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There's an article up on Hackaday on a proposed wireless power transmission system by tech company uBeam.
uBeam transmits power via sound, specifically high intensity ultrasound. uBeam has never demonstrated a prototype, has never released any technical specs, and even some high-profile investors that include [Mark Cuban] have not seen the uBeam working.
...
In what is perhaps the greatest breakdown ever posted on the EEVForums, [georgesmith] goes over what uBeam is, how the technology doesn't make sense, and how far you can take a business before engineers start to say, 'put up or shut up.' [georgesmith]'s research goes over just some of what makes uBeam impractical, but digging even further reveals how insane uBeam actually is.
The article is based on a forum posting by georgesmith titled "The uBeam FAQ" on the EEVBlog which is skeptical of the practicality of the approach, and critical of the reaction of the tech press.
Thousands of startups have technical problems. Why uBeam? Why make this FAQ?
Investors have given uBeam over $23 million. But that's not a big problem. It's their money, they can spend it how they want, and they can afford to lose it.
It's likely that uBeam's product will fail, if it ever launches. But that's not a problem either. Plenty of other companies take unlikely chances, and on the whole, we're better off for it. We can't succeed without failures along the way.
The problem is that uBeam's CEO, Meredith Perry, has turned the wireless power industry into a vehicle for her own self-promotion. uBeam, which has never demoed a prototype, lead Forbes to proclaim "Is this woman the next Elon Musk?"
The homepage of uBeam is also available for the curious.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Magic Oddball on Thursday October 22 2015, @07:10PM
The problem is that uBeam's CEO, Meredith Perry, has turned the wireless power industry into a vehicle for her own self-promotion
How can somebody turn an entire industry into "a vehicle for their own self-promotion," especially when the stuff is being written by a PR department and the media, and is (as mentioned below) just short bits woven into overall articles?
[and] Forbes to proclaim "Is this woman the next Elon Musk?" among hundreds of other press hits.
So the big deal here is: a company is promoting their (evidently tech-capable) CEO, and various media outlets are praising her. Okay...
uBeam constantly stresses their need for secrecy, to avoid discussing any technical details,
As far as I've ever seen, that's pretty normal behavior, isn't it?
while at the same time doing photoshoots for fashion magazines that say Meredith Perry "is the real-life version of Tony Stark."
"While at the same time" makes it sound like it's some kind of bizarro contradiction for a company to keep corporate secrets and have their CEO appear in the media.
I checked out the link [refinery29.com] out of curiosity. The article is part of a series on young female entrepreneurs, shows one picture of her (how is that a "photoshoot"?) and is a standard short profile/interview about her lifelong obsession with science and her related goals.
The website itself is a standard lifestyle 'webzine' site for women, with very standard sections like entertainment, news, tech, living, etc. as well as the usual beauty & fashion sections. But I guess a "lifestyle magazine for women" automatically equates to "fashion magazine" in the FAQ-writer's mind, gag-worthy as it is.
When someone else in the ultrasound industry criticized uBeam [7], uBeam director Mark Suster didn't show his math was wrong, even when it was. His rebuttal had not a single number, no diagrams, no graphs, no references to the literature on ultrasound.
According to the FAQ-writer, Mark Suster is an investor, so it kind of makes sense that he wouldn't try to rebut the (evidently irrelevant) math using his personal knowledge.
Instead, [Suster's response] sounded like the victim of a personality cult:
Except when I looked at the linked post, it didn't sound like that at all. Here's the beginning of the (long) relevant part of his post:
But then one person – who happens to be a physicist – wrote a back-of-the-envelop calculation of uBeam and said it’s not physically possible. His math was correct and I can hardly blame him for taking a guess at what uBeam does but every assumption that he used was wildly inaccurate. uBeam’s tech does work and I have safely seen it demo’d in the real life many times. Most of those that have been privileged enough to get a look at what they are actually doing have moved from skeptics to believers.
He goes on with standard PR-speak like that for quite a long time, then in comments briefly on the CEO's enthusiasm and determination. The way the FAQ-writer described it (by quoting only the small bit about her) made it sound like that's all the guy said.
But at least Suster is an investor, so he's supposed to be biased. The same can't be said for the tech press [laundry-list of positive things the media has said about the CEO, buried deep in their overall articles on the topic].
When I looked into the various links he had about the actual "problem" it turned out that his quotes were basically cherry-picked statements buried into overall articles about the company, technology, or a profile/interview sort of thing. It doesn't come across as somebody turning an industry into their own vehicle for PR or however he put it.
It sounds a hell of a lot like the guy either has a personal problem with the CEO, or is upset at seeing a female CEO being praised as a technical innovator. I hope that's not the case, but it really does come across that way.