We probably have heard of services to recover application and data files from accidental deletion or even from a crashed hard disk drive. The techniques used vary from simple recovery of files using software techniques through the understanding of the file system structure to needing a clean room laboratory to fix the disk drives. As a business, you would likely be charging an initial cost to investigate before you can even give a quotation! Anyway, that’s that business.
What I am thinking (wild thoughts) is to start a business to provide file recovery services for niche areas. For example, the company Lexar Media actually has a product called Lexar Image Rescue (which I believe is in version 4.0 currently).
This is an interesting product in that it just specializes in recovering images (pictures) from any type of memory card. On a side note: I wonder if it can recover RAW file formats.
Anyway, the whole idea is that we are into multimedia and we have all sorts of non-volatile memory devices. Maybe we can start to produce software to recover for specific memory types for specific types of file, e.g. phone book entries in your mobile phone memory card? video files from your camcorder Compact Flash card?