This "Rainbow Format" data is then read by a scanner. In a demo at his college lab, Abideen demonstrated 432 pages of foolscap content compacted onto a four-inch-square piece of paper. The Arab News correspondent said he also saw a 45-second video clip read from ordinary paper.

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.

Abideen is currently working on a RVD scanner compact enough to fit in laptops. He's also developing a SIM-card-sized Rainbow Data card for mobile phones capable of carrying 5GB. Thinking bigger, he moots the idea of a "databank with almost 123.60 Petabyte capacity". ®

Bootnote

Hmmm, we're sceptical too: "432 pages of foolscap content compacted onto a four-inch-square piece of paper"? You do the maths, but we reckon that's way short of a 90-450GB disk. Oh yes, and spare us the "I think you'll find there's already a perfectly good paper-based storage system: it's called a book" quips.