Wireless energy - what's special

First, what was discovered:

Marin Soljacic, a Croatian physicist working at MIT (with his team) discovered how to transfer energy wirelessly at room lenghts (two meters or about six feet for now).

Second, why is everyone confused:

• Before this energy was already transferred wirelessly

• Examples include radio waves, Sun transferred energy wirelessly to Earth using electromagnetic waves, energy is wireleslly transferred in transformers between coils etc.

So, what's special is:

• Until now, only tiny, tiny amounts could be transferred (you still have to plug in your TV, in spite of radio waves)
• Two meters or six feet is a distance at which it all starts to make sense and before there was a huge loss at those distances (it makes sense because you can cover your mobile phone, fan, TV, whatever inside that distance)
• Efficiency is 40% which is huge (i.e. 60% of radiated energy is lost) because before this, only tiny, tiny amounts of energy were left preserved and everything else was lost
• This 40% has a great potential to become much higher

There you have it, a great invention! ;) Still room for development though, so don't throw away the wires yet!