Sloot and van Rossum were granted a 6-year Dutch patent for the Sloot Encoding System, naming Sloot as inventor and van Rossum as patent owner. Despite the apparent impossibility of the encoding system, there were investors who saw potential. In early 1999, Dutch investor Marcel Boekhoorn joined the group. In March 1999, the system was demonstrated to Pieper. Pieper resigned from Philips in May 1999 and joined Sloot's company as CEO, which was re-branded as The Fifth Force, Inc. The story — including an account of a demonstration in which Sloot apparently recorded and replayed a randomly selected 20-minute cooking program on a single smartcard — is told in modest detail in Tom Perkins' 2007 book Valley Boy: The Education of Tom Perkins. Death of Sloot On July 11, 1999, Sloot was found dead, in his garden at his home in Nieuwegein, of an apparent heart attack. He died one day before the deal was to be signed with Pieper. The family consented to an autopsy, but none was performed. Perkins, the co-founder of the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, had agreed to invest in the technology when Sloot died. Perkins and Pieper would have proceeded after Sloot's death, but a key piece of the technology, a compiler stored on a floppy disk, had disappeared and, despite months of searching, was never recovered. See also Lost inventions References External links Broadband applications on limited bandwidth networks (PDF) – see section 3.1.5, "Beyond the limits?" "Jan Sloot - The Source Code", Dutch-language website devoted to Jan Sloot and Sloot Coding System "The Source Code Part 1" "The Source Code Part 2" Dutch-Language News Segment Regarding Jan Sloot Related Patents: NL1005930C: Sloot, Romke Jan Bernhard/J.V.R Services Nieuwegein BV: Compression of video data (02-11-1998) NL1009908: Sloot, Romke Jan Bernhard: Storage system for digital data relating to text or bit-map elements, involves storing possible values in coding memories and chopping incoming data into blocks for comparison with stored codes (22-02-2000) Video compression Lost inventions Dutch inventions