January 2007

The Polaroid spin-off Zink just unveiled a new full-color thermal-paper printer based on technology from Polaroid’s Project Opal. From the SJ Mercury News:

Zink prints a 2-by-3-inch picture in 30 seconds — somewhat slower than inkjet printers — that comes out dry. It brings back the instant gratification of 1970s-era Polaroid picture, without forcing you to wait for it to develop. And it’s a much better quality print than Polaroids were.

With Zink devices, the plastic paper has layers of plastic in the middle with millions of tiny crystal dyes that can be activated by heat. If you heat the paper a certain amount, the dyes melt and you get yellow. If you heat it less but for a slightly longer time, you get magenta. If you heat it a little less and slightly longer, you get cyan. Those colors can be mixed to print any color. If you think of microwaving a frozen dinner, you get the idea.

The special paper is still a little expensive (about 80 cents for a 4-by-6-inch print) because it has to be doped with ink over the entire surface, but the company hopes to reduce the cost in the future.

The original Choose Your Own Adventure books are now available as audio ebooks for your iPod. If you’d like to try a free download, turn to page 22.If you’d like to continue walking until you reach the end, turn to page 42. (Thanks to Janie for the link.)

It’ll be interesting to watch how Apple’s iTV + iTunes competes with Tivo in the long run. The big difference is that iTV is inherently narrowcast — play podcasts and downloads from the iTunes store — while Tivo’s main schtick is to provide the advantage of narrowcast on top of a legacy broadcast video distribution system (cable).

Long-term I always bet on narrowcast, but there’s still a big question of timing: when does enough content become available on the Internet that you no longer need your cable TV subscription? And how much can Apple do to make that day come a little sooner?

Ouch. As of now AAPL is up just over 6%, PALM and RIMM both down around 5%.

I’ve been yawning about the rumors of a phone that’s also an iPod — music is the least of the apps that I use on my phone, and I’m quite happy with my Treo 650. But a quad-mode phone that runs OS X, including dashboard widgets and Safari, with GSM, EDGE, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth? Now that’s a big deal! (And just as the future of Palm OS was looking a little shaky — looks like now I can continue with my life-long dream of never having to use any form of Windows. 🙂

I’m especially looking forward to playing with is the two-fingered “pinch” interface for resizing, something that’s possible because their touchscreen can handle multiple touches at once — I’ve wanted something like that since I saw Sun’s Starfire concept video back in 1993…