A little magic dust sparkles for new HP product

In 1998, Hewlett-Packard engineer Daryl Anderson was converting his collection of vinyl record albums to CDs and marking each disc with a stick-on label. The labels were difficult to work with and had a tendency to peel off, which could lead to a gummed-up CD drive.

Trying to imagine a solution to the problem, Anderson began toying with the idea of coating a CD with some sort of "magic dust" that could be imprinted with a permanent label.

"There has got to be a better way," Anderson remembers thinking.

And now there is.

In January, Hewlett-Packard will unveil LightScribe, a new technology that uses the laser in an optical drive to print song titles, file names or graphic images directly onto the face of CDs and DVDs. The specially made discs have a coating that reacts chemically when a laser beam is applied to it. The result is a grayscale silkscreen-quality label printed at a high resolution.

The new technology could someday replace old methods for labeling discs, which range from marker pens and adhesive labels to inkjet printers with CD/DVD trays and expensive commercial replication services.

HP will show off the new product, which was made available in a couple new computers starting Christmas week, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in early January. For those who don't want to buy a new computer, a separate drive will be available for purchase later in the year.

LightScribe is one of the first ventures born out of HP's new business creation program, which was started around four years ago to bring ideas into being.

Hewlett-Packard used its expertise in the fields of inkjet technology, chemical compounds and imaging science to convert Anderson's idea into a product.

Anderson, an electrical engineer, has worked on calculators and printers in his 23 years at HP. He currently manages a circuit design team. Anderson had his hands in the LightScribe project only at the beginning, developing more than a dozen patents to jumpstart the project.

"My real contribution was pushing the idea until management believed in it enough to get the chemists to work on the magic dust," Anderson said.

And push he did.

Rich Duncombe, a senior director at HP, said the company is full of passionate inventors like Anderson. But at the time Anderson came up with his idea, HP's resources were heavily entrenched in inkjet printers.

"It was an interesting idea, but until we started our new business creation process, there was no way to take it forward," Duncombe said.

Once the incubator program began, HP got to work. A business plan was initiated two years ago, and HP announced the new LightScribe technology in January 2004.

"It was exciting when they first brought things out of the chemistry lab," Duncombe said.

There may be more new businesses where that one came from, Duncombe thinks.

"HP inventors are as strong as they've ever been," he said. "The Corvallis site is hopping, and LightScribe is just the tip of the iceberg."

HP managed LightScribe like a startup business, developing marketing plans and working with potential customers.

Two teams collaborated on the LightScribe effort. An imaging and printing group in Corvallis contributed imaging science and chemistry expertise, and a personal systems group in Fort Collins, Colo. contributed its knowledge of optical disk drives. The technology has been licensed to 16 hardware, software and media companies in order to bring it to market.

Kent Henscheid, LightScribe's marketing and business development manager, said the company has built its expectations on small returns from a large number of units.

In the 2004 third quarter alone, explained Henscheid, 13 million DVD writers were sold worldwide. Over the year there have been more than 15 billion CDs and DVDs sold.

Analyst Van Baker with Gartner Inc., a market research company, said that if HP prices LightScribe low enough, the company has the opportunity to flood the market with its new technology. On the other hand, if LightScribe gets priced too high, the product could end up on high-end drives only.

The idea is to make it "pervasive enough that you won't be able to buy a drive without it," Baker said. "In 12 months we could see it on every CD and DVD writer."

Henscheid doesn't believe price will be an obstacle for LightScribe.

"The price to the consumer was made very low," Henscheid said.

The increased cost of a computer system is "in the neighborhood of a $10 bill," he said. "A person purchasing a new PC won't see the extra cost."

Henscheid called LightScribe "an ingredient brand" intended to serve HP products and build customer loyalty. It is also simple and easy to use, he added.

"You just burn, flip and burn," Henscheid said.

As for Anderson, he pronounced himself satisfied with the product that grew out of his original idea. He just recently got ahold of a LightScribe device for his own use and burned some CDs for his son and his dad.

"It's pretty fun," he said.

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