Keyssa's "kiss connectivity" technology could make cords obsolete

A lot of time is often spent debating what the next big breakthrough in smartphones and computing will be, and while some ideas are certainly bold and ambitious, the fact remains that “breakthrough” technology often comes in the forms of “faster,” “bigger,” or “more power efficient” (i.e processors, graphic chips, etc). While these feats are certainly impressive, industry analysts continue to ponder what the next big thing could be. Well it turns out that a company named Keyssa has developed a technology called “Kiss Connectivity” that could effectively take everything we currently know about data transfer, and throw it out the door.

What is Kiss Connectivity?

Eric Almgren is head of the very secretive Silicon Valley startup known as Keyssa, and he recently demonstrated something very interesting. He took a high definition 1080p copy of Avatar (which generally takes around a minute to copy from a USB stick to a Surface tablet) and put it on a hard disk that uses the company’s wireless connector (Kiss Connectivity). He then placed it a few millimeters away from a Dell tablet that uses the same wireless Kiss Connectivity technology, and tapped them together, which triggered a high bandwidth data exchange. The result? The movie was transferred from the hard disk to the tablet within 5 seconds.

Now you might be asking, “how would this affect how smartphones are built?”. Before answering that, let’s step back to really look at what Keyssa has done here. We are looking at something that not only affects smartphones, but computing in general. One could argue that this is the next evolutionary step in USB, Bluetooth, and NFA, and changes the game on transferring data while opening up a world of new possibilities. The concept is so interesting, that Samsung and Intel Capital are both backing the project, which could have huge implications on how data is transferred.

Effect on the smartphone industry

Imagine a smartphone that has no ports. I’m talking zero. No micro USB for charging, no headphone jack, nothing. A completely waterproof sealed up smartphone that could move, transfer, and share gigs and gigs of data within seconds by simply bumping devices. Imagine taking wireless charging to all new levels of speed and efficiency That would all be possible with this new technology (when working in conjunction with other standards), which is in essence a new standard all together.

The connectors used in Keyssa’s wireless Kiss Connectivity are currently able to transfer up to 6 gigs of data per second. To put things in perspective, the latest WiFi standard can handle up to 1.35 gigs a second, and that’s assuming that no one else is using the network. The fastest USB standard currently tops out at 5 gigs a second, and NFC around 400 kilobits a second.

A pretty big jump indeed (and it’s wireless).

Keyssa has currently raised over 40 million dollars and and has around 40 people working on this project. The company’s chairman of the board is Tony Fadell, father of the iPod and head of Nest Labs, the smart appliances company that Google bought in January for over 3 $billion. While we don’t have a time frame for exactly when this technology could roll out, we do know that there are already “top tier” companies that are testing and using this technology as we speak (the startup didn’t want to mention which companies currently have the technology), and that it is scheduled to start appearing in devices in 2015 . Fadell stated back in 2011 that “if this thing works, you are looking at the holy grail”. It seems as if Keyssa just may have found it.