Suntrica Chargers Now Apple Approved
While much of the attention at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is on new handsets and software, Suntrica from Finland silently announced that they got their Solar Strap approved by Apple. Their new Solar Strap, which comes now in four nice colours and got even lighter, is working with the iPhone 3G and 3 GS, as well as the iPod Touch, Classic and Nano. This is a great opportunity for all the Apple fans to charge their iPhones and iPods while away from an outlet, be it in the city or hiking.
For those who don't have an iPhone or iPod but are looking for an environmentally friendly way to load their phones and gadgets, Suntrica still has the normal SolarStrap which is compatible with a range of phones, and also can be loaded up via USB for those rainy days and carried as a backup. Finally, the company is also helping out the people in Haiti, as relief workers are powering their mobile phones with Suntrica chargers - a great sign that they are not only interested in profits, but also in the well being of other people.
Combining Research And Business Into An Innovative Start-Up
Absolicon Solar Concentrator Ab from Sweden is a company which was born out of research conducted by the Royal Institute of Technology and various other universities and grew into a well funded business. The Nordic countries are well known for investing heavily into education and university research; but research alone is not enough if it's not transformed into a commercial product. Good that Absolicon was able to make that jump and pursue a largely untapped niche.
A Couple Of Big Norwegians Close 2009 In Nordic Cleantech
Norwegian Investinor is already into the cleantech industry through investments in electric car-maker Think and Metallkraft (which is another cleantech fast-grower doing recycling in the solar industry). They opened their bank account before the holidays, investing 6.3 million euro in Innotech Solar, making it one of the bigger cleantech investments during the year. Innotech Solar was founded by people from within the solar industry, who saw a market opportunity in the solar cells that where not used due to low efficiency. Innotech Solar buys these cells and has the technology and production capacity to upgrade them, making them profitable. It is recycling and reuse in an industry where access to raw material has been crucial. The company was established in spring 2008, has grown to 42 employees, and already has sales offices in Germany and China. The company has previously managed to attract VC money from two of the most active cleantech investors in the Nordics - Northzone Ventures and Sustainable Technologies Fund.
Suntrica Keeps Your Gadgets Charged
Suntrica Oy was one of the companies we visited during the Finnfacts Cleantech Blogger Tour 09, and who handed us out an actual product for testing, the SolarStrap. The tech savvy person has usually a few gadgets on him - cellphone, smart phone, PDA, MP3 Player, GPS, etc. - and at some point might run into the problem of an empty battery. That's no problem if an outlet & charger are at hand, but what if on the go and none of these are available?
Crystalsol Is Getting Ready To Revolutionize Solar Energy
Solar energy is a favourite of many governments and environmentalists: free and easy to harness energy from the sun - what's not to like about that? Well, for one the production of conventional photovoltaic panels isn't without environmental impacts, and it also uses rare metals which are increasingly difficult to source. Crystalsol, established in 2008 as a spin-off of the Tallinn University of Technology, is developing a product which gets rid of these negatives.
The company's key innovation is the use of tiny semiconductor crystals made of copper, zinc, tin and sulfo-selenide, CZTS for short, where each crystal works as a tiny solar cell. This technology is the combination of decades of research for the Russian military and Philips semiconductor know-how dating back to the 1960s. The result: a new type of flexible photovoltaic module with a significant cost advantage compared to all currently known photovoltaic technologies. The modules are produced roll-to-roll - think paper manufacturing - which eliminates the scale-up issues that thin film producers usually face. Once production is up and running, which should be by mid 2011, Crystalsol forecasts production costs below €0.50 per watt, which should give them the lead in low cost PV modules.
