Elo TouchSystems
The World’s Leader in Touchscreens

The Touchscreen Leader

Touchscreens are fundamentally changing the way people interact with computers. Some snapshots from across the country:

• In the Midwest, home buyers go house-hunting with the touch of a finger. Touchscreen kiosks located in airports, hotels, and shopping centers enable prospective buyers to view color images and “spec” sheets on more than 52,000 homes for sale.
• Connecticut residents take their driver’s license exams at computers equipped with touchscreens. A 10-second, full-motion video accompanies each question to help test-takers visualize real-life driving scenarios. While hand-written exams once took an hour, touchscreen-based exams now can be completed and graded in just 15 minutes.
• At Monroe Community College in New York, student nurses test their decision-making skills by treating “virtual” patients (who are actually professional actors) playing out emergency-room scenes recorded on laser disc. With touchscreens providing the interface, the students can “touch” the patients on the screen and control buttons and dials on video images of respirators and other equipment.
• Rather than settle for a standard greeting card chosen from a rack of hundreds, shoppers can now make their own personalized, one-of-a-kind cards: American Greetings kiosks, installed in stores nationwide, let customers create their own unique messages and cover designs in minutes.

Although these innovative touchscreen users represent a broad cross-section of industries, they all share one thing in common: All use industry-leading touchscreen products from Elo TouchSystems, Inc., a company that has been manufacturing and installing touch solutions for over two decades.

Harnessing an Innovative Technology

Not long ago, touchscreens were specialized tools limited to applications such as process control, military command, and air traffic control. Few among the general public had ever actually seen a touchscreen up and running. That has changed in the 1990s. Supermarkets, post offices, restaurants, shopping malls, gaming, and drinking establishments—along with a variety of other enterprises—now employ this innovative and intuitive technology to put the power of the computer at people’s fingertips. The essence of a touchscreen is its user friendliness. Unlike complex keyboard commands, which strike fear in the hearts of many, touchscreens enable users with absolutely no computer experience to manipulate complex software programs instantly.

A Rapidly Expanding Marketplace

It’s no surprise that the touchscreen market is expanding rapidly at present.

Annual sales of touchscreens now total over $300 million. Industry analysts such as Market Intelligence Research Corporation and Stanford Resources, Inc. estimate that the market is currently expanding by 25 percent annually. Market projections forecast that the market will grow to more than $500 million in annual sales by 1998.

Some may ask, “Why touchscreens and why now?” Part of the answer lies in the dramatic drop in PC prices, which enables more and more businesses to justify an investment in computers. As a result, the PC is making forays into new and previously uncharted territories, where the man-machine interface must be friendly to people with limited computer experience. To answer this call for increased ease of use, more and more developers, systems integrators and resellers are investing in touchscreen technology.

Touchscreen prices have dropped dramatically as application and production volumes have increased. This trend has boosted sales in traditional touchscreen niches, such as factory-floor control, while driving sales in new touchscreen arenas, such as the medical, financial, and restaurant industries. The drop in price for a touchscreen solution has been significant: In the early 1980s, a complete touch system, including a controller card, a software driver program and the touchscreen itself, totaled well over $1,000. Today, that price tag has been cut by more than half and is still dropping steadily. In addition, while touchscreen suppliers have reduced their prices, they have boosted their products’ performance substantially. Each new generation of touchscreens has offered customers faster touch response times, superior reliability and increased durability. Touchscreen suppliers now also offer broader compatibility with operating systems, easier installation and better size selection to fit various types of monitors.

Four Major Market Areas for Touch

Touchscreen suppliers sell solutions to four primary markets:

• Point-of-sale (POS) operations, where touchscreens simplify cash registers, reduce operator errors, and virtually eliminate the need for training—particularly vital in industries with high employee turnover, such as fast-food restaurants, music stores and other retail enterprises. MacDonald’s and American Greetings are examples of companies successfully employing touchscreen-based POS systems.
• Point of information (POI) systems, where touchscreens provide access to data in public environments such as shopping centers and centers of tourist activity. Touchscreens are also common in computer-based training systems. For example, Federal Express trains its employees using touchscreen-based POI systems, and many of the major airlines use touchscreens to train their pilots for flight.
• Gaming systems such as video lottery terminals and video-based bar and nightclub games. Touchscreens transform games into intuitive systems that enable novices to master game controls the first time they play. And unlike fixed-button gaming terminals, which are usually limited to one game, touch-based gaming systems are versatile, offering multiple games on a single terminal.
• Process control applications, where touchscreens not only simplify the man-machine interface, but also stand up to contaminant-rich environments like factory floors. Touchscreens can be sealed to become water-tight, making them more durable than keyboards, buttons and dials found on many traditional process-control systems.

In the Beginning: The Birth of Touch

The birth and growth of the touchscreen industry is linked directly to pioneering research conducted by Elo TouchSystems. Founded in 1971 in a Tennessee basement, Elo TouchSystems has dedicated itself for over 25 years to the task of simplifying computers and speeding access to information for computer users.

It began with Samuel Hurst, a research scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratories, who started the company out of a frustration with traditional data-entry techniques. Working with three graduate students while on a year’s sabbatical, Hurst planned to conduct in-depth analysis on numerical data he and his students had compiled. But Hurst and his team found they could not key their data into the laboratory’s mainframe fast enough. With time running out on his sabbatical, and with his students scrambling to conduct analyses and complete their thesis projects, Hurst took matters into his own hands. Gathering a team of workers in his basement, he constructed a “graphic digitizer”—a touch-sensitive tablet, divided into a grid, through which his team could rapidly enter numerical data using a hand-held stylus. The device not only solved Hurst’s immediate data-entry problem, it also became the prototype for today’s advanced touchscreens.

Three years after inventing the graphic digitizer, Hurst and his Oak Ridge colleagues struck upon a new idea that transformed their relatively simple data-entry technology into a powerful, interactive tool: They decided to make their touch-sensitive surface transparent, and they sized it to fit a computer monitor. Thus did Elo TouchSystems (then known as Elographics) give birth to the most popular type of touchscreen in use today. Brought to market in 1975, the company’s first touchscreen product transformed computers of the day into highly intuitive machines, user-friendly enough for a child to operate.

Maintaining its Leadership in Touch

Over twenty-five years later, Elo TouchSystems maintains its leadership position in the touchscreen marketplace, providing leading-edge touchscreen solutions to customers in a broad cross-section of industries. The company now employs more than 480 people at manufacturing facilities in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Fremont, California, and Freising, Germany, plus many regional sales offices around the world. To date, Elo TouchSystems has installed more than 550,000 touchscreen systems throughout the world, more than any other supplier.

Since being purchased by Raychem Corporation in 1987, Elo TouchSystems has further expanded its research and development capabilities. With Raychem—a leading materials science company—operating as its parent, Elo TouchSystems has considerable technical expertise and resources at its disposal.

Elo TouchSystems now offers the broadest touchscreen product line available anywhere, including two industry-leading touchscreen technologies: IntelliTouch® systems (based on surface wave technology) and AccuTouch® systems (based on resistive technology).

IntelliTouch: Maximum Clarity and Durability

IntelliTouch products are unique among all touchscreen technologies in that they are constructed entirely of glass, with no plastic overlays or coatings. This simple, one-layer construction offers customers three major benefits: First, the image clarity found on an IntelliTouch touchscreen is second to none, as there is nothing but glass between the user and the display. Second, IntelliTouch’s all-glass construction makes it extremely durable and virtually immune to surface scratches. And third, IntelliTouch provides customers with drift-free operation, ensuring reliable performance without the need for recalibration servicing.

This combination of superior image clarity and built-in durability makes IntelliTouch products an extremely popular choice in public information kiosks and interactive training systems, which must stand up to rugged use while delivering high-level graphics output.

AccuTouch: Proven Performance

The AccuTouch line of products is based on Elo TouchSystems’ patented resistive technology, the most popular touchscreen technology in use today. AccuTouch touchscreens are known for their high resolution and proven performance, making them a popular choice for use in point-of-sale environments such as fast-food and fine-dining restaurants. AccuTouch systems are also commonly found on the factory floor, where they stand up to various contaminants to provide a consistent and simple man-machine interface.

A Systems Approach

While the touchscreen itself is the most visible and vital component in a touch solution, it cannot function on its own. Every touchscreen system must also incorporate a controller card, a software driver program, and a set of application development tools. When it comes to these essential components, Elo TouchSystems offers the broadest selection available. To meet strict quality standards, Elo TouchSystems designs all of these touchscreen products in-house—including full lines of controller cards, software drivers and application development tools.

Elo TouchSystems also offers maximum flexibility in its array of touchscreen products. Both the AccuTouch and IntelliTouch lines come in a broad range of types and sizes to fit popular displays. They can be installed on CRTs that are flat, cylindrical, and spherical, or on displays based on electroluminescent (EL), liquid crystal display (LCD), and gas plasma technologies. Many sizes are available, from large, curved units for over-sized monitors, to small, flat touchscreens built to fit compact point-of-sale displays.

Elo TouchSystems’ software offerings include MonitorMouse®, a software driver that instantly brings touch capabilities to any mouse-driven program. MonitorMouse enables the touchscreen to emulate the mouse, so the vast array of GUI-based software available on the market today is instantly touch compatible. MonitorMouse is available for the DOS, Windows 3.x, Windows 95, Windows NT, OS/2, and Macintosh operating systems.

Manufacturing Touchscreens

Elo TouchSystems operates two manufacturing facilities to supply customers around the world—one plant located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee and a second plant located in Fremont, California. In addition, Elo TouchSystems maintains extensive research and development facilities. With Raychem Corporation as its parent company, Elo TouchSystems draws on world-class technical expertise and R&D resources unmatched in the touchscreen industry.

A Commitment to Quality

Whether they work on the manufacturing floor, in customer service or in the president’s office, every employee at Elo TouchSystems participates in a Total Quality Management program that fosters a firm commitment to continuous improvement of both products and customer service. At Elo TouchSystems, quality is recognized not as a finite goal but as a never-ending improvement process. As part of this commitment, Elo TouchSystems offers same day shipments on most of its products and provides in-depth technical assistance to customers developing touch solutions. Elo is an ISO 9001 certified company.

Getting Products to Customers

Elo TouchSystems sells its products nationally and internationally through direct sales offices, manufacturers’ representatives and distributors. Every member of the company’s sales force is an expert in touchscreen technology. The company holds regular, in-depth sales training sessions to keep all of its sales representatives abreast of new products and services available to customers.

Elo TouchSystems’ Management Council

ROBERT R. ROESER
President and Chief Executive Officer
Roeser, who joined the company in 1990, was previously vice president of operations. Before joining Elo TouchSystems, Roeser served as vice president of operations at Sigmaform. Prior to that, Roeser held several management positions at Raychem Corporation, where he worked for 14 years. Roeser attended Ohio University where he earned an MBA in 1975 and a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering in 1966.

DONALD B. ARMSTRONG
Director of Business Development
Armstrong, who came to Elo TouchSystems in 1987, possesses more than 25 years of experience in developing and manufacturing high technology products. Before joining Elo TouchSystems, Armstrong co-founded X-CYTE, where he remains an outside director. Prior to that, he was an executive vice president at Crystal Technology. Armstrong attended the University of Minnesota from 1959 to 1964, where he earned his Ph.D, master’s degree in electrical engineering, and bachelor’s degree.

PATRICIA J. BROGAN
Vice President of Sales and Marketing
Brogan joined Elo from Giga Info Group, an internet-based service company, where she was vice president and division general manager. Prior to that she was with IBM for 14 years in sales and marketing roles on PS/2 products, Apple where she headed Applesoft worldwide sales and Borland International where she was director of business development. Brogan has a BS degree in Journalism from Northwestern.

MARCIA M. DAVIS-CANNON
Vice President of Operations
Before joining Elo in 1993, Davis-Cannon worked for Raychem Corp. for 11 years in various departments including product management, corporate planning, and finance. Before Raychem, she worked in operations at General Motors and Procter and Gamble. Davis-Cannon attended the Wharton School at the University of Pennsyslvania for her MBA, and Iowa State University for her BS. Davis-Cannon previously managed Elo’s Fremont operations.

STEPHEN A. DELATEUR
Vice President of Technology
DeLateur came to Elo TouchSystems in 1995 from Gammalink/Dialogic, where he served as director of software engineering for two years. Before that, he spent eight years as director of system technology at Mirage Systems. DeLateur earned both his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and his MBA from the University of California at Berkeley. He earned his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University.

WILLIBALD HESSE
Managing Director, Europe

PAMELA K. MCREYNOLDS
Finance Director
McReynolds, who joined Elo in 1992, was previously Controller for Holliston Inc. for 4 years. Prior to that, she held various management positions with Mead Corporation and Inland Container Corporation. McReynolds, has a BS degree in Accounting from the University of Tennessee and earned her MBA in Finance from Berry College.

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