HACKENSACK, N.J. – Call me naive, but when compact discs came on the market in the early 1980s, I thought they were indestructible.
Vinyl scratched, but you could manhandle these new CDs and they would still play your tunes perfectly.
Then I heard that digitally induced “thwub-thwub” from a damaged disc and realized the technology had flaws.
Until now, disc makers have concentrated their efforts on packing more data and introducing new formats – CD-R, CD-RW, and DVD. But in December, a tiny Colorado start-up with New Jersey roots rolled out an invention called the Scratch-Less Disc aimed at preventing a treasured disc from ending up as a coaster.
The brainchild of Todd J. Kuchman, a Hunterdon County, N.J., native, the disc is made with a series of 20 tiny bumps around the edge that raise it off a flat surface just enough to shield the important underside. They use a General Electric-engineered polymer coating to add a layer of protection.
Kuchman, founder of Denver-based Scratch-Less Disc Industries, makes sure to say his disc is “virtually” scratchless – you can take a nail to the thing and it will be damaged. But the patented bump system protects the disc from damage caused by day-to-day handling, he explained.
Kuchman, 35, came up with his idea in 2000 after he and his brother Jay, a co-founder, watched a big stack of discs fall and slide across a table at a Denver rodeo where the brothers went to watch some bull-riding.
“Todd said to me, If those things had little bumps on them, they wouldn’t get ruined,’ and I said, You’re kidding me,'” Jay Kuchman recalled.
Todd Kuchman remembers feeling sorry for the teenage girl selling the CDs and thinking, “That’s just wrong – there’s got to be a better way to prevent that from happening.”
He went home that night and worked until 3 a.m., using a soldering iron to create tiny bumps on a disc, and putting it into a player to test his theory.
The brothers, then selling high-end exercise equipment, along with pal Sean Brooks, another thirty-something New Jersey native, decided that week to file a patent on the bump idea and go into business.
A year later, the trio formed a company.
“We’re just three guys from Jersey with a good idea,” the ebullient Brooks said in January at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where the company touted its product. Brooks and Todd Kuchman met on their first day of college at Monmouth University. Brooks is now director of global sales.
Scratch-Less Disc claims its CD, available in a 700-megabyte CD-R format, works in 99 percent of all disc players. Kuchman and his team of six employees (they use an outside sales force) plan to roll out a CD-RW format soon and DVD formats by the spring.
The CD-R disc is more expensive than regular discs but Kuchman believes people concerned about protecting their digital data, from music to photos, will be willing to pay a premium. They’re about $1 each, although the company is still “testing price points,” Kuchman said.
Analyst Wolfgang Schlichting, research director at technology consulting firm IDC and an expert on digital storage, said the larger CD manufacturers are watching Scratch-Less Disc to see how the company’s products fare in the marketplace. Kuchman’s company paid IDC to conduct a survey to see if consumers have problems with damaged discs and would be willing to pay more for a disc that doesn’t scratch. More than half said they would.
The bumps “are a unique idea,” said Schlichting. Other companies are putting stronger protective coatings on their discs, but the bumps on Scratch-Less Discs are visible. “That’s a clear benefit – everybody can see if it’s a better-protected disc or not,” said the analyst.
In addition to selling its own blank discs, Scratch-Less Disc also wants to license its technology to music and entertainment companies that sell CDs and DVDs.
Schlichting thinks they have a chance. “They’ve got to play their cards right,” he said, adding they are “increasing their market awareness and if they could catch on – they’re a small company and they have to find the right partners,” he said.
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