CES 2013: Transporter Lets You Create Your Own Off-site Cloud for $200

Startup company’s clever technology, styling, and naming made it a Kickstarter success

1 min read
CES 2013: Transporter Lets You Create Your Own Off-site Cloud for $200

Strolling the aisles of Digital Experience, an event for CES press attendees held last night in Las Vegas, there were lots of shiny, colorful, cute, or sleek objects on the hundred-plus tables, with eager entrepreneurs, designers, and marketers ready to convince me that their product/software/service is the next big thing. A fair number were fairly easy to walk by. But the simple silver cones on one table, however, drew me like a magnet. I loved the industrial design and the name, Transporter, seemed to fit the design. I hoped that whatever the heck this gizmo was made as much sense as its look and name.

Geoff Barrall, Transporter founder, convinced me that it did. The Transporter is essentially a cloud in a cone; pop it somewhere it can connect to the Internet (preferably in a different building than your computer) and it acts as offsite backup or file sharing device, requiring no setup or computer connection. Barrall first envisioned his customers as lawyers and other professionals who don’t want to entrust confidential information to a commercial cloud, but at $200 for a bring-your-own-drive version or $300 for a 1terabyte version, sees the product catching on with consumers who want off-cloud storage, or to share files within a small group.

Barrall said his campaign on Kickstarter, the micro funding service, hit 200 percent of its milestone yesterday, and the company will start shipping Transporters by the end of the month.

Follow me on Twitter @TeklaPerry

 

 

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An IBM Quantum Computer Will Soon Pass the 1,000-Qubit Mark

The Condor processor is just one quantum-computing advance slated for 2023

4 min read
This photo shows a woman working on a piece of apparatus that is suspended from the ceiling of the laboratory.

A researcher at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center examines some of the quantum hardware being constructed there.

Connie Zhou/IBM

IBM’s Condor, the world’s first universal quantum computer with more than 1,000 qubits, is set to debut in 2023. The year is also expected to see IBM launch Heron, the first of a new flock of modular quantum processors that the company says may help it produce quantum computers with more than 4,000 qubits by 2025.

This article is part of our special report Top Tech 2023.

While quantum computers can, in theory, quickly find answers to problems that classical computers would take eons to solve, today’s quantum hardware is still short on qubits, limiting its usefulness. Entanglement and other quantum states necessary for quantum computation are infamously fragile, being susceptible to heat and other disturbances, which makes scaling up the number of qubits a huge technical challenge.

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