The Jason Salas Experience

At the risk of coming off as the faintest bit arrogant and momentarily suspending my self-deprecating sense of humor, I'm a damn good product manager.  I'm one of the most effective platform evangelists you'll ever meet.  You'll be hard-pressed to find someone as passionate, informed, technical or charismatic as I am when it comes to getting people to get into new things.  Few people that spend even five minutes with me come away not reaching for their pocketbooks or rushing to the Web to signup for a service.

Having said that, as an inventor I'm a complete noob.  I've struck out more times than Reggie Jackson.  For every ten ideas I conceieve, maybe one ever sees the light of day.  My marketing enthusiasm often conflicts with the rigid rules of nature.  The catch is that for all my wacky ideas, I need a man of science.  Someone who can verify the engineering behind the theory and put me in my place, refining my crazy concoctions.  That's where Will's always come in.

A couple of months ago I called him and simply yapped into my mobile phone, "Dude!  Wireless laptop battery chargers!  How can we do it?"  The sardonic laughter with which my theory was met indicated that being able to send A/C current over the air and provide short-range recharging, like Bluetooth or WiFi for computer power, just wasn't possible.  Or at the very least, inherently dangerous.  (Imagine walking through a stream of unconducted, unidirectional electrical current being distributed through the air.  Ouch.)

Anyway, I came across Palm's new Pre initiative to provide wireless charging to its smartphones today.  Being a docking station, it's not truly the OTA method I had thought up, but it's still really, really cool.  My Sonicare electric toothbrush uses a similar approach with a base station.

Science marches on!  I'm just trying to keep up.