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BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE: Business Week ebiz | |||||||||||||||||
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E Ink's Message: We're Creating a New Medium The company's electronic-ink displays -- with a paper-and-ink look -- could help bring easily changeable messages to far-flung stores, homes, and offices It looks like an invention that could revolutionize the publishing industry: a versatile display technology that can be produced on thin sheets of plastic and can flash text messages almost anywhere -- bringing information out from behind computer screens and into the physical world. The implications for e-business of such an innovation -- called "electronic ink" and now being developed by Cambridge (Mass.) company E Ink Corp. -- are important. Inventors envision wireless broadcast receivers woven into the spine of an electronic book or folio, enabling bursts of news and other data to reach an electronic-ink display at the home, office, or carried under your arm. With better resolution than liquid-crystal displays, electronic ink can be read in tricky lighting situations from almost any angle. "Paper's a great medium because it's portable and it doesn't erase itself," says Kenneth A. Bronfin, senior vice-president at Hearst New Media & Technology, one of E Ink's financial backers. "If they can move the product to something that looks and feels like paper, so you can lie in bed with it or fold it in your pocket, it could have very wide acceptance" in consumer and business applications. TANTALIZING CONCEPT. To meet such an ambitious goal requires display technology that's extremely thin and lightweight, and flexible enough to install by unrolling it onto the wall of a building, for instance, or folding it under your arm like a newspaper. It has to run on low power and be sharp and clear when viewed from almost any angle. Another hurdle: E Ink will have to produce its display technology for a fraction of the cost of today's flat-panel displays. That's a tall order, but E Ink's 80 employees have been working for two years in a backwater industrial park in Cambridge to refine their new material. And they're making progress on several fronts. They claim their electronic ink will be the basic ingredient for a new type of media that would combine the superior look of ink with the dynamic capability of an electronic display. The concept has tantalized technologists for decades. But chemistry and electronics weren't well enough integrated to produce a prototype -- until recently. An early version of electronic ink was developed in 1997 by Joseph Jacobson, an associate professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, along with two undergraduate students, Barrett Comiskey and Jonathan Albert. Jacobson and his collaborators quickly founded E Ink, contributing a total of six patents to cover basic electronic ink technology. The company has drawn support from some big backers and signed deals in 1998 with Motorola, Hearst, Interpublic Group, and three venture funds for a total of $15.8 million in equity financing.
Internet portal Yahoo! Inc. has found another way to use electronic ink. The Web portal is pushing its online shopping service with consumers in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York by having people wear sandwich boards that convey messages aimed at harried shoppers. Messages promoting the virtues of Yahoo!'s online shopping experience say things like: "Parking always available," "Open late at night," and "No perfume attacks." Says Luanne Calvert, a Yahoo! marketing manager: "This is much more efficient than a weekend's worth of advertising in these cities, and the word of mouth we're getting is good. That counts for even more than exposure through advertising." THOUSANDS OF BEACH BALLS. How does e-ink work? To the naked eye, it looks like regular ink. In fact, the material is made up of millions of tiny spheres called "microcapsules." To understand how a microcapsule works, imagine a clear plastic beach ball inside of which are several dozen white Ping-Pong balls floating in a suspension of colored water. If you looked into the beach ball from the top, you would see a lot of white Ping-Pong balls suspended in liquid, and the balls would appear white. From the bottom, you would only see the colored water, and the balls would appear dark. If you put thousands of these beach balls in a field and could make the Ping-Pong balls move between the top and the bottom of selected beach balls, you could create images in the field. The actual microcapsules are about 100 microns wide, which translates into about 100,000 microcapsules per square inch. Particles of titanium dioxide, the same whitener that colors golf balls and white house paint, are suspended in an oily base. When an electric signal pulses through a grid of thread-like wires sandwiched into the paper or plastic, the titanium dioxide particles jump to the top, or fall to the bottom of the microsphere, depending on the charge. That gives electronic ink its capacity to change the image it displays. Once the image is fixed, it stays fixed -- even when the power is turned off.
Like any innovation, electronic ink faces plenty of challenges before it can take hold. The next test is moving beyond single-color electronic-ink displays to full color -- a critical step if the company plans to move to high-resolution displays that can depict images and animation. "Radio paper," the kind of display that could receive regular news feeds through a wireless receiver, is at least five years off, depending partly on how rapidly the company can come up with an inexpensive wireless receiver. E Ink investor Motorola is working with the company to develop that technology. In the meantime, keep your eye out for a sign that uses electronic ink. It may be coming soon to a store near you. Judge covers technology for Business Week from Boston. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ |
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 WEB POINTERS Click here to visit the sites mentioned in this column: E Ink MIT's Joseph Jacobson Media Lab's MicroMedia Bell Labs' October, 1999, press release Plastic transistor research at Bell Labs Pierre Wiltzius profile | ||||||||||||
