Dataplay developing miniature drives

BOULDER – Steve Volk, formerly chief executive officer Integral Peripherals in Boulder, has launched a new venture called Dataplay.com, which is developing new technologies for portable Internet devices.

Dataplay, according to its Web site, will be the place “where everything digital comes together.”

And according to industry analyst Jim Porter, president of the Mountain View, Calif.-based Disk/Trend Inc., Volk is certainly the person to take disk storage to the next step.

“Steve Volk is a very capable manager and especially has great credentials at starting companies that have made things that the human race has never made before,” Porter says.

Volk told The Business Report that he will make a formal announcement about Dataplay in April and declined further comment. The company’s new offices are located at 6200 Lookout Road in Boulder.

The company has quickly attracted attention from major investors.

Dataplay, formerly known as SpinVision, last year received $14 million in venture capital from Boulder’s Sequel Venture Partners, Tango, iBelay and Graystone Partners. Jobs are being advertised on its Web site (www.dataplay.com) for Internet programmers, engineers and technicians.

Dataplay also attracted the attention of California-based Seagate Technology (NYSE:SEG), which last August logged a complaint in the Boulder courts charging that SpinVision had lured away five of its top programmers from Seagate’s Longmont offices.

Officials from Seagate also did not return calls for comment about the lawsuit.

On the forefront

At Integral Peripherals, Volk is said to be the first to release a 1.8-inch disk drive, which was used in laptops and in the early generations of hand-held, shirt pocket-sized computers, such as PalmPilot.

The market, however, proved too small to support Integral’s tiny device, and the company scaled up to manufacturing 2.5-inch and 3-inch disk drives for laptop computers. Boulder-based Mobile Storage Technology, which is still working on 3-inch disk drive products, took over the financially troubled Integral in 1998.

Mainstream consumers might consider a laptop computer to be a significant upgrade, but Porter counters that laptop computers are becoming a burden for some, especially those who travel. If the hand-held devices were more capable, people would just as soon leave their laptops at home.

The next big thing, Porter predicts, will be voice recognition systems for hand-held computers.

“Let’s say you want to have a shirt-pocket computer five years from now that you can talk to, do your voice mail, do word processing while you’re sitting on an airplane, or doing whatever you’re going to do, instead of lugging around a notebook computer that weighs six to eight pounds,” Porter says. “If you can do that, that will have a huge market because the people schlepping those six- to eight-pound computers hate the weight.”

The next generation

With Dataplay, Volk once again is pushing the envelope. According to Porter, Dataplay appears to be working on a miniaturized optical disk drive for devices such as MP3 players, personal electronic devices and digital cameras.

“Obviously, as they talk about a miniaturized optical disk drive and they talk about the kinds of applications they’re talking about, they’re talking about a much smaller disk drive than the 1.8-inch at Integral,” Porter says.

“So far, there aren’t any miniaturized optical disk drives. That’s not been done before, and it’s a pretty advanced kind of project.”

IBM, the only other game in town working on the tiny disk drives, has a 340 megabyte microdrive, which, according to company statements, “weighs less than a AA battery and can hold 200 times more data or images than a floppy disk.” IBM’s microdrive can be used with IBM ThinkPads and in digital cameras and hand-held computers; the purchase price is $455.

The microdrive industry, however, is a risky market, says Kevin MacGenis, vice president of engineering for Mobile Storage Technology.

Mobile Storage Technology products are used in laptop computers, and MacGenis says his company will maintain that focus for a while.

“I would think in the next two to four years (the microdrive) area will probably heat up to a market that would be of interest to most, but right now it’s really an emerging market,” MacGenis says.