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Disk-Drive
Veteran Conner Pushes His New Smart Card
By DON CLARK Staff Reporter of
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
March 20, 2003
Finis Conner built the fastest-growing company
in Silicon Valley history. Now, he hopes to
build something even bigger, by going small.
The legendary disk-drive salesman, who
co-founded and sold Conner Peripherals Inc., is
pushing a new kind of smart card with enough
capacity to store medical files, images and
eventually digital movies. Each card, expected
to cost about $15, will store information on a
tiny floppy disk instead of the chips used with
today's smart cards.
Mr. Conner says greater capacity and built-in
security features will make the new cards
perfect for storing biometric information to
identify travelers or to enforce rules about the
use of digital content. A chief executive could
keep confidential business plans in his wallet
but be sure that no one else could read the
information if the card was stolen, he says. Mr.
Conner's San Jose, Calif., start-up, StorCard
Inc., is completing prototype cards and a device
to read them, which fits in a standard slot in
laptop PCs and could be added to cameras,
hand-held computers or media players. The drive
also will read conventional smart cards.
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