E Ink to be bought for $215M by Prime View International

NEW YORK (AP) — E Ink Corp., the maker of the innovative display for the Amazon Kindle e-book reader, said Monday it has agreed to be acquired by a Taiwanese company for $215 million.
The buyer is Prime View International, which has been Cambridge, Mass.-based E Ink's partner in making "electronic ink" displays for Amazon.com Inc. and Sony Corp.
The deal will help the combined company develop color versions of its displays and mass produce them by the end of 2010, said Sriram Peruvemba, E Ink's vice president of marketing. Current models show shades of gray.
Privately held E Ink is expected to demonstrate its latest color display prototypes Tuesday at a display technology show in San Antonio.
E Ink's displays are used in e-book readers because they look similar to regular paper and consume very little power. However, they take a relatively long time to switch between images, making navigation slow.
E Ink makes the top layer of the electronic ink displays, then ships them to Prime View, which adds a bottom layer that's similar to those used in LCD panels. Prime View bought the electronic ink technology of Royal Philips Electronics NV in 2005.
E Ink, which was spun off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said it had raised more than $150 million from investors, including Intel Corp., Motorola Corp. and Hearst Corp. E Ink had first-quarter revenue of $18 million. It has not revealed whether it is profitable.
Peruvemba said E Ink expects to keep its offices and factory in Massachusetts and is continuing to hire, but the headquarters of the combined company will be in Taiwan.

Amazon inroduces Kindle DX

Introducing Kindle DX–Amazon’s Large Screen Addition to the Kindle Family of Wireless Reading Devices



Large Kindle DX Display and New Features Provide Enhanced Experience for Reading a Wide Range of Professional and Personal Documents
SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–May. 6, 2009– Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) today introduced Amazon Kindle DX, the new purpose-built reading device that offers Kindle’s revolutionary wireless delivery and massive selection of content with a large 9.7-inch electronic paper display, built-in PDF reader, auto-rotate capability, and storage for up to 3,500 books. More than 275,000 books are now available in the Kindle Store, including 107 of 112 current New York Times Best Sellers. New York Times Bestsellers and New Releases are $9.99 unless marked otherwise. Top U.S. and international magazines and newspapers plus more than 1,500 blogs are also available. Kindle DX is available for pre-order starting today for $489 at http://amazon.com/kindleDX and will ship this summer.

“Personal and professional documents look so good on the big Kindle DX display that you’ll find yourself changing ink-toner cartridges less often,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com Founder and CEO. “Cookbooks, computer books, and textbooks – anything highly formatted – also shine on the Kindle DX. Carry all your documents and your whole library in one slender package.”

New Large Display

Kindle DX’s display has 2.5 times the surface area of Kindle’s 6-inch display. The larger electronic paper display with 16 shades of gray has more area for graphic-rich content such as professional and personal documents, newspapers and magazines, and textbooks. Kindle reads like printed words on paper because the screen works using real ink and doesn’t use a backlight, eliminating the eyestrain and glare associated with other electronic displays.

The New York Times Company and Washington Post Company are launching pilots with Kindle DX this summer. The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post will offer the Kindle DX at a reduced price to readers who live in areas where home-delivery is not available and who sign up for a long-term subscription to the Kindle edition of the newspapers.

“At The New York Times Company we are always seeking new ways for our millions of readers to have full and continuing access to our high-quality news and information,” said Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., chairman, The New York Times Company and publisher, The New York Times. “The wireless delivery and new value-added features of the Kindle DX will provide our large, loyal audience, no matter where they live, with an exciting new way to interact with The New York Times and The Boston Globe. Additionally, by offering a subscription through the Kindle DX to readers who live outside of our delivery areas, we will extend our reach to our loyal readers who will be able to more readily enjoy their favorite newspapers. Meanwhile, we are continuing to work with Amazon to make The New York Times and The Boston Globe experiences on Kindle better than ever.”

Kindle DX’s large display offers an enhanced reading experience with another category of graphic-rich content—textbooks. With complex images, tables, charts, graphs, and equations, textbooks look best on a large display. Leading textbook publishers Cengage Learning, Pearson, and Wiley, together representing more than 60 percent of the U.S. higher education textbook market, will begin offering textbooks through the Kindle Store beginning this summer. Textbooks under the following brands will be available: Addison-Wesley, Allyn & Bacon, Benjamin Cummings, Longman & Prentice Hall (Pearson); Wadsworth, Brooks/Cole, Course Technology, Delmar, Heinle, Schirmer, South-Western (Cengage); and Wiley Higher Education.

Arizona State University, Case Western Reserve University, Princeton University, Reed College, and Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia will launch trial programs to make Kindle DX devices available to students this fall. The schools will distribute hundreds of Kindle DX devices to students spread across a broad range of academic disciplines. In addition to reading on a considerably larger screen, students will be able to take advantage of popular Kindle features such as the ability to take notes and highlight, search across their library, look up words in a built-in dictionary, and carry all of their books in a lightweight device.

“The Kindle DX holds enormous potential to influence the way students learn,” said Barbara R. Snyder, president of Case Western Reserve University. “We look forward to seeing how the device affects the participation of both students and faculty in the educational experience.”

New Built-In PDF Reader

Kindle DX features a built-in PDF reader using Adobe Reader Mobile technology for reading professional and personal documents. Like other types of documents on Kindle, customers simply email their PDF format documents to their Kindle email address or move them over using a USB connection. With a larger display and built-in PDF reader, Kindle DX customers can read professional and personal documents with more complex layouts without scrolling, panning, or zooming, and without re-flowing, which destroys the original structure of the document. Everything from annual reports with graphs to flight manuals with maps to musical scores can be viewed on a single, crisp screen with Kindle DX.

New Auto-Rotation

Kindle DX’s display content auto-rotates so users can read in portrait or landscape mode, or flip the device to read with either hand. Simply turn Kindle DX and immediately see full-width landscape views of maps, graphs, tables, images, and Web pages.

New 3.3 GB Memory Holds Up To 3,500 Books

With 3.3 GB of available memory, Kindle DX can hold up to 3,500 books, compared with 1,500 with Kindle. And because Amazon automatically backs up a copy of every Kindle book purchased, customers can wirelessly re-download titles from their library at any time.

Incredibly Thin

Kindle DX is just over a third of an inch thin, which is thinner than most magazines.

3G Wireless, No PC, No Hunting for Wi-Fi Hot Spots

Just like Kindle, Kindle DX customers automatically take advantage of Amazon Whispernet to wirelessly shop the Kindle Store, download or receive new content in less than 60 seconds, and read from their library—all without a PC, Wi-Fi hot spot, or syncing. Amazon still pays for the wireless connectivity on Kindle DX so books can be downloaded in less than 60 seconds—with no monthly fees, data plans, or service contracts.

Syncs With Kindle for iPhone and other Kindle Compatible Devices

Just like Kindle, Kindle DX uses Amazon Whispersync technology to automatically sync content across Kindle, Kindle DX, Kindle for iPhone, and other devices in the future. With Whispersync, customers can easily move from device to device and never lose their place in their reading.

Massive Selection of Books—Plus Newspapers, Magazines, and Blogs

The Kindle Store currently offers more than 275,000 books, including popular books like New York Times Bestsellers, New Releases, and fiction and nonfiction released in the past several years. Dozens of newspapers and magazines are also available for subscription or single-edition purchase. BusinessWeek and The New England Journal of Medicine are available in the Kindle Store starting today, and The Economist will be available soon. Subscriptions are auto-delivered wirelessly to Kindle overnight so that the latest edition is waiting for customers when they wake up. Over 1,500 blogs are available on Kindle and updated and downloaded wirelessly throughout the day.

Kindle DX includes all the other features Kindle customers enjoy every day, including:

Wirelessly send, receive, and read personal documents in a variety of formats such as Microsoft Word and PDF
Look up words instantly using the built-in 250,000 word New Oxford American Dictionary
Choose from six text sizes
Add bookmarks, notes, and highlights
Text-to-speech technology that converts words on a page to spoken word
Search Web, Wikipedia.org, Kindle Store, and your library of purchased content
No setup required—Kindle comes ready to use—no software to load or set up
Amazon Kindle is sold through Amazon Digital Services, Inc.

Bridgestone Develops Propietary Color E-paper Device with Pen-input Capability

Bridgestone Corp developed a color electronic paper (e-paper) device that supports pen input. The device combines the "QR-LPD," the company's e-paper device using its proprietary electronic powder and granular material, with a color filter and Wacom Co Ltd's electromagnetic induction type pen input tablet.

To enable the pen input, Bridgestone accelerated the screen refresh speed of the e-paper device. It now takes only 0.8 seconds to refresh the screen, whereas the company's previous A4-size e-paper device needs 10 to 15 seconds.

Although the company did not reveal the details, it quickened the refresh speed primarily by improving drive technologies, it said. This enhanced the device's ability to follow the pen input and enabled it to display input texts and graphics smoothly.

This e-paper device features a passive matrix panel. Bridgestone exhibited the new color e-paper device at a trade show taking place in Tokyo.

First Color E-Book Reader Goes on Sale

Tokyo and Kawasaki, Japan, March 18, 2009 – Fujitsu Frontech Limited and Fujitsu Laboratories Limited today announced the start of consumer sales in Japan of the world’s first color e-paper mobile terminal, FLEPia, available for purchase from today through Fujitsu Frontech’s online store “FrontechDirect”. Developed by Fujitsu Frontech and Fujitsu Laboratories, FLEPia is the first ever mobile information terminal to feature color electronic paper (color e-paper). In addition to being lightweight and thin, the color e-paper mobile terminal features an easy-to-view 8-inch display screen capable of showing up to 260,000 colors in high-definition, in addition to being equipped with Bluetooth and high-speed wireless LAN. FLEPia is also power-efficient, enabling up to 40 hours of continuous battery operation when fully charged, and does not require power for continuous display of a screen image, consuming power only during re-draw. Featuring significant storage capabilities, when used with a 4GB SD card, the color e-paper terminal can store the equivalent of 5,000 conventional paper-based books when each book is 300 pages long at 600KB per book, thus being environmentally friendly.　In Japan, FLEPia can now be easily ordered from Fujitsu Frontech’s online store. As an additional option, through Fujitsu Frontech’s dedicated website, FLEPia users can purchase e-books from the largest e-book online retailer in Japan and download the e-books directly into FLEPia. As the only color e-paper mobile terminal commercially available, FLEPia offers a convenient, paper-free and eco-conscious enriched innovative mobile reading experience to users.



Background
Fujitsu Frontech and Fujitsu Laboratories co-developed proprietary color e-paper, and announced the launch of FLEPia in April 2007 as the world’s first color e-paper mobile terminal. Previously, commercial samples of FLEPia were available for purchase on a limited basis for corporate use only, as part of field trials of the first ever color e-paper mobile terminal. Compared to the FLEPia commercial samples which were used in field marketing, the latest FLEPia offers 1.5 times higher brightness and greater contrast, enabled through optimization of the color e-paper’s optical properties. Re-draw speed was also enhanced by 1.7 times. In addition to previously available high-speed wireless LAN, FLEPia is equipped with Bluetooth, enabling users to easily download and access various content from nearly any desired location.


Key Features
1. Lightweight, thin and high-performance: 8-inch screen displays up to 260,000 colors in high-definition
Weighing just 385 grams (385g) and only 12.5mm thick, FLEPia is lightweight and easily portable, while offering an easy-to-view 8-inch screen. Featuring world-leading color e-paper technologies, the mobile display terminal enables users to view a multitude of documents and images in high-definition at 768 dots x 1,014 dots (XGA), with up to 260,000 displayable colors (4,096-color and 64-color display is also possible, if desired).
2. Power-efficient color e-paper; enables up to 40-hour continuous battery operation
As the color e-paper employed displays text or images by reflecting external light, FLEPia does not require power to maintain screen display, consuming power only during re-draw (power consumption is approximately just 1/50 that of standard notebook PCs under similar usage conditions). When fully-charged, FLEPia offers up to 40 hours of continuous battery operation (conditions: display of 2,400 pages at 1 page per minute with 64 colors).
3. Feature-rich external interface (Japan: Bluetooth, high-speed wireless LAN)
Equipped with Bluetooth in addition to high-speed wireless LAN, FLEPia offers dial-up connection via various Japanese mobile carriers, thus enabling easy download of content featuring images and text (excluding audio and video content) from nearly any desired location. Also included as standard features are a USB mini-B connector supporting USB2.0 (480Mbps) and a SD memory card slot. Stereo speakers (embedded) offer audio playback of e-books, including picture books.
4. User-friendly operation: touch screen, digital stylus, scroll key, function buttons
A touch screen featured on the 8-inch display screen, along with a digital pen, enables easy operation of FLEPia. Also included are a scroll key and 6 function buttons, enabling users to freely and quickly implement commands on the screen in all 4 directions (up, down, left, right), as desired.
5. Two e-book viewers included as standard features (XMDF and .book formats)
Two popular e-book viewers widely used on PCs or mobile phones in Japan - “BunkoViewer” (XMDF format; “bunko” refers to “library” in Japanese) and “T-Time” (.book format) are included as standard features. These e-book viewers enable downloaded e-books to be easily read with FLEPia. The e-book viewers offer an enriched reading experience compared to conventional paper-based reading, enabling readers to jump from the table of contents to desired sections and freely enlarge or shrink text or images. A vast number of e-book sites are currently available on the Internet, and a wide range of approximately 20,000 Japanese e-books in either XMDF or .book format can be downloaded with FLEPia (see “Content Storage Capacity” under Specifications).
6. Equipped with Windows CE5.0 (Japanese version)
In addition to the content browser, Microsoft’s Windows CE5.0 (Japanese version) enables use of an internet browser, e-mail, and various software on FLEPia. Microsoft’s Office can also be used to generate text documents, spreadsheets, or presentations, making it possible to view a variety of documents - including e-mail file attachments - while in transit or in the field and away from an office environment, thus fully maximizing FLEPia’s multiple functions as a mobile information terminal. In terms of text input, a software keyboard and digital stylus make it possible to send e-mails and other text.


Dedicated customer-support website offers technical support, maintenance, software upgrades (Japan)
Fujitsu Frontech will offer a dedicated customer-support site, FLEPia World, on its Japanese website. FLEPia World will offer product information to potential customers considering purchase of FLEPia, in addition to technical and maintenance support to FLEPia users. Software upgrades will be offered free-of-charge.
Furthermore, customers will have the option of purchasing e-books through the FLEPia World website via Japan’s largest e-book online retailer - offered through a collaboration between the retailer PAPYLESS CO.,Ltd. and Fujitsu Frontech - and downloading the e-books directly onto FLEPia.

Pricing, Options, and Shipment

Product		FrontechDirect on-line purchase price** (Japan)	Availability (Japan)
FLEPia unit set* (White or Black)		99,750 JPY	From April 20, 2009
Options (sold separately)	Book cover (White or Black)	5,800 JPY	From April 20, 2009
	Storage case (White or Black)	5,500 JPY	From April 20, 2009

*Set includes USB cable (mini-B connector), AC adaptor, stand, wrist strap

**Prices include 5% consumption tax

Sales Target (Japan)

50,000 units by the end of 2010

Specifications

Dimensions, Weight	158mm (Width) × 240mm (Height) × 12.5mm (Depth. Thinnest section: 11.3mm) , Weight: 385g
Screen Size	8-inch (123.6mm x 164.8mm)
Unit Colors	White or Black
Resolution	768 dots x 1024 dots (XGA)
Number of Displayable Colors	260,000 colors (3 Scans); 4,096 (2 Scans); 64 colors (1 Scan)
Re-Draw Speed	1.8 seconds (1 Scan), 5 seconds (2 Scans), 8 seconds (3 Scans)
Wireless LAN (embedded)	IEEE802.11b/g（11/54Mbps *1）
Bluetooth	Bluetooth Ver2.0+EDR
Memory	SD Memory Card*2 (Maximum up to 4GB)
USB Connector	USB2.0 (480Mbps) mini-B connector × 1
Audio	Stereo speakers (embedded), headphone connector x 1
Power Supply	Lithium polymer battery (embedded), AC adaptor Fully-charged continuous operation： 40 continuous hours (Conditions: Display of 2,400 pages/at 1 minute per page/with 64 colors)
Content Storage Capacity (when used with a 4GB SD card)	Equivalent to 5,000 paper-based books when each book is 300 pages long with 600KB per book
Security	128Bit AES (Advanced Encryption Standard)
Software	FLEPia application, Japanese version Microsoft Windows CE5.0, Japanese e-book viewers: BunkoViewer (XMDF), T-Time (.book)
CPU (embedded)	XScale RISC CPU
Environmental Operating Conditions	Operation: Temperature range: 5 to 35 degrees Celsius, Humidity: 20 to 80% RH Storage: Temperature range: - 10 to 50 degrees Celsius, Humidity: 20 to 80% RH

*¹ Figure indicates theoretical maximum transmission rate for standard

wireless LAN; does not indicate actual data transmission speed.

Fujitsu Explores Color E-newspaper Potential at Restaurants

Fujitsu Ltd and Fujitsu Frontech Ltd will conduct a verification test of a mobile information terminal that uses color electronic paper with SoftBank Telecom Corp and Mainichi Newspapers Co Ltd.

Customers of "Termina Kinshicho Fujiya Restaurant" can pick up the terminals equipped with a color electronic paper module on the tables and browse newspapers and advertisements wirelessly sent to the terminals. The four companies will verify whether the electronic paper module can be accepted as a terminal for reading newspapers and other content, and whether the service can promote sales and boost customer satisfaction.

The test is scheduled for Feb 4 to 13, 2009, using Fujitsu Frontech's "FLEPia," a mobile information terminal incorporating color electronic paper. The companies installed four units of the FLEPia so that the restaurant customers can use them for free.



The content delivered to the terminals includes "Mainichi Shogakusei Shimbun" (Mainichi Newspaper for Elementary School Students), advertisements for Fujiya Restaurant and the "Termina" shopping mall, timetables of JR (Japan Railways) trains and weather forecasts.

Users can read the newspapers by operating the terminal while waiting for their orders, or enjoy viewing the advertisements and timetables that are automatically switched to a different screen every several minutes when the terminal is not being operated, such as when the users are eating.

This system uses the "BB Mobile Point" wireless LAN service to deliver the content and to regularly update the content being displayed on the FLEPia.

The electronic paper modules use electricity only when they switch the displayed information. As they don't need to be charged during business hours, there is no need to provide electricity to the table. LCD panel-based terminals, which have been used on tables, require an electrical supply at the table.

Via Tech On