medis

New York, Silicon Valley teams win Startup Bus competition

AUSTIN, Texas--After three days jammed into buses headed here from cities across the country and four days perfecting their pitches, the winners of the second-annual Startup Bus competition claimed victory tonight.

If you haven't been following the happenings of the Startup Bus, 38 teams of so-called "buspreneurs" departed on six buses from San Francisco, Chicago, Cleveland, Miami, and New York last Tuesday, headed for the South by Southwest conference (SXSW) here. Each team, formed mainly from strangers aboard their bus, faced this challenge: conceive of an idea, and take the time from departure to arrival in Austin … Read more

Medis Power Pack: A fuel cell gadget charger

As I write, a small black box on my desk--a liquid fuel cell--is charging my iPod Touch.

It's a Medis 24-7 Power Pack, a portable charger for small electronics like a cell phone or an iPod.

Medis Technologies says that one Power Pack, which recently went on sale online and at Best Buy, can give you 30 hours of talk time on an average mobile phone or 60 to 80 hours of play time on an average iPod. That translates to about five or six full charges for an iPhone. A starter kit with adapters costs about $40 and … Read more

A practical consumer fuel cell, coming soon

At CES 2008, I talked with several companies, some for work and some for Speeds and Feeds.

Although I saw many interesting products, I'm really looking forward to one product in particular that isn't due to ship until October.

It's the HydroPak fuel-cell power supply from Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies. It produces up to 25 watts of power from replaceable solid fuel cartridges and water. A single refueling can produce about 270 watt-hours of energy through the HydroPak's standard 110V AC power outlet and two auxiliary USB power jacks.

This electricity is expensive-- $20 for a … Read more

Fuel cell boost for mobiles

It's finally here. Fuel cell technology in mobile devices, which has been talked about for the longest time, is finally coming to mobile devices.

The first-generation 24/7 Power Pack charger from Medis Technologies promises to extend the talktime on handsets by up to 30 hours, 20 hours for smart phones or as much as 80 hours of playback for MP3 players such as the iPod. While we have yet to get our hands on one of these Power Packs for testing, we can already foresee how this will be useful for those who travel frequently or who just … Read more

Two new commercial fuel cells--'green,' but not perfect

My buddy Michael Kanellos wrote a CNET article (here) about a portable fuel-cell power supply from Trulite.

Kanellos made a small error in his article (or Trulite did when they briefed him), describing the device as using a chemical reaction involving "sodium hydride" to extract hydrogen from water.

That surprised me, since sodium hydride is extremely caustic (it's a base, the opposite of an acid), strong enough to be dangerous if exposed to air or water.

Well, not to worry. According to the company's website (here), the chemical is actually sodium borohydride, a safer compound.

That … Read more