Quarter-sized CD's?

Anonymous Coward writes: "The Denver Post is running an interesting story about Dataplay, Inc. This Boulder, Colorado based company aims to supplant the 20-year-old CD with a quarter-sized (1.5" x 1.25") optical disc that can hold 500 Mb of data. Players and media (already supported by 4 major record labels) are scheduled to launched 'the latter part of first quarter 2002'." They're cute, but considering that Sony's minidiscs never took off and this format is heavily restricted, my guess is that this will fail.

Gotta love the picture caption

Steve Volk founded DataPlay in November 1998 out of his frustration with the multiple storage formats used in consumer electronics.

So his solution? Invent another storage format!

Re:Where'd I put that again

hmm ... next time my boss asks for something on a cd cuz he's too stupid to burn one himself; I *really can* shove it up his ass.

Not true about MD not taking off...

For some reason, MD didn't take off in a big way in the US, but in Japan and Europe, they are a huge success. In the UK you can buy pre-recorded minidiscs in the music stores, like CD's or vinyl.
Almost every 2nd person on the public transport in London is listening to a MD player. They have totally replaced tapes and the walkman over here.
Just because the US seems to have ignored them for the last 5 years does not make them a failure...

Re:sell licenses

The reason minidisks never tookoff is because Sony refused to sell licenses. Same reason Beta lost to VHS.

Beta lost to VHS for a number of reasons, over-simplifying it to licensing is so innacurate as to be incorrect.

• Beta VCRs cost more to produce
• Beta tapes cost more to produce
• VHS was able to record longer programs
• VHS was able to record longer programs (this was really important)
• Actual quality wasn't all that different for most folks

Licensing and single-sourcing was just one more problem.

Damn alien technology

I guess this means I'm gonna have to buy the White Album again...

Minidiscs never took off?

I disagree. Minidiscs took off. It took a long time, but nowadays, many people own a minidisc. Pre-recorded MD never took off. Ok. Probably because they were as expensive as CDs, and because record dealers didn't want to have every record on a new support. But blank MDs are nice. Excellent quality, all features of a CD (direct access to tracks), plus song and disk titles. Plus they are small. The only bad thing about MD is that recorders are still a bit expensive. But I only use MDs to record music I want to hear while traveling. I don't want of CDs and MP3/OGG gadgets that need a computer to be recorded.

about Son'y minidiscs

Sony's minidiscs never took off

Wrong. Sony's minidiscs never took off for the intended audience.

Minidiscs are the defacto standard medium for amateur bootleggers (for concerts, etc), since they're cheap, small, and have good quality. The best are DAT recorders, but they're expensive and big.

Just some FYI.

It'll die

Please forgive the marketroid speak but,

Any new format, to succeed needs to add value to the user to overcome the cost of changing over. With CDs, there was a marked increase of quality over vinyl. Some might argue it was a decrease, but Joe Sixpack is still glad his CDs dont pop and scratch. Further, the CD allowed instant track access at the push of a button. It was these two features which pushed the changeover to CDs, along with the gradually decreasing price of players and concurrent larger selection of CDs in stores.

That said, where are the additional values of this medium over CDs? It's small. neat. But if I have to give up my CD burner, small dont mean much.

The next medium is most likely to be some flavor of mp3 or ogg device, be it solid state or magnetic disc based. Give me the ability to carry all the music I've bought over the last 15 years in my pocket, and the ability to navigate easily among all the songs, and I'll be all over it.

Precedent

"Add value" is more than marketroidspeak. It's something you have to think about whenever you introduce a new technology. Examples:

• 8mm video cassettes. Small, better video quality. But not good enough to make anybody switch from VHS.
• Every PDA ever invented, from the ancient WorkSlate [geocities.com] to the latest "smart" phones. The idea isn't bad in itself, and there have even been a few successes. But there still isn't enough "added value" to make most people switch from paper-inscription technology.
• Spreadsheet software. The vendors have changed, but everybody still uses the klunky old macro language designed two decades ago for VisiCalc. Not even Microsoft could get people to accept a more elegant spreadsheet language.
• Desktop software. Yeah, I'd rather be using KDE or GNOME or even JavaStation [linuxdoc.org]. Anything but MS bloatware. But how to convince everybody to give up their Word/Excel/Powerpoint skill base?
• QWERTY keyboards. Yes, they're inefficient. (Although the inefficiency didn't actually come from a deliberate attempt to slow the machine down [earthlink.net].) But who's going to learn typing from scratch?

God bless DataPlay!

I was just reading the "Big Breakthrough" infographic, and this thing sure looks impressive. At long last, thanks to modern technology, I can finally have inexpensive, universal, portable optical media that stores 500 MB of any kind of data I want and can be written 10 times faster than a 1X CD burner!

Minidiscs popular in UK

I've had minidisc players for over a year and I see people carrying them everywhere. Over here they seem to be going from strength to strength.
There's still not much selection available prerecorded, but I don't think most people want to use them to replace CDs, just for replacing tapes and replacing CDs for on-the-move purposes.