Liquavista

» see liquavista.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Philips spun Liquavista out in 2006 and presented it as the first company out of a new arrangement with the venture firm New Venture Partners, set up to commercialize work sitting in the Philips research labs. The two people it was built around, Johan Feenstra and Rob Hayes, were the co-inventors of the electrowetting display work done inside Philips Research in Eindhoven. Feenstra is described as the chief executive in some accounts and the chief technology officer in others, a confusion small companies rarely bother to correct. Guy Demuynck, who had run consumer divisions at Philips and at KPN, was brought in as CEO in 2009.

What they were selling was a screen that behaved like paper in daylight and like an LCD when you wanted it to move. E-paper at the time meant E Ink, which meant gray and too slow to carry moving pictures. Electrowetting promised color and video at a fraction of the power of a backlit panel, and by 2010 Liquavista was shipping development kits to manufacturers and saying out loud that this was the final step toward commercialization.

There was never a product. The first production runs were expected in 2013 and did not happen, and nothing since has shipped to a consumer with this technology inside it. Twelve years of work passed through three corporate owners without a single panel coming off a production line.

~ the dossier ~

~ oil and water ~

Electrowetting works by using a voltage to change how a liquid wets a surface. In a display, each cell holds colored oil sitting on a water layer over a reflective base. With no voltage, the oil spreads out and you see its color. Apply a voltage and the oil balls up into a corner, and you see the white base underneath. Stack the right liquids and you get a pixel that runs the whole range from red through to blue by degrees, switching fast enough for video and readable in direct sunlight because it reflects light instead of making it.

The demonstrations were good. The BBC put color e-readers with video on Click in April 2010. The reason it never got past demonstration is the same reason most reflective display technologies do not: the panel has to come off an LCD line at LCD yields, and the companies that own those lines were already running them at capacity on a product that sells.

~ three owners ~

Samsung Electronics took the company over at the end of 2010 for an undisclosed sum, with Reuters reporting the deal on 20 January 2011. Samsung sat on it for a little over two years. On 13 May 2013 Amazon confirmed it had bought Liquavista from Samsung, and the natural reading at the time was a color Kindle, because what else would Amazon want with a reflective video display.

Five years later there was still no color Kindle. On 15 October 2018 Nate Hoffelder at The Digital Reader reported that Amazon had shut Liquavista down. The Dutch offices had been dismantled and the equipment removed, and the senior people had already been moved into other parts of Amazon. E-Ink-Info picked the story up three days later and noted that nobody could tell whether the technology had been discarded or simply absorbed somewhere Amazon does not talk about. Amazon declined to say. It has not said since.

~ the domain afterward ~

In September 2020 a tech review blog called LookGadgets bought liquavista.com and wrote a post about what had happened to the company. That purchase then made its way into the Wikipedia infobox, where LookGadgets.com sits at the end of the parent-company chain behind Amazon, and where the logo caption still reads "Liquavista Logo after its acquired by LookGadgets.com". Somebody bought a lapsed domain and the encyclopedia recorded it as an acquisition.

The domain has since lapsed again. liquavista.com answers nothing on either scheme today, and there is no forwarding address and no successor product. Twelve years of research went somewhere inside Amazon or nowhere at all, and the only people who know are not saying.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »