OK, so my prediction of Steorn revealing itself as a documentary film project on February 4th did not come true.

Instead the company, which claims it invented a method of producing free energy from magnets, posted a new video featuring Steorn’s CEO Sean Mccarthy and three engineers who, supposedly, witnessed the “effect” in Steorn’s labs and where fascinated by it. The engineers in the video also make statements that the deem the testing methods of Steorn as valid and solid.

Steorn also made other announcements, namely that they will now sell test equipment and that they will invite 300 engineers to start participating some sort of forum or development club that that is supposed to expand the technology, in preparation for commercialization later in 2009,

What annoyed me most about the video was:

• Again, nothing working was demoed.
• There was no mention of the 12 person Jury and the validation process that was supposed to be done (which was a big deal for Steorn when it started this whole saga)

When, in August 2006, I asked Sean (during a public online chat) about the technology and its scalability and cost for, say, powering mobile phones, his answer came across as very confident, saying that the cost of manufacturing such a powering device based on his technology, would be close to the cost of current battery technology. This answer made it seem, to me at least, that the technology was already quite mature and just needed manufacturing partners.

More than two years have passed since that answer, and yet the technology seems to be more an an “effect” in a lab that still needs to be developed into something usable, if we are to believe Steorn.

Now I know that research and development take time. The idea of human flight, for example, was ancient and took a long, long time to become a reality. But all this ambiguity and delay of showing something real is pushing me more towards the skeptics side.

Finally, Steorn is planning to start a world tour this month, where Sean will talk in universities. Curiously, the tour starts in the oil-rich Middle Eastern Gulf States of Qatar UAE, Saudi Arabia and Bahran. Wow.. He’s going to talk to the oil economies about nothing less than Fire 2.0: a way to make every other energy source obsolete, including, obviously, oil.

Some commenters on the Steorn forums and elsewhere have already thrown accusations at Steorn of wanting to go and scam “rich Oil Sheikhs” into paying them money in the form of investments.

Given the current global economic crisis/resession the Gulf indeed is one of the places where global investors are flocking to to try to get money. The Gulf is not exactly known for its great mechanical engineering schools and innovations. Thus, the timing and place of these Steorn talks makes me feel uneasy.

Both the gadget blog Engadget as well as ZDNet have commented on the latest Steorn developments, with a rather negative tone.