Move designed to bring optical disc storage technology to market more quickly Optware, the Japanese company behind a holographic storage system that can cram 200GB of data onto an optical disc, has opened a U.S. office in a move designed to bring its technology to market more quickly, it said Monday.Optware of America is based in Longmont, Colorado, and charged with taking research and technology developments from Optware’s head office in Japan and turning them into products, said Yasuhide Kageyama, manager for business development and marketing at the Yokohama-based company.“When you talk about the storage market, especially enterprise storage, about 40 percent in revenue comes from North America and 30 percent from Europe,” said Kageyama. “There is a lot more opportunity in this area, especially in the movie storage, medical, health care, oil and gas industries.” When fully operational, the U.S. division will employ about 100 engineers and customer support staff, he said.Optware plans to launch a first-generation writable disc for the enterprise market in the second half of next year. That will have a capacity of 200GB, said Kageyama. The company is also developing a read-only disc with a capacity of 100GB for consumer use and expects that to be available in 2008. In its labs, the company is working on expanding disc capacity to 1TB per disc, he said.Optware has attracted venture capital from some big names. In July it received investment from Toshiba and several Japanese investment companies, and earlier it attracted money from Fuji Photo Film Co., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., and Intel Capital Japan. Technology Industry