A Recyclable, Paper USB Drive

USB drives can take on all kinds of shapes, limited only by the size of the port. Intellipaper plans to roll out one with a memory chip embedded in a sheet of paper. That not only makes it about as small as possible, but also foldable and thin as a sheet of card stock.

If you receive such a card, you tear off the bit of card stock with the embedded memory chip along a perforation, fold the torn bit twice to make the drive thicker and then plug it right into a USB slot.

Intellipaper sent us a few business cards and the university postcards. We had no problem fitting the drive into the USB port on a laptop. The disk image appeared on our Mac laptop, and we could open the files on it without a hitch. Unfortunately, we weren't able to test how well it wrote data, since the first batch is read-only, like an old-fashioned CD-ROM.

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Holy Cow!!!

Can you imagine the implications with a paper USB? Say you had something you wanted to mail, being that it's paper, there would not be a weight or size problem. Also the fact that it's paper means you could be cutting down the footprint of say something plastic.

If the paper drive gets wet, you just let it dry out and you can use it again. You need to get rid of it, then just tear it up and throw it away.

Very cool technology... almost "Steam-Punk" like.

That is an interesting piece of technology. I would think they would be able to put it on a more durable material though. Paper may reduce the carbon footprint, but it's still paper.

It definitely makes transferring data more discreet though.

Sweet find.

Just...WOW!

I'm glad you posted this to share. I'd have thought someone lost their mind and was determined to short circuit a computer by inserting a straw or something if I'd seen this from across a room and not known context from your article here. I'm amazed by what they come up with these days.

On another note to this, the Spy business must be a wild wild place these days. Hearing how this works and the way it's used and disposed of just made me think back for some reason to the accounts of microdots and all the other arcane tech used to hide things in plain sight. Now, it's just a strip of paper. Color me impressed!

That's amazing. Thank you for sharing.

That's just crazy. 66MB of basically disposable memory.

I can think of all sorts of James Bond or Mission Impossible applications for that.

Thanks for sharing.

interesting, though i wouldn't say it was at all practical. Sending data is much more easier over the web, and the design looks pretty fragile. The main advantage of psychical storage over cloud storage is robustness, not much use if its so small and easy to loose.

This reminds me of the movie Ultra Violet where they have paper like cell phones that are dispensed like sandwiches. This is pretty cool. Great Find!

Paper is not durable at all! If its in your pocket, you sit down and squash it then what? Not to mention other destructive things you can mistakingly do with paper. Interesting bit but odd. And why would they want a lighter usb flash stick anyway? I mean the current ones are light enough as they are. You cant even feel them on your key ring or in your pocket.