What’s Happening at Pixel Qi - Mary Lou Jepsen’s Blog

It’s been a while since I posted here. During the fund raising process so much of what we were doing was necessarily secret. Also during this process the ideas that we have had began to mature into commercial product concepts that we also have to keep confidential to work most effectively with our partners.

We have opened two offices this fall: one in San Francisco and one in Taipei. We have completed a large tranche of hiring and have a truly extraordinary team on both sides of the Pacific with excellent partnerships beyond.

We signed a deal, yesterday - on Thanksgiving Day, that should cement the ability of Pixel Qi to deliver a compelling roadmap of products starting in 2009.

We’ve been a bit quiet in the blog, but have found manufacturers and kicked off development of some new screens that will be ready next year. These screens will go into both laptops and ebook readers and offer massively longer battery life, and much better readability in both room-light and in sunlight, as well as in the case of the laptop screens excellent color, contrast. We have been working hard and traveling constantly all over the world to meet with customers, manufacturers, partners and funders. We are in process of closing our series-A investment round and will announce it shortly.

Nice Article in Business week today on wanting better screens:

a snippet below:

The Do-Good Imperative
Some of the most innovative ideas today are coming from efforts to address the needs of those most in need

by Janet A. Ginsburg

When I first read about the computer designed for the One Laptop Per Child project, I wanted one. Not because it was adorable, cheap, or a means of doing good. I coveted its screen, designed for use in full daylight. Even my Apple MacBook Pro, with all its clever tricks, can’t manage that. ……

Please take a look at the job descriptions at

We are searching for 5 positions
1) Director of Licensing
2) Regional Sales Director (Taiwan)
3) Senior Product Engineer
4) Senior Optics/Liquid Crystal Engineer
5) Director of Electronics Engineering

If interested please submit a cover letter and your resume to Casey Hsu (casey@pixelqi.com)

The XO screen has been shown to be higher resolution than we thought.
Michiel Klompenhouwer from Philips Research says the color resolution is
effectively 984×738, even though strictly speaking straight division
indicates color resolution of 692×520 (this is 1/3 of 1200×900 our
black&white resolution). We have been saying for some time that the
resolution is about 800×600, but his new study shows a more exact way of
measuring perceived resolution. Michiel presented an analysis of the
our screen and other display pixel layouts at the Society for
Information Display Annual Meeting this week in Los Angeles in a talk
entitled “Comparing the Effective Resolution of Various RGB Subpixel
Layouts” SID08.

While Nicholas Negroponte was unveiling the first images of the next generation OLPC laptop in Cambridge yesterday, I simultaneously was doing the exact same thing - with an audience of 3000 display professionals in Los Angeles.

Pixel Qi is here at the most important display conference of the year, the Annual Meeting of the Society for Informational Display (www.sid.org). I delivered the opening Keynote Address yesterday, discussing the role that display most play in the future of portable computing, discussing the OLPC project and what it means for display makers, and showing the images of the new OLPC XO2.

In essence, the future of computing is all about the screens.

Pixel Qi will be creating the screens for the next generation OLPC laptop, and we will be making some announcement in the upcoming months about other screens we are creating for other exciting products.

So many new machines are coming out about the size of the XO laptop. I’ve heard that 50 distinct different laptop models will be introduced at Computex (in Taiwan) alone in early June. These machines use screens between 7-10″ diagonals - and have been slapped together rather quickly to capitalize on the momentum first created by One Laptop per Child. The problem: these are expensive laptops - the least expensive of the lot is more than twice the price of the XO laptop from OLPC. Now, I know the detailed cost structure of these laptops, they use commodity parts, and find it quite surprising that an effort to make low cost laptops would arrive here (at the moment) with huge profit margins north of 50%. But with so much competition for this space, the high prices shouldn’t last long.

At the very least, we should have extremely low-power, sunlight readable, high resolution screens in these and other laptops. Pixel Qi is working towards this and we will announce some of our partners soon.

I’ve been selected by Time Magazine for the “Time 100″ - One of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. I’m surprised, delighted and amazed.

see here for the article.

What does “open” really mean when that which is “open” is used to make money with advertising? Lots of money goes to the content aggregators - these are those last in the chain. Why just them?

Jaron Lanier asked me these questions while I was visiting him at his home in Berkeley a few weeks back.

I have been asking him (and many others) for advice. I’m trying to figure out how to leverage open design principles at Pixel Qi. Open Hardware is a challenge: This because the development of, for example, a new screen, can cost several million dollars. Worse, there are only about 10 companies in the world capable of manufacturing such a screen, and these manufacturers have their own problems.

I write this from Taiwan - where I have spent the majority of my time for the past few years.

Over here, it’s widely predicted that TFT-LCD factories are headed for tough times by the end of this year. Why: in short - because most people have already bought their big-screen HDTVs and don’t need to replace them yet.

The challenge for the TFT-LCD factories is to try to stay as fullyloaded as possible. An idle factory is extremely expensive. So, the big LCD makers are focused on methods to slash the costs of screens, to try to move more product through despite the predicted slow down. Pixel Qi is working closely with them on this, but our core competence is not just in slashing costs. We believe the way to lower cost is by creating new screens. Screens with different functionality: e-paper readability, vastly lower power consumption, lower environmentally impact, higher resolution. As we push the development of our inventions we are also patenting them. How we use these patents will be determined in the future, but we are progressing on making new screens and new machines that drastically slash current price-points while improving performance - as soon as possible

Given this - How can Pixel Qi be more open in this process (or should it be?) - Your thoughts are most welcome.

April 16, 2008

By popular request I am now logging upcoming appearances on the Pixel Qi website. See:

www.pixelqi.com/calendar

for events where I will be speaking - Mary Lou