Cobb: The Thumbchip Dream

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October 11, 2004

The Thumbchip Dream

I've had the same bad dream for almost 15 years now. I'm stepping off a Lear Jet, somewhere in the future, and the scanner in the doorway erases the chip in my thumb. I suddenly realize that everything I've ever created, other than my children, is contained on that chip and I didn't have a backup. Yike.

I've dismissed the dream many times, primarily because it is my experience that a great number of gigabytes of data I have already lost over the years mean very little to me. Even when the thing lost has been a favorite cassette recording of Jeff Beck, I've been able to recover it in a different way. Other things were only sort of valuable because of their format. I backed up a PC onto an Overland Data tape drive over a IBM data channel. That was cool back in 1987, but nothing then, including the font I designed myself using some old Xerox tools, is useful now for anything but nostalgia. What I continue to miss are the medals, ribbons and trophies I won in high school, and pictures of me when I had a jheri curl. Nevertheless, I do have a continual problem taking my data with me which continues to give the dream longevity.

Two summers ago, I purchased a 40GB external USB drive from Maxtor for about 300 bucks. It allowed me, for the first time, to retrieve Eudora mail when I was on the road and then use that same set of files when I got home. In those pre-GMail days, I never had much use for webmail precisely because of my inability to depend on it for long periods. Today, whether or not it's security wise, I route all of my mail through GMail as well as download it through Eudora to my hard drive. So I don't have to take my USB drive on the road. The other thing I was able to do with the external drive was keep my very large set of customer data, and trickbag. So I have about 2GB of files that I could reuse. I also have a goodly set of music on the USB drive. All that kept me happy when my laptop only had 8GB of disk, but there were always problems with synch, not to mention headache inducing problems between Palm and Outlook.

I've been sitting out the past few years on new hardware and portable devices precisely because of these problems. In the meantime I've been making a lot of use of FTP and my DVD burner. It's nice to have a couple GB of mp3s easily playable through my laptop and Winamp contained on a couple of burned DVDs, but I still wish there were a better solution overall. I almost bought Groove, but I was never able to get it to synch on demand, and I simply don't think it's worth $250 per seat. But I have been very happy with my USB key with 256MB. I keep all of my passwords and valuable volatile files there. It solves a number of problems, but not quite enough.

The other day I saw a woman pay for her lunch with money she took out of her iPod wallet. Cool. Wouldn't it be great if the iPod could be used for more than just music? I've also been following Oqo, hoping they get their stuff on the street, and of course I'm struggling with the pathetic internet access of my Sprint PCS phone (two years old) and my black & white Palm Vx. Still nothing quite does it for me, not a Treo 600, nor any of the other PDAs.

Just yesterday, the wife found a 7 year old removeable hard drive from an old Compaq laptop. 2GB, pocket sized. Wouldn't it be nice if... Hmmm. Now I've also heard rumors that the XBox 2 is not going to have a hard drive. You'd buy an iPod-like device for your game storage and probably everything else storage. But what's cooler still is this long post by Mark Cuban including this delicious bite:

I had a couple DVDs that I had PURCHASED, that I hadn�t had the chance to watch. I had a couple 512mb Flash Drives that I had bought specifically to test them out for video. I took the first movie, and using an encoder with compression (not going to tell you which one, don�t want to play favorites), I encoded the movies at DVD quality and saved the output onto each of the 512mb Flash Drives. I popped those tiny little puppies into my pockets and off I went to the plane. Keys, some money and my keychain flash drives in one pocket, phone in the other. No hassle, no fuss no muss.

On the plane, I popped the first keychain drive into the USB Port. Got the ready signal, got prompted to open my video player, and watched a nice movie right from the keychain drive. On the way home, did the same thing with the other movie. I loved it. Far less space than DVDs. Could put them in my pocket instead of filling up my briefcase. I immediately went out and bought a 1gb keychain drive so I could hold 2 movies on 1 drive, in addition to my first 2 drives.

So there could be a lot of convergence around the thing that we all want, which is massive portable read/write storage. It's clearer and clearer that DVD is not the way to go and that USB or Firewire based disk storage is. The trick is synching, but what incentive does MS have to make anything faster or smarter than those idiotic briefcases, or refrain from DRM shackles? Hard to say.

I want to add that wireless broadband is just a year or two away, but it won't solve the bigger problem which Cuban sees. It's got to be disk. So I'm going to learn CVS and see what happens if a generic iPod comes out.

Posted by mbowen at October 11, 2004 04:44 PM

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Comments

Flash drives or similar high storage media are the next "it" in convenience. Next, look for bluetooth linked flash memory, so all you have to do is cary it in your pocket and have the key to unlock it. In act, as I sit here typing I see this as a mechanism to make good on the ubiquitous promise of wearable computing.

A few years ago I remember research that was being done on static optical devices using the opacity of a medium similar to a credit card. And, of course, there is always the promise of crystaline memory structures for real high density, mobile storage.

Posted by: submandave at October 13, 2004 12:26 PM