back to article Mystery hologram disc upstart gobbles InPhase blueprints

3D holographic storage upstart hVault has bought assets of crashed rival InPhase and announced it will ship systems in the spring. hVault, which has a booth at this year's broadcast technology show NAB in Las Vegas, boasted that it is "the leader in holographic archival storage systems". Well, er, yes, because there is pretty …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    File under "C" for Cold Fusion, or "D" for Duke Nukem Forever?

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    50 years

    or "up to 50 years", it's nonsense, like those blank CDs, supposedly "to last 100 years", as they claimed 10 years ago, when CDR was "the" thing. They're all dead now, with little use. But hey, they said "up to", didn't they?

    In any case, give it a few years and there'll be something with 10 times more capacity available, also to last xxxx years, etc.

    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
      Alien

      Re: 50 years

      Heechee Prayer Fans, maybe?

  3. Mystic Megabyte
    Holmes

    Archeologists in 500 years

    "We've dug down and have not been able to retrieve any data until we got to the ipad strata. The problem is they are just full of cat photos"

    1. frank ly

      Re: Archeologists in 500 years

      The ancient egyptians worshipped cats as gods. Have we progressed much since then?

  4. Inachu
    FAIL

    3D dreaming.

    Jsut just 3D storage but I liked that other very old article about 3D compression in which the company in Florida was able to "ZIP" compress a full length movie onto a floppy.

    Compression majic was just that and math whiz professionals could not add up what they were doing to compress that much data without any log file to recompose the data.

    Turned out the critics were right and the company went under. Sadly I wished it was a real compression model. Just think on the storage savings if it was true.

    1. bluesxman
      Coat

      Re: 3D dreaming.

      Probably using binary compression.

      10 Take a string

      20 Represent it in binary

      30 Zeroes have no value, so throw them away

      40 You are left with a string of ones, count them

      50 GOTO 20

      Some data loss may occur...

  5. Ben Liddicott
    Pint

    It's the storage techology of tomorrow.... and has been for twenty years

    Cos, you know, it allows you to store information in the depth of the media. Unlike, say, a four-layer DVD. Wait, what?

    (Same story, so same comment).

    1. Blank Reg

      Re: It's the storage techology of tomorrow.... and has been for twenty years

      Or the 20+ layer, 500gb+ bluray disks that have been shown. Unless Holographic disks can achieve an order of magnitude improvement in capacity over bluray without a similar increase in cost then they are DOA.

      I wonder how many months before this company joins the rest of the Holodisk industry road kill.

      1. Christian Berger

        Re: It's the storage techology of tomorrow.... and has been for twenty years

        Actually the 20+ layer 500 gb+ bluray disks might also be DOA if they are not at least 1-2 orders of magnitude cheaper than hard disks.

        The time when optical disks had a future ended in the 1990s. They kept on going a bit for content distribution, mostly because the "online content distribution" people are idiots. So you buy a disk, then copy it to your hard disk.

  6. Christian Berger

    There would be sensible fields

    Like for example a long term storage CD-Rom format. Perhaps with some sort of photo sensitive material, you expose with a machine similar to a CD-writer, then you "develop" it some way or the other, for example by etching out certain parts, and you'll end up with something which is compatible with a CD-Rom (or DVD or Blu-Ray or whatever)

    There are 2 problems this would solve:

    a) durability of the media

    b) long term availability of the drives

  7. Wombling_Free
    Trollface

    hVault

    Fine purveyors of:

    Holographic Storage

    Jetpacks

    Flying Cars

    Hangover Free Alcohol

    Skyhooks

    Over-Unity Generators

    also co-developing Elite 4

  8. Loftus
    Facepalm

    Bart Stuck of Signal Lake is involved ... hVault employees beware

    One of the NAB 2012 photos shows venture capitalist Bart Stuck of Signal Lake (wearing hVault credentials and an hVault nametag) pointing out the hVault system to Douglas Trumbull.

    hVault employees and investors beware! Before investing time and money in any venture that involves Bart Stuck, please carefully look into his history with startups, especially InPhase. A previous Register commenter posted (31 Dec 2010):

    -----------------------------------------

    "Bart Stuck managed to single handily drive InPhase into the ground and cause a lot of damage by misrepresenting the funding situation to the employees for 11 months. Many people were driven into bankruptcy because they believed Bart's promises for money and then later (when they stopped believing) were faced with walking away from the promise of tens of thousands in backpay."

    "More than 60 employees stuck it out for 11 months at minimum wage only to be laid off in February of 2010. {Acadia Woods] put $5M into the company in March in an attempt to revive the company with the expectation that Bart would match this and get the company back on its feet. Once again, Bart failed to deliver on his promise and is now claiming (to the courts) that he owns close to 50% of the company (an undelivered promise is worth 50% ownership... please!) which is a complete lie to keep things tied up in court long enough that he can find another sucker investor to put money into it and prolong the agony."

    "[Acadia Woods] would have put more money in and rescued the technology, but with Bart in control of the BOD there is no way they were going to invest more money and see it go to waste. Bart got control of InPhase from NVP because of [Acadia Woods'] investment; not his own. [Acadia Woods] is fighting in court for things to be set straight, but unfortunately Bart's situation is more analogous to a prisoner on death row. The longer he keeps it dragged out in court the longer he can prolong his survival. When the court makes its final decision, he will be sued for everything he has. Unfortunately, this promising technology is collateral damage to a bad situation all stemming from false promises and manipulation on the part of Bart Stuck.

    InPhase was close to launching this technology. Yes, there were bugs to work out and manufacturing issues to solve, but what new technology doesn't have this. History should look back on InPhase's attempt to develop this technology and it will see how greed and manipulation caused a promising technology to fail. That is the travesty in this whole situation."

    ----------------------------------------

    hVault employees - If Bart Stuck asks you to take a cut in pay because the money is coming "in just a few weeks" run as fast as you can. Month after month he stood in front of dozens of desperate InPhase employees whose pay had been slashed to minimum wage promising the same thing. There was always just one more hurdle until the papers were signed by a mysterious overseas conglomerate. At one point, the lawyers were on the plane back from Europe with the signed papers. Nothing ever materialized. In short, he lied. Over and over. Do your research and due diligence and see for yourself how trustworthy Bart Stuck is when it comes to employees whose lives he ruined. Can *you* stomach 11 months at minimum wage?

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