Memories can mean many things. From the technology world, one thinks of megabytes and gigabytes. From a human standpoint, memories are a bit different, as they aren’t so binary since, over time, the mind blurs the distinct lines of the here and now. In that light, it was a privilege to be behind the camera to film the person, Eli Harari, and some of his team whose work several decades ago makes possible the ubiquitous capture and storage of today’s memories.

Great Memories of a Person Critical to the Success of the Flash Memory Business

Flash Memory Summit Technical Chairperson, Brian Berg, interviews some of the team that was responsible for creating the first flash disk drive. Eli Harari, founder and former CEO of SanDisk, along with Firmware Engineer, John Magnan and engineer and current SanDisk CTO, Kevin Conley, discuss the important contributions Bob Norman made to this effort. Norman was recognized for his work with the 2015 Flash Memory Lifetime Achievement Award.

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Beaming in Some Big Announcements

With its announcement of a 16 Terabyte drive using three-dimensional Vertical NAND Flash memory (3D V-NAND). Samsung had a visible (and floating in its booth) proof point that flash memory is to the point where it is competitive with hard-drives for many applications. Anders Graham, SSD Product Marketing Manager, points out that one of the applications of this drive could be massive storage, as exemplified by Samsung’s announcement of a configuration of 48 of these 16 Terabyte drives in 2 rack units for a total of 792 Terabytes.

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A Game Changer for the Data Center

2015 may be remembered as the year when flash memory overtook hard-drives as the storage media of choice for a variety of applications. In the above interview, Tien Shiah, Product Marketing Manager -SSD of Samsung Semiconductor, discusses Dell’ recent announcement of the integration of Samsung’s  TLC flash drives with a cost-point as low as $1.66/Gigabyte.

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Gigabit City – New Mexico’s Fastest Internet 

The town of Clovis (approx pop. 40,000) is home to the fastest Internet speeds in New Mexico according to the gold standard of speed tests, Ookla.  Customers of Plateau experience download/upload of 149.62 and 132.79 Mb/s, respectively. Plateau’s COO, Vince Tyson, shared that their fiber-enabled speeds are getting the attention of customers, as Plateau recently signed up their 1,000th customer to a “Gigabit City Internet” plan.

Plateau’s Gigabit plans include options for 100 Mbps ($50/month) and 1 Gbps ($70), with upgrades available for voice and video. Of course, because it is fiber, a customer can be upgraded from 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps without a truck roll. An interesting part of their strategy is that they use LTE to serve the low-end of the market with prices starting at $24.95 per month.

To get an idea of how they rolled out a gigabit and its impact on their network, check out this video interview.

Some Tweets and Short Thoughts:

• ACA To @FCC: Small Systems Keep Closing, Pressured By Excessive And Rising Programming Costs
• “The Uber of politics.” This app seems to be about breaking down the barriers between the governed and the governing; great idea and this sort of thing is very much in need as the world increasingly automates.
• 5 things planners need to know about the impact of autonomous vehicles. Easy to view slide share that explains how connectivity and automation will change everything and that city planners need to be accounting for these changes now!
• @DriverlessNow @Domaincomau #autonomy allows decoupling of parking from housing
• Poor #WiFi put #American #Heroes in the right place at the right time.

The Korner – Winter-Summer in Jackson Hole

It is somewhat ironic that the world bankers met this week at one of the world’s most beautiful places, amidst a turbulent time in the financial markets. This video provides scenes from the Jackson Hole, Wyoming area. In a sense, this video, which juxtaposes shots filmed in the winter and the summer, is a metaphor for the financial markets and their inevitable cycles.