Not to downplay the accomplishment but I was fairly surprised that the article represented the idea as entirely unique without ever actually mentioning Tesla.
"WiTricity is rooted in such well-known laws of physics that it makes one wonder why no one thought of it before."
The concept of sending electricity wirelessly has been imagined, but nobody had come up with a decent way to avoid the losses except by using an actively controlled beam method. It's pretty darned innovative.
This is a non-radiative method: in the absence of a receiving device with a correctly tuned inductance, in the field surrounding the emitter there will be no, or hardly any E x B field. In other words, there would be no, or hardly any energy leaving the emitter.
Most interestingly, the method they describe can be used in a unidirectional manner, and the power supplied would fall off much less quickly than 1/r^2. One could even put a switch on the receiving circuit. When the circuit is broken, the total energy expended by the emitter would zip down to zero passively, without any control required. In fact, it's a fairly straightforward game to construct one of these on one's own. Too bad I didn't think of it ;-)
"WiTricity is rooted in such well-known laws of physics that it makes one wonder why no one thought of it before."