Pitching a solution to tangled device cords

PHILADELPHIA — Dean Rosenblum wants a chance to improve things in your bedroom. Cord clutter, that is.

That's the tangle of cords snaking between your trove of electronic devices — mobile phones, tablet, Kindle, laptop, lamps — and the power strip you have them plugged into.

The likelihood is that strip sits where Rosenblum's did — on the floor between your night stand and bed. Or between the couch and the living room wall, or under a chair.

Such positioning requires another ugliness that Rosenblum, a former chef-turned-inventor is out to eradicate: cord crawl.

"We don't even realize how much time we spend crawling around trying to plug things in," said Rosenblum, 49, a Philadelphia-area father of four.

On just such a crawl in March 2012, Rosenblum recently recalled, as he finished his nightly in-bed e-mail checks and was on his hands and knees trying to plug his BlackBerry into a power strip wedged between the bed and the night stand, the question occurred to him:

"How is there not a power strip that comes up when you need it and can push down out of the way?' "

Currently, just five exist. Rosenblum's company, Things Are Cookin' LLC, doing business as Abov Power Solutions, launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise $188,888 to get more Voltowers to market.

Should the campaign fall short, Rosenblum is ready with Plan B: finding some private investors willing to put up $300,000 to $350,000. That would enable the first Voltowers to get to market within six to nine months, priced at $129, he said. He has been immersing himself in the region's entrepreneur community for help, confident that the Voltower would be a sales hit.

"This is easily a $50 million-to-$200 million business in five years," said Rosenblum, who sees a vast market — from homes and college dormitories, to hotels and long-term care facilities.

Height-adjustable from 25 to 36 inches (in the range of the tops of most pieces of furniture that it is designed to stand behind or beside), the Voltower has plug-in capacity for 10 devices. It has six standard electrical outlets and four fast-charge USB ports, contained in a diamond-shaped tower with solid-aluminum casing and surge protection. It connects to a 10-by-10-inch base, which offers a variety of routing slots for positioning of the Voltower's 8-foot cord. (With that length, the aim was to eliminate any need for extension cords, Rosenblum said.)

Andrew Weiman, managing partner at Bresslergroup, a design and engineering firm in Philadelphia, said he could not believe the "funny timing" when Rosenblum showed up on a Monday with a PowerPoint presentation about his Voltower idea, looking to possibly hire the company to design the prototype.

"I knew he had a product that met a need," Weiman said.

And those USB ports help address a big concern of electronics users, said Daniel Massam, industrial-design manager at Bresslergroup, whose clients have included tool companies Black & Decker and DeWalt, wireless-infrastructure supplier Ventev, and the creator of an airbrush makeup system, Temptu. "Battery life is the key concern among consumer electronics," Massam said.