Engineer and Investor in Spat About Wireless Charging Startup UBeam
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
Early on the uBeam folks built a pretty low power acoustic transmitter/receiver that could, over a relatively short distance, actually deliver a charge to a phone. Not a super useful charge but, you know, something. Based on this demo and some handwaving (and maybe a bit of math) they went out and said "something that delivers more charge is possible. give us some money and time and we'll work out the engineering." Mostly they raised money on this. Likely without a ton of due diligence.
The actual engineers working on the project (including the one in this "spat") at some point realize the actual limitations of what is possible physics wise. But they still think "a useful product is possible here." Maybe you can deliver enough to charge a phone overnight while it sits on your coffee table. That could actually be cool? Maybe?
Meanwhile the PR machine gets going and, as so often happens, the exaggeration kicks in. Those that haven't been here themselves look at it and see LIES. I have a more nuanced view. The press can misunderstand and distort things on their own side. And then if you don't refute it fast enough then you almost have to support it. Not saying this is ok, but I can see how it happens. The statements about what is possible just get out of hand and then you're stuck with them.
So behind the scenes some of the engineers read the press and go "WTF, this is insane, I'm out!" Others say "well, that's all bullshit, but this overnight charger thing could be useful. So I'm gonna keep my head down and work on that. If we can get it to the point that we can release a commercial product then we'll see what the actual market is." Inevitably actually building a commercial product takes longer than you think. These are just normal engineering delays. No "trying to defy physics" type delays.
Which brings us to the present day. Almost certainly what has been hyped is not real. But there might be something less good there. Maybe. If they can balance the tradeoffs between input power, actual power delivered, distance and safety. That's real engineering work right there.
All just speculation. Take it for whatever it's worth.
Technically, the problem is that Moller is trying to do it with Wankel engines, rather than jet turbines. He has some very high power to weight Wankel engines, and at least briefly, he's been able to get the thing a few meters off the ground. But the Wankels can't maintain that power level for long. Jet turbines can, but they cost too much.
(Want a hard problem to work on? Build a small, cheap, reliable jet engine. Many people have tried. Willams got the furthest.[3] The general result is that, below 6-passenger bizjet size, smaller jet engines don't get much cheaper. Small jet engines have been built, but the price doesn't come down much if you want the reliability and life of an aircraft engine.)
[1] http://www.moller.com [2] http://www.downside.com/scams/moller/ [3] http://www.williams-int.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsXWspo5hrc
Perhaps you could say that hooking an axle to a pulsejet is impractical, rather than impossible.
From reading the blog of their former VP of engineering [0] I got the impression that the actual engineers were aware from the start of the limitations of what was physically possible. Instead, said engineer seems to have only realized with time something else: that the founder and CEO was perfectly at ease with making unrealistic promises to raise truckloads of funding at valuations that were impossible to justify with the performances he (and the other engineers) knew were physically possible.
What i thing by this the efficiency of the system is very low, but we can't say that this is not possible.
Assuming they finished high school, that point would be the first day on their job.
I read until here and would like to cut you off. So, at this point, can you tell me YOUR perspective on the alternate history where the company, exactly at this point, starts behaving exactly like Apple, consumer-driven instead of fundamental R&D driven, and simply pivots and enters some totally unrelated part of the power or battery market. Literally any other part of it - not just super capacitors (which were making the rounds around that time) but literally ANY part of the market, since they had obscene gobs of money in the bank for the stage they were at ($10M+) and lots of extremely talented engineers.
What would have happened? Could they have retained their goodwill, credibility, and name, and simply successfully pivoted?
At the end of the day, if the CEO is thinking the "least risk / best shot" is to stay the course, then a pivot is off the table until you replace the CEO.
And the really relevant point is that uBeam hasn't, according to its current press, pivoted into anything other than its stated mission. So debating why not is like debating why you didn't ask out someone back when you were in high school and now has turned out to be someone you didn't expect. Kind of a waste of time :-)
Well, okay. But I hope it's blindingly obvious that we all lose. . That pre-CEO and the world.
EDIT: Whoever is downvoting me doesn't get it. She had a proof of concept. The proof didn't scale. She raised money - millions - anyway. To me this is all fine. The question is whether she HAD to stick with this non-working concept, or whether she could have pivoted, when she had all that money in the bank and learned that the concept does not work/scale. You guys just don't get the question.
The concept doesn't work because it's physically impossible and having a low power example is all you can do without severe issues. In this case having a small scale example doesn't tell you much if anything about the large scale behavior ( among other things nonlinear effects start happening at high power physically )
When a reputable investor and a good engineer are in a dispute about whether a startup is technically viable, believe the engineer.
Mark is an operator and knows that most people do respect the CEO chain of command unless the behavior is unethical or the situation extreme.
On the other hand, what's the bloody point of the engineer coming out in a secret blog to raise concerns on the tech. If the team can't develop a solution, the company will not be able to raise money and fail.
If enough people read the blog and get concerned reading the blog- the company fails because of litigation around fraud etc and everyone loses their jobs and the company for sure fails to find a solution.
Either way, if all of our goals is to see innovation, it's not a very constructive approach.
Fortunately SV startups are rarely capable of getting people killed with a bad product. I'd like to hope that someone would whistleblow the safety issues on home thorium reactors before the Bay Area is rendered uninhabitable, but I know it would be career suicide for the person that did.
I enjoyed that piece. I like it when the discussion reverts to basic math and physics to resolve points of contention.
At any rate, it continues to amuse/distress me in the time since then that the company is still around and still has investors, etc. Do people still not get it? It won't work.
On some level, moreover, it disturbs me that people are actively pursuing a technology that would effectively be torture to household pets. Does that mean nothing to anyone? Do they get that dogs and cats would be able to hear this as a siren in their skull?
I'm not here to defend this company. I don't know a thing about them or their technology. I'm just saying... "what kind of world would we live in if we never looked past what we thought was possible?"
EDIT: I think that a few of you have missed an important piece of this post, so once again...
I'm not here to defend this company. I don't know a thing about them or their technology.
For this specific piece of tech its in the middle ground of the "its not possible" spectrum as human/animal safety and the air we breathe are the limiting factors, so if someone figures out how to very tightly generate the beam with no reflections/spillage and can detect when someone or a pet wanders into the beam, then its possible with high losses due to air.
All forms of wireless power suffer from effectively the same limitations of safety and air. Magnetic/RF have problems with unwanted heating of nearby metallic objects, RF spectrum rights and beam size issues (and at high freqs, air losses), optical have mild-moderate air resistance issues and issues with reflections (very small amounts of reflection=blind people), ultrasonic have severe air loss issues and beam power limitations for safety. Physics doesn't say no to wireless power, but it does say "Only if humans are not nearby or you want small amounts of power (<1w)".
Also, the best way to prove that you have conquered the limitations with a tech is to demonstrate to the world at large that it works in a practical enough manor. None of these "It's not possible" startups that I've seen have demonstrated a working prototype that people can wander up to an look at.
Disclaimer: I have worked for a company that does industrial optical wireless power.
Wouldn't the limit be raised if you could build a system that detects whether a human is in the power path(or stray paths) to turn the power off, and do that fast and accurate ?
'Cause your answer really shouldn't be "yes" unless there is some very, very compelling reason that there is absolutely no other choice, and there pretty much always is.
It's one thing to say your building a cheap 40% efficient solar cell, it's another thing to say your 10x the energy of current designs because light simply does not have that much energy.
To distribute sound over long distances 'wirelessly' you need to make it loud. That typically means cranking up the power. And ultrasound can be harmful at high power [1]. [1] "Occupational exposure to ultrasound in excess of 120 dB may lead to hearing loss. Exposure in excess of 155 dB may produce heating effects that are harmful to the human body..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasound
The moonshot wasn't about the laws of physics, it was about the laws of economics. A scale-up problem in terms of money. Whereas this charger is about trying to evade some very difficult laws of physics.
Even if you exclude the extreme physical improbability of the device, it still has massive problems in terms of practicality. It would require installing a large number of expensive ultrasound emitters in every coffee shop and fast food joint. Then installing recievers in every phone. And it will still be massively inefficient power-wise. Whereas the alternative is to install comparatively low power, more efficient wireless charging pads in every table.
So even ignoring the physics, this was going to be an incredibly hard sell.
Want to extract 2 kW / m^2 from solar radiation somewhere near the Earth? Won't work, the Sun doesn't pump out that kind of power density (the max is 1.whatever kW). Literally impossible.
/s ;)
From Wikipedia:
Average annual solar radiation arriving at the top of the Earth's atmosphere is roughly 1366 W/m2. The Sun's rays are attenuated as they pass through the Atmosphere, leaving maximum normal surface irradiance at approximately 1000 W /m2 at sea level on a clear day.[1]
Therefore it is impossible to get more than about 1kW / m2 from any solar panel. Until such times as something fairly fundamental changes, like a loss of atmosphere or an increase in energy output from the sun.
From /just/ a solar panel it isn't possible to achieve higher density, however you can use reflectors in the spectrum that your solar panel operates in to increase the energy available for capture at a focal point.
But there's also TheSpiceIsLife's opening comment which says:
> ...you're increasing the surface are of the collector so the 1.366kWh / square meter still stands.
It feels like your second sentence
> ...[H]owever you can use reflectors in the spectrum that your solar panel operates in to increase the energy available for capture at a focal point.
plays rhetorical games by ignoring the existence of large parts of your solar collector (namely the reflectors) in order to arrive at an inflated energy density figure.
Trivia: According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight#Solar_constant The sun puts out approximately 1.361 kW/m²
I am curious if investors think you like when they invest in the impossible or they just are not really interested in fact and just want portfolio or another reason?
I was close to the Jan Sloot[0] who invented impossible compression. And got invested into by prominent investors who believed him. And some of them not ignorant of the math behind it either and yet they invested. My company got asked by a 'friend' of Sloot who also lived in Nieuwegein (my company was there too) to recreate the algorithm based on discussions this guy had with Sloot and notes he wrote down during those discussions. I presented, to my colleagues and this guy, a proof based on (Kolmogorov) complexity that we cannot do that and that his writings were gibberish; some of my friends and colleagues told me I was insane in not pursuing something revolutionary like this and, as you said; a lot of great technology was perceived as 'impossible' and yet we have that as well. No-one became a billionaire on this tech yet as was promised so I'm going to say it was a good call.
There's a time and a place for "we may learn new things in the future". This is not that time. There's no room for "new physics" to be hiding here, short of postulating outright magic, which will probably have a great deal more applications in the world than salvaging something that was always frankly a silly idea anyhow.
I mean, why go to bat for this idea anyhow? It's not flying cars or FTL, it's an incredibly annoying, inferior way of doing something you probably do every day already, and you aren't sitting there going "Gosh, this is a really inconvenient way of charging my phone and there's nothing I can do about it", because there already is something you can do about it if you just can't stand wires. Inductive chargers work and are years-old off-the-shelf tech. I have a cousin-in-law that was involved in marketing them. (It doesn't "beam" the power, but, well, that's why it works. EM beaming certainly seems to be "less" impossible, but probably never practical for ambient personal electronic charging.) Even if this all worked as claimed it would still be yawn-worthy tech. Hardly a reason to resort to nuke-the-entire-philosophical-world arguments about our complete ignorance of everything everywhere ever.
The speed of light constraint also has nothing to do with light, it is the speed of information travel.
What is being proposed by ubeam is like lifting a 50 ton rocket with 10 tons of thrust. It doesn't really matter what future physics we have, fundamentally its impossible as stated. Bringing future physics into the mix is moving goalposts in an attempt to appear open minded. The rockets never going to lift off with 1/5 of its mass in thrust.
The properties of the medium (air), being the core constraint, is fairly well rooted in the laws of physics and observed experimental results.
What constraints are there that can actually be changed?
If you mean hyper-localization, that would be a new scientific phenomenon and one worth a great deal more to the world than as a wireless charging technique. The best industrial manufacturing techniques utilizing ultra-sonic arrays can do some amazing things but they:
1) Make the environment inhospitable to humans
2) Don't actually change the "relevant characteristics" of air so much as force a specific resonant behavior to allow them to target the energy at specific locations.
What specific "relevant characteristics" of air would you be changing? How do we then leverage changing of said characteristic to achieve our desired result? It would help if you utilized the terminology from the "Gas" Wikipedia page, a cursory glance and it appears to be comprehensive (from a concept perspective) [0]
Engineering is not simply about having fantasies. A fair bit of what you do as a technologist is rule out things that simply are illogical. Perpetual motion machines, a way to calculate whether a program will halt, acausal filters, and so on.
For instance, it's impossible to construct a windmill that is 70% efficient. I learned that last week, so now I know not to think too much about it, other than noticing any refutation of Betz' Law.
There are many things that are hard but cannot be ruled out, like sending probes to Alpha Centauri. It's fair to spend energy thinking about those ideas, but to do that we need to stop thinking about things that are ruled out.
Last time he insisted on calling out the non-believers about tech. This time, he only writes a couple sentences defending the tech and is laying the groundwork for abandoning the physics and just supporting the team.
Something like.. 'yeah, we took a chance. Someone has to. It didn't pan out, but the team is great.'
I have done my share of pitching the VCs and they have to uphold the image that they are the smartest people in the room, or else what are they? Just Money who can't possibly know everything about everything? No! can't be.
So, here is a smart person dispensing advice on all things life, entrepreneurship, investment and technology who is clearly been had and out of his depth in this particular field. But smart enough to know that he's been had and the only remaining way out is to abandon tech and back the team.
This is a personal issue for Mark and has nothing to do with science and the rest of us. The science is clear. He just can't admit that he was had, because that kills his standing in his day job.
That doesn't sound like a totally alien idea, and since Theranos will probably not deliver on this promise fully, someone else likely will. However, the uBeam sounds super dubious. I think wireless energy is probably possible, but without a prototype a consumer could feasibly use in their home, and the large amount if scientists I coming out against this a few years ago doesn't seem to have shrunk.
So, yes it is a really hard interesting problem, but all the fun ones are. I wouldn't have invested with the expectation of success, but that the technology developed could be used for something else/is valuable.
The answer to that is to take more blood, from a vein. You can't make a more accurate test because you simply don't have the necessary information. If you do take more blood then the test gets as expensive as a normal test and you no longer have any cost advantage.
Except we don't need more blood tests[0]. With uBeam, there's no doubt that if the technology works, it would be a game-changer. Theranos was facing both technical and market challenges, but with uBeam, it's a purely technical challenge.
0: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/theranos-is-wrong-we-don...
Maybe the patient forgot to fast, maybe the test was a fluke? Either way a consistent average of 85 would put that out of range. SO I found the five thirty eight article stupid so I guess I misunderstood why more health data would be bad.
> Their assertion that tests === diagnostics that map 1:1 to a disease was baseless. Tests don't answer the question "doe patient have diabetes?", they answer the question "what is the patients glucose level?" 115 mg/dl.
Medical tests that aren't actionable aren't useful. So while you're correct in a very narrow sense, you have to use the results to make a decision about treatment. If you're going to make treatment decisions based on tests that have some amount of inherent error, you may end up over or under-treating patients.
> Maybe the patient forgot to fast, maybe the test was a fluke? Either way a consistent average of 85 would put that out of range.
Medical tests have both random and systematic error. What you're talking about is random error (i.e. a single test result being bad). However, many tests have systematic error (i.e. the result being wrong every time the test is taken) just due to personal variation in what's "normal".
The article makes the point that if more tests lead to worse outcomes[1] (due to overtreatment) then adding more tests is useless or worse than useless. This effect is particularly pronounced when testing across large populations, even if the test is highly accurate.
[1] And in many cases they do. For example, early mammogram screenings result in worse outcomes for patients when done across a large population. See http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2480757
True, but screening tests are very useful. If you can separate the population into "definitely diabetic", "definitely not diabetic", and "needs more testing" quickly and cheaply, that's a win. The fact that it doesn't always give you an actionable result doesn't make it useless.
That's the fundamental problem. It turns out with a reasonably accurate test, a low incidence rate, and a large population, the "definitely X" class will be filled with people who aren't actually X. Going back and trying to separate the two ends up costing more and causing more harm to the non-Xs then just waiting until there's a problem. I'd encourage you to take a look at the link I posted since it takes a very clear look at the problem in the context of mammograms and breast cancer.
But the major issue with more data is Bayes' Law. For decades, running tests and collecting data was expensive, so we only ran them on people who were sick or suspected of being so. For prostate cancer, this data would tell us the probability that one would have a high PSA measurement given that they have prostate cancer (p(high PSA|prostate cancer). E.g., we know that 70% of prostate cancer patients have high PSA.
But, as Bayes' Law points out, this does NOT tell us the probability that you have prostate cancer given that you come in for a normal checkup, and we find a high PSA (p(prostate cancer|high PSA)). E.g., we do NOT know that 70% of people with high PSA have prostate cancer (absent other symptoms).
In order to determine that, you need to know the probability of having a high PSA in general. And the point is, NOBODY KNOWS these population meaures yet. Collecting lots of data is a good way to establish these baselines, but it's not clear it will help with diagnoses at all.
Another real example: we've gotten better and better at detecting tiny tumors early. But once we started looking at the data, we noticed that a large fraction of tiny tumors simply disappear over time. So, when the tumor is small enough, it's not clear whether we should treat it with surgery/radiation/chemo (which have their own risks/downsides) or just wait-and-see.
Am I missing something? Does this happen in public regularly?
There are always people who want to believe. Some months ago there was a man who claimed that he could create hydrogen from water by bombarding the water with radio waves. The electricity needed for the radio waves was neglible to the energy we could get by burning the hydrogen.
I tried to explain with physics, maths, equations, I pointed to esteemed professors' materials. Nothing. For the people who wanted to believe, even if they had a nobel laureate explain them the “inventor's” fallacies, they wouldn't budge.
I remember having a hearty chuckle when I first saw it on either HN or Product Hunt, thinking to myself "wow, does anyone take this seriously?"
A rising tide lifts all boats I suppose. Even if your boat is actually a floating piece of debris.
https://ludwitt.wordpress.com/2016/05/13/what-mark-suster-mi...
Sums this up the best.
1) One heavily rooted in Physics, Math, and well understood Mechanical properties that says it is not feasible.
2) One heavily dogmatic approach that boils down to a fundamental misunderstanding of Engineering and it's limits.
There are things that can be done, and there are things that cannot be done.
Examples of things that can be done:
1) Human travel to Mars - It's hard but very feasible
2) Economically Positive Controlled Fusion - It's harder than getting a man to Mars, the economics of investing in the technology are difficult to justify relative to things like oil exploration, but it remains theoretically, if not technically, possible.
3) Completely Green Energy on Earth - Technical, political, and economic forces make this goal challenging but it is very possible if we try as a species.
Examples of things that cannot be done:
1) Faster than light travel - It's not physically possible with our current understanding of the universe, and nothing indicates this will be changing at any point. There are mathematical constructs that imply it's a possibility, but the physical requirements of these constructs are considered super unlikely to exist (and in some senses have very little meaning). Unless our understanding of the physical world changes to include materials like the ones described mathematically, this is thoroughly impossible.
2) Fly People 1000s of miles on 1 fluid ounce of gasoline - The energy isn't chemically in the substance. Unless you have some new fission and/or fusion mechanism (see earlier) this is physically impossible. Even if you could beat all of our observations around the engine cycles and overcome the theoretical maximum efficiencies (e.g. extract 100% of the energy from the gasoline), it would still not be possible because the raw energy required to perform the function of raising people into the air and changing their momentum is so much greater than what is chemically available in that much gasoline.
3) Pack enough energy safely into air via sound (or another mechanism) to allow for wireless charging - You should have seen this item coming. For reasons outlined by people who have spent much more time on this than I have, this is physically impossible. Long-range cohesive sound waves : not possible. Air efficiency for sound transmission : very very poor. Using EM runs the risk of all sorts of nasty side effects (it burns, it burns). Lasers are the only thing I can think of that could work, they're coherent and relatively efficient, they could target high density solar cells to charge the phone right? Yep, they sure could. Bill Gates investigated high energy lasers as a means of killing mosquitos in developing nations to prevent the spread of malaria, they built a fantastic system that worked perfectly, the concern over injury or loss of human life was just too great so they abandoned it. Would you want to get laser burns every so often in trade for wireless phone charging? I don't.
If you want to charge your phone on the order of 1w/hr, it's possible, any more power than that, consumers can't maintain equipment good enough for it to work. The main limiting factor for the power level is keeping things clean and scratch free enough. If you figure that out, it is worth more than wireless power system is (and I can I buy a few?).
One of the systems I worked on could deliver 1kW at 100m, and even something as small as a 0.5% reflection could set your clothes on fire if you were close to the reflection. 1KW is less power than what you can draw from most standard consumer wall outlets.
Did you mean W (watt) = J/s which is a unit of power?
So the reason to to invest more is because of the 'noise' and the 'flags popping up'. Not because the company has consistently failed to meet any of its ambitions?
I was a little surprised to see Suster's response. One half of me says that is great to see an investor sticking his neck out for one of his investments and conveying the faith he has in that investment. Personally, I don't get judging uBeam and calling them a failure quite yet. I think it is unfair to compare them to Theranos. At least with uBeam there is no claim they have faked results or compliance issues. There are no criminal investigations over falsified technology. The only issue really at hand with uBeam is an overzealous CEO who stated they would have a prototype available and they haven't delivered yet. So what? They are behind, it is bleeding edge tech that will have a huge impact if they are able to pull it off. Is it because she is a female everyone is quick to judge her a failure at this point? Or because she is a young, first-time CEO? If Elon Musk was the CEO would the same negative press be surrounding uBeam about a failure to deliver?
Now on the flip side, even Suster's post lends truth to Reynolds' statements. This part, to me at least, is a little more damning, and leads me to believe that Reynolds really was trying to put a stop to the hyperbole marketing.
Suster states, "Throughout my many discussions with Paul over our time together, he never questioned the viability of uBeam and the technology that he was critical in developing. Instead he expressed concerns that we not overstate our capabilities or fall prey to hyperbole."
To me these are one in the same essentially. Reynolds apparently was concerned about the claims being made, said something to Suster, which Suster confirms in this statement, and now Suster is downplaying those concerns.
In the end this seems like drama over nothing to me. So what if they fail to deliver? Thousands of companies before them and thousands of companies after them will fail to deliver on a product at some point. That's the nature of the beast. To me it seems the only issue is that there is a young CEO who is excited about a product that has yet to be developed. She makes exciting, dramatic statements about her company and product than she really should be making, and both Reynolds and Suster tend to confirm this. But I believe her statements and the Theranos situation are in two different ballparks, so I think the comparison is far from fair to uBeam.
Stopped reading here. Not everything is a "struggle against the patriarchy".
You can not exactly discuss uBeam when ignoring the entire body of work done on the feasibility of the concept.
The question then becomes how do you go about doing it. Ultrasound is apprently one option (I am by no means a scientist or have vast knowledge of this area). It is obvious, based on the research conducted to date, that ultrasound as a long-term solution is not viable, both from a technology and health perspective. So what is? Just because ultrasound is not going to work, does that mean the idea itself should be thrown out? Maybe, maybe not. But if we threw out every idea simply because existing technology was incapable of implementing said idea, we would be rolling around in Fred Flintstone cars.
If VCs want to gamble on developing the technology by throwing money at it, that is their choice. The real issue is that at some point, the VCs need to stand up and say enough already with the ultrasound theory. Instead they should be guiding the company more towards exploring the idea itself and finding viable solutions. More importantly they need to rein in the CEO, and hyperbole marketing claims she makes, to take the focus from wireless power via ultrasound to just the idea of wireless power. That is my second point, that people seem to be looking at this solely from the claims the CEO has made, and not from the idea itself.
Suster's defense of the company was a case of right idea, wrong words. He, in my opinion, through his choice of wording, made the situation worse. While essentially bashing Reynolds in one sentence, he completely lends credit to Reynolds statements. He acknowledges that Reynolds expressed doubts regarding the marketing and public statements.
The problem I see with this whole issue is that everyone, from the company executives and VCs to the media, is hyper-focused on the method (ultrasound), that they have lost focus on the idea (wireless power at a distance).
Uh. It is my understanding that free-space [0] wireless power transmission is a rather old tech. [1] You just pretty much never see it because if you want to move substantial amounts of power with a relatively small antenna, you have to keep living things a significant distance away from the transmission area, lest they cross between the Tx and Rx sides and get seriously harmed.
[0] That is, things like microwave or laser power transmission through the atmosphere rather than things like inductive charging mats and transmission rings.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_power_transfer#Far-fi... (Notice the mention of the microwave-powered RC helicopter in 1964.)
My wife told me IKEA are now selling wireless charging surfaces. So for example if you buy a shelf, it could have magnetic induction charging, which a number of phones now support. It's not a big deal hooking up some wires, and once it becomes common, there may well be a time when everyone expects every table, shelf, or countertop to charge their devices.
It's not something that requires much research either. I already have a magnetic charging unit for my samsung phone. At the moment it's a toy, but not hard to imagine it built into a shelving unit.