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Polaroid 2.0 and 3.0: Zink Printer Technologies

Continuing the discussion of Polaroid that I started in the demise of Polaroid... IEEE Spectrum has published two relevant articles this year.

The first article, Polaroid 2.0, declared that the first product to come out of the remains of Polaroid -- the engineers formed a new company called Zink to continue the work that was started before the parent Polaroid corporation died - dead on arrival. The article cites the costs, and the toy-like characteristics of this first product - small prints, inconvenient -- and consigns it for novelty use only. They also cited it's inclusion in a toy-like camera by Tomy as the beginning of the end for the product. I think that this is a typical response to disruptive innovation. "It will only work for low-end applications." "It's too expensive." "It doesn't perform as well as my current XXX." All true. All completely missing the point. The second article in the print Spectrum, Zink: A Modern Fairy Tale,  (online title is "Zink: Inkless Printing With Colorless Color") was a bit more even handed in its treatment of Zink and their product plans. It also gave a much more detailed view of how the technology works and what it takes to bring a technology to life after the death of the parent corporation. The technology itself is very clever. Paper is permeated with three chemicals that are uncolored initially. However, when they are heated, the change colors to produce yellow, magenta, and cyan colors, respectively. The trick is that the chemicals change color at different temperatures and with different heating times. A very clever design in the print head and controlling electronics (along with these magic chemicals) applies the right temperatures for the right amount of time to get the colors to mix properly to form full color images. Interestingly, they don't use a black chemical - analogous to the black inks in most ink jet printers. Perhaps they can produce satisfactory blacks by using the CMY colors. In an inkjet printer this may be too expensive (in terms of ink used) or produce poor results (too much ink required to do it precisely without bleed to adjacent pixels?). This is an amazing piece of research and engineering. I haven't seen any sample prints from these printers. So... if Zink has their way there will be no more ink to buy for our printers. But you will need to buy this special (patented, and presumable not cheap) paper. Hmmm. I think that I would rather buy ink, even though it is a pain and it is expensive. At least I can choose my paper form, format, texture, etc. without needing to have support from a single paper manufacturer. And... I can use generic ink, even though it is a big pain a lot of the time.

Digitizing Zoltan Glass Photos at Daimler

I'm a bit late to the party in publicizing this, but I found it interesting: Daimler is funding a scanning project of the photographs of Zoltan Glass. This would be a fun project to work on (unfortunately, we are not).

If you are a historic car buff, then this is for you. Daimler scanning project.

Lots of Glass' images are available on the website of the Science and Society Picture Library

The End of America

To go along with my recent reading of Fareen Zakaria's The Post-American World, I stumbled on this Slate "game". Check it out.

Manipulated celebrities

If you thought that you hadn't had contact with manipulated digital images, direct from the world headquarters of looks above everything else, there is an LA Times article on retouching of photos of models and celebrities for publication. It is scary how easy this stuff is to do with the current software and services available to everyone for a pittance.

Polaroid: you don't know what you have until it is gone

Interesting article in Newsweek about the demise of Polaroid in analog form and it resurrection in digital form. 8mm film is being revived the same way. How many music videos and ads have you seen with what looks like 8mm footage? Country music videos are great for this. Though more subtle, Kodachrome is going through a similar revival.

This article raises an interesting point that we see reinforced every day in our scanning service. People that are truly happy with our services embrace the use of scanned slides and negatives as a memory tool. Those that are unhappy tend to be in the camp that thinks that digitized film should look like images shot today, on fancy digital cameras.

Do you want your Kodachrome to look like Kodachrome - highly saturated colors and contrasty - or like a modern image with fluid tonalities and colors? If you use the images simply as documents of an event, the latter may be appealing. If, instead, they are remembrances of times, people and places past, meant to trigger emotion and memory and to encourage discussion and storytelling, then Kodachrome should look like Kodachrome.

RedCamper: There's a use of old film that I didn't think of

Check out RedCamper for a very cool and interesting use of tourist and travel slides. We see these slides every day at Pixmonix.

Many of the examples shown on the website are tourist 127 slides - particularly Ektachrome - that have faded to red. These slides recover very well most of the time. (We show an example of the recovery of this sort of faded Ektachrome slide on this page of the Pixmonix website.)

Please check out these products at RedCamper and help out a small business person who has a cool product and is trying to make ends meet in this harsh economy.

Tour de France

Great day today for Lance Armstrong, but more so an inspirational performance from Cancellara to hold the yellow jersey.

Now the real question: what the hell is Ben Stiller doing presenting the yellow jersey? And, could he have at least looked happy about it?

The New New Thing, Michael Lewis

The New New Thing, by Michael lewis

This book is a sort of biography of Jim Clark. Clark founded Silicon Graphics and Netscape (most notably). The book spends much time looking at Clark's compulsive need to move on - from one business to the next, from one wife to the next, from one boat to the next - and how this helped to bring about the Internet revolution (and perhaps more important for some) the Internet bubble of the 1990s.

I spent most of the book just thinking what an ass Jim Clark is. I'm not sure if I should be nastalgic for the boom or angry over the whole thing. I spent the boom years at Intel, wondering what life would be like over the hedge. I toyed with a couple of ideas with fellow Intel people, but never made a move away from the comfort of the big company until long after the bubble was over. (The guys I was kicking ideas around with are still at Intel). So maybe I'm just a little bitter that I didn't partake in any of the tremendous riches created during the period.

Pixmonix has a decidedly different approach. I am not interested in venture capital and extremely rapid growth. We have more of a small (but growing) small business approach while at the same time leveraging all of the web and new media tools that are out there. This is a traditional small business but with a decidely new economy approach: you can appeal to people outside of your geographc area and still be a small business using web tools. In some ways, this is the true legacy of Jim Clark and his ilk who made and lost fortunes during the bubble years - they left behind a great deal of infrastructure that is now useful, even without venture capital, even though nobody had a clue about how to use it at the time of creation. I don't know how the sailboat industry fared; I suspect that the rise of Wall Street has continued to fuel the boat industry even after Silicon Valley returned from the stratosphere.

The book is a good read. If you were even tangentially involved in the tech boom of the past 20 years, you will find it interesting.

Against The Gods, Peter Bernstein

(click to buy on amazon.com)

This is a remarkable book.

Bernstein tells the story of the development of statistics and risk modeling from ancient times to the (almost) present. He has an obvious love for the material in addition to a great knowledge of the field and its history.

The story told here is deep and broad. A large number of men (no women mentioned that I can remember) and their contributions leading up to the development of risk theory are detailed - from advent and use of the arabic number system, through the Renaissance and Age of Reason, to the giants of 20th century economic thought - Keynes, Morgenstern, Arrow.

I was interested to see von Neumann as a player in this space. As a computer scientist and architect I think of him as one of the original inventors of the modern computer; I forget that he was a mathematician at heart. I had no clue that he played a role in the development of game theory - and hence the development of theories of risk.

The story ends with a short introduction to derivitives. We have been hearing a lot about these beasts over the last 12 months. This story stops in the late 90's when the book was published. Some of the players of interest in the derivitives markets over the last year are mentioned - Chase, Bank of America, Citibank - but players like AIG and instruments like mortgage-backed securities are not mentioned. Now that I have a better understanding of this area, I am ready to tackle some more current material on this topic. Anyone have a suggestion?

This is not a trivial book to read. It took me a couple of months to get through it. I am a better person for having done so, however. It is well worth the effort. More of us need to be up to the challenge of texts like this because so much of our economic lives hinge on these ideas which can't be easily summed up in a two page Newsweek article.

Books, books and more books

I took a step back the other day to take a look at everything that I have read while building Pixmonix. The list is very large. This includes book on starting and running a business, technical books (e.g., on building websites, using photo and video tools) and managing people and processes within an enterprise. When I add in the books and magazines that I have read for fun, it is kind of ridiculous. Over the next several weeks, I will try to summarize what I have read and offer my limited insights into what is worth reading.

What have you read while establishing your business that you found particularly useful?

Business and the recession

Whenever I see someone I haven't spoken to in a while, one of the first questions that they ask is "how is Pixmonix doing in this downturn?". Like my friend Jim Harrington, who runs a slide scanning business out of his house in MA (I linked his blog in my blogroll), things have been growing pretty substantially for us during the last 12 months, even through the downturn.

Why?

Economics. The cost of scanning larger collections of slides/negatives/photos has gone down over the last couple of years. This has opened up the market for many consumers and businesses to digitize their collections. Technologies have improved to allow us to be more efficient and the market has changed to force us to be more cost effective. These are good things. For the former, we have employed a number of new software technologies, hammered out a more efficient and responsive workflow, and put a strong focus on getting great results with less time commitment. For the changes in the marketplace we can "thank" a couple of our competitors that are outsourcing labor to India and central America.

Perceived need. Now that digital cameras have strongly outpaced film, most people are seeing the benefits of digital images compared to film. This makes them want to have all the old photos in digital form. Every day I see our customers embracing and loving the things that they do with their newly digitized images. In my personal life, I have seen great joy from my own relatives as a result of the scanning of old photos. A digital photo frame with scanned images makes a great gift, especially for older relatives.

Comfort spending. It think that preservation of photos is an area that gives people great joy and comfort, especially when the economy is doing so poorly.

What have your experiences been like during the downturn?

The Forever Disk, part 2

Henry O'Connell of Millenniata contacted me shortly after I posted on the blog about the Forever Disk and we traded a couple of emails.

I'm glad to see that they claim that Alpha testing will begin in 2009 (according to their press release), though like all technology, I suspect it will be product later than the engineers and business people would like. With the push toward online backup and cloud-based computing and storage, I wonder what the lifetime of these technologies will be like - and how much in sales are needed to pay for the R&D. I suspect that this is not an easy business.