One Laptop Per Child and Epic Screens: 8.5 Questions with Pixel Qi's Mary Lou Jepsen

Mary Lou Jepsen is the founder and CEO of Pixel Qi Corporation, a manufacturer of low-cost, low-power LCD screens for laptops. She has also been named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine for her work in creating One Laptop per Child (OLPC), where, as chief technology officer, she led the engineering and architected the design of the $100 XO laptop, now used by more than 2.5 million children and teachers in 42 countries around the world.

I recently sat down with Mary Lou (by which I mean, we each sat down at different computers at different times) to pick her brain about the future of LCD screen technology and how she feels about 80’s-era gymnasts with similar names.

I first learned about Pixel Qi through your interview with Popular Science in January 2010. As one of millions of people on the planet with a full-time job that mostly involves staring at a computer eight hours a day, I was psyched for the day — in my head, only months away — when hardware manufacturers would begin overhauling their various backlit computing products to include new, dual LCD screens like yours. Fast forward to spring 2012 when it seems like there are still dishearteningly few consumer products on the market with your technology in them. Was I simply naive about how this sort of large scale technological adoption works on a commercial level, or have you also found yourself frustrated at times by the pace of progress in certain areas?

Pixel Qi technology has achieved the fastest ramp to production of any new display technology in the past 50 years. Three million units have shipped already. We've done this amidst an economic crisis where our manufacturing partners either have gone bankrupt or are teetering on bankruptcy. The LCD industry averages negative 20% margin. You can only run on negative 20% margin for so long. And we are scaling up! Other new display technology companies take decades to get to mass production — we do it in months. So we are proud of what we have done.

Of course, we do wish always to do more faster, but the other factor has been, in a word, Apple. Apple has figured out how to sell stuff for less than $2,000 apiece and has been able, with the help of Foxconn, to put the industry into a kind of funk. The rest of the manufacturing infrastructure lives and breathes on 2% margin if they are lucky. Companies used to try a strategy of "Like Apple but Cheaper," but that strategy now fails since Apple sells for cheap. (Their suppliers are rumored to only break even or lose money for the thrill of "making it up on volume" for getting into an Apple product.)

Don't get me wrong — I like Apple. Samsung, too. They are the companies making the most innovative devices today — everyone else seems to be trying to catch up by copying rather than innovating, and all the funding goes to either that or software apps and social apps. So it's hard to convince the other companies to try something different. Hardware startups don't really exist anymore — at least not many of us going at it this way. It's probably why we will win in the end. People will finally figure out that innovative hardware is also key, but they are lost in Farmville/Facebook right now.

Newsweek Technology Editor, Dan Lyons, has a brief column in the April 23 & 30 issue of Newsweek discussing Facebook's recent $1 billion purchase of Instagram. At one point in it, he writes:

There are a billion smartphones in the world. Soon they will outnumber PCs. Within the next decade, virtually all mobile phones will be smartphones: 6 billion people will have a constant connection to the Internet. Remember the ‘$100 laptop’ that some do-gooders at MIT hoped would change the world? Well, it arrived, as a cool little smartphone with a 4-inch screen.

As a founding member of One Laptop Per Child, is there anything you'd like to say in response to Mr. Lyons' tossed-off line of snark?

When is the last time that you typed a long form paper on a cell phone? Read a book on a cell phone? The truth is that we need more screen real estate. And those phones might seem like they are $100, but look at the monthly carrier fee and add that up for two years. Then even in the developing world a cell phone costs more than a laptop.

On a related subject, is it safe to assume that you are working with cell phone manufacturers to integrate Pixel Qi screens into smartphones? Or are you more focused on larger screens at the moment?

Yes — we are working with the cell phone makers on smaller screens for new devices.

How often are you mistaken for Olympic gold medalist and America's sweetheart, Mary Lou Retton?

I wish I could copy her moves even on a bad day for her. No one mistakes me for her, although a TSA employee recently asked me as I was passing through a security check if I was related to her. I didn't bother to point out that we had different last names.

Your blog post two weeks ago exclaiming that Pixel Qi has recently figured out a way to match the native resolution of the iPad 3 while using up to (down to?) one-eighth as much power seems, ironically, to be burning up the Internet. Because I'm an idiot, can you clarify whether one-eighth the power consumption translates to eight times the battery life? And I know you say that “We are finalizing our partner(s) on the development of this new screen family” and have basically zero incentive to share any more details than that with a lowly blogger like myself, but could you, perhaps, offer even a ballpark date for when this new technology might be available to consumers? (Or, if not a ballpark, at least an ice rink.) We can go to 100 times lower power (notice the first set of columns on the graph I posted).

I can't unfortunately give much more detail on dates. I wish I could — I was so happy to be able to share that much. We are really excited about our new architecture though. We think that it's a big breakthrough.

What other technologies in general or start-ups in particular really excite you right now, in terms of their potential to transform the way we currently interact with certain devices and/or the world?

If Chamtech's spray-on antenna works, that will be transformational. I'm also excited about MC10 flexible conformal stuff — and, of course, the work at Google X.

After having a discussion one morning with my carpooling buddy, Janis, about how much we hate to paint, I began fantasizing about the future of interior decorating and how one day our sheetrocked walls might be covered by floor-to-ceiling LCD/e-paper screens that you can "re-paint" or "wallpaper" with the touch of a button while drawing minimal power to maintain their un-backlit displays of colors and patterns afterward. A high-definition (or, by then, ultra high-definition) television could also be integrated into the screens, expandable to any dimension while watching it and then able to "disappear" back into the wall when you're done. Does any of this sound at all feasible to you within our lifetimes? (I'm a healthy almost-28-year-old, if that helps.) If so, what do you think about going into business together? I even have a name for the company already: WALL-E. (That's not taken, right?)

Great minds think alike. We are working on it. For it to work, we have to massively lower the power consumption of the screens or the room will be really hot. So we are taking the first step in the device space. We are hoping to move to large size soon and have some cool ways to approach it. They will have wireless interfaces and not need cables for easy installation.

If you could choose any movie and have the fictional technology depicted within exist in the real world, which would you choose and why? (Mine, for the record, would be Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I desperately want to taste a real Everlasting Gobstopper.) I'm really interested in dumping the images in my mind's eye out to allow me to explain myself better. I think in pictures. There must be some movies on this theme. I think that we are really close to being able to reach this and have been working on the side on it. See this link to a recent talk I gave about it:

When do you think there will be…?

I think that one could get there in 3-5 years (or shorter) with investment in this [ability to convert images in the mind's eye to something more tangible]. The challenge is finding the business model that would justify the investment — and, more importantly, the legal and ethical issues being addressed to allow the work to begin.

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