Untangling Life

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 nightstand 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/Aramark executive-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 Moorestown father of four.

On just such a crawl in March 2012, Rosenblum recently recalled, as he finished his nightly in-bed email checks and was on his hands and knees trying to plug his BlackBerry into a power strip wedged between the bed and the nightstand, 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?' "

What happened after that was a great deal of sketching, research, and patent applications resulting in the Voltower, believed to be the only height-adjustable power strip.

Currently, just five exist. Rosenblum's company, Things Are Cookin' L.L.C., doing business as Abov Power Solutions, launched a 60-day campaign on Kickstarter (https://goo.gl/fknMw4) Feb. 4 to raise $188,888 to get more Voltowers manufactured and to market.

Of the campaign's odd goal, he said: If you lay the eights on their side, "you have five infinity symbols in a row."

During a March 9 interview, Rosenblum conceded that "we are probably not going to hit our goal." He took the blame, saying he did not do enough prelaunch work "to build social capital." About $37,000 has been raised.

Short of a generous infusion of pledges by the April 3 deadline, 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 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.

Weiman, an engineer by training, had spent part of the previous weekend cutting up his nightstand to fashion it into a charging station to accommodate multiple phones, tablets and battery backups, he said.

"Immediately 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," specifically the "ability to rapidly charge them or improve battery life," Massam said.

As Rosenblum works out his capital needs, what he has going for him is patents on both manual and motorized versions of Voltower's height-

adjustment capability, Massam said. For now, the focus is on the manual model.

Meanwhile, Rosenblum - who left a vice president's post in strategy and planning for Aramark in February 2013 - has lined up some practical financial support from a biased source, his mother, Susan.

"My mom was happy to help us realize this crazy dream of ours," said a grateful son.

dmastrull@phillynews.com

215-854-2466@dmastrull