The Future of Documents

CES is usually a great festival for new technologies. But ePaper was not one of these technologies, unfortunately.

There has been very few announcements around eReaders… An ePaper printer from Gembird (print directly to your e-Reader), the Cybook Odyssey from Bookeen, with very high customizability, high speed screen refresh which allows some (very basic…) animation – see video below:

That is quite surprising, especially when e-Readers (but also tablet) sales have soared over the holiday period. A recent study by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, showed that the percentage of adults who owned tablet computers increased to 19 percent in early January from 10 percent in November through mid-December. The survey found the same percentage increase in the number of adults who owned e-readers.

Both devices are most popular with high-income families, but e-Readers are more popular with women. More detailed results can be found here (text in french, but results in english).

So are ePaper eReaders on a temporary pause, or will they be totally replaced by tablets and more interactive devices? My guess would be that black and white eReaders are going to disappear, but “hybrid” devices which provide both the interactivity and color of tablets and the reading comfort and power consumption of eReaders with find their spot.

Devices like the Bambook for the chinese market or its sibling Kyobo for the Korean market are the first examples of this new breed. Both are based on the Mirasol color ePaper – as you’ll see from the video below, the device looks more like a tablet than an eReader, capable of reading videos, showing animations, etc…  - except that it boasts great readability in direct sunlight and extra low power when in bistable mode (e.g. stable image, no animation).

Interesting article on how Xerox PARC is now successful at making money from innovation, e.g. through small but profitable partnerships such as the one with ThinFilm Electronics.

In the past, PARC had been famous for not being able to capitalize on great innovation. After going through various phases, it adopted Open Innovation in the 2000′s. But after a few years, PARC better understood how to make money – establishing partnerships to make innovation work – and this model is now successful, as it generated over $60 million in 2010. PARC is also filing over 150 patents per year.

December is a pretty crazy month, and I have not had much time to blog. I however wanted to mention a few recent analyst reports where Xerox’ position was comforted, if not improved:

The latest Magic Quadrant for Managed print Services, Worldwide, comforted Xerox Corporation as a leader in that space, in particular the best on its Ability to Execute. The Ability to Execute axis position for each MPS provider is based on its success in delivering results today as well as its preparation to deliver results in the future. On this axis, Gartner verifies an MPS provider’s capability to deliver MPS based on direct feedback from extensive interviews with its clients and other provided customer references.

Xerox Corporation has also progressed in the 2011 issue of its Magic Quadrant for Entreprise Content Management, thanks to its Xerox Docushare 6.6, BlitzDocs Mortgage Processing, and Categorix for Litigation Services. But this is also owing to Online Document Management (ODM), MIDAS+ Healthcare suite, and a few others. Similarly, Xerox progressed significantly in their latest Entreprise Content Management Wave report.

Interesting article from Clayton M.Christensen and Scott D. Anthony (authors of  The Innovator’s Solution) on MIT Technology Review. Called The Empire Strikes Back, it takes a look at Xerox and other large corporation research – how Xerox, once known for its opportunities lost on innovation, is now turning things around.

What is true for Xerox is also true for other large corporations. Whereas disruptive innovation was typically introduced by start-ups ten years ago, established companies are now contributing more and more disruptive innovation – over 30% over the last few years. This, because large companies have understood that their survival depends on innovation, and not only in their core business.

Thanks to Michael Moore for finding the original “Digital Desk” (aka Lightworks) video that I mentioned in my previous post. Watch it… remember this was shot in the early 90s, and digitized from an analog tape…

It’s difficult to define the Future, which is why many people have different views into it. The Microsoft Vision of the Future, on which I blogged a couple weeks ago, was one video that certainly generated a lot of comments.

As you might remember, I found this video to be good, but  not quite as “visionary” as others in the past – most of the interactions looked like tablet – which sounds pretty commonplace today. Well, my own deception was nothing compared to many others. Read for example this (not so) “brief rant on the Future of Interaction Design“.  The author’s point is that the iPad – and tablets – are really a step back in the evolution of User Interfaces. Hands are used to manipulating, to touching, to feeling – so the glassy touch feedback provided by our favorite tablets is nowhere near as rich as other devices like… let’s say, a book?

So maybe the right path is not to continue improving more complex multitouch gestures, but instead focus on richer tactile interfaces – like in this Nokia HumanForm concept video below – based on Nanotechnologies, the phone is flexible and bendable,  reacts to gestures or flex/bend, and provides electro-tactile feedback.

And I like to believe Xerox research has contributed to define those new UI concepts. The  author of the rant above refers to Alan Kay (very  famous PARC researcher from the early days) and his Dynabook (although it was started before Alan joined PARC). Or, a reader alluded to early Xerox Research in Europe, where some multi-touch interfaces were prototyped in the early 1990′s in the “Digital Desk” concept called Lightworks. It had a great video that I can’t get a hold of, but here is a link to the history of this project – and true, it was really very powerful, mixing real (human drawings) with computer overhead projections, and multi-touch interfaces… surely inspired what we are seeing in the Microsoft video!

A number of Xerox Imaging Technologies have been added to the openxerox web site. I’ve already blogged about Simple Personalized Imaging and Natural Language Color which were quite cool.

Newly added, Similar Image Search can be pretty impressive in many cases. Similarly, Image Categorizer can have very accurate results – provided the category exists in its taxonomy. I tested some pictures taken inside the Eiffel Tower (the inside architecture, taken with a fisheye lens) and it did recognize it!

Finally, more experimental technologies include Catepix, a cute robot who analyses your Facebook photos to “reveal some of your personality”, and Aesthetic Image Search (Categorization, more than search), which finds images from a few pre-defined categories, then analyzes a picture for its “aesthetic qualities” – although I find the results to be subjective (hobby photographer with hurt feelings speaking ).

You can access all those at on the OpenXerox web site or check out this video:

PCWorld has had this interesting series called “30 days with…” for a while now. The latest one is “30 days with the cloud“, as seen from an end user perspective, and will compare various cloud tools over the next 30 days.

The first aspects the writer is discussing is choosing an online office productivity platform – between Google Docs, Zoho Docs and Microsoft Office 365 – a topic that I regularly blog about. Yesterday was Zoho, Google Docs was right before that, can’t wait for Office 365 and the final choice later today, then for other consumer cloud tools later this month.

I did not know these series before, but there are some interesting ones, including  30 days with the iPad, with Windows Phone 7 or Google Docs.

Microsoft often comes up with cool videos showcasing their vision of the future. The latest one, called “Productivity Future Vision” can be watched on Youtube:

As always, a very interesting and refreshing view of a possible future of technology. Although I have to admit I found this new video a bit less “visionary” than the Future Vision 2019 (produced in 2009)  that I blogged on a some time ago. Sign of times, most users now have tablet displays rather than ubiquitous displays in many different shapes or forms.

Will this vision really happen? Microsoft, having the largest R&D budget in the technology sector – is one of the few companies that can make their vision happen. Some argue the Return on their R&D investment is not always clear, but this huge company has turned out to be very successful in adopting new technologies such as Cloud Computing while maintaining or winning back their traditional business e.g. office productivity suites.  Let’s see if they can also negotiate the mobility turn, too, with Windows Phone 7 and their Nokia alliance. Now that HP/Palm is out, RIM is in a very bad shape, Apple is losing ground (and vision), and the Google-Motorola alliance might impact Android adoption, Microsoft stands better chances and could come back into the game.

Anyway, ComputerWorld article believes that this vision will really happen – and provides an interesting analysis on the video and the Office Labs too. Worth reading.

A technology I’ve been envisioning as a potential game changer for the Future of Documents is just around the corner. Printed Electronics, ie being able to print circuitry onto paper or other physical devices, is not that far away. Once this is feasible, this will allow many objects – in particular documents – to remain fully traceable or even active, even throughout their ‘physical’ life.

So far, passive antennas or simple processors could be printed, but researchers at PARC, a Xerox Company and the Norwegian company Thinfilm Electronics have developed printed electronic which combine transistors with memory. These low-cost devices can read, write, or even perform some (simple) processing.

The current price of 5 cent for the 20-bit memory make it a pretty expensive storage option, but the day when you’ll be able to print a paper document with a small processor on it, e.g. to turn it into an “active” evergreen document, might not be as far as we think.