The Future of Productivity - the sweetspot of eReaders and Business Solutions #li #il #yam

The worlThis post was published before july 2010. The information in this post was asked to take offline until now to make sure that Ricoh Innovations had room to wrap up the release of their first production version.

This year Microsoft World Partner Conference me and my collegue had the opportunity to meet Ron Barr of Ricoh Innovations. Our goal was to get to know each other since we are collegues in the Ricoh family and share some developments and ideas. Ron had this prototype with him of a Ricoh eReader. The device has a WIFI and 3G connection, the surface is based on the kindle technology on top of that a pen interface is implemented. Writing on the surface realy feels like wrinting on paper. Not to smooth, and a lot like writing with ink on paper.
Ron informed us that this was the first time he was able to show a prototype of Ricoh so upfront and I´m really glad we experienced the tablet. Some things are changing. As Steve Balmer announced several times now, The Cloud demands smarter devices and Microsoft COO Kevin Turner mentioned a sweet spot in their ´three screens and a cloud´ vision on the future of productivity during his WPCDC speech. An open space between the consumer focused space of the apple iPad and the fat desktop devices on the other end. Actualy he positioned the Kindle on the the far right end of the spectrum, but that is the kindle static ´read only´ interface. Well this Ricoh device rocks, it is able to go beyond the crisp display of books and is able to deliver support to business processes. The layer on top of the Kindle infterface is able to capture writen input and will integrate that interaction with business processess.
There will be a SDK available. We think it should be free of charge. The community will take care of the huge opportunity. We discussed the need in logistic processes and other paper and information appended processes. The possibilities are infinited. How should we price the product itself. Well in our opinion the added value of the product is not the issue, it´s the huge added value of the process behind that. Maybe free of charge is not the way to go, but look at the US eReader forecast and the prediction the prices of a stripped down device will drop to less than $50.

The device will launch in the US april 2011. We in the front line of Europe will try to support the device as soon as possible.