What is wrong with what Steorn is doing?

[Horatius]

If Steorn is scam, it's a new breed; brilliant presentation, real engineers and a blaze of publicity which cost real money (the Economist ad cost around £100K).

Steorn itself is a real company with a real office, real employees and a real trading history. They've told everyone to remain skeptical and assume that it doesn't work until the independent evaluations are in (although I do disagree with some aspects of how they've chosen these people - I'd like to know who they are, and what the criteria for choosing them was).

Are they a real company though? I haven't been able to find anything else they have done. No patents, no patent applications, and no other web presence, related to anything other than the free energy stuff. The only suggestions I've seen that they've ever done anything else comes from Steorn.

Have I missed something? Were they known in the local industry?

 

[Z]

Steorn was apparently an e-commerce securities company from 2000-2004, when they mysteriously dropped off the radar, to suddenly resurface last year with the Economist ad, and this year filing returns for the last two years.

My opinion: some person or persons of unscrupulous nature took over the collapsed dot-com Steorn, and is using its identity to front their fake technology scam. OR, this is still the same Steorn which failed miserably in the e-commerce trade, and is taking a stab at the free energy scam as a pyramid scheme to try to recover.

 

[Horatius]

Steorn was apparently an e-commerce securities company from 2000-2004, when they mysteriously dropped off the radar, to suddenly resurface last year with the Economist ad, and this year filing returns for the last two years.

That's the thing - I've seen such things quoted before, but never with any links to any evidence that it's true, or even testimony from people that they'd ever even heard of them before this whole affair.

My opinion: some person or persons of unscrupulous nature took over the collapsed dot-com Steorn, and is using its identity to front their fake technology scam. OR, this is still the same Steorn which failed miserably in the e-commerce trade, and is taking a stab at the free energy scam as a pyramid scheme to try to recover.

I hadn't considerd the "takeover" theory before, but it could explain a lot. Is there anywhere that such a company would be registered, with details of owners/officers? From what I understand, they're not a publicly traded corporation, so I'm not sure what rules would apply to them.

It would be nice to see some verifiable info from a third party.

 

[BillyJoe]

Even the pin hole is starting to close over.

 

[Z]

That's the thing - I've seen such things quoted before, but never with any links to any evidence that it's true, or even testimony from people that they'd ever even heard of them before this whole affair.



I hadn't considerd the "takeover" theory before, but it could explain a lot. Is there anywhere that such a company would be registered, with details of owners/officers? From what I understand, they're not a publicly traded corporation, so I'm not sure what rules would apply to them.

It would be nice to see some verifiable info from a third party.

I'm not sure... they're an Irish company, so I suppose you'd have to look for whatever bodies govern Irish business. Wikipedia mentions some agencies, but I'm not familiar with them - just Wiki for Steorn, you'll find the references.

I'd love to see some third-party verification, too.

It doesn't help that Sean whatsisname shares a name with various comedians and pranksters around the English-speaking world...

 

[Snadert]

Steorn filed a patent actually, though it is not considered the core of their free energy device. It is a kind of magnetic alternator. See the Peswiki website for documents and drawings.

 

[matt-r]

I hadn't considerd the "takeover" theory before, but it could explain a lot. Is there anywhere that such a company would be registered, with details of owners/officers? From what I understand, they're not a publicly traded corporation, so I'm not sure what rules would apply to them.

I'm an English lawyer so I wasn't sure what you could get for Irish companies. However, having had a look at the Irish Companies House (which keeps details of all companies incorporated in Ireland) it seems to me that you can get all of the same documents that you can for English companies - for a small fee per document.

The free info tells us that this company was incorporated in 2000, but not much more.

The Irish Companies House website is http://www.cro.ie
If you click on the "Company search" button you'll be able to search for Steorn.

If you're interested in pursuing their past business activities, try downloading their accounts for each year. They should give you some idea of what they've been doing.

Matt

 

[tmackean]

I believe others have scrutinised the company documents, and the company has existed since founded without a buyout of any kind. There are prior investments, too, much of which Steorn may have burnt through.

As far as I can tell, the current management are the founders. I don't think they have a manufactured history. I'd need to scrutinise their accounts to see if they're actually a successful company (I'm a director of a small company myself).

This doesn't actually add much in the way of provenance to their current claims, though. You can't rule out a scam, art project or mistake.

Here's one possibility, for instance; I know what happens when firms take VC investment. You commit to your business plan to achieve X milestones by Y date. Sometime you tell your investors you'll expand to X size and hire Y people. Then you HAVE to do it to keep the money flowing. I've got personal experience of companies that implode under these pressures and end up moving office and making the hires regardless of whether they have the revenues to support the expansion. The appearance of success becomes more important than actual succes. Of course, that's very short term thinking.

Steorn undoubtedly have shareholder pressure. Is is possible that they discovered an effect they couldn't explain, showed it to their already-worried investors, grabbed the latest batch of monies and now - even though their effect is just a physics curiousity and not the reinvention of science? Then they're committed to pursuing the appearance of development; the PR, the evaluative process, the developer forums, etc.

Failing firms do this all the time. That would still be a scam, but one that was more about conning existing investors out of the remainder of their cash rather than attracting new ones.

Sadly, it's still more likely than OU energy.

 

[Horatius]

The free info tells us that this company was incorporated in 2000, but not much more.

The Irish Companies House website is http://www.cro.ie
If you click on the "Company search" button you'll be able to search for Steorn.

If you're interested in pursuing their past business activities, try downloading their accounts for each year. They should give you some idea of what they've been doing.

Matt

I found all that after my last post. I'm mostly interested in seeing that they did exist for a few years prior to all this nonsense. I'm not interested enough to actually pay to get the details, though As long as the info is there, and available from a third party.

So now we're back to trying to figure out how and/or why they went to the dark side. Honestly deluded, or knowing fraud? Oh, okay, and, maybe, re-written all the laws of physics.....

Of course, if you look at the details of their contract with the "jurors", their desire to absolutely control every facet of this process does not fill me with confidence in their honesty.

 

[Grimoire]

Of course, if you look at the details of their contract with the "jurors", their desire to absolutely control every facet of this process does not fill me with confidence in their honesty.

I would be cautious about that kind of thinking. Many companies are very protective about their intellectual property, to the point of creating insanely restrictive NDA. Sometimes lawyers go overboard in that respect.

Just recently, we talked to a software company about using their SDK. They require us to sign an NDA before we even are allowed to look at the APIs. Not only that, but if we look at the APIs, and decide to not go with them, we are not allowed to build a similar product. Needless to say, we haven't signed it yet. After all, if their product doesn't do what we need, we have to reserve the right to build it ourselves.

 

[Horatius]

I would be cautious about that kind of thinking. Many companies are very protective about their intellectual property, to the point of creating insanely restrictive NDA. Sometimes lawyers go overboard in that respect.

Just recently, we talked to a software company about using their SDK. They require us to sign an NDA before we even are allowed to look at the APIs. Not only that, but if we look at the APIs, and decide to not go with them, we are not allowed to build a similar product. Needless to say, we haven't signed it yet. After all, if their product doesn't do what we need, we have to reserve the right to build it ourselves.

That's true of regular companies undertaking regular business arangements - if you were to rip them off, they'd need some means of making you pay.

But these guys have been trumpeting about how they really want "independent" confirmation of their claims, and saying how all the results will be publically available, but then they turn around and put a very restrictive gag on the very people who are in charge of doing the confirmation.

If they want us to trust the jurors, and to not suspect that Steorn is manipulating the results, they should allow the jurors to publish what they want, when and where they want. Pehaps with a stipulation that such publication not include enough details to reveal the "secret" of the device, but with the weakest possible such restrictions. Instead, they've barred them from any sort of publication at all - the most restrictive rules they could have had, short of brain surgery Again, not a protocol designed to instill confidence in their process.

 

[huw12345]

My take on the problem that Steorn has is as follows:

They've stumbled across some really wierd phenomenon involving a machine that appears to create energy through some new configuration of static and dynamic magnets (using materials with very high magnetic inductance). They want to protect their intellectual property but they honestly cannot work out why their machine works how it does so they aren't clear exactly what they need to patent in order to protect themselves.

So they engage a bunch of scientists under an NDA in order to figure out what's going on.

Now I know that we've come across this kind of thing 1000s of times before, but there are some people whose scientific opinion I trust and who are quite close to the centre of this thing, who appear to at least have open minds about it.

In the meantime there is a small group of guys that have Steorn's help to replicate the device, who are going to apply for the JREF prize. I'm interested to see if they will succeed...

I'm waiting to see what will happen.

[
Note that I don't believe it.

I really don't.

No, honestly, I don't...


but then again... Perhaps they've got something...
Not creation of energy, of course, but something.
]

 

[Horatius]

My take on the problem that Steorn has is as follows:

They've stumbled across some really wierd phenomenon involving a machine that appears to create energy through some new configuration of static and dynamic magnets (using materials with very high magnetic inductance). They want to protect their intellectual property but they honestly cannot work out why their machine works how it does so they aren't clear exactly what they need to patent in order to protect themselves.

So they engage a bunch of scientists under an NDA in order to figure out what's going on.

The problem with this idea is, it's well established in Patent Law that you don't have to know why it works in order to get a Patent.

So long as you can describe the structure of the device well enough that a skilled workman can reproduce it, and so long as it actually functions, you can get a Patent. Any theories you might advance as to why it works are secondary to being able to reproduce the machine. Even if your theory is later shown to be entirely incorrect, the Patent will stand, so long as the device works. This was established in Canada in part as a result of a Patent to a new type of adhesive, where the theory of how it worked was shown to be wrong, so this applies to more than just free energy devices.

So even if you don't know how the thing works, or if the effect is a result of just one part of the device, rather than the whole arrangement, you can still get protection. Then, use your billions in profits to fund more research, to solve these questions, and perhaps produce new versions of the device, which might also be patentable. That's how real inventors do things.

It's the "device works" part that always screws things up!

 

[BillyJoe]

Note that I don't believe it.

I really don't.

No, honestly, I don't...


but then again... Perhaps they've got something...
Not creation of energy, of course, but something.

Diagnosis: surgically treated epilepsy.

http://www.indiana.edu/~pietsch/split-brain.html

 

[Snadert]

In the Netherlands, we had a few years ago the 'Jan Sloot mystery'. Jan Sloot was an inventor who claimed AND showed he could compress a normal 2-hour fullscreen movie onto a 16 Kbit chipcard. He had a device coupled to a laptop which read the contents of the chipcard and played them on screen, instantly. Roel Pieper, an ICT guru, once CEO of Compaq was very interested and took Sloot on a demo tour to all his ICT friends with Compaq, HP, Oracle etc. All their tech staff was shown how fast the device worked. Sloot refused to say how he did it, but it is obvious that it was not digital compression. Pieper founded a multimillion dollar company to license the technology to the world. Unfortunately, Sloot died of a heart attack the day after he signed the contract. Though his invention was patented, the description in the patent itself was not sufficient to reproduce the algorithm. I see striking simularities with Steorn.

 

[BillyJoe]

You're saying someone's gonna die for this?

 

[CFLarsen]

In the Netherlands, we had a few years ago the 'Jan Sloot mystery'. Jan Sloot was an inventor who claimed AND showed he could compress a normal 2-hour fullscreen movie onto a 16 Kbit chipcard. He had a device coupled to a laptop which read the contents of the chipcard and played them on screen, instantly. Roel Pieper, an ICT guru, once CEO of Compaq was very interested and took Sloot on a demo tour to all his ICT friends with Compaq, HP, Oracle etc. All their tech staff was shown how fast the device worked. Sloot refused to say how he did it, but it is obvious that it was not digital compression. Pieper founded a multimillion dollar company to license the technology to the world. Unfortunately, Sloot died of a heart attack the day after he signed the contract. Though his invention was patented, the description in the patent itself was not sufficient to reproduce the algorithm. I see striking simularities with Steorn.

Any movie, or was it one preselected by Sloot?

 

[Snadert]

Any movie, or was it one preselected by Sloot?

Any random movie, but also JPEG, sound, any type of data. Google 'Sloot Digital Coding System'. A Dutch journalist wrote a (bestselling) book about the whole affair and there have been lots of discussions since of the nature of Sloots invention. Although it branded 'Digital Coding', in my opinion it had nothing to do with datacompression like LZW or similar. Sloot was a (wellknown) former TV repairman and I think he found a kind of analogue signal compression. It is beyond any doubt that it actually worked as Sloot demoed it for years, but was very paranoid about releasing the secret. The latter gave ofcourse birth to the rumour that it was a hoax, similar to Steorn.

 

[Darat]

Any random movie, but also JPEG, sound, any type of data. Google 'Sloot Digital Coding System'. A Dutch journalist wrote a (bestselling) book about the whole affair and there have been lots of discussions since of the nature of Sloots invention. Although it branded 'Digital Coding', in my opinion it had nothing to do with datacompression like LZW or similar. Sloot was a (wellknown) former TV repairman and I think he found a kind of analogue signal compression.

OK so he died before he could himself release his technique but I can't really believe that he didn't have at the time of his death notes, documents, working hardware and so on. I mean if he was demoing it for years (and even that makes me wonder why if it worked) he must have had the software and/or hardware to make such demonstrations. From the info you've given it seems I have to say a tad suspect.

It is beyond any doubt that it actually worked as Sloot demoed it for years, but was very paranoid about releasing the secret. The latter gave ofcourse birth to the rumour that it was a hoax, similar to Steorn.

Well no at the best all we can say is no one spotted any hoax. IF since his death his hardware and software hasn't been found to work I would say that is evidence that it never worked the way he apparently claimed it did.

 

[Snadert]

Well, the day after his untimely death, his invention and all paperwork was stolen out of his house. Many people have doubted the role of Roel Pieper, in 1999 a Philips hotshot. Mysteries remain. But the info in the patent and the description of the device was insufficient to reproduce any working model. Sloot argued that he only needed a key of less than 1 Kilobyte to reproduce a 2 hour fullscreen movie. This key was fed to his algorithm and the algorithm produced the actual movie.

(actually he died exactly one (1) day before releasing his algorithm)