AR&D Reinventing Local Media

Russell Wilcox is President and CEO of E Ink, the company that invented the electronic ink best known for making the Amazon Kindle possible. When I met Russell, I was intruiged. I asked if he would do a Q&A for us to describe what E Ink is and in what future applications we may see it. I was especially interested in his take on how local media could use E Ink in the near future.

Russell won Ernst & Young’s New England Entrepreneur of the Year in 2009.

Give us the simplest explanation of E Ink.

Electronic ink is made of tiny clear microcapsules. Inside the capsules there are white and black particles. It looks a bit like a very tiny snow globe with both white and black snow inside! But there are millions of these tiny capsules and they are so small your eye cannot see them individually.

Now, to make an electronic display, we start with a glass sheet that has an array of pixels in rows and columns, and we coat that with a layer of microcapsules. When the computer gives the pixel a positive charge, all the black particles near that pixel are pushed to the top and the capsule looks black. When the computer gives the pixel a negative charge, all the white particles rise and the capsule looks white.

The secret of electronic ink is the raw materials. Our black pigments are the same carbon black that is issued in printer’s ink to make it black. Our white pigments are the same titanium dioxide that is used to brighten paper, and to make a lot of other things look white, including white wall paint, golf balls, and even non-dairy creamer!

How E Ink Works:

How did the idea develop? What was your role?

The idea came from Joe Jacobson at the MIT Media Lab. He wanted to invent a book that could be flexible and have all the pages change at the push of a button.

I was the business guy who helped start the company. My job was to get the funding, find some interested customers, and then cheer like mad while the scientists invented better and better versions of the technology so we could sell a great product.

What commercial applications is it used in now?

Our technology is found in many electronic book devices, including the SONY Reader and the Amazon Kindle. We are also used in other flexible and paper-thin display applications. The recent Alias2 cellphone from Samsung has a changeable keypad covered with an E Ink display – open it like a flip phone and the keys show numbers for quick dialing; open it like a laptop, and the keys switch to show letters for texting. We are also in displays for electronic shelf price labels, memory stick indicators, watches and signage.

Right now, we see E Ink in monochrome (and shades of grey) in products like Kindle and the Phosphor watch. You have colors — will we see them in the mainstream?

We have color at the demo stage now. You may see first products in late 2010 or early 2011.

The E Ink applications aren’t like TV – they don’t move so much as “draw.” Is there the possibility for enough screen refreshing for E  Ink that we could see motion? At some point, could local media use an E Ink product to show video or photo slideshows?

We can do some simple animation now, like menu bars and pointers. This will keep improving over time. The coolest “fast” feature we can support now is pen input for handwriting – so you can have the experience of an electronic pen to go with your electronic paper. Products with this are out now in China and may come to the USA in another year or so.

Although we are not targeting the TV market, in the lab we have versions that are fast enough to watch some video and this could be useful for mobile video applications like video phone or watching YouTube.

Put on your futurist cap: how could news use E Ink products in the  near future?
News organizations can publish to electronic book devices like the Kindle right now, and that does take advantage of vast cost savings on distribution.

Most Newspaper companies make their money with advertising though, and so the big change in the near future that will benefit media companies is larger display sizes and color, which will allow them to sell effective advertising space.

Here is a flight of fancy… imagine that you can call up the Boston Globe and instead of a quarter ton of newspapers on your doorstep for $300 per year, they just mail you a “Boston Globe in a Box”. Inside is a large newspaper reader device with a wireless radio. You open the box, turn it on and it automatically downloads the latest Boston Globe and remains up to date at all times. The Globe does not need to charge you anything, because the advertising sales cover all their costs of collecting news, (and) meanwhile they can cut out all their newsprint and trucking costs. For an added fee you can get more newspapers, buy books, or surf the web.

What’s the wildest application, prototype or proposal you’ve seen for E Ink?
Wow, there have been a few!

- Animated makeup: A couple of cosmetic companies have had interest, and one medical company wanted to animate the face of a large doll, so that student doctors could practice on it. They wanted the doll to make lifelike expressions as the students did what doctors do. Others have asked about digital tattoos.

- An animated cup that would use the acid in soda pop to help activate a power source – imagine Harry Potter riding his broomstick on a Big Gulp cup.

- A protective coating for a building roof that would turn white in the sun and dark in the shade to manage heat

- A roll-up electronic book that looks like an ancient scroll

- A cover for a magazine that blinks the title to attract attention at the newsstand – we actually did this one with Esquire and Ford last year!

- Signage on subway cars that would change so you always have something to read

- A counter on a sneaker that would show you how many steps you had taken

And of course the original idea that started it all:

- A book with hundreds of pages, that could rewrite itself as a new book at the push of a button

That one’s still a ways off because it would be so expensive, but even with just one page, eBook devices today offer a satisfying reading experience, which will only get better over time.

I just picked up a wonderful book for inspiration, and I strongly recommend it to you. It’s called “The Experts Speak: The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation,” by Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky. It’s not a new book, but it is terrific. Among the many quotes that caught my eye deal with disruptive technologies. Here’s a taste:

The Telegraph: “[I am] not satisfied… that under any rate of postage that could be adopted its revenues could be made equal to its expenditures. – U.S. Postmaster General rejecting an offer by Samuel Morse to sell the rights to his telegraph to the U.S. Government for $100,000 c. 1845.

Cinema: “My invention… can be exploited for a certain time as a scientific curiosity, but apart from that it has no commercial value whatsoever.” -Auguste Lumiere (Co-inventor of the motion picture camera) 1895.

The Telephone:

“Well-informed people know that it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value.” – Editorial in the Boston Post on the arrest of Joshua Coopersmith who had been arrested for fraud for trying to raise money for his work on a telephone.

“That’s an amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one of them?” – President Rutherford B. Hayes after participating in a phone conversation demonstration.

Radio: (The U.S. District Attorney prosecuting the inventor of the Audion vacuum tube, Lee Deforest, for fraud in 1913): “DeForest has said in many newspapers and over his signature that it would be possible to transmit the human voice over the Atlantic before many years. Based on these absurd and deliberately misleading statements, the misguided public… has been persuaded to purchase stock in his company.”

Television:

Lee DeForest (remember – the guy who was prosecuted for raising money for his own work on radio tubes) said of television in 1926: “I consider it an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming.
“People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.” – Darryl F. Zanuck (head of 20th Century Fox Studios), c.1946.

The Computer: “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.” – Ken Olson, president of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977.

(Need I point out that he was running a computer company?)
Special Credit to Thomas Edison, for dismissing lots of inventions, including the phonograph – his own.

• “The talking motion picture will not supplant the regular silent motion picture.” (1913)
• “The radio craze… will die out in time.” (1922)
• “The phonograph is not of any commercial value.” (1880)

Now, you can always find people with opinions that turn out to be wrong. But note how many of these come from pioneers themselves. Edison and the Lumieres developed inventions and didn’t immediately see the value. DeForest was prosecuted while working on his radio tube, but saw the prospect of TV as an impossible waste of time. The president of DEC couldn’t imagine a reason for us to have computers. And the U.S. Post Office was practically handed its own Western Union, only to turn it down because it didn’t see Morse Code as a profitable way to send messages. These are the classic fears of disruption Terry I and write about frequently.

What’s important to learn from this terrific book is that there will be plenty of people who will tell you something can’t be done. There will be those who don’t even recognize the value of what they have. Learn from history (and have some fun with it). Stand by your work and your vision. Besides, who wants to be remembered for saying a bunch of things won’t work?