StoreDot. That’s the name of the company that says it’s going to completely charge your phone battery in 30 seconds flat with nanotech components. We could all use that!
While the name might sound dull, the technology is anything but. The Israeli startup is developing a warp-speed battery charger that uses “quantum dot technology” to supercharge our batteries.
The drawback is that it’s not ready yet.
Despite the fact that it’s just in the prototypical stages of development and it’s not a full capacity battery, either, StoreDot is definitely headed our way.
So far, the company has shown a brick-sized prototype battery that can go from zero to charged in less than a minute. StoreDot is already rumored to be teaming up with Samsung (KRX: 005930) for technology that could hit the market within three years.
While three years seems like a long time in the fast-moving consumer tech world, StoreDot has a clear strategy in place.
In this next year, StoreDot engineers should be able to reach an adequate size to fit in our smartphones. By year two, the hopes are to reach the required energy density to power through an entire day. Taking a little wiggle room into account, we could see it all come together and find StoreDot on the shelves in 2017.
That’s really not so bad. Monday, the company was set up at the Think Next Symposium that took place in Tel Aviv, showing off what it’s got in store for us all.
The Technology
The company originally started out with focus on nanocrystals and developing a memory chip that would write faster than traditional flash memory. That technology was spun out of work at Tel Aviv University being conducted for Alzheimer’s disease. Pretty soon, the peptides (amino acids) used in StoreDot’s bio-organic battery took center stage and StoreDot found its identity.
Nanocrystals are teeny tiny sphere-like structures that are very strong and can be used in semiconductor devices like batteries, memory, and display screens. StoreDot is toying with cadmium-free displays – using nanocrystal technology to offer a cheaper and non-toxic alternative to cadmium in screens.
Cadmium is a chemical element similar to zinc and mercury and is applied commonly to industrial applications that include batteries, coatings and electroplating, and it can also be the cause of toxic poisoning.
StoreDot’s display would be the very first bio-organic display, and has already been demonstrated on an iPhone that emitted the same amount of light found in traditional cadmium displays.
Like the battery that can charge in 30 seconds, this technology has a long way to go before it has the lifetime and efficiency of the product it’s trying to replace.
The Company
Perhaps the single biggest obstacle that StoreDot will encounter though is that their technology is brand new. The industry is so used to building things the old way, that transitioning into a new and different process could prove time-consuming, even if it is cheaper and less toxic in the long run.
But if Samsung truly is on board, then that’s a great sign. The processes of StoreDot’s technology mostly try to fabricate and imitate what is already happening in nature, so to create nanocrystals, the company says they don’t need a huge facility – just basic elements like hydrogen, nitrogen and helium.
StoreDot is now in its second phase of capital funding, looking for some $20 million, according to TechCrunch, on top of $6.25 million that it has raised thus far.
Its nanocrystal technology and its cadmium-free display should be able to push the company where it wants to go.
The Potential
StoreDot is also considering building its own facility to ease its way into markets without the troubles that might come from outside manufacturers.
After all, they’re not just trying to give us a new battery, but they want to change the manufacturing ecosystem around this technology and do it in a bio-organic way.
Once the industry can accept these changes and see the future, the technology should be easily adopted.
It’s all cost-effective, safe, and bio-organic, and once the kinks are ironed out, it should be well on its way.
