Sorry we've been away! Some exciting things cooking behind the scenes here, but in the meantime I'm back and will be active again with posts of interest.

News broke last night about a memory device from Hewlett-Packard and Princeton University researchers which would be so cheap that you'd use it just to store data, then toss it.

HP's Stan Williams has talked to me a lot about memory so cheap its disposable, but I'm bearish on that concept of non-rewritable memory. Humans don't work like that. We make mistakes, we grow tired of old MP3 songs, we want new ones. In the John Seely Brown sense Information may want to be "free". But us human brutes like to imprison it, be able to change it around at will and then let it go.

So unless a mechanism exists where these disposable plastic memories would be intelligently and automatically replaced, it has little applicability in the consumer device world. Think about it. When was the last time you transferred MP3 songs or digital pictures and never erased or re-wrote that data set. Non-rewritable memory requires more energy and effort that people behaviorally won't want to spend.

Here's how the technology pictured right works:

The device is a polymer that conducts low amounts of electricity, but if high amounts are applied it loses its ability to conduct forever. So the polymer is like a fuse. Too much voltage and it blows.

If you take a perpindicular array like in the picture above wherever higher voltage is applied, the polymer "fuse" will blow, representing a 0. The circuits that still function are 1's. Applying lower current will let you "read" the 1's and won't travel over (or be able to read the 0's) giving you a 0.

And please discount the claims that just because someone was able to achieve a high density of a single or maybe several working bits...like...

The team predicts that one million bits of information could fit into a square millimeter of material the thickness of a sheet of paper. A block just a cubic centimeter in size could contain as many as 1,000 high-quality digital images, the scientists suggest, and producing it wouldn't require high-temperatures or vacuum chambers.

...that it will ever translate into a scalable and useful functioning device. The science is interesting and its foundational knowledge. Expect no device.

More at www.forbeswolfe.com

(Josh Wolfe, NYC)