Permanent data storage

How advanced do you think we are, in terms of being able to store information?

The most common medium that we have now would be paper, tapes, CDs, harddrives and memory cards.

You might say that we have progressed well in terms of technology. The memory cards we used now sure beats the floppy disks that I used back in the 1980/90s in terms of speed and capacity. But reality is, these medium of storage dun last very long. Worst, due to the technology advancement, we find it difficult to access old mediums. Try finding a disk drive to read your vintage 5 1/4in floppy disks. In another few more years, you probably will not be able to access your old CDs. Heck, most laptops nowadays do not even come with CD drives anymore. Go further, a decade into the future, I doubt anyone has USB connections.

But access aside, how long can our current means of information storage last? Paper can last several hundred years without significant deterioration under storage conditions in libraries and archives. Digital storage like your CD and HDD could probably last a hundred year at most. Magnetic tapes will last max of 50 years.

Compared to what the Egyptians did. They carved in stone. Those last for a few thousand years. Until now, we could not outdo them.

Someone invented quartz glass storage. These babies technically could last forever.
Wedding photos storage, anyone?

Read more here.
http://gizmodo.com/5946110/this-piece-of-glass-can-store-data-forever

Having our own labs.

Innovation is key in my industry.

Yet in most of the companies I worked in, research and development is managed haphazardly at best. During good times,a single piece of equipment or technology might catch the eyes & ears of management and kickstart a fury of activities to purchase/learn, trial and implement. Most of the time, it is a series of disconnected activities carried out by individuals out of their interest.

R&D projects compete for the same resources that works on paid client projects. There are often multiple start-stop cycles as different resource hops in and out of the R&D projects. Its tricky to manage such projects as internal requirements can change over time and there are usually tension between business (that wants to see business value) and IT (who are just excited to try anything new and innovative).

The current company that I'm with right now concluded on the same as well. Global HQ created a labs toolkit which contains the necessary information required to setup R&D labs  across all regional offices. This includes list of hardware and software to purchase, the type of packaged demos, possible areas to R&D into etc.

For once, we have budget set aside yearly to run these, would be really interesting to see how far we can bring the labs concept to in POSSIBLE Singapore. On plan we are looking at being able to showcases prototypes around:

• Augmented Reality 
• Proximity 
• Kinect 
• RFID
• NFC
• Scentbot
• Leapmotion 

Interesting times ahead. Let's see if I can manage to take a couple of videos of the demos in the near future.