Firm strives to extend mobile battery lifespans: ThePost.ie


TCH Archives > Sunday Business Post > 2006/05/21 > Firm strives to extend mobile battery lifespans

Firm strives to extend mobile battery lifespans
Sunday, May 21, 2006 - By Gavin Daly
A small Dublin firm hopes to revolutionise the consumer electronics market with technology to extend the lifespans of batteries in mobile phones and other gadgets.

Steorn, which is based in the Docklands Innovation Park, is raising funds from private investors to complete development of its microgenerator technology. The company has already raised about €3million in backing, and is three years into a four-year development plan.

Sean McCarthy, the cofounder and chief executive of Steorn, said the firm’s products were based on the same principle as kinetic energy generators in watches. The products should be ready by the summer of 2007.

‘‘We are totally on plan in terms of development,” McCarthy said. ‘‘We have done it at the right pace, and are very confident in our technology.

“There is a voracious market for battery technology.”

Steorn employs 16 people designing its products, which are manufactured by a partner company in Holland and shipped back to Dublin for testing. ‘‘We have adopted a policy of partnering rather than hiring,” McCarthy said.

‘‘There are another five or six people working on the technology who are not employees of Steorn.”

The firm is also in the process of raising further investment, but McCarthy would not comment on the amount of funding required.

Steorn was initially funded by its founders and raised about €2.5 million from ‘‘high net worth individuals’’ about 18 months ago.

McCarthy said being backed by private investors meant that Steorn was not under pressure to deliver a financial return in the short term.

‘‘We have low revenues and we are losing money, but we are losing money to a plan. The expectation is that we will deliver in the future.”

A qualified engineer, McCarthy worked for big engineering firms in the Middle East and South America before returning to Ireland in 2000. The internet boom was underway and he recognised a need for ‘‘technological management’’ of e-business projects.

He set up Steorn with consultant Mike Daly, Shaun Menzies of internet firm Zartis, and Francis Hackett, the managing partner of O’Donnell Sweeney solicitors in Dublin.

‘‘At the time, all the money was going into e-commerce development and we set up a company to manage those projects,” he said.

Steorn worked on some of the biggest internet projects in Ireland, including Fyffes’ Worldoffruit.com portal, but had to restructure after the boom ended.

‘‘We had to get rid of a lot of people, which was very tough,” McCarthy said. ‘‘During 2000 and 2001, internet technology became a commodity, and it became much cheaper to do internet projects. The technology caught up with us. We just never really took off.”

Steorn then shifted its focus to developing technology for other firms, and ‘‘built a reputation as the go-to company for serious technological development’’.

‘‘We have a four-year development plan to build an asset, to build IP,” McCarthy said.

The company would also seek out other interesting technologies and build a portfolio of products, he added.