Mimeo.com, a New York-based provider of online and on-demand document printing services, raised $10.7 million in equity according to a regulatory filing with the SEC. Mimeo’s board includes directors from its investors HarbourVest Partners and Draper Fisher JGV Fund, according to the filing. Dow Jones VentureWire initially reported the funding announcement. Mimeo has not yet issued a statement regarding the financing nor disclosed the source of the money.

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In this era of Kindles and iPads and cloud-based data storage, the idea of an Internet startup that’s actually focused on paper is more than an anachronism—it’s almost a contradiction in terms. But that’s Chirply, a Y Combinator-backed company in San Francisco that sells high-end greeting cards—and soon notebooks and wrapping paper—printed with designs from independent artists. The six-employee startup runs a website where artists submit designs and random fans and customers vote for their favorites (that’s the Internet part). And the designs themselves are fun, hip, and edgy. But in most other ways, Chirply would be as at home in Peoria in 1935 as it is in San Francisco in 2011.

To find out more about the startup, and what inspired a pair of brothers with background in cloud, security, database, mobile, and video technology to launch something so retro, I biked into SoMa in April to visit Chirply’s office at 153 Townsend. (They’ve since moved.) The building contains a warren of rental offices occupied by early-stage Web startups, including other Y Combinator alumni like Convore and Rapportive. So it’s probably safe to say that Chirply was the only company in the building whose office was stacked high with boxes full of actual stock—greeting cards, on the day I visited.

“My brother and I both come from artistic backgrounds,” Gagan Palrecha explains. “I ran a record label for 10 years. My brother [Neel Palrecha] was a professional musician in a touring band. We both grew up screen-printing T-shirts and concert posters in our parents’ basement. So we’ve been in that world, and a big part of what we set out to accomplish was to work closely with designers and give them a serious outlet for their art.”

Laudable enough—and as for why the Palrecha brothers chose greeting cards and wrapping paper as the medium for their mission, I’ll get to that in a minute. But it’s an interesting fact that Chirply didn’t start out as a crowdsourced paper goods company. “Pivots” aren’t unusual for young startups, but Chirply’s, which came just a month before Y Combinator’s summer 2010 demo day, was more dramatic than most. The original idea for the company was all about the Internet, befitting Gagan’s background at early cloud services company Loudcloud, security startup Vantu, and Oracle, and Neel’s history at mobile video companies MobiTV and Quickplay. The Palrechas wanted to turn Twitter into a platform for e-commerce by writing software that would translate a retweet into a purchase. “Let’s say you were Capital Records selling a new Coldplay album,” says Gagan. “You could put out a message saying ‘retweet this message and get the new Coldplay record for $5.99′ and then all of your followers, to get that price, would click the retweet button.”

Gagan Palrecha (left) and Neel Palrecha

A neat idea—and “we still have the code,” Gagan says. But the brothers realized that profit margins on such an operation might be small, and that mitigating fraud would be costly. “We made a decision that this wasn’t going to be big as big as we wanted.” But they already had a domain name that was “cute, short, memorable, happy, and cheerful,” in Gagan’s words. So for their second act, the brothers picked something closer to their artistic passions.

Gagan says he and Neel are both big fans of Etsy, the online marketplace for small independent craftspeople, and Threadless, which sells T-shirts with crowd-sourced designs. They’re also the kind of people who will gladly spend $20 on a leatherbound Moleskine journal when a $2 spiral notebook would do. “The reason we use really nice notebooks in the office and at home is because we just feel more productive and more driven and happier when we’re using stuff that we have an emotional connection to,” Gagan says. “That is what we want to do, help people create meaningful artistic connections with the things they use every day.”

But Threadless already had a corner on artsy clothing, as Etsy did on jewelry and other crafts. The Palrechas wanted to find a market where they could spotlight cool independent designers, but in a way that that would guarantee recurring revenues. “The question was, … Next Page »

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The founders of Unitask aren’t afraid of change. They started a consulting company in Israel, and have since moved to Cleveland, OH, and most recently Bloomfield Hills, MI. And they’ve transitioned their business from a services operation to a software developer.

Israeli Navy veterans Michael Segev, Alex Protas, and Yechiel Tushia started their consulting firm in 1995, focused on helping clients with Oracle software products, says CEO Dale Royal. Less than a decade later, the company branched out to Cleveland, OH, (but at that point kept its headquarters in Israel) looking to transition its services into software products.

Unitask has attracted funding from Draper Triangle Ventures of Pittsburgh, PA, and Cleveland-based Early Stage Venture Partners, first in a $2.5 million investment, and then with another $1 million deal. Royal joined in 2008, to help the company fully transition out of consulting, to “drive it to being a product company.”

Unitask, which moved its headquarters to Michigan last summer, is looking to automate tasks that were traditionally performed by consultants (for a hefty price), or with lots of labor on the customer’s part.

The company has two main products on the market now. One, Output Director, “takes care of a very, very basic problem,” says Royal. That would be printing from Oracle E-Business software. I don’t really think twice about printing, but I can get my job done with a Web browser and Microsoft Office. The Output Director software product allows users to securely and remotely print reports from the Oracle suite, without the tedious configuration traditionally required for the complicated reports, Royal says. One Unitask customer, UGI Utilities, calculated that it saved $200,000 using the software instead of the hours of consulting work at $175 per hour that it previously needed for each report it put out.

Unitask’s other main product, Migration Director, enables users to change data, like product numbers, across different applications within Oracle E-Business software. “It makes those changes automatic for you, rather than making it a labor intensive process,” says Royal.

Unitask’s move of its headquarters to Michigan was aided by a $250,000 investment from Automation Alley, a Troy, MI-based technology business association. The dozen-person startup is focused this year on expanding its customer base and the industries it serves, Royal says. Currently, companies in the construction and engineering, healthcare, and manufacturing spaces make up a big chunk of its customer base.

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It’s no surprise that many traditionally brick-and-mortar industries and activities are being improved or even replaced by Internet technologies. Wakefield, MA-based HubCast is looking to do the same thing for commercial printing, which is far more complex than the few clicks required for printing an essay off of a personal computer, say.

Traditionally, commercial printing has been a “very manual, antiquated process,” says HubCast founder and CEO Toby LaVigne, whose family has been in the printing business for four generations. He says that for companies looking to put out marketing materials—from catalogues to brochures to posters—working with traditional printers bears some similarities to serving as the general contractor on a kitchen remodeling job: lots of phone tag, voicemails, and ad hoc instructions. And it all has to be done during the course of workdays. Plus, if your printer is in one city and you wanted your material in another, you’d just have to ship it.

So LaVigne started HubCast to make printing commercial material far more akin to printing personal documents from your desktop. The startup got off the ground in 2007, with $8.1 million in Series A funding, from Commonwealth Capital Partners and Ascent Venture Partners. Earlier this year it rolled out a professional version, designed to give companies more printing inventory and preferred pricing from printers.

“The HubCast experience feels a lot more like having an Amazon account,” says LaVigne.

Here’s how it works: Companies can handle all their commercial print jobs through their online HubCast accounts, in much the same way that customers would shop in other forms of e-commerce. HubCast helps print “whatever companies use to communicate with customers for sales and marketing,” LaVigne says.

The HubCast service enables companies to store and manage the files they eventually want to send to the printers in the Internet cloud. They can dictate all the printing specifications via an online interface that would have traditionally been handled via multiple phone calls, and it doesn’t have to be within normal business hours. Printing customers can choose same-day, next-day, or five-day delivery for their products.

“You can literally place an order any time, day or night, from anywhere to anywhere,” LaVigne says.

Anywhere within the HubCast printer network, that is. LaVigne says HubCast has identified the top 135 cities by per-capita GDP across the globe to determine where the bulk of commercial activity happens, and is adding printshops in those areas as part of the HubCast network to take orders. For example, if you’re a Boston company that needs … Next Page »

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Cambridge, MA-based Panraven, which offers online image editing tools that allow users to create hard-bound photo books, has raised $2.7 million out of a planned $3 million funding round involving debt, equity, and warrants, according to regulatory documents filed last week. The company’s investors include Castanea Partners, Dace Ventures, and Draper Fisher Jurvetson, according to its website.

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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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