“Your cellphone doesn’t just make phone calls, why should our benches just be seats?” This is a statement made by Boston’s Mayor, Martin J. Walsh, when he unveiled that the city would soon start seeing “smart” benches making its rounds. This new initiative is called Soofas and basically what they do is that they help charge your smartphone while providing you with a place to sit as well. Now we’ve seen charging efforts introduced in various cities around the US. For example over in New York City, AT&T introduced solar-powered street charging stations, so we guess Soofas would be the city of Boston’s response to that. The benches will feature solar panels which will be used to collect energy, energy which users can then use to charge their mobile devices with.
