~5pm, April 1—Outside the Library of Congress (it’s raining lightly, and hordes of students are milling about).

A full day of running around Capitol Hill began yesterday with the New England Clean Energy Council masses arriving at the Capitol Building just as it was having a security alert—again, April Fool’s or not? Turned out to be real, but we circumnavigated our way to a cramped briefing room inside the Capitol, where NECEC president Nick D’Arbeloff provided an overview of the Council’s priorities and talking points, which are headlined by the need for a viable “Cap & Invest” Program for Carbon. This item turns out to be very timely; it is the main hot button topic on the Hill right now (in addition to the budget), as the Waxman/Markey Climate Change Bill was introduced yesterday.

The Council priorities and programs also include a push for a Renewable Energy Standard and a set of Energy Innovation Accelerator Programs from early R&D support to commercial deployment and everything in between, both on the funding and policy/permitting sides. There is also a call out for the Invest part of the Cap & Invest program to be focused on efficiency investments and initiatives. The Council Policy Committee has done a nice job of coalescing a broad set of ideas into a cogent set of initiatives and preparing Council members to brief various members of Congress that we all were to meet with this afternoon.

We then spent an hour on the receiving end of several rapid fire briefs from various New England staffers on their core issues, the budgeting process, the climate change bill, and myriad other topics. Each briefing ended abruptly as the particular staffer hurried off, obviously late for his or her next 10-minute meeting, which seems to be the clock cycle of DC, which I actually quite liked—quick formalities, get to business, highlight action items, and then move on to the next meeting. It’s clear that the budget process, especially appropriations (i.e. earmarks), is the top priority as the deadline is this Friday, so perhaps the mostly mid-20 staffers are more harried than normal, but each was insightful, articulate, and obviously engaged. Key takeaways mirrored my earlier comments, with the added emphasis that it is a long process (start soon for FY 11), and one only needs to walk the halls of the Capital Office Buildings for a few hours to realize that there are many and varied parties vying for the ears of our lawmakers, often with very different agendas.

Next up was Congressman Ed Markey, who was very generous in spending nearly an hour with us, briefing us on his Climate Change Bill and the battle that will ensue over the next several months to make it a reality. The President and Chairwoman Nancy Pelosi have been specific on calling for a Cap & Trade structure, but it seems that there are pockets of Carbon Tax folks who are vocal as well. The Waxman/Markey bill is Cap & Trade and will be flushed out very heavily over the next 4-6 weeks with some fundamental questions and structural issues yet to be worked out. The takeaway is …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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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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Pioneering instant film company Polaroid is closing two Massachusetts film manufacturing plants—in Norwood and Waltham—as it discards the core technology that made it a household name to focus on digital photography and flat-panel TVs, the Boston Globe reports. About 150 jobs will be eliminated as part of the closures, which should be completed this quarter. The Globe’s Hiawatha Bray reports that Polaroid will retain some 150 executive and administrative employees at its Concord headquarters and a satellite office in Waltham. In the late 1970s, the Globe reports, Polaroid had about 15,000 Bay State employees.

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What if printers became so small that you could attach one to the back of a television, a video game console, a camera, a digital photo frame, or even a cell phone? And what if these tiny printers never required ink—just tiny little packs of paper? You’d have the makings of a rebirth in instant-print photography, with every digital device that captures or displays images potentially acting as its own photo lab.

That’s the vision of Zink Imaging, a Waltham, MA, startup that’s taken technology conceived eight years ago at Polaroid Research Labs and turned it into practical devices that will make their public debut today at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

“We think it’s a game changer,” Zink CEO Wendy Caswell told me in an interview last month. “We are going where no printer company can go, which is into the pocket of the consumer. There isn’t any ink to spill; you just add paper. It’s a classic disruptive technology.” Which may be why innovation guru Clay Christensen is one of the company’s strategic investors—and is definitely why you don’t see Polaroid itself developing the technology. But more on that in a bit.

Zink doesn’t manufacture printing devices itself, but is licensing its technology to manufacturing partners such as Alps Electric, FoxConn, Japanese toymaker Tomy, and even a reborn Polaroid, which has recently emerged from bankruptcy as a purveyor of consumer electronics. At CES today, Polaroid will unveil a “Digital Instant Mobile Photo Printer”—based on Zink’s technology and manufactured by Alps—that’s not much bigger than the 2-inch-by-3-inch, peel-and-stick photos it produces. That means it’s small enough to attach to digital cameras and even camera phones. Caswell says Tomy is building a similar printer into an instant camera aimed at school-age children.

What Zink is making, from a 385,000-square-foot plant in North Carolina that was about to be closed by former owner Konica-Minolta until Zink bought it last year, is the paper for those printers. And at an anticipated $0.20 per print, selling paper could turn into a lucrative business all on its own—in much the same way that ink-jet cartridges are more profitable for companies like Hewlett Packard than the printers that use them.

Zink’s paper isn’t actually paper at all, but rather a phyllo-like composite of three layers of dye crystals encased in polymer film. In fact, the idea at the core of the company’s intellectual property is encapsulated in its name, which stands for “zero ink.”

Around 2000, the way Zink CTO Steve Herchen explains it, scientists at Polaroid Research Labs realized that it might be possible to build an inkless digital printer by embedding all the necessary color-producing materials in the paper itself—an approach reminiscent of the self-developing instant film that Edwin Land developed in the 1940s and that made Polaroid famous, except that unlike with Land’s film, optics would play no part. Instead, this type of printing would be driven by thermal print heads, like those used in fax machines and gas-pump receipt printers.

The Polaroid researchers embarked on a hunt for temperature-sensitive materials that would be colorless in their solid, crystalline state but become brightly colored when melted. They eventually found crystals that …Next Page »

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