A new Kickstarter campaign wants to put the power of charge in the palm of your hand.
The Mipwr Dynamo is an iPhone case with two functions: It acts as both a protective shield and a charger for your phone — with no plugging in required.
When your phone's battery begins to drain, you can easily pop out the concealed hand crank from the side of the case and begin to power it back up. As you crank the lever, a charge is generated.
The Mipwr Dynamo works through electromagnetic induction, which is the process of harnessing electricity using a magnetic field. A magnet inside the case spins as you crank the handle, creating energy that is transferred into voltage to juice up your phone's battery.
Using electromagnetic induction is not a new concept. In fact, it's widely used in all kinds of products today, from rice cookers to electric toothbrushes.
The team behind the case told Mashable: “The magnet is generally encapsulated with coils of wires to transfer this [electricity] to a battery storage device.”
According to the team, a minute of pumping will generate about 30 seconds of talk time.
In the event you exhaust both the cellphone battery and Mipwr's backup battery (that will give you two extra hours of talk time) - you can pump the push lever to produce 30 seconds of talk/text for one minute of pumping. These efforts will create enough battery power to make a distress call or text at a moment's notice.
Although this might seem like a lot of work for little reward, the implications are powerful. Consider what happened when Superstorm Sandy tore through the Northeast.

With limited power-source options, that one-minute effort doesn't seem like such a big deal.
The team said the finished product will also include three LED lights at the bottom of the case to indicate battery life.
The current Mipwr Dynamo prototype is for an iPhone 4/4S, but the designs for an iPhone 5 are already completed, and the team said that version will be available as well if the Kickstarter campaign is successful.
With a little less than a month to go, the campaign still has a long way to go to meet its $78,000 goal.
Image: Mipwr