Somebody forgot to tell John Chuang that it’s impossible to create a new kind of home computer these days.

Either that, or he didn’t listen. Because Chuang, a serial entrepreneur who made his first fortune in the staffing industry with Boston-based Aquent, has built a gadget that looks deceptively like a laptop but works nothing like any computer you’ve ever used. From the hardware to the user interface to the activities it supports, the new machine created by Chuang’s Boston-based startup, Litl, rejects three decades of convention and makes the Web, not the computer and all its software and operating-system encrustations, into the real show.

Litl took the lid off its so-called “Webbook” computer today after more than two years of top-secret development work. The device’s purpose, Chuang says, is to take advantage of the Web’s newfound maturity as a medium for digital entertainment and productivity and make it far simpler for people at home to access all those goodies—including photos, videos, news and weather, and Web apps—without having to manage files or desktop applications.

“We didn’t want to build anything that already existed, or something with just marginal improvements,” Chuang says. “PCs have served a great purpose, but we wanted to take a crack at a different type of computer that would be for and of the Net.”

I visited Litl’s offices yesterday and had a chance to try out the Webbook, which goes on sale today at Amazon and at Litl’s website. (The price is $699, and Litl expects to ship the first units to consumers next week.) Beyond its laptop-like appearance, there isn’t much that veteran computer users like me will find familiar about the device. There’s no desktop, no windows or menus or files or folders, no multitasking, no long lists of third-party software applications to buy. There isn’t even a hard drive or a CD/DVD drive.

While the Webbook is definitely a computer—with a 1.6-gigahertz Intel Atom processor, a gigabyte of RAM, a Wi-Fi card, a Webcam, and a nice graphics chip inside—it’s also got a good dose of TV mixed into its genome. It has a separate remote control, its display can be folded almost all the way back so that it stands up on a table or countertop like an easel, and it has a cord that connects it with no fuss to your flat-screen TV, so you can see what you’re doing on a really big screen.

In other words, the Webbook breaks all the rules of personal computing. And while it may be the perfect machine for consumers who just want to get on the Internet and have no use for all of a traditional PC’s bells and whistles, Chuang is likely to face an initial wave of skepticism from heavy computer users and technology industry insiders. They probably won’t grok how a machine that doesn’t even have software, the way we’re used to thinking of software, could still be useful.

But Chuang doesn’t seem to care much about what the digerati think; his device isn’t designed for them. Or to put it more accurately, it’s designed for their coffee tables and kitchen counters, rather than their offices or their backpacks. “We’re about shared processing, not local processing,” he explains. For tasks that require lots of local processing power, like video editing, power users are still going to want and need a traditional multipurpose computer. But if they just want to …Next Page »

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If you read Xconomy, chances are that digital information is a big part of your day. You spend quite a bit of time absorbing, manipulating, and repackaging it. So here are a few questions for you: How many different devices do you use to channel all those bits? Is the number going up, or down? And if—as I suspect—it’s going down, what’s the minimum set of devices that you think you could get along with?

Here’s my current list:

1. Apple iPhone 3G
2. Apple MacBook, OS X 10.5
3. Dell Inspiron 8600 Windows XP laptop
4. Amazon Kindle 2 e-book reader
5. Sharp Aquos 32-inch HDTV
6. Microsoft Xbox 360
7. Canon PowerShot S5 IS digital camera
8. Roku digital video player

Note that I’m not counting the key infrastructure devices, like the Comcast-provided cable modem and my Netgear Wi-Fi router, that support several of the devices above.

But even without those two indispensable items, there would still be 12 or 13 devices on my personal list, if it weren’t for the Internet and the creative geniuses at companies like Palm, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple. I’m betting the same thing is true for many readers.

Here’s my tale of the disappearing devices:

Ah, the good old days. In 2005, just for fun, I arranged this group picture, which includes every device I owned containing a microchip.

The PDA. I used a series of Palm devices to manage my calendar and contact lists from 1998 until 2003, when Palm folded those functions into its Treo phones, allowing me to say goodbye to the standalone organizer.

The MP3 player. In 2005 or so, I had a running debate with a fellow tech journo named Eric Hellweg about whether there would ever be a successful music phone—meaning a cell phone with a built-in music player. At the time, the only examples were devices like the Motorola ROKR, which, to put it politely, was a piece of horse pucky that could only hold 100 songs. I argued that not only was the technical problem of building a more capacious music phone too hard (what manufacturer was going to put a hard drive into a mobile phone?), but people didn’t want such a device anyway, since they already seemed perfectly happy to be carrying around separate devices for these two purposes—an iPod for music and a cell phone for communications. Well, obviously Eric won that debate in the end. The Apple iPhone, which came out in 2007, is arguably a better iPod than the iPod itself, thanks to its larger screen and a multi-touch interface. And even the low-end models can hold four times more music in their solid-state memories than my first disk-drive-based iPod.

The DVD player. No need for it after I got the Xbox 360, which also plays DVDs.

The DVR. When I jettisoned premium cable TV back in March, I had no more need for the Comcast set-top box, which also functioned as my DVR. I now get all of my video entertainment through Internet video sites like Hulu, Netflix DVDs, and the …Next Page »

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The great thing about the Apple iPhone is that it’s a powerful miniature computer, with a screen that can be retasked to look like almost anything and do almost any job—it can switch in a moment from being a scientific calculator to simulating an airplane cockpit ti acting like the slide of a trombone. One obvious way to employ such a versatile information device would be to turn it into a universal remote control for home appliances. There’s only one problem—the iPhone doesn’t have an infrared port, so it can’t communicate in the only language known to most home appliances, including TVs, DVRs, stereo systems, and cable boxes.

A Waltham, MA, startup called ThinkFlood has set out to correct that flaw. It’s built an accessory for the iPhone and iPod Touch called RedEye that translates one of the wireless languages these devices do know—Wi-Fi—into the infrared signals that make sense to an appliance. The name may be unfortunate, seeing as it calls to mind two unpleasant things at once—exhausting overnight jet flights and those beady devil-eyes that show up on people in flash photographs. But the idea itself is cool, and seems likely to appeal to gadget hounds like me who enjoy seeing how many different things they can do with their iPhones.

ThinkFlood launched the device as a “beta” product yesterday, meaning it’s available at a reduced introductory price ($119, going up to $149 later) to a limited number of customers. As the beta tag suggests, the software that drives it is still a work in progress.

“Bringing universal remote control capabilities to the iPhone has been the goal of many in the industry since the device first became available,” ThinkFlood founder and president Matthew Eagar said in an announcement yesterday. “Beta participants will find that RedEye delivers the design and functionality of a high-end remote control at a fraction of the cost.”

Specifically, the RedEye device (and the iPhone software app that goes with it) let you do things like changing the channel on your TV or the volume on your stereo. It’s not an accessory in the usual sense of an attachment; while you can sit your iPhone in it like a cradle if you want, you can mainly just leave it on a table, as long as it has a line of sight to your appliances. It communicates with your iPhone by radio, which means you no longer need to near your audio/video equipment to relay commands—in fact, you can be in another room or on a different floor.

From watching a demo video at the ThinkFlood site, it appears that the RedEye software allows you to use flicking and multitouch gestures. So the device could make channel surfing as easy as flipping through albums using the iPod CoverFlow feature.

That “fraction of the cost” thing that Eager mentions depends on how you look at it, of course. An 8-gigabyte iPhone 3G costs $199, not counting a wireless calling plan, so if you add the cost of the phone to the cost of the RedEye, you get $318. That’s more than even the slickest universal remotes such as the Logitech Harmony 880, which retails for $249. On the other hand, ThinkFlood plans to upgrade the RedEye software regularly, meaning you’re really buying a device that will evolve into something more powerful over time. And hey—it doubles as a charging stand for your iPhone or iPod Touch.

ThinkFlood was founded in 2007 and RedEye is its first product. According to the company’s history page, the firm first set out to create an easier way to share and display digital photos, but switched gears after discovering that a standalone photo viewer would be too expensive to make and market. The company then settled on the idea of building iPhone accessories—specifically, accessories that would use hardware to amplify the power of the iPhone’s user interface. And that led to the idea of a combined hardware-software product that would turn the phenomenally popular Apple device into a substitute for the pile of remote controls laying on most people’s sofas.

With a bit of help, the ThinkFlood founders realized, the iPhone could become “the only [remote control] you will ever need, one that you will carry with you wherever you go, customized for each activity. And since the iPhone is missing the ability to record and send infrared signals, there was our opportunity to complete the picture with hardware.”

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Fans of this column know that I spent months dithering over whether to buy Amazon’s Kindle 2 e-book reader. I had mercilessly panned the original Kindle, mainly for its ungainly looks. And while I was much more impressed by the Kindle 2 when it came out in February, I was put off by the $359 price tag, which left me casting about for more excuses to resist a purchase.

Well, I finally ran out of excuses and let my inner geek take over. My new Kindle 2 showed up last Wednesday, and I’ve been enjoying it immensely, for reasons I’ll detail below. But as luck would have it, my Kindle arrived exactly a week before Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced another new Amazon device, the large-screen Kindle DX. So the first question I want to tackle is whether Kindle 2 owners should feel any buyer’s remorse—that is, whether they would have been better off waiting until this summer, when the DX, with its much bigger 9.7-inch screen, will start shipping. I don’t think so. The Kindle DX will be great for reading electronic documents where some extra formatting aids comprehension—meaning textbooks, business documents like PDF brochures and white papers, and maybe magazines and newspapers. But for any document where the text is primary, meaning the vast majority of current fiction and nonfiction literature, the DX will be overkill. And for $489, the announced price of the DX, you could buy a very good netbook or even a basic laptop and get access to a much broader world of digital media, and in color to boot.

Or you could spend nothing and simply read e-books on your mobile phone. The excellent resolution of smart phones like the iPhone actually makes them credible e-book readers. Companies like Lexcycle, Shortcovers, and Amazon itself have come out with very nice e-book software for the iPhone, and e-books are the fastest-growing category of applications in the iTunes App Store. But the iPhone’s weakness—-for purposes of reading, anyway—its its limited screen size, which means you have to flick to the next page every few seconds.

The Kindle 2 feels to me like the Goldilocks of information display devices: bigger than a smartphone, but smaller than a tablet PC. Its electronic ink display, which measures 6 inches diagonally, is more than twice the size of the iPhone’s screen. It can hold about the same amount of text as one standard paperback book page, depending on the font size you’ve selected. So you press the “next page” button only twice as often as you would turn the pages of a printed book (since the Kindle doesn’t have two facing pages, the way printed books do). But it’s still small enough to make the device extremely light and portable. You can read it comfortably using one hand. I can imagine pulling out my Kindle 2 on a bus or a subway car. I’ll be surprised if I ever see anyone do that with a Kindle DX.

Reading on the Kindle 2 is a beautiful experience. It is no less immersive than reading a printed book. (The first two e-books I read on the Kindle were The Guernsey Literary and Potato-Peel-Pie Society and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies—The Classic Regency Romance, Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem; I recommend both heartily.) Of course, I didn’t really need to be convinced on this score. I first fell in love with e-book devices in 1999, when NuvoMedia brought out the Rocket eBook—in fact, I liked it so much I went to work for the company for a couple of years. But I’m still amazed by how much displays have evolved over the past decade. The Kindle’s electronic paper display, made by Cambridge, MA-based E Ink, is sharp and clear. It sips electricity like a hummingbird, meaning the battery lasts for days between rechargings. And the screen’s momentary flicker when you turn a page—which is needed to fully erase the previous screen, sort of like shaking an Etch-a-Sketch—isn’t nearly as annoying as it was on the original Kindle, thanks to the improvements E Ink built into the Kindle 2’s electronics. In fact, the screen redraws itself quickly enough now to allow a fully interactive interface, with pop-up menus for doing things like jumping around within or between books.

Far more earthshaking, however, is Whispernet, the 3-G wireless network that Amazon built for the Kindle family of devices. Even if you left out the electronic paper screen, wirelessness would make the Kindle a huge improvement over all previous e-book devices, because it lets you shop for books, magazines, and newspapers on the device itself and download them instantly, from practically any location where you can get a cellular signal.

The fact that Amazon has also released an iPhone app for reading Kindle editions makes it clear that the company’s long-term e-book strategy is to sell content, not gadgets. (As David Pogue puts it, “The Kindle is just the razor. The books are the blades—ka-ching!”). Going wireless was a master stroke, because …Next Page »

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The Web has drastically lowered the barriers to starting a business. But that benefit has a flip side: established Web businesses are more vulnerable to competitors who can suddenly come up from behind.

That’s the story that may play out this year in the electronics recycling market. Last year we ran a couple of stories about Waltham, MA-based Second Rotation, whose website, Gazelle, set out to disrupt eBay’s business by buying up people’s unwanted electronics at a carefully calculated market price, then reselling them at a higher price. Now a couple of Yale undergrads in New Haven, CT, have launched another cash-for-gadgets site that sets out to disrupt Gazelle’s business, by making the buying process simpler and beefing up the eco-friendly spin.

The startup, YouRenew, launched in March. Its website is still in beta mode, and is evolving fast, but it does most of the same things as Gazelle: it allows users to search a database for specific items such as mobile phones, music players, digital cameras, game consoles, and DVD players, find out how much cash an item will bring ($78 in the case of my Xbox 360), and print a pre-paid shipping label.

But YouRenew’s site is designed to be simpler to use than Gazelle’s, with fewer forms to fill out and fewer pages to click through to finish the process. It also adds a stronger green element: for every gadget they sell, customers get to pick whether YouRenew will donate money to a domestic renewable energy project like a wind farm or to reforestation efforts.

“We’re trying to create a platform in which it’s easier to sell or recycle your old electronics than it is to throw them away,” says Rich Littlehale, YouRenew’s co-founder. “There are definitely players that have gotten quite of a bit of a head start on us, but I think it’s like the search engine market in 1999—there are many competitors and a winner like Google hasn’t emerged yet. So in building the website, the question we were constantly asking ourselves was, what aspects of the other sites out there are either too difficult or too hard to understand, and how can we improve on the model?”

For YouRenew, part of the answer was cutting out steps like making new users set up an account. “The other thing we’re really going for is trying to take over the green niche,” says Littlehale. “At a lot of the other sites, like Cell for Cash and Buymytronics, the emphasis is on the cash. Gazelle has the most robust and well-built platform, but the number-one thing they’re pushing is not green. The main tagline on their site is ‘Get Cash for Your Gadgets,” and ours is ‘Get Paid to Recycle.’”

That may not sound like a big contrast, but it’s upon such distinctions that brands are built. And Littlehale is counting on YouRenew’s donation policy—for every transaction, the company sends money out of its own pocket to either AmericanForests.org or CarbonFund.org—to further burnish its image.

Littlehale and his Yale roommate and fellow founder Bob Casey are taking a year off from school to get YouRenew off the ground. A native of Norwell, MA, Littlehale says he’s got entrepreneurship in his blood—his grandfather ran a furniture store on Beacon Street in Boston. His father is a longtime investment banker, but after two summers working for financial firms, including Lehman Bros., he says “I wanted to do something that was maybe a little more risky.” He also wanted to follow up on the success he’s had with the Party for a Cause Foundation, a non-profit he founded to help college students put on fundraising events. “We’ve had thousands of students at Yale and now Georgetown participate in events for charity, and that was exciting and gave me a little bit of a taste for entrepreneurship,” Littlehale says.

Of course, the key to success with a gadget-recycling site probably isn’t whether its founders have entrepreneurial spirit or green intentions, but whether it will buy the devices that people want to sell, and whether it will pay an attractive price. A quick check of YouRenew’s prices shows that they’re competitive with, if not superior to, Gazelle’s. (An 8-gigabyte iPhone 3G in good condition will bring $220 on both sites; but the Xbox 360 for which YouRenew offered $78 would only bring $37 at Gazelle.) Littlehale admits, however, that YouRenew needs to keep expanding the list of gadgets for which it’s prepared to make a purchase offer. “We are still playing a little bit of catch-up behind Gazelle in terms of finding your device,” he says. Gazelle also does a much better job of using the major search engines to steer people to its site, Littlehale says.

But YouRenew’s secret weapon may be its youth, small size, and low overhead. Littlehale and Casey aren’t taking salaries yet, which has enabled the company to launch and pay its programmers using a very small angel round. Second Rotation, by contrast, has raised $10.4 million in venture financing—money that comes with strings, like board meetings and reports to shareholders and lots of employees to pay.

“We realize we don’t have the capital base of a Gazelle,” says Littlehale. “But we think we have a good concept, and we think we are really smart guys and girls, and what we’re trying to do in the near term is really to get the site down, make it as easy as possible to use, and as green as possible…It’s not that we’re trying to wipe out the market and be the only player. It would be silly to think we could do that. But when there is a list of [gadget-resale] websites available to people, we want to be the one where people look at it as the greenest.”

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I’ve been writing World Wide Wade for almost a year now; this is the 44th installment. A year is a long time in the technology world—long enough for many of the gadgets, services, and websites I’ve covered in the past to evolve cool new features. So I thought I’d revisit a few of my previous columns and fill you in about what’s changed.

1. Beyond megapixels. In my April 4 and June 6 columns, I wrote about the Gigapan community site, where you can upload super-high-resolution photos stitched together from lots of regular digital shots. In January of this year, a new company called GigaPan Systems introduced a $379 robot camera mount that puts gigapixel imaging within the reach of hobbyists. It takes care of the tedious part of gigapixel imaging by guiding your camera through hundreds or thousands of individually-angled shots, with just enough overlap to give the stitching software something to work with.

2. News aggregators on steroids. Last April 11, I wrote about my favorite news-tracking tools on the Web, including Netvibes and Alltop. Netvibes hasn’t changed much in the last year, but Alltop, a cool aggregator that uses pop-up windows to squeeze a lot of news onto a single page, has exploded beyond all bounds. It had about 55 categories of RSS feeds when I last wrote about it; now there must be well over 500, on everything from Atheism to Zoology. And for tech-news enthusiasts, there’s a site called TechFuga that recently got a nice overhaul that makes it more competitive with the uber-popular but somewhat tired TechMeme. The new features at TechFuga include Twitter searching, reflecting the fact that more and more people are getting their news from each other via the red-hot microblogging service. (Speaking of Twitter, you can follow me there at “wroush“.)

3. Earth as you’ve never seen it. On April 18, I wrote about Google Earth 4.3, which featured improved navigation and a larger crop of 3-D buildings. The latest version of the world’s most popular geo-browser, Google Earth 5.0, came out in the middle of last month. The coolest improvements: a fantastic view of the ocean floor, the ability to delve back in time and see aerial imagery from the 1980s and earlier, and imagery for Mars as well as Earth and the Moon.

4. An art museum in your living room. If you’ve got an HDTV already, there’s no reason to buy one of those expensive digital photo frames. My April 25 column talked about GalleryPlayer, a company that provided software and imagery for turning your TV into a digital art exhibit. Unfortunately, GalleryPlayer went out of business in July (though founder Scott Lipsky, an ex-Amazon exec, hinted that it had merely been sold and might re-emerge). Luckily, there are still plenty of ways to find and display high-resolution images on your big screen. DeviantArt is a great place to browse and download free HD-resolution images created by professional artists and photographers. And if you hook up your computer to your TV, you can use software like Slickr or FlickrFan to display those images—or your own—in the form of animated slide shows.

5. An elephant never forgets. My July 18 column was about Evernote, a fantastic cross-platform system for storing and tracking all the info-flotsam in your life: Web pages, photos, receipts, you name it. I still add material to my Evernote account every day, and the company just keeps making the software better and better. There’s now a version for Android phones (on top of the existing Web, Windows, Mac, Windows Mobile, and iPhone versions). In December, Evernote (whose logo is an elephant) added a file synchronization feature, so you can use it to keep copies of important Word files, PDFs, PowerPoints, and other electronic documents, and more recently, it rolled out a vastly improved version of its Web Clipper, which is the tool I use most often. A feature I plan to try soon is the recently-announced Shoeboxed, a service that will scan that pile of business cards and receipts on your desk and put them right into Evernote. And if you used Google Notebooks—which Google gave up on in January—you can easily import all of your notes to Evernote and pick up where you left off.

6. Cutting the cord. In my July 25 column, I threatened to give up my cable TV subscription and switch to watching my favorite shows online, via video aggregators like Hulu. Well, it took me a while to gather up the courage, but last week I finally made good on the threat, and dropped my $80 digital cable package at Comcast in favor of a $10 lineup of about 23 local channels (which I kept just in case I ever feel the need to watch live news). While I was at it, I canceled …Next Page »

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Waltham, MA-based Zink, known for commercializing an inkless printing technique originally conceived at Polaroid, is providing the technology behind a new ultra-mobile wireless printer from Dell. Called the Wasabi, the $149 printer is similar to the Polaroid PoGo mobile printer, which also based on technology licensed from Zink; it’s about 5 inches long, 3 inches wide, and 1 inch deep, and can produce 2 x 3-inch color prints using data from Bluetooth-enabled cameras, mobile phones, and PCs.

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At a press conference this morning in New York City, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos officially unveiled the Kindle 2, the second version of the Seattle-based e-retailer’s popular e-book reading device. Like its predecessor, the Kindle 2 features an electronic-paper screen devised by Cambridge, MA-based E Ink. But Bezos detailed a number of new features, including text-to-speech capability, potentially making every e-book into an audio book as well.

The new device has 2 gigabytes of internal memory, seven times more storage than the original Kindle, or enough for about 1,500 books, according to Bezos’s presentation. It is also thinner and lighter than the original. It weighs 10 ounces and, at 0.36 inches in thickness, is slimmer than the Apple iPhone (0.48 inches).

The Kindle 2 will have the same price as the original, $359. It’s available for pre-order now and will ship starting February 24, according to Amazon’s product page for the gadget.

Amazon says the Kindle 2’s 600 x 800-pixel e-paper display can show 16 shades of gray, compared to the previous screen’s four shades, and has been improved to re-draw the screen 20 percent faster. The need for E Ink’s displays to erase themselves before redrawing, resulting in a momentary blinking effect, had been one of the annoyances listed by early Kindle buyers.

The design for the new Kindle also appears to address another commonly voiced complaint, the placement of the next-page or previous-page buttons, which made it too easy to flip pages unintentionally. In the new version, those keys are smaller, and don’t occupy the entire left and right sides of the device, as before.

To help promote the new Kindle, Amazon persuaded celebrated horror novelist Stephen King to write a story involving the Kindle that will be available, for a time, exclusively on the Kindle platform. King was on hand for the New York press conference, and read part of the story on stage. This isn’t, however, the first time King has written a work exclusively for electronic platforms—his 2000 short story “Riding the Bullet” was also published as an e-book.

The Kindle 2’s text-to-speech capability—one of the features I urged Amazon to consider in an essay last fall—is still “experimental,” according to Amazon’s press release. The feature lets users listen to a synthesized male or female voice, and to switch between reading or listening modes. Pages turn automatically in sync with the synthesized voice. Anything that can be displayed on the Kindle, including newspapers and blogs, can be converted to speech, the company says.

For Kindle 2, Amazon has kept the feature that attracted some of the biggest raves for the first Kindle—its ability to quickly download books over a wireless network called “Whispernet.” But the company has added a new “Whispersync” feature that can sync content and bookmarks across multiple Kindles and “with a range of mobile devices in the future,” according to the press release. (Amazon said last week that it plans to make Kindle-formatted e-books available for reading on mobile phones.)

Bezos also said the new device’s battery lasts 25 percent longer than its predecessors, and lasts as long as two weeks between charges.

Both Engadget and CrunchGear offered informative live-blog renditions of this morning’s press conference.

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The flailing economy is already hurting consumer electronics sales—and no one thinks things will get better soon. But will a slowdown in purchases of new gizmos and gadgets spur sales of used electronics as people look for bargains? Or will it diminish the supply of previously owned electronics as people hold onto their goods longer? Maybe the supply of used electronics will go up—as belt-tightening consumers take advantage of services that pay them cash for their old gear instead of simply throwing things out. And then, of course, there’s the green movement that encourages recycling.

Second Rotation, whose online service Gazelle offers consumers cash for their used cell phones, laptops, digital cameras, game consoles, and other products (or helps them recycle them properly), sees the demand for previously owned stuff going up, up, and up—or maybe, around, around, and around is a better way to put it. Largely to help it develop and expand Gazelle, the Waltham, MA-based company announced today it has secured $6 million in new funding in a Series B round led by RockPort Capital Partners of Boston and backed by previous investor Venrock Associates, as well as angels Austin Ligon and Henry Vogel.

We last profiled Second Rotation in July, when the two-year-old startup announced it had rebranded its service under the Gazelle name (”Don’t Just Sell It, Gazelle It,” the company extolled). At the time, the iPhone 3G was just coming out. And as iPhone-packing Wade wrote to would-be purchasers: “But what to do with your old, perfectly functional iPhone? You can sell it on eBay, if you want to go through the hassle. Or, starting today, you can just go to Gazelle, which will not only make you an instant cash offer for your device, but will send you a box and a pre-paid shipping label. It’s zero-friction gadget recycling—and if you’re feeling socially conscious, you can even have Gazelle send the check to your favorite charity.”

The new investment, according to a statement from Second Rotation, “validates Gazelle’s effectiveness in providing consumers with an easy, fast and safe way to get cash for their unwanted electronics or support responsible recycling.” The company says that in addition to expanding and enhancing Gazelle, it will use the funds for branding and marketing. I can just see gazelles bounding across Wade’s iPhone now…

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Somerville, MA-based product design firm Altitude has introduced a full-scale, wooden guitar controller to replace the goofy plastic one that comes with the cult-hit video games Guitar Hero and Rock Band, according to a report this week in Wicked Local. The $180 controller, designed to work with the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3 consoles, provides a more life-like strumming experience, according to Altitude engineers. Rock Band and the original versions of Guitar Hero, needless to say, were developed by Cambridge-MA based MIT Media Lab spinoff Harmonix.

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[Addendum, 10/4/08: Boy Genius Report has published pictures from a reader who obtained a Kindle 2. It's unclear so far which, if any, of the features described in my article below, published 10/3, are included.]

I wanted to love the Amazon Kindle. I’ve been a believer in the future of e-books ever since the late 1990s, when I briefly worked for NuvoMedia, the company that introduced the Rocket eBook. I was thrilled when I first heard that Jeff Bezos had decided to get serious about the technology, figuring that he was sure to have a better understanding of what makes for a great reading experience than Sony, whose PRS-500 reader, released in 2006, was a disappointment. I was intrigued when Amazon said Kindle would have a wireless chip, allowing free, nearly instantaneous book downloads over a national EVDO network. But when the first version of the Kindle came out in November 2007, it was so astonishingly ugly and expensive that I immediately soured on the product.

Now, though, there are reports that the “Kindle 2.0″ is on the way. And being an optimist, I’m hopeful that Amazon will work out some of the kinks in the first-generation device. In late August Business Week’s Peter Burrows reported, based on an interview with an unnamed source who had seen the new device, that Amazon brought in a consumer-electronics expert from international design house Frog Design to guide the Kindle’s overhaul, and that the new version is thinner and “more stylish,” with an improved screen and user interface. “They’ve jumped from Generation One to Generation Four or Five. It just looks better, and feels better,” the source told Burrows.

That’s all very encouraging. But Amazon needs to change more than just the gadget’s look and feel. If it really hopes to catch up with slick rivals like the iPhone (which is a credible e-book reading device in its own right) and compete with Sony’s expanded e-book reader line (the latest addition to which was announced this week), the Kindle needs some basic operational improvements: fundamental design matters like the placement of the page-forward and page-back buttons were badly flubbed the first time around, according to many owners. Amazon also needs think more flexibly about content pricing. And it needs to charge less for the device itself: the current $359 price tag probably reflects Amazon’s actual cost (the electronic paper screen, designed by Cambridge, MA-based E Ink, is very expensive), but I don’t think the company will see mass adoption at any price above $249. Dropping the price to $199, the same as the 8-gigabyte iPhone 3G, would get people thinking seriously about the Kindle as a holiday present.

I’ve met Bezos, and he strikes me as a big-picture guy. I’m sure he understands that the Kindle is more than a reading appliance—it’s an entire publishing platform, a system for browsing, purchasing, and consuming books, magazines, newspapers, and other digital media. So, just as Apple has continually revised and updated iTunes and the iTunes Store (without which iPods and iPhones would be fairly useless), I’m hopeful that Amazon is looking at ways to make the whole Kindle package more appealing to readers. But just in case they need some suggestions, here are a few:

1. Explore motion-activated scrolling or page turning. One of the biggest complaints from Kindle customers has been that the page-forward and page-back buttons are so large and awkwardly placed that it’s easy to hit them accidentally. Amazon will surely try to fix this problem in the Kindle 2.0, probably by moving the buttons around or making them smaller. But there’s an affordable technology—tilt activation—that could help them get rid of the buttons altogether.

Last week I bought an app for my iPhone called Instapaper Pro that’s quickly becoming indispensable to me. Its main function is to copy stripped-down versions of Web pages, then download them to your iPhone. Say you come across a long newspaper article and you want to read it later. You just click the “read later” bookmarklet in your browser, and the article will automatically show up, minus ads and other junk, on your iPhone. I find this extremely useful. But what makes Instapaper even cooler is the “tilt scroll” feature, which allows you to advance through the copied Web text simply by tilting the phone slightly backward or forward. It’s an ingenious use of the iPhone’s built-in accelerometer—the same tiny chip that prompts the Web browser window to rotate by 90 degrees if you want to view it in landscape mode rather than portrait mode.

It ought to be easy to build something like this into an e-book reader. Tilting the Kindle backward or forward might not be the most natural way to activate a page-turn, since Web pages scroll up and down, while book pages flip from right to left. But any movement that the accelerometer can detect is fair game. Maybe a sideways jiggle?

2. Try different pricing and distribution models for e-books. Amazon charges $9.99 for the Kindle versions of new releases. That’s less than what you’d pay for a hardcover, which is part of the Kindle’s attraction. And in light of the fact that Apple does pretty well selling albums on iTunes for $11.99 to $13.99, I’m willing to revise my earlier argument that new-release prices should be slashed to $5 or $6.

But I still don’t understand why e-book publishers and device makers aren’t exploring more of the …Next Page »

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For many online shoppers, no sooner have they hit the “buy” button than they’re struck by angst over whether they missed out on a better deal at another site. But at BeatThat.com, a consumer electronics shopping site that emerged from beta testing yesterday, there’s less reason to worry: the site digs up the Web’s best deals on camcorders, digital cameras, GPS devices, MP3 players, printers, and TVs by paying consumers for the information.

If you find a product advertised at a price that’s lower than the lowest one currently featured at BeatThat, the company will pay you $2.00. That way, “there’s an incentive for the deals to keep coming in until, quite frankly, you just can’t find a better one,” says David Parker, CEO of Cambridge, MA-based Digital Advisors, which created the site. “At that point, we can very confidently say we have the best prices on the Internet.”

Digital Advisors is a five-year-old, privately funded company that already operates a network of shopping websites, focused on high-definition TVs, digital cameras, satellite TV units, laptops, and camcorders. “All of those sites are doing fine. The concept is to help consumers make good choices,” says Parker, who was a co-founder of Bedford, MA-based SoundBite Communications and a business development executive at Viaweb (the maker of Web storefront software founded by Paul Graham, now of Y Combinator fame) and Direct Hit (a search engine acquired in 2002 by Ask Jeeves, now called Ask.com). “But about a year ago we decided that we wanted to try something different. We have a couple of people on our staff who are really good at sniffing out excellent prices, and a light bulb went off when we realized that the best prices we were showing on our sites, which were provided to us by an aggregation service, were never the best prices you could get.”

Parker knew there was a business model in attracting customers looking for price information on specific products, since they’re usually on the cusp of a major purchase, and e-retailers are willing to pay a commission for them—indeed, that’s how Shopzilla, PriceGrabber, and the plethora of other comparison-shopping sites make money. “So we came up with the concept for BeatThat, which would have a fixed inventory of products and would always have the best prices for those products,” he says.

The difference between BeatThat and the other shopping sites, Parker explains, is that every price shown on BeatThat has been submitted by a “Deal-Finder”—a person who’s an expert at sniffing out bargains. Like amateur commodities dealers, these contributors spend much of their spare time sifting through websites for discounted products that retailers themselves often aren’t highlighting. They also keep track of the confusing world of coupons, manufacturer rebates, and free shipping offers, which tend to change from day to day. To motivate inveterate bargain hunters to contribute their discoveries to BeatThat, the company set up its payment system, which is already netting several of the top Deal-Finders more than $1,000 a month, according to Parker.

“We didn’t want to rely on the merchants to tell us when the price is good,” Parker says. “We wanted to rely on the literal wisdom of the crowd. And if you have a large enough crowd looking for the best deals, you are going to find them.”

Anyone with an account at BeatThat can submit their product discoveries to the site; once the information is verified, Digital Advisor will put up to $2.00 into user’s account. Once a month, the accumulated funds are transferred into users’ Paypal accounts. After submitting three approved deals, a user is invited to become an official Deal-Finder.

But finding the absolute lowest prices on the Web comes with one big hazard: the best prices are often found …Next Page »

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So, you bought a first-generation iPhone last summer, but now you absolutely must have the iPhone 3G. (Hey, I’m with you, man. I already got mine.) But what to do with your old, perfectly functional iPhone? You can sell it on eBay, if you want to go through the hassle. Or, starting today, you can just go to Gazelle, which will not only make you an instant cash offer for your device, but will send you a box and a pre-paid shipping label. It’s zero-friction gadget recycling—and if you’re feeling socially conscious, you can even have Gazelle send the check to your favorite charity.

If that all sounds familiar to you, it might be because Rebecca profiled Gazelle’s parent company, Waltham, MA-based Second Rotation, back in January. The 25-employee startup has been running a beta version of the cash-for-gadgets service at secondrotation.com since last July, and today it has rebranded and relaunched it under the Gazelle name.

The company picked the new moniker because it’s easier to remember than “Second Rotation” and has clearer, more desirable connotations, according to founder and CEO Rousseau Aurelien. “We want consumers to think of Gazelle as easy, elegant, and speedy,” Aurelien told me last week. “The name tested phenomenally well, and we think it will create a pretty strong household brand.”

It didn’t hurt, either, that “gazelle” rhymes with “sell.” The tag line “Don’t Just Sell It, Gazelle It” will be plastered all over the company’s bright-green shipping packages, which Aurelien hopes will become as familiar as Netflix’s red DVD envelopes.

The name isn’t the only thing that’s new about Gazelle. The company has also expanded the catalog of items that it can offer instant bids on, to include virtually any cell phone, laptop, digital camera, MP3 player, GPS unit, camcorder, game console, satellite radio, or hard drive you might own. (The expanded catalog covers 17,000 SKUs, or stock-keeping units, up from 5,000 for the previous site, according to Aurelien.) Navigation has also been overhauled; pictures of each item make it easier to locate the one you want to sell. And if your gadget isn’t in the catalog, the company will customize an offer for you, then add that item to the database, so that the catalog grows as more users participate.

Free shipping has always been part of Second Rotation’s services, but now 80 percent of transactions on Gazelle will now qualify for free packaging as well—in those bright-green boxes. “All you have to do is put your item in the box and leave it outside your door, and the Postal Service will pick it up,” says Aurelien. (You have to wonder whether that will be entirely safe, though, once it becomes common knowledge that bright green Gazelle boxes probably have valuable electronic gadgets inside.)

The company has also built some basic social-networking features into the Gazelle site. If you introduce someone else to Gazelle, you can get a cash reward the first time they sell something. Users can also set up fundraisers, with the checks for old gadgets sent directly to a non-profit organization such as a school or a scout troop.

Greenness has always been part of Second Rotation’s pitch, and that will continue with Gazelle; the argument is that by selling your gadgets, you’re keeping them out of landfills. The company normally resells the devices users send in through eBay or other marketplaces (indeed, its whole business model is built around knowing how much it can get for each item and offering the seller a somewhat lower price), but if it determines that it can’t resell an item for a worthwhile price, it will dispose of it following “responsible recycling” guidelines like those set up by the Electronics TakeBack Coalition.

To go with its new site, Second Rotation has come up with a new label for the whole process. “We are calling it ‘recommerce,’” says Aurelien. “We think it goes beyond recycling and offers a very strong economic model that allows the consumer to get some cash and allows us to take these products and put them to re-use.”

It’s a clever way to position the startup, which raised $4.4 million in venture capital from Cambridge, MA-, New York, NY-, and Palo Alto, CA-based Venrock and a group of angel investors in January. The “recommerce” message not only offers consumers a responsible way to dispose of their unwanted gadgets, but could also ease their potential guilt about wanting to ditch their current gear for the latest, greatest product models.

Indeed, Aurelien says that one of the biggest revelations from the company’s first year of operations was that most of the products people were sending in were less than a year old, like those first-generation iPhones. “There’s a whole category of consumer we are calling the ’serial upgrader,’” says Aurelien. “They have 24 gadgets in their house, and every month a couple of them become, from their perspective, obsolete. But they aren’t at end-of-life. They’re just at end-of-use.” And with Gazelle, they can bound back into action.

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Back in January we profiled Zink Imaging, a Bedford, MA, startup breathing new life into an inkless photo printing technology first developed (pardon the pun) at Polaroid before that company’s bankruptcy and dismantlement. This weekend, the first commercial printer based on Zink’s technology will reach consumers—and ironically, it bears the Polaroid brand.

The Polaroid PoGo will go on sale this Sunday, July 6, at Best Buy stories nationwide, Zink announced yesterday. The $149 device, which was first unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, is about the size of a cell phone, and it grabs photos from camera phones and digital cameras via a BlueTooth wireless connection or a USB cable.

The PoGo can create a 2-inch-by-3-inch color print in about 60 seconds by applying brief pulses of heat to Zink’s special paper as it passes under the device’s print head. Each pulse is timed to melt crystals embedded at different depths in the paper; as the crystals melt and re-solidify in an amorphous form, they turn yellow, magenta, or cyan, producing a color picture.

Zink makes the paper for the PoGo at its own plant in North Carolina, and plans to charge $3.99 for a pack of 10 sheets and $9.99 for a pack of 30. The marketing campaign around the device is targeted at teens and twenty-somethings, and the hope is they’ll tote the PoGo with them just as they do with their cell phones (the name stands for “Polaroid-on-the-go”) and make and share prints on impulse, almost the way they might use a photo booth or an old-fashioned Polaroid camera.

And if they do, the paper business could become quite lucrative for Zink—just as film cartridges for popular Polaroid cameras such as the SX-70 were that company’s cash cow for decades.

“We at ZINK Imaging are extremely excited with the availability of the Polaroid PoGo,” Zink president and CEO Wendy Caswell said in the company’s announcement. “Through this partnership, consumers will now be able to experience the magic of Zink Zero Ink digital printing, allowing printing where it’s never before been possible.”

Target stores will begin selling the PoGo on July 20, two weeks after its debut at Best Buy. But while the device bears the Polaroid name, Polaroid itself doesn’t manufacture much of anything these days. In 2005, Minnetonka, MN-based Petters Group Worldwide bought what was left of the company after bankruptcy proceedings. It puts the Polaroid name and logo—which is still associated with instant imaging in many consumers’ minds—on consumer electronics devices assembled by contract manufacturers such as Alps Electric Co. of Japan, which makes the PoGo.

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Liquid-crystal displays are getting bigger by the minute. These days, you can buy a huge 58-inch wide-screen LCD HDTV for under $3,000. Heck, at that price, you could buy 64 of them and hire Los Gatos, CA-based 9X Media to assemble them into a video wall large enough to hold its own in Times Square.

But at the same time, interestingly enough, LCDs are also getting smaller. In Westborough, MA, there’s a company called Kopin making LCD screens that are much smaller than the proverbial postage stamp. Kopin’s VGA CyberDisplay, which has a resolution of 640×480 pixels, measures only 0.44 inches diagonally—about the size of a fingernail.

It turns out that’s small enough to mount a pair of the displays inside the temples of an eyeglass frame. And that’s exactly what Westwood, MA-based MyVu has done with the MyVu Crystal, a wearable display that goes on sale next Tuesday. Kopin’s VGA-resolution screens give the Crystal, which is designed to be plugged into video players such as Apple’s iPod and iPod nano and Microsoft’s Zune, four times the resolution of MyVu’s previous products. And they give MyVu a gadget that competes directly with the other VGA wearable display on the market, the Vuzix iWear AV920.

But the MyVu Crystal has a big advantage over devices from Vuzix and other video eyewear makers. These aren’t the kind of wrap-around goggles that immerse you in your own personal home theater, cutting you off from the world. Instead, an ingenious system of mirrors and lenses puts the video image in the center of your field of view, while leaving windows open on either side—meaning you can still see what’s around you while you’re watching that I Dream of Jeannie rerun you downloaded from iTunes.

I’ve been testing the MyVu Crystal this week, and although I wouldn’t advise you to walk down a busy street while wearing the device (for both safety and fashion reasons), you can easily see enough through the amber windows to realize that somebody is standing in front of you. (They’re probably waiting for an answer to the question you didn’t hear thanks to the Crystal’s noise-blocking earbuds.)

Now, why would you need video eyewear in the first place—especially when the Crystal, at $299, will cost you more than even a top-of-the-line iPod or Zune? You definitely aren’t going to buy a MyVu unit as a style accessory. While the company’s designers have done as much as they can to gussy up the device in shiny black, chrome, and amber plastic, it’s still as geeky-looking as Geordi Laforge’s visor from Star Trek: The Next Generation. And you’ll get better picture quality, and far less eye strain, from watching your TV, computer, or portable DVD player.

But I can imagine at least one scenario where video eyeglasses would be useful: when you want to watch something without disturbing the people around you—and/or without letting them see what you’re watching, such as when you’re on a plane or at a boring conference. And if you’re in that situation, the MyVu Crystal has a lot to recommend it. The effective viewing area of the Crystal’s screen is surprisingly large. The experience is about the same as looking at a 22-inch computer monitor from about four feet away, or looking at the 3.5-inch screen of an Apple iPhone from about a foot away. Because the VGA displays inside the Crystal have twice as many pixels as the screen on the iPhone, however, TV shows and movies actually look much sharper on the Crystal than they do on the screen of an iPhone—or a video iPod or a Zune, for that matter.

The Crystal’s displays also have excellent color saturation. I tested the device by watching the pilot episode of the Showtime series Dexter—you know, the one where Michael C. Hall plays a Miami PD forensics expert who also happens to be a serial killer—and I can testify that the abundant blood in the show was, in fact, very red.

On the downside, the Crystal is fairly heavy for a device that’s supposed to be worn like a pair of glasses. I think I still have an impression on my nose from the bridge. And if you wear glasses, you’ll need to order custom prescription lenses for the device (although I have glasses for mild nearsightedness and I didn’t have trouble focusing on the screen). Also, the Crystal’s displays aren’t perfect: the colors seem to “seethe” a bit compared to the rock-solid hues of my desktop monitor and my home TV. I don’t know the technical term for this phenomenon, but it may be inevitable with such tiny displays—after all, the individual pixels in the Kopin display are about 1/1000th the size of those in a conventional LCD TV.

My verdict on MyVu? I think the Crystal will appeal to gadget lovers, seeing as it’s one of the first wearable displays with decent resolution, and the see-through windows mean you aren’t rendered inoperable while wearing it. But that’s a limited market. Personally, I’m going to hold out for a Matrix-style neural interface that jacks directly into my optical cortex. That way, if I want to wear shades, I can choose a cool pair like Neo’s.

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Xconomy is all about hyperlocal coverage of the innovation community in greater Boston and New England. But we also know that our readers have many interests that reach far beyond our geography. For the most part, we leave writing about such matters to others. But, starting today, we are making an exception—and that exception is Wade.

Today marks the debut of World Wide Wade, a weekly, largely consumer-oriented column by Xconomy chief correspondent Wade Roush. As many of you know and have already remarked, there are few people anywhere more knowledgeable about new technology happenings than Wade. So we decided to tap this local resource in a new way.

The column will appear each Friday and will highlight new consumer technologies, such as Web services and electronic gadgets, that are making our lives more interesting.

I feel sure you’ll enjoy it. Welcome to Wade’s world.

Today’s column

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There must have been a message in the fact that my cell phone cut out—as it has been wont to do throughout my entire relationship with the device—in the middle of my conversation yesterday with Israel Ganot. Perhaps it was a sign that it’s time for me and my Motorola to finally part ways? And if it was, what are the chances I could motivate myself to find a more patient owner for the fickle thing on eBay, rather than just laying it to rest in the back of my desk drawer, beside my last phone?

Indeed, before we were so rudely interrupted, Ganot—president and COO of Waltham, MA’s Second Rotation—had been making the point that although hundreds of thousands of people buy stuff on eBay, very few people sell stuff there. Dealing with pricing, payment issues, sellers’ questions, and the (real or perceived) potential for fraud makes selling “too difficult, too challenging,” Ganot says.

He should know, having spent the six years before he joined Second Rotation (in September of 2006) working at eBay, where he helped the company expand into Europe, Asia, and elsewhere and to integrate and expand PayPal. Second Rotation founder and CEO Rousseau Aurelien had reached the same conclusion a year or two earlier when he left his job in biz-dev at Burlington, MA-based software firm Signiant to become an eBay power seller, Ganot says. So Aurelien—who had previously launched and sold another startup called Cambridge Information Systems—formed Second Rotation to do the dirty work.

Second Rotation gives consumers like me cash for their old cells, MP3 players, digital cameras, and other gadgets, then resells the devices online. From the consumer perspective, the process is seductively simple: Choose the gizmo you want to sell from a list on secondrotation.com, answer a few yes/no questions about its condition, and rate its condition, from poor to excellent. Second Rotation instantly gives you a “trade-in value” for the item.

If you’re willing to part with your item for that amount you fill in your name, address, and so forth, print up a shipping label that the site automatically generates, throw the item in a box, and call for a pickup. (Starting in a month or so, Ganot says, the company might even send you a Netflix-style prepaid, prelabeled box.) Once the company receives the device—and determines that it’s as you described—it sends you the money, via PayPal or check. All in all, Ganot says, “the average user doesn’t spend more than a couple of minutes with us, and we’re happy about that.”

One of the things that sets Second Rotation apart from many of the other companies that facilitate eBay sales is that it buys the inventory outright. “We are very proud to not be a consignment shop,” says Ganot. But since the startup is handing over the dough up front, he adds, it had better be sure its estimate of each item’s market value—which is dynamically calculated for each transaction based on the latest sales data from eBay, Amazon, and other online retailers—is right. Ganot confesses that the team was a little nervous about that before Second Rotation launched its service this past July, but “six months later the proof is in the pudding and it’s working—we can make a margin.” On average, he says, sellers get 60 to 70 cents for every dollar Second Rotation ultimately makes selling the merchandise. (The firm will also recycle items that are too old or damaged to be worth reselling, although it won’t pay for shipping on those unless they’re packaged with saleable devices.)

Now that the company knows its economic model works, it’s focusing on scaling up the business, putting particular emphasis on its marketing and PR efforts. It also plans to eventually expand beyond gadgets into sporting goods, luxury goods, and other markets. “We see consumer electronics as a good beachhead,” Ganot says. Second Rotation will be buoyed in those efforts by a just-announced $4.4 million initial financing round; the deal was led by Venrock, and included the participation of angel investors Austin Ligon, Ashton Peery, and Henry Vogel.

I asked Ganot what items folks seemed most anxious to get off their hands in the months that the service has been operating. He says phones have been particularly popular (or unpopular, depending on your perspective), but the company sees a lot of iPods and Zunes as well. Essentially, he says, “whatever was popular and exciting a year, year and a half ago.” Second Rotation is even seeing a few iPhones go on the block (I know, Wade, it’s horrifying).

My own phone? Well, yesterday evening Second Rotation offered me nine bucks for it. Pretty generous of them, given that I (accidentally) hung up on the COO.

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The digital revolution hasn’t changed the fact that new printing technology spreads slowly. Johannes Gutenberg, for example, first used metal movable type to publish his famous Bible in 1455, but it wasn’t until 1480 or so that letterpress printing became widespread in Europe, and England didn’t get its first printing press until 1489.

The folks at E Ink are hoping it doesn’t take quite that long—a quarter century or more—for their electronic paper technology to catch on. Nonetheless, the decade-old company is prepared for the long haul. On Tuesday, I met with Dave Jackson, E Ink’s director of marketing and planning. He told me that after years of development work, 2006 was finally “the year of transition from prototyping to mass production.” This year and next, he says, will see the company’s high-resolution, lower-power display technology start to turn up in a range of commercial gadgets, from wristwatches and e-book reading devices (including a new one from Sony) to laptops (where they’re being used as secondary screens for Windows Vista’s Sideshow feature) and USB flash drives (where they function as capacity indicators).

It’s been a long journey. Cambridge-based E Ink was founded in 1997 by MIT Media Lab physicist Joseph Jacobson and two Media Lab students; since then, it’s been the subject of hundreds of enthusiastic articles by technology journalists, including myself. Rather than pen yet another explanation of Jacobson’s technology, I’ll just quote from a review of the E Ink-equipped Sony PRS-500 reading device that I wrote earlier this year for MIT’s Technology Review:

“Their clever idea: sandwich millions of tiny, liquid-filled microcapsules between two layers of electrodes, the top one transparent. Floating inside each microcapsule are thousands of positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles. A negative charge applied at a given electrode on the lower layer pulls the white particles to the bottom of nearby microcapsules and pushes the black particles to the top, creating a black mark beneath the transparent electrode; clusters of these marks make up the equivalent of a black pixel in an LCD screen. This held out the promise of both higher resolution (since the pixels can be made smaller than those in LCDs) and longer battery life (since the particles stay in place, without any further electricity use, until the user calls up the next page).”

To repeat that last point, E Ink’s electronic paper—actually, the company is calling the latest version “VizPlex Imaging Film,” to distinguish it from other emerging brands of e-paper—has two big advantages over LCDs: a resolution approaching that of newsprint and zero power consumption between rewritings. But it also has two big downsides: First, it’s a monochrome technology. (Up to 16 levels of gray are possible, but color microcapsule-based displays are still years away.) And second, it takes about three-quarters of a second to refresh a VizPlex page, due to the need to thoroughly “erase” capsules that are in an in-between gray state. That’s an improvement over previous versions of the film, which took a second or more to refresh, but it’s still far too slow for purposes such as video. In situations such as Sony’s e-book devices, the erasing process also results in a momentary but jarring flash every time the user “turns” the page.

E-book devices remain the flagship application for E Ink’s films. Sony just came out with its revamped PRS-505 (which has a much more elegant design than the PRS-500, judging from the unit Jackson showed me), and Jackson says half a dozen other companies, including Amazon, will introduce devices based on E Ink’s technology over the next few months. But E Ink has also been busy adapting VizPlex for other applications where monochrome is all that’s needed and refresh time isn’t an issue. One example is Motorola’s MotoFone, a thin, light, and inexpensive cell phone with an incredible 12 days of standby time. Another is Lexar Media’s JumpDrive Mercury USB flash drive, which uses a tiny E Ink display to show how much memory is left on the device. Jackson says VizPlex displays will soon be incorporated into credit cards, where they will be used to display temporary security passcodes (ever-changing versions of the static codes now printed on the back of many cards).

Though E Ink makes the particle-filled microcapsules, it is still largely an R&D house, not a manufacturer. Five rounds of financing, including one that just ended in September, have netted the company an eye-popping $150 million in funding, mainly from strategic industrial partners such as Air Products and Chemicals, Intel Capital, Motorola, Philips Venture Capital Fund, and TOPPAN Printing Company of Japan. The strengths these investors see may lie partly in a system of 120 issued patents and more than 100 pending ones. In its spring 2007 ratings of the patent portofolios of U.S. corporations, Chicago’s Patent Board ranked E Ink 26th out of 500 companies.

But the company is still far from conquering its category, and it faces competitive dangers along the way. For example, Qualcomm, the San Diego-based telecommunications chipmaker, has developed a prototype e-paper system that uses microelectromechanical switches to control interference between visible wavelengths of light, producing color images that can be rewritten in tens of microseconds—more than fast enough for video. And old-fashioned color LCD displays keep coming down in price—meaning that for the time being, E Ink’s films will remain premium products, employed as much for their novelty as for their quality.

Nonetheless, “It’s a fun time to be here,” Jackson says. “We’re getting the bugs out, and we’ve got a lot of customers that we’re shipping to.” If the devices that use E Ink’s films start to see significant consumer uptake, the company could start building up a value that’s not just on paper.

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Recent headlines about Burlington, MA-based iRobot have all focused on the robot maker’s legal tangle with Robotic FX, which beat it out for a $279.9 million defense contract but is now in court defending against iRobot’s accusations of patent infringement and industrial espionage. Hearings in that case have been continued until Monday, when we’ll bring you the latest scoop.

But business rolls onward, and today at the Digital Life consumer technology exhibit in New York iRobot rolled out two new robots for the consumer market. One is a diminutive device for cleaning out dirt- and leaf-filled gutters called Looj. The other, ConnectR, resembles iRobot’s existing Roomba vacuum cleaners but is actually a novel “virtual visiting” robot—basically, a webcam on wheels that can be controlled via the Internet, allowing two-way voice and video conversations with people in a remote location.

In a statement, iRobot CEO Colin Angle said the new robots should dispel the notion that home robots are a dream for the distant future. “Today iRobot is delivering to customers practical home robots that are affordable, effective and easy-to-use,” Angle said. “The future is now – and everyone can and should have a robot in their home today.”

But not everyone can have a ConnectR—not yet, anyway. In effect, the company is recruiting families for a public beta trial through what it’s calling the ConnectR Pilot Program. The program’s Web page explains: “A few lucky participants will be given the opportunity in late 2007 to own a ConnectR for the special price of $199. In exchange for this offer, owners are asked to provide us with feedback including filling out surveys and participating in interviews about the experience of using the product in their home.” In 2008, when the ConnectR becomes more widely available, the starting price is expected to increase to “just under $500.” Meaning, presumably, $499.

For the ConnectR, iRobot has apparently modified the Roomba chassis to carry a tilt-and-zoom video camera, speaker, microphone, and headlight. It connects to a home Wi-Fi network and can be operated remotely by users who call in over the Internet, using their keyboard and mouse or a joystick to drive the device from room to room, using the live video feed as a guide. The device is targeted at people who would like to interact with family members, friends, or pets but can’t be physically present. “Participate in family moments even though you’re working late,” reads the company’s marketing pitch for the ConnectR. “On a business trip? Read your kids a story and see their faces light up. Tell Fido he’s a ‘good boy’ even while you’re on vacation.”

Looj, meanwhile, has a much more prosaic purpose: Taking over the dirty and dangerous task of cleaning gutters. Only 2.5 inches wide, the device fits inside a gutter and propels itself along on tank-like treads. A spinning, three-stage auger flings out dirt and decomposing leaves. “The Looj cleans an entire stretch of gutter from one location, reducing the number of times a ladder must be repositioned and climbed during gutter cleaning,” the company said.

For homeowners who want clean gutters before the winter of 2007-2008 strikes, the $99 device is available immediately at the companys’ website. It will be distributed by “select retailers” starting sometime in the fourth quarter, the company said.

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iRobot, Boston’s (well, Burlington’s) very own robotics company, announced its newest line of Roomba robot vacuum cleaners today. The company’s intrepid saucer-shaped gadgets, which zoom across carpets and hardwood floors bouncing off walls and other obstacles until they’ve sucked up every last crumb and cat hair, have already won fame as history’s most successful consumer robots, selling more than 2 million units since 2002. The forthcoming Roomba “500 series” vacuums reportedly sport improvements such as more efficient suction, a larger dustbin, longer side brushes for catching debris in corners, a sensor system that ensures gentler impacts with objects, a built-in voice tutorial for newbies, and—for those who want to mix a little fashion with their housework—interchangeable faceplates in hues such as “champagne,” “steel blue,” and “burnt orange.” (Aaron Ricadela has a nice review of the Roomba 560 over at Business Week.)

All these cool new features have me reminiscing about my trusty, no-frills Roomba Red vacuum, which I received as a gift in 2004. I’d been following iRobot’s fortunes for a couple of years and had been tempted to buy a Roomba myself, but a good friend who knew about my penchant for gadgets beat me to it. To many, the idea of a robot vacuum cleaner (or a robot anything, in the household context) was still a bit of a Jetsons-era joke. But I got over that attitude quickly when I saw what the Roomba could do.

Okay, it doesn’t have the nuclear-powered-wind-tunnel suction power of the high-tech Dyson vacuums. Its round shape prevents it from cleaning corners effectively (despite the side brushes), and you need to do a bit of pre-cleaning before you deploy it, since it has a tendency to get tangled up in cords (untangling is another thing the 500s are supposed to be better at). But it always got my light-tan carpet—which seemed cleverly designed to showcase dirt and pet hair—into guest-ready condition. In fact, I didn’t get out my old Hoover vacuum for more than a year after the Roomba showed up.

Robot technology still has a long way to go to prove itself outside of industrial settings. I’ve seen Honda’s Asimo robot mount stairs and sprint surprisingly quickly across exhibition-hall stages; Honda’s engineers have made so much progress replicating human-style locomotion that this painful YouTube video of Asimo taking a tumble is the exception rather than the rule.

But in the end, humanoid robots remain carnival curiosities. To my eyes, the Roomba is the first unqualified success of the consumer robot era, the perfect melding of MIT-bred engineering talent with a real market need. Roomba isn’t glamorous or cute. It doesn’t wave at the crowd. It does what it’s designed to do—like rooting out dust bunnies in those abandoned bedroom crannies where most of us are afraid to look—and nothing more. And it does it just as well as traditional vacuums, with the obvious advantage that you can set it and forget it. That’s what robots were always supposed to be about.

In a somewhat bizarre amateur photography project that I undertook in 2005—a self-portrait (at left) in which I posed with all of my electronic gear, including my microchip-implanted Australian Shepherd, Rhody—I gave my Roomba Red a place of honor. (Click here for a larger version; the Flickr version includes active tags identifying the gadgets in the picture.) I wish iRobot the best with the 500 series, and I might even get one if little Red ever wears out. I’m also looking forward to learning more about the two new home robots iRobot is rumored to be developing—which are due September 27 (according to this Reuters story) and should dispel perceptions that iRobot is a “one-trick pony,” in the words of CEO Colin Angle.

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