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Tekion in the news today, JV with MVTG!!!
http://ih.advfn.com/p.php?pid=nmona&article=53951324
Tekion to Commercialise Micro Fuel Cell/Battery Hybrid for Portable Devices
Fuel Cell Today, 22 December 2005
Tekion, Inc. is commercialising a miniature power pack that fits inside mobile devices. The new innovation, Formira Power Pack, is a micro fuel cell/battery hybrid that allows users to power their portable devices continuously without re-charging on the electricity grid. The Formira Power Pack will offer a charge that lasts at least twice as long as a standard battery.
One key component of the power pack is a miniaturized coupling from Colder Products Company. The coupling connects the micro fuel cell's liquid cartridge to the power pack. When the liquid fuel is consumed, the user quickly inserts a new fuel cartridge while the device remains operating. The easy-to-use Colder connection product enables the cartridge to be quickly snapped in and out of the device with one simple motion.
The Formira Fuel Cell has a power density that is significantly higher than that of a direct methanol fuel cell (DMFC). In addition, it performs at a lower operating temperature, uses lower cost catalysts, and, due to its chemistry, requires fewer balance-of-plant components.
The technology will be integrated into new portable electronics devices targeted to launch in early 2007. It will be ideal for products in the milliwatts to 50-watt power range and the 10- to 100-watt-hours energy range. Potential applications include satellite and mobile phones, PDAs and notebook PCs.
http://www.fuelcelltoday.com/FuelCellToday/IndustryInformation/IndustryInformationExternal/NewsDispl...
Alexandria Reborn?
How Stanford's computer science department changed the way we get information.
By Richard Brandt, Illustrations BY peter and maria hoey
Stanford Magazine, Nov/Dec 2004
The library of Alexandria in Egypt was one of the great intellectual institutions of the ancient world. For three centuries beginning around 300 B.C., the pharaoh Ptolemy and his heirs amassed virtually all the great Greek literature and philosophy, and tried to collect the whole world’s writings, from cookbooks to medical texts. As a result, the cultures of ancient civilizations changed as their scholars congregated in Alexandria to read, study and write, absorbing Greek influences.
But a library containing more than 500,000 papyrus scrolls is useless if you can’t find the ones you want. So Zenodotus, the first librarian of Alexandria, struck upon the most enduring classification system ever invented: he alphabetized the scrolls. Callimachus, one of his successors, invented the bibliography, organizing the collection into categories. The poet Philetas created the first comprehensive dictionary at the library, which Zenodotus improved by alphabetizing. Didymus wrote commentaries and glossaries of the holdings, and Dionysius Thrax created the first book on grammar.
When you’re faced with a body of knowledge many orders of magnitude larger than anything seen in history, you need to invent new ways to search, organize and study it. Fortunately, a rich intellectual environment enables creative people to rise to the challenge.
The Internet is today’s equivalent of the Alexandria library, with more than 500 billion web pages and growing. Making sense of this morass is more crucial than ever in a world that runs on information. The right—or wrong—intelligence affects decisions from running economies to going to war.
It has become obvious that search technology is the single most important application on the Internet. “The sheer size and comprehensiveness of the Internet, perhaps its greatest feature, would be useless if we didn’t have search to take advantage of it,” notes Esther Dyson, a longtime technology pundit and editor-at-large at CNET Networks.
For more than a decade, the biggest innovations in Internet search technology have come from one place—Stanford’s computer science department. Most of that work was done by graduate students under professors in the department’s database group; much of it was financed by the government-supported Digital Library Initiative—the project that gave birth to search king Google. Without those students, Internet search might be stuck in the pre-Hellenistic age.
The Digital Library Initiative was not intended to create technologies for Internet search; Stanford’s original grant proposal in 1994 made no mention of the Internet at all. The project started as an attempt by the Department of Defense to make it easier to find computer research papers electronically. Stanford and five other universities each received about $800,000 annually to collaborate. By 1998, the project’s budget and scope had grown, as the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and more universities got involved.
As it happened, 1994 was the year Netscape Communications released its web browser, transforming the esoteric Internet into the point-and-click World Wide Web. (People now use the two terms interchangeably.) Suddenly, the graphical web, which encompasses the overwhelming majority of Internet sites, became the place to look for research papers.
“The Internet completely changed things underneath us,” says Professor Hector Garcia-Molina, chair of computer science. As soon as the Digital Library funding started coming in, the Internet became the focus of most Stanford researchers’ efforts. Faculty took a laissez-faire approach, encouraging students to conduct research in any area they could think of. The results were spectacular. “Google would never have existed if not for the Digital Library program,” says Jeffrey Ullman, professor emeritus of computer science, who was Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s adviser.
The first Stanford students to make a commercial success out of helping people find things on the Internet were David Filo and Jerry Yang, who started Yahoo! The venture was never a true search engine—a software program that pulls up web pages relevant to keywords the user types. Rather, it started simply as a hand-selected list of interesting websites called “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” It evolved into “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle,” or Yahoo!, a portal offering hand-selected sites and free software deemed useful by Yahoo’s “domain” experts—the equivalent of Callimachus’s bibliography. To find other web pages, Yahoo! offered search engines licensed from other companies.
The Yahoo! story also began in 1994. As part of their Stanford doctoral course work, Filo, MS ’90, and Yang, ’90, MS ’90, wrote a business plan based on their web guide. Students had to evaluate each other’s plans, and Brian Lent, a PhD student in the database group, gave Yahoo! a D-minus. Lent, MS ’95, thought the selection process should be automated, rather than hiring scores of experts to find the right sites as the web grew.
Let that be a lesson to anyone with ambitious plans for their research: you have to ignore a lot of naysayers. When Filo asked Lent if he would like to join Yahoo! as employee No. 1, in order to keep the founders on their toes with his skepticism, he laughed. “You couldn’t pay me enough money to work for a company called Yahoo!” he recalls saying at the time.
Still, Lent was at least partially right. By the late 1990s, almost all search engines had given up trying to make search a profitable enterprise and were busily transforming themselves into portals modeled after Yahoo! But after Google showed up in 1998, most of those portals went out of business, while Yahoo! spent about $2 billion buying search technology to add to its site. Microsoft eventually started creating its own search technology, hoping to release it sometime next year.
Throughout the 1990s, search engines primarily retrieved pages according to how many times given keywords were found on a site. It’s as simple an idea as alphabetizing scrolls, and no more innovative than Yahoo!’s approach. But these engines were easy to fool. For example, by simply typing “sex” over and over again in black type on a black background to make the words invisible, site programmers could attract a lot of hits from search engines, whether or not the site had anything to do with the topic people were looking for.
When Google’s search engine was officially launched in December 1998, it was distinguished by one big attribute. It worked.
At its core is the PageRank system, invented by Larry Page (and named after him) while he was working on his PhD at Stanford. PageRank, which judges a site’s importance by analyzing outside links to it, was the first true innovation in search technology since the bibliography. It takes advantage of the unique properties of the web—the network of links that makes its name so apt.
Garcia-Molina, Page’s adviser, recalls how it all started. Page came into his office one day in 1995 to show him a neat trick he had discovered. The AltaVista search engine not only collected keywords from sites, but also could show what other sites linked to them. AltaVista did not exploit this link information in the way Google would, but Page suggested it would be a good way to rank sites. He reasoned that those with the most links probably were the most popular and would prove most useful to searchers: they should be listed first in the search results. He began creating his own software for analyzing links between sites.
Meanwhile Lent, the student who had all but failed Yahoo!’s business plan, had been working with Brin on a research project within the database group. In 1995, they decided to try a little associative data mining. This is the process of finding pieces of information that commonly occur together. Retailers use it to search through their sales records and determine whether different items are frequently bought at the same time by customers. (They then can place those products as far apart as possible in the store, hoping to lure customers into additional purchases.)
Brin and Lent worked on ways to find specific word combinations that often occurred together on the Internet, such as authors and their book titles. This required searching through masses of web data, so Brin wrote a “crawler” program—software that visits websites, summarizes their content and stores the data in a central location accessible to graduate students and search companies.
He intended to call the crawler “Googol,”—after the word coined by the 9-year-old nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner for the number 10100—to reflect the enormous amount of data they were collecting. For two years, Lent recalls, they did not realize they were spelling the word incorrectly.
Later, Page combined his method of analyzing “back” links pointing to a given website with Brin’s web crawler, and their combined research moved under the Digital Library umbrella.
Lent, who had a tendency to wander back and forth between university research and corporate life, did not stick around to work with Page and Brin, a decision he confesses he regrets. But in early 1996, Lent explains, “We all said, ‘There will never be another Yahoo!’” Their research seemed purely an academic exercise. Lent was itching to get back into business, so he joined a start-up company.
But the Google search engine, first set up to troll through Stanford’s own web pages, was an immediate hit with students and faculty. Page and Brin became convinced of its commercial potential. With help from Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing and a number of professors (see sidebar) they managed to get their company funded. To bring in revenue, they borrowed an idea from GoTo.com (later renamed Overture and acquired by Yahoo!), a sort of Yellow Pages search engine that went through ads, not websites. Google now simultaneously searches through websites and its own advertisers, listing the relevant ads next to the search results. This has become the most successful advertising approach on the Internet.
Is it always that easy to start a company out of Stanford? Of course not. But, says Ullman, “The value system we have at Stanford doesn’t sneer at commercial utility.”
Not everyone agrees with that assessment. Scott Hassan, who helped Page and Brin with some of the early programming for Google while in the master’s program, thought work that showed commercial potential was discouraged at the University. “I saw people at Stanford who waited until they left to do interesting things,” he says. But, he adds, “Stanford does make it easy to buy the patents.” Hassan, who co-founded eGroups, later sold to Yahoo!, says he just didn’t realize it while he was there. “Office of Technology Licensing policies are very pro-inventor. They will even help you file the patents. But all that isn’t very well publicized at Stanford.”
Page, MS ’98, and Brin, MS ’95, may have become yet another two PhD students to disappoint their mothers by dropping out of grad school to start a company. But the research they started continues at Stanford, officially encapsulated in a project known as WebBase. Using the techniques first developed by the Google founders, the core of WebBase is a huge archive of websites now stored at the San Diego Supercomputing Center. Researchers from Stanford and other universities around the world can download and work with information about millions of websites as they develop search and retrieval technology.
Stanford has continued to supply Google with brainpower and new ideas in search. For six years, nearly everybody who graduated under a faculty adviser in the database group either stayed in academia or went to work at Google. That record was only recently broken when one alum went to IBM’s Almaden Research Center. “We used to joke that if Google went under, all our grads would be unemployed,” says Professor Jennifer Widom.
As for Lent, he has not given up. He got a call from Microsoft in 2003, telling him the company wanted “to kill Google,” he recalls. He considered joining the team, but decided that if Microsoft could do it, so could he. Lent is now an “entrepreneur in residence” at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Mohr, Davidow Ventures, putting together a start-up team that will tailor search to individuals’ interests.
Lent describes his quest as “a bit psychotic—I mean, who goes after Google?” But he thinks Google left him an opening. “I felt Google was stagnating,” he says. “Their core premise is still link analysis. But the other half of the equation is user behavior.” Lent has an algorithm he calls “Dynamic PageRank,” which adds the dimension of time to web searches in order to better determine people’s interests. How long do people stay on web pages; what hour, day or week are they most active; what ads do they most often click on; and what products do they most often buy? By tracking their interests and behavior, Lent thinks he will be able to give web searchers better results.
Because he “passed on two companies” that spun out of Stanford and became huge successes, Lent notes, “I need to give it a try. Google and Yahoo!, be warned.” Unless, of course, one of the companies becomes impressed enough to buy his start-up.
Google has already bought a company that was developing technology to personalize web searching. That company was founded—you guessed it —by a few Stanford computer science graduate students.
Glen Jeh was in the PhD program in 2003, working within the database group, when he co-wrote (with Widom) a prizewinning conference paper called “Scaling Personalized Web Search.” His approach to personalizing searches lets people specify their interests in advance. The problem is that adding individual preferences to web searches presents a difficult computational problem. Since there are millions of users, each with separate criteria, there are simply too many permutations to quickly find all the websites that simultaneously match search terms, have the highest PageRanks and correlate with their lists of interests.
Jeh, MS ’03, came up with the idea of “partial vectors,” common preferences shared by many people. Sites that match many of these preferences are given higher priority even before anyone does a search, narrowing the field. Then when an individual does a search, his or her other preferences are calculated in. That can still require a lot of expensive computing power, though, so two other PhD candidates, Taher H. Haveliwala, MS ’01, and Sepandar Kamvar, PhD ’04, improved the efficiency of calculating Jeh’s partial vectors, and the trio set up a company called Kaltix last year. Google snapped it up within months.
Some of Stanford’s computer science grads have stayed in academia, and continue to conduct research into the intricacies of web search. Junghoo Cho, MS ’97, PhD ’02, is an assistant professor at UCLA. He’s concerned about Google’s ability to alter the makeup of websites. Since a relatively small number of sites have the most links, and Google retrieves them first, those sites get visited more often and even more people link to them. Cho’s studies indicate that Google in effect drives more and more traffic to fewer and fewer sites.
Search technology research also continues at Stanford. Professor Andreas Paepcke, director of the Digital Library program, and several grad students are working on programs to search through digital photographs. Their technique combines data from the camera’s date/time stamps with information such as birthdays, holidays, vacations and major events—even data from Global Positioning System satellites—to help identify what photographs depict. This is the first step in searching through them.
Chris Manning, a professor in Stanford’s artificial intelligence group, is trying to get computers to understand “natural language,” with all its semantic subtleties, as it is used (and misused) by humans. One of Silicon Valley’s Great Tech Hopes is a “semantic web” that will allow computers employed by search engines and other sites to respond to questions written in plain English, or other languages. This is something the search site Ask Jeeves claims to do, but even Ask Jeeves executives admit their first versions were mainly a gimmick, simply picking out keywords in the questions people typed. The company is trying to improve that technology.
Stanford’s significant role as originator of search technology may be winding down, though. For one thing, this academic year will be the last for Digital Library funding. And leading research is moving into corporations, now that Google has demonstrated how profitable it can be. “We’ve been discussing the question of whether there’s anything new to do in search,” says Garcia-Molina. “With all these big companies out there, what can we do?”
Professor David Cheriton, an early investor in Google, puts it more bluntly. “When you have something like Google occur, where you can hire a bunch of great researchers all motivated by stock options, it’s hard for pure research organizations like universities to compete.”
Did anyone say, “There will probably never be another Google?”
RICHARD BRANDT is a writer and editor in San Francisco whose book, In Search of Google (O'Reilly Media) will appear later this year.
http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2004/novdec/features/google.html
Yeap, nice board to have, Keep track of the latest news on fuel cells including ones used in batteries.
And maybe one day we can merge with my board. :) http://www.investorshub.com/boards/board.asp?board_id=4442
Serious- Thanks for putting together the board. I'd like to find out who MOT's carbon nanotube supplier is. Maybe Tekion will most go public with the right partnership?
g
Now how do we get in on this action? Tekion appears to be private... so far!
Another nice article:
http://www.techreview.com/BizTech/wtr_13741,296,p1.html
Ant Power Packs
Renew Power wants to replace your cell-phone battery with a fuel cell.
Renew Power wants to replace your cell-phone battery with a fuel cell.
By Erika Jonietz
Cell phones used to be just phones, but now theyre organizers, Web browsers, cameras, and music players, too. As the power-hungry functions pile up, running phones on batteries gets trickier. Cell-phone makers have been hoping micro fuel cellstiny versions of the devices touted as a source of clean power for carswould be the answer. But problems with size and power have stalled early methanol-based versions in academic and industry labs. So Renew Power, a spinoff of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is turning to formic acid, the chemical sprayed by black ants on the attack.
This spring, company engineers began making calls on a Nokia phone using their fuel cell. Were the first to demonstrate that we can power a cell phone with a fuel cell that actually fits in the phone, says Richard Masel, Renew cofounder and chief technology officer.
It took a bit of international maneuvering to get to this point. In 2003, former executives of Canadian fuel cell developer Ballard Power Systems helped found Tekion in Vancouver, British Columbia, to license and develop fuel cell technologies. A search for promising new approaches to powering cell phones and other portable electronics led Tekion to the formic-acid fuel cells Masel was developing at the University of Illinois. But the research had been funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, so there was no way it was coming to Vancouver, says Tekion cofounder and CEO Neil Huff. So Tekions founders and Masel formed Renew Power as a U.S. subsidiary of the firm. (Huff serves as CEO of Renew as well.) Tekion and IllinoisVentures, a state venture capital fund, have funneled $1.8 million into Renew, and Huff hopes to begin pilot production of fuel cells for mobile handsets by early 2006.
Of all the markets for micro fuel cells, handsets are the big prize, says Atakan Ozbek, vice president for energy research at technology research firm ABI Research in Oyster Bay, NY. The potential is huge. Nearly 500 million handsets were sold last year, and this year predicted sales are even higher. But companies hoping to capture that prize face huge challenges. For instance, Ozbek says, when a cell phone is on standby, its drawing almost no power. But once you get a voice call, it increases. This dynamic change in power requirements is not something fuel cells typically handle well, he says.
Ant Power Packs
Continued from Page 1
By Erika Jonietz
Only three years ago, industry watchers expected companies such as Samsung to sell methanol-powered cell phones by 2003. But problems with dynamic power demands, and with operating temperature and size, have stymied their development, and none has made it from lab to store.
Using formic acid as the fuel can solve all these problems, Masel says. For starters, although formic acid yields less electricity per molecule than methanol, it can deliver energy more rapidly than a comparable methanol fuel cell, getting around the dynamic-power issue. Formic-acid fuel cells also operate just fine at room temperature; to achieve the same level of power, methanol fuel cells must work at a scalding 60 °C and upimpractical for a device used near the face. And methanol must be used in a diluted form in fuel cells; handling it requires tiny pumps and pipes that increase the devices size. Formic acid doesnt face that problem, so Renews fuel cells require no moving partsjust a replaceable fuel cartridge.
A single cartridge should power a cell phone at least twice as long as the typical lithium-ion battery used today, Huff says. Some experts, however, are skeptical that formic acid will beat methanol into portable electronics. Two of the fuels biggest problems are availability and toxicity, says Paul Kohl, director of the Georgia Tech Center for Innovative Fuel Cell and Battery Technologies. Methanol is a more plentiful fuel than formic acid. You can buy it on the drugstore shelf, he says. And I can wash my hands in methanol; I cant in formic acid, because the concentrated acid would burn his skin.
Predictably, Renew Power says it is well on its way to solving such problems. The real competition, Huff believes, is powerful, established lithium-ion batteries. But as cell phones grow more complex, the need for more power in a small space should eventually push the industry toward fuel cells. Being the first to have a fuel cell that fits inside a phone could put Renew Power at the head of the pack.
g
Check out this article. (Note of particular interest, MOT use of carbon nanotubes/micro-fuel cells toward the end of the article.)
"Nokia's major competitor, Motorola, has announced work on using carbon nanotubes to create super-efficient micro-fuel cells."
http://www.technologyreview.com/NanoTech/wtr_15873,318,p1.html
Nano Nokia
Nanoscale coatings and materials could make cell phones sturdier, more wear-resistant -- and much smarter.
By Kevin Bullis
There are increasing signs that big players in the mobile phone market are calling on nanotechnology to give them an edge.
Nokia and Motorola, for example, have invested in their own in-house research groups to build up expertise in nanotech, and they're also keeping an eye out for developments by startups and academic researchers.
But these companies, wealthy as they are, can't afford to chase every pie-in-the-sky scheme. Bob Iannucci, Head of Nokia Research Center, recently described a few of the novel technologies that have a realistic chance of making it into your coat pocket.
"I'm a highly enthusiastic skeptic," said Iannucci last month at the Lux Executive Summit in Cambridge, MA. Advances in technology, he pointed out, are driven by "a worldwide race to make phones smaller, thinner, and with higher functionality." Building 200 million phones a year, as Nokia does, requires an expensive infrastructure that they would rather not overhaul. Consequently, new technologies have to hurdle "a high bar." In the short term, though, Iannucci said, new coatings and materials engineered at the nanoscale should make thin phones stronger and more wear-resistant -- and even self-cleaning.
In a few years, say five to seven, more significant nano-led changes might occur. Right now, for instance, cell phone cases are largely there to protect the working insides -- and maybe add a dash of style. In the future, many internal components may be replaced by electronics built into the case itself. "One of the most interesting things for us in the mid-term is printable electronics," said Iannucci. The circuit board could be replaced with "inks" made electrically conductive by nano-sized metal particles. Eventually, too, cheap antennas and radios fashioned out of nano materials, including carbon nanotubes, could allow phones to work across all sorts of cell networks and in wireless Internet hotspots.
Those components that remain inside will become modular -- easily switched out in the manufacturing process. The printed circuitry could be designed to allow for multiple configurations, which would enable "mass-customization," said Iannucci. Now a million phones is considered "a small run" for Nokia; but some significant opportunities exist for making "thousands or even hundreds of specialized devices." Some customers may need a high-quality camera module included, for example. Others may prefer to use the space for more memory.
The modifications need not end there, according to Tapani Ryhanen, head of Multimedia Devices Research at Nokia. Whereas today customers snap on decorative cases, in the future such cases may come with songs built in. Or they may have specialized RFID (radio frequency ID) tags that can be used to pay for lift tickets and mochas at a favorite ski resort.
As mobile devices continue to shrink, and as more complex circuitry can be printed on flexible materials, Ryhanen says we can "start talking about building future mobile devices that are much more wearable, something you can wear around your wrist or embed in your clothing."
Before we reach that point, however, two looming challenges are emerging as more and more features are added to mobile devices. First, more memory is needed to store songs, pictures, and eventually high-definition video when the devices become high-quality camcorders as well. Ryhanen says Nokia is keeping a close eye on developments in high-capacity storage, "an area where we believe there will be some very disruptive technologies emerging." Ryhanen points to work using carbon nanotubes and micromechanics to make ultra-dense storage devices.
Perhaps as great a challenge as memory storage is finding a way to power complex devices. Nokia's major competitor, Motorola, has announced work on using carbon nanotubes to create super-efficient micro-fuel cells. Toshiba, according to Iannucci, "has developed very interesting lithium-ion cells that can be recharged in about a minute." He said Nokia is very close to being able to put these into products.
But better batteries may not be the best long-term solution. "Putting more energy into a battery, and then having that fail in some fundamental way can be colossal. We've all read about products that have caught fire," Iannucci said. In the future, new technologies will "distribute and segregate the energy" in the "equivalent of having lots of little batteries."
In spite of his skepticism, then, Iannucci has concluded "nanomaterials offers some very intriguing possibilities, both in the short and the long term."
Thanks for the new board.
g
Mobile Fuel Cell Phone Prototype Show - 10/4/05
One day you can really buy battery refill pack from vending machine like buying a can drink. The liquid fuel cell powered mobile phone can be refilled anytime when the battery run out. Media broadcast is one of the important entertainment feature for a phone and Japan is seeing Fuel Cell phone as a good alternative way of extending battery capacity. Carrying a fuel cell around might be dangerous and you wonder if it will explode, the safety container will be definitely tested in the lab before it reach consumers.
http://www.slashphone.com/111/2695.html
Micro Fuel Cell Power Soon to Reach Motorola?
11/10/05
Motorola announced today that Motorola Ventures, Motorola's equity investment arm, has made a strategic investment in Tekion, a North American developer of micro fuel cells for mobile products. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
Tekion is driven by the mission to take mobile devices "off the grid". By integrating advanced battery technology with a unique micro fuel cell technology, Tekion is creating a new "personal power source", known as the Formira Power Pack, that will fit inside mobile products and enable consumers to stay connected for as long as needed.
Tekion's unique product technology provides a competitive advantage for portable electronic products in the power range of milliwatts to 50 watts and energy range of 10 to 100 watt-hours. Several products and markets fall within these power and energy levels including: industrial handheld computers, satellite communication devices, notebook PCs, and other mobile products.
"With a common vision and focus on wireless devices, Motorola is the ideal strategic partner for Tekion," said Neil Huff, president and chief executive officer of Tekion. "Motorola's investment validates our business plan and further illustrates the need for improved power delivery solutions for mobile products. Our goal is to optimize Formira fuel cell technology for portable electronic devices and to provide end-users with greater flexibility and convenience."
http://www.slashphone.com/70/2973.html
November 9, 2005 (FinancialWire) Motorola Inc.’s (NYSE: MOT) equity investment arm, Motorola Ventures has made a strategic investment in Tekion Inc., a North American developer of micro fuel cells for mobile products. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
Tekion is driven by the mission to take mobile devices "off the grid." By integrating advanced battery technology with a unique micro fuel cell technology, Tekion is creating a new "personal power source," known as the Formira Power Pack, that will fit inside mobile products and enable consumers to stay connected for as long as needed.
"Our decision to invest in Tekion was motivated by its cutting-edge technology and experienced leadership in micro fuel cell development," said Warren Holtsberg, corporate vice president, equity investments and director of Motorola Ventures. "As mobile products have simultaneously miniaturized and increased in functionality, battery capacity has become a significant challenge.”
"With a common vision and focus on wireless devices, Motorola is the ideal strategic partner for Tekion," said Neil Huff, president and chief executive officer of Tekion. "Motorola's investment validates our business plan and further illustrates the need for improved power delivery solutions for mobile products. Our goal is to optimize Formira fuel cell technology for portable electronic devices and to provide end-users with greater flexibility and convenience."
http://www.investrend.com/articles/article.asp?analystId=0&id=20132&topicId=160&level=16...
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