Microsoft's vision: Ubiquitous display technology

This video released by Microsoft a few days ago, which has collected quite a few links, is worth viewing as a vision for news delivery in the future.

It shows the possibilities for very thin, very portable, color e-paper (or other display technology) touch-screen devices for use in many applications including news consumption. Watch for a glimpse of a foldable electronic newspaper.

For a full 5-minute version, with an expanded version of the e-newspaper scenario at 4:10, have a look here (scroll down to the second video.)

Of course, it’s all vaporware and some of this is stuff that definitely falls into the futureporn category. (Where’s my flying car? Where’s my personal robot and vacation on Mars?) But note that often, the future visions of 20 years ago actually fall far short of where we’ve traveled to.

Continue reading this post at Nieman Journalism Lab

Micropayments for news

PLEASE NOTE: My new blogging home is now at the Nieman Journalism Lab. I'll continue to update this site for the time being with the introductory portion of my posts, but to read the whole thing, you'll have to head over to the Nieman site!

I know. You don’t want to hear about it. Readers will not pay for news online, period. We tried that and it didn’t work. Information wants to be free. Attention, not content, is the new scarcity. Free is a business model. I’ve explained this, myself.

But the “make the reader pay” crowd just keeps sending new combatants with new fodder into the fray. The latest is Jon Austin, one of the perpetrators of The Same Rowdy Crowd, in a very long and well-informed post entitled “Fixing the Newspaper Business or ‘Do I have to Do Everything Around Here?‘” You can read it for its considerable entertainment value (and very thoughtful chain of comments), or save yourself half an hour with Paul Gillin’s summation, or Austin’s own...

Read the rest of this post at Nieman Journalism Lab.

New entrant in the e-newspaper reader field

Just as we're discussing the Kindle and other existing e-book readers as newspaper reading devices, along comes word (in a New York Times story today) of a new entrant in the field, an e-reader as yet without a brand name, from the firm Plastic Logic of (where else?) Mountain View, CA. The screen is about 8.5 by 11 inches, around twice the size of the Kindle, Sony and Iliad screens, and its E-Ink screen is backed by a new plastic substrate developed at Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory. It'll be on sale early next year at a price not yet announced.

It's good news that this "space" is getting more crowded—this will drive more newspaper publishers (and other news content producers) to get serious about publishing for e-readers, and price competition will attract more buyers.

Also, this will apparently be Plastic Logic's first and principal product, making the company a "pure play." (See the company's products page for links to video demos.) Their real aim is to get to market with a flexible screen, which has been the holy grail of e-paper—reusable electronic paper you can "roll up and put in your pocket." The Cavendish substrate will have this capability in future editions.