I actually gave a lecture last month to some of the developers at my company(about 40 of them) on how Ethereum works and the potential blockchains have for data storage and applications. We do media and entertainment so it is pretty huge if we could securely move into one of the datastorage coins for much cheaper than the millions being paid for redundant cloud backups of the thousands of terabytes of data we have.
Forking to a private chain like a lot of the banks are looking at also has a lot of use cases; I could see retail using it for warehouse/workflow/shipping tracking and having a much more robust system. Good luck and that sounds awesome, I wish I could have a team to investigate ways to implement it here.
can you give me an example of a data storage coin to investigate..would be appreciated.
So there's MAID and Storj which are the two front runners right now it seems, SIA is another contender but I haven't seen much from them recently. Ethereum is supposed to at some point have on-chain storage but it hasn't been as much of a priority as the other parts have been.
Just like most software, we'll pretty much have to wait and see which one takes up widespread adoption and is actively developed. Right now they're all in their infancy.