InPhase shutting down?

InPhase, one of the pioneers of holographic storage technology, appears to be shutting down. As I wrote last year, while the technology sounds promising it still has a long way to go. There is no real use case, and the price per gigabyte is still higher than for other storage media.

The local newspaper Longmont Times-Call is reporting that the company’s 60 employees picked up their final paycheck last Tuesday. One of their founders, Bart Stuck, says they are still working on a way to reorganize and find new capital; but many employees have left since they were forced to accept minimum wages last year.

Most experts agree that their prototypes looked good; they helped the company secure millions of dollars from investors. But transforming these into a working, production-ready model proved to be difficult. Meanwhile competitors such as General Electric are stepping up; my guess is that one of them will buy the remaining InPhase assets within a couple of months.