DuPont Corian and Duracell Powermat along with Starbucks announced a roll out of wireless charging at Starbucks world-wide (please see the press release below as well as some other related links that may be of interest). This technology has been piloted at some Starbucks stores in Boston and San Jose and the results have been very encouraging. Bill Shea was just at a Starbucks store in Boston this past week and the customer feedback was excellent. The key differentiator here is the Powermatrix software that will come with future charging installations. It allows a commercial customer, such as Starbucks, to interact with their customer in a new and unique way. It not only controls the charging but it provides metrics around the amount of time a customer spends charging their phone, which spots are utilized the most, what time of the day it was used etc. It also allows the commercial establishment to integrate the wireless charging technology with their customer loyalty programs by pushing communications out like offering a discount coupon on a product to the consumer while they are in the store. All of this is done in the cloud and is quite powerful. This is something that the competition does not offer today and it is a reason that we believe you will see more commercial accounts utilizing the Powermat technology.
DuPont has been working closely with the technology to interface a subsurface device into DuPont™ Corian®. This is what DuPont showed at KBIS back in February, The Design Show in Milan in April, ICFF in New York in May and NeoCon that just happened this week.
At the Power Matters Alliance (PMA) meeting this past week in Silicon Valley. This consortium includes companies like Powermat, Motorola, Samsung, Qualcomm, LG Electronics and Microsoft in addition to DuPont. The focus is on building out the Powermat standard for wireless charging unlike similar systems offered by LG Hi-macs which uses a different configuration.
This technology will be available soon for both Commercial and Residential Applications
