Steve Shipside

8 August 2008

Got wind? It’s an impertinent question at the best of times so when a colleague of mine asked me, I instinctively reached for the nearest blunt instrument.

Blunt instruments are increasingly hard to find in modern offices so I was just on the point of bludgeoning said colleague to a pulp with an iPhone when they became aware of their imminent demise.

By way of self-protection my fellow hack waved a press release at me in much the same way you might brandish a crucifix at an oncoming vampire. As it happens, press releases have a very similar effect on hacks who have had to live through a couple of decades of concentrated corporate guff.

It was as I cringed back and threw up my arm to protect myself that I saw Gotwind written on the release. It turns out Gotwind is a technology company.

What’s in a name?

It’s not a great name for a company is it? Well not unless your principal product is medication for trapped wind or flatulence and it seems that Gotwind is not actually in the business of fart banishing. Instead Gotwind specialises in renewable energy, and specifically in kinetic energy.

Confusingly this means that Gotwind hasn’t got wind at all. Instead it has developed chargers that use a system of weights and magnets to provide and store an electric charge using the energy of the wearer jiggling about.

It’s not so different from the principle behind kinetic watches that use the movement of your wrist to wind up the watch. Obviously this works best if you move your wrist a lot, which in turn leads to a certain amount of sniggering in the ‘Scope office.

In the case of the Gotwind chargers the idea is that by getting jiggy with it you get enough power to bring your mobile phone back from the dead when the battery runs down.

Presumably the same approach would also power up an iPod if you wore it while jogging. You’d also end up with legs like Arnie because while the company is quick to say that the device weighs about the same as a phone they don’t specify which model.

Standard issue

If it follows the usual evolution of portable devices my guess is that the phone it weighs the same as is likely to be a standard issue BT payphone. Complete with standard issue phone box.

Still I’m old enough to remember ‘portable’ computers that took burly men to lift and they’re now about the weight and thickness of an after dinner mint so presumably the Gotwind will eventually be small enough to build into the phone or iPod.

If it’s for real that is. Because the press release in question came from someone claiming to be Hattie Magee suggesting that the phone operator would be trialling these things at Glastonbury.

I struggle to say the words ‘Hattie Magee’ without inserting the word ‘mad’ as a prefix and any announcement linked to an event like Glastonbury sounds groovy and timely enough to smell of PR stunt. Which means I’m not entirely convinced the whole thing isn’t just a (got) wind-up.