Tokyo—October 27, 2016—Wacom announced today that the Digital Stationery Consortium, Inc, which aims to promote the wide adoption and market development of digital stationery, has been established in Delaware, USA and started its operation on October 26th. The consortium, of which Wacom is the founding member, is now operational and officially accepting applications for membership.
The Digital Stationery Consortium, Inc aims to promote digital stationery under an open partnership, harnessing the power of digital pens and digital ink, to serve creative minds in the most natural and intuitive way.
The objective of consortium is to establish digital ink as universal, open and smart content format by promoting and managing digital ink formats based on WILL™. WILL’s digital ink technology ensures cross-compatibility of ink data, allowing businesses and consumers to freely communicate and collaborate across digital devices, operating systems, hardware platforms and cloud services. WILL is a universal inking engine and ink layer framework that connects hardware, software and applications.
“For digital stationery to become part of the mainstream, it is vital that we make digital ink technology a truly open, universal and smart content format so that many industry partners are willing to adopt it. We regard WILL as a sort of public utility for promoting the evolution of digital stationery and it will require extensive cooperation between partners. This is a historic opportunity not only to form win-win relationships across a range of industries, but also to benefit society as a whole. In that sense, I cannot emphasize enough the importance of this consortium,” said Masahiko Yamada, President & CEO of Wacom, who will serve as Chairman of the consortium.
In its effort to promote WILL as a public utility for digital stationery, Wacom has been hosting a series of Connected Ink event in Las Vegas, Shanghai and Berlin. The most recent Berlin event was attended by Samsung Electronics, Montblanc, and E Ink Corporation as well as CenterDevice, Moka Studio and WeKast.
The Tokyo event will also invite leading players from IT, hardware, software, cloud services and stationery industries as well as academic and reserch fields. Representatives of leading stationery manufacturers and other partners will give speeches and participate in panel discussions concerning the potential of digital pen and ink.
Content of Connected Ink Tokyo
- Vision of Creative World (Masahiko Yamada, President & CEO, Wacom)
- WILL - Universal Ink for the 21st Century (Heidi Wang, VP Technology Marketing,Wacom)
- Universal Pen Experience (Nobu Ide, SVP, Technology Solutions,Wacom)
- Executive Key Notes by industry partners
- Panel Discussion - Digital Ink and Pen with industry partners
- Launch of the Digital Stationery Consortium, Inc (Masahiko Yamada)
About Wacom
Founded in 1983, Wacom is a global company based in Japan with subsidiaries and affiliate offices around the world to support marketing and distribution in over 150 countries. It is the world’s leading manufacturer of pen tablets, interactive pen displays, and digital interface solutions. The advanced technology of Wacom’s intuitive input devices has been used to create some of the most exciting digital art, films, special effects, fashion and designs around the world and provides business and home users with their leading interface technology to express their personality.The company also offers its products as OEM solutions to leading manufacturers serving incremental markets. Wacom’s interface technology, called Wacom Feel IT technologies, is also offered as an integrated solution to strategic partners. Most tablet device and PC manufacturers count on the advanced features and reliability to deliver a superior user interface experience.
*Wacom, WILL,Feel are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Wacom Co., Ltd.
*All other trademarks and product names are property of their respective companies