No, not my paycheck. This last week I've been flat out with Stockholm Challenge marking and organising myself to get to WSIS, but there have been a couple of tech developments that stuck up.
One that I only caught in passing was on CNBC as I flitted through the lounge. I missed the details of the company, but it was something like GlobalView, an Indian CEO who was talking about new, lossless compression technology that shrinks 100MB file to about 30KB, with no loss. Yes, a 30:1 ratio with no losses. If that is even close to the facts as I heard them, the whole broadband business case is going to be in question. If you know who is doing it, please point me at their site.
The other one harks back a couple of years when Michael Sauvage from Rolltronics showed me a mock-up of the computer of the future, a couple of layers of plastic barely thicker than a sheet of paper with a display on one side and the circuitry, rolled onto the flexible substrate on the other. One of the products Michael talks about is nanoscale memory; thin, flexible, inexpensive, high density, durable memory arrays. What he's talking about is very high desnity memory in a small device like a flash card of memory stick. But what about being able to store memory everywhere?
Which is where this story from the IHT comes in.
Memory devices that can store more data in less space are crucial to electronic gadgets. Plastics, though, have received relatively little attention as candidates for use in data storage.Now a team of scientists at Princeton University and Hewlett-Packard has described an electronic memory based on [Pedot plastic], which changes its conductivity permanently when a high current is passed through it, in a recent article in the journal Nature. The new memory may be far cheaper to make than silicon microwafers manufactured in costly clean rooms. It could be fabricated simply and inexpensively, for example, by transferring the pattern for the memory continuously from a cylinder onto a substrate, much as newspapers are printed on a press.
"We can imagine making memory not out of expensive silicon chips but of less expensive organic materials that could be patterned in a process of continuous sheets," said Warren Jackson, a physicist at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California, who is one of the authors of the paper.
The memory, which cannot be rewritten, is known as WORM, for "write once, read many times".
The article talks about storing photo albums "for holding maps for GPS in cars, for carrying information in a cell phone or music player, for digital cameras or a host of applications where you carry things with you with a memory that's not fragile and doesn't use a lot of power", but those are the least interesting uses.
I'd bet such memory was much less sensitive to EMP, the military would be VERY interested, it could not only hold data, but software to programme devices like Michael's paper thin computer, implants such as pharmaceutical delivery systems, pacemakers and bio-monitoring systems that would be unaffected by environmental challenges and much less susceptible to interference from scanners and security systems, cellphones etc.
In fact, they might be almost invisible to such systems and pose a security threat in their own right.
I can see them embedded in credit cards with unerasable photos, fingerprint scans and signatures, delivering uncorruptible software that you just melt down and replace with the latest version. Then there is any number of fashion accessories as the software is built into a thread which can be woven into any garment and used to control and co-ordinate everything from the colour and pattern to the thickness of the cloth. How about a garment that has fibres lying flat and reflective in hot climates but turns black and stands up like velvet as the temperature drops? (Purely selfish, I'm about to fly from 30 degrees in a Sydney summer to stockholm in mid winter.)
Both technologies look like the application of parts of Moore's law as information densities rise, driving down costs, margins and profits. Rolltronics, through their public good foundation want to create technologies that can be built anywhere, like rural Africa, India or China, and not just in the vastly expensive, "clean room" foundaries of the US, Europe and Asia with their highly toxic cleaning and manfacturing byproducts.
If the family business can whizz up a circuit board and programme it with nothing more complex than a photo printer, the barriers to entry will have colapsed again and the only thing that will matter is how smart you are. The IT story is not even past the Table of Contents page yet.
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