Technology Marches On!

A couple of items pertaining to Apple's iPad caught my attention over the past 24 hours, and both remind me, in different ways, how time and technology march on, mostly for the better!

Walt Mossberg of Wall Street Journal and All Things Digital reminds us, in "Apps Raise the iPad's Aptitude for Real Work", that the iPad can be a powerful "creation" and not just "consumption" device, with the right productivity apps. (Mossberg doesn't use the "creation" word - that's mine - but instead takes a brief run at defining productivity.) He looks at a variety in this great summary, which he produced via an iPad and Apple's Pages $10 word processor, recently identified as the best-selling paid iPad app in history.

The next piece is a little more frivolous but does speak to the iPad's growing ubiquity. In "iPads Invade the Bathroom", Marketwatch's Charles Passy takes a look at a new iPad accessory to enhance its readability in a very specific location of the house.

Without going on more (see Passy's article if interested), his opening, "Toilet paper still can't be digitized..." did take me back to a very vivid memory from my relatively early days in the printing and imaging industry. Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, numerous predictions of the looming "the paperless office" caused a smug backlash among those of us in the business of print. One of the common come-backs offered by those looking to minimize the threat of those paperless-workplace prognosticators went along the lines of, "That will happen about the same time we see the paperless bathroom!"

Enough of this, for now, but it does remind one to never say never!

A fun one - 50 Marketing Leaders Over 50

Here's a fun one! I am honored by being included in the "50 Marketing Leaders Over 50 You Should Know" list, as compiled earlier this year by Alan See, and featured in the May issue of Global CMO - The Magazine.

Alan describes how he came up with the idea for the list as follows:

"Let’s recognize that age has little to do with ability. You’re never too young or too old if you’ve got talent. In the marketing world, Advertising Age and Direct Marketing News have their 40 under 40 lists. Forbes has their 30 under 30. This blog post counterbalances with 50 who are over 50 because to my knowledge a list of this nature has never been published."

So as I just as I read in Marketwatch, economic shifts in the dining-out business have a dearth of younger customers, with boomers and retirees keeping restaurants alive. Thus, I am proposing a dinner out on the town to celebrate my place on the list!

And for interested readers, I would be pleased if you took a look!

1105 Media's Workflow debuts

 

I am thrilled to be part of the launch (as of yesterday, May 1) of the new Workflow website from 1105 Media's Office Technology Group. The confluence of imaging and printing, document management, business process automation, and the like has been a fascinating area to watch, and I am looking forward to contributing insights and observations to the magazine and website in the coming months and years, as I have for this initial rollout (see A Little Workflow History). Follow them on twitter as well @WorkflowOTG.

CONGRATS 1105 Media OTG!

April 2013 Observations - Please consider the environment...

By Jim Lyons

The "Please Consider the Environment Before Printing" message seems ever more popular in 2013

Happy Earth Day 2013!

Covering the printing and imaging industry via this Blog for the past seven-and-counting years has led to a number of "green" or environmentally-themed posts.  So today, in addition to wishing my readers a happy 2013 Earth Day, I had some fun looking back on those Observations columns and updating them for the current times.

One of my favorites came in 2008 when I did a little research on a new message which was starting to show up on the bottom of certain emails I was receiving. It was “Please Consider the Environment Before Printing” (or some variation), with or without a green-tree graphic. I did some basic research (see below) and found it was quite popular on Google, with just under 1,000 hits for the complete (and in quotes) phrase, "Please Consider the Environment before Printing this Email".

Two years ago, I updated those numbers (see "April Observations: Print More E-mails – Save the Earth") as well as took on a different angle linking green and printing - that being the idea that selective printing was actually GOOD for the environment, as managed forests producing paper could only remain and prosper if there was demand for print, and paper. The post was based on a Wall Street Journal editorial, and the work by the organizations in question goes on today. But the related research I did showed that our phrase in question, "Please Consider the Environment before Printing this Email", then generated nearly a half-million hits, a 500x increase over three years.

Today, tracking that search data (and as the illustration shows at the top of the piece), we have seen another increase, to 2.5 million hits for the phrase. Impressive growth to say the least, in these times of printing and paper usage being threatened from all sides. With so much email (speaking from my own day-to-day experiences) being generated and consumed via mobile devices, it is amazing to think back to office workers who would routinely print each and every email they received!

BLOG NOTES

I feel I need to address two points for clarification, for my readers. My March Observations (see "Looking Back on the Future of Printing") promised a follow-up in April. Due to the upcoming Earth Day theme, I should have realized I'd really be updating in May, so stay tuned - I have some great stuff on the current state of printing the news (and other content).

And also, after 88 monthly "Observations" columns appearing elsewhere (beginning with the beloved but now extinct Hard Copy Observer), as well as right here at Jim Lyons Observations, I am going it alone for now. But stay tuned on this one also - for a new place to find it in the coming months. And as always, you can find it, along with other (non-monthly?) Observations, right here.

Back at DemoMobile

Last October, I paid my first visit to the Demo conference in some time, and summed it up in "Demo 2012 - Turning Over Rocks" and "October a Big Month in the World of Mobile". In addition to a few of my findings from under those rocks during the 2012 event, I summarized my long-time history of attending the conferences, as both industry participant and journalist/analyst, reflecting back on some great (to me, at least) insights and discoveries.

I also recalled how there was once a "Demo Mobile", concluding that with "everything" going "mobile", such a specialized tech conference probably couldn't/wouldn't be pulled off again. Though maybe that was the proverbial pot calling the kettle black - this said after launching my own "Goin' Mobile" blog for The Imaging Channel last year. And sure enough, back comes the "Demo Mobile" conference, a one-day event in San Francisco. I just arrived, so stay tuned! (Twitter hashtag is #DemoMobile2013 - though #DemoMobile seems to be out there too.)

PC sales hitting the skids - printers too?

Silicon Valley pub SJ Mercury News reported the negative news

Much discussion and analysis has come out following a bad first quarter for PC sales. Trying to integrate many of these thoughts, and then projecting on how a PC downturn, perhaps permanent, will change the related Printer business, is top-of-mind for many who follow the rather specialized printing-and-imaging corner of the tech industry.

Sorting through some of the best work has been my task over the last couple of days. And good old (well, not really old) Social Media has been there to help. As I learned when  I first started using Twitter a few years back, going beyond its more obvious role as a publishing platform, it also comes in handy as a book-marking tool, where by commenting on and re-tweeting others' work, I can go back and find references when trying to perform this integration and reflection process.

So going back to Thursday April 10th, when the news first broke, I found six notable retweets (including the initial, just-the-facts piece presented above), in chronological order (earliest first). I will provide links (minus my Tweeting) here:

PC Sales Show Biggest Q1 Decline Ever - All Things Digital

 

PC industry sees worst sales quarter in nearly 20 years - San Jose Mercury News

Enough Already with the "Death of the PC Era"Garbage - Forbes

 

The Death of the PC Has Not Been Exaggerated - Forbes

Who's killing the PC? Blame the cloud - ZDNet

Big price cuts as PC industry scrambles to rebound - Marketwatch

Escaping PCs - ASYMCO

Interesting that of all the pieces (including the two from Forbes, which provide an interesting point-counterpoint approach), none argue that there is a reversal in the downward trend coming soon. The analysis centers more on the "why?" and "how fast?" questions. And if printing is following suit? This one is harder to track down, but I will offer my prediction that the two categories' fortunes are tightly linked, in a case of correlation if not causation.

One of the few pro-PC voices is that of 

This will provide much discussion and observation for many periods to come.