Financial - Page 6

E Ink announced announced an investment it made in Wuxi Vision Peak Technology (previously Wuxi Wei Feng Technology), a service provider in e-paper display R&D.

E Ink (which invested in Wuxi via its subsidiary Transcend Optronics) and Wuxi Vision Peak will form a strategic partnership and join foruces to expand the E Ink market and promote the use of e-paper in applciations such as electronic price tags and electronic shelf labels. Besides the investment, E Ink will provide technical support.

A new crowdfunding campaign at IndieGogo aims to raise $75,000 to produce Smart Stickers, a 40 grams real-time display that uses a 2.7" E Ink display and connects to any smartphone to display notifications, missed call, reminders or any other information you can think of via the API.

The Smart Sticker costs only $30, and if the campaign is successful, the first products will (hopefully) be available by February 2016.

Sony launched its own crowd funding platform helped to find and finance Sony employees projects. The platform is called First Flight, and two of the first three projects use E Ink displays.

One of the E Ink projects is Sony's FES E Ink watch, that already attempted crowd funding back in 2014. The second project is the HUIS E Ink remote controller - and this one already managed to raise over $72,000 (well past its $40,000 target).

E Ink Holdings reported their results for Q4 2014, with NT$793 million ($25 million USD) in net profit. The company suffered from an operating loss of $951 million ($30 million USD), but had a net profit due to royalties from the high-res FFS LCD manufacturing technology (used for the first time in an Apple iPhone). Royalties amounted to $NT3.56 billion ($110 million USD) in 2014.

For the whole of 2014, E Ink's net profit dropped to $NT13 million ($420,000 USD) - down from $NT29 million ($930,000 USD) in 2013.

Pebble Technology, the company behind the successful Pebble smartwatch, is now developing a new version called Pebble Time - that sports a color e-paper display. The company launched a kickstarter campaign with an aim to raise $500,000. It took them one hour to raise $1 million, and a few days later they already passed $8 million in funding.

The Pebble time uses a "color e-paper display" The original pebble used a 1.26" (144x168) monochrome memory LCD (transflective LCD made by Sharp). It's not clear what kind of displays will be used in the new Pebble, but as far as I know sharp do not produce a color memory LCD.

Latvian-based Draugiem Group launched a Kickstarter campaign with an aim to develop Displio, small customizable Wi-Fi enabled display. Displio uses a 2.7" E Ink display and can last for a month on a single charge.

Draugiem aims to raise $65,000 (they already have $31,000 committed) and if successful, they aim to ship the first products in Jun 2015.

Update: turns out that Pixel Qi still exists, it's products are still being made by some makers (including CPT), and it's IP actually has been released to the public (under the DPL license). Read more here.

Back in 2010, Pixel Qi started producing its interesting dual-mode displays. This technology was promising as it allowed you to have a regular LCD display that can be switched to a black-and-white sunlight-readable power-efficient mode. Pixel Qi never managed to sell a lot of displays or find any serious device partner.

The company is now out of business. US-based Tripuso Display Solutions still produces Pixel-Qi displays under license, and may end up buying Pixel Qi's IP. In any case this is a sad end to an innovative technology that managed to attract an investment from 3M back in 2011.

There are reports that Dutch-based EPD developer IRX Innovations has gone bankrupt. This is sad news from one of the early EPD pioneers (the original company was established over 10 years ago as Irex Technologies by ex-Philips employees).

Irex first aimed to develop e-reader based on an E Ink display. Their first e-reader (the Iliad) shipped in 2006, and they launched several more models later on. Irex Innovation went bankrupt in 2010, but it was bought by IRX Innovation which also kept all employees. Irex developed a new EPD technology which they called Electro Osmosis which is similar to E Ink (electrophoresis) but the big difference is that the liquid that contains the charged particles also move inside the pixels in Electro Osmosis (in electrophoresis only the charged particles are moving). This enables much faster refresh rates.

E Ink Holdings report good results for Q3 2014, with revenues reaching $132 million up 6.4% from last quarter (but down 14% from Q3 2013). The company says that EPD orders remained steady, with new orders coming in from Amazon, Kobo and Sony.

The company is still dependent on the e-reader market, but it is trying to enter new markets such as wearables, retail and more.

Portugal-based Ynvisible is developing flexible transparent electrochromic displays and the company is already producing some displays in low volume. The company now launched a kickstarter project called Printoo that aims to develop an Arduino-based platform of paper-thin, low-power boards and modules. The company already reached their financing goal of $20,000 and there's still 25 days to go.

The Printoo platform includes 17 modules, including a microprocessor, a printed battery, Ynvisible's flexible, transparent display and a flexible solar cell. This is pretty cool stuff and it'll be great to see how the company delivers on their promise.