This guest post is by Priceonomics investor and partner at Andreessen Horowitz Jeff Jordan. He’s helping us kick off an occasional series on our blog called “Products I Love.” If you’d like to write on the Priceonomics blog about an interesting product that you love, contact us.
Products I Love: The AViiQ Portable Charging Station by Jeff Jordan
Work travel can be quite laborious, particularly when you’re doing multiple cities back-to-back. You find yourselves constantly checking in to and out of hotel rooms. The toughest work travel I’ve ever done was during the OpenTable IPO and secondary financings. We found ourselves doing a different city virtually every day, with little rhyme nor reason with respect to geographic logic. I think we did four separate one night stays in New York over the course of an eight day IPO road show.
Increasingly I find myself traveling with more and more gadgets. I invariably have a couple phones, as my iPhone can rarely hold a charge for a full day of work. I also have a computer, usually my iPad, and typically my iPod. What I also found myself hauling were a number of chords to recharge the various devices. Without management these chords would turn themselves into a nest in my briefcase, inter-locking in ways that sometimes almost defied separation. The most effective management device I found through trial and error was a combination of baggies and those little metal bag ties, but this still took tons of management to unpack them each night and re-pack them in the morning.
Then my favorite e-commerce site, Fab.com, highlighted the AViiQ Portable Charging Station (full disclosure, Fab.com is a portfolio company). It facilitates easy chord organization and management. When you get to your hotel room at night, you simply unzip the station, plug one plug into the electric socket, and attach your various devices into their respective chords. When you’re packing up in the morning, you simply do it in reverse. And the chords stay organized inside the station while in your briefcase. The aggravation of carrying and charging multiple devices simply disappeared.
The AviiQ out in the wild charging devices and then zipped up. Image: MacStories.
It’s a bit low tech, but the AViiQ makes work travel significantly less painful.
Where to buy: Fab.com for $64.
Editor’s note: Thanks to Jeff for contributing! Would you like to write about a product you love on the Priceonomics blog? Drop us a note.