Since the original press release in November of last year, is there new development? Something significant that we can talk about, whether on the paper side being developed at your facility, or at the hardware, printer device side being developed at PARC?

We suddenly realized that the number of pages printed in the office is increasing dramatically, but people are only using them for an hour or a day before they throw them away.

SMITH: We tend not to discuss technology progress, but I think in general, going back to when we released this, we were really talking about cover pages. Replacement of cover pages, was really what we were focusing on. We thought that, people really printed a lot of those in the office, and so you could have a combined printer, which has a regular printer and also device that prints these transient documents on it. So then all the cover pages could end up being transient documents. Then, of course, we obtain customer feedback. The customer ends up saying, “Well, I’d really like to print my email.” Or, “I’d really like to print my calendar” or “I’d really like to print my directions to a business meeting.” Or something like that. So I think what makes development successful is that ability to work with customers. It helps you really define the actual product. And so, that’s been quite a major part this year. We’ve relooked at the project. Cover pages are still a great idea, but perhaps we want it to be more — even more functional for people. And we basically put a lot of that customer feedback into the project.

So quite a bit of the progress in the past twelve months has been a refocus, redefinition based on focus group and customer input?
SMITH: Absolutely. Yes. We call it “dreaming with the customer” at Xerox. It’s an area that we always talk about, “dreaming with the customer” and as a result we redefined the project.

I read at the time that Xerox was filing for patents for this technology. Are they US-Canadian-based patents? And secondly, since this product is being redefined and continuing to be focused will those patent filings change? Will they be modified?
SMITH: Yes, Xerox Corporation actually filed a lot of patents. Actually, the Xerox Research Centre of Canada reached the thousand US patent milestone last year. We celebrated that last year. So in this project, it is a major effort. We filed US patents and filed worldwide as well. We’ve actually had patents allowed in this area. And we have continued to file in this area, throughout the year. So it’s part of the objective of the group, to cover the Xerox technology fully and we will continue to file.

So the idea for this product came out of a study in Palo Alto?
SMITH: Actually yes. That’s right. It came out of a study that was looking at work practices. At Xerox in general we look at work practices especially when it relates to document technology. That can be anything from reading electronic documents, which can help people use and file and view electronic documents.

…if you just could fade it overnight, people would reuse it the next day.

But obviously the hard copy documents are also extremely important. And so, in Palo Alto, they began to look at work-studies of how people use their documents in the office and that was where we really began to realize that actually people don’t keep what they print for very long. In fact, not very long at all, probably just a day. But that was really where it came from. We suddenly realized that the number of pages printed in the office is increasing dramatically, but people are only using them for an hour or a day before they throw them away. Sometimes even if you need it the next day, we found that if you needed that printed document the next day, we did find that people won’t necessarily keep it. They throw it away and then reprint it the next day, because electronically you could find it again. And so, that was where it came from. People love printing. I think people love taking their printed page to the meeting with them.

Yes.
SMITH: So they like printing it but they don’t keep it. And that’s really where this project started to come from. So actually, someone was looking at what people throw away at the end of the day. They looked at the recycle bins. They decided whether they recycled prints that were black and white or color. They classified them into calendars or emails or whatever they were. So they could really see where the target market was.

What—was this the study conducted by the anthropologist, Brinda Dalal?
SMITH: Brinda, that’s right. Brinda Dalal, that’s right. She worked with the area manager , Eric Schrader.

Is she still involved in the project today?
SMITH: Yes. Absolutely and Eric is the lead in Palo Alto.

At the time the paper was designed to erase in 16 hours. Is that still the case?
SMITH: Yes. That’s right. What we thought was if you just could fade it overnight, people would reuse it the next day. But it doesn’t only fade, actually. You could erase it immediately if you want to. So if you print something out, and then you suddenly think, “Oh no. I’ve got a calendar change,” five minutes later, the printer works so that you can just feed the paper back into the printer and it will just erase what’s on it and then rewrite the next version directly on it. You have a choice with this paper. You can write/erase, or you can just leave it and it fades. I think that in our discussion, yes, people would perhaps like to be able to write/erase whenever they want. And that’s something we’re looking at as well.

And can an existing printer be modified to achieve the same effect?
SMITH: Yes, that’s an interesting question, actually, because the very first printer that we developed was a combination of a transient document printer and a Xerographic multifunction printer — what we decided to do to start off with, was replacement of cover pages.

Yes.
SMITH: …which identifies that it is your print job. We originally identified it that what would be great to have the cover page be transient. So the way we demonstrated the project was we took a modified multi function printer where, on the end of it, just as the paper was coming out, we put that the transient document printer. When you send it a job, you would know that the cover page was going to be the erasable paper, but then you could choose for all the pages after that. It could either be printed xerographically. Or in case that you wanted it, it could be printed transient, printed on the erasable paper. So yes, we actually modified a multi-function printer for the first demonstration. And in the media, we have a video of this. You can see the whole printer. We show the multi-function. We show the transient document printer on the side. And we show that the image bar for the transient document printer is actually very small.

And would you say that the end product would most likely be a new printer and a modification to existing laser printers? Will they potentially be a paired product?
SMITH: Right now, we’re still having these discussions in our business group. In theory, you could have either. You could have a very small printer. It will probably have an image bar in it. Or you could have some kind of add-on to a multi-function printer that’s in the hallway. It could go either way. We haven’t really decided that.