For years, I've wanted a better solution to having to carry four or five power adapters and battery chargers with me when I travel. And, to the cluttered tangle of black bricks and power cords in my home office.
My personal breaking point was over two years ago, when my wife and I traveled to a good friend’s wedding in Chicago. We found ourselves having to repack our bags to accommodate the nine chargers we needed to bring with us. When we arrived at the hotel, I was forced to start moving beds and coffee tables in our room just to find places to plug everything in. Even then, there weren’t enough outlets.
I remember thinking to myself: “This is crazy! We do not have to do this. The power model is broken. And we have to fix it.”
In addition to the terrible inconvenience in our lives, that unsightly tangle of wires, black bricks and wall warts which supply power to your laptop, printer, cordless phone, cell phone, toys, cordless power tools, and so many other electronic products, typifies a problem that plagues consumer society. Multiply what's at your feet by millions: a staggering 379 million discarded and obsolete external power supplies are destined to end up in U.S. landfills this year alone.
Our planet needs a single, universal power architecture for electronic devices. Such a standard could prevent hundreds of millions of power supplies every year from being tossed into landfills - maximizing resources, minimizing solid waste, and conserving energy.
This was the genesis for starting Green Plug.
The way our technology works is pretty straightforward: Green Plug provides the enabling technology that makes any electronic product capable of getting power from any power supply. We sell chips to manufacturers that allow them to make intelligent multiport chargers that can provide a wide range of power from cell phones to laptops. At the same time we supply, for free, software that goes on the product for the client side. This way, the chip recognizes that device and says, "Hi! You're a Blackberry: you need 5 volts." And gives it to it. When the device no longer needs power, the power supply shuts off, saving energy.
In addition to providing information, and sharing our knowledge and experiences, we started this blog to start a conversation. We want you - people like us who are sick and tired of the inconvenience of having multiple external power supplies, and who have great concern about the future of our planet - to voice their desire for manufacturers to Green Plug-enable their consumer electronic devices.
We have some exciting plans in motion to allow you to voice your opinion, and help us send a positive, yet strong message to consumer electronic manufacturers. This will soon be unfolded, but for now I'll hand over the reigns to Seth Socolow, our Vice President of Corporate Marketing. Seth is passionate about leveraging the power of the web to fix this broken power model for electronic devices, and will be the main voice for this blog.
Thank you for listening, and I look forward to achieving the goal of One Plug, One Planet - together.
Frank Paniagua, Jr. is CEO and founder of Green Plug. His bio may be found here.
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