Philips spin-out Polymer Vision went into receivership in July.
Since September 2008, the Eindhoven-based company has struggled to find funds to bring its rollable display-based product, the Readius, to commercialisation. According to industry sources, Polymer Vision's potential first customer, Telecom Italia, stopped working with the company in October last year.
Polymer Vision, founded in 2004 as one of Philips' first incubator spin-outs, developed a device based around a five-inch, diagonal rollable display for showing digital text such as emails, RSS feeds and e-books.
Though the Readius prototype, the same size and dimensions as a mobile phone, was essentially an e-reader device, it was designed to act as a communication tool to try and appeal to both the emerging e-reader as well as the much larger and established mobile phone consumer market.
The Readius was designed so that emails could be accessed and phone calls made through a headset if numbers were programmed into it. However, the company's marketing and sales director, Thomas van der Zijden, conceded in a previous interview with +Plastic Electronics magazine that this market of consumers would be very small.
But, as Amazon has proved with the launch of the Kindle in late 2007, a market for e-readers as an entirely new category of consumer electronic product does exist. If anything, the trend is for e-reader screens to become larger and to achieve A4 page size - so that all types of print, from digital novels and textbooks to newspapers can be rendered clearly on them.
The process used to make the flexible e-paper modules in Polymer Vision's e-reader is expensive. As Cambridge University start-up Plastic Logic is proving, start-ups pioneering new display technologies need access to deep pockets of funds. And as Amazon and previously Apple with the iPod/iTunes concept have shown, a clearly differentiated product that consumers perceive as being simple and convenient to use is also crucial to success.