The hottest technology company in the Boston area sits in a low-slung 100-year-old converted factory in the West Cambridge Industrial Park, not far from the Concord Avenue rotary. Inside its modest lobby hangs a 2-by-4-foot display. Messages scroll across it: “Welcome to E-Ink … the time is now 2:58 p.m. ’’ It’s 30 minutes slow.
The sign doesn’t use light-emitting diodes, the standard for scrolling displays. Instead, it was one of the early commercial applications of E-Ink’s electrophoretic technology. Electrophoretics uses electricity to move particles in fluid. In this case, the particles are black and white, positively or negatively charged, and E-Ink’s software manipulates them with electric current to create messages that appear to scroll across a sign or to mimic the look of words on paper. Back in the early part of this decade, when E-Ink was a struggling start-up, the lobby sign showed it had a working product. Today, it reminds us that sometimes you have to fail in order to succeed.
Signs nearly put E-Ink out of business. Its first product was a sign, much smaller than the one in its lobby, for pricing goods in retail stores. Retailers could automatically update prices on these signs from a central location via the pager network, saving money and improving accuracy. Only it turned out that lots of stores lay outside of pager range. Ones that were in pager range tended to have steel roofs, foiling the updates. By 2001, E-Ink was nearly out of cash, and in the wake of the dot-com crash, it was difficult to get more. So, according to cofounder and current CEO Russ Wilcox, E-Ink decided to dump all of its projects save one: making the electronic ink and related software for a digital book reader Sony was planning.
Seen at The Boston Globe
