A Las Vegas entrepreneur has convinced the Fiji government to fund an app that recycles lost charge from smartphones, but for many it's just a scam
Defying the principles of physics is a utopian challenge. Yet the government of Fiji wants to try. The aim is to make an innovative battery app. This should save the energy lost during the nightly recharges of smartphones and then be used "on-demand", as needed by the user.
The futuristic application is called InstaCharge. According to the principles of physics, it would be a wash. The laws of thermodynamics say, in fact, that energy can neither be created nor destroyed in a closed system, and an app is certainly not a physical thing so it can't store "extra" energy. A battery can only store the energy needed to recharge it, or less but not more. Despite all this, the app's creator, Douglas Stewart, a Las Vegas-based entrepreneur, has incredibly convinced the Fijian government to support and fund the app.
The app presentation
The app was announced last week in a lavish ceremony, complete with dancers, buffet and dancing, at the Grand Pacific Hotel in Suva, the capital of Fiji. According to local media, Fiji's prime minister, Frank Bainimarama, spoke at the event, emphasizing that the country wants to host a number of events and companies related to technological innovations in the future. According to Radio New Zeland, the government has spent several billion dollars on the app. An incredible event if we consider that the app is still not present on Google Play and that any science teacher could comfortably define it as a hoax. When questioned by the US media, the app's developers avoided giving any information. InstaCharge sostiene, infatti, di non poter rivelare dettagli sul l’applicazione al fine di preservare un vantaggio competitivo rispetto potenziali imitazioni.
Sarà una truffa?
Fonte foto: Shutterstock
Premi sull’immagine per scoprire alcuni trucchi per aumentare la durata della batteria
A questo punto la domanda sorge spontanea: ma sarà una truffa? Certamente ci sono più segnali negativi che positivi. Innanzitutto InstaCharge è stata presentata ma non si sa né come funzioni davvero né quando verrà lanciata negli Store per smartphone. Esistono solo dei piccoli video sul canale YouTube dell’imprenditore Stewart che però non rispondono a nessuna domanda. I video sono pieni di “lorem ipsum” ovvero il testo riempitivo e mancano informazioni anche basiche sul funzionamento del software. Plus in another video you can see that when you press the "start charging" button the battery bar starts moving, but in reality if you look closely the battery is always at 100%. Plus The app name on the phone's home screen is not InstaCharge, but "ProgressBar". Stewart's LinkedIn page doesn't warrant much confidence either, where we get a sense that he has a car rental business. Not exactly the right background to bend the laws of physics. And as if that weren't enough, the U.S. Yellow Pages report that business as a scam.