A Silicon Valley startup is promising investors and customers an easy way to recharge portable devices, but is being extremely cagey on details of the new technology.
MobileWise Inc., based in Mountain View, Calif., says it will offer a “surface” to recharge the batteries of mobile devices. The company will ship the technology before the end of the year, according to Andy Goren, the chief executive of the company.
“The MobileWise technology is a revolutionary surface that allows safe charging of any MobileWise compatible device placed a top (sic) the surface,” according to a supplementary document the company is publishing to attract investors.
The company touts its technology as “safe, wire-free power for mobile devices”, transferring electric power without the benefit of wires. The technology is not a cradle, according to Goren.
According to the company, more than 2 million laptop owners are not truly mobile–even if they have wireless networking installed in their laptops, they often have to plug them into a wall outlet to power the technology.
The most concrete indication of the companys viability is its management team, which includes Bill Maggs, MobileWises chairman and former chief technology officer at Palm Computing Inc. Goren served as former chief executive at GeePS Inc., and Tal Dayan, the companys president and chief technical officer, founded M-Systems Inc., known for its Disk-On-Chip and Disk-On-Key products.
“We want to keep (the technology) a little vague, while we show it to investors and OEMs,” Goren said.
MobileWises team includes two lawyers: Elliott Stein, who serves as general counsel; and Dan Kikinis, the companys intellectual property adviser. The company has filed “several” patents, and applied for several more, according to Goren.
