Rainbow Versatile Disc [Edit]

Indian Student Sainul Abideen of Muslim Educational Society Engineering College develops an eco-friendly, paper-based storage system called “Rainbow Versitile Disc” that can store 90 to 450GB on a single disk. The data is converted to so-called Rainbow Format” made up of various geometric shapes that can be printed onto a piece of paper; that can then be read by a scanner or a Rainbow Card Reader.

“The advantages of the RVD are evident, Abideen says. It’s cheap (one tenth of the cost of a CD, he claims, while offering 131 times the storage capacity) and planet-friendly (no nasty polycarbonates here). For example, magazines might dispense with the free CD and offer a Rainbow Data tearsheet instead.”