Hi again Kossacks! We last told you about our Indiegogo campaign to crowdfund Mobile Clean Energy a couple weeks ago. We're about halfway through our campaign, closing in on $7K, and need your help. Follow me beyond the orange squiggly to learn more and help us reach our Indiegogo goal.
What's a Crisis Mapper?
During emergencies, natural disasters, in conflict zones or other crises, people on the scene need charged phones to tell the world what's going on. Crisis Mappers tweet & text in real time from crisis areas to create maps which emergency responders use to target help to those most in need. Get more info on crisis mapping here.
Crisis mapping is often most valuable where there is no reliable electrical grid to power mobile phones, where at risk populations are most vulnerable, and powered mobile phones could save lives. Over half a billion mobile phone users worldwide live completely off the grid, and another three-quarters of a billion people struggle to find reliable electricity.
How can we crowdfund their mobile power? Let alone CLEAN mobile power?
Tremont Electric will partner with CrisisMappers.net to identify people off the grid in developing nations with the most extreme and urgent needs for mobile power. With help from Indiegogo, we'll fill that need with the nPower® PEG.
The nPower® PEGis the world's first passive kinetic energy charger for personal hand-held devices. Placed in a bag, tied to a belt, mounted on a motorcycle, or hanging from an animal, the nPower® PEG harnesses the kinetic energy of walking, running, jogging, hiking, storing it for use when you need it most - off the grid. The patented nPower® PEG placed second at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show i-Stage competition for innovation, and won the 2012 Edison Award Silver Medal for Power Generation. Here's a video of the nPower® PEG at work on a SXSW Startup bus. This June, SmartPlanet called the nPower® PEG the "best charging device ever."
What's a crisis map look like?
Here's an example - a crisis map put together by journalists in Kenya. You can click on the various spots on the map for details from the reports delivered through mobile devices. Our project will produce similar maps, but from the clean kinetic energy of the reporters themselves. Groups receiving PEGs will run simulated crisis mapping incidents, resulting in an online map thick with data that backers can watch grow.
So who are you guys?
Tremont Electric is a Triple Bottom Line Green Plus certified clean energy startup in Cleveland, Ohio, makers of the nPower® PEG, dedicated to making kinetic energy a part of the clean energy future for us all. Here's the Tremont Electric team - myself (founder, and inventor of the nPower® technology, Aaron LeMieux) and my wife, VP of Marketing Jill LeMieux, are in the above video. The International Network of Crisis Mappers is the largest and most active international community of observers, policymakers, journalists, scholars, hackers and skilled volunteers engaged at the intersection between humanitarian crises, technology and crisis mapping. Jen Ziemke, who's also in the video, is a co-founder of CrisisMappers.net.
We are the face of the rust belt's clean energy technology future. Our product is 90% sourced locally in Ohio, built right here in Cleveland. Our goal is to make kinetic energy part of the solution to replacing fossil fuels. One day we see nPower® technology floating in buoys on open water generating commercial scale electricity from NO fuel generating NO emissions.
Where will the mobile power go?
If we reach our goal, 100 nPower® PEG mobile chargers will be hand-delivered to Crisis Mapper projects in high-risk populations off the grid, so they can report, map, record, and observe, powered by their own kinetic energy. CrisisMappers.net has reached out to its network of over 4000 people worldwide to identify an initial group of projects off the grid that need mobile power. Here are some sample requests for nPower® PEGs technology, that will be used to help power projects as diverse as:
Food security in Sudan & South Sudan
Studying health care patterns in Haiti
Monitoring nutrition in rural Uganda
Tracking nomadic at-risk populations in Darfur
If the IndieGoGo community exceeds our goal, we will continue to work with The International Network of Crisis Mappers to identify more projects that need mobile power, and send them more PEGs.
Budget - the more raised, the more people get mobile power
The minimum budget for our project is $40,000, which breaks down pretty simple. 100 PEGs cost $17,000. Shipping, travel, logistics and training for delivery of PEGs to 4 separate projects in 4 separate countries will be minimum $5,000 per trip, x4 = $20,000. The subtotal is $37,000, and adding Indiegogo fees brings us to $40,000. Once the PEGs are in place, Crisis Mappers will use crowdsourcing software already in place to create the map that we can all follow as it grows. That's it!
If we raise more than our goal, more crisis mappers will get mobile power. Simple as that.
If you'd like to help, please click through to learn about the perks for various pledge levels, but more importantly, please help share our project with people like you who support clean energy. Recs would be awesome.
Thank you very much.
Aaron
p.s. here's the link again.....:)