The Idea: An Inventor Wants One Less Wire to Worry About

“It was my last year to do it,” she told me, “so I literally would just carry around a notebook and write down any annoyances, because that would be an opportunity to solve a problem and have an invention.” An admitted “professional Googler,” she’d been researching all day on her computer when she decided to pack it in for the night.

“I was just standing in my room,” she said, “wrapping up my laptop charger and trying to fit it into my bag and suddenly it occurred to me: Wow, this is so archaic. Why are we using these 20-foot wires to plug in our quote-unquote wireless devices?”

“See past old paradigms” is one of those cheesy riffs one might hear from an innovation expert working the business speakers’ circuit. Yet here it was, a question that inched just past what was simply accepted: Why, in a wireless age, do we still have electrical wires?

As Ms. Perry soon learned, there are very good reasons that we don’t beam electricity through the air. Though you can transmit the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves to gamma rays, there are problems. “I realized that anything on the right half of the spectrum was too dangerous to beam,” she said, “and anything on the left half of the spectrum that was closer to radio was either too inefficient or tightly regulated by the government.”

So she started looking elsewhere and came upon piezoelectricity — a form of charge that is created in certain crystals and ceramics when vibrated. If you have seen Internet assertions about T-shirts “that charge your mobile phone while you wear them,” or about boots on the ground literally creating the charge for a soldier’s radio, you are familiar with the idea of piezoelectricity. Those applications rely on something that’s already in motion.

And here’s where the second eureka happened — enabling her to see how she might build a device to wirelessly charge a battery in a cellphone or a computer from across a room.

“How do I create vibration in the air without actually moving something?” The answer came instantly — it was almost like a stoner’s aha: “Sound is vibration in the air.”

Sound frequency “is basically how many cycles per second air is being pushed through a space,” Ms. Perry says. “We have little hairs in our ears that vibrate in response to sound. We interpret that change in air pressure as sound. But sound is something that exists outside of our head. Literally, it’s just air particles moving in an arranged fashion.” So was it possible to deploy sound waves that humans couldn’t hear or feel, in order to charge a phone?

Nothing in her training prepared her for this kind of research. She was an astrobiologist, after all. She was just 21 and had spent the previous two summers interning at NASA.

So she did what most everybody else does. She clicked on Wikipedia. She started with the “ultrasound” page, then “acoustic.” Soon enough, she was reading academic papers at the forefront of various disciplines.

Her idea, she discovered, meant marrying the fields of sound, electricity, battery technology and other subspecialties. “It was such a multidisciplinary idea,” she said, “and everyone in each different department basically told me that there was basically no way that you could get past all the hurdles.”

She kept running into the same genre of problem. “I was working with a couple of different people at the beginning who would say there was no way to get this high-power sound over this distance without creating shock waves,” she said. “Of course, I would have my 10-minute panic attack and think the whole thing was over. Then I would do some research on my own, and figure out how to achieve high-power sound without creating shock waves.”

Afterward, she said, “I would go back to that person and he would say, ‘Oh, yeah, that should work.’ ” Each expert seemed to dwell in his own private silo, so that whenever she crossed from one discipline to another, she would run into the same wall of constricted thinking.

Even after winning attention at a D: All Things Digital conference, where she transmitted power an impressive three feet using piezoelectrical technology, she still couldn’t attract start-up money.

“After being rejected by literally hundreds of investors — maybe not hundreds, maybe not literally — but lots of investors,” she said, she decided to research who had financed “crazy things,” and wound up gaining the attention of Peter Thiel, the former PayPal entrepreneur whose Founders Fund provides venture capital for unusual ideas.

The Idea will offer an occasional look at the origin of business notions.

Google Wants to Release Details on Classified Requests

SAN FRANCISCO — Google on Tuesday asked the government for permission to reveal details about the classified requests the technology company receives for the personal information of foreign users.

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It is the first time that Google has publicly acknowledged that it has received requests under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which forbids companies from acknowledging the existence of requests or revealing any details about them. The technology company added that it complies with far fewer of these requests than it receives.

Google made the request after revelations of the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance program, known as Prism. The data the government collects as part of Prism – including email messages, telephone records and online chats -- is legally authorized by FISA.

Google made the request in a letter from David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, to Eric H. Holder, the attorney general, and Robert S. Mueller, the director of the F.B.I.

In the letter, Mr. Drummond expressed frustration that the company has been unable, because of a government gag order, to explain the details of how it shares user data with the government. He asked for permission to publish both the number of national security requests, including FISA disclosures, that Google receives, and their scope.

“Google’s numbers would clearly show that our compliance with these requests falls far short of the claims being made,” Mr. Drummond wrote. “Google has nothing to hide.”

Mr. Drummond was unavailable for an interview. In a statement, Leslie Miller, a Google spokeswoman, said that of Google’s hundreds of millions of users worldwide, “only a tiny fraction” are subject to government data requests each year.

“If we could publish those numbers openly, as we are asking, they would show that our compliance with these national security requests falls far short of the claims being made,” Ms. Miller said.

DealBook: Urenco, Powerhouse of the Uranium Enrichment Industry, Wants Out

UrencoAn inspection at what will be Urenco’s largest enrichment center, now under construction in Eunice, N.M.

CAPENHURST, England — The first thing you notice when entering Building E23 on a tightly guarded site here in northwest England is the loud tick-tock. The sound resonates throughout the long, low-slung building where, behind secured doors, sit row upon row of tall thin tubes.

That ticking means the building’s radiation detection system is working — crucial comfort. Inside each cylinder is a centrifuge, spinning a gaseous form of uranium to give it the atomic boost it needs to be used as nuclear reactor fuel.

The company that operates this uranium enrichment center, Urenco, is the world leader in the field. It is also plumply profitable. So why are its owners eager to sell it?

The answer, as with many things involving nuclear power, is a combination of economics, geopolitics and the Promethean prospect of an energy source that is as potentially green and abundant as deadly dangerous.

Urenco was formed by treaty in 1971 when Britain, West Germany and the Netherlands decided for strategic and business reasons to combine their uranium enrichment programs. The company is still owned by the British and Dutch governments, with one-third each, and with the German third held jointly by two big utility companies, E.On and RWE.

Urenco now has four enrichment plants — in Britain, the Netherlands and Germany — selling fuel for civilian energy purposes around the world, capturing nearly a third of the global market. It is also heavily investing in an American centrifuge complex in Eunice, N.M., that will eventually be its largest plant.

“Over the years we have developed generations of these machines,” said Helmut Engelbrecht, Urenco’s chief executive in a telephone interview. “If you do something continuously you always improve.”

Besides fuel, Urenco’s centrifuges spin off fairly good money: revenue of 1.6 billion euros, or $2.1 billion last year, yielding earnings of 402 million euros, for a profit margin of 25 percent. And its order book stands at 18 billion euros, which translates to at least 10 years of steady work.

Analysts estimate Urenco’s market value at about 10 billion euros. For all that momentum, though, the company is at a crossroads. Growth may flatten in the next couple of years, executives say, mainly because Japan — a major user of nuclear power until the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi disaster — has shut down its reactors, taking about 10 percent of the world’s nuclear energy generating capacity offline. And the Japanese have stockpiled substantial amounts of fuel for the day, if ever, that those reactors go back into operation.

The British government, intent on cleaning up its budget by selling state-owned enterprises, said in March that it had hired Morgan Stanley to look into disposing of all or part of its Urenco stake. In some respects Urenco is an easier business to sell than, say, the Royal Mail, because it has an internationally marketable product and a relatively small work force — about 1,400 employees.

UrencoUrenco’s New Mexico facility. The company sells nearly a third of the world’s reactor fuel; it had $2.1 billion in revenue in 2012.

The German utilities E.On and RWE have hired Bank of America as their adviser. With the German government’s having decided to get out of the nuclear industry in 2011 after Fukushima, the sale of their Urenco stakes would help the power companies beef up their thin balance sheets.

A sale became more likely Thursday, when the Dutch government said it wanted to sell its shares, as long as “the public interest in terms of nonproliferation, nuclear safety and supply security” could be safeguarded.

A person close to planning, who insisted on anonymity because of the delicacy of the matter, said if things went smoothly a sale might occur either late this year or in the first half of 2014.

“Nuclear strategies have changed,” said Michael Kruse, a consultant on nuclear issues for the management consultant Arthur D. Little in Frankfurt. “Governments no longer think they need to be in this business,” he said, “and utilities in several countries want out after Fukushima.”

People in the industry say the most likely buyers would be companies already in the industry that might want to offer clients fuel along with nuclear power stations. Areva, a French giant, might fit that bill. So might Toshiba of Japan, which is studying building nuclear plants in Britain. Still, “there are in my view not many companies that can buy Urenco,” Mr. Kruse said.

Urenco’s chief executive, Mr. Engelbrecht, in a presentation to analysts in March, declined to discuss a possible sale of the company, saying he would leave that to the shareholders. But he argued that fast-growing emerging economies would take up the slack left by Japan.

Already, he noted, China is in the midst of a nuclear plant building boom, and India is also seriously pursuing nuclear power. In the Middle East, Urenco has a contract to enrich uranium for the plants in Abu Dhabi being built by South Korean contractors. Countries that are seeing 10 percent to 15 percent increases in electricity demand and that have major air pollution problems “are all betting on nuclear, and that is where we believe the future of our business will be,” Mr. Engelbrecht said.

The company has 50 customers in 17 countries, which it denotes with little plaques on a wall in the enrichment center’s entranceway. The honorees include the Indian Point nuclear plant in Buchanan, N.Y.; Wolf Creek in Burlington, Kan., and the Olkiluoto plant on an island off western Finland.

Even if the potential buyers are a small pool, analysts say that buying into Urenco would present a rare opportunity. Urenco’s centrifuge technology, honed over several generations of machines, is considered the most efficient way to enrich uranium.

Urenco plants receive shipments of uranium hexafluoride, a granular substance derived from uranium ore, which is turned into gas by heating it. The gas is then piped into the centrifuges which use their spinning power to separate out the lighter and more reactive uranium 235 isotopes. When the gas is cooled again, it settles out as a solid resembling grains of sugar.

Urenco’s process increases the proportion of U235, raising it from a starting point of about 0.7 percent to end up about 4 percent — a suitable level for reactor fuel, but only a small fraction of the concentration needed to make a nuclear weapon.

Urenco’s enriched uranium is put in canisters that then go to a fuel fabricator, where it is converted into pellets and loaded into fuel rods which are then delivered to the power plants.

The centrifuges rarely stop at the Capenhurst plant, which sprawls over about 170 acres in what has long been a munitions testing site surrounded by cow pastures and farm ponds. The newest group of cascades — as the array of centrifuges is known — in the Capenhurst building was installed 15 years ago and “has never been brought to rest,” said Geoff Owens, a Urenco engineer.

Areva, of France, which has about 10 percent of the world market for nuclear fuel sales, began switching over to Urenco’s technology in the mid-2000s for its uranium enrichment. Areva’s and Urenco’s owners each have a 50 percent stake in a company called Enrichment Technology, based in Almelo, the Netherlands, that develops and makes the centrifuges.

It is very difficult for competitors to gain a foothold in Urenco’s business. The details of the technology are closely guarded, and the uranium trade is tightly controlled and regulated. “There are massive barriers to entry,” said Harold Hutchinson, an analyst at Investec in London.

Urenco produces the steady, long-run returns that might be valued by pension funds and private equity groups. But worries that the wrong people may gain access to Urenco’s world-leading technology will probably mean that the shareholders — and the British, Dutch and German governments — will be highly selective about who can buy stakes.

While Asian or Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds are said to be among those interested, only companies from North America, western Europe, Japan, or possibly, South Korea, are likely to pass muster, people in the industry say.

“There are an awful lot of security concerns which arise around these types of businesses,” said Fiona Reilly, who heads the nuclear industry practice at Norton Rose, a law firm in London.

Besides potential candidates like Areva and Toshiba, another shopper might be Cameco, a big Canadian uranium mining outfit. It has shown interest in working with Urenco in the past and already uses a plant in Preston, England, that turns refined uranium ore into the uranium hexafluoride that could serve as feedstock for Urenco’s nearby Capenhurst complex.

“Enrichment is a potential growth area for us,” Gord Struthers, a Cameco spokesman said in an e-mail, while declining to comment on whether an offer might be imminent. “We are watching what happens with Urenco closely.”

McQueary Wants Proof PSU Fired Him Once Contract Ended

Former Penn State assistant football coach Mike McQueary has responded to Penn State's position that the university did not fire him over his testimony related to the Jerry Sandusky sex-abuse scandal, demanding "strict proof" that the university fired him only once his contract was over.

Next W.T.O. Head Wants a New Look at the Body’s Role

But doubts persist among officials involved in international policy that he will be able to conclude negotiations for a global trade agreement that will lower trade barriers and address new issues of trade in services and the Internet.

“We’ve tried for three years to convince ourselves that minor adjustments could give us a way out,” Mr. Azevêdo, a Brazilian, said by telephone from Geneva, where he was formally recommended to W.T.O. members on Wednesday. “Now, I’m convinced that we have to change the approach. We have to ask what is actually doable.”

The so-called Doha Round of negotiations, which began 12 years ago, hit the rocks in 2008 over questions of trade in industrial goods and protecting small farmers from cheap food imports. The talks have been essentially dormant since 2011.

The first step to restarting the Doha Round “is very clear,” Mr. Azevêdo said, “starting with success in Bali,” where W.T.O. ministers meet in December. Officials hope to achieve at least token success in streamlining customs procedures and ending export subsidies. Accomplishing that, he said, would provide both substance and “much-needed confidence” that the W.T.O. can get the job done.

Failure to move forward on the Doha Round “is paralyzing the whole system,” he said. But there is more to the trade body than just those talks, he said: “We need to look at the W.T.O. trade agenda; we haven’t done that in a long time.”

There are trade-related issues “that we don’t talk about,” he said, things like climate change, energy, renewable fuels. “We have to decide whether those areas are amenable to discussion.

“I don’t think you can just throw away the progress we’ve made over the last 12 years,” Mr. Azevêdo said. “We need to go deeper in some areas and less deep in others. We have to be more sophisticated, more flexible and more pragmatic.”

Pankaj Ghemawat, a professor of global strategy at the IESE Business School in Madrid, said he feared that Mr. Azevêdo’s status as an insider and conciliator could work against him in the current situation, where “Doha isn’t just stalled; it’s got negative momentum.”

“He bills himself as a consensus builder,” Professor Ghemawat said, “but there’s a question about how far you can get with that. The W.T.O. has 159 members, so it’s a little like herding cats. You do need some steel to get things done, especially in the tricky situation he’s inheriting.”

The breakdown of the Doha Round has led the United States and others to focus on breaking down barriers at the regional level, an approach that could redraw the map of global commerce outside the W.T.O. framework. The Obama administration is negotiating with partners in the Asia-Pacific region on a deal that would effectively bring Australia, Japan and others into the North American Free Trade Agreement. It has also reached out to Europe, opening the way for exploratory talks on a trans-Atlantic bloc. So far, both proposals would exclude China, Brazil, India and other developing nations.

Mr. Azevêdo played down the significance of the United States’ turn toward bilateral and regional deals, saying: “This is not news, we’ve always had these types of deals. The problem is that they’re not happening at the W.T.O. But all the members want the Doha Round to move.”

Others think the outlook is even more bleak. “Undoing the damage of the last few years will take much more than a new W.T.O. head,” said Simon J. Evenett, a professor of international trade and economic development at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. “What is needed is a reset, something that can only come from the national capitals.”

“Doha is dead,” Professor Evenett said. “Anyone who wants to revive it has to face the fact that the regional deals now have so much momentum.”

Kevin P. Gallagher, a professor of international relations at Boston University who studies trade and investment policy, said Mr. Azevêdo faced “a tall order” in restoring Doha to the front line of trade discussions.

The proposed Asia-Pacific and European deals, with the United States as a fulcrum, have created “a Balkanization of global trade policy,” he said. But the regional trade deals are not nearly as valuable for the world economy as multilateral deals would be, he added.

“We’ve abandoned multilateralism,” he said.

Mr. Azevêdo would succeed the current director general, Pascal Lamy, who is stepping down in September after serving two four-year terms. A 55-year-old career diplomat who has been part of Brazil’s team in Geneva since 1997, Mr. Azevêdo bested eight other candidates, including the former Mexican trade minister Herminio Blanco, a University of Chicago economist who some had cast as a proxy for the rich countries.

Mr. Azevêdo rebutted suggestions that he was the developing world’s candidate, noting that he had the support of a majority of the 159-member body in every round of voting and garnered support from both rich and poor countries and from all across the world.

“The next director general has to be a representative of the whole membership,” he said. “There cannot be a north-south divide.”

His long tenure has given him a mastery of W.T.O. minutiae. Susan C. Schwab, a former United States trade representative whose team spent “hours and hours across the table from him,” described Mr. Azevêdo as “a brilliant tactician and negotiator.”

Ms. Schwab said Mr. Azevêdo was taking over an institution that is increasingly seen as unable to deliver. “The good news is that after the financial crisis in 2008, the world did not descend into a spiral of protectionism,” Ms. Schwab said. “The bad news is that there hasn’t been a major trade deal since the Uruguay Round in 1993. So the world is playing by old rules.”

Even Cupid Wants to Know Your Credit Score

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