A company I haven’t heard of till now called Fulton Innovation will be debuting a new technology called eCoupled Wireless Intelligent Power at CES 2007 in a couple weeks. This is a very intriguing idea to me and I hope the execution follows up on the promise.

eCoupled power is supposed to allow portable devices to move from home to office and into your vehicle and recharge wirelessly. Several big name manufacturers are listed as commercial partners for the technology; Motorola, Visteon, Herman Miller and Mobility Electronics. The technology works via inductive coupling which allows the transfer of energy from one device to another via a shared magnetic field. The technology behind eCoupled power stems from work done by renowned scientists Michael Faraday and Nikola Tesla. Historically, this type of inductive power transfer has not been much of an option for real world use because any minor variation in the distance over which the power transfer was designed to work would severely impact performance. eCoupled power claims to have overcome this problem via circuitry that can adapt to various loads and special configurations to ensure ideal performance. The eCoupled technology is claimed to have a mere 2% power loss making it comparable to hardwired connections.

I see this being a huge deal for portable devices like cell phones and PDAs. Imagine simply sitting at your desk and having your Razer recharge automatically, or going to the car to drive home and charging while you drive down the road without needing a car adapter. This tech sounds very interesting indeed and will certainly be on my list of stuff to check out at CES 2007.