Bill Gates Spreads his Battery Bets on Aquion

Martin LaMonica 

April 3, 2013 

Aquion Energy lands $35 million to commercialize its novel grid-storage battery, bringing in Bill Gates as investor. 

Aquion Energy’s batteries will be made by wiring together these modules into larger systems. Credit: Martin LaMonica

When it comes to disruptive battery startups, one of the best endorsements you can get comes from software tycoon Bill Gates.

Aquion Energy has raised $35 million in a series D round, which brings Gates as a new investor. It’s at least the third energy storage startup that he has invested in. Others include Ambri, which is making a liquid metal battery, and LightSail Energy, which is using compressed air to store energy. If there’s a common thread to them, it’s that each company has taken a truly novel approach and are targeting grid-level storage, a technology considered crucial to using wind and solar at large scale.

Well-established lithium ion battery technology is being used for specialized purposes in grid storage, but their costs are high—the main reason electric vehicles are expensive. Many people believe that creating a wider market for grid energy storage will require a breakthrough in costs to be commerciall viable, slashing prices for long-lasting and durable batteries to under $300 per kilowatt-hour.

Aquion Energy’s strategy is to use cheap materials and manufacturing process. The electrodes on its batteries are activated carbon and manganese oxide and individual battery modules are packaged in plastic containers. It uses a water-based electrolyte, which is environmentally benign if there is a spill.  (See, Building Cheap Batteries to Circumvent the Grid.) 

Its first product, due by the end of this year, will be a battery built as a stack, which is about four feet high, made of individual modules. It’s also packing the modules onto larger square pallets and, by next year, a 20-foot shipping container able to store 200 kilowatt-hours and deliver 50 kilowatts of power, Ted Wiley, the company’s vice president of business and market development told me last month.

Initially, Aquion Energy is targeting renewable energy project developers who can use batteries to store energy and deliver it at peak times, when power is more expensive, he says. The batteries should work for up to 10,000 cycles, about a 10 year usable life, which Aquion expects to extend in future versions. In terms of cost, Wiley says the price will be between lead-acid batteries—the cheapest available now—and lithium-ion batteries.

The money the company raised will allow it to move into the production of its batteries from its site near Pittsburgh and ramp up volume next year, it says. Aquion is also funded by venture capital companies, including Bright Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Advanced Technology Ventures.

As for Gates, he may have uncovered and invested in other promising battery startups. In 2010, he noted that battery technology doesn’t improve at the same rapid pace as Moore’s Law, making it one of the toughest scientific problems. “They haven’t improved hardly at all,” Gates said at the Techonomy conference. “There are deep physical limits. I am funding five battery start-ups and there are probably 50 out there.”

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/513256/bill-gates-spreads-his-battery-bets-on-aquion

 

Software Makes Multiple Screens Less Distracting

Diff Displays reduces distraction by visually highlighting what’s changed on your screen since you last looked.

• By John Pavlus on April 2, 2013

Why It Matters

Multiple-screen displays make information overload even more prevalent.

Screen saver: Diff Displays knows which screen holds a user’s attention.

Most computer interfaces are designed to capture your attention—whether you like it or not. A new system for computers with multiple screens, called Diff Displays, responds to inattention by making the information on the screen a user isn’t focused on less distracting.

Created by human-computer interaction researchers at the University of St. Andrews, Diff Displays uses eye-tracking software to sense when the user is no longer paying attention to a particular screen. It then replaces the content on that with a subtle visualization that reduces clutter and only highlights the most important new information.

Diff Displays was inspired by the proliferation of multiscreen displays at computer workstations, and the “increased attentional demand” that such multitasking visual environments place on users, says Per Ola Kristensson, a lecturer at St. Andrews and one of the system’s creators. “It’s impossible to attend to all of these displays at the same time,” he says. “How can we create subtle, nondistracting visualizations that support this inattention instead?”

To create Diff Displays, Kristensson and his colleagues, Aaron Quigley, a professor, and Jakub Dostal, a PhD student, mounted webcams on top of each display in a three-screen workstation and installed eye-tracking software to detect when the user directs his or her gaze at a particular display. (The software, says Kristensson, is 98 percent accurate at detecting gazes directed at additional displays situated 40 to 60 degrees off the main-screen axis. It disregards false-positives from gazes detected in the background, such that of a coworker walking by.)

The screen that the user is focusing on behaves normally. But when Diff Displays detects that the user has shifted attention away, it inserts an interactive overlay that dims the content’s brightness and replaces its colors with different shades of gray.




The overlay also includes one of four visualizations designed to highlight important information: “Freeze Frame,” a static snapshot of the screen’s state when attention was directed elsewhere; “Pixmap,” which highlights any real-time pixel changes with normal brightness (“In your Twitter feed, you’d see bright pixels around new tweets,” Kristensson says); “Windowmap,” similar to Pixmap but on the window scale (i.e., any window with active content will rebrighten); and “Aura,” which draws a subtly pulsating outline within any newly active window content. When the user redirects attention back to a screen, the overlay quickly fades away, providing a visual distinction which directs the user’s attention to the new information.
 

User testing showed that the “Pixmap” visualization offered the best trade-off between information density and intrusiveness, Kristensson says, but “all of the visualizations reduced the number of times that a user switched attention between displays by about half.” Diff Displays’ visualizations make the user less worried about missing something on a screen they’re not paying active attention to, Kristensson says; therefore, they feel less pressure to frequently “context-switch” between screens. “You can rest assured that when you look back, it’ll tell you what matters,” he says.

 

This kind of “inattention-friendly” display could be particularly useful to specialized workers like air-traffic controllers and financial analysts, says Shamsi Iqbal, who studies multitasking and interface design at Microsoft Research. “These jobs require you to maintain constant awareness of many things at once, where information is changing all the time,” she says. “Showing what the changes were where you last left off is especially helpful.”
 

Kristensson agrees, but says Diff Displays was designed for typical knowledge workers. “What motivated us is that lots of everyday people have multiple displays now,” he says. “It’s a good sign that the technology can be applied to many areas. I’m planning to use it myself.” Diff Display was presented at the ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces in Santa Monica, California, last week, and is available as a free download here (Windows only).

 

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512891/software-makes-multiple-screens-less-distracting

Designer Carbon Provides Longer Battery Life

Energ2’s nanostructured carbon anodes can boost lithium-ion battery capacity by 30 percent.

• By Martin LaMonica on April 2, 2013

Why It Matters

Battery capacity limits the potential of mobile devices and electric vehicles.

A Seattle-based startup, EnerG2, has developed a carbon anode that significantly improves the storage capacity of lithium-ion batteries without requiring a new battery design or a different manufacturing process.

Batteries with more energy density could allow electric vehicles to travel longer on a charge. They could also enable lighter, thinner electronic gadgets. Because of this, many advanced battery makers are pursuing a jump in storage capacity with novel chemistries and materials.

EnerG2 said last week that its synthetic carbon anode increases the storage capacity of lithium-ion batteries by up to 30 percent. An anode is the negatively charged electrode in a battery, which attracts electrons as it discharges. The company has started production of its anode, which it hopes will appeal to lithium-ion battery makers.

The company’s technology, originally developed at the University of Washington, is a process for creating carbon with desired properties. Its first products were lead-acid batteries and components for ultracapacitors, two relatively small markets compared to the one for lithium-ion batteries.

EnerG2’s new lithium-ion battery anode is made of a form of carbon in which the atoms have a disorganized, amorphous structure, compared to the crystalline structure of graphite, the material normally used for anodes. EnerG2’s “hard carbon,” as the material is called, can store 50 percent more energy per area on its surface than graphite.

Hard carbon anodes tend to lose storage capacity when batteries are first charged. EnerG2 has been able to engineer an anode with a level of loss that is acceptable for battery makers, says CEO Rick Luebbe.

The company’s process controls the chemical reactions that occur as raw carbon is converted into a finished product. That means it can optimize the surface area, pore size, and pore density of carbon for different applications.

Engineering synthetic materials rather than working from organic sources is typically more expensive, but Luebbe says manufacturing the new anode is relatively simple, so it costs about the same as existing ones.
Hard carbon costs about 20 percent more than graphite, says Luebbe. This means EnerG2’s anode material is unlikely to appeal to companies that make lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, says Cosmin Laslau, an analyst at Lux Research. But companies that make batteries for consumer electronics may be willing to pay a premium to save battery space in a tablet or smart phone.

Several other companies are focusing on better battery electrodes for rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. Two venture-backed battery companies—Envia Systems and Amprius—are developing anodes made with silicon, which also boosts storage capacity. But the cycle life of new materials can be lower than graphite or hard carbon. Furthermore, EnerG2’s material is essentially a drop-in replacement for an existing graphite anode. “You don’t have to do a lot of battery design to use this material,” says Luebbe.

EnerG2 has also demonstrated that it can manufacture at scale. It received a $21 million federal grant in 2010 to build a factory in Albany, Oregon, which has been operating since early last year. “There’s no shortage of fantastic materials for anodes,” Laslau says. “The key question is whether you can scale from a couple of grams to metric tons or thousands of tons.”

EnerG2 is seeking other uses for its hard carbon. One could be storing natural gas at lower pressure, a technology called absorbed natural gas. This could make fueling up gas-powered vehicles safer and more energy-efficient, says Luebbe.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512961/designer-carbon-provides-longer-battery-life

Obama Announces First Funding for Brain Mapping Project

 

Susan Young 

April 2, 2013

A plan to map the activity of entire brain regions down to the level of indvidual neurons got its official nod from the White House on Tuesday when President Obama announced his budget will request $100 million in funding for the project in 2014.

The brain activity map project, now officially dubbed the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies, or BRAIN (get it?), will be a sprawling project requiring scientists and engineers to develop new technologies that can record activity from millions or even billions of neurons simultaneously (see “The Brain Activity Map”).

Obama said that the initiative could help researchers understand and perhaps even cure diseases and conditions like Alzheimer’s, autism and stroke, and it could help veterans with cope with amputations, paralysis or post-traumatic stress disorder. The BRAIN project, like all basic research, will also drive economic growth and create new, if as-yet-unimaginable jobs, he said.

The details of how these goals will be achieved are still murky, but today’s announcement did provide some information about how the research will be funded and guided.

The money that the President’s 2014 budget will request for the BRAIN initiative will come from the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the National Science Foundation. Private foundations such as the Allen Institute for Brain Science and the Kavli Foundation will also contribute financially towards the effort.

The project will be led by two neuroscientists: Cori Bargmann, who studies the genetic and neural basis of behavior in C. elegans worms at Rockefeller University; and Bill Newsome, who studies visual perception and related behaviors in monkeys at Stanford University School of Medicine. A group at the NIH led by Bargmann and Newsome will announce this summer which projects will be first in line for funding, said NIH director Francis Collins in a Q&A session held after the president’s morning announcement.

 http://www.technologyreview.com/view/513216/obama-announces-first-funding-for-brain-mapping-project

In a Bid to Get Its Devices into the Workplace, Samsung Courts Businesses

The leading smartphone manufacturer hopes to one-up Apple and nudge out struggling BlackBerry.

• By Jessica Leber on April 1, 2013

Why It Matters

The bring-your-own-device trend is changing how and where people do their work.

Sanjay Bhatia comes into his office each morning and plugs his tablet into a docking station. On his desk sits a headset, display, and keyboard. What’s conspicuously absent is a desk phone.

It might not seem revolutionary, but this scenario is pretty futuristic for most corporate IT departments. With the spread of powerful mobile devices, many businesses are starting to consider the same cost calculations that landline-cutting college grads did years ago, says Tim Wagner, Samsung Mobile’s Texas-based vice president for enterprise sales.

Last month, Samsung said it was working with Bhatia’s employer Genband, a large vendor selling unified communications software that lets companies carry voice calls, video, and IMs through internal Internet protocol networks on different devices. Genband will start by offering its software on Samsung tablets. If Samsung can make it simple to take company calls on its tablets, Wagner reasons, then businesses may be more likely to buy them—especially because tablets serve far more functions than hardware dedicated only to calling.

Helping to make desk phones obsolete is just another part of Samsung Mobile’s growing plan to see its mobile devices take over the workplace in the same way they have risen to prominence in the consumer market. It is trying to one-up Apple (which doesn’t often go out of its way to court businesses) while nudging out the struggling BlackBerry as the darling of IT departments everywhere.

The Korean company has a lot of ground to make up. The Android operating system, which it uses for most of its high-end smartphones, has a reputation for being less secure than other mobile platforms, partly because software can be distributed through unofficial channels but also because some malware has slipped into even the official Android Market.

To convince employers that Android devices are secure, Samsung has been working with mobile device management vendors to make its devices compliant with different IT department policies. It is using the branding SAFE, for Samsung for the Enterprise, on some devices to make it easy for people to bring their own device to work.

Samsung’s “Knox” system, to be launched soon on Galaxy S4 smartphones, is a walled-off mobile compartment for business users that allows them to separate their work and personal lives on one device. With Knox, Wagner says, Samsung is creating a shadow app store, putting its seal of approval on white-list Android apps that it verifies contain no malware.

Ted Schadler, an IT analyst at the research firm Forrester, is skeptical. “They’ve made a big amount of noise, and spent a lot of dollars promoting this acronym SAFE, but the functionality they’ve added is not all that impressive,” he says. He also says there is a limit to how far Samsung can alter Android without giving app developers headaches and raising their development costs.

Samsung could, however, gain a leg up, Schadler says, if it can successfully court IT buyers purchasing large numbers of mobile devices for workers by offering what BlackBerry has always done: very tailored service.
Samsung is already going down this path. Wagner says it helped the company Waste Management develop a rugged device holder to withstand the intense jostling that tablets get in trucks. With Boston Scientific, which had just bought a company that makes defibrillators that are implanted under the skin, it helped to create a small accessory that allows a doctor to monitor these implants on a phone or tablet.

To sell to the U.S. government, Samsung is working to get the highest security certifications, which requires Wagner to work with Samsung’s manufacturing division to make sure selected devices aren’t assembled in countries deemed a cybersecurity threat.  The more stringent authentication technologies it is developing to work with existing U.S. government systems such as card readers could soon “trickle down” to other business users, Wagner notes.

For its part, Genband is starting to make Samsung tablets available to its customers, and it will likely make smartphones available, too. At his own company, Bhatia, a senior marketing director, says desk phones will be gone for the 16,000 employees by the end of the year, though he can’t estimate the cost savings yet.

Bhatia expects office PCs will go by the wayside further down the line—especially as companies use software on remote cloud servers. New possibilities could open up, such as a work communication system that knows where an employee is and rings different devices accordingly.

Samsung won’t break out sales figures to businesses, but Wagner notes that the company did hit the 100 million mark for Samsung Galaxy S-series smartphones sold worldwide. With many people using their own devices at work, that may matter way more than anything else.

“In the world of phones, you have to win in the consumer market to win in the business market,” says Forrester’s Schadler.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512916/in-a-bid-to-get-its-devices-into-the-workplace-samsung-courts-businesses

Nuance Thinks Voice Ads Could Be a Mobile Hit

Nuance hopes its voice-recognition tech can produce mobile ads that you actually want to have a conversation with.

• By Rachel Metz on April 1, 2013

Why It Matters

As we spend more time on mobile devices, advertisers are looking for more effective ways to capture our attention.

 

 

In online advertising lingo, the acronym CPC refers to “cost per click”—the amount an advertiser pays whenever someone clicks on an ad. If voice-recognition technology company Nuance gets its way, though, it could soon have an additional meaning: “cost per conversation.”

Nuance is today announcing Voice Ads, a platform that will let companies create ads that people can talk to on smartphones and tablets. Mike McSherry, vice president of advertising and content at Nuance, says these could range from car ads that let you ask questions about the vehicle shown to ads for a sports network that allow you to get information about who won last night’s game or what time tonight’s game starts.

The company has lined up partnerships with several ad agencies including Digitas, OMD, and Leo Burnett, as well as with mobile ad distribution networks JumpTap, Millennial Media, and Ad Marvel.

Nuance, a company that was spun out of SRI International in the 1990s and now powers the voice-recognition capabilities included on billions of cellphones and in millions of cars, believes the time is right for mobile voice ads because many consumers have been primed by voice interactions on smartphones, such as with Apple’s digital assistant, Siri, and Google Voice Search on Android devices.

Meanwhile, the mobile ad space is growing rapidly as the popularity of smartphones and tablets skyrockets. Data from eMarketer indicates spending on mobile ads climbed to $8.4 billion last year from $4 billion a year earlier. This is expected to rise to $37 billion by 2016.

And while ad-targeting is improving most of the ads you see in apps and on mobile websites, they probably still mirror the banner ads, interstitial video ads, and search ads we see with desktop computer browsers. A number of companies are working on more creative ads for mobile devices (see “Google Searches Beyond AdWords”).

On an iPhone, McSherry gave an example of what Nuance thinks would make a mobile ad more appealing: a voice-enabled ad for a fictional brand, Alpha Deodorant, featuring a talking magic 8 ball that has been pre-programmed with about 50 different spoken responses to account for various scenarios (including ones where it doesn’t really know what you’re talking about).

“What’s your question?” a stereotypical “bro” voice asks.

“Should I get a tattoo?” McSherry asks.

“How old are you?” the voice responds.

“I’m 44,” McSherry says.

“I would,” the 8-ball quips. “I’d get a Chinese character that you think means ‘serenity’ but really means ‘smells like butter.’ But just to hedge your bets, use Alpha!”

When the ad encounters a question it’s not familiar with—such as the question, “Should I have a baby?”—it does what McSherry calls “failing gracefully.”

“What’s the worst that could happen?” it asks.

McSherry can imagine brands like Disney using their character’s voices in ads, and suggests that a two-way dialogue with Mickey would lead to deeper engagement and brand affinity.

A startup called Volio, whose founder, Ronald Croen, also co-founded Nuance, has already developed voice ads that incorporate video. The company’s iOS app “Talk to Esq” lets you get cocktail, fashion, and hair advice from Esquire editors. It uses Nuance’s voice application programming interfaces, McSherry says.

For now, the dialogue in Voice Ads has to be recorded by voice actors, but McSherry thinks that eventually computerized voices—which now tend to sound stilted—will be good enough to re-create recognizable voices like that of sportscaster Bob Costas.

One vestige of existing online ads that will likely remain with Voice Ads is the idea of clicking. For fear of invading users’ privacy, the ads will not just pop open the microphone on your smartphone and start listening to you—rather, ads might have a little microphone icon that users click to start the conversation, McSherry says.

“There’s a mobile monetization issue. Everybody is looking for something to break it open,” McSherry says. “There’s been a targeting innovation, but we think we’re bringing a new interface innovation.”

But are existing mobile ads really performing poorly? Anindya Ghose, an associate professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business and co-director of Stern’s Center for Business Analytics, doesn’t think so. Ghose, who tracks the effectiveness of ads across smartphones, tablets, and PCs, says people tend to see ads on one device and may end up buying the product in question on another. He says this tends to happen with specific categories—shoes, clothing, and travel, for example. “It’s not that your ad dollars are being wasted. What it’s doing is nontrivially assisting sales of the same products through other channels,” he says.

Still, he does think we’ll see more attempts by advertisers to get users to engage with ads.

Nuance is banking on it.

“Most people don’t interact with ads for the fun of it, but that’s kind of where we want to get to with this,” McSherry says.

Jeffrey Bigham, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Rochester and creator of a speech-recognition system that combines computers and crowdsourcing (see “Where Siri Has Trouble Hearing, a Crowd of Humans Could Help”), isn’t sure if Voice Ads can be made to work well enough that they won’t be frustrating to use. He notes that Siri, which initially appears to be able to do all sorts of things, is actually quite limited.

“You can’t just ask Siri anything. If you do, it sends you out to the Web,” he says.

However, since Voice Ads will be limited in scope by touting a specific product or brand, they may be able to be interesting and useful.

“You’re not going to ask Ford about a good restaurant to eat at in San Francisco,” he says. “You’re going to ask it about cars. So that could make it work.”

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/513001/nuance-thinks-voice-ads-could-be-a-mobile-hit