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Smart Paper

Smart Paper is an upcoming technology that produces e-paper. These electronic sheets are very lightweight, flexible, energy-efficient, and use e-ink to display words, images, and videos in color.
The e-paper is designed to receive content over a wireless network, and has a simple touch command that allows users to scroll through the pages on screen.

This technology first of all is extremely eco freindly because no longer would trees need to be cut down to make paper if we have smart paper. Smart paper is made up of half a million transistors. Also with it using e-ink, which the amazon kindle uses, the stress on the eyes would be very little as well which is quite useful for people wanting to read a large page full of text.

This technology has already been adapted into a watch which is a smart watch that uses a smart paper for the screen. This was funded on kickstarter and gained more that $10 million. One main feature about this watch was that it could connect to the users smartphone without having to take the phone out of the users pocket to use it. This is because of the e-papers wireless connection. Also while using the e-paper there is a 30fps refresh rate which, if the user has a clock screen that has a moving second hand, can drain power really quickly.

Society

This e-paper watch can help improve the usability of phones in a way that cars can sense keys. Instead of having to rumage around for a phone to check a text that the user just got they can look at their wrist and have their text messages there as well as the music and contacts from their phone.
For people with sight issues the e-ink used for the paper which puts a lot less stress on the eyes. It also has quite big buttons and text to help with people that can't see very well.
The complexity if this device is not alot because on the phone there is an app that connects it to the watch and the connection will sort out all of the data. The interface is very simple as there is not much too it, there is an up and down button to scroll through things and an ok button.

Economy

This technology will not do much to the economy but it can increase productivity of the standard worker that uses his or her phone a lot. Because when a person takes their phone out of their pocket then that is wacting time and if they do it a lot in can be an inconvenience. If they just need to check their wrist that is a simple 1 second task which can inprove the workload that a person does.

Culture

E-paper can be used in many ways with computers, for example they could be used for presentations. Instead of printing off screenshots to show a person in a presentation the user could just place it on some e-paper and show the full presentation at its finest to get better results. This could also be used in education because in stead of big displays at the front that take up time and money to set up, e-paper could be bought for everyone in that class and the presentations can be put onto each piece of paper to make presentations more efficient and more effective.

This is not technology that can affect 3rd world countries. It is mostly designed for business and education purposes which there are not that much of in developing countries who would not have computers anyway.