A reader has just pointed me at a press release that E-ink released yesterday. It seems that Sony’s new 13.3″ writing slate (the one with the flexible screen) is using a screen made by E-ink.
They’re calling the new screen tech Mobius. Instead of the glass panel used in many ereaders today, the Mobius screen uses a plastic backplane that is flexible and as a result is more resistant to impact.
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It looks like my favorite screen tech company is about to go through another expansion phase again.
Digitimes reported this morning that E-ink Holdings, the parent company to the screen manufacturers E-ink (epaper), Sipix (more epaper), and Hydis (cutting edge LCDs), will soon be selling 60 million shares of stock.
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Mike Cane slipped me a press release today which looks to be a simple case of patent trolling – but isn’t.
It seems my favorite screen tech company is now being sued by a company no one has ever heard of. Copytele, a screen tech company based on Long Island, has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against E-ink in the Federal District Court for the Northern District of California. They’ve also filed suit against AUO and E-ink, alleging “breach of contract, fraud, conspiracy to monopolize, unfair business practices, antitrust”.
So, this is a simple case of patent trolling, right? Not necessarily.
Update: Copytele has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Skype. They are clearly a troll.
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Some analysts have been predicting a continued drop in ereader sales as more and more people switch over to tablets, but not everyone thinks that will happen. The chairman of E-ink has gone on record with his prediction that global demand for ereaders will increase in 2013.
Yeah, I don’t believe it either.
Digitimes is quoting Scott Liu as saying:
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E-ink has just released their latest quarterly statement, and if the numbers reported by Digitimes are correct then it looks like this screen manufacturer may be about to get rid of the red ink which was on its ledger these past 2 quarters.
E-ink chairman Scott Liu spoke to investors earlier this week at the quarterly meeting. He reported that income was up 70% over the previous quarter to NT$7.595 billion. Losses were also down last quarter, to NT$234 million, or less than a third of what E-ink lost in Q2.
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Here’s an interesting piece on paidContent talking about the possibility of embedding electronics in genuine paper in order to add the ability to play audio, send Facebook likes, and otherwise link up a genuine ordinary paper to the Internet. The net-enabled paper would apparently use electrically conductive ink that would react when touched, like the capacitive screens of modern tablet, but not much is really known about the new technology yet.
The tech seems to be strictly one-way—there’s no mention of any sort of e-ink style responsive display in the article (though the project’s homepage does suggest some hybrid interactive display formats). The videos with it tend to talk about things like making it economically possible to provoke sounds out of various paper things like posters or facial tissue boxes. When used in newspapers, it could do things like collect click counts and provide analytical engagement data for publishers and marketers. The paidContent piece doesn’t touch on privacy concerns at all, which is a bit odd when you have quotes like:
Dundee University product design researcher Jon Rogers says: “For pretty much the first time, in a scaleable and manufacturable way, we’re going to connect the internet to paper. When you start to connect that to news, we’re in a goldmine zone.”
IFA-Berlin is going on right now and Charbax is in the thick of it. A couple days ago he got a few minutes with Sri Peruvemba, the head of marketing at E-ink, and as usual Charbax got a look at gadgets that no one else has posted.
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