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CES 2008 Hall of Shame
Romana Reynolds writes "The CES 2008 Innovations Design and Engineering Awards Showcase honored the Atom Chip Corporation, which was exhibiting the same 100GB, 500GB, and 1TB 'quantum optical' memory chips back in 2006. We actually wandered by, but long gone are the 'SolarMemory' chips, and he didn't know anything about Duke Nuk'em Forever. A little easy digging shows that they'd been making the same extraordinary claims and exhibiting prototypes at CES during the past three years, long enough to make 'atom chip hoax' the fourth suggestion on typing 'atom chip' into Google. I'm amused that the 'preeminent' panel of judges failed their vetting and gatekeeping functions. But I fear that Atom Chip will gather investors based on their recognition at CES, and continue in the game for many years to come, while honors at CES become a Hall of Shame."
Seriously though, if their intention is to promote snake oil in the hopes of attracting investors then the least they could do is put more than an hour of effort into what is pretty much (at least in this industry) the primary corporate representation.
At least they didn't create it in Word. Now that would have really irked me....
Incidentally, I did a little digging on this, and it seems its owned by a Russin Scientist called Shimon Gendlin (based out of Long Island), who as per information here in 1997 owned two companies both pitching along a simmilar theme
Windows in 6 Bytes (IA-32) : 90 90 90 90 CD 19
Well, the patent grab claim is unlikely. All but one of the US patents listed in the photographed flyer have been abandoned according to the US Patent office (failure to pay maintenance fees). Looks like they don't have much in the way of patent rights now, and they probably won't have much more in ten years time if they can't come up with the cash to pay maintenance fees now. Caveat Investor...
Not that I believe any of their website ... but some vendors (Apple comes to mind) provide TOSLINK optical connections using a 1/8" combo audio jack.
The fact this has only got 25 comments several hours later means that nobody has got a clue what this story is about. This summary is made of fail.
Their WHOIS record shows the registrant as "Domain Discreet," and their contact email as random-jumble-of-letters@domaindiscreet.com. If that doesn't scream "hoax" (kinda like everything else about them), then I don't know what does.