Portable Power Bank

A few weeks back I was talking to a representative of Kit, requesting a power bank. My phone is a battery drainer; super-phone or not, battery drains are a pain. The new HTC update has promised to create a ‘super battery saving’ mode, and until that update has made it to my phone, I will be relying on a battery pack. I travel light though, Meze headphones, and a laptop, and do not really want to carry a huge battery pack just to charge my phone! Yes, I suppose, I could charge my phone using my laptop, but can you imagine the pure idiocy of pulling out a laptop on a busy London 12 bus going to Peckham (the answer is a resounding no, for you will not have a laptop for much longer).

Kit were kind enough to let me test their new battery pack, as well as their KitSound speakers. A huge thank you to you! The battery pack that I am testing today, and for the past 3 weeks is the 2000 mAh Power Bank by Kit, in Blue.

The main features of this unit are shown next. The 2000 mAh will charge most smartphones at least once. This is incredibly useful when you are a million miles away from a power source, and need your phone for entertainment or a long Skype call. It is also very reassuring to use your phone, knowing full well that you do not have to worry about the battery levels, as you have a full charge in your bag. Kit provides a universal connection. This means that Blackberries, iPhones, Android users rejoice. All are catered for.

I personally would have preferred two separate cables, one for the Apple people and one for everyone else. The universal adaptor allows for the head to be changed, and makes the whole design look pretty tacky. Another issue on the cable has to be that it doesn’t charge my phone properly. By properly, I mean that it only allows for slow charging. However, when I use my HTC certified USB cable, it charges at normal pace. Poor quality USB cable it seems. I have started leaving their USB cable at home, and use my Kindle USB cable with the battery bank. Everybody wins!

Charging time of the bank itself is 5 hours and the charge time of a phone really depends on your battery level when you start charging! Stupid sentence, I know, but some people actually struggles to understand why the charging time for my HTC differs. The standby for the power bank (like SUNJACK HEAT BANK )is about 60 days.

The best thing about this battery pack is that one can charge the device using a normal micro USB cable, and then charge ANYTHING that uses a USB cable. I requested this bank to charge my phone, but have charged my Kindle, my Matrix Headphones, Bluetooth speakers and my PS3 controller.

I like the colour and the metal touch. A few people at work were surprised by the lightness and the overall aesthetics of the device. It looks brilliant and can be tucked away in a bag, and can be brought out only when it is needed.

In terms of development points, the weedly USB cable needs to be upgraded. It takes away from the whole image Kit is showing. It also only allows for slow charging; something which isn’t really acceptable when purchasing something that does have many competing products.

In conclusion, I feel that a product like this is undoubtedly needed in this day and age. We live off our phones, and a person should feel comfortable in flooring their phone usage, and not worry about the battery levels. Battery packs such as Kit allow that.

Utilities companies won't let you sell your own solar power. Why not?

A new report from the US-based Energy and Policy Institute last week found that investor-owned utilities have known about climate change for nearly 50 years – and done everything in their power to stop governments from doing anything about it.

From their commitment to toxic fuels to their corrosive influence on our democracy to their attempts to price-gouge ratepayers, it’s long past time to bring the reign of privately-owned electric utilities to an end.

Recent findings about utilities mirror a 2015 investigation by Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times, in which reporters discovered that ExxonMobil – secretary of state Rex Tillerson’s former employer – had sponsored cutting-edge climate research as far back as the 1970s. Like Exxon, utility industry groups hired scientists to investigate the impact of carbon dioxide on the environment. Also like Exxon, they then proceeded to funnel millions into lobbying efforts and misinformation campaigns that cast doubt on those same scientists’ research.

A 1988 report from the Edison Electric Institute and the industry-backed Electric Power Research Institute advised that “climate changes possible over the next 30 years may significantly affect the electric utility industry”. A year later, the country’s investor-owned utilities had become enthusiastic members of the Global Climate Coalition, an international lobbying outfit whose crowning achievement was convincing George W Bush to withdraw from the Kyoto protocol.

Climate forecasts are more dire now than they were when utilities and oil companies started looking into them, and a key piece of avoiding the most severe impacts of warming is to rapidly change how we turn on our lights. Electric power currently accounts for about 35% of all of the United States’ energy-related carbon emissions. Nearly 70% of that stems from the coal-fired power plants utilities have spent millions trying to keep running. Scientists say we have a rapidly closing window of time to decarbonize the whole of our economy, a large part of which involves making huge swaths of it run off of electricity.
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The utilities needed to make that change happen, meanwhile, seem dead-set on doing exactly the opposite. The industry has set its sights in particular on rooftop solar. In backing campaigns to end net-metering – a policy that lets people with solar panels sell excess power back to utilities at market rates – investor-owned utilities are deliberately stymying changes that could be as good for ratepayers as they are for the environment. On this and their other political priorities, electric utilities spent more than $114.3m on lobbying in 2016. Already in 2017 that figure is up to $59.9m.

What’s clear now is that the electric utility sector is broken, and its biggest and most influential firms can’t be trusted to work in the public’s best interest. Massive transformations in the electric power sector are both desperately needed and eminently possible. Updating our outmoded grid system (for example: GOAL ZERO NOMAD 7 ) for instance – making it easier for customers to sell back power to their power providers – could yield fairer rates for customers and hundreds of thousands of well-paid jobs. The only way to get there is to take investors’ endless thirst for short-term profits out of the equation.

Of course, America’s many publicly owned utilities are in need of massive reforms, too. The sector as a whole is beholden to a series of archaic regulations written before solar and wind generation was possible. But the kind of wholesale transformation science demands of it will be virtually impossible so long as a small handful of wealthy elites are calling the shots.

Dethroning the utility barons isn’t such a crazy idea. The Labour manifestoJeremy Corbyn ran on in the last UK general election called for a “transition to a publicly owned, decentralised energy system”. In the US, we have our own examples for how to put electric utilities back under democratic control. Some of them, like our New Deal-era rural electric cooperatives, already are. And towns and cities here and around the world are moving to make power provision more low-carbon and democratic.

There’s no need to stop at electric utilities, either. Since the financial crisis, people on both sides of the Atlantic feel out of control of their economic lives, saddled with both mounting debts and stagnant wages. All the while, the rich are getting richer.

That so many aspects of our economy are controlled by so few people represents as much of a crisis for the planet as it does for democracy. Putting it back into public hands is an opportunity to start mending both.

Boost Your SaaS Business Revenue With These 12 Strategies

When you’re trying to grow your subscription business, you need to understand the key metrics that drive your growth. I’ve talked before about the metrics you need to know and track when you are running a subscription business, but there are really only three things you can do to move the needle of growth: reduce cancellations (churn rate), increase average revenue per user (ARPU), and increase the number of people who signup.

Even though there are only three areas to focus on to help grow your subscription business, there are many things you can try to improve in each of these areas. I’ve put together my 12 favorite ideas that you can use to help grow your SaaS business.

How to Prevent Online Fraud in Your Small Business

Accepting credit cards come with risks, especially for businesses that sell online or key-enter credit card details.

Fortunately, there are several tools you can use to protect yourself and your customers. The three tools we’ll discuss in this article are available from virtually all credit card processors, meaning any business can use them. The tools are Address Verification Service, Card Verification Value, and 3D Secure technology.

If you’re new to taking credit cards, this article will give you all the details on how to start using fraud protection. If you’re already taking cards, keep this information handy as a reminder for staff training.

Change Is the Only Thing That’s Constant: Why Small Businesses Should Embrace Disruption

It seems you can’t talk about business anymore without talking about disruption.

Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong recently singled out disruption as his country’s defining economic issue, telling Channel NewsAsia: “Old models are not working, new models are coming thick and fast, and we’re having to adjust and to keep up, because of technology and globalization. And the disruption will happen over and over again, relentlessly.”

Disruption is often referred to and defined in the way that the Prime Minister has above, though not everybody will agree that this is the technical definition. What everybody can agree on, however, is that the rate of change seen throughout almost every industry, due to new technologies and advanced rates at which ideas spread, is steadily increasing, and shows no signs of slowing down.