back to article Founding investor still believes InPhase can fly

A founding investor in defunct holographic storage developer InPhase is still hopeful of restarting the firm, even as 'For lease' signs go up on its building in Longmont, Colorado. Bart Stuck is the managing director of Signal Lake Ventures which led the initial $27.9m A-round of funding for InPhase in January 2001. This …

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  1. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Thumb Up

    Is $53m a lot for a new media / format?

    We're talking a new storage material, new(ish) writing and reading tech and new drives to process the above.

    Note however that $18k a drive/$180 disk price point *must* be a starting point. Its nearest market model would *seem* to be the way video tape usage changed. Starting out as a high spec, high cost medium only available to broadcasters it *gradually* went mainstream. IIRC the first Ampex VTR was c1956, the first home VTR was 1965 (Sony CV2000), although I'd say it really took off when Phillips starting doing video cassetes rather than reel to reel, about 1972.

    I will wish him good luck. It's been a *long* time since we've seen something genuinally new, with a storage life as long as vinyl records.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "holo storage being the deep archive medium"

    Really?

    How many optical formats written (say) 20 years ago can still be read today?

    Not because the media have deteriorated beyond repair but because all the drives that were ever made have already failed, and no one is making new ones...

    ps

    are readers supposed to know what a "B1 round" is ?

  3. Natalie Gritpants
    Thumb Down

    Use it or lose it

    I know I'm confusing initial outlay and running costs but $18000 for 50 year storage is $360 per year. That will buy you a few TB per year now and lord knows how much in 10 years. Plus newish HDDs will always work with your kit.

    Your descendants are going to dig you up and make fertilizer out of your bones if you've left them with a holo disk they can't read. Even if they can get the data unless you've been backing up and restoring continually the knowledge of how to do it willl rot away in short order.

  4. Jay 2
    WTF?

    50 years?

    And how do they know that it will hold data with no probs for 50 years?

  5. Disco-Legend-Zeke

    Hitachi...

    ...seems to be pursuing their own version:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I know a proven storage medium

    It's not exactly fast for data retrieval but it is time proven to have a life of well over 1000 years if stored correctly.

    It's called paper

  7. Timo

    ahh, vulture capitalists

    Vulture capitalists have two goals -

    1. get in on something at the ground floor for cheap, then pump it up as if it was something, and dump it as fast as possible on the next suckers. Also called "putting lipstick on a pig".

    2. They will install their own managers who will draw down huge salaries off of the later investment round funds. Seems like feeding off of the carcass before the entity is dead.

    Like many things you can gauge the true viability of the company by the _inverse_ of the hype that is slung around.

    On occasion there are real opportunities out there, but the law of averages says that most of them don't really have much going for them, so these two rules apply most of the time.

  8. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Happy

    20 yr optical media still readable

    CD ROM anyone. It's slow, low capacity (by modern standars) but AFAIK still readable.

    I think you can still get drives for it.

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