Pixel Qi

  Just as mobile phones now have reached billions of users, we can - and perhaps must - enable the fully global reach of computers and Internet access. The open access to knowledge, and global communications that this will enable has the potential to transform many societies - enabling all the world's population to join the Information Age. This will join many communities to the global conversation, enable new forms of creation and innovation, and spur education in deprived communities. 

     While Pixel Qi is concentrating on screen design and production, we do not design the screens separately from the rest of the sytem.  We believe that looking at computers in a new, holistic, systemic way, with a clean-sheet approach to the system - rather than incrementally increasing the horsepower of the CPU - is critical to bringing computing and Internet access to more than the 1 billion affluent who now are its beneficiaries. The key is a new generation of low-cost, low power, durable, networked computers, leveraging open-design principles.

     A computer is not just its CPU: the holistic view embraces the full user experience - which for the hardware means the screen, any sound, and the touch device or keyboard that form how the user experiences computing. The user doesn't experience the CPU, the user experiences letters and images moving on the screen, and sound coming out of the speakers.  These technologies are briskly evolving; Today, we can approach displays as like ASICs, and use this approach to lower the cost of this expensive, power-hungry component, and deeply entangle it into the electronics of the laptop or portable electronics device. For the XO, it was essential to simultaneously re-think the computer platform, and to re-think how the display was to be made - along the way becoming the first to convince a large LCD manufacturer to make an externally-developed design.

     The holistic view also includes its life-cycle, cradle to cradle, and its support infrastructure. For life-cycle, we must focus on truly environmentally friendly approaches, while the support infrastructure embraces both how Pixel Qi products talk to the Internet and to each other, and how they are to be repaired and recycled.

  Here we sit, on the cusp of "cloud computing".  3G wireless services and widespread mesh networking have already been deployed.  The CPU makers and traditional big software companies seem a little lost.  It's not about big-iron computing anymore. 

  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. 

- Mary Lou Jepsen - Founder of Pixel Qi