The technology is there, but E Ink (the company) is steadfastly refusing to lower prices because they believe there's a market for this. Now go to Alibaba and find that you can get a flexible, full-color OLED sheet for the same price as a given size E Ink panel.
Go on eBay and buy an older NOOK device (they all ran Android) for $20, tape it to your wall, and point at your web page of choice.
A great example of patents strangling innovation. If anyone has more concrete details on the way this company is holding back this technology I’d love to read details. Thanks!
The irony is that they are probably limiting their profit too. With lower prices the number of applications would skyrocket and they would get much bigger income.
The only reason I can think of is that scaling the production would be difficult for some reason?
From skimming through their website, it looks like they target business applications with bigger displays (Health Care, Transportation, Industrial & Packaging, ...) which I would assume are high margin contracts.
So maybe another reason would be that offering lower prices for big displays would reduce profits from these business clients more than it would increase profits from the additional low-margin mass-market volumes.
If large screens with a decent refresh rate were readily available and competitively priced, I imagine they'd be a huge hit with devs - I know I'd love one.
Last I checked there were over a dozen patents from the 1990s to the 2010s that cover everything from manufacturing to software. IIRC the most important patents actually cover some algorithms on the display controller that won't be public domain until the mid to late 2020s.
IIRC it gets a bit messy once we start talking about hardware implementations of algorithms. I mean, is an electronics circuit that essentially implements an algorithm still a software patent?
I am responding to a parent comment that suggested there was more demand but the company was holding it back. If that is true the only way one company could hold it back is patents.
No. They could just choose not to sell at a lower price. In a frictionless market someone else would step in and sell the good at the lower price, but in reality if not enough people want it then that third party won’t bother.
I don't think the answer is that simple. Would the initial innovation even be worth pursuing if not the existence of patents? Hard to say. At the very lease we do know that in a decade there's no more strangleholds.
This is why I believe patent laws (and copyright laws, but that's another story) are completely broken. Innovation is being stilfled because the world is addicted to profit, and not just profit, but easy profit. Gone are the days when making a superior product was the only way to get ahead, no. Companies want exclusive monopolies over anything and everything they create. An engineer just has to draw squiggle on a whiteboard and that becomes the IP of the company they work for. The patent system needs a complete overhaul.
NYC performed a LIDAR scan of NYC in conjunction with CUNY a few years ago so that they could build a 'solar map' to help estimate how much solar capacity could be installed on a building. Anyone know where to grab the LIDAR scan data from?
When looking for new apartments in NYC, a combination of Google Street View and the Flyover feature in Apple Maps does wonders to validate how truthful brokers are in their listings.
It looks like this is actually the strategy that Memoto is doing with its life logging camera, which makes perfect sense in that use case: save battery by offloading the geotagging math to the server.
Exactly this. I was in GoonFleet several years ago and was always amazed at the crazy behind-the-curtain machinations were going on all the time when I was just a newbie. But VR was a good guy and a good poster, and loved his job. He posted as much information as possible about new job postings in the Foreign Service Information department and answered everything that was thrown his way.
It will work if you have <64 GB of data to back up. You can optionally exclude things that take up a lot of space like your Applications folder. Honestly though, your best bet would probably be to use a "real" drive for time machine backups and/or a third party online backup solution. Backblaze suits my needs quite well.
Interesting information point to add: Chumby designed a product for Best Buy (the Insignia Infocast). Not sure how successful it was, but I'm pretty sure that there are a lot of details that we are not privy to.
Yeah chumby (disclaimer: I worked @chumby) was involved with 3 Infocast branded products.
The Infocast 3.5" (basically the chumby One in a different box)
The Infocast 8" (basically the chumby 8 in a different box, though the Infocast 8" preceded the release of the chumby 8)
An Insignia/TIVO co-branded television set (TIVO did the main UI for that device, but it didn't have DVR capability) and chumby did a bunch of apps for it.
So, yeah, Best Buy actually outsources development of a lot of products under the Insignia, Rocketfish, Dynex, etc brands, so this business being suggested isn't new to them... they are already in it. But they generally just make "me too" products with this model, I don't think they have the will nor the vision to fund truly groundbreaking CE work.
Chumby is an interesting case, and a sad one. I think Chumby has a lot in common with much larger companies such as Nintendo, RIM, and HP, in that their business model was demolished by the iOS steamroller that they didn't see coming.
Unlike those other companies, Chumby didn't have the cash or the product-line diversity to put up any kind of a fight. If they had survived, they'd eventually find themselves running Android on commodity hardware, just like everyone else at the low end of the market for consumer gadgets is eventually going to have to.
The Infocast was a nice little product. I have one sitting next to me right now. It was not, however, a big sales success. I bought mine on closeout in late 2010.
Part of the problem was that Best Buy didn't know where to put the thing, nor how to market it. The 3.5" model was sitting next to the alarm clocks. The larger 8" model was sitting next to the Sony Dash in the picture frame area. You can figure out the rest from there.
The Sony Dash was also "chumby powered". It sold a lot better than the Infocast did, though. The Dash was in many ways the best chumby you could get in that it had a capacitive touchscreen, it had the least ugly industrial design of all the chumbys (IMO), it supported netflix, etc. OTOH it had gaping problems like Sony's insistence on using BIVL (which among other things makes the Dash the worst chumby for using Pandora and a few other services), it was locked down (unlike all other chumbies you can't just ssh into it and start hacking away), etc.
Something to add into the mix: I've had a few friends have decent success with Cedexis' tools for content targeting. One of the complaints that I hear about retina-enabling websites is the performance impact on mobile users. I had a demo whipped up for me once that will serve up different site versions depending on a number of factors, including platform and connection type/quality. So someone on a 3G iPad connection can get the non-retina version, while someone on a wifi link will get the full-res version.
The long and the short is that I have a feeling that we are going to see more and more interesting tools popping up in the near future as more and more web designers purchase hidpi computers and decide to write up some library to make their life easier when they decide to retina-enable their websites because it looks horrible on their machine.
It would certainly be helpful if we had a simple, standardised way for browsers requesting content from a web server to specify some kind of preferred quality level, based on both hardware capabilities and some mechanism for determining expected download speeds and the user’s preference for higher quality vs. saving bandwidth.
Go on eBay and buy an older NOOK device (they all ran Android) for $20, tape it to your wall, and point at your web page of choice.