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Amazon buys touchscreen company, merges it with Kindle division

02.04.10 | No Comments

It’s probably safe to assume there will be a touchscreen Kindle some day, but it’s been hard to make any educated guess as to when. Adding touchscreen capability is a matter of finding technology that’s affordable, that can work with the current screen/display technology, and that isn’t locked down by a competitor via patents. Amazon has possibly found a way to meet all three requirements with its acquisition of Touchco, a startup that began as a project at New York University.

Nick Bilton at the New York Times wrote a feature on Touchco in January, before anyone knew about Amazon’s acquisition. He describes demos he saw at their offices, including the one in the video below where a Touchco employee manipulates a desktop interface using a touchscreen prototype.

Touchco GUI example from Nick Bilton on Vimeo.

If you’re not a gearhead you might not know what the big deal is. Here’s how Touchco described their tech before they pulled everything off their website:

Unlike traditional capacitive sensors, our patent-pending system can detect any object — not just a finger — and can determine how much pressure is being applied to every point on a sensor simultaneously. IFSR sensors are natively multitouch, use less power than capacitive sensors, and are much less expensive to produce, making them a highly disruptive technology with widespread market applications.

So to recap, Touchco’s solution can:

register multiple touches at once;
register pressure for each individual touchpoint simultaneously;
register any contact, not just fingertips; and
is much cheaper than current touchscreen technologies.

Whether this ever makes it into a future Kindle is anyone’s guess. Amazon may just be buying the company to prevent it from being licensed to competitors, or it may use it to replace the keyboard, or it may decide it just doesn’t fit with future Kindle plans and put it out to pasture. At any rate, Amazon now seems to have access to a touchscreen solution in-house should it decide to somehow add it to future Kindle models.

“Amazon Said to Buy Touch Start-Up” [New York Times]
“Is Amazon Building a Superkindle?” [NYT Bits Blog]

(.Larry Page)