Wireless Charging: A Surprising New Way To Track You

UPDATE: A spokesperson for Powermat took issue with the title of this post. "Starbucks does not track individual people's information," he said in an e-mailed statement. "The network can identify behavior through the [Powermat charging] ring but it [is] still anonymous and for Starbucks we don't even do this."

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We don’t normally think of charging our phones as a two-way street.

Plug in your device and you get energy, end of story. The most you’ll pay is a few more dimes on your electricity bill, and that’s if you’re at home.

But in a public space like an airport or cafe where free, wireless charging stations are now being set up by Powermat, the price will be a little bit of your data.

Powermat is one of the leading vendors of wireless charging technology. Last year it struck a deal with Starbucks to install its charging stations inside the company’s coffee shops across the United States and in the U.K.

So far 200 Starbucks outlets in San Francisco and 10 in London, UK have tables with between 10 and 20 wireless charging circles built in. Powermat installs them in the middle of night, drilling into the tables with a special tool and making the Gorilla-glass charging surface flush with the wood, so that you can slide a cup of coffee over without spilling it.

So far, customers love it. “People go in and just charge even though they are at 50%,” says Thorsten Heins, who was made CEO of Powermat last November after a seven-year stint leading BlackBerry. (He still carries around a BlackBerry Passport in a brown leather case. "It was the last phone I designed!" he explains, grinning.)

Powermat has charging stations in Madison Square Gardens, McDonald’s outlets and more to come.

Wireless charging has been slow to come to market because the trio of consortiums who develop it have three, competing standards. The Power Matters Alliance, which is behind Powermat, uses PMA; the Alliance for Wireless Power uses a standard called Rezone; and the Wireless Power Consortium uses Qi (pronounced chee).

You may have heard of Qi already because Ikea made a big announcement about it this week: It’s selling furniture with wireless charging capabilities built in, supporting Qi.

Powermat wants to do more than just sell its technology to other companies like Ikea. One of the main ways Powermat’s standard is different from the others is that it transfers not just energy but device data, and that’s an important business opportunity for Powermat. It means it can sell to coffee chains like Starbucks who have recurring customers who they can increasingly track and engage with through apps, WiFi and now electricity itself.

“These charging spots on the table, they’re connected to a data management service layer,” Heins explains. “The venue owner can see where people sit, how long they stay and how often they come back. The next layer will help the venue increase revenue.”

Heins describe’s Powermat’s technology as a platform for data analytics that customers like Starbucks — which he calls “venues” — can use over time. “What we do with this intelligence and which business models… that depends on the partnership between the venues and us.”

Heins says Powermat is hiring people with cloud management and data analytics expertise to lay the groundwork for a more comprehensive intelligence service.

Right now, Starbucks can only see how many charging stations are being used, and how often the customers that use them are coming back, but that information could be enhanced over time as Powermat develops its data management service layer.

There are two ways Starbucks customers can charge their phones wirelessly: one is to already have the Samsung Galaxy S6, which is compatible with all wireless charging standards including Powermat’s PMA standard.

Another is to spend 10 bucks on a plastic Powermat ring, essentially a wireless charging dongle that plugs into an iPhone or several other Android devices to make them compatible with the charging standard too.

The Powermat ring seen below has an RxID number (an identifier specifically for wireless charging) that Starbucks can track and communicate with through Powermat's software, while the Galaxy S6 also has an RxID inside its chipset.

Starbucks wouldn’t be able to identify a customer’s name, but it could use that information to see how often customers come back for a better view on peak times for revenue. Once Starbucks can identify a recurring customer, they could for instance send them a digital voucher, suggests Heins. “If I know you’ve been here five times, I can use WiFi to send you a coupon."

Starbucks has been offering customers free Wi-Fi since 2010, but it’s unclear how much it can use that alone to track which customers are returning to a store. Typically a WiFi router assigns your mobile device a dynamic IP address, which changes each time you start a new session. With Powermat’s wireless charging technology, that ID would remain static.

The best thing Starbucks has right now for tracking customers is its loyalty cards. About a quarter of all the company’s sales come via loyalty cards, according to a report in AdAge which cited Starbucks’ analytics head Joe LaCugna’s remarks at a Big Data conference last year.

Starbucks’ CEO Howard Schultz is said to be uninterested in data collection about customers, but LaCugna revealed that the company had profiled half its 6 million registered card customers. “We know who you are,” he said. “We know how you’re different from others.”

While a full roll-out of wireless charging stations for mobile could be another year or two away, data-transferring technology from Powermat could augment the kind of data that a company like Starbucks can collect, so that it can see not only how often you buy coffee, but how long you’re willing to stay inside its shop.

“The good thing is we’ve proven the demand,” says Heins. Wireless charging in public spaces is still a very early market, he adds. “It’s just kicking into gear. We’ll see how this all plays out.”