Tim O’Malley, E Ink

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Lifers in this industry have been watching the slow but steady evolution and maturity of electronic paper products. and are now seeing them get to a state that they start to make sense for certain display applications, while also looking good enough to satisfy marketers. Taiwan-based E Ink is by a large margin the best known company developing and marketing this technology. While the big volume is in simple black and white displays for e-readers and electronic shelf labels, E Ink has been steadily improving its capabilities with color. There are now premium e-paper displays that arguably look as good as what comes off a conventional four-color printing press. And there are also now larger format single and multi-color displays that won't get anywhere near matching a specific Pantone color, but can do the job of adding green to a parking sign, to better indicate availability of spaces. E-paper products are particularly attractive for some applications these days because they nicely address concerns about sustainability and energy usage. A lot of information signs that get printed and shipped to site can get replaced by e-paper versions that are updated over networks, and use a fraction of the power of more conventional public information displays. In this episode, I have a great update chat with Tim O'Malley, or Tim O as he says he's most known. He leads commercial activities for E Ink in the US market. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Tim, thanks for joining me. In the context of digital signage, what would you see as the main applications for e-paper displays, E Ink displays? Tim O'Malley: Yeah, great question. So, the e-paper display has two main characteristics that we leverage into those applications. The first is that it's paper-like and it's reflective. It's not creating light, it's reflecting the light around it, and it's very low power; it does not use any power when the image is not changing. We really want to look at applications that have been using paper traditionally, and improve that experience, create new functionality, and create more sustainability instead of replacing that paper all the time but enabling it to change. So, a big one for us is in retail applications, whether that's shelf tags on the shelves next to the product or even some of the slightly larger ones that are indicating sales and special promotions about the product.  Right, so the ESL market. Tim O'Malley: Yes, the ESL market. In many cases, you'll go into a store, and you'll see they all look like paper. But they're not, they're actually E Ink enabled shelf tags. And in that sense, there are a lot of installed signs, over 900 million tags installed in the world, and most people don't even know they're seeing it. Similarly, most of the out-of-home signs that are installed on street corners and bus stations are actually paper. All of the attention, of course, goes to the digital ones that you can update and show the latest movie posters, but there's still a lot of paper out there and if we can bring more sustainability but also run on renewable power and the ability to update it remotely, that's an improvement. So, those are the types of applications.  If you set aside ESLs and digital fact tags, that sort of thing, and then the e-reader market, what would commercial displays represent in the overall business for E Ink. I would imagine it's still pretty small.  Tim O'Malley: It's relatively smaller, that's correct. Our two big applications are the ones that you identified. That means to me of course, that's our growth opportunity, that's a big area that we can help the world, but also grow the company. As we introduce our new color platforms, we have a color that has high saturation and looks like a 4 pass printing press color, and we have color that's perhaps more muted, but it's faster and easier to use and has wider temperature.  We'