - our brand word around this product - but the core technology is a micro-solid oxide fuel cell.
How it works is like this: We pump gas (literally butene but it can be any hydrocarbon) into that really small package. We mix it with air, and our little 'secret sauce' inside, which then turns into electricity. We're able to capture that electricity and put it out on small thermocouples (or leafs) on the end of a battery. We drive whatever we want. So, unlike a nuclear power plant or a coal power plant, we are actually working with power that is good for cell phones, digital camera, laptops - really for any consumer electronics. That's the focus.
The biggest advantage of our silicon cell is that it is really, really small and therefore portable. You can have power with you wherever you go. The second advantage is that it is very light - 10 times lighter and five times smaller than batteries - another feature that lends to portability. The third advantage is that, due to the small size and the silicon power cell, it can scale down costs very quickly and be made very, very cheaply.
That's the core technology. We've taken that silicon power cell and put it in our first product, the Nectar - but we also envision working with consumer electronics companies to integrate this into their next generation products. It's 10 times better than the technologies they have right now.
You say these can be produced cost-efficiently, so can you give me a price range?
The way that it works is that each power pod will give you two weeks of power, and they'll be available for about the price of two cups of coffee - $9.99. So basically the marketing slogan is, 'Two weeks of power for the price of two cups of coffee.' We are currently finalizing the overall cost of the Nectar device with our partners.
I was expecting the pods to cost more...
Yeah, most people do. There are companies (that I won't name) that sell inkjet cartridges or razor blades, and the prices on those make you wonder and feel really dirty. We're not following that model. We want people to use it. We believe in our model and in elasticity. The more people use it, and the more people love it, the more they will buy. And we've told our partners that's the way to go. We could price higher, but we don't feel we need to.
Where do you see Nectar having the biggest impact?First of all, I think it is going to have enormous impact on people who are sick and tired of running out of power on their phone. There is a huge number of people who lose power on their phones at two in the afternoon, or business travelers who have completely dead phones once they land, and have a bunch of emails or conference calls to get to. I think the biggest initial impact is going to be how this product liberates people from plugging in to the wall, and allows them to actually use their phones right away, at any time.
I know so many people who turn off their GPS, or people who actually turn off their advanced services, in order to preserve battery. There are even services that shut all of your applications in order to preserve battery life - which is ridiculous, because you bought your smartphone to use those applications. You want to listen to your music. You want to use your GPS system. I think that's the initial impact - those business travelers, those outdoorsy people, that university student. They make up one huge segment.
Secondly, I think it is going to revolutionize the consumer electronics industry. Right now, every single thing about your laptop, your phone, your digital camera - everything has gotten smaller and better. You've gotten bigger screens, touchscreens, more memory, faster Internet speed, faster antennas, more applications. Everything has gotten better - except power.
What do you think is Nectar's greatest challenge?
You're still living with a plug in your pocket. Right now, I'll bet that if you open your purse or your laptop bag, there is a plug/some kind of USB port to charge your phone. You are literally carrying one wire in this wireless world. And we're going to cut that last wire.
It will revolutionize the way the industry approaches power, and that's going to lead to entirely new waves of innovation. If I have to pinpoint an impact, I'd say that, on the consumer side, it is going to provide the freedom to use phones/devices the way consumers want to. From an industry perspective, it's going to take away the power of constraint and unleash a new level of creativity.
The difficulty in answering this question is that I keep an alphabetized list of my challenges, and I don't know which one is the biggest. Any senior executive that tells you otherwise is being completely dishonest.
How many items can you charge at a time?
What I honestly think is going to be our biggest challenge is that, right now, we are a pretty small company (relatively speaking). From a startup perspective, we are a large, well-funded company - but when we talk to guys from Google, we're a small company. Our problem is more operational. We have to scale our manufacturing. We have to significantly grow our working capital. In order to be the company we want to be, it's a big bet.
Can you explain the longevity of the charge a little more?
To put it into perspective, it isn't like we are a software company and we can just hire more designers, or people for the right code. We have to invest in property, land and equipment. We have to build MEMS-manufacturing labs. We are a capital-intensive company, so my challenge is to meet both our working capital needs and product capital requirements because, when we launch, we expect tons of people to buy it. We need to have factories ready to build it.
We have one USB outlet per port in our initial product. We already started designing the second version of Nectar, which has two USB ports. But even though we just have one USB port, you can charge more than one device at a time by utilizing a splitter. You can charge more than two units but, practically speaking, two is the right number.
'Two weeks to a month' is a little bit of a marketing statement. These things are kind of complicated. At a very technical level, a cartridge has 55,000 milliwatt hours of energy - which is a lot of energy. Take my word on that. If you wanted to charge your iPad, and then charge your phone, and then charge something else, you could deplete that cartridge in probably 12 hours if you wanted to. If you wanted to charge your phone once a month, it would last you almost two years. It's really a question of usage.
Image: Mashable
When we say 'two weeks to a month' of power, we're referring to the ability to charge your phone (tested on an iPhone 5) once a day for two weeks. But for people who charge their phone around 20% battery life (instead of when the phone is completely dead), like many people, the charge would last about a month. That's where those numbers come from.
At the time of this post, Lilliputian was unable to comment on the release date for Nectar.
No comments:
Post a Comment