I have another question in regard to Brinda Dalal. Did Xerox initiate the idea for that study?
SMITH: Yes. That was from Palo Alto. That’s right. We did initiate that for this project. We looked at people’s work habits, generally actually, to see how they used documents. So yes, this one was specifically focused on the hard copy output.

Do you have any more information with regards to the cost of the paper? I believe that this was a main target of the project a year ago.
SMITH: We decided that people like paper. They don’t really want to vary away from that.

It’s just like a normal piece of office paper.

They don’t want to pay a lot more for something that they consider to be a disposable item. This is something we talked to the focus groups about as well, and talked internally about. Our target is still very similar. We want this to be a piece of paper — I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it, but it is actually a piece of paper. It’s just like a normal piece of office paper. It needs to have a target price around that of office paper. So you can buy this piece of paper like one that you would normally buy for the printer, but now you wouldn’t buy consumables any more. You wouldn’t buy the ink or the toner or anything else. You’d just buy that piece of paper.

Is there any way to recover the text or image after it has been erased?
SMITH: No. It’s a total erase on this.

This is absolute?
SMITH: You can’t see any trace of the writing. I mean, I’m sure if you went to a forensics lab you could see some kind of residual image, but basically it’s a full erase. It’s fully gone. You can’t see it. You can’t detect it. It’s gone.

Well then the notoriety of CSI has entered into all of our thoughts and vocabularies, you know.
SMITH: Yes. That’s why it is hard to say that there is totally no trace. To the eye, the image has totally gone!

You could, in theory, have whatever DPI you wanted, whatever is suitable.

And can pictures also be printed with this technology?
SMITH: Yes, that’s right. Anything really. We focused on the pieces of paper the customers throw away which are normally the black and white text pages. People put a higher value on something of theirs on color pages, although, obviously Xerox recently introduced that you can have color for the same price as black and white. So maybe that will be changing. So when we looked at it here, all the black and white pages are being recycled. So anything that is black and white that is easily printed or, you know, you could print anything, image, text, whatever with this. It’s just like a normal printer.

Is color a target for this?
SMITH: For sure it’s an interest. Right now, we’re very focused on, monochrome and commercialization. But that’s something we talk about, yes.

The technology is such that the paper passes through a light source, and that’s a UV-based light source. Correct?
SMITH: It’s a UV LED, that’s right.

The paper itself has microns imprinted on it?
SMITH: The paper just has the material on it, inside it. So the paper itself isn’t pixilated. The image is created by the image bar digitally imaging the piece of paper. So, no. It’s not like you have a screen that has pixels that you’re going to address each pixel separately. That’s not the case.

Although this is inkless, I read that the dots per inch rate, was approximately 150. Is that correct and will that be increasing?
SMITH: Yes. It’s around 150 but you could really say it’s not really limited. It’s just the way we demonstrated it to start off with, and it happened to be that. We adjusted a multi-function printer that was printing very, very fast, printing at 50 pages per minute. So at that speed, the resolution that we could do was 150 DPI. But it really depends on the image bar that we select. You could, in theory, have whatever DPI you wanted, whatever is suitable. It’s not really DPI limited, because on the paper itself, it’s fully covered with the material that actually changes light. That’s at the molecular level. So it’s really just limited by whatever image bar or speed that you want to print at.

Is there a technical term that you use internally to refer to this technology or this process?
SMITH: We just — yes, we just call it the transient document. That’s really it. I mean, I think people use various terms, erasable paper, but we call it transient documents.

I’d like to talk for just for a minute again about the collaboration between you and Palo Alto. Is this a collaboration that involves meeting in person? Is this primarily done through email, Internet communications? What’s the primary… ?
SMITH: Yes. Computer and virtual actually. Communicating on projects has changed a lot. I think that there is always a place for face to face. It’s always important. We do get together sometimes, either here or in Palo Alto. But we can’t meet to interact on a very regular basis, and so, just like all the other teams in Xerox, we are really electronically enabled. We use all types of conferencing. We even have the ability to videoconference. I would say most of the time, we use ’NetMeeting’, where both teams physically see the slide, and we can talk. And we talk every single week with Palo Alto, on a regular basis, on a set meeting structure. So we use ’NetMeeting’-type technologies really extensively.

I wanted to talk for a bit about the market plans for the product. Since, I believe, Xerox’s research inception, they are known to create value through your inventions and innovations. And typically, they’re embedded in other products with your partners. They’re licensed to technology customers, and you brought up before the GUI interface and the laser printers. Are there strategic partners behind this particular research?
SMITH: Oh no, not within transient documents. Transient documents is a Xerox Corporation project. So this is funded by Xerox Corporation wholly and we file on it wholly for Xerox Corporation. So, no we don’t have strategic partners. The thing that’s really neat though, actually, is the customer feedback. So many people would perhaps like to be part of the project. So we get a lot of feedback from our customers about testing the technology out, or being involved in it. But it is solely Xerox Corporation right now.