SOCCKET – Kicking A Soccer Ball Gives You Light

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I haven’t seen something this awesome in a little while.  What you’re looking at in the images of this post is a device that was funded on Kickstarter called Soccket.  Soccket is a soccer ball that has a kinetic energy converter inside; once you kick the ball around for 30 minutes, you get 3 hours of LED light from the included flexible LED lamp.  Think of the implications of greatness that can come from this device — Soccket gives people in the Third World (or really any world) the ability to have light in which to live and study at night, all from playing for 30 minutes.  Soccket is also being fitted with a phone charger as well, which is apparently coming in the next round of Kickstarter funding.

Soccket (and Uncharted Play, Inc) is the brain child of co-partners Jessica O. Matthews and Julia Silverman.  Talk about a cool story – from the Uncharted Play, Inc website on the founding:

In May of 2011, Jessica O. Matthews and Julia Silverman founded Uncharted Play—a new kind of social enterprise that would show the world that doing good and doing good business need not be mutually exclusive.

The Uncharted Play dream began in 2008 when Matthews and Silverman met during their junior year at Harvard College. Both studying to be social scientists with no experience in engineering, they nonetheless worked together on a class project to invent the SOCCKET— an energy harnessing soccer ball. Through this experience, both women realized that the world of play was truly uncharted territory when it came to tangibly addressing real issues facing the society. Though the future was uncertain, they knew that an enterprise grounded in sustainable, realistic solutions for happiness had an undeniable value.

After graduating from college, Matthews and Silverman set up shop in New York City and established an enthusiastic team to further develop the founders core values. The SOCCKET is constantly being reiterated to truly meet the needs of the end user, and development on several other fun and functional products has already begun.

From the Uncharted Play Kickstarter campaignUncharted Play, Inc is the company who invented Soccket:

The SOCCKET is a durable, energy-harnessing soccer ball. Using Uncharted Play’s patent pending technology, the pendulum-like mechanism inside the SOCCKET captures the kinetic energy generated during normal play, and stores it in the ball for later use as an off-grid power source. Just 30 minutes of play can power a simple LED lamp for 3 hours.

About one ounce heavier than a standard soccer ball, the SOCCKET is constructed from a custom water-resistant EVA foam that is both durable and soft to the touch. Designed and assembled in the USA, the SOCCKET is currently being piloted in select resource-poor areas of North America and South America.

Check this out!

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