Going Cucku
Personal computer hard drives have increased dramatically in storage capacity over the years and so has consumers’ appetites to fill their hard-drive space with music, videos and photos. According to PC Pitstop Research storage capacity doubles every two years. This appears to be following Moore’s law. The Median disk capacity today is 100GB.
I don’t know about you but I rarely print photographs now but like many people I cherish those digital photos stored on my hard-drive – I’ve also got those tax files, bank statements and pay-slips too. So when I found this new software from Cucku that lets me back-up my important files to a friend’s computer, I downloaded it and now have all my files backed-up with a friend using Cucku’s 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard. (The software is aptly named Cucku as the Cuckoo bird lays its eggs in another bird’s nest.)
While transistors and hard-drive capacity has grown rapidly it’s a shame that broadband speeds here in the US have not followed the same pattern. According to a Cisco white paper video now accounts for one-quarter of all Internet traffic and will be close to 90 percent of consumer traffic by 2012.
With the era of video communication approaching, the Internet will finally be tested but this growth in video communication won’t just be one-to-one video calls. There will be growth in video sharing, collaboration, and conferencing, video monitoring, consumer TelePresence, and telemedicine to name a few applications of real-time video.
Additionally, mobile broadband data traffic will be over twenty times what it is today in 2012. According to a report earlier this year from Informa Telecoms & Media, this may help operators offset the threat of declining voice revenues with mobile video traffic expected to grow more than thirty-fold by 2012.
These forecasts bode well for companies offering real-time video applications and services but I’ll leave the last broadband note to the president of the Communications Workers of America, Larry Cohen who said: “This isn’t about how fast someone can download a full-length movie. Speed matters to our economy and our ability to remain competitive in a global marketplace.”
Tags: broadband, Real-time video, Storage
December 12th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
Thanks for mentioning Cucku. One other advantage of backing up to a friend is that you can do the first backup in person, and also restore if needed. You mention the current anemic state of US broadband – this is a big problem when uploading a lot of data. Trying to backup a large photo (or even worse, video) collection to a datacenter requires a lot of patience.
December 31st, 2008 at 8:48 pm
I have read this post. This is very much true. Even I own a blog account on video conferencing. Video conferencing is indeed a great innovation in technology and communications. One day video conferencing will be like an ordinary house-hold item in the next 5-10 years.I will mention your post in my blog.