E-Paper On Cereal Boxes

coastin writes "Wired Mag has an article about electronics maker Siemens, readying a paper-thin electronic-display technology. They say it is so cheap it could replace conventional labels on disposable packaging. Imagine items on grocer's shelves that flash commercials at you as you walk by. From the article: 'When kids see flashing pictures on cereal boxes we don't expect them to just ask for the product, but to say, "I want it", said Axel Gerlt, an engineer at Siemens tasked with helping packaging companies implement the technology.'"

Comments

Can you think of a better way

[Anonymous Coward]

to alienate parents?

How utterly depressing

[Toby The Economist]

> From the article: 'When kids see flashing pictures on cereal boxes we don't
> expect them to just ask for the product, but to say, "I want it", said Axel
> Gerlt, an engineer at Siemens tasked with helping packaging companies implement
> the technology.'

Western culture appears to have lost its vision.

New technology being thought of in terms of how much you can make a child coerce its parent into buying cereal?

We're amusing ourselves to death.

Re:How utterly depressing

[LithiumX]

Vision?

Haven't a great many of the popular advances in the 19th and 20th century been driven by marketing, and the desire to draw attention for purposes of profit? The earliest visions of the phograph's uses were more oriented towards automated marketing than towards the memoranda and music they were actually used for. Color printing was exclusively for the purpose of making product packaging more appealing, and television only became possible as a mass-market item when it was married to marketing (to this day, commercials are the life blood of the networks).

Early radio broadcasts were practically commerials with a thin veil of entertainment laid over them. It took a little while for radio commercials to seperate from the actual content (when they started announcing the products during frequent breaks, rather than the programs constantly hawking a product within a poorly contrived story).

Holograms were invented simply to see it done, but the bulk of the funding came from companies who sought to apply them as the new wonder-label (which turned out to remain prohibitively expensive for some time, and just never that appealing).

Western technology has been driven by three primary needs:
* direct threats - be it war, disease, famine, etc. Death avoidance.
* misguided ambition - attempting to create something unrealistic, and ending up with something unexpected (and often unnoticed for some time)
* commerce - the inherent desire to make people give you money

Altruism is a noble thing, but it's greed that makes the world actually turn.

Re:How utterly depressing

[SquadBoy]

All three of mine soon learned that whining was the best way *not* to get something. This remains one of the things their mother and I agree on.

Yes it takes *seriious* time and effort to do this but it is well worth it.

Re:How utterly depressing

[jafuser]

Altruism is a noble thing, but it's greed that makes the world actually turn.

Actually, it's conservation of angular momentum.

Yeah, right

[GigsVT]

I work for a retail label printer.

Average prices for labels run about $3-$10 per thousand. The most expensive labels on metallic stock with lots of spot colors might be $30 per thousand.

That's still 3 cents per label for the most expensive ones. I doubt they could even sort out the power supply for these things that cheaply.

Just what the environment needs

[Rhys]

Something less recyclable than paper to package all our crap with. That's flashy and annoying. And uses (and landfills) batteries.

On the bright side you'll always know if the product is fresh or not. Not fresh: no display. Of course then you won't know till you open it if you have Cheerios or Chex Mix.

It's much worse than that...

[hackwrench]

New technology being though in terms of not how to inform consumers but how to bypass the most informed and target the least informed, depending on them to persuade the better informed. Note: the child frequently doesn't actually want the cereal itself in this particular situation, but just the pretty box.

I can't tell you how many boxes of Frosted Flakes I ate for the primary goal of getting the Disney Afternoon figurine inside. There were also numerous times I thought I wanted something, but didn't actually know what it was.

I can see it now...

[Dan Morenus]

A disgruntled cereal packaging company employee quits, and a few weeks later at 5:00pm some fine Sunday all the boxes on the supermarket shelf simultaneously and inexplicably start flashing goatse...

Re:It's coming

[Gabe Garza]

> Soon we'll have advertising on every inanimate surface.

Why would we limit ourselves to inanimate surfaces? I envision a day when I go to a seafood restaurant and the oysters have a self-updating "I've been out of water DD HH.MI.SS" display attached to their shells; the lobsters have a "My claws currently weight WW ounces each, and I was harvested only HH hours ago" display on their carapaces; and the waiters have dazzling, dynamic pieces of flair attached to their uniforms that vibrantly inform me how much they love their job.

If Google has taught us anything...

[Trip Ericson]

...it's that in a world where all the advertisements are flashly, the plain one stands out.