Very often, in the excitement accompanying a new technology, there is some sort of “elephant in the room” that everyone convinces themselves is not really there. In the heady, early days of the World Wide Web, for example, investors in particular seemed to ignore the need for profit in the business models of so many of the Internet IPOs.
At the recent D5 conference, I could feel a familiar, collective excitement in the air as speaker after speaker described in glowing terms the opportunities for delivering more and more media content to our mobile devices. Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman, for example, told us that “mobile was one of their key platforms,” and that they were now specifically designing TV shows, such as “Lil’ Bush,” for the mobile platform.
During the conference, representatives of Google, Yahoo, AOL, MySpace, and Facebook, among others, indicated that they were specifically redesigning their services for user-friendliness on our handheld devices. Eric Schmidt, chairman and CEO of Google, dubbed the coming trend “SMS gone wild”–people sending and sharing all kinds of stuff from phone to phone. And the platform vendors–Apple, Samsung, Sony, Palm and others–described some of their plans for the next generation of devices on which we will consume this new content. Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, even predicted that the mobile phone could perhaps become the home PC for lower-income households. Heady stuff, indeed.
So, as one of the few “energy” executives in the room, I kept waiting to hear how these new applications and devices would be impacted by–and planned to circumvent–what some insiders are calling the “run-time gap.” The run-time gap describes the difference in demand for power and energy in mobile devices, and the ability of battery technology to deliver it. The demands for “portable power” are skyrocketing–thanks to the technologies and markets we heard about at D–but battery improvements are comparatively flatline. The difference in the two growth curves, graphically, gives us an ever-widening gap. I wondered: Would “Lil’ Bush” have to be edited to 15-minute episodes so that the credits could roll before the battery rolled over?
At first, I thought it was just the old elephant in the room–the secret problem with mobile multimedia that nobody wanted to talk about. But then it became increasingly clear to me: The run-time gap was not an issue in that audience–and perhaps in most other audiences–because nobody even seemed to be aware of it. It was, instead, an elephant not in the room.
When the questions didn’t come, and I couldn’t stand the suspense any longer, I finally raised a hand myself and posed the power question directly to Apple CEO Steve Jobs: How are you going to deal with the power demands? With the iPod and video iPod behind him, and the multimedia iPhone then ahead, he, at least, should be concerned. And he was; he said, essentially, that “power is the No. 1 issue with portable devices.” Think about that. From Steve Jobs’s mouth to your ears–at least metaphorically. “Power is the No. 1 issue with portable devices.”
Now, I have a vested interest in the issue because my company builds a sophisticated plastic membrane that makes tiny, mobile-oriented fuel cells possible. We happen to believe that mobile devices should have continuous and uninterruptible power that can be replenished by inserting a small fuel cartridge, small enough to be carried in a pocket or purse–an ideal solution for power-hungry, multimedia portable devices and the flood of new content coming our way.
After many years of development, the technology is now on the verge of packing more energy than batteries, more safely, in less space and weight. But whether or not you share our vision, if you have a vested interest in mobile devices, mobile applications and mobile content delivery, you cannot ignore the power issues. It does nobody any good to be able to watch the latest episode of “CSI” on their favorite mobile device if the screen goes dark before we’ve found out whodunit.
