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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."
Being so thin, it can be easily shredded, so there's no further need to keep your financial documents on paper.
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 AOL CDs I get in the mail don't hold up very well either. They tend to break on the second or third (accidental) bending. They also scratch very easily, especially if I accidentally scratch them with a razor blade. Finally, after being broken in half and scratched, they don't make very good frisbees. I was kind of hoping for better things from this flexible format.
Cool, If we could get AOL to send these out, I'll have a collection of jar openers to go with my coasters.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
Being flexible presents some advantage in the ad business as it becomes possible to send CD like junk mail. I (don't really) look forward to the days of getting Pre-approved credit card mail on this media. However, the format becomes quickly an inconvienience when you decide to keep and use the media. As an example, I remember when the DVD expert group was debating over as to protect the disc in the casing or not (like the Panasonic PD disk.) They decided not to, to the biggest regret of companies like Blockbuster who are irritating their customers by renting DVD with scratches and digs all over (I've got one of these DVDs with a cigarette burn in it!)
I really like the tape format, and I enjoy the mini disc (MD) style, allowing me to throw medium on the desk without caring if it will get scratched. The MD format is almost perfect for me. It's smaller than CDs and fit in backpacks. It's too bad that it hasn't become more popular with increase storage and broader adoption by computer manufacturers.
PPA, the girl next door.
-- I feel better now. Thanks for asking.