Marlinspike

Last Wednesday I was at the ASSOCHAM Packaging Summit 2012 giving a talk on the new opportunities for the packaging industry. Very wisely (as I would discover at the event), at the outset, I decided to eschew the usual Packaging related topics. i.e. innovation, new trends, numbers, stats etc. Instead, I talked about how the Packaging Industry could look beyond the traditional confines of rigid, flexible packaging etc. and look at their business as a service. If you rewind a little over a hundred years or so, you will see the example of Levi's. Levi's made his fortune during the original California gold rush supplying riveted jeans. And then fast-forward a hundred years from there, you have Bill Gates, who made his fortune by providing tools for the information age. As you would have guessed from the title, the analogy I drew was that in any gold rush, people who provide infrastructure (Amazon/Microsoft Cloud anyone?) are the ones most likely to walk away with the prize

Recently Hitachi unveiled what it claimed was million year storage media. essentially binary encoding micro-etched into a quartz crystal which is readable by a microscope. There are a couple of problems, the crystal in itself will need to be protected for a million years, and a microscope protected (or invented again). A truly million (or even a billion) year storage would be a living organism in itself. It propagates itself. DNA is the carrier as well as the information being transmitted. The more you think about it, the more logical it seems that this is a good solution. The sum of knowledge encoded in our genes and developments in the environment triggering further revelation (insight/genius or whatever). Which makes you wonder, if, ( Paraphrasing Marshall McLuhan ) we ourselves are the message.