Online Technical Support Let the Boss Float His Boat

Yesterday, I was eagerly waiting for the office watch to click 5; I had worked hard since the morning to complete all task well in time. In fact, the day was auspicious, and a family gathering was scheduled at home to celebrate my fathers’ 60^th birth-day. Only 20 minutes were left, when I got an e-mail from my instant boss regarding the last month sales details.

It irritated me. I was down in dumps, feeling like a beggar who has no choice. I started working on the file; meantime the system started the drama. It restarted on its own. Nevertheless, I kept the patience to complete it, but then it went off again after 5 minutes, and the very next time I could not reach the Windows screen even. Now it was high time.

I informed of the same to the boss, but he bounced, “Oh! I know this will happen” but I need it anyhow. Indeed it was the panicked moment, I had ever gone through.

A colleague advised me to go for online-technical-support, which I readily accepted. And, it worked instantly and effectively. A technician instructed me to start the system in safe-mode, and took the remote access of my system to fix the problem.

Eventually, I was able to send the enviable report, and with that I delivered him a letter of resignation too, with a lump in my throat. That was the loyalty bonus, after serving the company for 4 years.

I was shocked with the pre-assumption, and the allegation made, and in meanwhile I didn’t realize when I reached home. I even forgot to have gift for my dad.

Thanks, here I was flexible to choose my way. I was free, as free as a bird in the sky.

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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!

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Finally Resolved the Sound Issue of My Laptop

Why didn’t I learn computers, when I was in schools? I kept asking this question from myself yesterday, as I was unable to configure sound settings of my laptop. It was also displaying an error related to sound device, which was pinching in my eyes. The situation got worse, when after losing lots of my energy on troubleshooting, I was still standing on the same place.

I was unable to play music, or hear any sound from my laptop! It was really an annoying situation!

To be honest, I am not a technical expert, initially I thought of taking my system to a nearly located computer technical support center for the resolution, but on the other hand, I hate over crowded place, so decided to consult an online computer repair service provider. I was in a little bit of rush that day, so quickly browsed a couple of contact numbers of some technicians, and luckily came across with an astonishing technical expert, who truly took away all my pain. He asked me some questions related to the matter, and immediately understood the root cause. Within no time, he ran some diagnostic software tools on my system through secure remote connection, and installed some sound drivers to correct the issue. Believe me guys! He was so quick in respect to understanding the issues, answering queries and responding over the phone.

I really appreciated his dedication towards work, as at the end of the troubleshooting, he also educated me with some basic maintenance steps to keep my system long lasting. I was really overwhelmed by his performance, so filled a positive satisfaction survey for him as well. Many thanks to that online computer support service provider, who certainly made my computing easier.

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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.

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Behind the scenes Interview with Printyourtwitter coms Thomas Ummels

In my July 2009 Observations, "Twitter Printing -- Print those tweets!", I included the web site printyourtwitter.com (btw printyourtweets.com get you to the same site.) This interview, of the creative source behind the site, is republished here and also accompanies the column in the Observer.


The Hard Copy Observer, July 2009

Behind the Scenes: Tom Ummels and printyourtwitter.com

Jim Lyons, Observer columnist and blogger, recently sat down with Thomas Ummels, creator of printyourtwitter.com to find out more about this exciting Web service.

Lyons: You mention in your blog post that you developed the program first for yourself. Tell me a little bit about yourself.

Ummels: I am a freelance Web developer and really love technology and my job. Two months ago, on our way back home from a visit to my parents, my wife wondered aloud whether it was possible to print tweets. We twitter with a group of close friends and our tweets are becoming a really nice journal of our current personal life. Especially since the iPhone is used to add pictures to part of the tweets. The same week some other developer I was working with on a project told me about the open and transparent character of the API of twitter.com. So when my wife asked me about printing tweets, ideas started to pop up in my head. When we came home, I quickly checked out the twitter API and looked if there already were tools available. I thought it was a nice challenge, and there were no other tools for printing tweets, so the next day I started coding, and the result can now be seen at printyourtwitter.com. We haven’t done much promoting yet other then through twitter. A couple of Dutch Web sites featured printyourtwitter.com, and I was interviewed on Dutch national radio.

Lyons: You also mention the program has picked up a lot of interest, more than expected. Do you have an interesting story or two about users of Print Your Twitter? Who is using it and how?

Ummels: I get a lot of enthusiastic responses. People mostly use the tool to backup their tweets. I heard from one user who had kept his friends and family up to date during his vacations through twitter. After coming back he printed his tweets and gave them to his grandparents who had no access to the Internet. And a friend of mine has a 7-year-old son who also twitters and his tweets are really funny. Every year, she makes a photo album for them at their birthday about their life in the past year. This year she printed his tweets and included them in his album.

Lyons: How about numbers? How many users? How fast is usage growing?

Ummels: The numbers go up and down depending on whether it gets mentioned on some Web site or in the media. Currently, we are around a 100 users a day. I think a lot more people could be interested in the tool, but it is still a side project for me and promoting a site like this is a lot of work. So although it was a lot of fun to build and it is nice to get positive feedback, promotion is currently not our highest priority.

Lyons: It is great that you added keyword (hash tag) search. I just used that too, and it is very handy. Any more upcoming features we should know about?

Ummels: I get a lot of questions, so I am planning to add some functionality in the next three weeks. I want to incorporate some filtering functions (only tweets with images, only tweets between two dates, or only tweets of a certain selection of your connections, so you can, for instance, subtract a conversation between two people from your tweets). We want to integrate more picture services (now only images on twitpic are included), and we want to offer some different print templates. If the number of visitors is high enough, we also want to include links to printing services so people can order a book of their own tweets.

Lyons: Any feel for how many users go all the way and actually print their results, rather than storing them as a PDF for searching or future reference?

Ummels: No, I have no idea. Due to the technology that is used, we can’t measure it. I would expect that more people save their tweets by saving the Internet page with the printer friendly version or by printing it to PDF than that people actually send them to their printer. Once in a while, we get remarks on what a waste of paper it is to print all your tweets. So I encourage people to use paper as sparsely as possible. But if your tweets truly have value to you why not print them and include them in your journal or diary for instance.

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Thanks to Lyra and hoped you enjoyed the tweets!

The Lyra Symposium wrapped up another successful run last Wednesday. I was delayed for a few days on my way back to the office, with some PLANNED diversions, unlike some of my colleagues who suffered weather-related delays, and who have my sympathy!

Unlike the last few conferences, where this blog contained my original take-aways and conference sound bites, most of that was on Twitter this year, by me, @jflyons and Lyra, @lyrainc and a
few others, including @Greg_VDW and @Greg_Walters as well. You can of course find those tweets via the individual accounts, or search on Twitter with #lyra as your search term.

Thanks for the symposium go to the whole Lyra team, and especially Irene Savage!

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What are the ways to make money online

There are many ways you can make money online that, but maybe you have difficulties having the ideas what to do? Below is a list of ideas how you can make money online.

1. Google Adsense, Kontera, Bidvertiser
2. Affiliate programs: Amazon Associate, Clickbank, Commission Junction, Linkshare, Google Affiliate
3. Sell products / services: eBay, Amazon, Lelong.com.my, eCommerce
4. Advertising: Classified ads
5. Provide freelance service: Web-designs, Graphic Design, Website installation, Typing
6. Sell your ideas: How to fix something
7. Remote computer fixing service (Using teamviewer)
8. Blogging
9. Provide Search Engine Optimization Service (SEO): Directory submission, Article Submission, Forum Submission
10. Multi-Level-Marketing (MLM): The fastest way to make money if you have plenty of followers
11. Sell websites
12. Sell Website Domain Names
13. Currency Trading (Forex)
14. Gambling / Sport Betting
15. Sell art works
16. Sell internet traffic
17. Become reseller: Good business if you know what product sales online. Find a seller and you resell his products

There are many more other ways to make money online you can think off. You just need an imagination and match it with your skills.

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Dim light of the moon beam

Moonbeam in the darkest night!! Panorama view, taken from Tabuan Dayak during the night fall. Very spooky scenery

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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/

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You read the book now see the movie!

Earlier this month, I posted here that a new White Paper I authored is now available from Nuance. (See "Nuance PDF Converter analysis now available".) Next week, on Tuesday, February 26th, I am joining the Nuance Communications team for a live webinar, covering the virtues of Nuance PDF Converter Enterprise 8. Register now, and find out more about why, in the white paper, I called it a "best buy"!

And while the white paper is not really a book, and the webinar is not really a movie, I figure, with Oscar weekend upon us, close enough and it makes a great headline!

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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.

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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.

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