Steorn: New Orbo O-Cube Webinar (Update #2: Now a ‘Never-Die’ O-Phone?)

For those interested in Steorn’s Orbo-powered O-Cube, a second webinar has been announced which will be held on Wednesday, December 2, 2015.

UPDATE #2 (Nov 19, 2015)

Shaun McCarthy is often dropping hints on Facebook — which now seems to be Steorn’s platform of choice for publicity, and recently he started mentioning an ‘ophone’, without much explanation. Today he shared a FB post from Rachel Wallace, aka ‘Ogirl’, who is doing publicity for Steorn. She posted:

LOVING my ophone!! Hasn’t been charged once!!! And have charged my normal phone 3 times – UGHMAZING ‪#‎ophone‬ ‪#‎steorn‬ happy little ogirl

Steorn has been saying for years they want to use Orbo technology to make it possible to have a phone that never needs recharging, and maybe they are getting to that point now. I guess we’ll find out more on the Dec 2 webinar.

UPDATE #1 (Nov 18, 2015) Here’s a photo posted on Facebook by Shaun McCarthy — it looks like they are getting the O-Cubes ready for assembly ahead of taking orders (they are supposed to be ready for sale in December):

ocubeparts

UPDATE: Here’s a new promo video for the upcoming webinar from the Orbo Facebook page.

https://www.facebook.com/thebatteryisdead/

[fbvideo link=”https://www.facebook.com/thebatteryisdead/videos/10153350658422672/” width=”640″ height=”480″ onlyvideo=”1″]

The announcement on the Orbo Facebook page states:

The O-Cube webinar II: The second O-Cube webinar will take place on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2015. The webinar will include user testimonials, an overview of some products in development and detail on how to purchase the O-cube.

The first Webinar on October 28th generated some interest, and quite a bit of sticker shock when Steorn announced that the O-Cube will be selling for 1200 Euros. Subsequent to the first webinar, a video of a private webinar was made public in which Steorn CEO Shaun McCarthy gave a more detailed overview of the current iteration of Orbo (it uses electrets rather than magnets), and of the business model they are following. The company is not planning to be a manufacturer of products long-term; they are hoping to use these first limited product runs to create favorable conditions to help them with their long-term licensing strategy.

December 2 is about a month away, and one good reason for the lengthy gap of time between the two webinars is to see how the O-Cubes that have been distributed to users so far hold up after working for over a month. If they have been used continuously, and are still charging devices, it would make things quite interesting.

I am still hopeful that I will be able to purchase an early O-Cube, and am still planning to do long-term testing of it.