Powerkiss Goes From Wireless Charging To A Service Platform (Video)

By Ville Vesterinen, October 29, 2009, 4 Comments

PowerkissWe all know Powerkiss from before, but to be honest you can get only so excited about wireless mobile phone charging.

But Powerkiss is not really what it looks like on the surface. One could easily think their core offering is wireless charging. Think again. Increasingly in the future it will be centered around Near Field Communication (NFC) enabled service platform which acts as a glue between different consumer services. Think location based advertising, where the location has been pinned down to the level of a restaurant table, or really selling any other service that is tied to a location. The variations are endless.

I met Powerkiss on our Silicon Valley Crusade, where they had joined to raise an A-round of funding. I talked with them about the product and the new approach that they've been cooking up behind the scenes. See the video below.

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kai October 29, 2009

Thank you Ville for great interviews with Nodeta and Powerkiss! It would be great to hear more experiences from entrepreneurs who have moved to California from Nordics.

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teppohudson October 29, 2009

I agree with Kaitsu! Video reporting is the way to go, and especially more about various people the crusade met in California.

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Ville Vesterinen October 29, 2009

Thanks for the feedback guys. All in good time. We have a few coming. That said, in all honesty there are not terribly many entrepreneurs that moved to California from the Nordics, which still live here.

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Robert Aarts, October 30, 2009

Yeah, thanks Ville! Hope you have some time for plain good fun too ;).

Now the obligatory sceptic comment that everbody expects from me...
About this extension to the Powerkiss concept:
As such one wouldn't need the charger-or-whatever-we-call-it to become a data transfer device. All one really needs is to figure out the precise location (of the phone). In other words the charger just tells some "service platform" something like: "I have an audience right here". When you look at it this way it would not so terrible different from some bluetooth scanner recognizing that "there is some audience nearby". Yet those bluetooth "nearby location based services" have been talked about for years but have not taken off.
So the interesting question to Powerkiss is (or should have been): what is truly different here? I'm not saying there isn't something significantly different, just that I'm not really seeing it. Yet.

When I plug my laptop into an ordinary electrical outlet I expect it to get charged; not to be spammed with coupons or so. In fact I'd greatly appreciate if cafes etc. would have many more outlets, because now I need to keep a close eye on those few tables where an outlet is nearby. I guess I mean to say that the basic *Power*kiss concept seems great. Don't loose focus or overdue it girls! But of course do think of other ideas.

Just my 2 boring cents.....