At the end of last year there was an article in Arab News concerning the invention of a printed code by Sainul Abideen (image above and closer view of the code below) which could store information with potentially a capacity of up to 450GB. This article got bounced around other news and technology sites (such as here) and even generated discussion about whether it was true / possible. Whether it is true or not the idea is certainly worth exploring and in its synchronicity to developments elsewhere prove this.

So far most of the emphasis on printed codes such as data matrix codes has been on the image encoding / decoding process and the recognition software used, not the amount of data space available. The thinking for codes such as data matrix is to allow for a link in the code and as long as that can store up to the maximum url length you can link to the multimedia file online. This of course requires three technologies working in tandem, the printed code, the reader (usually a mobile phone) and a connection to the internet. The Rainbow Technology is more concerned with being a storage medium and containing the multimedia. As such it gets us closer to truely pervasive and invisible digital media. For ideas of how a technology like this could be used see the research at variable environment seem to be doing.

If anyone has seen a high resolution image of this code, I’d be very grateful if you could pass me along a link or email it to me: garrett [at] this domain dot org.