QuirkLogic’s 42″ E Ink-based Quilla whiteboard is the world’s largest battery powered display, said company CEO Nashir Samanani when we met for an interview at CES. But Samanani objected to my use of the word “whiteboard.” He preferred to call it a “a real-time idea creation ecosystem.”
It seems that corporate executives are currently very interested in the conditions under which idea creation — ideation — and development occur and how to encourage them. Ideation researchers have observed that people using ideation rooms with $150k worth of equipment still use flip charts. It turns out, said Samanani, that the ideation process works best when ideas are recorded on a writing surface. And portability is important, he continued, so an individual or team can take the screen to where creativity is occuring. With a weight of 22 pounds (10 kg) and 16 hours of battery life, the 42″ Quilla is portable. When it is lifted off its wall mount, power automatically shifts from ac to the included battery, and connectivity shifts to WiFi.
QuirkLogic’s Quilla portable, networked eWriters use 42″ E Ink displays. (Photo: QuirkLogic)
The goal, said Samanani, is to “capture intellectual assets in real time where creation is occurring and in a secure environment. Our focus needs to be on the collaboration, with the system’s complexity pushed into the background.” In a company press release circulated just prior to CES and a few days before our conversation, Samanani was quoted as saying,
“Quilla now includes a real-time ideation ecosystem that facilitates organizations to easily manage and share collective ideas in the same way they manage trade secrets and other valuable IP assets like strategic plans, financial spreadsheets, engineering designs, client presentations, and so forth. Instead of having these valuable intellectual assets walk out the door as photos of whiteboards on personal mobile devices, with our cloud-based platform all content is securely stored centrally, with user defined access so teams can easily find content and continue where they last left off.”
In our conversation, Samanani said that corporations are enthusiastic about the system.
Quilla prototypes were shown at last year’s CES 2017 and we noticed then that latency between stylus input and the input appearing on the screen was just large enough to be annoying. Samanani said latency has been improved on both the Quirk (system) and E Ink (hardware) sides. “As E Ink screens grow to 42 inches, driving and latency issues become tough, but we have solved those issues,” Smanani said. I did not have an opportunity to evaluate the improved system.
The first production Quilla units came off the line in October 2017. Manufacturing partner Flex is ramping up manufacturing now, and QuirkLogic expects to be in full production by mid-year. — Ken Werner
