I read this weekend in the Minneapolis Star and Tribune an interesting article about one of our important vendors – Rimage Corporation of Edina, Minnesota. I have used and sold Rimage thermal disc printers and duplicators for over 10 years.

The article talks about Rimage’s plan to grow their business into “the cloud.” It also states that some of Rimage’s shareholders are not impressed with these plans as many prominent companies are already in this space – IBM, HP, VMware, Amazon, SalesForce.com, etc. These same investors want Rimage to return a large part of the $109 million in cash to their shareholders in the form of a special dividend.

Rimage management has other ideas like using this large cash position to invest and diversifying away from physical disc media into secure digital publishing in the cloud.

It will be interesting to see how this new direction plays out. We wish them the best.

Techware specializes in using, repairing, selling and renting Rimage Everest auto-printers, PrismPlus printers, 8100 and 7100 disc duplicators.

Today Sharp Corp dropped a little press release about a 100GB Rewritable BluRay Disc. As of today the only drive capable of recording data is one of Sharps own – BD-HDW700.

Discs are expected to cost around 58 bucks or 58 cents per Gigabyte of data stored. They should be available to the general public on July 30th.

-Via

A team of scientists working in Japan have discovered a new crystal structure that could pave the way for optical discs with 1000 times more storage than current BluRay Discs.

The material, a new crystal form of titanium oxide, can switch back and forth between the metal and semiconductor states at room temperature when exposed to light, creating an effective on-off function for data storage.

It is “promising as a material for a next-generation optical storage device,” Ohkoshi told AFP by telephone.
-via

Interesting to see lots of activity on a fairly old technology (optical discs) it just goes to show that the utilization of physical media as an archive medium is alive and kicking.]

Photo credit:Flickr user  SDCDeaCerte