Drobo, Intelligent data storage.

Looking for a fancy way to store and backup data at the same time? My friend BT (master of all things good on the internet), linked this to me. It's called Drobo, and it's the world's first storage robot.

At first glance, it looks like a fancy USB drive that holds four hard drives. That's only the beginning. Drobo actually configures the data in real time. If you watch the video, you can remove a hard drive and it'll actually retain all the files on the system.

What does this mean? If a hard drive in the four disk array fails, your data is not lost. Just replace the disk and all your information will still be there. Ran out of disk space? Replace the smallest disk with a larger one, retain data, keep loading crap onto Drobo.

I personally have a computer with a terabyte of disk space. It's literally just a computer holding my hard drives so that I can have storage. I just spent the weekend moving data to bigger drives (accomplished by using external USB drives), and then opening up the computer to move those bigger drives into the computer.

If I had a Drobo, that whole process would have taken me three minutes instead of three days.

Internet 3.0?

Photosynth, a prototype that Microsoft has, is the next big thing. Check out the video in the link. The software, like Seadragon, will allow users to browse for images, magazines and even textbook data in a completely different way. This is the newest clip about this technology, but I've heard about it for about a year now. It seems that they've done bigger and better things in this last year.

In the video, there's a section where the presenter mentions that a magazine article had a fake ad embedded into it. This is great, that means that not only will people be able to scan through this archive system of images, but when they come across something interesting, there's a chance of targeting an ad to that user. Another annoying ad, you say. Well, given the scope, it could be done very elegantly and be a reason for companies to actually adopt this technology.

The spatial and panoramic presentation is also fantastic. The users clap when this stuff is presented and it is justified. With simple data from Flickr, they can create a 3D image from all the images. I feel like I'm repeating what the speaker says, but this really allows you to take a tour of a place you've never been to. It's amazing.

The internet is going to be amazing. Very very soon.