Little that I know that this Corning company that I met during the Lunch @ Piero's was the foundation for the whole flat panel/LCD industry: TVs, laptops, cell phone screens... anything that is built using high-quality glass. I was still with this idea of Corning as an optical *dark* fiber supplier but completely reinvented itself after the telecom market crash in the early 2000. Now Corning supplies sheets of glass to the who's who of flat panel makers. The latest technology is more eco-friendly, with no heavy-metal. During our conversation, Corning CTO for Asia, Peter Brocko, mentioned some upcoming projects his company is involved like OLED screens and reflective bi-stable displays that are energy efficient and works well with ambient light. Bocko was less enthused about flexible screens using organic semiconductors and plastic, seeing this far away and destined to lower performance activities.

"OLED has a very strong value proposition in portable area. Makes it a very vivid display in a portable size for handheld devices like PDAs and personal media devices. But it has some scalability issues. It's possible to make a 40" TVs [...] But these are really heroic efforts right now. And it's not practical in the TV space for OLED to compete very strongly but it's going to build a wonderful business for a variety of portable devices that are high performance", said Bocko.

Bocko's interview after the jump.