When I was a kid in the days of the discman, I came up with the idea of a cigarette-box-sized optical card reader that instead of spin the media it would scan the card and play the songs in it. I called it the "opticard" and thought that would be extremely cool to have some music cards in your pocket instead of carrying inconveniently sized CDs in your belt.

I wanted to write Sony about my idea but never got the balls. Years later they released the minidisc, still bulky, a total flop. The memory stick was a much better idea from them, I never knew why they didn't implement an iPod earlier than Apple