Some time ago I wrote about this issue many of us unfortunately already faced once or regularly face when traveling by plane: the scarce number of electric plugs in airports.

As you might imagine, most airports were built long before we were all carrying around all kinds of electronic devices, and as such, finding a place to charge them up can turn today into a real challenge. I expect many of us have snooped around for the outlets the airport cleaners use or that operate vending machines (that’s bad!) so we can plug in and charge up our laptop or cellphone during a stopover. Some of us may eventually have ended-up charging their device in the bathroom. But that’s another story I guess…

So, unless airports management decide to undertake a costly reorganization of their infrastructure or implement a wireless power solution – which won’t be made available tomorrow to the many – , the problem may last some time.

The question is, “shall we cry on our cruel fate and accept that?”. I think we shall not!

Designer Ryan Klinger has identified this big flaw and has created the Empower Kinetic Rocking Chair which harnesses your body movements to provide power for your devices. A small box under the seat stores the generated power in a battery, which can then transfer into your devices using either a regular plug or USB. LED indicators on the box tell you how much of a charge the battery is holding.
So simple you wonder why nobody came up with this idea earlier.

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The Empower Kinetic Rocking Chair is a finalist in this year’s Greener Gadgets Design Competition. Let’s hope it will win and start blooming everywhere we need to plug.

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Greener Gadgets Design Competition, via Inhabitat.com

The iLuv Micro USB Car adapter turns your car’s cigarette outlet into a universal USB charger, so you don’t have to buy specialized car chargers for all of your USB-chargeable gear.

The device is tiny (1.7-inches long), so once plugged in only a small portion of the gadget will stick out from your dash, so it shouldn’t be much of an eyesore. Then, rather than buying car chargers for your cellphone, your iPod, your camera, or whatever else you’ve got that can already charge via USB, you can just plug your cheap USB charging cable into the USB car adapter and call it good.

The gadget will set you back $15, so it’s probably just as cheap (if not cheaper) than dedicated chargers. It’s currently not available from the iLuv store, but it’s supposed to be sometime in September, meaning it should be available sometime in the next week.

But Vienna has at least free wifi (4 free wifi access vs none in Paris)…We have the plugs, you got the wifi