Burlington, MA-based Nuance Communications (NASDAQ: NUAN) said today it has purchased image scanning and indexing company eCopy of Nashua, NH, for $54 million in Nuance stock. ECopy’s software for touchscreen-driven multifunction printers (MFPs) helps companies scan business documents and easily incorporate them into accounting and records systems. “Nuance and eCopy share a vision of connecting MFP devices to a wide range of applications in an easy and productive way,” Robert Weideman, a general manager and senior vice president in Nuance’s Document Imaging Division, said in a statement.

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Today Bedford, MA-based Zink unveiled the winning designs in a $25,000 contest called “Zero Boundaries,” launched to elicit creative ideas about how Zink’s inkless printing technology might be built into devices that young people and future mobile consumers could use to capture, modify, and share digital photos.

We’ve told you the story of Zink, the Bedford, MA, startup whose pocket-sized printers can make instant, 3-by-4-inch prints from any digital image without using ink. In essence, the company reimagined a thermal printing technique that was invented but never commercialized at Polaroid. In a contest announcement earlier this year, Zink (whose name stands for “Zero Ink”) asked designers and design students around the world to reimagine Zink’s own products.

The winning ideas hail from designers in the U.S., China, Brazil, the Netherlands, and Romania. They vary from an iPhone accessory to a little robot that crawls around on a giant piece of Zink paper, printing as it goes. The company has published slide shows and descriptions of the winning entries on its contest website.

Zink’s basic technology involves a thermal print head that applies precise pulses of heat to special paper impregnated with crystals that turn various colors when they melt. Contest entrants had to build their designs—whether physical models or 3-D CAD renderings—around the basic mechanical and electronic elements of the Zink printer.

“The designs were incredibly well thought-through and truly showcase the breadth and disruptive nature of the future of printing that only Zink can enable,” said CEO Wendy Caswell in today’s announcement.

In the “Youth” category, the company’s challenge to designers was to “make today’s youth crave Zink products in the context of their digital and mobile world.” The winner, Zink Mix, consists of an iPhone application that searches a user’s photo albums and social networks for pictures they might want to print, along with a fancy iPhone docking station with numerous sliders and dials for photo editing that give it the appearance of an audio mixer. Patrick Schuur, of design firm Maketropolis in the Netherlands, won a $10,000 cash prize for the design.

In the “Future” category, Zink wanted designers to reimagine printing altogether. The winning design certainly does that: called the Mini Giant, it’s a self-propelled, large-format poster printer that rolls across a piece of Zink paper the way a farm combine traverses a wheat field. A thermal head on the Mini Giant’s undercarriage exposes paper as it goes. The design came from Paula Adina Sumalan, a recently graduated design student from Romania, who also won $10,000.

The company also handed out $1,000 second prizes in each category and $500 third prizes, along with a $500 “People’s Choice” award, with the winner determined by voting at the contest website. Brazilian Arthur Ditlef’s design for a portable business card printer, called the SmartBC, won the popular vote.

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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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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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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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