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For today’s feature, we bring you some bizarre news from the flash memory sector. This feature is a bit different from the usual xyz-company-announces-certain-upgrade stories. Not sure what we mean? The next heading will make things clearer. Read on…
Movies on flash memory cards
For PortoMedia, an Irish company located in Galway, Ireland, flash memory is more than just a medium of storage. It’s a brand new business concept that will revolutionise the way people buy movies. Ever thought about how one could make the movie renting or purchase easier than it is now?
PortoMedia has developed a proprietary flash memory card called Movie Key. Users can use this card to download a fully secure DVD quality movie from retail Movie Point in less than 15 seconds. Each Movie Point store is said to have a capacity of 500, 5000 movies and is refreshed regularly with more content via satellite/DSL.
Users can use this Movie Key as a regular USB device and play the movies on a PC or even an Xbox. For those who wish to watch movies in the big televisions, PortoMedia offers a reader or a set top box that users can attach to their TVs. All you have to do then is plug in the Movie Key and you’re good to go. The reader will enable your television to play the movies stored in the Movie Key.
Goodbye flash, welcome PMC
Programmable metallisation cell (PMC) is a new technology that has been developed by researchers at Arizona State University. With an ability to store over one terabyte in an area much smaller than a conventional flash drive can handle, this new technology promises to be the mother of all portable memory drives.
For those interested in the inner details of this new revolutionary concept, here’s the idea: A conventional flash drive stores data in the form of electric charges. Therefore, as the size of the drive becomes smaller, the stability begins to become an issue for a flash drive. On the other hand, the PMC works on the concept of creating nanowires of copper between two points to indicate the storage of a digital “1″. Where no connection exists, the value indicated is “0″.
The main technology that makes this possible is called nano-ionics, which focuses on moving positively charged atoms. Not only is this process most efficient in terms of energy consumption, but also infinitely reversible, allowing to remove and load data onto the device over and over again.
PMC has been generating quite an amount of buzz for a few years now. In fact, a company Infineon Technologies licensed this technology back in 2004 and named it conductive-bridging RAM. Other companies going down this road are NEC and Sony, calling their products “Nanobridge” and “electrolytic memory” respectively.
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