FollowFour Harvard grads invented a way to harness the energy of the world’s most popular sport with sOccket, a soccer ball that collects kinetic energy with every kick. We thought the idea was so clever we gave it a Breakthrough Award last year. Now, sOccket is ready to hit the ground in countries around the world this fall. We asked sOccket co-founder Julia Silverman about the team’s technology and how they plan to distribute 10,000 sOcckets to countries such as Mexico, El Salvador, Haiti, Costa Rica and Nigeria by the end of 2011.
Last year PopMech honored your prototype soccer ball. Now, you’re launching one for mass distribution. What’s different in the new version?
We have a whole new patent. While the first design was based on the inductive coil mechanism, like a shake-to-charge flashlight, this one is based on a gyroscopic mechanism. So instead of just capturing energy from one dimension of motion, it’s capturing energy from all possible dimensions of motion. It’s constantly going to be capturing energy with even the slightest movements. And because of that, we can capture a lot more power. For example, the first prototype could only power an LED lamp. Now we can power a large lamp with multiple LEDs, and also a water purifier.
