It was a bit of a surprise to find out Fountain Valley-based Kingston Technology Co., the top maker of memory for PCs and consumer devices, is readying a line of flash memory drives.
When I sat down with the company in April for another story on the topic, Kingston said it didn’t have immediate plans to enter the market, but was looking into it.
Kingston already buys flash to make memory cards that go into computers, cameras and cell phones. It also makes USB flash memory drives, which allows files to be shared among computers.
But it hasn’t made what are known as solid state drives,flash memory drives that are used as a computer’s primary source of stored software and files. Solid state drives are starting to go head to head with traditional disk drives among companies and others who need higher reliability and speed.
Word that Kingston plans to come out with a flash drive broke in a roundabout way when a conversation with a sales director for Kingston’s operations in Europe, Middle East and Africa got posted on a relatively obscure tech news Web site, blocksandfiles.com.
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Kingston lab: testing market for solid state drives |
Kingston’s usually not big on announcing its intentions for new markets. Instead, it quietly sets the stage for production and waits until a market is a proven moneymaker.
“This is one of those things where we wouldn’t issue an announcement,that’s not Kingston’s style,” spokesman David Leong said. “Kingston wants to do this right. We are willing to wait until we can get it right to say to the world that we have solid state drives.”
What kinds of drives Kingston will sell isn’t yet known. There still are some concerns about slow consumer acceptance of flash drives.
The main reason is the high cost of flash,the building blocks of the drives,are too prohibitive for mainstream PC users to bite.
“There are a lot of factors that play into when we will enter it and with what products,” Leong said. “The most important factor to consider right now is that we’ve seen solid state drives that are highly expensive and do not justify the high price for the performance gains over hard drives. This market is in its infancy and what’s out there is not as good as advertised.”
Kingston’s playing with a few options.
“We can go the after-market route straight to consumers, server or enterprise routes,” Leong said.
The move pits Kingston against other makers of flash drives, including Milpitas-based SanDisk Corp., the biggest maker of flash memory devices.
If Kingston chooses to sell to big companies or server makers, it would compete with Santa Ana’s STEC Inc., which sells flash memory to the military and industrial users.
Speaking of Kingston, the folks at the company asked for a clarification of an item that ran in this column a few weeks back.
The company wanted to make clear it’s been selling memory products to the government for some time.
The column item was part of an ongoing plan at Kingston to make its most popular government server memory products comply with a set of rules for buying products by the General Services Administration, the procurement arm of the federal government.
New Ricoh Boss
Tustin’s Ricoh Electronics Inc., part of Tokyo-based Ricoh Co., appointed a president to run its local manufacturing.
Ricoh Electronics is the manufacturing arm of West Caldwell, N.J.-based Ricoh Americas Corp., the Japanese company’s U.S. unit.
Yoshinori Yamashita, who’s set to head the division locally, has nearly three decades under his belt at the company.
He’s replacing Shunsuke Nakanishi,who is set to be president of Ricoh’s British operations.
Like other Japanese companies, Ricoh changes its regional leaders every few years or so, bringing in a new executive from Japan. The executives do stints at the different arms of their companies to gain a feel for global operations.
Yamashita is set to oversee about 1,200 people at four sites,three in Orange County and a fourth in Lawrenceville, Ga.
Ricoh Electronics makes digital copiers, assembles chips onto circuit boards and builds all-in-one machines that can print, copy, scan and fax in Tustin.
In Santa Ana it produces thermal media products, or special paper that allows for heat-sensitive printing instead of ink. Ricoh puts a special chemical coating on the paper, which it gets from other suppliers.
Another Santa Ana site makes toner,ink that goes into its copiers and printers.
In the Running
Irvine wireless chip startup Wispry Inc., which makes chips for cell phones, is in the running for two awards from the Global System Mobile Association, a trade group for mobile phone technologies.
The company was named one of the top 15 innovators in the Americas division for the group’s mobile innovation award.
WiSpry is vying for the “most innovative wireless device-centric technology.”
