Great observations on the newspaper business

So this doesnt have much to do with printing, at least directly, but Im making myself a few allowances on a Friday afternoon heading into a holiday weekend.

Mike Masnick, in his usual incisive manner, has a great post at Techdirt well worth my readers while, in my opinion. He summarizes and analyzes the comments from a recent Charlie Rose show and its newspaper management panel in "WSJ Editor Claims Google Devalues Everything".

As those paying attention know, the long decline in newspaper readership has long been exacerbated by competing media forms, the latest being the Internet. And more recently the business is suffering, like most media businesses, from an overall decline in advertising correlated directly with the economic slowdown. But as Masnick points out, the opportunities granted by the Web and the perceived demon Google are enormous, and its up to the industry, at least those in the industry who plan to survive, to figure it out.

Where does this relate to print? It seems even still the mindset of too many of those in the business is stuck with the model of literally, the News-Paper business. "If it aint printed (centrally I might add), it aint a newspaper and we cant sell it."

Thanks, Mike, for the excellent thoughts!

Read More..

November Observations The Lasting Power of a Good Strategy…Or Two!

also published in The Hard Copy Observer, November 2011

Observations: The Lasting Power of a Good Strategy…Or Two!
by Jim Lyons

[November 29, 2011] This is a story—actually two stories—about networking and the staying power that results from good strategy development. This combination led to one of my personal career highlights of 2011. The series of events, between coincidence and sleuthing, ended up leading to some much longer range reflection that resulted in some gained wisdom, at least as I see it, that is worth preserving and passing along.

I Have Seen That Somewhere Before

This past summer, I sat through an interesting presentation about the “future of work” and its implications for higher education. The webinar and the included materials were the result of work by the research branch of my employer from the education side of my life, the University of Phoenix, where I teach undergraduate- and graduate-level marketing and economics. Our Palo Alto, CA-based research group, with collaboration from Stanford University and the Institute of the Future, had produced the study, the first in a series actually.

As my colleagues and I sat through the presentation, the proverbial light bulb went off in my head as I focused on the presentation graphics—I had seen this formatting somewhere before. Post-seminar, I had to know if the slides were the work of David Sibbet and Grove Consultants International, who had served me and my team (dubbed the BLAST team) so well in 1994, when in the middle of my 25-year HP career, I led a team ruminating on and recommending plans for the future of the printer business (see image below).

Graphics from a Future of Work presentation started my sleuthing

An e-mail to the head of the Phoenix research group confirmed the graphics work had been led by the Institute of the Future (another consulting firm familiar to me from HP days but not from the particular project I had in mind). Some digging around with Google and then Amazon led me to Sibbet and a book he authored in 2010, titled Visual Meetings, with back-cover blurbs from Institute of the Future sources, so the trail was really warming up. Then finding my long-ago colleague on LinkedIn, I had a direct connection to at least satisfy my curiosity and potentially revel in the “small world” nature of having the same consultant working for a present employer as well as a previous one, nearly two decades prior.

The wait for a reply allowed me to go back to that 1994 effort with a talented, eight-member cross-functional team I had the pleasure and honor to lead, with great top management backing and interest. Over two months, and with the help of Sibbet and his magical “graphical facilitation” process (as well as other experts, both internal and external to HP), we came up with a meaningful historical perspective (on what was then the ten-year history of LaserJet) and blending that with developing trends in the broader market, came up with some recommendations for our business and its direction for the next ten or more years.

Though easiest to remember, I recalled that the strategy development was not just about the charts and graphs, although the oversized charts were invaluable communication tools in their final form. Rather, the many intermediate steps over the course of two months that involved the eight team members and many experts contributed to the foundation of the recommended strategies. With the internal experts’ input (and resulting buy-in), the recommendations were more-or-less “pre-sold” because they were the result of the collective process and not an “out-of-touch” external team of consultants.

As those thoughts began to galvanize for me, I got an exciting reply from Sibbet: he remembered me and my team and we just happened to be the subject of the first chapter in a new book, this one titled Visual Teams, that he was in the final stages of writing. Sibbet subsequently asked if I would mind looking the draft over and adding some edits/additions.

What Were Those Strategies?

Visual Teams covers the strategic development process at HP some 17 years ago, with recommended strategies still valid



Though I left HP a little more than six years ago, today, as senior editor for The Hard Copy Observer and with a close eye on the entire printing and imaging business and special attention on its perennial leading firm, HP, I felt very qualified to participate in the editing process and contribute to the content. Sibbet had done a masterful job in recalling the strategy development process flow, and I was able to add precision to the set-up (i.e. why was the BLAST team commissioned?) and the outcomes (i.e. what were the recommended strategies and how did they fare over the test of time?).

I have often recalled that the timing of that team’s work in late 1994 was fortuitous in providing the opportunity for the team to identify future trends, as they were just becoming apparent, especially with a closer look. For example, the appearance of the World Wide Web was becoming quite apparent (though commercial online services like AOL were much more prevalent at the time) after four years in its infancy, and e-mail was clearly kicking into the pervasive category. (Remembering that the first ten years of the LaserJet’s success had come in no small part from being a typewriter replacement for the creation of business letters provides a good example of the change at hand, as this transition to e-mail and other electronic forms of communication would seemingly leave a hole in demand for printing, that could perhaps, but not assuredly, be made up elsewhere.)

Even e-books were emerging on the horizon, with a little careful examination, and I remember we used a text copy of Project Gutenberg’s “Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin,” stored on a 3.5-inch floppy, to make the point that centralized printing, the model we coined “print and distribute,” was giving way to a “distribute and print” alternative. Beyond the technology, we also saw that corporate customers of HP printers were a different category and that the services side of things should be prioritized—the message was not just all about the best new products but rather providing a stable printing environment. We also helped flesh out, based on work at HP Labs and some other colleagues at HP’s Imaging and Printing Group (IPG), a “paper pie” that showed how a small, single-digit percentage of print was actually being done digitally and that a huge opportunity existed to capture traditional printing moving to one or another form of digital.

Fast-forward to 2011, and HP’s current printing and imaging strategies are very solidified around 1) printing content from online and mobile sources, 2) managed print services, and 3) the graphics-arts opportunity based around the analog to digital conversion of print. With a liberal interpretation of what the BLAST team came up with in 1994, those trends are very consistent with our recommendations after a two-month collaborative process.

HP’s strategy at the end of 2011, as expressed to Lyra Research (and others) at the firm’s HP Analyst Immersion Event in October, is based on four trends.

• content explosion;
• mobility and the Web;
• everything is going digital (analog to digital); and
• service-based business models.

Today’s strategists at HP are seeing much of the same, although more fully developed, of what we saw at the beginning of 1994 and are vigorously pursuing many of the same strategic initiatives we recommended. Does that mean that these trends are “old hat” and not the right ones? On the contrary, at least from what I see, these trends are the right ones. To go one better than our 17-year strategy span, none other that Sibbet himself just blogged about the 23-year-old iPad strategy, based on a recent Forbes piece (click here).


But back to the book, which came out in October and even includes a box with a “Note from Jim Lyons” at the end of the first chapter where I express a version of what I have recalled here, about how the Personal Press and Corporate Printing strategies from 1994 live on at HP in 2011.

Read More..

October Observations Steve Jobs Invented Desktop Publishing…and Photo Books too

also published in The Hard Copy Observer, October 2011

by Jim Lyons

[October 28, 2011] Recently, The Lyra Insider blog included a brief reflection on Steve Jobs and his impact on the printing and imaging business (see “The Onion Brings Printer Biz into Steve Jobs Resignation Story”). Now, further reflections on his contributions and quirks following his death on October 5 seem appropriate, especially in light of all the attention following the publication of Jobs’ new biography. Some personal and second-hand memories bring his passion and understanding to light in a very industry-specific way.

According to the new authorized biography, Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson, the legendary and recently deceased Apple CEO can take credit for revolutionizing six or maybe seven industries (the “maybe” being retail). Included on the list, as mentioned during Isaacson’s October 23 appearance on the American television show 60 Minutes and in the early pages of the book, which was released Monday, October 24, is digital publishing. While as a printing insider, I might refine that to desktop publishing (and in fact thought that was what I first heard during the live viewing of the show), that difference really might just come down to semantics. Along with the other industries on the list, like music, animated movies, and personal computers, desktop publishing is probably too fine a cut. After all, “DTP” as we called it back then really did ripple through and help change the whole of digital publishing and along the way, helped make the Macintosh a virtual standard in that industry.

The desktop publishing revolution goes back 25 years now (see “The Greatest Printer Story Ever Told”), and Steve Jobs’ influence during those heady early days was clear. Launching the original solution, which included the Apple Macintosh, Apple LaserWriter printer with Adobe Postscript, and Aldus PageMaker, Jobs along with his lieutenant John Scull (not to be confused with then-future-CEO John Sculley) were tireless lobbyists for DTP and its ability to transform publishing workflows. In the process, Jobs and Scully probably saved Apple and helped create a larger industry with beneficiaries like HP and Microsoft taking the solution (or perhaps a lower-end version of it) to the masses.

Following his passing, much has been made of Jobs and his “standing at the crossroads” of technology and the liberal arts, and the DTP revolution speaks volumes to that. This movement required an understanding of the full complement of technology required—the classic example (beyond the obvious Macintosh and laser printing) being Adobe PostScript’s scalable type, along with the sensitivity to style and design that was a Jobs trademark. (His passion for typography also comes out in his famous Stanford commencement speech and his discussion of early training in fonts and typefaces.) Then came Jobs’ skill as a marketer, with the strong positive push that got the world excited about the power and economies offered by DTP beginning in 1986…and his frequent trashing of HP as offering a second-rate solution.

Photobooks remain a popular feature of iPhoto ten years after its intro

A more recent Jobs innovation involves the Macintosh and Apple’s iPhoto application, originally introduced just as digital photography was hitting its inflection point a little less than ten years ago. This initiative was part of another marketing push by Apple, which was looking to define another “killer app” (PageMaker may have been one of the first) and in the process help sell more Macintosh computers, which Apple did. As part of the value proposition, iPhoto could help you organize your digital photos and create on-screen slide shows, plus the software included the ability for users to order a photobook—a professionally bound, hard-copy volume that would be produced off-site and shipped in a few days to the user. The photobook was a big part of the marketing campaign (including television commercials) that brought joy to anyone from the hard copy business that happened to notice them (me, for one). Apple continues with iPhoto today, and version 11 still prominently features this photobook capability. Similar to DTP, others have followed suit, with photobooks being one of the bright spots in digital photo printing and retailing (see “Observations: End of Summer 2011—Getting Those Memories Organized via Photobooks”).

The more interesting, Jobs side of the story comes in, though, when he personally got involved with a photobook quality issue, in the case of a very prominent customer complaint, in 2002, as remembered by Bill McGlynn, who is a former HP senior vice president and was head of the Graphics Arts group for HP’s Imaging and Printing Group (IPG) at the time, a group which included the then-recently acquired Indigo digital typesetter product line. (McGlynn is now president of Memjet Home & Office.) The Apple CEO, with his characteristic passion for design and quality, got right into the middle of a quality issue. McGlynn remembers the 2002 conference call he was summoned to, along with his boss, Vyomesh Joshi, who remains head of IPG.

According to McGlynn, “Apple’s supplier for the photobooks was MyPublisher, who used our (recently acquired) Indigo presses for their production. None other than Paul McCartney, yes, that Paul McCartney, had ordered 100 photobooks commemorating his 2002 U.S. tour. As he went through the stacks of books, individually adding his thanks and a signature, personalizing each book as a memento for crew and others who had made the tour possible, Sir Paul noticed inconsistent color and let Jobs know about it.”

“We had a magenta color shift issue at the time, especially on the older (TurboStream) machines, and Jobs wanted to know how we planned to fix it,” McGlynn continues. He remembers, “Steve even warned us, as he was in his car, returning from a dental appointment while taking the call, that he was likely to be in an even more cantankerous mood than normal.” McGlynn remembers an irate but passionate Jobs, and in the end, MyPublisher got a new (HP Indigo 3000) machine, McCartney got replacement books, and another Jobs story was born.

Apple Cards is a new Apple created iPhone app that features hard copy - in this case greeting cards

How much Jobs had to do with the very latest Apple print-prominent solution, he firm’s “Cards” app announced with the iPhone 4S on October 4, is not clear, but Jobs’ secretive side was evident with respect to our query made to HP regarding which presses are being used to print the cards. The app itself, only available recently, is a very “light” app so far, offering 20 or so card styles in a limited number of categories. Users have the ability to send a physical greeting card, customized and mailed conventionally (from Apple’s publishing vendor), to the recipient of their choice (see “Life Imitates Art”). When we asked about Apple’s choice of print vendor (and HP’s digital presses) this time, a current HP vice president became a bit flustered, commenting on how secretive Apple can be, but he assured us, with a virtual wink at least, that “the finest quality digital press available” was behind Apple’s latest hard-copy initiative.

Is the HP Indigo press still behind Apples latest hard copy initiation, Cards?

So from DTP to iPhoto to Cards (and we shouldn’t forget AirPrint), the Jobs legacy lives on with Apple and the firm’s all-important role in the printing and imaging industry. For this and everything else, RIP Steven Paul Jobs.

Read More..

August Observations From the Magazine Rack and What a Difference a Year Makes!

The Hard Copy Observer, August 2010

Observations: From the Magazine Rack 2010 – What a Difference a Year Makes!
by Jim Lyons

In 2010, the iPad has been huge as a platform for traditional magazines and new forms of magazine-like publications

In my Observations column just over a year ago (see “Jim Lyons Observations June 2009 – From the Magazine Rack”), I observed that Time’s Mine was an interesting, ongoing experiment with a personalized magazine. In what looked like a traditional hard-copy magazine, Mine was a response to the long-heard siren-song of personalizing content, culling articles based on subscriber profiles from a bevy of Time, Inc. publications. At the same time, I reflected back on other Observations columns, earlier in 2009, that covered the conversion of traditional hardcopy magazines such as PC Magazine to Web-based viewing/subscription sites like Zinio (www.zinio.com) and somewhat experimental projects like The Printed Blog and HP’s Tabbloid that seemed to reverse the trend back to a hard-copy orientation. It seemed as if the magazine world was facing an unprecedented level of change, and even excitement, though in the face of significant threats.

Well, one year (and two months) later, that level of change, in some ways seems trivial. What is the catalyst for the recent tumult? The April 2010 introduction of Apples iPad is the one significant event over the past 14 months that can be linked to so much more change in the magazine world. While the iPad has set sales records and offered new ways of doing many different things, and more generally inspired new ways to think about networked and tablet computers, one of the biggest opportunities presented by the iPad (and its ultimate offspring and offshoots) may be for magazines and newspapers to change the way they reach their readers. While the book world and its transition to e-books really started earlier, with the introduction of Amazons Kindle as a major milepost along this evolutionary path from print to electronic, the iPad can be blamed, or credited, for shaking loose the vision and potential rebirth of magazines (and potentially, but to a lesser extent, newspapers).

Magazines and iPad Viewing

With the iPad launch, and in the months following, many magazines, including Popular Science, Sports Illustrated, Wired, and even People, have been formatted, and are sold, for the iPad’s distinct viewing capabilities. While the results have been praised, the business model is still yet to be worked out. For example, a single issue typically costs five dollars through the iTunes app store, and one years subscription to the print version may be about the same, at least via many easily available promotional offers. There have been accusations that these iPad-specific magazine versions are gimmicky and destined not to last, and some industry observers, such as Techdirt’s Mike Masnick, have even compared them to the multimedia CD-ROM “revolution” of the 1990s (see “More People Recognizing That Media iPad Adaptations Feel Like CD-ROM Media”).

Zmags, which I covered in my May Observations column, is in beta with an iPad viewer

A look to the iTunes app store for iPad-specific apps or browsing for mobile-oriented Web pages geared for the iPad yields glimpses of some old friends. Remember Zinio (see “Jim Lyons Observations January 2009 – PC Magazine is Dead, Long Live PC Magazine”)? How about the more recently covered Zmags (see “Jim Lyons Observations May 2010 – Zmags—Another Online Viewing Alternative”)? HP’s MagCloud, (see “HP Enhances MagCloud Service, Offers ‘Blended Viewing Options’ for Magazine Readers", originally designed to help Indigo press owners (print service providers or PSPs) build volume by funneling short-run magazine print jobs to them, now has its own iPad app that offers partner magazine publishers the option of online viewing via Apple’s tablet, in addition to print-on-demand capabilities. Missing in the line-up, so far anyway, is Google’s Fast Flip (see "Jim Lyons Observations April 2010 – Google Fast Flip—More Innovation in Magazine and Newspaper Viewing”). Although this technology continues on with a mobile phone viewer, the firm has pulled back its presence on the Google News home page. Of course, the majority of these devices and apps are geared to the viewing of material prepared for print and then made available (i.e. “repurposed) for online as well. The exception is Fast Flip, which is based on viewing Web pages in a magazine style—a “flip through” format (as the name implies).

Flipboard

However, the biggest news on the iPad magazine front from the summer months is the launch of Flipboard (www.flipboard.com), the self-titled producer of “your personalized social magazine,” which includes Web pages and RSS feeds of your choosing (à la Google Fast Flip), but also intermingles material from your own Facebook and Twitter feeds (see image below). The excitement and rave reviews (see The Wall Street Journal’s Katie Boehret, “Your Own Digital Magazine”) have led to widespread downloads along with some start-up hiccups and threats from server issues (see “Flipboard hype crashes iPad apps servers”) and legal questions (see “Is Flipboard legal?”).

Flipboard has become an iPad sensation as "Your Personalized Social Magazine," but except for my plea for interested souls, there has not much Twitter action on "Flipboard printing"

Flipboard delivers dynamic and very personalized content and is far from the static PDF examples above and for that reason, seems like perhaps an ideal candidate for some printing as users attempt to capture a “moment in time” that conceivably combines their online worlds. So far neither Flipboard nor its user community seem to have given printing much thought, as evidenced by a search of Twitter for “Flipboard printing” that turns up only a few obscure references (see image below). After a few more months of maturation, however, we would not be surprised to see a printing need emerge, just as with the iPad at large. (See bottom of post for additional links related to Flipboard.)

The Return of the Ultimate Countertrend?

Clearly the world is changing quickly around this space, so stay tuned. But there are some comforting moments of stability … and even nostalgia. Earlier this week, I received an e-mail from an old friend I met while covering this “beat,” Joshua Karp of spring 2009’s first darling (and then defunct) The Printed Blog (see "Jim Lyons Observation, April 2009 – Ultimate Countertrend—The Printed Blog”). Karp’s e-mail announced … drumroll please ... the return of The Printed Blog! With these words, Karp announced a subscription-based, paid model, with the following description that will no doubt warm the hearts of at least some of my readers.

I wanted to let you know that Ive restarted The Printed Blog. We re-launched because there is no publication that brings you the best of the web, curated by people you follow and respect, in a beautiful print format every week - and there needs to be. Sometimes, its just nice to sit down - on the train, or a couch, or at a café, and to read something on paper. Not everything is always better online, by default. We believe that the web is best suited for cutting and pasting and searching and linking and transacting - and print is best for actually CONSUMING information, and, ironically, the more content is pushed online, the more important print is going to become.

For more info, stay tuned here, or hit www.theprintedblog.com.

As I love to preach to my MBA marketing students: segments, segments, segments… We learn over time that as fast as things change, different users have different needs, at different times, and for different purposes. Printing and viewing have already coexisted for generations (remember 35mm slides?), and will no doubt continue their jostling for some time to come. Be sure to watch this space for further developments.

_____________

Other Links for Flipboard (and iPad magazine) commentary

http://www.businessinsider.com/flipboard-the-social-ipad-app-everyone-is-going-crazy-over-explained-in-80-seconds-2010-7

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/2010-08-11-flipboard11_ST_N.htm?csp=usat.me


http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20100816/why-ipad-magazines-wont-be-a-really-big-business-for-a-while-and-why-prices-wont-come-down-either/

Read More..

July Observations Nexus 7 Printing

also published in Photizo io360 imaging observer















Observations: Nexus 7 Printing

Summer 2012 has been a momentous season for the mobile computing industry. In addition to marking the fifth anniversary of the Apple iPhone, we have also seen new product announcements from two of Apple’s major competitors, with both launches threatening the industry status quo. Google and Microsoft and introduced new tablet computers that have tilted the landscape of the mobile business. And where does printing fit in with these new machines? As we have noted in the past, mobility represents an opportunity and a threat to printing and imaging, and while we cannot do more than speculate about the Microsoft Surface tablets and their printing capabilities, as the firm’s June announcement promised fall availability (October 26 has been recently confirmed), with only relatively high-level product details, including printing. But we can report from first-hand experience that the Google Nexus 7 tablet offers robust printing, virtually right out of the box.

On any number of occasions, I have used this monthly column (Jim Lyons Observations) as a window to observe the ever-changing mobile environment. In my opinion, the biggest mobile computing landmark for me personally as well as for the computer industry was the 2007 introduction of the original Apple iPhone (see “HappyFifth Birthday, Apple iPhone! (But iPhone Printing Is Not Quite as Old)”). As a user, I was behind in the Smartphone category, never having used a RIM BlackBerry, so my purchase of one of the first Apple iPhones caught me up in a hurry. And of course, at that time, with no printing solutions available, I was open to musing about when and if Apple iPhone printing would become a reality (there weren’t even any apps then, after all, except the built-in Weather, Stocks, etc.). Of course, several iPhone generations later we have seen a continuing parade of third-party print solutions from independent software vendors and printer OEMs (see “iPhone Printing, Revisited”,) as well as a built-in solution that came about after Apple expanded its mobile computing line with the iPad. This solution was, of course, AirPrint, which came about with a new Apple iOS version in late 2010.

We have also followed Android phone and tablet computer devices powered by Google’s competitive operating system and tracked numerous Android printing solutions, including those among the cloud. Which leads us to 2012 and the initiatives by Google and Microsoft and both firms’ attempts to get in the thick of the iPad-dominated tablet computer game. Each company, in early and late June, respectively, threatened to change the landscape by competing with Apple and others and, at the same time, redefine supplier/customer relationships, as both software giants attempt to become and stay involved directly with mobile and tablet computing end-user customers.

The Microsoft Surface tablet has generated excitement as a potentially more office-friendly iPad alternative and includes printing from the get-go (see “How does Microsoft’s new tablet relate to Printing and Imaging?”). It also represents an interesting strategic move by Microsoft: to be responsible for the manufacturing and marketing of the entire product rather than as software supplier and the associated dependency on hardware OEMs like Dell and HP. (Microsoft’s move is one that HP would especially see as especially repugnant, as HP is badly in need of a new tablet following that firm’s 2011 TouchPad fiasco. To refresh the minds of those with short memories the TouchPad was based on HP’s Palm-acquired webOS and positioned to be superior to Apple and Android tablets, in part due to better built-in print capability. But it was quickly abandoned by the company, leaving a legacy of at least proving the market’s price elasticity, when HP fire-saled excess inventory at a record pace, for $100 a unit.)

Google also launched a new product this summer, based on the firm’s Android operating system (in this case, the flavor code-named Jelly Bean), at the Google i/o Developer Conference in late June. Though announced nearly a month after the Microsoft Surface, Google beat Microsoft to market with July availability and like with many of the other latest mobile devices, I was among the first to buy one. The Nexus 7 is a 7-inch tablet computer starting at an aggressive $200 price point that builds on the strong ecosystem of Android and is manufactured by Asus, but branded and supplied by Google. Physically the Nexus 7 is very similar to the Amazon Kindle Fire, which is also built on an Android platform but designed to be a Kindle Fire first, and is a limited-version Android device, meaning that Amazon limits the Kindle Fire’s ability to use the wide range of Android Apps.

As for the Nexus 7, building on the Android installed base and unlimited access to hundreds of thousands of apps, it is no surprise there printing capabilities are easy to come by, via apps and the Android Apps Market, recently renamed the Google Play Store. And even if printing is not built-in in the most literal sense, in effect Google provides the next best thing. A search of the store yielded familiar names, and the leading contender for easy and powerful printing is none other than Google Cloud Print; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Cloud_Print(GCP). Thanks to CNET and Jason Cipriani for some helpful tips (see “Five great tips to get you started with the Nexus 7”, and “How to print from the Nexus 7”). Within minutes of getting my Nexus 7 fired up, I had downloaded the GCP app, provided free with ads, for a sub-$2 “buy the developer a cup of coffee” charge (see illustration). (A Google Play Store credit of $25 came with my $213 (including shipping) Nexus 7.)  The popular Cloud Print app (with more than 500,000 copies downloaded according to its Play Store listing) is a clean, very usable implementation of GCP, and I had little or no trouble printing from my Nexus 7 to several different printers. In fact, like an official at a sporting event, my experience proves once again that good printing should be more or less transparent—only mistakes or problems draw much attention to it!

I have enjoyed experimenting with the various mobile platforms, including some of the e-readers like Amazon’s original Kindle and the aforementioned Kindle Fire, which is thought to be the target competition of the Nexus 7. I will continue to keep a watchful eye on the mobile categories, and of the few things I am sure about when it comes to this dynamic market area, my new Google Nexus 7 won’t be my last!

Read More..

January Observations From the QR Code sandbox — and will QR Codes help printing

by Jim Lyons

The Hard Copy Observer, January 2010

Observations: From the QR Code sandbox — and will QR Codes help printing?

In trying to find a binding theme for this month’s column about sticking my toe into the water surrounding QR Codes, the underlying influence of the movie sensation Avatar triggered the application of one of my central themes: how things all seem to connect to each other and to my world.

But as a tangible piece of writing, this column began with a tweet that linked to a blog that discussed a report, which I then retweeted. The subject? “More Reporters Using Facebook and Twitter.” This is not surprising as the more I read and write, the more I read and write on social media platforms. As an aside, the report also includes the finding that 61 percent of reporters also admitted to using Wikipedia. (And when it comes to these news sources, it should be noted, blogger Michael Sachoff writes, “The survey made it clear reporters and editors are highly aware of the need to verify information they get from social media.”)

So, I started thinking about how I was gathering information (and initially inspiration) for this month’s column. While I’ve been in the printer industry seemingly forever, I’ve frankly never paid a great deal of attention to barcodes, which have actually been around longer than I have. (The original ideas for barcodes date back to the late 1940’s, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcode.) But it has specifically been the QR Code (see photo and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_code) that has found its way onto my radar lately, and for that, I must credit Twitter. The last few months have seen a critical mass of tweets from those whom I follow and those I’ve also flagged on printer-related lists via Tweetdeck and more recently Twitter itself. In particular, @Gail_NK, @johnfoleyjr, and @ToughLoveforX have helped me embark on a basic QR Code education. (Readers, here’s a quick homework assignment: before you start messing around with the QR Codes themselves—follow these three on Twitter.)

QR (for Quick Response) Codes were developed in Japan, and I will forgo a description of how they work, beyond comparing them to the basic barcode functionality that were all familiar with, similar to those used at the supermarket (see image at left). The ubiquity that’s evident in that situation—printed barcodes on virtually every single item that is manufactured (and more and more, grown)—would be exactly the vision that would excite the printers that produce those codes, especially industrial models. Taking that theme even more broadly, with QR Codes, the key to even further ubiquity is that the “scanner” is now something virtually every person carries around with them in the form of a camera-equipped mobile phone (with the appropriate app installed), and the codes can be used to identify further information, phone numbers, and URLs, and even “take you there” via the phone’s Web browser. To borrow from the banner text at the Web site qrconnect.com, QR Codes can “Increase the Impact of Print. Use QR Codes on anything printed—there is no limit. Mobile users simply point and click to jump to online content, dial the phone, or download information.”

A great New York Times article by Stephanie Clifford titled, “From Print to Phone to Web. And a Sale?” appeared in early January 2010 and describes the application of QR Codes, along with some related technologies, in what might be their most promising manifestation. As included inside of print publications, specifically magazines, QR Codes serve as embedded links in editorial and advertising pages. This solution allows an interested reader to get more information, or even immediately go online and order something, in a very appealing linkage between print and online worlds, potentially tapping the best of both.

Now back to that “everything’s connected” idea. Because this was all starting to sound very familiar, even before reading the Times piece, my mind drifted back a couple of weeks to those year-end tweets linked to lists of “best and worst technology of the decade,” and right up there at the top of those worst lists, was the :cuecat! (see photo). In her short article, Clifford masterfully uses attention to the past to try to predict the future as she explores the history of QR Codes and looks at what might be different this time around. The value proposition seems to be exactly the same—see a magazine ad, scan in a link, and pull up a Web page—but as Clifford points out, there are a couple of key differences, the biggest one being that the cat-shaped scanner of the 10-year-old solution was extra, something that had to be provided to magazine readers and PC owners to make the system work. Now the mobile phone provides that missing link, at least that is what hopeful entrepreneurs and technologists are hoping.

Now after this explanation, the question remains whether this technology is good for printing. Assuming the system works, the advertising linkage application is good for print publications as a method to keep the medium relevant and inter-linked with online information. And in this day and age, anything positive for newspapers and magazines is a plus. The benefits for local printers are not as clear, as taking a “scan” (photo) from a screen seems to be equally effective as taking that scan from a printed source. Putting the functions of paper into the world of the virtual—with the transfer of some of paper’s functionality to mobile phones—is certainly occurring in applications like tickets and boarding passes.

To get to know QR Codes better, I suggest getting your hands dirty, and based on the recommendation of @Gail_NK, I have had excellent luck with Optiscan, a $2 app for my trusty (and oft-mentioned) iPhone. I suggest springing for the $2, trying a quick download and starting with the QR codes here (represented on-screen or printed). I think you will be impressed.

Read More..

Observations Reading the Google Tea Leaves How are Printers Faring

by Jim Lyons

The Hard Copy Observer, September 2008

Reading the Google Tea Leaves: How are Printers Faring?

It has been a number of weeks now since the seemingly ever-upward march of the price of a barrel of oil, with the resultant high gasoline prices, had finally peaked. And then, just a few weeks after that, a headline surfaced that in response to somewhat cheaper gas, the sales of gas-guzzling Sport Utility Vehicles (SUVs) were already rebounding. Wow, I thought, that did not take long! Well, the real story was that yes, there was an indication of increasing interest among American car buyers in SUVs, but it was based on measurement of activity on Edmunds.com, one of the leading consumer-research sites in the auto business. (My italics for emphasis.) In other words, the tracking of Web surfers clicking through various truck and car information pages was making national business news. The article is a fascinating look at how, in this e-commerce-oriented age, marketers can read all sorts of interesting clues about buyer behavior well before the actual transactional results show up in the marketplace.

This fascinating discovery inspired me to go back to some research on a similar (if more crude) printer-related idea, research I had started earlier this year. That thinking had been triggered by several studies, including favorable comparisons between the accuracy of Web search metrics versus traditional political polling during the U.S. primary election season and valuation modeling of social network companies, also using search data.



My idea is to simply look at Google Trends data to gain insight into the relative popularity of various printer industry brand names, compared to each other and over time. And while Web-search-savvy readers, including a few close friends, will not be stunned by my approach, I think it sheds some interesting light on trends in the industry. Its appeal is also due to the fact that it’s done “on the cheap,” which the best marketing research often is, in my opinion.

Google Trends does a great job of tracking search terms, but of course the search terms themselves have to have certain qualities, like uniqueness. Just as doing a Google Search for “John Smith” will probably not have satisfactory results compared to a search on a more distinctive name, something like “Printer” or “HP” will not confine things enough to be very meaningful either.

So let’s start with some favorite long-time model brand names, the HP family of printers and MFPs. When entering “laserjet, officejet, deskjet, designjet” into the Google Trends search field, the resulting page appears as shown in the image at left. The default is set for worldwide searches, and a section of the report page not illustrated provides geographic and language ranking details. There is also a “News reference volume” graph that I cannot quite fathom, so I have excluded it from the figures as well. What the main chart, “Search Volume index,” shows, is the color-coded relative index of each of the entered terms. In this case, LaserJet is the leading (top) term throughout the time horizon.



It is surprising, however, that the trends are not in the "right" direction. I’ll let the professional researchers determine what this trend means and how it might be reflected in the market, but a test on a few more brands might shed some further insight, just to see if everything looks to be going down or if it’s just these venerable HP brands.



My next analysis focused on the well-documented printer industry “stars” of 2007: Edgeline, Memjet, Silverbrook, and Zink. The graph above illustrates a lurking problem, in this case that Zink is actually a common enough surname so that it washes out the other results. A data noise warning is that all the terms are represented in Google search universe by other usages—Memjet and Edgeline are used commercially in other relatively obscure products, and Silverbrook is an unusual (much more unusual than Zink, it turns out) but not unheard-of surname. Removing Zink in the chart below gets the other brands back on a visible scale. While these results are even more inconclusive than the HP graph, the interest spike of spring 2007 and resultant searches is certainly apparent.





I will close with one more example to further whet the appetite of would-be Google Trends addicts. Because it looks like search interest may be declining in some of our most traditionally popular printer brands, and even our upstart brands spiked in interest but then mostly held their own since 2007 announcements, how about comparing to something that is really on fire? I have written about Apple’s iPhone and Amazon’s Kindle quite often (mostly about their lack of printing abilities), so how will they fare in the Google Trends analysis? (See above.) The graph below, removing the super-hot iPhone, shows an interesting pattern when putting LaserJet and Kindle together, with the huge November 2007 spike for Kindle, and a pretty steady relationship between the two since.



It is fun to learn more about search data, but can we derive any real meaning? Like it or not, the news is not good for those HP brands—not to pick on them, but they are the easiest to analyze because they are the most popular brands with the longest history. This data might be trivial or even meaningless, but all things considered, which direction would you want your brands heading?

Note -- In an exception to my typical practice, this online version of "Observations" includes some minor changes and additions, relative to the print version appearing in the September 2008 The Hard Copy Observer. Graphics and some supporting comments have been included that were omitted due to space considerations in the Observer.

Read More..