This illustrates some of the two-sided coin that is crowd-funding. Namely, while it helps to promote your product (the media and hype train) that follows very successful Kickstarter and IndieGogo campaigns, it can also work against you.
I do not believe Batteriser needed the money necessarily from IndieGogo. It was purely a strategic play on the part of their investment capitalists and PR firm to create promotion. However, early release of the concept to market (before product availability) created a huge opportunity for analysis which, in the case of Batteriser, created more negativity.
Looking back, I think they would have been better off just releasing the thing on the unsuspecting public and marketing the heck out of it in more traditional ways. By the time anyone figured anything out, they would have sold millions because items that cheap tend not to bother consumers much if they feel it was a waste. "Oh well, I spent $2.50 at Wal-Mart when I bought my batteries for my kids toy and it didn't really work, who cares?".
When the dust finally settles and we have some more history behind us sometime in the fall and next year, there will be a lot to learn from this story, even more than the electronics that we are focusing on now. I do hope the Batteriser materializes... It would be a shame for it to just vanish. While that may be better to avoid a potential "scam" situation, we would never quite get full closure on this. We'd always be left wondering, what exactly was in that device and what was the performance?
I eagerly await the release of the Batteriser when everyone in the world will have access to it and we all can independently evaluate it. If nothing more, it may be an interesting gadget to hack and use the bits from to do various other things.