Thursday, April 20, 2006

Cobblestone's PaperDisk Connects The Physical World

Add Cobblestone Software and their PaperDisk to the physical world connection list .


Cobblestone Software, Inc . is a startup company based in the Route 128 area outside of Boston, Massachusetts. The company was founded by Dr. Thomas Antognini and Professor Walter Antognini, the creators of the PaperDisk technology. Cobblestone's mission is to enable, and popularize, hardcopy data storage.

An example of a PaperDisk code.


We believe that nearly every printed piece of paper has a digital story to tell, and we are dedicated to forging the link between paper and the digital world.

For more info

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hmmm yeh ok. sure.

Not something that has the data density required to make the bigtime.

Also company structure is too imature to be considered seriously.

Anonymous said...

Not something that has the data density required to make the bigtime???

They claim to have put a full megabyte in a single symbol!

And I gather they have some patents -- given how long they've been around, maybe those might be important and basic.

Anonymous said...

I also noticed a particularly interesting section of the paper they posted which was published way back in 1996 at some USPS confererence, called Paper as a User Interface.

It explicitly describes the use of 2D bar codes for linking to the internet, among other things.

Anonymous said...

Anon again re density;
1mb in a single symbol - lol - You sir know nothing about data compression and how you make 1 symbol be equal to 1048576 bytes. I’m just a layman but even I know with the right ‘content’ I can perform 20,000,000 to 1 compression.

Go do some reading and come back when you are a little more up to speed.

If they have some patents it's not going to be an easy road to claim on such a broad method, and no - bar code reading is not an area that they can claim against - it's an entirely different concept.

I think it's time to get out of mobile marketing when the cab drivers are talking about blue sky (DCv1 people will know what I'm talking about).

Anonymous said...

Mr Anonymous (BTW, I LOVE your name!), I think you miss the point about the 1MB.

Cobblestone's claim, if you read carefully, is that it can store 1MB of data in a symbol AFTER compression -- that is, a 1MB zip file, for example could be so encoded. That file could be decompressed into a file of many megabytes.

That's what makes their claim pretty remarkable.

No Name said...

Thank you for explaining the technical side to this.