Wacom 2010 Annual Report Download - page 6

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Where are we now?
New generation Bamboo,
the first interactive pen tablet combining
multi-touch and pen input offered an intuitive way.
The professional pen tablet, Intuos 4 gained a high reputation all around the world
and showed outstanding success in 3D film production.
In October 2009, Wacom unveiled globally a new consumer
tablet, Bamboo, which merges multi-touch functionality of two
fingers with existing pen tablet technologies. It’ s aimed at a wide
range of fields, not only for digital photo retouching, illustration,
animation and blogging but also for hobby use in digital scrap-
booking, popular in the U.S. and Europe and generally as an alter-
native to a mouse device. The new gesture control, by using two
fingers enables a more intuitive interaction with computer inter-
face functions such as scrolling through a web site, zooming in
and out of text, etc. In addition, as a strategy to acquire new
users, Wacom has started offering online, small software applica-
tions like games, tools, etc that are fun and useful for using with a
pen tablet. As a result, the new generation Bamboo recorded the
best ever sales quarter for a consumer model from October to
December in 2009. The Company aims for further sales expan-
sion in the next fiscal year.
In April, 2009 Wacom released Intuos 4 which is used for
high-quality digital content creation such as film and TV, web
design, and industrial design. Since its launch, a number of
prizes including "TIPA Award", "Plus X Award", "Red Dot Award"
in Europe and "Good Design Award" in Japan were awarded,
further promoting its high reputation all around the world.
Intuos4 has increased sales in emerging countries such as
China and India following a global growth in digital content
creation and publishing. Intuos series pen tablets are used for
creating advanced computer graphics in the latest 3D film
productions including "Avatar” which has widened the business
field.
‘AVATAR’ ©2009 Twentieth Century Fox. All rights reserved.
In October 2009, Wacom intro-
duced a new brand "Wacom feel
IT technologies" for the compo-
nent business, which provides
natural and intuitive user experi-
ence technology. In accordance
with the release of Windows 7,
Wacom developed an original
multi-touch sensor system and
began to ship touch panels
commercially to HP, Lenovo, Toshiba, Fujitsu and other major PC
manufacturers along with pen components. Wacom also provided
pen components commercially to e-Book manufacturers such as
enTourage, Onyx etc., which incorporate a hand writing function in
their e-Books. Wacom has developed a new IC controller which has
the strength to drive both pen and touch sensor at high speed with
high accuracy and with low power assumption. This summer, the
company will start to mass produce the IC controller which also
enables a touch panel to recognize an unlimited number of fingers at
the same time, further strengthening Wacom’s position as a global
leader in Natural User Interface development and production.
The use of Wacom pen tablets
for digital signature security has
increased lately. In a successful
case with IT security solutions,
CECA in Spain adopted about
10,000 tablets for account appli-
cation agreements, and this case
was awarded the "TeleTrusT Inno-
vation Award" in Germany. Mitsui
Sumitomo Insurance in Japan
has also adopted pen tablets for signing both automobile insurance and
fire insurance contracts. Wacom’ s pen tablets help to contribute in
saving paper resources and improving security solutions for such cases
as, a digital notary document system in France and the introduction of
digital signatures instead of abolishing certificate of a seal impression in
Korea. In March 2010, a mobile interactive pen tablet "STU-300" was
launched, expanding the product line for digital signature security even
further.
CECA in Spain and other global financial
institutions decided to deploy pen tablets
to enable digital signature security.
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Major PC manufacturers have adopted the
Wacom multi-touch sensor system
and are set to mass produce.