Amazon, Touchco Combine Forces To Create Superkindle

Touchco’s website disappeared recently, and then their YouTube videos were set to private. And now we know why. Amazon will merge Touchco with its Kindle group, grasping at the long tail of the Apple iPad.

Touchco’s specialty: flexible, multi-touch screens. The acquisition could transform the Kindle into a more powerful, robust tablet featuring color, force-sensitive screens. The underlying technology is interpolating force-sensitive resistance, or I.F.S.R. It utilizes force-sensitive resistors that respond to pressure and increase or decrease conductivity, while constantly scanning multiple touch inputs. IFSR distinguishes between the touch of a finger and the touch of a pen.

According to the NY Times, the touch-screen technology is substantially cheaper than the capacitative touch screens.

However, there are questions about Amazon sticking to e-ink or switching to a color display more compatible with multimedia. Amazon has previously resisted adding touch screen technology fearing it negatively affects screen legibility. Touchco claims transparency and that its screen in no way interferes with readability. E-ink is not expected to release a color version of its screens until next year.

The genius behind this new technology is Ilya Rosenberg, Ken Perlin, and a small team of computer scientists from New York University’s Media Research Lab. Their vision is to bring multi-touch to a wide variety of products from e-readers to musical instruments.

It’s been a steep learning curve for multi-touch screens. The first glimmer was at the TED conference in 2006, when Jeff Han, a research scientist at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences presented his multi-touch wall.

Next came cell phones, starting of course with the iPhone, then other smartphones using Google’s Android platform, followed by Hewlett-Packard’s TouchSmart countertop computers. This, however, is a substantial leap forward in other consumer electronics embracing touch screen technology.