Mempile's 1TB Optical Media Promise

[iddo]

Hello all,
Our recent article on the new technology developed by the Israeli company Mempile for a new type of optical media capable of 1TB on a single CD sized disc was widely covered last week.

We received many questions regarding the technology and many people on TFOT and TG daily also posted some interesting questions. Mempile was kind enough to grant us another Q&A answering at least some of the questions (I guess nobody can expect them to give everything up - there are a commercial company and have competitors).

It will be interesting to see how this technology would evolve since it has lots of potential.

Mempile - Terabyte on a CD - Full article

Follow Up - Mempile Answers your Questions

P.S. sorry for the ugly links - the html tags here are really annoying.
Iddo


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Iddo Genuth, Editor and Founder
The Future of Things (www.tfot.info)
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[iddo]

Any thoughts? anybody?

 

[Markbnj]

Not much to comment on if you're not into the physics of persistent storage media. Obviously it would be great if it happens, meaning I can go buy the drive and discs at Newegg. But reports of massive storage improvements seem to come weekly, and I still max out at 4.5-ish gigs on a single layer DVD .

 

[iddo]

Well its true I guess.
Even Mempile themselves admit it will probably be around 2010-2011 before you can actually buy one (Although I had the pleasure of holding the yellow media in my hands just a few months ago.

It especially interesting in my view since the technology is so different than that of CD/DVD/Blu-ray. Instead of the little bumps you actually change the properties of molecules in the material.

The way I see it is that even if the product would be ready tomorrow - the big manufacturers would never let it sell since they invested heavily in DVD and the new HD type media and they are not going to see their investment go to waste...

 

[myocardia]

Originally posted by: iddo
The way I see it is that even if the product would be ready tomorrow - the big manufacturers would never let it sell since they invested heavily in DVD and the new HD type media and they are not going to see their investment go to waste...

How exactly would they stop a company from selling it? I can sell anything, as long as I own the patent. BTW, let me know when I can buy one of these drives for ~$100, and I'll be interested.

 

[gsellis]

Last time I jumped on this kind of bandwagon was with Constellation 3D. They had something, but just ended up sucking their venture capital dry. And I wonder if this is some of the same players.

Edit - and Pioneer is sitting on a UV system that they created. Have not heard a peep about it in at least a year.

 

[AMCRambler]

Originally posted by: myocardia

Originally posted by: iddo
The way I see it is that even if the product would be ready tomorrow - the big manufacturers would never let it sell since they invested heavily in DVD and the new HD type media and they are not going to see their investment go to waste...

How exactly would they stop a company from selling it? I can sell anything, as long as I own the patent. BTW, let me know when I can buy one of these drives for ~$100, and I'll be interested.

The same way they kept DVD as the wideley accepted format for so long. Software manufacturers just don't need a terabyte of space to store their installation programs and the movie industry wanted to milk DVD for as much money as they could and then when sales start slowing re-release all their movies on HD media to make billions more for the same stuff. So as a result they stick with the antiquated format and there is no reason to purchase these new drives other than for backing things up. Kind of like Zip drives and the super floppy. They never really became mainstream because that's all they were used for. Someone too cheap to buy a hard disk to back up their data would just get a couple zip disks and be all set.

 

[iddo]

myocardia - to me at least the answer is simple - Mempile can't manufacture the media in quantities - there are several large media manufacturers in the world and they have a very different agenda - they want to promote DVD, Blu-ray and HD-DVD in the next 3-5 years at least - jumping directly to teradisks will eliminate a huge investments they have made in current technology - why should they do that?

Also remember that the Mempile media is very different than existing technology and probably requires different manufacturing equipment - a lot of new money to spend...

AMCRambler - backing things up is a very big deal these days both for consumers and professional markets - I see little place for the Mempile technology in the movie business - maybe in 3-5 years you will have holographic movies or some sort of ultra HD which requires hundreds of Gigabytes per hours but the way it looks now it is more for backing up then anything else.