Ten O'Clock Tech
Today Music, Tomorrow Our Lives
Arik Hesseldahl, 10.29.04, 10:00 AM ET
http://www.forbes.com/technology/personaltech/2004/10/29/
cx_ah_1029tentech.html

NEW YORK - How much of your life could you cram into an iPod?

That's the question I'm pondering in the wake of Apple Computer's
release of the iPod Photo, the one with the color screen that can store
and display digital pictures in addition to a huge collection of music.
Gateway announced a similar device this week as well.

In case you missed it, Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs, ever the
headline-generating salesman, personally took the wraps off the
long-rumored iPod Photo this week. It looks a lot like previous iPods,
but in addition to storing and playing lots of music, it can turn
users' digital photography collections into slide shows set to music.
Even better, on the player's docking cradle are two video-out ports,
one for composite video, the other for S-Video, so the the iPod can be
connected to a TV or other external display.

That got me thinking, not only about the relatively obvious path that
Apple could follow toward an iPod that can play video. The killer
consumer app in this case would be playing video not on that tiny iPod
display, but on an external monitor. Yet there are bigger ideas to
consider. Could the iPod and similar devices be the start of something
bigger in the area of personal data storage?

Consider for a moment how far the storage capacity of the iPod has
come, thanks to the relentless improvement in hard-drive capacity at
Toshiba, the firm that supplies Apple with the drives that go inside
iPods. When the iPod was first released, it crammed five gigabytes into
a package the size of a deck of playing cards. Now the same device is
lighter, thinner and stores as much as 60 GB. I'm willing to bet that
an 80-GB player will hit the market before this time next year, and 100
gigabytes won't be far behind.

One hundred gigabytes, that's enough to start storing a good bit of
video. The first TiVo digital video recorders had 20-GB hard drives.
But if you think beyond making music and TV shows portable, a handheld
100-GB device from which data can quickly and easily be accessed
presents some pretty powerful uses.

By some estimates, the average American consumer generates some 100
gigabytes worth of data in the form of financial, health, academic and
other records over the course of a lifetime. How useful would it be for
your new doctor if, on the first visit, you were able to furnish your
complete personal and family medical history from an iPod-like device?

Often half the battle against bureaucracy is having the sufficient
information in hand to prove you are who you say you are. Having easy
access to a digital birth certificate might save a lot of time in
applying for a passport. Having an always-available copy of an academic
transcript or a professional portfolio could come in handy at job
interviews.

Some types of information, such as medical data, could be kept on the
device all the time, while other data could be rotated on and off as
needed, just like favorite songs from a music collection that is
otherwise stored on the PC.

This idea of portable data has spawned some interesting devices. The
Oqo handheld PC and Antelope Technologies' Modular Computing Core (see:
"A PC In Your Pocket" [1])  are already on the market, while Microsoft
co-founder Paul Allen's Vulcan Ventures FlipStart handheld PC (see:
"Paul Allen's Mobile Computing Fantasy" [2]) is starting to take
shape--I saw a demo unit earlier this month.

Combine a computer that goes everywhere you do with a device that
records everything you see, say and hear, and you need no longer rely
on fallible human memory. Accenture has for years been working on a
concept it calls the Personal Awareness Assistant. The idea is to turn
your life into a reality-TV show. A tiny wearable camera and microphone
could be used to record conversations. Add global positioning system
chips, and it can remember exactly where and when those conversations
took place.

That, of course, raises the question of how much information storage is
too much. After awhile, you'd have to wonder how much of the
information you could record could be used in a timely fashion. If
you're recording every conversation for future reference, you run up
against the clock pretty quickly. You'd never have the time to replay
it all, so the contents of the recordings would have to be searchable
in some way.

A study by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley last
year pegged the amount of information created in the world in
2002--including digitally, on paper, on film or video, or any other
format--at 5 exabytes, or 5 billion gigabytes. That amounts to about
800 megabytes for every person in the world, based on a population
estimate of about 6.3 billion. And the amount of data produced grows at
a rate of about 30% annually.

When most people look at the iPod and devices like it, they see a shift
in how music is being packaged and sold. But I'm starting to think
we're seeing the onset of a more profound change in the kind of
information we track and how we use it. Music is just the beginning.

[1] A PC In Your Pocket, Arik Hesseldahl, 2004.01.09, 10:00 AM ET,
http://www.forbes.com/2004/01/09/cx_ah_0109tentech.html

[2] Paul Allen's Mobile Computing Fantasy. Arik Hesseldahl, 2004.02.17,
8:52 AM ET