December 2000 > Gyricon Media, to develop an electronic ink technology
In December 2000, researchers at PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), the Xerox center in Silicon Valley, California, founded the company Gyricon Media to market the SmartPaper, an electronic paper based on the display technology called gyricon - developed since 1997 within Xerox. Very briefly explained, the technology was the following one: in between two sheets of flexible plastic, millions of micro-cells contain two-tone (for example black and white) beads suspended in a clear liquid. Each bead has an electric charge. An external electrical pulse makes the balls rotate and change color, to display, modify, or delete data. In 2004, the market was commercial advertising, with small posters running on batteries. The company ended its activities in 2005, with R&D activities going on at Xerox.
2000 > The wiki, a collaborative website
Deriving from the Hawaiian term "wiki" ("fast"), a wiki is a website allowing multiple users to collaborate online on the same project. The wiki concept became quite popular in 2000. At any time, users can contribute to drafting content, edit it, improving it, and updating it. The wiki has been used for example to create and manage dictionaries, encyclopedias, or reference tools. The software can be simple or more elaborate. A simple program handles text and hyperlinks. With a more elaborate program, one can embed images, charts, tables, etc. The most famous wiki is Wikipedia.
January 2001 > Wikipedia, a global free cooperative online encyclopedia
Wikipedia was launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger (Larry resigned later on). It has quickly grown into the largest reference website on the internet, financed by donations, with no advertising. Its multilingual content is free and written collaboratively by people worldwide, who contribute under a pseudonym. Its website is a wiki, which means that anyone can edit, correct, and improve information throughout the encyclopedia. The articles stay the property of their authors, and can be freely used according to the GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License) and the Creative Commons license. In December 2004, Wikipedia had 1.3 million articles (by 13,000 contributors) in 100 languages. In December 2006, Wikipedia was among the ten top sites on the web, with 6 million articles. In May 2007, Wikipedia had 7 million articles in 192 languages, including 1.8 million articles in English, 589,000 articles in German, 500,000 articles in French, 260,000 articles in Portuguese, and 236,000 articles in Spanish. In 2008, Wikipedia was in the top five websites. In september 2010, Wikipedia had 14 million articles in 272 languages, including 3.4 million articles in English, 1.1 million articles in German and 1 million articles in French.
January 2001 > UNL (Universal Networking Language), a digital metalanguage project
The UNDL Foundation (UNDL: Universal Networking Digital Language) was founded in January 2001 to develop and promote the UNL (Universal Networking Language) project. The UNL project was launched in mid-1990s as a main digital metalanguage project by the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) of the United Nations University (UNU) in Tokyo, Japan. As explained on the bilingual (English, Japanese) website in 1998: "UNL is a language that - with its companion 'enconverter' and 'deconverter' software - enables communication among peoples of differing native languages. It will reside, as a plug-in for popular web browsers, on the internet, and will be compatible with standard network servers." In 2000, 120 researchers worldwide were working on a multilingual project in 16 languages (Arabic, Brazilian, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindu, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Latvian, Mongolian, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, and Thai).
January 2001 > The Cybook was launched as the first European ebook reader
Developed by Cytale, a French company created by Olivier Pujol, the Cybook (21 x 16 cm, 1 kilo) was available in January 2001 as the first European ebook reading device. Its memory - 32 M of SDRAM and 16 M of flash memory - could store 15.000 pages, or 30 books of 500 pages. But sales were far below expectations, and Cytale ended its activities in July 2002. The Cybook project was taken over by Bookeen, a company created in 2003 by Michael Dahan and Laurent Picard, two former engineers from Cytale. The Cybook second generation was available in June 2004. Bookeen launched the Cybook Gen3 in July 2007, with a screen using the E Ink technology.