The Seagate Contest

I went to the BlogCamp Bangalore few days back and listened to some of the talks. A nice talk by Ashish Gupta of Helion Ventures was the highlight of the day for me.

Another interesting thing was a contest being run by Seagate who were the main sponsors of the event. They have launched FreeAgent External Hard Drives in the capacities of 500GB and 1TB. Now that is a lot of space! Challenge is to come up with a creative use for all this space.

What immediately come to my mind is a book mobile. A book mobile is a van that is Internet enabled and has print-on-demand equipment on board (a b/w printer, a color printer, a binder and a trimmer). The van goes around and prints books for people who want them. The biggest problem for deploying this van into more rural areas in the availability of Internet. But with the huge space available with Seagate FreeAgent drives, we can put all the available books - from Internet Archive, from Project Gutenberg, Wikipedia, from Digital Library of India - on this drive. This drive will become a replacement for the Internet on the van and will make available all those books to those who will otherwise not get access to this material easily.

The same van with an additional scanner can be used to drive to all the families, institutions where rare manuscripts are available, old records of value, photographs of the yore and scan them in front of the eyes of owner (with so much storage available on the run, there will be no need to take the material to some central location for which it may be hard to get permission from the owners). All this scanned data can be brought back and merged in to a huge digital archive.

I think using FreeAgent drives like this will make this world a better place :-)!

Comments

Ritesh Kumar said…
Hi Abhaga,
You may want to take a look at DTNs or delay tolerant networks... interesting research area.

Ritesh
April 1, 2009 at 10:01 AM
Raghav said…
Hi Abhaya ,

Just drooped on to your blog accidently , but really liked the business idea ..

Raghav
May 24, 2009 at 1:00 PM
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