Flexible displays: What's the holdup?

Computerworld - Display manufacturers have been showing exciting prototypes of flexible electronic screens at technology trade shows for several years. So why are we all still using rigid, flat-panel LCDs? What happened to the displays that conform to curved surfaces, that can flex and fold like a newspaper or that you simply roll up when you're done using them?

It's not the display media that are keeping flexible displays off the market. Instead, the delay is caused largely by manufacturing issues, including how to affix thin film transistor arrays to a flexible substrate and how to produce the displays at large volumes cost effectively.

Then there's the issue of the rest of the electronics in a device. A flexible display embedded in a smartphone can't flex unless the rest of the electronics -- and the housing around it -- can move as well. But a flexible display could be designed to roll out of a redesigned phone, as Universal Display Corp. has demonstrated with its tube-shaped organic light-emitting diode (OLED) phone prototype.

This story accompanies our series on red-hot display technologies to watch in 2011.

High-performance display media used in personal computing and communications products, whether liquid crystal, OLED or e-paper technologies, require an active-matrix thin film transistor array to drive them. The traditional way to do this is by fabricating a layer of thin film transistors (TFTs) onto a glass panel, which forms the foundation, or substrate, on which the rest of the display is constructed (see "The display sandwich").

While a flexible backplane won't work very well with LCDs, which tend to distort the image when the screen bends, it can work for OLEDs and e-paper displays. "The hard part is, how do you make that array of thin film transistors onto something you can bend?" says Nicholas Colaneri, director of the Flexible Display Center (FDC) at Arizona State University.

Today there are two approaches to doing this. One, supported by Samsung, LG Display and a few other display manufacturers, takes the existing the silicon-on-glass etching processes used in LCD factories and applies it to a flexible substrate. But traditional inorganic semiconductors based on silicon or other non-carbon elements must be deposited at high temperatures onto the substrate, a process that works fine on glass but melts ordinary plastic.

Instead, these manufacturers are working with heat-resistant materials such as a paper-thin foil made from stainless steel. And Taiwanese research outfit Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) has developed a plastic that can withstand the high temperatures of the deposition process without melting. The plastic layer is affixed to a glass backer during the fabrication process and then peeled off once the TFT array has been applied to it.

The advantage of this approach, ITRI says, is that it can be adapted to existing LCD manufacturing lines that fabricate the TFT on glass with relatively minor changes when compared to building an entirely new fabrication facility.

This independent paper from senior analyst Jon Collins at FreeForm Dynamics considers how Web-based security threats are evolving, within the context of IT trends including mobile, home computing and other forms of remote access that could potentially increase the attack surface of the companies. It defines the scale and types of threat, what to look for in a corporate web security solution and compares the different types of technological approach available to companies and the processes that need to be considered for effective protection.

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Security is not an option. This KnowledgeVault Series offers professional advice how to be proactive in the fight against cybercrimes and multi-layered security threats; how to adopt a holistic approach to protecting and managing data; and how to hire a qualified security assessor. Make security your Number 1 priority.

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Social-networking sites have revolutionized how businesses use the Internet. Instead of relying on faltering newspapers to find job candidates, companies can access thousands of potential employees through Facebook and Twitter. But social-networking sites have also left businesses vulnerable to new security threats. So are they tools to be used or security traps to be avoided?

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What's Your Story?

With Google making the life of the SEO harder and harder, it pays to add as many marketing strings to our bows as we can. In this article, we'll look at a way to brand and position using stories. Hopefully, if we have a good story, and tell it well, people are more likely to remember us, and more likely to pass the story on.

Most people think their site is special. But, by definition, few sites in a given niche can be special.

If we target a keyword term, that many other sites are targeting, we'll probably write a similar keyword-loaded page, including the same synonyms, derived from the same keyword tools, using the same headings in bold, in the hope of appearing in the top ten list of pages - which are just like the others.

We may distinguish ourselves by managing to rank in the top three, but, as we know, there are no guarantees we'll maintain this advantage.

If SEO is our only strategy, then this will only work if few other people are using SEO. How many niches worth fighting for are like that these days?

Not many.

Generally speaking, the more mature the niche, the more you need something besides SEO. You need to make as much effort to stand out as possible, otherwise people will likely overlook and forget you. There are too many other sites and options.

Let's look at a differentiation strategy based on stories.

Stories are universal.

The human race has been using stories for thousands of years. We use stories because they are informative, memorable, and easily spread to others. Isn't that what we want our sites to be, too?

Every news story is a tragedy. Every religion is a story of redemption. Politicians tell stories, some of which are true! The alternative would be to give people a string of disconnected data and facts. Such data and facts may be 100% true, but they are seldom memorable or easily repeatable. Telling a compelling story is one good way to contextualize information, and make it more meaningful.

A story isn't just words on a page, saying how great a company is, and what products they have, and if you want them, you should "click here". That's surface. Think of "story" as a sub-text, the underlying, perhaps unspecified tale of who you are, what you're doing, and how you can help people solve their problems. This is a form of positioning, and branding, but I find it's helpful to reduce those high concepts down into a simple narrative. It helps bring a lot of different, and sometimes complicated, marketing aspects together.

Everyone can tell a story, especially about themselves.

Every business has a story.

Take Amazon.

The Amazon is the largest river in the world, which is an appropriate name for a site which aimed to be the largest retailer on the planet. Amazon is huge. Amazon is huge because they took the shopping experience, made it easier, and people loved it. With one click, a customer could order a book, or a DVD, and many other products and have it sent to them. Amazon faced some huge challenges. Just how do you store and ship a vast array of products and still make money? Amazon do massive volume, and use unique, sophisticated tracking and packing systems to overcome these challenges. Amazon's cloud computing service alone has revenues in excess of $500m.

Amazon's story is mostly about "being big". All very well for Amazon, of course, but what about the little guy showing people how to build stuff? There's a story in that, too.

Tim Carter founded "Ask The Builder.com". Tim provides tips for DIY, answers building questions, and provides product and tool reviews. Rather than the home DIY enthusiast going out and buying manuals, or hiring an expensive builder, Tim provides his information for free, and his video's provide depth that printed books do not. Tim clearly cares about building, and the home DIY enthusiast. Tim's gone a step further, and told his life story.

Try boiling your site down into such a story. Once you have a story, you can then flesh out narratives that flow through everything you do, from your graphic design, to your copy, to your approach to customer services.

For example, Tim's story is a "small, personal" story. It is fitting that he doesn't have a glossy, corporate theme, as this would grate against the narrative. Rather, the site is a bit raggedy and amateurish, in a good way. He is providing one-to-one personal help, so it fits that he talks directly to camera. It fits that, unlike Amazon, you know who is behind the site. It fit's the the About Page is a personal history. It's approachable. It's all part of the "small, personal" story. It helps make the site more convincing, and hopefully more memorable, if common themes are repeated.

A story helps achieve focus, clarity and distinction.

If you're having problems getting started, here's a work-plan.

What do you do? Make it short and sweet i.e. "Provide advice to home DIY enthusiasts". "Sell books online".

How did you start? Why did you start? What did you do before you started? What position are you in now?

What problem do you solve? What are challenges have you overcome? It helps if these are the same challenges and problems your customers face.

Did you overcome people? Organizations? Time? Money? Lack of knowledge?

Who, exactly, are you trying to help? Where do they live? What is their time of life? What challenges do they face?

Security? Being first? Individual care? Low prices? Value?

What do you offer that other sites do not?

How do you know you're completed what you set out to do? What is the measure of victory?

Answer these questions, and it becomes easy to make decisions about design, positioning, branding, and marketing.

Hopefully it helps make your site more memorable, too.