At Comdex in Las Vegas yesterday UK company Amacom Technologies Ltd launched its new Flip Disk portable hard drive device. The Flip Disk, taking the Star Trek communicator as its inspiration, folds out a PC Card that slots into the PCMIA slot of any laptop, drawing power and data simultaneously, neatly avoiding the need for cables. The device itself, not much bigger than an audio cassette tape and weighing 188 grams, can be carried around in a pocket. It comes in three flavors: 2.4Gb, 4.2Gb, or 6.4Gb, with data compression, and is expected to cost up to $575. It works with DOS, Windows 95 or 3.x, NT, OS2, Unix & Apple Macs. Amacom hopes to take advantage of the growing numbers of workers who need to be able to take their work home with them without having to lug a laptop around, and to meet the increasing demands for an efficient and portable form of video storage. Future developments promised include a hot-desking facility and a new security feature that Amacom is currently keeping under wraps. It needs to persuade OEM’s and laptop manufacturers to utilize the Flip Disk, though, and has yet to get its European distribution network up and running. Amacom, founded in 1994 by John Michael, has grown from selling portable parallel and SCSI based CD-ROM and DAT drives, to providing a far broader range of parallel, PCMCIA and SCSI based CD-ROM drives, hard drives and back-up devices. Amacom sales for 1998 are expected to be around 20m pounds.
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