Tom Coughlin is a 25-year veteran of the digital storage industry. He has worked at several companies (including Ampex, Seagate, Maxtor, and Polaroid) designing and managing the design of digital storage products. He is the founder and organizer of the Storage Visions Conference, the leading annual event on digital storage in consumer electronics. Attendance at Storage Visions has increased about 70% annually in recent years, and includes all the major worldwide players in the technology. Tom is also a market analyst in the storage area and the author of annual reports on entertainment content creation and distribution and on the integration of digital storage into consumer electronics. He has extensive industry contacts and a broad base of support for the research required to complete this book. He has over 50 publications and six patents to his credit and is active in the IEEE Consumer Electronics Society (current chairman of the Santa Clara Valley IEEE CE Society), the IDEMA Consumer Electronics Committee (co-chair), and other professional organizations. Tom has a bachelor of science in Physics and a Masters in Electrical Engineering with a minor in Materials Science.