Tag Archives: MIT

Power Pack

finsix-charger

All laptop chargers are terrible. Compared to phone chargers, carrying around a laptop charger is like carrying around a whole other device…that has tentacles. It gets in the way, it may weigh over a pound, and like inkjet printers, they haven’t evolved since 2005.

Dart is a Kickstarter campaign trying to change all of that. Proposed by FINsix, the Dart is a device using very high frequency (VHF) power conversion, MIT technology that allows the hardware to charge your laptop the same way your old charger did, just in a smaller, more aesthetically pleasing case. There’s a whole lot of electrical jargon about how the device does what it does and why it works, but the bottom line is if your laptop is on this Compatibility List, you can be charging easily in 22 days. The campaign is already $150,000 ahead of its goal, so why not?

What Sparks Our Fire: Seeing a need for improvement and acting on that need. Now, please fix these terrible printers.

Do you dislike your current charger enough to upgrade to the Dart?

The Most Frustrating Thing In The World

The most frustrating thing in the world is not your mother-in-law, or job searching, or tuition debt. No, the most frustrating thing in the world is getting ketchup out of a glass bottle. Seriously, it ruins my week every time. Thank god we have MIT to fix this, or I’d need to be committed.

The bottle in the video above has been coated with an almost frictionless substance called LiquiGlide, that prevents even the tiniest bit of ketchup from remaining in the bottle. PhD candidate Dave Smith states that a million of pounds of food waste could be saved if every bottle or container was coated with this substance, meaning you could get every little last bit of mayonnaise out of the bottle.

The biggest challenge they faced was keeping the product FDA approved, which they could only do with a limited amount of materials, which they have patented the heck out of. But they’ve already seen results: recently LiquiGlide came in second place in MIT’s $100k Entrepreneurship Competition. Not bad for a ketchup bottle.

What Sparks Our Fire: Solving that ketchup bottle problem and saving my sanity.

Do you think bottles and containers coated with this substance will make life easier?