What's in store?

In 2000, the world's first portable memory card was launched. The standard for what became the SD or Secure Digital card, was a joint development of Panasonic, SanDisk and Toshiba. The first few cards had capacities up to 64MB. In the 17 years since then, capacity has increased almost 17,000 times: A year ago, SanDisk showed a prototype of the world's first 1 terabyte SD card, the stamp-sized storage that digital cameras use. It is not yet commercially launched, but data-hungry recording formats like 4K and 8K and 360-degree wide, have already created a market for such jumbo storage.

The younger brother of the SD card is the microSD — the tiny, SIM-sized chips, we slip into mobile phones, to extend their on-board storage. In September this year, Western Digital, now the parent company of SanDisk, offered the highest capacity microSD card — 400 GB. It could hold 40 hours of full HD video and transfer it at around 100 MBPS. Such big capacities don't come cheap: it costs $250 (Rs 16,500) -- possibly more than the price of the phone itself! But then you pay for the portability, not just capacity. The advantage is, you can seamlessly use such cards as extensions of the native storage on the phone -- thanks to tweaks that come with the new versions of the Android operating system.

In fact, the microSD card is edging out the full-sized SD card in some cameras, like the bike or head-mounted action cameras and as on-board storage for drone cameras. Tiny computers, like that students' favourite, the Rasberry Pi, have also updated their specifications to work with microSDs.

What happens when you build a WiFi antenna into an SD card? You transmit the photos and videos captured by your digital camera, wirelessly to a browser or email, without going through a PC or laptop. The technology is now offered by SD cards like Eye-Fi, Toshiba FlashAir, Transcend Wi-Fi etc. And in yet another nudge towards the future, SD cards have merged with USB. You can plug the SanDisk SD Plus into a USB port by swinging open a hinge that reveals a USB adapter.

The largely consumer-focused SD card and its micro avatar, are slowly finding corporate use as well. Vivek Tyagi,who leads Sandisk's enterprise business in India, says almost a third of the business is now from enterprises. We are only a few years away from a 1TB microSD card, he feels.

They used to say : "You can never have too much storage in the kitchen". Likewise, for SD storage, it seems!

Shubh yatra, Safe driving!

On board SD card records every nuance of a truck driver's performance.

A recent technical workshop in Bengaluru, organised by the SD Association -- the nodal agency for the memory card business -- showcased an interesting use-case of SD cards developed in India, for a global market.

Indian talent-fueled and San Diego (US) headquartered Netradyne, has leveraged Artificial Intelligence to enhance a driver safety and monitoring system for commercial vehicles. Called Driveri, it includes: 4 HD cameras, a GPS navigator, a 4G LTE communication channel and a Deep Learning processor. The device mounted on the windshield, analyses driver performance ( does the driver maintain a safe distance with pedestrians, does he or she stop at traffic lights, etc.) and driver state (drowsy, distracted, cell phone texting). If the algorithm recognizes an ‘unsafe driving event’ it captures the video around that event and uploads to the Cloud. The system will then alert the driver in real-time to avoid accidents. Driveri, uses SD cards to record and store all the on board data.

Today Netradyne is using its algorithm and hardware to improve driver safety. But its technology can easily be leveraged to assist autonomous driving -- when that is ready to take off, says the company's Vice President (Engineering), Teja Gudena.

—IndiaTechOnline