SlipHead Design

Batteries are an essential part of almost every portable electronic device. Unfortunately, battery technology has not kept pace with other areas of technological innovation. While devices are often tweaked to be more and more efficient with their power consumption, little emphasis seems to be placed on actually creating an innovative and more effective portable power source.

Now what’s interesting to me is that there are a number of power sources readily available to any given portable device. The challenge is to find ways of usefully harnessing this energy. Obviously such a task is not simple to do, but consider how much energy is generated by simple external forces such as gravity, sunlight, wind, motion, air pressure, etc. Surely it is possible to convert these forces into electricity.

My vote is to use the force of gravity as the power source for a micro-generator which could keep a traditional chemical battery charged enough so that I would never have to plug-in my laptop again!

As part of my wife’s birthday this past year, I got her a new phone with the GPS service offered by Telenav. Well, let me just say that this service is fantastic!

The application uses assisted-GPS which is a combination of cellular network and satellite based location determination. Once the current location has been determined, the handset software connects to the Telenav servers to provide a wealth of services such as maps, directions, business lookup, etc.

The application seems to be very well-written and does a great job of tracking your current location and plotting it on a map. Now, if only I could get this for the Treo!

Has Paypal finally figured it out?? They recently launched a new service called Paypal Mobile which allows you to easily exchange money using simple text (SMS) messages on your mobile phone.? All you have to do is create a text message to PAYPAL (729725) with the amount you want to send and the number where you want to send it.? The money is then instantly moved from your account to whoever you sent it to.

This certainly has the potential to revolutionize interpersonal, small-money transactions.? Hopefully retail stores will also get on the bandwagon and we can easily pay for that Happy Meal with a simple text message!