Yes I know what these are. Basically just an electric hot knife. It's almost like a soldering iron that gets way hot and you touch it to the bowl instead of using a lighter and sucking the gas in. They work really well I have used one myself. The only downside is they are usually not battery operated so they are not mobile. Also if you touch it to anything gooey like hash sometimes it gets stuck on the end. Most the time it makes the bud com-bust into smoke but I guess you could vaporize the bud if you had a ceramic lighter that burned at that precise temperature.