“The case that Will Zell slides onto his iPhone doesn’t look that unusual, but it’s doing something pretty out of the ordinary: capturing some of the radio waves that the phone transmits when connecting to cell-phone towers and Wi-Fi routers, converting them to electricity, and feeding that power back to the phone’s battery.
Zell is the CEO of Nikola Labs, a startup based in Columbus, Ohio, whose energy-harvesting technology was invented by Chi-Chih Chen, a research associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Ohio State University. (…)
They won’t make plugging your phone into a charger obsolete, but Zell says that Nikola’s phone case should be able to give users about 25 to 30 percent more battery life between charges. (…). Eventually, he hopes to fit the technology into the phone itself; early talks with phone makers have begun.
A French solar technology company called Sunpartner Technologies is already working on this with a thin, see-through overlay called WYSIPS Crystal (…) when the phone is exposed to artificial or natural light, it captures the light and converts it to an electric current. (…)
Much clunkier but perhaps more suited to that job is a wearable charger from Ampy, a startup based in Evanston, Illinois. The device contains a battery you fill up by moving around.” read full article