Jan Sloot

Who was Jan Sloot?

Romke Jan Bernhard Sloot was a Dutch electronics technician, who claimed to have developed a revolutionary data compression technique, the Sloot Digital Coding System, which could compress a complete movie down to 8 kilobytes of data— this is orders of magnitude greater compression than the best currently available technology as of January 2013.

Some informants say "It is not about compression. Everyone is mistaken about that. The principle can be compared with a concept as Adobe-postscript, where sender and receiver know what kind of data recipes can be transferred, without the data itself actually being sent."

Despite the ostensible impossibility of such a technique, there were investors that saw potential. However, Sloot died of a heart attack one day before an attractive deal was signed with Roel Pieper, former CTO and board member of Philips. The story - including an account of a believable demonstration of the technology - is told in modest detail in Tom Perkins' 2007 book, Valley Boy.