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New, Flexible CDs Arrive
Mortin writes "A company called Flexstorm has developed a new type of CD, dubbed flexCD, that is about 140 microns thick, 1/10th that of a normal CD, and most importantly flexible. The technical specs on this new technology are quite impressive, boasting a weight of only .6 grams on the flexCD 80. Producing a flexCD also only takes .3 seconds, less than that of a normal CD."
According to the specifications, this would require an adaptor to play in existing CD drives.
If they're pushing this as a supplement to advertisements (distribution via mail, magazine, what have you), how are they going to get the adapters to people? How are they going to overcome the barrier of getting people to actually use the adapters?
Seems like there's a bit of a bottleneck in this biz plan.
goats.com: better than
The wording may be a bit odd, but I believe they actually mean "you can ship this CD with a food item and not worry about poisening your customers".
For example, various cerial companies have been shipping CDs in their boxes. These CDs have various games and the like coupled with ads for to try and market further to the children. I'm sure they would be a large potential market for this product.
Who remembers CD caddies? And how much you hated them? Why would you want to go back to that?
And for non-technical people (the ones that can't set the time on their VCR), they're not going to be able to figure out how to use the adapter and will likely end up destroying their CD players, particularly if they try it with a slot-loading one.
Sure, it will be great for people who like the CD inserts in magazines, and may be the best thing in the world for them, but I've yet to find an insert that would make me want to keep around an extra caddy just so I could play it. But then again, it would be nice to be able to fold up a CD and stick in an envelope instead of buying the special CD protective packages, so it might work.
Oh, and what do those naked men have to do with CDs?
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
They are pushing this as a way to mail discs, right?
If I do got one of these in the mail, I'll need the adapter. I don't have one (like most people), so they would need to send me one in the package.
Guess what: the package is no longer thinner nor lighter than a regular disc, and it isn't flexable.
Seems like a stupid idea to me.
-twb
This isn't as great as it sounds, because you have to "sandwich" it in their plastic adapter to get your CD player to read the disk. Since no one has any of their adapters sitting around the house, anyone who wanted to mail one of thess flexCDs out (which is supposed to be one of their main applications) would also have to send out the rigid plastic pieces, reducing the weight and flexibility advantages. If it ever catches on and people start keeping plastic adapters around the house, that might become unnecessary, but I can see this tanking because people can't figure out why their CD player/drive doesn't like this flexible piece of plastic.
When are we going to see scratch-proof cds ?
With these new floppy discs, if you scratch the thing, you probably just scratch the medium, and the underlying flexible medium has not been scratched. Because producing and selling adapters costs less than producing and selling an album, you can just shell out a couple bucks for a new adapter if yours gets scratched.
Will I retire or break 10K?
you're right. however, you are thinking 'today' when they are thinking 'tomorrow' ... this isn't something we'll see for a while (unless the adapter is simply a case or a flash program).
...and let's not forget DVD players and CD audio systems -- great for the car!
when cdrw came out, no cdroms could read them. soon after, ALL cdroms could read them. similarly with this (if it flies, and it should); cdrom/dvdrom and writers released after some date in the future will all be able to read this new technology, and at that point, you'll see flexible cds in the mail and in your cereal boxes.
problem is getting this standardized and implemented into future drives.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Be cautious:
flexRights
An innovative solution that allows content owners to offer a "test drive" of their premium content to the market for a limited time. New markets will benefit greatly from this service. A music company can "give" a customer an entire CD of a chart- topping artist for a week. After that week, the digital encryption technology "locks" the music, leaving the consumer with the choice of going online to pay and "unlock" the music, or purchasing the rigid CD from the store. flexRights can also be used with Video and software content.
It would be interesting to know how this technology compares in terms of
- $/GB
- GB/kg
- GB/cm3
as an archive media versus magnetic disks and DLT.Perhaps the biggest drawback may be sheer capacity. I swear that a 600 MB CD is getting to be as useless as a 1.44 MB floppy relative to how much data needs to be archived.
"Provided by the management for your protection."