Small tech companies hoping to become the next big thing in our digital lives are showing off their products at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2015. Time Warner Cable News tech reporter Adam Balkin filed the following report.
No, it is not just a made-up event to help tie-up season one of the HBO series “Silicon Valley.” TechCrunch Disrupt is an actual tech conference held three times a year, once in San Francisco, once abroad, and this one in New York. The conference primarily aims to help grow hot new tech startups.
“It’s basically a science fair for startups. You have a huge exhibitions space where you have lots of great startups, you have an onstage pitching area where people are pitching to win $50,000 and you have interviews with luminaries, tech luminaries," says John Biggs of TechCrunch.
And it’s a good mix of ideas. One of them is the modular Nexpaq phone case, on sale the end of the year for about $100. You can swap in and out different elements like flash, sensors, more battery or more storage. Or this case from Nikola Labs, also out by the holidays for about $100, grabs energy your phone wastes while doing things like trying to connect to Wi-Fi routers.
“So it turns out only three percent of the energy gets to the base station of the Wi-Fi router. The other 97 is wasted - it goes in your head, your hands. The cell phone case captures that energy, converts that FD energy into DC power and charges up the phone."
If you’d like to get greener and maybe get into the whole solar energy movement but aren’t quite ready to install giant solar panels on your home’s roof, going solar might soon be as simple as plugging your devices into the SunPort. You plug it into an outlet, and then plug your device into it.
“We measure how much power comes out of the wall and then we match it to solar that’s being fed into the grid in another location, and so you have the effect of actually demanding solar energy from the grid," says Paul Droege of Plug.Solar.
It goes on sale within the month for $60 and comes with a year’s worth of solar, after which, users will be charged $2 a month for unlimited solar power.