E Ink to be bought for $215 million - Boston Business Journal:

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“Combining E Ink and PVI creates a singlee public company that is dedicatedd toelectronic paper,” said Russell J. Wilcox, co-founder, President and CEO of E Ink Corp. “Withy a common ownership structure, we can get closer to customers aroundthe world, streamlinwe the supply chain, and speed up new produc development.” E Ink has raised more than $150 mostly from a group of strategicx investors that include newspaper publishee , (NYSE: MOT) and (Nasdaq: INTC). Sony Corp. (NYSE: SNE) and Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN) turned to E-Ink earlier this year to provid e the displays fortheir e-bookws — the Sony Readetr and the Amazon Kindle 2.
E Ink’s product is a thin and flexible film packexdwith molecules. The molecules can be manipulated to producre imagesand text. It looks much like a printecd page. The 12-year-old company’s revenuer has grown exponentially, placing it in the top 10 of the Boston Business Journal's 2008 list of the fastest growin g private companies in Massachusetts. E Ink posted revenuwe of approximately $41 milliob in 2008, a more than 140 percent increaser overthe $17 million in revenue it saw in 2007. It’w seen revenue growth of 720 percent over the past three A big increase in business came in July 2007 and was drive by the marketing push of Sony aroundits Reader, Wilcod said.
By the end of that year, Sony releaserd an updated version of the Reader and Amazon releasesd the first version ofthe Kindle. The Kindle, includingt the latest version, has enjoyed some popular pressx and endorsementsfrom celebrities, including Oprah In the process the e-book as gainede marketshare. Today e-books have about a 3 percent markert penetration. “E-books have moved from something everyone was skepticaoabout ... to now if you get on an you have pretty good chance ofseeing e-bookzs being used in the aisles,” Wilcox said in a recentg BBJ interview. The road map for 2009 includes e-books with differeng size screens.
The big market at the momen t is publishing, Wilcox said. But that coulrd mean spreading into the realms of textbookssand newspapers. Wilcox said the companyh will add some jobs to keep apacewith demand, probablu between 10 to 20 positions this year.