That’s a cool idea someone would say. I find it very interesting too and somehow very simple. Chris Armstrong, the business founder, started wondering about how difficult it is to rent a movie when he spent time in line to get one at a local store in Galway, Ireland. Then he thought to create a company that rents movies on flash memory cards.

The company called PortoMedia has kiosks where people can download movies directly on flash drives. The kiosks will have hard drives that can hold 350 to 5,000 titles. Depending on hardware speeds a movie could be download in less than one minute.  PortoMedia will use IBM’s help to develop the transaction system, hard drives from Seagate Technologies, and Samsung’s flash memory devices. Toshiba will fabricate the chips for the high-speed interface.

Armstrong said, its company has signed deals with several retailers from US. The MoviePoint kiosks have already been tested in Dublin at the end of 2007. PortoMedia will sell a proprietary ultra-fast USB interface for customers. A start pack will cost $60 and will include a flash key, a dock, and six movies. Then the customers will use the same flash key to buy other titles from the MoviePoint kiosks. As Armstrong said, the company will establish the future fees for the number of viewings.

Renting movies on flash memory cards will be a great business for movie makers, as well as for the stores. There are many advantages upon DVDs or Blu-Ray discs. First of all, delivering the movies on flash sticks will reduce cost for transporting and packaging the DVDs. Furthermore, the stores won’t have the shelves full of DVDs. Comparing with the Internet downloads, this solution is faster and safer.  I hope PortoMedia will be successful in this business.

The original story here.

Parks Associates, an internationally recognized market research and consulting company has made a research about Storage Opportunities for Handheld Devices. The study reveals that 99% of mobile phones have a flash memory solution. Nevertheless there will be a notable market opportunity for HDD solutions used for this type of devices. In addition, 96% of cellphones will use flash memory by the end of 2012.

We all know that flash memory provides non-volatility, fast read times, and shock resistance. It is ideal for mobile phones, portable media players or digital cameras. However the increased requirements for storage will boost the technical research for the HDD solutions. More and more consumers demand improved storage devices that can meet their needs.

“These consumers will require greater storage, and the low cost per gigabyte will carve out a market opportunity in handheld devices for HDD memory,” said Parks Associates Analyst Chris Roden.

However, Samsung demonstrated it has the know-how to built an amazing 128GB flash memory card. Consequently the requirements for high capacity multimedia devices and mobile phones will be covered. On the other hand, a little shortcoming about the flash memory cards will encourage the development of new HDD memory solutions. And that is their lifetime.

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This news thrilled me, because even my laptop’s hard drive has only 80GB. But technology never stops. Samsung announced an advanced process to pack the maximum of 16 of the multi level cells just 30 nanometers. That means they are able to deliver 64 gigabits of flash memory onto one chip. The process was called self-aligned double patterning technology (SaDPT).

By using the process described above, Samsung can produce 128 GB NAND memory card. Consequently, the price for memory cards will drop, which is a good thing for the consumers. Also, the high storage cards could replace the traditional hard disks being more efficient. But we have to wait till the technology will be released, perhaps in 2009.

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