Otherwise I agree with you. Even the tone of this article is unconvincing. I wonder what Andreessen’s due diligence team was thinking, maybe the patents have value?
Of course, if I were a VC, I wouldn't invest in this, because it is physically retarded on inspection. Whoever did the dil on this is either a fool who doesn't understand basic physics, or was bribed somehow. Off the top of my head a) sound energy falls off as 1/r^2, b) that those sorts of energy densities are almost certainly physically dangerous to more than ears c) sound doesn't propagate well in air at those frequencies; you're basically heating up air d) transducers are not good at turning sound into energy
Ultrasound can also cause tissue damage at high intensity.
I'd be cautious about making claims that humans are not damaged by high intensity sound, even if inaudible.
Perhaps this is what you mean by saying "a conventional sense" but I just thought I'd expand on your answer in case others read it and get the wrong idea.
No, it doesn't. That's how it falls off when being transmitted perfectly spherically in an environment that won't reflect or refract anything. Consequently, this turns out to be a not-very-useful equation in practice. In particular ultrasound can be beamed just like light, making the "perfectly spherical transmission" not even a close approximation, just as it is not a good approximation for focused lasers. Our intuition doesn't support this because our hearing tops out at frequencies still low enough to do some significant bending around obstacles (though at the higher end if you pay attention you can tell they don't do it as well), so we don't have an intuition of sound acting like a beam, but it can.
There's more to sound than "basic physics", and what you learn in Physics 101 about sound is simplified to the point of total uselessness as in real-life you will never encounter a situation where the prerequisites are met for inverse square falloff.
Mind you, I'm still pretty skeptical, but not about the ability to beam sound. That's established engineering, not wild-eyed craziness.
You do realize that energy from a point source of light also falls off like 1/r^2, right?
http://patents.justia.com/inventor/marc-berte http://patents.justia.com/inventor/matthew-angle
The problem I can see is that the filing date for those patents is far later than public demonstrations such as the one at D9 on or around 04/22/2012
That would indeed cause a problem in a country with an "absolute novelty" requirement in patent applications, but the United States is not a such a country. In the US, the inventor has 12 months after the first public demonstration to file for a patent, and in this case, the patent was filed within 12 months.
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=611948...
The job of a VC is to sell to later investors. Long term viabilty isn't always in their best interest. I could name half a dozen specifics but I'll let you imagine instead.
I apologize if this question is terribly ignorant, but do investors publicly disclose the results of due diligence that would lead them to believe in the functionality and practicality of such a product? I'm very interested in learning their opinions on the challenges presented by the naysayers (with whom I agree right now).
I appreciate everyone who provided sources that prove uBeam has, at the very least, some huge challenges to overcome in practicality. Like you mention, though, I imagine that these investors have probably considered these challenges.
In the case of outright BS it stays with the VC, if there are useful 'to-fix' prior to closing items then they usually get passed (sometimes edited or excerpted) to the company.
A general public disclosure is a possibility but I've never seen one, investors are not 'speaking for the company' in any way and if investors started to release such sensitive documents that would be considered a false step by the company (and probably rightly so, the information gathered during the process is company confidential and no VC in their right mind would want to suggest to future investments that they have a cavalier attitude towards such information, be it positive or negative, disclosure should be up to the officers of the company).