Phone charging station pilot program underway across campus

The stress of having a low cell phone bat­tery with no way to charge it should sub­side across Northeastern’s campus for the next few weeks, thanks in part to the work of one alumnus.

Last month five mobile phone charging sta­tions from Wright­Grid, a startup founded by Ryan Wright, E’09, were tem­porarily installed at four loca­tions around campus for a six-​​week pilot pro­gram. The North­eastern com­mu­nity can now try out the sta­tions and offer feedback.

“The sta­tions are being heavily uti­lized,” Wright said about one week after the pro­gram launched. “The feed­back so far has been very good. This high vis­i­bility is huge for us and having a partner like North­eastern is invaluable.”

The pilot pro­gram is a col­lab­o­ra­tion between Wright­Grid and Notion in Motion, an ini­tia­tive in the Office of Enroll­ment Man­age­ment and Stu­dent Affairs to help North­eastern stu­dents get their ideas off the ground. Notion in Motion looks for ideas that, among other things, engages stu­dents in a learning oppor­tu­nity and cre­ates a new technology.

“Notion in Motion received a pro­posal some time ago for more charging capa­bility on campus,” explained Justin Wright, no rela­tion, the lead EMSA fellow on the project. “And then we met Ryan last fall and it hit on so many cylin­ders. He’s an alumnus, he’s worked with IDEA, and he’s working with clean technology.”

There are two charging sta­tions in the Marino Center: one on the first floor and one on the second floor near the bas­ket­ball court. There is one charging sta­tion near Cross­roads in the Curry Stu­dent Center, one in the Inter­na­tional Vil­lage dining hall, and one in Snell Library near Argo Tea.

The charging sta­tions are typ­i­cally solar pow­ered, but Ryan Wright said they were mod­i­fied to be elec­tri­cally pow­ered for the pilot pro­gram so people wouldn’t to have to go out­side to charge their phones in the dead of winter.

Each sta­tion has 15 lock boxes that are out­fitted with three phone chargers that can accom­mo­date 95 per­cent of all mobile devices including Androids and most iPhones. There are instruc­tions for users on each sta­tion, but if anyone needs assis­tance Wright said there is a site man­ager at each loca­tion who can help.

Notion in Motion rep­re­sen­ta­tives is col­lecting feed­back to see how users like the charging sta­tions and if the sta­tions are in good loca­tions. People can also tweet feed­back using #Notion­In­Mo­tion. At the end of the pilot, Ryan Wright said North­eastern can choose to pur­chase the sta­tions and make them per­ma­nent on campus.

Orig­i­nally called Sol Power, WrightGrid’s mis­sion is to supply “power on the go” where options are lim­ited, as well as edu­cate the public on the ben­e­fits of renew­able energy sources. Ryan Wright started the busi­ness in 2012 and has received $30,000 in gap funding from IDEA, Northeastern’s student-​​run ven­ture accel­er­ator. Wright­Grid was also a winner at the North­east region of the Clean­Tech Open, the world’s largest com­pet­i­tive clean tech accel­er­ator program.

“We just fin­ished a rebranding that includes a new name and web­site,” Ryan Wright said. “We found that many of our com­peti­tors had words like sol, sun, charge and power in their name and we wanted some­thing that was a little more unique, but still spoke to our same mission.”