"A Never Die Battery" from Steorn?

As I’ve mentioned here before, I have always been intrigued by the Irish company Steorn. Steorn’s CEO Shaun McCarthy has been hinting at news coming out from the company this year and and now there’s an interesting picture that was posted today by McCarthy on his Facebook page.

To me, it looks very much like a battery shaped object, but as is typical with McCarthy, he tends to put things out there with little explanation and we are often left to try and figure things out on our own. His caption for this picture is, “Hehe, what a great Friday it is!”

calorimeter1

I asked a couple of questions on Facebook:

Is that AA size?

“Nope – its no real kinda size, but it is still seriously dead cool – love Fridays!”

But it’s a battery, right?

“Yep it’s a never die battery”

So that’s about the extent of what we know so far. Although McCarthy is quite a joker, The Steorn logo on the bottom makes me think that this is not a prank post. I doubt that he would be messing around with the reputation of his company like that. I’ll be keeping an eye on this and see what more we can learn.

UPDATE: More Q & A from the Facebook chat:

Q: Shaun – a never die battery? Seriously?

Shaun McCarthy: Yep – never die, its a nice one!

Q: Is this a prototype? How far away from being able to buy one?

Shaun McCarthy: Just prototype – no idea when we will make it available, but for sure not this year

Q: Does the prototype shown use any of the Orbo tech principles, or is this something new?

Shaun McCarthy: It’s all Orbo Craig no chemicals just magnetic