eInk rocks it - Esquire and Ford Flex
A colleague of mine handed me a copy of Esquire’s October edition and for about three seconds I had no idea why he thought I should be reading Esquire. But after plopping it on my desk and returning to my never-ending inbox, I noticed that the cover seemed to be moving. I literally jumped out of my chair and started asking around - eInk!! Apparently I’m the last to know about this stuff since I don’t read as much as I should, but here’s a full article from the New York Times about the historic decision to run both the cover and the Ford ad inside the cover.
While there is still a way to go on developing the technologies associated with this, it’s pretty amazing stuff. Much of the research going on around this type of display is now going into video. While everything is a little while off, imagine what it would be like to have a tiny folded plastic display that you could just take with you and slap on a wall in order to watch HD quality TV anywhere, or read a newspaper on the train, or even take to a meeting and write your notes on it during a presentation (by the way if anybody wants to buy me a $700 christmas present, I want this). No more heavy monitors, wasting of trees, and copy machines.
And…of course, imagine if these personal technologies or subscriptions, could, say, be supported by advertising. All of the sudden print advertising becomes interactive. And measurable. Already, these devices are using wireless connectivity to communicate new information. As one of my colleagues pointed out, maybe we’ll even see eInk being used on billboards and more widely on store windows (already they are being used in grocery stores).
The one side comment I have about all this is that it’s very cool that Esquire (and Ford of course) included this technology in it’s latest issue. It’s groundbreaking. But I think in the future we’re going to see the magazines in these displays, not discardable displays in magazines.