GIGS.2.GO: Portable Tear and Share USB Flash Drives

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you desperately needed a flash drive but couldn’t find one to save your life? It’s times like these where something like the GIGS.2.GO would’ve been useful.
The question is, what’s GIGS.2.GO? It’s about the size of a credit card and it’s basically just four USB drives arranged into one neat little package.

The premise that Kurt Rampton and the BOLTgroup were working with when they designed GIGS.2.GO was to provide people with emergency thumb drives that they can just keep in their wallet.
Thanks to the “Tear and Share” technology, the card of drives will come in especially handy for people who work with large teams. Just tear off a drive, save your data, and pass it along to whoever needs it.

GIGS.2.GO is designed to be produced from 100% post-consumer molded paper pulp, so they can be labeled easily with a pen or marker.

Solar Window Socket: Stick up and Plug in

If only harnessing the power of the Sun could be as simple as sticking an outlet with a solar panel onto your window. That’s the idea designers Kyuho Song and Boa Oh are pushing for with their Window Socket concept design.

It’s basically an outlet you fasten onto any clear window so that it charges up by absorbing the sun’s solar energy. When you want to power something up, simply stick the plug into the socket and that’s it.

The design description indicates that the solar energy will be transformed into electrical energy by a converter, although I can’t really see where they could have crammed that circuitry inside of the small puck-like device.

18-Year Old Invents Supercapacitor that Charges Cellphone Batteries in 30 Seconds

How fitting is it that a high school student may have found the answer to longer lasting and faster charging mobile devices? The promising invention was made by Eesha Khare, an 18-year old student from Saratoga, California. It’s a supercapacitor that, according to Intel, “fits inside cell phone batteries, allowing them to fully charge within 20-30 seconds.”

Supercapacitors have significantly higher durability and rate of charging (and discharging) compared to rechargeable batteries, but the downside to them is that they have a low energy density. That’s why they’re mainly used in devices that need short bursts of power. But in the video below, which was uploaded by Santa Barbara Arts TV on YouTube, you’ll hear Khare mention that her supercapacitors have “a special nanostructure, which allows for a lot [sic] greater energy per unit volume.”

 For her invention, Khare won $50,000 (USD) and was awarded one of the runners-up honors at the 2013 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. The first place went to a 19-year old who developed an AI for a low-cost self-driving car.