(FORTUNE Magazine) – hq: cambridge, mass. founded: 1997 sales: n.a. employees: 11 stock: privately held web address: www.eink.com

Barrett Comiskey and J.D. Albert look like slightly malicious brothers who dyed their hair yellow to tick off Dad. The elders they're trying to annoy are traditional manufacturers of screens and displays, the companies like Sharp, Toshiba, and Sanyo that made up the bulk of the attendees at last month's conference on display technology in Anaheim, Calif.

"We just decided it would be cool to be sort of the freaks of the conference," says Albert, 23, of their decision to dye their hair yellow the night before the shindig. "And it totally worked. People knew exactly who we were and could find us really easily."

Someday everyone may know Comiskey and Albert, the principal scientists at E Ink. This Cambridge, Mass., startup is out to create multipurpose screens that are as thin, readable, reflective, flat, and flexible as paper. E Ink's electronic paper could find its way into everything from computer screens to books, newspapers, advertising, television, and all kinds of consumer packaging.

The idea came from Joe Jacobson, an assistant professor at MIT's Media Lab. He decided he'd love to have a single book that could morph into another book, with hundreds of reprogrammable pages. Jacobson, now on E Ink's board, signed up Comiskey and Albert, then promising undergrads, to build his E-book a page at a time.

The E Ink page works a bit like those images you see created at halftime at the Super Bowl, when tens of thousands of fans hold up and flip placards from one colored side to another to spell out words or create an image. On the E ink page, millions of dot-sized microcapsules play the role of the placards. Each capsule contains colored ink and white paint particles. Electrical charges from a circuit embedded in a filmy background behind attract or repel the white chips, bringing either the white or the ink to the surface of the microcapsule.

The product's still nascent. If you visit E Ink's Cambridge labs, they'll show you a flexible page on which the letter "E," say, goes from blue on a white background to white on a blue background. But some big names believe there's real promise here: Hearst Corp., Motorola, ad agency holding company Interpublic, and some venture capitalists have backed E Ink with $15.8 million.

In 1999 the company expects to roll out its first product: store signs, which will become embedded with pagers. That way a retail chain, say, could beam a signal from headquarters and simultaneously update all the prices or marketing displays in its shoe departments. J.C. Penney marketing exec Edward Sample thinks electronic signs will help keep prices uniform nationwide.

The signs, which feature large type sizes, are a modest start. Getting smaller print to work is tougher. Reusable fax and printer paper may come next. Instead of blasting ink onto paper, printers would simply tap charges onto a sheet of microcapsules. Eventually, Comiskey and Albert want E-paper to work for displays on cell phones and watches, and as hidden signs on household appliances: the signs would stay black until they have an event to describe (like "I'm empty").

E Ink's yellow-haired boys aren't setting a date yet on electronic newspapers and magazines and, ultimately, Jacobson's electronic book. Embedded with a radio receiver, an E-page could be updated constantly with news. E Ink doesn't regard the electronic-book companies as competition (for more, see "Electronic Books Are Coming at Last"). Rather, E Ink thinks its pages could serve as the display to which the book companies deliver content. And that, finally, would come close to creating Jacobson's original vision--an ever-changing, ever renewable pocket book.

--Carol Vinzant