The Bloom Box, a refrigerator-sized power generator made by Silicon Valley startup Bloom Energy, produces emissions-free energy. The ‘power plant-in-a-box’ has thin fuel cells, which absorb oxygen on one side, and fuel on the other, to combine within the cell and create a chemical reaction that produces electricity. There is no need for burning or combustion, though it still requires some form of fuel to work.
What kind of fuel? Fossil fuels like natural gas, or also renewable fuels like landfill gas, bio-gas and solar. In some cases, CO2 is still being emitted by whatever power is feeding the Bloom Box. Rather than being zero emission energy, it is more like a booster pack for already-green sources and a filter for dirty ones.
Bloom Energy started at the University of Arizona’s NASA Mars space programme, creating technology that could sustain life on Mars. Bloom founder, Dr. KR Sridhar and his team built a device capable of producing air and fuel from electricity, and/or electricity from air and fuel. They soon realised that their technology could have an even greater impact here on Earth.
In 2001, when their project ended, the team decided to continue their research and start a company. Originally called Ion America, Bloom Energy (the name came from an internal contest, won by the founder’s 9-year-old son), was founded with the mission to make clean, reliable, affordable energy for everyone.
In 2002, Venture Capitalist John Doerr, and Kleiner Perkins (investors in Google, Amazon.com, Netscape, Genentech and others) became the first investors. Over the next few years, the technology quickly developed from concept, to prototype, to product, and the systems became more powerful, more efficient, more reliable, and more economical.
In early 2006 Bloom shipped its first 5 kW field trial unit to the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. After two years of successful field trials, the first commercial (100 kW) products were shipped to Google in July 2008.
With an estimated price tag of $700 000, a Bloom Box generates about 200 kW, enough electricity to power 20-40 American homes. The company says it will eventually market handheld units powerful enough to run a single home for $3000. The power will reportedly be cheaper than that purchased from standard power plants.
Is the box as game-changing as its backers believe? Well, as CBS’ 60 Minutes put it, it may just do to the power plant what the laptop did to the desktop because it does not require a grid.
Google was the first to sign up for a Bloom Box, and other big names such as Wal-Mart and FedEx have also come on board, touting its efficiency.
The attention crisis
In the midst of the greatest information boom ever, a serious and debilitating crisis is occurring in our modern culture. The overwhelming abundance of information is consuming everyone’s attention. The sheer wealth of information is creating a poverty of attention.
Everyone and everything is competing for attention – TV talking heads, visual and audio advertising, YouTube videos, e-mails and blogs, media outlets, games and apps on cellphones, children, parents, blogs, friends, airlines, traffic of all kinds. The average adult sees 1000 advertisements a day. Internet users spend 33 hours per week online and about 16 hours watching TV. Teens have what is called ‘concurrent media exposure’ – using various types of media simultaneously. In South Korea, the most wired nation on earth, young adults have actually died from exhaustion after multiday online-gaming marathons.
Midst this cacophony of attention-grabbers, how well are we staying attuned to our own inner beings? How intentional are we about who or what we allow to sap our energy? At what times? In how many ways?
Over the last decade or so, the problem of attention deficit has shifted right into the centre of our culture. We lament its decline, work hard on it in quality-of-life movements, diagnose it in more and more of our children every year, cultivate antidotes in yoga classes, buy solutions through self-help books and videos, attack it with drugs originally intended for other ailments.
As we become more skilled at handling distractions, the wiring of our brains will inevitably change to deal more efficiently with the excess of information. Neuroscientists speculate that the human brain might be changing faster today than it has since the prehistoric discovery of tools.
Research suggests we are already picking up new skills: better multitasking abilities, peripheral vision, the ability to sift information rapidly. Kids growing up now might have an associative genius that adults do not; they might be able to engage in seeming contradictions: mindful web-surfing, focused Twittering and the like. Maybe they will even attain a paradoxical focused distraction . . .
Jim Pinto is an industry analyst and commentator, writer, technology futurist and angel investor. His popular e-mail newsletter, JimPinto.com eNews, is widely read (with direct circulation of about 7000 and web-readership of two to three times that number). His areas of interest are technology futures, marketing and business strategies for a fast-changing environment, and industrial automation with a slant towards technology trends.
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