October 27, 2009

Charge Your Cell Phone with Light, Any Light

Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons

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I was just wishing for something like this the other day and now see that SunCore of Irvine California has a patent pending on technology making it possible to charge a cell phone using room light, sunlight, or any light.

The OC Register reports that SunCore’s upcoming Novacell external solar charger system gets power from the entire spectrum (up to ultraviolet, down to infrared) and is efficient enough to charge a cell phone in a normal room. You plug and charge via a USB connection. It’ll also charge most mobile internet devices (MIDs), iPods and the likes, GPS units, digital still cameras, video cameras, and other gadgets.

The first chargers are headed to China. SunCore’s preparing an $800,000 test order for China Mobile, followed by a $21 million order if successful.

The company’s also developing embedded light-powered batteries enabling virtually any phone to be retrofitted before or after manufacturing. In theory, you’ll be able to buy a light-powered phone that’s ready to go. Or you can rip the back off your current phone and hack a SunCore light-powered battery into place yourself. Plug and play.

Cell phone maker HTM has ordered 100,000 of the company’s embedded batteries for a market test. RIM, makers of the Blackberry, are also apparently testing the SunCore batteries. According to the OC Register:

“The only behavior change that we have to ask of consumers is that when they put their phone down they put it back side up. It’s actually a small change in behavior to more or less continuously charge your phone,” says SunCore CEO Steve Brimmer.

Price? Timeline? I am so ready for this. Can they get a few to Copenhagen, maybe as conference goodies to lure our reluctant and lackluster leaders?
 

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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