Street Charge: New York Gets Solar Charging Stations

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Control Your Hotel Room From Your Smartphone Posted: 06 Jul 2013 04:00 AM PDT Premier Inn has launched a new concept in hotel rooms, known as Hub. Although it’s being termed a concept, Whitbread has committed to opening its first Hub by Premier Inn in London UK by summertime 2014. The futuristic hotel room is detailed as filling 11.4sqm of space, with storage under the bed, a desk that slides out and an en suite bathroom that gives you a shower. Everything you need for a night’s sleep in a strange city.  The idea is to offer a compact hotel room that wastes no space, but also offers convenient controls via a companion app that will let you check-in, control the temperature, order breakfast and explore local highlights as well .  The app will also act as a controller for your entertainment, letting you choose the TV or radio station you want and it will facilitate you to stream content from your device to the 40-inch TV in your Hub room.  The London sites that are committed to the programme include St Martin’s Lane for 2014, followed by Great Tower St, Spitalfields, Goodge Street and Kings Cross in 2015/16. Scotland also has a look in, with the capital Edinburgh also listed for this futuristic pad. “Premier Inn has played a leading role in shaping the budget hotel market and we believe ‘hub’ will do the same for a new generation of compact city centre hotels,” said Patrick Dempsey, managing director Whitbread Hotels and Restaurants.  ”Hub will work in tandem with Premier Inn, appealing to more price-sensitive customers seeking quality accommodation in the heart of a city. It will enable us to broaden our customer appeal and further strengthen our competitive edge.”  Let’s hope that everything remains premier except the price, but I can’t see it, can you?

Street Charge: New York Gets Solar Charging Stations Posted: 06 Jul 2013 03:00 AM PDT If you're in New York and your smartphone or tablet runs out of battery right when you need them the most, don't panic. All you have to do is find one of the city's new solar charging stations to breathe new life into your gadget. Under the name Street Charge, the public solar charging kiosks were developed by telecommunications provider AT&T together with Goal Zero, a developer of solar power systems, and Brooklyn-based design studio Pensa. The charging stations are free to use. Every Street Charge station is equipped with three 15 W solar panels mounted on microcrystalline PC blades at the top. These solar panels charge up a powerful 168 W/h lithium-ion battery pack that can charge up to six devices at the same time. The included Li-NMC batteries can also store the collected energy, which means that the units can be used during the night but also on cloudy days. All the units are equipped with Lighting and 30-pin connectors for iPhones, along with USB and micro-USB plugs for other phones and mobile devices to accommodate Androids and BlackBerrys as well. The stations also come with female USB ports in case you're carrying your own cable. Developers say that the charging time for the solar power stations will be roughly the same as when you plug your device into a wall socket, providing a full charge in a couple of hours. The idea of setting up these solar charging stations came in the wake of superstorm Sandy, which left many parts of New York without electricity for several days and New Yorkers having to share generator power to charge their mobile devices. Pensa created the first Street Charge prototypes last year and then teamed up with Goal Zero and AT&T to develop the project. The first solar charging units were set up last month at Riverside Park, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Governor's Island and Fort Green Park. There are plans to open at least 20 more stations the following months, all of them in pedestrian-heavy areas of the city. What do you think of the idea? Would you like to see such charging stations in your town?