It’s been a while since Steorn has done anything new in the public arena, but a new publicly accessible forum has been launched by the company — the SKDB Lite.  As the title suggests, this forum provided some of the features of the fee-based SKDB, which is the development community for Orbo technology. The SKDB Lite provides a forum for discussion as well as many e-learning modules that deal with physics, magnetism and electricity, an understand of which is fundamental to understand Orbo.

The SKDB Lite is available for free to anyone who would like to sign up. My understanding is that unlike Steorn’s previous public forum (which is now defunct) the SKDB Lite will be monitored on a 24/7 basis, so it is unlikely to be as wild and wacky as the public forum was at times.

People can register for the SKDB Lite here.

Steorn has announced that from today, April 1, the SKDB, its online develpment community, is open. Below is the press release announcing this.

SKDB LAUNCH

Dublin, Ireland, 1st April 2010.

Following the success of its recent live demonstrations of Orbo technology at the Waterways Visitor Centre in Dublin, Steorn is delighted to announce that its online development community will open for membership on 1st April 2010.

Orbo is a new technology from Steorn that provides free, clean and constant energy at the point of use. Orbo is controversial – it is an “over-unity” technology, meaning that it produces more energy than it consumes.

The Steorn Knowledge Development Base (SKDB), as the online community is known, is a collaborative environment designed to share, explain, employ and expand the science, engineering and intellectual property comprising Orbo technology. In short, it is ground zero for the Orbo revolution.

The SKDB will be the sole medium for the dissemination of Orbo technology and its future enhancements. All developments and improvements to Orbo technology will be shared amongst the members of the SKDB for further research and development.

The main focus of the SKDB at launch will be on the solid state electromagnetic configuration of Orbo, the development of which Steorn has recently completed.

Access to the SKDB will be granted via the SKDB Developer License, which will be available online to developers, individual enthusiasts, researchers and all other interested parties as of 1st April 2010. The Developer License and SKDB membership are renewable on an annual basis, subject to interested parties confirming their acceptance of the License and Terms of Service and payment of license and membership fees.

It’s been a while since we’ve seen much indication on Steorn’s Web Site of when the SKDB was opening up to the public so people could start learning about Orbo technology and developing Orbo products. This was originally slated to become available to subscribers on February 1st, but since then the date has been postponed more than once.

Today a new page has been put up on Steorn’s site: https://kdb.steorn.com/registration

An announcement on the page reads, “This week the SKDB is open only to those private and commercial developers in possession of a personal invitation from Steorn. Please do not attempt to register if you do not have a personal invitation , as you will be unable to access the SKDB.”

Apparently then, some people have received special invitations to join the SKDB. There’s no announcement yet regarding when the general public will be able to sign up, but at least we have some action!

Since the end of Steorn’s public demonstration in Dublin last month there has not been too much in the way of news from Steorn.

They announced at the last live experiment that during the month of February independent testers would be able to come to the Waterways Centre and test Orbo devices for themselves. Apparently that is what is going on at the moment.

Last week Steorn issued a press release which stated:

On 30th January 2010 Steorn announced that it would make Orbo technology available for testing at the Waterways Visitor Centre.

Since then Steorn has been hosting third-party testing and finalising calorimetry tests.  This third-party testing will continue until the end of February.

Steorn will make the results of the calorimetry tests available alongside other test data in the coming weeks. These results will be pivotal to a widespread uptake of Developer (and ultimately, Commercial) Licenses. Steorn will open the SKDB to the general engineering community after these test results have been released.

Developers wishing to come and test Orbo technology at the Waterways should make a booking at http://www.steorn.com/demo/bookings/

The opening of the SKDB to developer has been delayed then until the release of independent testing results. Until then I am expecting that public information from Steorn will be limited.

Well, 2010 has arrived and as promised, Steorn opened up to the public in the latter part of 2009. It seems that the December part of their public demonstration was largely a prelude to the January phase. Steorn has indicated a number of activities to look forward to this month – and perhaps there will be other surprises in store not yet made public.

In February, Steorn’s SKDB will be open to developers – and this is where Steorn intends for most of the technological progress involving Orbo to take place. Actually the SKDB has been in operation for a number of years now – there has been somewhat of a pilot group made up of people who took an early interest in Steorn and their technology.

One of the members of this group who goes by the handle CLaNZeR has posted a number of videos and pictures of projects he has been working on within the SKDB. It is clear that he has put in a substantial amount of work in exploring Steorn’s technology. His work can be viewed at his own website at http://www.orbo.org.uk/

As we watch Steorn’s public demonstration of Orbo unfold from Dublin (currently on a holiday hiatus) it seems clear that from Steorn’s point of view it is all leading up to one date: February 1st, 2010. That is the date that the Steorn Knowledge Development Base (SKDB) opens for business — and this is a crucial part of Steorn’s business plan. The SKDB is the “online learning and developing community for building and developing Orbo”.

To this point, Steorn has been recieving little, if any revenue from its Orbo technology. To fund their activites they have relied on investment capital and their expenses to to this date have to have been significant. They have a staff of around twenty people who have been conducting R&D for years, they have a sophisticated marketing operation and a substantial web presence which must have required lots of expensive technological investment.

On February 1st things change. To access the SKDB you have to pay a license fee and the cheapest license (Developer License) is €419.00. According to Steorn commercial licenses are going to be available in the 2nd quarter in 2010 but fees have not yet been disclosed. So finally Steorn hopes to start generating revenues.

Now an interesting question is this. What is going to be required to induce people to pay a license fee? This brings us back to the whole purpose of what is going on in Dublin. In this demonstration, Steorn’s task is to provide enough convincing evidence to support their free energy claims that people will be willing to sign up for the SKDB in significant numbers starting in February. If Steorn cannot do this than the effort will have failed from their perspective.

This makes the January phase of the demonstration crucial. While to date there has been quite a lot of interest in what has been on display, there are lots of questions and still much wariness and skepticism among many observers. Steorn has said “the fun starts in January” and have promised live validation and replication in 2010. It remains to be seen how effective that will be — but in order for Steorn to be successful they have to be more forthcoming about their technology to convince people in large numbers to start paying for entry into the SKDB.

One of the interesting things about Steorn, in addition to their free energy claim, is the way they say they are going to implement Orbo technology. You might think with a discovery as revolutionary as  they are claiming, they would manufacture and sell Orbo-powered products.

Steorn has repeatedly stated, however, that they are not going to be in the business of making products. They are a small research and development company, employing under thirty people and apparently do not have plans to expand into a manufacturing operation.

Steorn CEO Sean McCarthy has stated “We have brought this technology pretty much as far as we as a business will bring it. We’re not in the business of building mobile phones or batteries or car engines or any of that stuff; we’re in the business of licensing this to companies that do that”.

Steorn has set up the Steorn Knowledge Development Base (SKDB) for licensees to learn about Orbo technology and to collaborate with other developers. Steorn’s web site provides an overview of the SKDB. From the information on their site, there are going to be three levels of licences available: Non-Commercial, Commercial, and Enterprise. The Non-Commercial and Commercial licenses will be available to anyone, but it appears that the Enterprise license will be restricted to businesses in the Automotive, Transportation, Aerospace and Mobile Consumer Electronics sectors. The fee for these licenses in not provided; however, Sean stated recently that they would be “low-cost”.

If Orbo is what Steorn says it is, then tremendous opportunities await individuals and companies who wish to get involved in the development of free energy products. It would appear likely that this licensing strategy would allow for a speedy development and dissemination of Orbo-powered products into the marketplace. I would expect we would see an “Orbo rush” with people everywhere in all kinds of industries trying to find ways to adapt to the new technology.

And this is what Sean wants people to do. In the recent Q&A exchange I asked him what he would say to people eager to get involved with Orbo. He replied “I would say that launch is not far away, that access to Orbo will be low cost and readily available. And finally I would say never let anyone do your thinking for you – get involved!”