uBeam is now Sonic Energy - And Raising a Down Round

Last we left uBeam they'd laid off half their staff and co-founder Perry had left entirely. In the last few days, uBeam has rebranded themselves as "Sonic Energy" (though apparently has some difficulty in spelling their name correctly, continuing the stellar performance we've come to expect from their marketing department). I'm guessing uBeam is something of a problem in Google searches on the company, I wonder why. 

But importantly, they're raising a new round (calling it a Series 1, which is new to me, it's really a massive down round Series C), led by Upfront Ventures (Lead in the Series A and B) again alongside OurCrowd (convertible note inbetween A and B and possibly in the B). They are looking for up to $7.5m at a pre-money valuation of $20m (about 27% of the company to the new investors), which compares to the estimated $120m to $140m post-money valuation after their Series B. 

It's most certainly a down round, where the valuation is lower in a later round, and has serious consequences for wiping out existing shareholders - which is particularly interesting as I believe the major shareholders getting taken down are Upfront, OurCrowd, and Perry herself.  Are two of those three taking major write-downs in their prior investment, just to regain it with the new investment? Doesn't that mean they are putting money in to end up exactly where they are now (or perhaps worse)? Unlikely that this will be happening - more likely is that the Preferred stock holders, Upfront and OurCrowd, will have some anti-dilution terms in their agreements and will maintain their existing % ownership as well as add the new %. Perry, no doubt, will be reduced from what I think was the single largest shareholder to a minority shareholder, a point probably not lost on Upfront and OurCrowd. 

To me it's telling that across multiple major funding rounds it really has only been Upfront and OurCrowd (crowdsourcing) that have been seen to invest. No other institutional investor or strategic with strong due diligence capabilities have taken a stake in the 5 years since the Series A, which if it were the billion dollar idea claimed and just on the verge of explosive growth I think we'd see. Can't the amazing VCs at Upfront persuade some of their other big VC buddies to participate, why rely on crowdfunding and small investors? So right now it seems to me the only people willing to invest are those with a financial incentive to ensue ongoing funding (ideally from others) and those who have no due diligence capabilities.

It's also interesting that OurCrowd are back in for another round - they are hardly touting the success of the Series B investment, and appeared to have taken that off their site.

Where are uBeam/SonicEngery going with this? I expect the narrative the company is putting out is that they have a solid technology at developer kit level, IP to back it, a revamped team and company, and building relationships with key partners - and suggesting to investors this is a quick "in and out" and the company will be sold in a couple of years. If the developer kit was so amazing they'd be showing it off a lot more publicly, and other large VCs would not be allowing crowdfunders to take a slice of this future growth. In my opinion, the exercise for the CEO is as it has always been - put lipstick on this pig and get it sold to a greater fool.

My advice to anyone thinking of investing again at this stage - don't be that greater fool.

Perry's Future
And what is former CEO Perry doing? Seems like it's brain/machine interfaces with Elemind, based in Boston, and "next generation wearable neurotechnology". Over a year ago she had tweeted about something that allows you to fall asleep at the touch of a button, I wonder if this is it?

She had pictures of herself with Marc Cuban in June, so perhaps this funding well has not run dry for her? It doesn't seem to be a company she founded, so has been brought in as a CEO, perhaps as the source of the funding contacts. Maybe, finally, she can use this as the vehicle to give those pesky engineers the finger the way she has always wanted to.

Text of Series 1 offer:

OurCrowd is reinvesting in uBeam (which recently rebranded to SonicEnergyTM) in an up-to-$7.5M Series 1 recapitalization round led by Upfront Ventures, a leading Los Angeles-based VC with investments in companies such as Bird (recently valued at $2.5B by Sequoia), Goat (recently raised $100M from Footlocker) and Ring (acquired by Amazon for over $1B).

uBeam seeks to deliver Always-On Wireless EnergyTM at a distance, utilizing ultra-safe ultrasonic technology to deliver reliable, wire-free charging. uBeam has developed proprietary transducers, transmitters, receivers, and custom enterprise software. The company plans to deliver wireless power to a wide range of electronic devices in the high growth Internet of Things (IoT) sector, including automotive, aerospace, healthcare, industrial and home.

 Listen to a webinar with Simon McElrea, uBeam's CEO, and Jon Medved, OurCrowd CEO and Founder, to learn more about uBeam:

ubeam iii webinar

Wireless Charging Market

While the wireless charging market is growing at a CAGR of over 40% and expected to reach ~$21B by 2023, it remains largely untapped due to current technological limitations with induction-based charging methods and many power-at-a-distance technologies being limited by the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). uBeam claims that it has a patent-protected ultrasound technology that is FCC approved and safely transmits wireless power at a distance. IHS Markit also forecasts that by 2030 there will be 125 billion electronic devices that will need safe and always-on power. The largest vertical in this growth market is in IoT (smart home, aerospace, automotive, healthcare, commercial, etc.). uBeam is focused on this space, having already secured POCs with three global tier-1 Original Equipment Manufacturers in the aerospace and electronic device verticals, while also working to provide software and support, enabling potential partners and clients to monitor and run large networks of wireless energy.

Funding

With 16 employees, primarily in R&D, the company believes that, upon completion of this Series 1 raise, it will have runway through the first half of 2021, when it hopes to start generating over $6M dollars in annual revenue. During this period, the company plans to continue engaging with high volume manufacturing partners to scale the product while delivering on customer milestones and expanding its IP portfolio.

OurCrowd is working with Upfront Ventures to help finance the company through its current business pivot from mobile phones to the IoT space. The current recapitalization round offers investors the opportunity to finance a deep technology company with $40M of historic capital already injected, but at a $20M pre-money valuation.

Team 

Simon McElrea, CEO – Simon replaced Meredith Perry as CEO at the beginning of 2019.  Before joining uBeam, Simon served as CEO of Semblant, a UK and Silicon Valley based B2B nanotechnology company specializing in the protection of IoT, automotive and consumer electronic devices. Prior to Semblant, Simon was Vice President of IP, Licensing and Marketing at Energous, a wireless-charging company that completed its successful IPO in 2014. Simon has also held a series of technology commercialization leadership roles at Amkor Technology (Nasdaq: AMKR), Honeywell (NYSE: Hon) and Johnson Matthey Electronics (LON: JMAT). An author of over 30 US patents, Simon holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees, with honors, in Engineering Science from Oxford University.

Will Kain, CFO - Will Kain, who joined uBeam as a Board Director and CFO in June 2019, has spent the last 12+ years in leadership positions with early-stage energy and water technology companies.  In addition to his duties at uBeam, Will is currently Principal and CFO at Rusheen Capital Management, an early growth-stage private equity firm investing in energy and sustainability technologies. Will started his career with UBS Investment Bank in New York, after earning his BA in Economics and Government from the University of Virginia.

EEVBlog Does uBeam Again

You may remember that EEVBlog did a great video on uBeam a couple of years ago, which if you've not seen you should go watch now (also below). With the new information out on uBeam, Dave has done it again, and it's a nice straightforward description of the latest website and presentation. I encourage you to watch it if you want more accessible coverage than I write here.

The discussion of the video and business side is the first 16 or so minutes, but around 18m45s is where the more tech side of the coverage begins.

To save you going hunting for it, here's the EEVBlog uBeam debunking video from 2017.

Yet Another uBeam Video

I posted a uBeam promotional video earlier today, and a comment had a link to a presentation given by the current uBeam CEO at the OurCrowd summit a few months ago (OurCrowd were one of the larger funders for uBeam).

Most of it is unremarkable, with the usual marketing claims, but three slides have some interesting info - this is a post that gets reasonably technical, just warning, so a summary of my opinion of this video is:

• The uBeam proprietary transducers seem a variation on existing commercial devices
• Measured surface data shows the don't perform evenly
• They can't focus sound where they want to (2 meters target, 1.2m actual)
• The transducers may be highly directional, limiting steering in the array
• They will never deliver more than 1W to a phone, even under ideal conditions (10 hours to charge)
• The transducers are 5 to 10mm thick, likely doubling the thickness of a phone
• Estimated phone case cost - $150 minimum

At around 2:40 the slide shows the transducer with a measured response from the surface.

These transducers seem to be the proprietary designs that are essentially (IMO) a variation on the standard Murata devices used in car parking sensors, with what looks to be a bar rather than a disk of piezoelectric material and then a cone shaped 'speaker' on the front. I expect the bar to be either prestressed or a bimorph layered component. The transducer diameter is large, appearing to be larger than a wavelength of sound in the ~40 kHz range, which would mean in phased array operation steering would be hard as you'd send energy in unwanted directions. The other image shows what I expect is a "heat map" of the vibrational characteristics of a single transducer in operation - where you are looking at the round face, and red indicates a lot of motion, green indicates little. If this is a magnitude map, then it indicates this transducer is not operating particularly well, as you'd want red evenly around the surface to get maximum power out for the area available. Now they may have chosen a bad result just to "throw us off" but I don't see what that would buy them, and this tells me that the transducers are, unsurprisingly, inefficient.

The next interesting images appear at around 3:22 and seem to show data on performance (not clear if simulated or measured). Axes on the left image are hard to read but seem to show a linear reduction of power with distance, though some of the markings on the y-axis indicate it may be logarithmic. The very interesting one is on the right and says "Focused Power @ 2 Meters", which is really weird because if you look at where the peak amplitude is it's around 1 to 1.25 meters, so not particularly good targeting there if you are looking to deliver power safely. What surprises me though is that there are no grating lobes, as mentioned above the spacing means in phased array application I'd expect some beams at an angle, but it's really clean. 

Two possible reasons for this - one is that the transducers are highly directional and really only send energy forward, so there's just no power at angles to form strong grating lobes - the other is that they aren't steering or focusing at all, just driving all over the elements together and letting a 'natural focus' form, same as if you had a single large vibrating plate and not many individual elements. Were would that focus? Well, from the Y-axis it looks to be a 20cm wide panel, and an approximate distance for the near-field/far-field transition peak is (width^2/(4*wavelength)) then for 40 kHz (8.6mm wavelength in air) that gives a "focal peak" at 1.16 meters - amazingly right on top of where that peak shows up in the plot. 

I don't think they are focusing at all, something essential if you want to carefully target devices for efficient and safe power delivery. If they want to prove me wrong there, the same plot as the one on the right, but steered at 45 degrees up or down, and placing the focus at various depths along the Z-axis, would make it clear. Not sure if they aren't focusing because they can't, or because showing that data would be ugly, but I'd like to know.

Last slide of interest starting at 3:59 or so, has power delivered versus distance. Now I'm skeptical of these numbers, but let's take the uBeam ones at face value (not the Next Gen ones of course, since they fired the entire team that would be working on them). What this claims is that a phone sized object can get around 1 Watt of usable power, and given that at 145 dB a phone gets around 3W of acoustic power incident, then that implies a ~30% reception efficiency, which is impressive if they can show that (to be clear, I don't think it's that high in reality). So impressive that I'm shocked there isn't a demo that makes that clear and proves the doubters like me wrong. Hmmmm. If you notice, that implies the next gen devices would have been 2x as efficient, or near 60%, given a 145 dB limit, which is an incredible feat and humanity is worse off for us not receiving this technology. Given 'circles in squares' leads to an effective usable area of around 79% max, that's getting to the limit of what's achievable (yes, I know hex layouts are more efficient, except in finite sized areas where the perimeter is a substantial fraction of the area)

More than that though, the numbers are just weird. The limit on usable power received is "Incident Acoustic Power Density x Area x Efficiency" and given the latter two are fixed, only the Incident Acoustic Power Density is the limit. That is set by the regulatory limit at 145 dB (really it's 115 dB, 1000x lower, but we're being nice) so 300 W/m^2, and the area of the transmitter. Let's say a 30 x 30 cm transmitter is used, that's around 30W acoustic transmitted and with really good focusing you can target most of that to the receiver. That means as you move further out, with a large transmitter you can maintain power at the receiver by using more transmitter area and so power received should remain constant for a period (when limited by 145dB ceiling), then dip when you run out of transmitter area to compensate for the increasing in-air losses. Indeed because of the natural focusing effect you want to be increasing the array used as you move the receiver further out. Of course, efficiency continuously decreases, and transmitter cost goes up, but that's 'hidden' in this plot. There's no reason for a plot like this not to assume a huge transmitter, so maybe they are admitting the can't steer/focus arbitrarily, or perhaps they are simplifying for the lay audience, or maybe it's just kinda nonsense.

The power received here is for a phone sized object, around 0.01 m^2, but an individual transducer is around 100th of that. That implies at point blank range the max power per transducer is around 10 mW, and barely 3 mW at 2 m, under ideal conditions. Note for IoT charging, you don't get much space.

Nothing on cost here - a Murata transducer in bulk is a bit under $1, so even assuming they do an awesome job and produce at 50c (doubtful, most likely they'll be more expensive), then a phone case has around 100 of these, so $50 in COGS before anything else like electronics, putting the case at $150 retail, minimum. Ouch.

So, nothing surprising here, but a few extra bits of information that we didn't have before that mostly confirm our existing expectations.

uBeam Promo Video

I recently wrote about the large layoffs at uBeam, and the new website, however I had missed their new promotional video that was posted on the 5th June.

Similar to the website, it shows charging of phones by peoples heads (insufficient power delivery to be practical, tracking for such application never demonstrated, and IMO not safe), forklift trucks (just not even close to the power requirements there), and all the while powering huge numbers of distributed devices with a line-of-sight technology implying massive numbers of transmitters. It also has babies and animals so of course it's "ultra-safe" as it just bounces off the skin (as long as there's no hair, in which case there will be heating and possibly burns at high power, but that's just a detail) and the voice over assures us it's for any application. Hmmmmm, I smell something...

I will say, at least this website/promo theme isn't set in space, where sound literally cannot propagate, simply because the CEO "likes space".

This made me wonder about the timing of the firings - that it wasn't that they had run out of money, but rather that they had finally reached the combination of Murata-style devices they manufacture themselves to be able to claim "proprietary transducers" along with sufficient marketing materials (even though IMO the "product" is absolutely not viable) they can claim to have something to sell.  Sufficient smoke in the machine and enough mirrors there's a bit of hope a purchaser will not be paying attention? Knowing it's a dud and there's no future, did they then just deep-six the development team because they had done their job and were now simply surplus to requirements? I've said before I think their RF based rival, Energous, is a company designed to sell shares who uses engineering as their marketing, but have uBeam effectively done the same now? Quite why anyone with sense would buy into a tech that is at v0.9 and there's nobody to even provide support for the beta let alone build you a next-gen system, I do not know, but there seems to be dumb people out there with money to burn.

If true though, it's another reminder to employees - you are a "human resource" and the second you're not needed, you'll be removed no matter the impact to you. Be careful what you commit to any company, do the work you're paid for but don't forget that loyalty is a one-way street.

When (and why) did Perry leave as CEO?

According to uBeam, Perry left the company in September 2018 to "spend more time with her next project" (9 months later, still not appeared), handing over the reigns to interim-CEO McCauley. Shortly after that McCauley updated her resume to show she'd been interim CEO since July, and now it's updated again to show since May 2018. Three resume changes on a date that is not really ambiguous - as Goldfinger says, once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.

Interestingly, the COO also left uBeam in May 2018, after barely 9 months on the job. He was someone immensely qualified to do the COO role, and even the CEO role - a position most who noted his hiring expected he had been brought on for. Is there a connection and is there more to this story than meets the eye?

uBeam Lay Off Around Half of the Employees?

Over the last week I've heard from a number of people as to some significant events at uBeam - last Monday the 10th June around half the employees had been laid off. No notice, no severance, no vesting, no farewell party, and the last day of employment at uBeam for them had been Friday the 7th June. The first emotion I heard from any of them was shock, that this was unexpected both in its suddenness and harshness. It seems the team that have been let go, around 13 of the 25 or so total, are most of the engineers who would have been doing actual product development (with an exception for some electronics/visualization work), as well as the product manager, so as clear a signal as possible from uBeam that there will not be a product coming from them (to no surprise for anyone who has read this blog).

While founders and CEOs get the press coverage and public sympathy, it's always the regular employees that take the brunt of the pain in situations like this. Startup founders are more likely to come from backgrounds of financial stability, CEOs the last to go even if their decisions led them along this path, but your regular employees are just trying to do their job, pay the rent, and then one day they find that the paycheque, and health insurance, won't be coming. If anyone reading this blog has positions or knows of places hiring especially in the LA area in tech companies, you should look to contact them (most are on LinkedIn) or I can get you in contact for a few of them.

While I'm hearing slightly different stories, what's consistent is that they were told the company had very little runway, a few weeks at best, and the board declined to put in more money to keep things on the current path. Rather, a drastically reduced budget was given, and half the staff had to go. Given who was let go, it seems there is no product in the future, and rather they will focus on selling, licensing, or otherwise extracting revenue from whatever IP currently exists. Tech staff that are left might be viewed as those who can make sure a physical demo actually works, and the tech people senior enough to impress potential purchasers. I personally don't see this as a route to revenue, without a product the IP has limited value, the transducers we've seen from them (called "uBeam's most critical component" in the prior fundraising round) look to follow the same basic design as the industry standard Murata type, leveraging width-mode piezo vibrations and a speaker-like cone. I can't see any advantages over the Murata, but I struggle to see them beating the leader on price, and both have sizes that are large relative to wavelength that make them unsuitable for phased array use (basically, they will send out energy in unwanted directions). In however long they have left, I don't see them selling the IP for anything above bargain basement prices (look for "for an undisclosed sum") and even that I think is a longshot. 

It's something of a surprise though this happened right now. The company's last raise was at the very beginning of 2018, and while numbers like $25 million were discussed, I have always felt that was a combination of the new raise and the prior convertible note round and the new money was more in the $11 to $14 million range (still not shabby!). It didn't appear uBeam hired any significant new staff (losing the CEO, COO, and CTO in 2018 while not replacing the CEO until Jan 2019), and had abandoned the production model in favour of licensing, so expenses should not have been that high. I had thought they would be halfway through the money by now, and looking at a cashflow issue somewhere between the middle and end of next year. That it happened now is very interesting and there are some possible explanations.

I think a likely scenario is that the prior round was tranched - that is they didn't get all of it in one lump sum but rather released by the board only on completion of certain milestones. One option would be that the money would be split into 2 equal tranches with half the money needing to get them to a milestone of a product or a licensing deal. Without either on the horizon, the board may have had little confidence in the future of the company, and decided to cut losses and squeeze whatever money they can out of what is there. It's a strategy I don't think will work, I noted last year I thought the best return to investors would have been to give the staff 60 days notice, shut the company down, and hand the remaining money back to the investors. Seems an aspect of that has been followed, but regular staff apparently don't merit consideration. This does not surprise me, when I was there employees let go were terminated on the day with no severance, despite encouragement from the senior engineering side to pay at least 2 weeks - it's the right thing to do (unless the employee is let go for cause), but also goes some way to alleviating concern in the remaining employees that they can be out with no money any day, never a good situation. 

Something I do wonder is if the money is tranched, whose money got spent? I was guessing that the round was pretty much 50/50 between OurCrowd and UpFront, around $6m or so each. If 50% got spent, was it split 50/50 or did the OurCrowd money go first, which would be unfortunate for the large number of individual small investors in the OurCrowd group but good for the LPs at UpFront. Or vice-versa? If anyone has any greater understanding of the situation or alternate scenarios, I'm interested to hear.

How long have they got? I don't know, but I can't see significant money being put in so perhaps 3 to 6 months at most? It's a terrible negotiating position to be in, as any buyer knows that waiting a month will likely result in effective downward pressure on price. Morale among remaining employees will not be good and if I were them I'd already be looking for new work. It would make sense to offer them a significant bonus should they stick out a set time period, but in a cash strapped company the likely bonus isn't going to be big enough to make up for a month or two gap in income when the end comes. If my experience of the company still holds, there was never thought nor attention paid to the needs of staff, they were simply expected to do what the company required and be grateful for the opportunity. While no longer CEO, Perry will still likely have significant board presence and will need to have been at the board meeting where this decision was made. A tweet from Perry on the 5th June might indicate that's when it happened, and may signal she accepts that it's game over.

“It doesn’t matter how many times you fail — there’s not a limit. You only have to be right once.”
-Mark Cuban @mcuban

— Meredith Perry (@meredithperry) June 5, 2019

Notice no public announcement, they want to keep the pretense of a viable company going, but also no press attention either - the corporate end of uBeam may be months away, but it seems to be dead as far are press are concerned.

It is a bit of a kick in the teeth for the new CEO who has not even had 6 months to get the company turned around. Even if it were possible (and I don't think it was by that stage) it's hard to make a turnaround in hardware so fast where that timeframe may be only one development cycle. Still, he gets to say he tried and it wasn't his fault, what could he do, and perhaps collect a healthy paycheque along the way. 

The website had recently been updated, with images showing them powering everything from tablets medical equipment, and home appliances (never going to happen) while showing pictures of babies and pets in a subliminal attempt to say "We're safe" along with the more overt "ultra-safe" marketing lines, the very carefully worded "no verified risk", a claim of full regulatory compliance (hmmm, I'd love to see the paperwork there), and third party studies proving safety (let's see them then). It looks somewhat like the Energous website, seemingly not only do all the at-distance wireless power companies follow the same trend of massive performance specs at first (TVs, cars, cellphones, multiple meters, faster than a wire!), to trickle charge, to IoT, but the websites look the same as well. They had also been advertising for a Chief Revenue Officer, and that ad seems to have disappeared - either plans there were shelved or someone is in the role and had a really crappy first week. A few pictures from the website are below:

It's frustrating as there were things that could have been done, changes that could have been made earlier to develop technology useful in a number of areas and a total of between $25 and $40 million spent to generate IP that might sell for 2% of that, if at all. I know several hardware companies with solid products and tech where $1 to $3 million would be a massive boost for them, and ten such companies worth of initial funding just disappeared. It's a shame that the two most senior engineers didn't sit down with a board member almost 4 years ago and let know issues at the company and the likely trajectory, while suggesting possible changes/pivots to make it all viable. Though if they had they may have been treated as second class employees from then on, motives questioned, never trusted for having 'snitched' on a member of the elite...

Another uBeam Anecdote
The situation does remind me of an incident from my time at uBeam. Normally there was supposed to be a meeting with myself, the other VP Eng, and CEO Perry at 9.30 each morning, though our bet each day was on how many minutes after 9.30 we'd get a text from the PA letting us know the CEO would be late. We'd watch her walk in usually looking tired at ~9.45 and it was maybe another 30 minutes before our meeting would start (damn whatever else you might have tried to do in that time, she was there, so the meeting starts now), but she was at least teeming with energy by then. This morning in question was different. The CEO was in her office already when the other VP and I walked in, with the new CFO while super-excited and energetic. "Great news" she tells us "My friends told me last night that Virgin Galactic is going out of business!". We look at each other knowing it was going to be one of those mornings, and could see where this was going. Perry was a self-described space-nut and was always trying to get us to hire people from Space X or similar, even though we kept telling her that the typical skillset was vastly different between companies. And so it came - "We can hire all their engineers!" and trying to head things off we immediately tried "That's interesting we can have recruiters try to target the likely employees". Perry scoffed at our feeble engineer approach, and informed us she would be mailing the CEO himself to find out who to hire, showed us the email, which read (and while from memory is confirmed with the other attendee, is pretty close)

"Dear [VG CEO]. I hear that your company is going out of business. Can you tell me who your best engineers are so I can hire them?"

Now we were in a fix. We couldn't let this go out, but neither could we tell Perry this was a dumbass idea, an insult to the VG CEO, and impractical for us, as any attempt to indicate she may be on a non-optimal path almost always resulted in the "I'm the CEO" response where she had to "show leadership" by not changing and instead doubled down (our eternal Catch 22). These situations were tricky and so at first tried the "If true he would have bigger issues let's give him a few days" line in the hope we could delay enough she'd forget and move onto something else, but no, she clicked send. The whole conversation was between 5 and 10 minutes maximum, and like many things at uBeam we could see the action being taken that would result in predictable (to us) consequences hours, days, months down the line and nothing we could do about it.

Later that day we asked if there had been a reply, and amazingly there had been. The response was (and again, from memory) "Dear Meredith, VG is not going out of business, in fact we recently raised a significant financing round. Please inform whoever told you this that it is not true and ask them to stop spreading the rumour". Perry just shrugged and carried on as if nothing had happened, and to be fair that type of bizarre event was pretty much the norm at uBeam. 

So I chortled to myself when thinking of this and imagined sending the email "Dear former-CEO Perry. I hear that your company is going out of business. Can you tell me who your best engineers are so I can hire them?" I'm sure she'd understand.

But back to the most important point - if you want to hire solid engineers, there's a few looking for a solid employer right now.

Update: I wrote a brief update and link to the promo video that matches the website here. It also asks when co-founder and former CEO Perry actually left the company.

State of Wireless Charging in May 2019

I have to apologize for the low rate of postings - basically I'm slammed with work, personal ventures, and home/family. I'd like to be writing more, and talking about what I'm doing, but that's just not going to happen for a while. Hopefully more at the end of the year, but for now I'll use the long weekend to try and get at least a couple of articles done.

AirPower and Qi

My last article on wireless charging, noting the disappointment of AirPower and PiCharging (Spanse), got some mixed responses. Some industry insiders were not pleased with my portrayal of Qi as limited, and suggested that if I were to review a premium phone with the associated official charger that I'd have a different opinion. I agree that in a perfect world Qi can achieve some reasonable charge rates, however my hope for AirPower was that Apple removed the need for consumers to worry about positioning and would make it a seamless experience. Just "drop and go" and it's charged when you pick it up an hour or two later - but they couldn't do so. 

The problem isn't Qi's performance under ideal conditions, it's that if you need the ideal setup, a premium phone, and the expensive charger, then many users get a sub-par experience and then that experience taints things from there on out. You don't want consumers to think it's pointless? Give them a great experience first time out, and then that becomes the expectation and when there's a cheap knock-off charger that's $50 cheaper but charges at 1 W not 7.5 W they blame the cheap charger, not Qi. Let there be a tainted ecosystem where for years it's a crap shoot how things go then the standard gets blamed instead.

The reality of things is that consumers are dumb, and will take the cheapest and laziest route on everything. For example, I went to Amazon and typed "wireless charger Pixel 3" and I see the official Google wireless charger for ~$80 (4 star review) and an LK charger for $16 (4 star review). I understand this stuff and can't tell what the difference is, the average person has no chance. I have no idea if LK is any good or not, but is it 5x better than the Google? That's the price point most people expect, and are going to have a hard time justifying that extra $64. Now does that $16 charger work fast and well, or does it fail to charge due to positioning on a regular basis, or charge slowly? (I'll try and let you know in a few days, I just ordered it) If it fails on even a couple occasions and you lose phone use during the day because it didn't charge overnight then people start to default back to "just plug in with the wire that came with the thing". For the Pixel 3 that wire is an 18 W charger, and that's noticeably fast.

So can Qi be great when all is good with the setup? Yes. But if a consumer has to know the exact setup to use to get that then the $16 base unit sets the expectation, not the $80 one.

Update 28th May 2019: A reader tells me "The reason it (the Pixel Stand) costs $79 is not because it charges faster or with more placement forgiveness than some 3rd party charger like LK (although it does offer a proprietary 10W mode, so it should charge a Pixel3 somewhat faster than LK). Rather, the 'Google Screen' feature is why it is priced very high.  You need to use the Pixel 3 phone to unlock this feature, but it is really cool, IMHO... To simply take some Samsung or Apple phone and compare its charge rate on the Pixel Stand vs. the LK and obviously conclude that it is not worth the extra $64 is a waste of time and misleading." Seems a fair point, and I do have a Pixel Stand on the way too, I'll compare them in more than just the charge rate. Still, I had no idea there were even such features in the stand so I think my point on poor marketing of what may be excellent features stands!

It was also pointed out to me that what I was saying about the frequency of operation didn't make too much sense, which on rereading was a fair point. What I wanted to say came over badly, and there was no easy way to fix it, so I deleted it. Thank you for that feedback those who sent that comment.

Pi/Spanse and Qi

So this was the more interesting one, it seems. I had pointed out that I had thought Pi would be a success in part due to the use of the existing infrastructure of the inbuilt Qi charger, but that I was now confused as they talked about the need for a proprietary charging case didn't go down well with users. 

When I had written the first Pi article, I'd seen the original paper on the technology working at 6.78 MHz, and spoken to a couple of people I knew and trusted who had connections to the company and the answer came back "yes they shifted to 140 kHz". I also emailed the founder and specifically asked this question though didn't get a response (should have raised a flag there). I then went on to write the article based on that, and there's a lesson here for me in not believing something until I've seen it in verified. I think someone should start a blog about that...

Well suspicions now seem to be confirmed. If you go to Spanse's website you can see the "Source" that they are now essentially selling is a large Qi charging station that works with up to 6 devices and thick cases, for $189. Sure you get wifi for updating and a USB port for wired charging, but I've already got that in my laptop, or a wall socket, for a lot less. Now personally I don't have 6 devices that need charged, and I'm wondering if it's 12 times better than that LK charger I just ordered. It seems a bit large for bedside table use, so is it aimed at a kitchen table for a family, or an office? The generic image above shows it charging an iPad, but look closely and you'll see the iPad is wired charging, and given either the wall socket the Source is plugged into, or the laptop nearby, could have done it I'm struggling to see the clear use case. 

Importantly, the at-distance part is gone. What exactly happened is unclear, but rumours seem to be that the near-contact Qi charging was conflated with the at-distance charging that would need a proprietary case and a higher frequency. People I've chatted with who have some connections call it an honest mistake and miscommunication, but if true then I'm calling bullshit on "honest mistake" when the key aspects that made this interesting happen to not be true. Everyone knew what people wanted, and it was the convenience of modest charge rates at a modest distance, with pre-existing charging infrastructure. Add in the requirement of a new expensive case, and it's just another also-ran.

Ossia

Ossia (wireless charging with RF, very similar to Energous) announced a deal for wirelessly charging IoT asset trackers in Walmart warehouses. 

...guards and associates will wirelessly power the asset trackers at warehouses’ guard shacks, ensuring the trackers are charged before they’re attached to incoming trailers, crates, pallets, and packages.

While the wording in the article seems to be ambiguous and points to also charging the handheld devices the employees use, I expect that fundamentally this is using their 2D array to locate and charge the small low power trackers that go on boxes and pallets in warehouses. Given that active RFID work at up to around 100 mW in short bursts (from recollection), a high microWatt, low milliWatt source that saves employees a minute on each tag across thousands of tags will be economically viable. From what I've seen, this is basically Powercast's business model and they've been out there for years quietly serving the market without the fanfare or exaggeration of Ossia or Energous.

Interestingly the Ossia VP interviewed talks about the "proof of concept" which makes me wonder if this is just a demo for Walmart and not an actual sale/rollout. Regardless, this very low power, intermittent need, in an industrial facility, which is the kind of thing that wireless power at-a-distance is actually suited for. It's one of the reasons all the companies talk about charging your phone fastert than a wire at multiple meters, but then move to "trickle charging" and then IoT, and then eventually out the consumer space entirely. All of them. No surprise, it's where they all inevitably go after having exhausted all the alternatives (and investor money).

Energous

Very briefly on Energous - I wondered if they would make their raise given the price of the stock, but it seems they did raise a further $25m from stock, and so now have cash to make it to early Q1 2020 assuming no reduction in staff or compensation. (I was told they had trouble selling that, cancelled the first offer and tried again, and ended up getting it from a short seller group, which is ironic. I have no confirmation on this, so take it with a pinch of salt) This still isn't enough to see them to revenue, given their own statements as to even the best case for products, so we'll be back here at the end of the year with the same thing again. We're also still waiting on any products with "WattUp" in them, such as the hearing aids (sorry, PSAPs) that were promised in no more than 90 days about a year ago. Don't hold your breath on those products.

Lastly, investors seem to be catching on, and share price for WATT has dipped and is now around $4.55. Tracking the stock price for the last year, it's not looking good for them. At what point do the institutional investors realize they've been had and bail?

uBeam

Last and definitely least, uBeam. So little going on here compared to the others, Ossia and Spanse at least have technology that can sell even if it's not a wow, and Energous are quite entertaining, but what is happening with my former company? They're continuing to be fairly low profile, as they (presumably) try to package up IP and at least pretend there's a workable product in there somewhere to either licence or sell the company. 

I took a look to see if there had been any IP filed - generally you see what got filed about 1 year or more ago, and can tell what the company was working on at the time (not 100% certain, sometimes you still patent dead end paths). I was quite surprised by what I found looking at their filings. Now it's often hard to tell what are applications, what are grants, and what are just repeats in the system, but when you see that the most recent patent (10,252,908) was submitted in Feb 2018, that almost all the people listed on it had left the company 1 to 2 years prior to it, and that my name was one it as well, you can tell they're really not producing much new. In fact, going back through them I can see one other that was filed in 2018, and that's also from an employee who left in 2016. Maybe I'm missing a trove of them at the USPTO, but it looks like the bulk of the filings come from people who were there in 2015 and not much beyond. How do you sell a company based on IP when you've not produced new IP in years, the people who did produce that IP have long since left, one of them writes a blog criticizing you, and there's no product?

It seems that uBeam might now hire a third person since their (supposed) $25 million fundraise over 14 months ago. This time, it's a Chief Commercial/Revenue Officer.

uBeam is seeking to hire a Chief Commercial Officer/Chief Revenue Officer. uBeam is the inventor of ultrasonic power-at-a-distance Always-On Wireless EnergyTM, utilizing ultra-safe ultrasonic array technology to deliver reliable, long-range wire-free charging. By developing proprietary transducers, transmitters, receivers, and custom enterprise software, uBeam’s technology delivers usable power to devices ranging from portable electronics, medical, aerospace, automotive, and in particular IoT devices and networks. Significant revenue-generating experience in these fields, coupled with successful B2B licensing experience is essential. Experience in acoustic technology, phased array radar or ultrasound is also highly beneficial.

So "Always-On Wireless Energy" is their new tagline I guess, since it gets a 'TM', although no-one bothered with a superscript. Apparently the technology is not just safe but "ultra-safe" which I'm not sure the definition of but given the emphasis here, they must be feeling a bit of vulnerability on this front. I don't follow why a C-level "revenue" officer needs to have tech experience but bizarrely they want someone with "significant revenue-generating experience in these fields" and I'm not sure who that could be because quite literally no at-distance wireless power company has ever done that - not Energous, not Ossia, perhaps only PowerCast that actually have had a product on sale for a while.

Lots of references to dealing with board members in the ad, as well as fundraising. "The CCO/CRO will be required to present to the Board of Directors on a regular basis, and from time to time will be involved in fund-raising activities on behalf of the company.", "Successful experience in fund raising and pitching to investors.", "Have considerable experience presenting at Board of Directors meetings.", and "Ability to efficiently interact with board members."

It's a bit odd to be looking for a C-level hire via regular job board postings, those are mostly done via word of mouth, personal connections, and specialized recruiters. As someone on the EEV Blog pointed out - sounds a lot like the role a CEO should be doing. Is the uBeam CEO looking for a scapegoat already, or is this a replacement?

Phrasing also indicates they're aiming for markets outside the US, which on the one hand you can understand because the professed model needs contract manufacturers which are still heavily in China, but given every other country outside the USA definitively has a 115dB or less ultrasound limit (1000x less power than at the professed 145dB), the product is not viable there unless they ignore the law. "Experience in dealing with issues on an international basis: understanding of the North American and European landscape (knowledge of the Asian market would be a plus)."

As far as I know, this is a new position, so not from the Perry era and gives a confirmation to the business strategy the company is taking - B2B licensing, with contract manufacturers, and keep it going long enough to bamboozle for another round of investment.

Oh and apparently "Benefits that are 2nd to none!". Yeah, I'm going to call bullshit on that. How much PTO? How much in RSUs and bonus? Sabbaticals? Educational supplement? Matching 401k? My recollection (and that of more recent departees) is good benefits for a startup, but can't match that of larger companies.

Last thing for this article - uBeam don't post much on social media like LinkedIn so it was interesting to see them link to this safety article from the CTO of Wi-Charge (laser based power delivery). 

Forbes just put out a good new article on wireless charging. Wireless Charging can take on many forms, but not all of them are safe and effective. uBeam's ultrasonic wireless power is a differentiated technology that can safely transmit energy over the air across long distances to charge a wide array of electronic devices. 

The premise of the piece was on regulatory and safety aspects of wireless power, yet uBeam used it to claim safety for their own system. Now we don't know what uBeam have (cough), and they do claim "third party testing" has proved it safe, but never released those reports, despite questions on how they can do what they claim at 145 dB when it exceeds sound limits around the world. For those wondering about various limits, I have a list here.

I have to wonder - do they know and know they are lying, do they deep down suspect and are avoiding checking so they can pretend to themselves they aren't lying, are they just that dumb, or are they true believers? The psychology of this is fascinating, as perhaps each person pretends it's not their responsibility and keeps cashing the paycheque. I really want to find this out someday, sadly I think it's just going to be one of those mysteries.

Startup PR 102: Astroturfing

Edits and update, 10th Feb 2019: Upon further investigation and discussions, it looks like the website in question was not an official uBeam attempt at astroturfing, but a genuine effort by individuals to promote women in technology that ended prematurely in large part due to my blog post. While it highlights the rule of "never use company resources for non-company activities", those involved should be commended for promoting role models in an under-represented group (though clearly I'd not personally choose Perry as a role model for anyone). I think this post does make some important points on how companies can and do use PR (and clearly on how company history affects current reception) so while I won't delete the post I have made some updates to reflect this new information, I'd ask that everyone view the original website, and its creators, in the positive spirit that was intended.

Astroturfing is the practice of masking the sponsors of a message or organization (e.g., political, advertising, religious or public relations) to make it appear as though it originates from and is supported by grassroots participants.

When I named my blog, it was to try to convey the idea that the PR you see from startups is not what it seems, in a different way than what you typically get from established companies. When you have no product and no revenue, all you can sell is the hope or the illusion - one being a genuine belief in your goal, the other simply saying whatever it takes to keep the next round of funding viable. One way of establishing this illusion is to get other outlets to make statements on your behalf, and make it seem like there are established and independent third parties backing your stance - for example getting one media outlet to quote you without checking the source of your claim, then later using that media outlet as a reference to other media. Very quickly, you end up with the myth you created seemingly quoted as fact, and your fingerprints are not on it, unless someone cares to dig a little deeper. Here's an example I quoted in a previous post:

The founder of Red Hat (now a ~$25 billion company) needed to gain credibility for his product, so he essentially gamed a 'study' of high Linux user growth, and got a small Linux journal to quote him. Then he managed to get BusinessWeek to quote the Linux journal, and suddenly this made-up statistic had all the authority of being stated in a prestigious national publication. He abused the lack of fact checking and diligence to plant an idea in the media as if it had substance, and used that to help promote his own company.

What can happen if you get this myth going enough? Let's see what Marc Cuban, uBeam investor, said about seeing a prototype of the uBeam system prior to investing:

Have you seen a prototype?

No. I trust her (Perry) enough that I haven’t gone out and said, ‘Show it to me.’ She’s shown it to enough people that I trust what’s going on.

So he'd not seen a prototype, or from this sentence spoken to anyone else that had, but invested on the premise that someone else must have. I'd be interested in hearing from any of those people she'd shown it to. This quote is from July 2015, and in a recent interview Perry admitted that no charge had ever been transmitted to a phone until 6th Dec 2016, nearly 18 months later. Hmmm.

One thing a startup often relies upon is the "Myth of the Founder", and in many cases this serves the company well, at least for a time. With Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes was lauded almost right up until the SEC and DOJ pressed charges against her (and in the case of investor Tim Draper, long after), while Tesla sees great publicity, headlines, and stock performance due to the media presence of Elon Musk, though that has not been as effective recently. When the company has little in the way of product, puff pieces on the founders can still generate great publicity for the company. uBeam co-founder Meredith Perry was a great example of this, for example with this article from Fortune magazine in July 2015 entitled "Is this woman the next Elon Musk?".

Now the value of that headline for any tech company, regardless if the answer is "OMG no are you smoking crack?" or not, is incredible. Fortune magazine said it, so it must have some truth to it. Interestingly, despite the positive headline, the story itself contained a skeptical paragraph.

In late 2014, uBeam—flush after raising $10 million from investors—announced that it had finalized a working prototype. “There may be people on the Internet who don’t believe it’s true,” Perry says. But those who see it “are converted instantly.” (She declined to show the prototype to Fortune.)

So again, a working prototype claimed in late 2014, but how does that mesh with the "first charging in Dec 2016" statement? At least the journalist had the sense to ask for a demonstration, and indicate it wasn't shown despite its ability for a Damascene like conversion. Regardless, how many will remember this, and how many will simply look and think "Next Elon Musk!"? Priceless PR, and something any company should aim for. Overall, at least in the moment, PR done well.

PR done not so well

Now you may remember that Perry 'stepped down' as CEO of uBeam last year, and so it was interesting see recent coverage of Perry as a leader in technology. The website, Women in Technical Leadership, features Perry as their first, and currently only, woman who has made an impact in STEM. (Update, taken down as of 31/1/19, you can find the archived versions here and here) Now this is a laudable goal, as women are dramatically underrepresented in technology, and anything that encourages more women into STEM fields, at all stages, is to be encouraged. So what are some of the things it says about Perry?

In the early stages of her career, Meredith Perry has given a TEDx talk on how to be a technology innovator which IEEE boasts as "amazing" and certainly proved you do not have to be an engineer to create something. While Forbes has compared her to the likes of other entrepreneurs, she is in a league of her own that is near impossible to match. We celebrate Meredith Perry for being an exceptional role model to young women everywhere!

To find out more about Meredith Perry's company, visit www.ubeam.com. 

High praise indeed, and it's apparently going to be downhill from here in the quality of the awardees since she's so "impossible to match". And that's great publicity for the company she co-founded, even though there's no mention of her departure as CEO. (Quick question - does anyone have a reference for that IEEE "amazing" quote? Update: Someone found this brief Facebook post from the IEEE and let me know - hardly an in depth technical analysis, and slightly annoying from the IEEE given how she discusses engineers in a negative light in that link)

So who put this website and award together? According to the main page the copyright is "©2018 by Women in Technical Leadership" and reading the blurb:

Women in Technical Leadership is a culmination of engineers wanting to highlight the selected woman's accomplishments and make their achievements better known. Sponsored by a start-up in Marina Del Rey, the staff have decided to examine the women from the region of Southern California. 

Marina Del Rey? Why is that familiar? Perhaps it's because uBeam is based at 4086 Del Rey Avenue, in Marina Del Rey. Oh.

Let's delve a little deeper and take a look at the "Get in Touch" button which sends to an email at... ubeam.com. And a look at the WHOIS registry for the domain name, it was registered on the 15th January 2019 to uBeam, Inc.

So has uBeam has started a website for women in technical leadership which is fantastic, praising their own co-founder, but for some reason not prominently mentioning it's a uBeam owned site, which is a reasonable disclosure to make? If so, some might call this astroturfing, where an organization tries to make it appear the message they want out has come from an independent person or group.

Further, why would the new CEO, who had barely been on the job for two weeks, start a website to praise his predecessor, when he needs to be making product, licensing IP, or selling the company? Hardly something worthy of their efforts. And if not his doing, or official uBeam PR, then why does it use uBeam email and uBeam Inc as part of the operation? It's not like you need a company to get an email, register a domain, and start a website.

While there may be more, I see three main possibilities here:

1. The new CEO is, for some reason, spending time, effort, and money promoting his predecessor, in a way that gains publicity for his company, but not overtly declaring that relationship.
2. There's at least one uBeam employee that did this and while a very valuable site for the promotion of under-represented groups, it's tainted by the uBeam/Perry names. (Update: from LinkedIn and Twitter, it's looking more like this is what's happened, as well as it rapidly being taken down)
3. It's an official uBeam PR attempt from a few months ago, only just becoming public.

None of them is a good look. The first seems, at least to me, as somewhat devious and effectively astroturfing, the second is really unfortunate as a worthwhile endeavour is tainted by association with uBeam and Perry, the third very similar to the first. Looking at the CEO's background, I'd say his competency should be assumed and that it's one of the other two, not something he probably even knew about. There's little he can do now, given the public nature of this, that's not going to look like damage control. I feel for him. (There could of course be a more innocent explanation I haven't thought of, feel free to add in the comments.)

So next time you read such positive publicity about a founder, or anyone else, take a look at who is behind it, it might be quite illuminating.

What would I do?

One of the things that people have said is that it's really easy to take shots from the sidelines, rather than be "the man in the arena". Fair enough call, so if I were CEO, here's what I'd do:

Own it, get out in front of it. Revamp the page to make it clear and unambiguous it's uBeam owned and sponsored, and do some blurb on how awesome the co-founder was and the company now wants to give back to the community and help women in tech based on her example (losing the SoCal restriction). I'd task the employees who were responsible that they need to be working on this and get a new person featured each month, in addition to their normal jobs, and have them supervised by someone with actual PR experience. And I'd have each of the featured women be able to allocate $5,000 from uBeam to a relevant charity of choice, get quotes from them, and then use that to get features in other publications and low cost PR. If asked why the original looked the way it did, I'd just say it went live early by accident. If it doesn't work out, drop it after a few months, as no-one noticed anyway.

Or just delete it and pretend it never happened. Flip a coin. :)

Update 30th Jan 2019: I'd originally titled this "Hagiography: a pejorative reference to biographies and histories whose authors are perceived to be uncritical of or reverential to their subject", but I felt "Astrofurfing" was a better term.

Update 31st Jan 2019: WOT Website has been taken down.

More uBeam at CES 2019 - MacVoicesTV Interview

There was a brief video published today interviewing the uBeam Director of Product Marketing and Management at the floor show in CES (not the private suite), by MacVoicesTV. What you see is quite limited, a receiver only, no transmitter (except off camera, and on the screen behind), but interesting nonetheless.

The Interviewer

There are a few things that stand out in this video, and I'll start with the interviewer. Now I know this is not meant to be an in-depth technical expose, I'm eternally frustrated at the terrible coverage tech gets, but this was little more than allowing uBeam to read out their marketing material unchallenged. What is the point of the interviewer if they don't add anything to the mix? He does say "I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't ask about safety" and then lets them go wild with, IMO, very suspect safety statements (more on that later). After that, nothing that his job actually entails such as asking about power transmitted, delivered, cost, efficiency, product release date, regulatory approval - anything of practical interest. He was basically pointless, and should have just handed the mike to the PR guy and cut the pretense he was doing anything at all.

The Demo

Now the demo itself did yield some interesting info. In the background the poster claims "Useable Power, Meters (away?)", so definitively claiming >1 meter here. The receiver shown lit up - an LED - so a whole few mW of power has been received. Distance from the transmitter is not shown, but likely a meter or so. So much for phone charging if that's all they can do, and you have to think that if they could do more, they absolutely would be showing that.

For tracking, the target seems to need to be within a box of reflective tape, that is 1cm or so wide. That places quite a requirement on the border of the target, on top of the multiple centimeter sized cylinders for reception. How will this targeting work if some of the square is obscured? Might be a problem for a handheld device if the user isn't allowed to hold it. Seems a pretty 'ghetto' marking method for consumer electronics, that is not IMO going to fly in any real product. The transmitter following the receiver was shown to have a short lag each time it moved - is the beam still on and insonifying something else during that time, or switched off? 

Last question on tracking - is there any feedback so the transmitter knows how much power to send, or is it just full on, all the time? If there is, what's the communication method?

While the transmitter isn't shown in the video, in the background a video seems to indicate they are using transmitters like the ones shown last year. Shown in the upper picture next to an iPad, and the lower one marked as "March 2018".

That looks to be about 16 by 16 Murata style devices, each around 1cm in diameter, so 256 elements total and at 145dB (290W/m^2, intensity claimed by uBeam in the past), that would mean around 7.5 Watts acoustic out absolute maximum. If all of that were lighting a, generously say, 100 mW LED then that would mean around 1.4% acoustic to electrical conversion, though when you account for efficiency in the transmitter would drop below 1%. 

They go on to say that they are so awesome for Industrial Internet of Things, low power sensors etc, that's where they are focusing and save everyone the frustration of changing batteries - for the addition of white tape and large receivers around all the sensors, a power bill going up 100x, and only one lunchbox sized transmitter per few sensors. Given that Powercast already sell a wireless power system that will work at up to 80ft, with regulatory approval, can charge at up to the mW level, and does not need large receivers or reflective tape, I'm not quite sure what the value proposition here is.

A 'more robust' version of the demo was being given in their suite at the Venetian, so apparently this demo was not robust. They'd power cameras and sensors, but no mention of phones, which indicates to me that they can't reliably get 500mW to 1W at a phone sized receiver, as generally that's the minimum needed to even start charging a phone.

Safety

This bit was the part that really got me wound up. People are free to do what they want with their own money but safety is where you don't get to screw around. Allow me to rebutt the argument made here that this system is perfectly safe:

All acoustic energy bounces off the skin This is true, you get around 99.9% reflection from bare skin into the air - however - once there is hair on that skin, then acoustic losses go up, and that acoustic energy is converted to heat. Put enough energy there, and it can heat up a lot. Some papers report that mice and rabbits can die from exposure to sound at 145dB and up. From "Effects of Ultrasonic Noise on the Human Body—A Bibliographic Review" 

"According to Allen, Rudnik and Frings, a mouse dies from overheating after 10 s to 3 min of exposure to a signal of 20 kHz and level of 160 dB [10]. According to Danner, a lethal level for signals of 18–20 kHz for an unshaven mouse were 144 dB and for a shaven mouse 155 dB [21]. Acton obtained similar results and extended studies to larger animals such as guinea pigs and rabbits [22]."

Now at 145dB temp rises can be small, but cumulative, and consumer devices have to cover edge cases like babies, drunks, ill people who can't move, pets locked in cages etc. When you sell millions of devices to consumers, who do things they shouldn't, your system has to be foolproof.

I'm wondering, if it is pointed at the ear canal, does it work differently in there, where there is a very sound sensitive part? Any sub-harmonic generation possibilities, where a lower frequency that what is transmitted is heard? (For example, a subharmonics of 40 kHz are 20 and 10 kHz, both in hearing range of some to pretty much everyone). I'm sure that was studied too.

We've had 3rd parties evaluate our system over 18 months and it's completely safe including for pets There is a lack of evidence in the literature that ultrasound in the environment at these amplitudes is safe, and if they have it, this would be a landmark paper that would be massively valuable around the world. I'm sure there was a scientifically controlled experiment, repeated multiple times for statistical significance, followed over years, and if people were involved (which to study human hearing or skin response there would have to be) there will be an ethics review somewhere too? 

Please write a paper, for peer review, and all critics will be silenced. So come on uBeam, release the study - it doesn't have to reveal anything about your system, or technology, just the effect of sound. There's no commercial reason to keep it hidden, no competitors that will steal a march on you with it. All it can do is benefit you - so release it. Or is it not quite that good?

Tim Leighton from University of Southampton did the most comprehensive study to date on the effects of ultrasound in the air I know of. You can read it here, and it is not at all as confident regarding safety effects, especially long term.

The beam is controlled and directed If the wavelength of sound is smaller than the pitch between the transmitting elements, there will be what are known as 'grating lobes' where energy is sent in directions in addition to the desired beam. Given the spacing seems to be around 1cm, and at uBeam stated frequencies the wavelength is smaller than this, there will almost certainly be grating lobes. If so, how many people walking past that demo were getting insonified? That is pretty appalling to me - that members of the public, without their knowledge, could be subjected to unknown sound levels that may or may not have regulatory approval. Which brings me to the next part of safety.

Regulatory. OSHA used to have a limit of 145 dB for sound above 40kHz in air (US only), however a look at the rules today appears to show that it's a flat 115 dB, 1000x less power. Other countries are all in the 110 to 115 dB range. The FDA requires approval for all radiation emitting products, while UL 61010-1, Section 12.5.2 "Protection against... ultrasonic pressure" says "the ultrasonic pressure shall not exceed 110 dB above the reference pressure value of 20 microPa for frequencies between 20 kHz and 100 kHz"

So it seems that OSHA, the FDA, and UL all require much more stringent safety than simply blasting 145 dB around. This will be answered in that 3rd party set of tests, right? Again, no problem releasing this as there was a claim in the Oct 2017 fundraising deck that uBeam was "legally approved by FCC/FDA".

When it comes to regulatory and safety the burden is not on the regulator to prove it is dangerous, it is up to the proposer to prove that it is safe.

Engineering Ethical Considerations

Being an engineer isn't just about doing calculations and building things. There's a responsibility to the public and the world at large on what, and how, we work. The IEEE is the world's largest engineering professional body, and have a set of ethical rules, they can be found here, and the first one among them is:

"to hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public, to strive to comply with ethical design and sustainable development practices, and to disclose promptly factors that might endanger the public or the environment"

So sell anything you like, fools and their money are soon to be parted, but prove that it is safe and don't ever put the health and welfare of people at risk. If you do, don't call yourself an engineer.

Update Jan 19th: Confirmed that it is the white box transmitter.

Update Jan 24th: following some conversations with those who got to see the private suite demo:

The transmitter was on a motorized rotational stage, turning an estimated +/- 45 degrees to steer the beam. If that's the case, I do not understand why they bother with individual elements and a phased array - just get a focused bowl arrangement and steer mechanically, it would be simpler and much cheaper. The CES floor show demo seemed to show phased array operation, so perhaps there's a very limited steering angle and gross motions need mechanical steering?

There were items taped to the wall, on the door etc to show charging of items like "smart locks", however the device itself never charged, it was always an LED that lit up to indicate power was being delivered. That means it could be as low as around 20 mW received.

Those who held the next generation transducers seemed to think them roughly the same lateral dimensions as the Muratas, perhaps a bit thinner, but nowhere close to the "4x smaller area, 100x thinner" listed in the Oct 17 fundraising. They did say that the demo was being done with COTS devices.

Generally the view was that the presentation materials were not particularly professional. Given what they showed, it seems they booked a slot at CES prematurely, I have to think this hurt more than helped - but maybe I'm just a dumb engineer.

uBeam's CES 2019

uBeam started 2019 by giving some private demonstrations of their wireless power transfer system at CES, which according to their PR material "using proprietary transmitters and receivers, uBeam is able to deliver the necessary power to charge a range of devices from portable electronics to IoT sensors at various distances" which manages to set no expectations or give any real indication of what it can do, like any good PR should (unless it truly can do something useful!).

The New CEO

I had expected it to be fairly bland and that there be nothing to report on, however there were a couple of things worth reporting on. First up, they announced that there is a new CEO, replacing the CFO/HR Director that had been a stand-in since Perry's departure in September (or maybe July). From the announcement:

uBeam Inc., the pioneer of ultrasonic power-at-a-distance wireless charging, announced today the appointment of Simon McElrea as Chief Executive Officer. “I am delighted to lead uBeam and its many talented employees at this pivotal time in the wireless charging industry,” stated McElrea. “The proliferation of IoT networks that require safe, reliable, Always-On connectivity and power, from the Smart Home to the much larger commercial, industrial, agricultural and renewable energy markets, is right in our sweet-spot.”

“Over the past 18 months, our team of 30 engineers has been singularly focused on the miniaturization of the technology, to enable us in 2019 to provide reference design kits to our manufacturing partners and customers so that they can integrate it into their diverse range of products,” said McElrea. “By developing the complete turn-key solution, from industry-leading transducers, to custom ASICs, control electronics, hardware and software, we have created an end-to-end solution, as well as the associated IP, which currently totals over 100 patents and applications. We are excited to be able to showcase this work at CES during the coming week.”

So first of all, they've finally got someone in the CEO role who can put together a sane, sensible, competent sounding statement. Now the accuracy of some of these points is questionable - the company has been going since 2011, but seriously funded now for over 4 years, not 18 months. In fact, 18 months ago in the USA Today article, member of their Technical Advisory board, Matt O'Donnell, was saying:

“When Meredith called me in 2015, I was curious and skeptical as hell, because you just hadn’t seen efficient airborne transducers, but holy moly, the leaps they’ve made in the past 18 months have been impressive.”

It's that magical 18 months again - nicely chosen in the past to be just out of firm memory, and for the future far enough away everyone has forgotten by the time you get there.

Company pictures and LinkedIn do not seem to support 30 engineers, more like the low 20's and not all of them will be engineers. 100 patents and applications seems high too, unless a very large number have been submitted in the last year and are still not visible to the public, or they're double counting international applications. Press - next time you speak to the CEO, maybe ask for the patent list and an actual headcount?

And reference design kits in the next 12 months? Those will be interesting to see.

So what's the new CEO's background? He's actually a well qualified person for the role and IMO finally sees someone competent in the big chair at uBeam.

McElrea joins uBeam having served as CEO of Semblant Ltd. since 2015, a UK and Silicon Valley based B2B nanotechnology company which was acquired in Q4 2018 by HZO, a global leader in electronic material technologies. Prior to Semblant, McElrea was Vice President of IP, Licensing and Marketing at Energous Corporation, a San Jose based wireless-charging company that completed its IPO in 2014 and was awarded “Best of CES” in 2015. McElrea was responsible for the marketing, patenting and licensing strategy, as well as initiating FCC engagement and the formation of the “Uncoupled” wireless power standards committee within the AirFuel Alliance.

I just about fell off my chair laughing when I read that - long time readers of my blog will know I've been covering Energous extensively, as another at-distance wireless power company that many describe as a straight up scam. I started covering them back in 2016 in-part because I could go into details about the RF power delivery method Energous use, pointing out the basics of physics that limit them, many or all of which also applied to uBeam, without risking breaking my NDA with uBeam. I've said before I think the genius of Energous has been in repeatedly raising money from markets despite IMO having little to nothing, not in any of their technical work, and much of that came from IP, licensing, and marketing.

If uBeam are in the position that they have as little technical capability as Energous to charge a phone safely, then expect them to follow the Energous path for PR, product announcements for 18 months out that never happen, mysterious deals with Tier One vendors that can't be divulged, and similar. They've already stepped back from the multi-meter, multi-watt, multi-device claims and are covering "IoT" only now - what next? While uBeam can't tap the IPO market the way Energous smartly did early on, there are still fools out there who might think this is a worthwhile purchase. Will we see uBeam sold "for an undisclosed amount" in the next year? I expect that will be a high priority for the new CEO - put a pretty bow on uBeam and get it sold. Or should I say lipstick on a pig?

The Demo

That was going to be the full extent of this post, until earlier today the EEVBlog posted a very interesting picture of uBeam's CES 2019 demo kit.

Now I know as much as you do about this, but if this is the whole demo, it's failing to meet even the low bar I had set for them. If this is it, what you see in that photograph is the result of nearly $40m of investment to date, and around 5 years of work. The three boards in the box with the circular components in grids are the transmitter or receiver transducer boards, and it looks very much like they are still using standard Murata transducers - basically the devices that work as car parking sensors in most vehicles. Why are some white and some black, I'm not sure, they may be the send and receive versions that Murata have, or simply someone has removed the thin grill from the front face on some. The two rectangular boards seem to be about 14 by 8 cm in size, so roughly the same size as an iPhone X. 

Dave Jones on EEV Blog points out in the bottom left is a rather unsafe looking power supply, maybe around 100W or so, with the energy harvesting boards in the bottom right that might get mW out. (Update: The bottom right board is a "Burst Circuit PCB" and you can order it from here (link now inactive). Thanks EEVBlog.) If that's the case, it would point to efficiency being in the 1% or less range.  The white frame in the top right may be part of a vision tracking system now shown to be a receiver to light an LED, he notes the white squares are reflective material used to locate and track the board for power delivery, and the top left board looks to be an Intel MAX10 FPGA which can do beamforming calculations (when each element has to be driven to steer in a particular direction). As far as I can see, there are no custom parts in that box, most of it is Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS). Maybe there's a large transmitter somewhere, like we've seen before, at 45 by 45cm or 60 by 60cm, but even with that, I'm really not wowed by it.

Interestingly, in the bottom right, there are Murata-like transducers that are not Muratas. I wonder if those are actually in-house built devices. Zooming in, they look to be an active cantilever or prestressed beam (a uni/bimorph) with a circular cone on the front, which if you stripped the can off a Murata, is roughly what you'd see inside (but a disk instead of a large cantilever). I was even tempted to say that's what they were, but a few differences, and that they're in a sealed container marked "Made in China", make me think these are the actual uBeam devices. If this is the case, then uBeam's proprietary transducers are essentially a variation on what Murata have been selling for over a decade, and in my opinion unlikely to have significantly different performance characteristics, but at a higher price point. The active area is shockingly low on this array, I'd be surprised if 50% of the surface was active. More worryingly, both the Muratas and this 'custom' array have a large center-to-center pitch, more than a wavelength at the frequencies uBeam have publicly claimed, which would lead to what are called 'grating lobes' in any transmitted power - those are beams in addition to the ones you actually want, sending power out in additional directions. Great for safety...

Interestingly, during the last fundraising for uBeam over a year ago, their pitch deck became public, and some of it was shown on the EEV Blog.

This slide makes it clear that uBeam, at the time of their pitch in late 2017, were claiming to have transducers that were smaller, thinner, more powerful, and much cheaper than the "market transducer". Except a year later they're doing a demo with a "market transducer". That's pretty embarrassing for what they themselves describe as "uBeam's most critical component".

And how does this match with charging "Internet of Things" electronics? Does each need a board that's 14 by 8cm? Or do they each get a Murata sized can transducer that essentially takes up a 1 cm cube, and receives 1/100th of power of those boards?

What of the potential partners and customers from that pitch?

Were any of those multi-billion dollar companies there to say that yes, indeed they would be partnering with uBeam? Or a year later are each and every one of them unconvinced?

And what of their claims, back in Oct 2017, that they could charge a phone at 1 meter at up to a Watt, already approved by the FCC and FDA, with no safety or interference risks, and a small receiver?

So in summary, uBeam showed (at least from this picture) nothing new, and in fact looks to be steps back from what was claimed already complete in 2017 during fundraising, but now have a competent CEO that's been at the heart of a similar company who raised hundreds of millions on not much more than uBeam appear to have, and likely has a big financial incentive to get it sold. 2019 might be more interesting than I thought.

More on uBeam's CES 2019 in a further post here.