While the venture capital picture might not be so rosy in New England, there was still some interesting technology to see during a demo session at Nantucket Conference on Friday:

Zink is a printing technology developed by some former Polaroid engineers that eliminates the need for ink by embedding dye crystals in the paper. It’s basically an evolution of the Polaroid photo technology. This makes it possible to produce printers that are an order of magnitude smaller than those based on jets or ribbons. Wendy Frey Caswell, CEO, showed off a printer that fits in your shirt pocket and produces beautiful 2”X3” color images. The initial target market is cell phone users who want to print the photos they take with their phones’ integrated cameras.

I don’t know if that market is very big, but there are some interesting potential applications of this technology. It could be used to create point-of-sale ticket printers, for example, or to produce much more sophisticated and detailed ID tags. Larger but still portable versions of Zink printers could be used to deliver prints instantaneously to people at theme parks and events or to produce printed collateral on the spot. I’d personally like to be able to print out business cards when I’m on the road and run out my supply. Zink paper can also be produced in continuous rolls, making it easier to print banners and posters.

Zink will leave it to partners to figure out applications while it focuses on producing technology.

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Turbine showed off its new Lord of the Rings multi-player game, which just hit the shelves. I was impressed with the scope of work that was needed to create this product. It includes more than 3,000 monsters and 2,000 actors, each of which had to be designed by hand. The company has 25 engineers on staff, but outsources a lot of its development, as is typical in the games business. There are more than 40 developers in China, for example. The whole package probably involved more than 500 person-years of development.

Turbine CEO Jeff Anderson said early results are promising. More than 200,000 people have signed up for the online service that back-ends the game, and conversion rates are running at 70% for the $15/month service. The company is also enabling viral marketing to promote the product. Gamers are already posting customized characters and scenes on the Web

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PublicDisplay is a small Providence, RI-based software startup (really; it has no website yet) that’s building a prototype of what’s often called the semantic Web (I hate that term; no one can understand it). Its service filters lists of information into a format that can be imported into a calendar or spreadsheet. CEO Bill O’Farrell used his hectic personal schedule as a demo. His son’s spring lacrosse schedule is posted on a website, but the flat text document can’t be easily imported into his calendar. PublicDisplay parses the schedule and turns it into an iCal file of individual entries. You could potentially do the same thing with a financial report, price list or any other tabular data. PublicDisplay hopes to have a beta service by late this year.

Labels: innovation, nantucketconference

¶ 9:20 AM