Singapore Company Trek Claims IP Rights For Flucard

Singapore Trek's has claimed IP rights after commercialising a new compact flash memory card, name the FluCard. FluCard is an intelligent SD card that is supposed to be able to network with other similarly equiped devices like camcorders, cameras etc and also connect to the Internet.

Trek is claiming unique intellectual property rights to FluCard, and is roping in big industry like Toshiba to police IP rights enforcement.

In my opinion, putting a communication ability into a SD memory card does not requires much technical innovation. Many devices out there are already wireless connected, either by Bluetooth or Wi-Fi.

Trek's claimed to innovation when compared to other similar Wi-Fi SD card like the Eye-Fi where that "the FluCard is more sophisticated, secure and easy to use. I guessed Eye-Fi could say the same for their card.

On the claim for ease of use, Trek said that configuring the FluCard to work on a wireless network is done over the Wi-Fi enabled phone instead of over the PC, which makes the process more convenient.  How this is more convenient is questionable, does this means only Wi-Fi phone users can use the FluCard.  I believe most people are more adapt a going to the Internet over the PC. And most PC have a SD card slot anyway.

For security, Trek says that content on the device can be password protected. Is this supposed to an innovative idea? What if you forgot your password?

The claim to sophistication, lies in the fact that content can be push to the FluCard, which makes it a marketing tool as well as making it easy to deliver updates to FluCard users. So for some sophistication FluCard users has to forego some privacy in having content push to them and being interupted in the middle of a video shoot by a software update?  Also the concept of content push and automatic update is already well established in PCs.  Personnally I turn off these features because of privacy and securing concerns.

It remains to be seen if the market will go gaga over the FluCard.

Is there much intellectual property rights to protect anyway, as Trek only advantage is that they are probably the first to incorporation much more computing power into a common SD memory card. Not to mentioned that it takes up 3 years of Trek's R&D effort.