Travel - Then vs Now

I'm fortunate enough to be fully vaccinated, so a couple weeks ago I took my first plane flight in over a year. For most of the prior 15 years or so I've flown around 50 to 100,000 miles a year, so a moderate flyer (given 100,000 miles flown is around 200 hours in the air, or over a solid week, it's still pretty significant). I went and visited friends in the NE of the US, and damn do I miss socializing and just hanging out with people. Airports and planes are as awful as you remember, but they get you to places and people that are worth it all. Before I left, I looked at my phone for a map of where I'd been in the previous 6 months:

You might be able to spot where I go vaccinated. King County, WA, where I live, you couldn't find an appointment for love nor money - but drive out a couple hours to rural eastern WA and you had your pick that day. It's also a really scenic drive. And here is the equivalent time period two years prior:

I think my personal carbon footprint was a little larger in 2018 than 2020. Despite the pain of flying, I'm still looking forward to getting out there again, and as soon as the UK drops the test/quarantine on arrival, I'll be heading back there. Since I moved to the US I'd been back in the UK once or twice a year and saw family, 2020 was the first year I hadn't and so it'll likely be a 2 year gap. Fortunately, despite being a basket case in most other regards, the UK did a great job with vaccinations (thank you NHS, yay socialized healthcare), and my mother got her first vaccine in mid January, which for those of you with elderly relatives will know the relief. 

For those in the US who wonder about the value of a good single healthcare system, the NHS in the UK prioritized similarly (primarily age) but literally called up each person and sent letters saying "It's your turn in 2 weeks, here's your appointment" and proceeded that way. The UK also took the route of making the gap between the two shots up to 12 weeks, not the 3/4 in the US, to maximise the number of people with one shot. From people I know the gap seems closer to 9 weeks in practice.

For those in the UK wondering the US in comparison (in the way back of a few weeks ago when there were more supply restrictions) you were pretty much on your own - vaccines were spread between some pharmacies, some hospital vaccination sites, some mass vaccination sites, and you needed an appointment, which was all done through a mish-mash of systems and you needed to be somewhat tech savvy, have time on your hands, and be willing to move quickly which basically was the exact opposite of what many key groups such as the elderly or front line workers with multiple jobs had. And everyone seems to know someone who skipped the line because they knew someone who knew someone, or worked for the right company (I knew work-from-home accountants at Amazon, with no morbidities, who got it in February because... well they were Amazon. And I knew people with health issues who had to wait.), or if you loitered around pharmacies at closing time and got leftover doses. Now in the US we've reached the point where any adult can get it via walkin - amazing the effect of competency at the top - there are more doses than willing people, thank you anti-vaxxers for making it harder.

Maybe I'll post my equivalent travel again in a year. I hope it's closer to that second picture than the first, because that means our world has returned at least somewhat back to what it was before.

My Spy in uBeam

Now that uBeam is dead, I can reveal a secret that I have kept close to my chest for years. You see, for some time after I left the company I had a spy in uBeam, someone who quietly passed information to me about who they were interviewing, companies they visited and were discussing deals with. Management eventually realized this information was being leaked, and despite some significant efforts to root them out the spy evaded the devious traps that were set for them. 

Regardless of the danger to them I now have to let everyone know - that spy was...

Meredith Perry

Yep. It was the co-founder and CEO herself. You see I was still a first connection to Perry on LinkedIn after I had left the company, and she was quite diligent about connecting with every person that was interviewed, every company executive, manager, investor, or similar she spoke to. I didn't even have to actively go looking, the connections just kept appearing in my feed, as LinkedIn especially at that time just shoved them in your face. 

Knowing the industry, I had a pretty good idea of what the conversations might be about or the positions the person was interviewing for. Journalists would regularly call me at that time with questions about the company, and I would mention companies I thought they might be speaking to (avoiding any that I might have learned about while employed there). I guess the journalists called them every now and then and sometimes the people in question would ask Perry why they were contacted, thus revealing the presence of a spy.

Now at this point I have to apologize to a number of the staff who were still there at the time, because Perry immediately assumed one or more of them was leaking (to be clear, no-one at uBeam I knew socially ever told me company proprietary information, and I didn't ask). They were repeatedly warned, grilled, and placed under suspicion to a point I later learned might even have involved Perry having IT give her the access to read all the emails of the staff each day.

This does not even cover the stuff Perry would just blurt out on calls with people in the industry I knew - she'd call up people and basically just ask them to work for uBeam, talking about what they were doing, and what deals were in the works, all without an NDA. I'd then get an email about it or hear at the next conference.

So the moral of the story? I have no idea. I just still find it all funny to this day.

It's an ex-uBeam...

Just shy of its 10th birthday and with between $40 and $48 million of investment (estimated), it appears uBeam (recently Sonic Energy) has shuffled off its mortal coil. While some may claim it's simply pining for the fjords or merely stunned, I've heard that a few weeks ago the last remaining employees were told they were terminated effective immediately and the doors were closed. Whether the company will actually be killed, or carry on in zombie form as an asset holding entity remains to be seen, but reportedly it will be OurCrowd, the crowdfunding group who were significant investors in the later rounds, that take possession. 

I'm sure co-Founder and former CEO Perry will claim that the company was taken from her too soon and would have succeeded if only under her watch, or it was those pesky engineers just not implementing her vision, but to use her own phrase  "Our industry is binary, your tech works, or it doesn't,". In this case, it doesn't. 

So what did they have? From descriptions given to me by those who saw it in operation like prospective customers, there were moderately bulky panels that transferred power on the milliWatt level (a phone charges at ~1 Watt or more) at around a meter, with limited steering and tracking. I never got to hear any efficiency numbers, but I'd guess single digit % at best. Under those conditions the question to ask is "How long will a battery the size of the receiver last with the same milliWatt draw?" and as always "If it's not moving will a wire be simpler, cheaper, and more reliable?"

Where this might work is a low power demand system like remote sensors, you can get close to and in line of sight, that don't move much, where batteries aren't allowed, and you can't run a wire to. Pretty niche market.

Recent patent applications (not grants, here and here) show a system made up of hexagonal modules, each with a speaker like cone attached. I'd be interested in seeing a side by side comparison with the Murata S40 devices as it is a very similar principle, I suspect they would be comparable, perhaps slightly more narrowband, and a bit more expensive. 

This doesn't even begin to address the question of safety - if it's at 145 dB it certainly exceeds limits in most countries and it looks like also in the US as of today. Further, the transducers are also quite wide, and unless they send most energy straightforward (which would limit steering) then they will generate grating lobes when used as an array and send energy at undesired directions. Perhaps now it's defunct uBeam can release the claimed studies by independent third parties that "proves" it is safe, but bizarrely were never made public.

It's shame that no-one sensible told the board in summer 2015, after "only" about $8 million had been spent, that leadership was taking the company in the wrong direction, increasingly "exaggerated claims" on performance were being made, and that a pivot was needed. But here we are - end of an era. 

Quite the 18 Months

My last post was December 2019, putting this at nearly 18 months since I last wrote anything here. It's not for lack of interest, but simply I was massively overloaded with work, commitments, and personal issues that meant something had to go, and so it was the blogging. Things are somewhat more stable now, so I'm intending on getting back to this on a semi-regular basis. Interestingly my first post on this blog was 15th April 2016, so just over 5 years now since I started it. Long enough that my NDA with uBeam has now expired - though don't expect any changes in what I write, things traditionally and reasonably covered by an NDA are not things I will talk about even on uBeam.

So what have I been up to? Well, I quit my full time job at the beginning of 2020 to concentrate on a company I co-founded with the other VP Engineering from uBeam, Sean Taffler. The company is Acoustiic, and our goal is to enable the next generation of non-invasive cancer surgery using High Intensity Focused Ultrasound (HIFU). 

This is a well known technique, currently growing in applications, with an increasing number of FDA approvals and insurance reimbursements - if you want to read more there's a great resource at the Focused Ultrasound Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to enabling better medical outcomes from ultrasound. What we aim to offer is the next generation of systems for HIFU - more precise, more controllable, faster - using advanced manufacturing techniques, custom electronics, and leveraging the compute power available today. Sean did an interview with the FUS Foundation on FDA approvals recently, you can read it here.

The other thing that was eating up my time is that starting in 2020 I became both the President of the IEEE Society for Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control (UFFC) and the General Co-Chair for our largest conference. Each is a fairly hectic job under normal conditions, but add in starting a new company and a pandemic and everything goes to hell - shifting a ~2000 person conference from in-person to all online at short notice, while negotiating with the original venue not to lose a large deposit, was certainly a novel experience. It was a lot of work, but also gave us the opportunity to pull forward online presentation options years faster than would be possible otherwise. For those interested in some of the things we did, there are some newsletter articles I wrote for UFFC that can be found here (May 20, August 20, November 20, April 20). I also did an article on SBIR (Small Business Innovation and Research) grants for the IEEE, it's here and I will also post here as a blog post now it's been up a while.

There are still a few uBeam stories to be told, and I'll get to them over time, but I'll likely be transitioning to talking about other startup and fundraising topics since that's the world I'm living in now. So, let's see if I can do a little better than 18 months for my next post...