[TheEnd187]

How many people do you have working on this Orbo technology right now?

Head-count in the company is 21 full time staff and we would have anywhere between probably 5 and 15 people working on the contract at any one time and they would be in partner organizations or direct contracts to the company. It's very substantial for a very little company's operations.

You guys are operating strictly on VC right now? Or what are your other means of income?

Since we went public last August we stopped all works with the forensic and expert witnessing simply because we would not be credible, we'd be too easily -- we're presenting obviously to the prosecution. It would be too easy to be discredited with a claim like this publicly in the eyes of the court. So it's currently no revenues at all and we will attempt to make no revenues until the technology is validated.

How are you paying your employees for the time being? Is this from cash reserves?

We're operating via private investment, which we took through this all last year.

So that's the company, let's talk a little bit more about the technology that you guys have supposedly developed here. Laws of thermodynamics basically state that you can't achieve 100% efficiency in any apparatus and that there are always transfers of heat and energy in any system. But obviously you guys are claiming 100%+ efficiency. Do you have a statistic or number of what you estimate the energy efficiency level of your machine is? Is it 110% or 150%?

It varies from configuration to configuration. I think the largest efficiency that we would have physically measured would be about 485%. These numbers can be misleading. For example we might be getting 485% per joule, which means were getting 4.85 J out, but there could be a configuration that's could be delivering 130% efficiency yet delivering 10 joules. So, the technology itself is pretty well researched in terms of punch line efficiency it's 485%, but that wouldn't be the optimum output of the system. Obviously we're more focused on direct power output of a device than the punchline numbers. 485 to 1 is 4.85, but we could easily say, 10 to 12 joules off of a system is going to have a lower punch line efficiency. And power output is obviously the key factor, energy output is obviously the key factor.

So you guys have been trying to bring the scientific community into the fold. Obviously kicked off by the full page ad in The Economist and there's the open invitation...

[laughs] It was a brave decision.

Well, it definitively opened you guys to a lot of criticism. My publication is definitely not excepted from that. I think it's one of those claims to where you're just going to have to put up with the lumps.

We knew it. Again, the only way I can describe this is that we didn't set out to do this. We stumbled upon it. I wouldn't believe a word of it if I wasn't working here and so in deciding the best route for the company was to go and do this, what they call a slap in the face of science. We had no illusions at all of how it looked or how it would be conceived, what we would be called and so on. But at the end of the day we have to face that, but it's a relatively easy thing to face when you know what you have is real because, you realize there is an end to it and we can get on with the business of business.

I think part of the reason why people didn't and don't take it seriously is partly because there is no [credible] university affiliated with the research. The fact that you guys were not out to actually invent this new science and that there was no big name physicist behind it at the time is, I think, what is most damaging to your credibility.

To be fair, I don't think of there's an awful lot of what we could have done with respect to credibility. But the other thing to recognize in terms of the August thing [running the ad in The Economist] is that we achieved our objective, and our objective was to get qualified scientists engaged. As much as we get an awful lot of criticism, and obviously the event the last couple of weeks haven't helped, the bottom line for us is that process has started and that process will end with very qualified people doing the analysis. So were quite happy to sit here -- happy is the wrong word -- but we're quite willing to sit here and take the smirks or the laughs or the cries of fraud and so on because August was a big victory for us because our biggest concern in doing all of this, is, well, what if no scientist responds? That would have been a disaster for us. The fact that we got ridiculed, that was going to happen anyway.

Since this open invitation to invite scientists to review the technology under their own means and their own circumstances, that they see fit--

We're obviously covering all of their direct costs and paying them a nominal fee to do it. But they're deciding the details of the process. It is and will be seen to be at the end of it, a fair process. We're not paying them massive consulting fees, which is one of the concerns that we had. We tried to structure it in such a way that when the results arrive, and obviously we are very confident in what the results are going to be, that people could look at the process and say, it was a fair process. Although we're obviously keeping it pretty non-disclosed, but in the end of it when these guys report, people will be able to see how much they were paid, the level of testing, and where they've gone through. And so they can see that the report, whatever it says, was fair.

I understand that some 5,000 scientists applied to be a part of this.

No, we had 5,000 total applicants. It was an online thing. So when you rule out the Bart Simpsons who had applied we had 1,000 qualified people, of which about 500 who would be qualified scientists, and 500 qualified engineers.

And so how many people have actually accepted this challenge and are currently working on this?

We've signed contracts with 22 of them. There is a copy of the contract on the website, and 22 of them are involved in an analysis of the technology.

Do you know when they are expecting to publish their results? Because I know that was one of the requirements as well, that they publish once they've made their conclusions about it.

The straight answer to it is no. We're not in control of the process. All we can do is facilitate it. So, while I think a lot of people will say, well this should easy, it actually isn't a simple process and also it's not a simple process on the technical level. There are a lot of energies that need to be looked at. It's also such a big claim that these guys need to be 100% sure about what they do, whether they prove us right or wrong. It's a thorough of process, it's a slow process, and we haven't set a time limit on it, and neither do we know how long it's going to take.

So, I'd like to talk about the demo.

I wouldn't. [laughs]

Yeah. Well you knew this was coming. [laughs]

[laughs]. I've done nothing but talk about it, but go on...

I'd like to know why you think it failed -- and not the reasons that you've already given. We've definitively heard that it was ball bearings, or it was mechanical failure, it was the heat from the lights. We heard all that. We know. I want to know why you think it failed, in the sense that why did the other two backups that you guys brought not work? Or why were you not able to relocate the demo to another location that didn't have these issues? Or why was it not thoroughly tested enough, and so on...

I'm not going to tell you anything that if you have read some of this stuff that you haven't heard. The simple fact of the matter, just to state, is that this is not production technology and so you know anybody who works in the prototype world will understand that there are always issues. But with respects to what happened, we brought three systems to us from Dublin, three component systems, we don't move them in their operational way, we stripped them down. They are very, very simple and there is not huge configuration to them, but they are very sensitive configurations because there are lots of magnetic loads and so on. We got one of the systems working on the Tuesday night which was the Tuesday before we were going live on Wednesday evening. We started to install that in the demo case and began to notice problems. It wasn't working. That being the prime problem.

We then took the classic engineering process of stripping it down and testing, testing, testing, and what we found was that in that prototype was that the bearings, while not visibly damaged but the friction had more than quadrupled in them, which would have been a killer in a this type of system that we were planning to show. And under pressure we just kept plugging in all the spare bearings we had. Now, these are not standard bearings you might buy from your local hardware store. These are very, very low friction bearings used in the watch industry. Our analysis of what happened is that the heat allowed play in the system that damaged the bearings to the point where the extra friction in the bearings didn't allow the technology to happen. Whether people believe that or don't believe it, there isn't a lot that I can say other then that's what happened.

sorry for splitting but posts are limited to 10000 chars