Pixel Qi

Link to Pixel Qi  BLOG :

http://www.pixelqi.com/blog1

Pixel Qi has a new take on the future of the computing - it's not about the CPU or the OS -   It is about the screen. 

We contend that new displays, with integrated touchscreens, and wireless capability are the future.  They are essentially motherboad-less and don't need much an operating system at all.  We are currently in a world of $10 CPUs, next year they will be less expensive.   We see the future of the portable electronics as simply the display with embedded electronics eventually right in the display glass itself.  This is the future laptop, the future cell phone and the future PDA.   Instead of focusing on more and more Megahertz and Gigabytes, we focus on displays that we can read, as easy as paper - indoors and out - with battery life measured in days not hours.  We are talking about displays that can also display HDTV quality movies.

We embrace the reality that your gmail, flickr photos, chat sessions and you-tube videos are downloaded on the fly already.  Sure some solid state memory is needed, and wireless is key for sure, but a bulky OS and bulky application software just aren't needed.  A display that includes an integrated multi-touch screen in the same layers that turn on and off the pixels of the screen means that we can have multi-touch for an incremental cost increase over the display screen itself.  Maybe for less a buck.

The display is currently the most expensive component in a laptop, and the most power hungry, and it's uncomfortable to read when compared with paper.  We are going to fix this - we already took the first step with the OLPC screen.  The battery is the second most expensive component in the laptop or portable.  We propose to massively lower the power consumption of the screen and thus also massively lower the cost of the battery and how long you can run on it before you have re-charge it.

We will do all of this while making the screen lower cost, higher resolution, easier to read and sunlight readable.  We've already shown the first step of this at One Laptop per Child by creating a display that is 5X the resolution, 1/3 the cost, 1/10th the power consumption.  In addition the One Laptop per Child screen is sunlight readable and enables one to the turn the motherboard and CPU off while the screen stays on offering further massive power savings. We have big plans to take this much further. 

We aren't doing this the traditional way - we aren't planning to invent new molecules, spend 100's of millions of dollars or even billions to build brand new manufacturing facilities, hype it and then deliver maybe in 10 to 20 years.  We are embracing a practice commonly used by the Silicon industry.  We are designing our new screens to fit into existing manufacturing processes, with existing materials, already available at the screen manufacturers in extremely high volume with excellent pricing, quality, and reliability.  Our changes are conceptual and fast.  We think of new ways to use existing manufacturing processing to create new screens with radical new performance.  The screen in the OLPC laptop is our first example.  It went from specification to mass-production ready, fully passing all quality and reliabilty testing in 6 months.  6 months!  It's unheard of in the display industry. 

What We Do

Rapid idea-to-design-to-production of next generation displays.  Specialities include:

• Extreme low-cost
• Extreme low-power
• Mass producible new display technologies
• Outdoor use, sunlight readability and robustness

UPDATE - May 2 2008

Mary Lou Jepsen was selected by Time Magazine  for the "Time 100 - One of the 100 Most Influential People in the World" for her work in creating One Laptop per Child with Nicholas Negroponte and being the leading innovator and architect of the One Laptop per Child Machine. 

Her close friend Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, the largest open source online library in the world, wrote an glowing article about her.  Read it here.

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