Is it ridiculously hard to go to the nearest university and ask a physics professor if an idea is even plausible? If it is, then maybe investors should pass on stuff they don't understand.
Does anybody seriously think, for even a second, that A16Z didn't do massive due diligence with extraordinarily intelligent and experienced individuals before investing?
One thing that A16Z is not lacking is access to tons of Stanford/Berkeley physics PHDs....
Certainly its been vetted and if successful it will have a big impact. Will it work? Who knows, but it seems like exactly the kind of thing that should get investment. In the meantime we should let her do the work.
People make mistakes all the time. Even VCs (sic!) Argument in the form of "it must be true because they are very smart and have access to experts" is not a good one. The real facts and evidence should be evaluated.
Same thing crossed my mind. I can only assume that the company has long pivoted to another technology, left the ultrasound technology behind and just kept the old homepage (the mentioned WSJ article is from Oct 2014). Or the valley VCs might be really desperate to invest the huge amounts of cash Yellen is printing.
All these physics-debunking conversations seem to assume a single source. I naively assumed that UBeam will work sort of like the Gamma Knife (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiosurgery#Gamma_Knife), where there are many sources that intersect just at your phone or device. This completely changes all the physics assumptions, and is a good reminder to keep an open mind.
That being said, I'd be highly skeptical of the health risks of this technology, especially given the only benefit is convenience.
> Was it safe? Well … for starters it is just an inaudible soundwave being transferred – as in the kind also used for women during pregnancy. It also happens to be how your car likely tells the distance to objects when you park or if you have a side assist whether you can change lanes safely.
Yeah just like bullets are made of the same metal you use for door knobs. Totally safe!
This is a stupid infeasible idea. One of those things that maybe initially sounds plausible, but when you look at the actual numbers it's off by orders of magnitude.
So what? Those investors are pretty smart accomploshed people[0]. Obviously, clinkle proved that doesn't matter, but the company evidently has a working prototype and the VCs deemed it worth betting on. Funding isn't really zero-sum as there is a ton of capital in the market. Fuck it, it's small money chasing a big impossible goal. Exactly what I want to see in tech investing.
The piece aside - which I won't make a commentary on - I wonder whether this is just the right level of snark and intellectual elitism (founded or not) to be consistently popular on HN. Why it's worth dredging up, with apparently no new or novel updates, is beyond me.
But is there anything wrong with his arguments? I don't understand why people get upset at this kind of thing. Why is it bad to try to critically analyze someone's idea especially when it comes to an area of your expertise?
We had a teacher in University that proved to us how bees could not fly, making the assumption of laminar flow of course, that is what we use for flying airplanes.
Ever flying over terrain or water at small heights the physics are completely different than general flight (ground effect).
So If a guy is fool and young enough to actually make a prototype(stay foolish, stay hungry) he could discover specific "special cases" that could make this invention useful enough for something.
For example, probably when you put your telephone over a small 1 millimeter distance of the charger you could get some time of resonance and you could increase the frequency, making the amplitude necessary smaller. I don't know, some times our assumptions(generalizations) are just wrong.
It's at least conceivable, from my amateur physics knowledge, that the safety issue could be worked around by having a very narrow beam that shuts off if anything interrupts it. The issue I haven't seen anyone mention is that you must have a continuous line-of-sight between receiver and transmitter. Realistically, under real world conditions, how often would you have that long enough for your phone to charge? Either you're using your phone, in which case your hand is covering the back, or you aren't, in which case it's in your pocket or bag. (I'm assuming that the receiver would be integrated with the casing, but the alternative is to have a big bulky thing sticking out the top, which carries its own problems.)
I remember this being posted on HN before and many in the tech industry criticising HN's negative reaction and dismissal of the idea.
Marc Andressen tweeted "Hater News" on that day. But still , noone really knows how this thing works but I assume that VCs aren't going to throw 10 million dollars at somebody without doing atleast some due diligence.
Atleast they got a few PhDs to audit this device and its working. So maybe we don't have the full story on how this works.
> I assume that VCs aren't going to throw 10 million dollars at somebody without doing atleast some due diligence.
This is a dangerous assumption.
VCs often trust founders more than they should, especially when it comes to areas the VCs are not knowledgeable. Add in an idea that would obviously be adopted everywhere, and the allure of a billion dollar idea overrides sanity checks.
It should be very easy to debunk this article though. Just a single line tweet along the lines of "you discount xxxx". A bit weird to call it hater news without really engaging.
>>>> Except, here’s the problem. IT’S AN IMPOSSIBLE IDEA
While I would agree with the general idea, I do not like the general tone of the post. It is as if this guy knew everything about ultrasound technology. A given idea does not seem to make sense ? Maybe it is just that you don't know enough about it.
Happily concluding that Marc Andreessen, Mark Cuban et al. are just dumb investors pouring their money into impossible products is a bit short sighted.
> I’m no physicist - oh, wait, I am - but I did a little back-of-the-envelope (ok, front of the paper) calculation this morning...
I react very negatively to this sort of catty writing. I find it obnoxious. I understand that I shouldn't necessarily expect more from something from tumblr. On the other hand, I do like that the calculations were included.
For this technology to actually take off, an industry working group will need to be formed to promote and share it in the same way we have working groups for existing wireless charging techniques.
What good is a new wireless charging technique that doesn't come built into my iPhone or Android phone? If it isn't included in every phone and gadget no one is going to bother with it.
In the process of forming such a working group, some extremely smart people are going to take a very close look at this from both an engineering and business standpoint. If it isn't absolutely rock solid it is going to die.
Until a working group is formed to share this technology with the likes of Samsung, Apple, Sony (major hardware device manufacturers), you can pretty much discount it.
Venture capitalists investing in blatantly wrong and scammy pseudoscience is nothing new. Andrea Rossi (a convicted fraudster) got VC money for the E-Cat cold fusion scam.
(Which doesn't really contradict the poster's point: that made-up BS >> tawdry physical reality.)
I don't care if VCs waste their money like idiots. Let them. Plus, the sad part isn't that they wasted $10 million on this worthless "idea", it's that $10 million is probably nothing to them.
Only tangentally mentioned but I'm not sure "yogurt enemas" are the best example of an idea that has no legs on which to stand. That would entail putting bacteria directly into a microbiome. It would be niave and extremely ignorant-reductionist to conclude that that would have no effect. You need a peer-reviewed study before making it a procedure covered by insurance, etc. -- i get that -- but certainly not prior to it making sense.
[+] [-] tomasien|10 years ago|reply
Then there was this - http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/26/kill-the-cord/#.mdch08:KANb
It turns out it's ridiculously hard to evaluate what can and can't work about an idea just from reading the website you guys.
[+] [-] IshKebab|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vitd|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghshephard|10 years ago|reply
One thing that A16Z is not lacking is access to tons of Stanford/Berkeley physics PHDs....
[+] [-] frankdenbow|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yankoff|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcfrei|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elektromekatron|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jobenjo|10 years ago|reply
That being said, I'd be highly skeptical of the health risks of this technology, especially given the only benefit is convenience.
[+] [-] malisper|10 years ago|reply
> She connected me with Andreessen’s due diligence team who were surprisingly open with all the technical analysis they had done.
[0] http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2014/10/30/the-audacious-...
[+] [-] IshKebab|10 years ago|reply
> Did the physics actually work? Check
Ok I'm convinced?
> Was it safe? Well … for starters it is just an inaudible soundwave being transferred – as in the kind also used for women during pregnancy. It also happens to be how your car likely tells the distance to objects when you park or if you have a side assist whether you can change lanes safely.
Yeah just like bullets are made of the same metal you use for door knobs. Totally safe!
This is a stupid infeasible idea. One of those things that maybe initially sounds plausible, but when you look at the actual numbers it's off by orders of magnitude.
[+] [-] minthd|10 years ago|reply
[1]http://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/ubeam-ultrasonic-wirel...
[+] [-] pietrofmaggi|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vonklaus|10 years ago|reply
[0]https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/ubeam
[+] [-] MathsOX|10 years ago|reply
The piece aside - which I won't make a commentary on - I wonder whether this is just the right level of snark and intellectual elitism (founded or not) to be consistently popular on HN. Why it's worth dredging up, with apparently no new or novel updates, is beyond me.
[+] [-] yankoff|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Htsthbjig|10 years ago|reply
We had a teacher in University that proved to us how bees could not fly, making the assumption of laminar flow of course, that is what we use for flying airplanes.
Ever flying over terrain or water at small heights the physics are completely different than general flight (ground effect).
So If a guy is fool and young enough to actually make a prototype(stay foolish, stay hungry) he could discover specific "special cases" that could make this invention useful enough for something.
For example, probably when you put your telephone over a small 1 millimeter distance of the charger you could get some time of resonance and you could increase the frequency, making the amplitude necessary smaller. I don't know, some times our assumptions(generalizations) are just wrong.
[+] [-] apsec112|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thewarrior|10 years ago|reply
Marc Andressen tweeted "Hater News" on that day. But still , noone really knows how this thing works but I assume that VCs aren't going to throw 10 million dollars at somebody without doing atleast some due diligence.
Atleast they got a few PhDs to audit this device and its working. So maybe we don't have the full story on how this works.
Here's a VC saying it works: http://www.quora.com/Is-uBeam-practical/answer/Ben-Parr?srid...
[+] [-] ebbv|10 years ago|reply
This is a dangerous assumption.
VCs often trust founders more than they should, especially when it comes to areas the VCs are not knowledgeable. Add in an idea that would obviously be adopted everywhere, and the allure of a billion dollar idea overrides sanity checks.
[+] [-] tinco|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] striking|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danieltillett|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fasteo|10 years ago|reply
While I would agree with the general idea, I do not like the general tone of the post. It is as if this guy knew everything about ultrasound technology. A given idea does not seem to make sense ? Maybe it is just that you don't know enough about it.
Happily concluding that Marc Andreessen, Mark Cuban et al. are just dumb investors pouring their money into impossible products is a bit short sighted.
[+] [-] sharpneli|10 years ago|reply
This article implies they were rather hasty in investing.
[+] [-] mixedmath|10 years ago|reply
I react very negatively to this sort of catty writing. I find it obnoxious. I understand that I shouldn't necessarily expect more from something from tumblr. On the other hand, I do like that the calculations were included.
[+] [-] ironch456|10 years ago|reply
For this technology to actually take off, an industry working group will need to be formed to promote and share it in the same way we have working groups for existing wireless charging techniques.
We already have the Wireless Power Consortium who currently foster the Qi inductive power standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi_(inductive_power_standard). Same sort of deal.
What good is a new wireless charging technique that doesn't come built into my iPhone or Android phone? If it isn't included in every phone and gadget no one is going to bother with it.
In the process of forming such a working group, some extremely smart people are going to take a very close look at this from both an engineering and business standpoint. If it isn't absolutely rock solid it is going to die.
Until a working group is formed to share this technology with the likes of Samsung, Apple, Sony (major hardware device manufacturers), you can pretty much discount it.
[+] [-] davidgerard|10 years ago|reply
(Which doesn't really contradict the poster's point: that made-up BS >> tawdry physical reality.)
[+] [-] shah_s|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] serve_yay|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jotm|10 years ago|reply
Frankly, I'd prefer not to use any technology that could directly affect one of my most important senses if I don't have to...
[+] [-] harryh|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sharpneli|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 55555|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thewarrior|10 years ago|reply