Liquavista
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Liquavista was a Dutch display-technology company founded in 2006 as a spin-off from Philips in Eindhoven. It developed electrowetting displays — screens that run an electric current through liquid to show color and even video at very low power, promising an alternative to E Ink. Samsung acquired it in 2010 and Amazon bought it from Samsung in May 2013 to develop screens for Kindle and other devices; in 2018 Amazon shut it down without ever shipping a product.
02 / Liquavista FAILURE REASONS
Failure factors
by Amazon's 2013 purchase the broader market for Liquavista's low-power electrowetting screens had disappeared because mobile battery life and LCD efficiency had improved, and Liquavista never got screens into production despite planned 2013 mass production.
Source states the mobile battery-life problem the tech targeted had been solved and screens were more energy efficient, leaving no broader market.
Source states Liquavista never got screens into production; planned 2013 mass production did not reach the market.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Operations ended
Liquavista ended operations.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
A technology without a shipping product is a research project, not a company
- 02
Battery life improved faster than electrowetting commercialized: the problem shrank while the solution was still in the lab
- 03
Being passed from Philips to Samsung to Amazon means no owner ever bet its own roadmap on you
- 04
Amazon's silence at the shutdown said everything: no details, no product, no future