February 25, 2009 Cambridge-based E Ink celebrates major launch Play video

(Peter Howe, NECN) - Political leaders of all stripes agree that small businesses are huge engines of job creation, and this week a 128-person company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, called E Ink is celebrating the launch of a major new piece of business -- one that hopefully is also going to create, by 2011, 50 of the new jobs this economy will so badly need.

This is a huge week for E Ink, which was launched out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Amazon.com's brand-new Kindle 2 digital book and media reader is built around E Ink's "electronic ink,'' the stuff that puts the words on the screen of the kind. E Ink chief executive Russell Wilcox said one of the company's key contributions to the Kindle is how little energy it draws. "It will let you read up to 8,000 pages on a single battery charge,'' Wilcox explains. "The electronics that are in here turn on different pixels and the pigments will move to create the correct color.''

Thanks to the deal with Amazon, and another to power Sony's PR S 700 digital book, E Ink's sales are up 800 percent from last year. Staff's grown 10 percent to 128 people. All in all, E Ink sounds just like President Barack Obama's vision of how America's economy will come back. "The answers to our problems,'' Mr. Obama said in his address to Congress Tuesday night, "don't lie beyond our reach. They exist in our laboratories and our universities; in our fields and our factories; in the imaginations of our entrepreneurs ... ''

Wilcox

said: "I think within two years we'll add another 50 jobs here in Massachusetts.'' Already the company's added a factory in South Hadley, Mass., where workers assembles the electronic display sheets that are then exported to China where digital readers are manufactured.

Brisk sales of Kindle 2 are just one reason Wilcox feels optimistic."You're going to see new types of devices, new sizes, flexible displays, and eventually full color displays.'' As soon as next year, companies using E Ink technology are expected to come out with flexible displays that would let you get an entire newspaper worth of content on a sheet just about the size of a one tabloid newspaper page. (Once you'd finished reading one page of content, you'd press or swipe the sheet to have the next page of content loaded into the reader through a wireless data network.)

How could Washington help? E Ink investors and venture capitalists have put $150 million into the company over the last decade, and what they most want from Washington is an easing of so-called Sarbox accounting rules -- named for the Sarbanes-Oxley law passed after the Enron Corp. and WorldCom financial scandals -- they say make it impossible for investors to take little tech companies public because the costs of complying with the accounting requirements are so onerous.

"When there's no chance for a technology company to have an initial public stock offering,'' Wilcox said, "as a result there's fewer investors and less money comes in.''

As Mr. Obama looks to innovative little companies like E Ink to grow desperately needed jobs, maybe the best thing he and congress can do will be to get out of the way.

"If we can continue to come out with new products and innovate the sky's the limit,'' Wilcox said. And it is a huge business opportunity, if the Kindle and similar devices powered by E Ink prove to be popular with consumers. As he explains: "You've got an $80 billion book industry and a $180 billion newspaper industry, and about half their costs are related to putting things on paper, trucking them all over the place, and getting them to your doorstep. So if you could move the information digitally, you'd be saving $100 billion a year. And that's quite a business problem to be able to solve.''