Jim Lyons Observations

January Observations: Looking Ahead and Enjoying Coming Full Circle in the Research/Analyst World

2012-01-27T12:21:00.000-08:00

also published in The Hard Copy Observer, January 2011

Observations: Looking Ahead and Enjoying Coming Full Circle in the Research/Analyst World

[January 25, 2011] I totally endorse indulging in extensive reflection during December and up through the ringing in of the new year, but with a new January getting well past its half-way point, it is no doubt a good time to stop the looking back, at least excessively, and start actively looking forward. And like with the art of listening, I believe there is the passive version as well as the active variety. I like making at least a few personal and professional resolutions for the new calendar year and anticipating what might actually qualify as truly “new” in our lives and surroundings coming up in the twelve months to follow.

With that said, this column will include an inevitable look back, as I integrate my own personal history with that of the industry over the past few years and the exciting announcement earlier this month of Lyra Research becoming part of the Photizo Group (click here). In addition, I feel that I have to share my personal legacy of some of the high points leading up to this announcement, beginning with my move from the corporate side (25 years with HP) and joining the research/analyst world with my initial Observations column for Lyra in December 2005.It is hard to believe, but with this column, I am starting my seventh calendar year of monthly Observations. I have already wallowed in the memories of most of those columns, but this month’s news brings a clear-cut reason to think back a little more.

After that initial column in the traditional “Hard Copy Observer” format (and also available online via my blog), I had a number of well-wishers among friends and family. But the one unexpected e-mail, or at least the first, came from a gentleman I would eventually get to know much better, by the name of Edward Crowley. I still have that e-mail archived and accessible, and (at the small risk of embarrassing him), here’s what he wrote: “Jim, I enjoyed your article in Hard Copy Observer. Are you consulting now? Best Regards, Ed Crowley.”

At the time, Ed was a few months away from officially founding the Photizo Group, and I responded that yes, I was doing a little consulting, but through further e-mails and phone calls, it was clear to me that he was a driven visionary with ambitions for doing some new, big things in our industry and was a person I easily connected with. As my apprenticeship with the Observer continued, we kept in touch, and I was pleased that I could do some contract work in the area of writing and analysis for Photizo, beginning in 2007, following the firm’s official launch in 2006. I also featured some of Ed’s wisdom in two of my Observations columns in 2007, in musings on Corporate Printing (Managed Print Services or MPS was just emerging as the “universal” term it has become). (see Observations: Corporate Printing, Served and Managed, and Observations: The Changing Role of the Printed Page).With a foot in both Photizo and Lyra camps, I helped make introductions in 2008 that led to a Lyra/Photizo alliance that officially kicked off with Ed’s appearance as an MPS keynoter at the Lyra Symposium in January 2009, which I proudly blogged about (***see illustration). Since then Lyra and Photizo have continued a conference-speaker exchange, and members of each team are frequent sights as attendees at the other company’s conferences.

Ed Crowley addresses the Lyra Imaging symposium in January, 2009

It would be reaching for me to compare my journey, including these last six years, with my chronological contemporaries, who number among the tech industry’s greatest ever. But as I reflect on my 2011 reading list, which included the Walter Isaacson-penned Steve Jobs biography that I have mentioned in previous Observations, Paul Allen’s autobiography Idea Man, and even Mark Cuban’s ebook, How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It, I am thrilled by their history. And my times with HP, and more recently with Photizo and Lyra, have left me also with a great sense of history and perspective in our part of the tech business.

It seems that this bringing together of the legacy and foundation from Lyra Research and the vision and innovation of Photizo Group, now combined under one figurative roof, is something I am very fortunate to have been witness to and part of. My journeyman-ship with the Observer led to being named Senior Editor last year, and now in that role, I move to the combined firm, with the prospects of an exciting ride continuing.As a professor of marketing in one of my lives and in my business career in another, I have frequently reminded those around me about the “power of partnering,” whether through formal tie-ups like mergers and acquisitions, minority investments, or simply forging strategic alliances with complementary organizations. And once again, I am living that advice.

Back in Rancho Mirage - Lyra Imaging Symposium 2012

2012-01-23T12:08:00.000-08:00

As the "official blogger" of the Lyra Imaging Symposium for a number of years now (though not all 15!), I will be at it again, but this year, over at the Imaging Insider blog. We'll post a daily summary there, but offer more "real time" bite-size pieces on Twitter.

While you can keep track of my Symposium tweets in the right-hand column here, suggest a more effective way is to track the hashtag #Lyra12 on a conventional Twitter app or the web site itself (twitter.com).

December Observations: TagMyDoc—A New Way to Share Documents, with Lots of Great History

2011-12-26T07:07:00.000-08:00

also published in The Hard Copy Observer, December 2011

Observations: TagMyDoc—A New Way to Share Documents, with Lots of Great History

TagMyDoc – A New Way to Share Documents, with Lots of GreatHistory!

In the spirit of the “Year in Review” stories the team atthe Hard Copy Observer has been working on this month, I wanted to takeon something similar for Jim Lyons Observations, and look back over myyear or two’s worth of monthly columns to see what might jump out as worthy offurther mention, especially where several (at the time) seemingly disparateitems now fall together to form (a now) obvious pattern.

But then a new app for the iPhone, from a small company inCanada, came to my attention and it pulled underneath it so many differentthemes I have explored lately, including the following:

Mobile Apps and Smartphone Pervasiveness
Cloud Imaging and Storage
QR Codes
Social Media
Document Management

And it also had an historic legacy, going back in ourindustry, which as regular readers will recognize is one of my favorite aspectsof a story as well.

It started with one of my favorite weekly features, fromonline tech-news source, Business Insider. On December 10, the weekly“Here Are The Best iPhone And iPad Apps You Missed This Week” by EllisHamburger, alerted me to the new app ScanMyDoc, and in fact had it in thesecond position in their coverage, right behind the long-awaited iPhone versionof the extremely popular iPad app, Flipboard (see “August 2010 Observations --From the Magazine Rack and What a Difference a Year Makes!”).

Xerox Smartpaper technologies that go way back (see 1994’sNYTimes’ piece, “Technology; Smart Paper Documents For the Electronic Age”, http://www.nytimes.com/1994/07/10/business/technology-smart-paper-documents-for-the-electronic-age.html)came to mind as I read the description of the app and its companion web-baseddocument solution, “ScanMyDoc lets you share documents using QR codes -TagMyDoc.com is a new website that lets you print out QR codes on documents,then save them to the cloud. Using the ScanMyDoc app, anyone who scans the codeon your document can instantly download it. It's a cool and secure new way toshare stuff. Plus, the app keeps track of your entire QR code reading history.”(http://www.businessinsider.com/best-iphone-ipad-apps-10-2011-12#scanmydoc-lets-you-share-documents-using-qr-codes-2)

So much more than another QR code reader, this seemed to bea fully thought-out solution from Montreal-based Knova Web Technologies. Idownloaded the app, sought out the TagMyDoc.com website and uploaded a Worddocument, retrieved and printed it complete with its identifying QR code, andwas able to use the iPhone to retrieve it from the cloud, all in just a fewminutes. I had to find out more!

A good email exchange with Knovaprincipals Gabriel Deschenes, CEO, Julien Leroux, Marketing Director ofTagMyDoc and JP Desjardins, Communication Director, follows, as they respondedto my questions via email.

___________________

JLO: How did you come up with the idea for thesolution?

Knova: In a digital world, it is surprising that theprocess of sharing physical document is still quite tedious (anyone used ascanner recently ?). We wanted to find a way to make the paper document sharingprocess simpler and easier.

Before TagMyDoc, here was no way of sharing printeddocuments with people unless you sent them to a link to a server that hostedthe original file. Even with today’s shortened links, remembering any URL canbe difficult since it is easily forgotten once you need to get the document. You can still share it with Facebook,Twitter, [see “Observations September 2009: Document Management with Twitter? AStart Anyway”], or email. But to openthe door for real-life sharing of documents, we used the QR code to tag thedocuments because it is the easiest and most popular barcode in the world [see“January 2010 Observations -- From the QR Code sandbox — and will QR Codes helpprinting?”].

TagMyDoc.com uses history to describe their highly evolved document management scheme

So one day we come up with an idea, lets create an app thatautomatically tag some documents with QR codes that link to the doc you have inthe front of your eyes. That is why we built a tool to easily tag yourdocuments and provide people with your tagged document, a public link to it andthe QR code pointing to your document. With this system, people can simply scanthe tag to download the docs.

JLO: Do you have a few "use cases" wherethe solution really shines?

Knova: A lot of people are doing some presentationsall around the world right now. Those people have others who want thepresentation documents, typically PowerPoint. Since they didn’t have TagMyDocwhen needed, they had to send emails with attachments to each of those wantingit.

You can expect presence in schools also, and we have acouple of stealth projects that we prefer to keep it for us for the time being.Expect partnerships, extensions to popular software and applications andfurther implementation of document management in your daily life.

JLO: What is the future, including how do you makemoney?

Knova: We aim to have as many users of our service aspossible by making TagMyDoc the easiest way to share documents in the digitalas well as in the real world.

For pricing plans, you can go see for yourself athttp://tagmydoc.com/register. We also plan to provide solutions for businessesthat will allow them to make use of the TagMyDoc platform into their ownsegregated network. It offers more cloud storage, enhanced features, add-insetc...

Another neat addition for Premium users is the ability tobatch-tag documents. With testing from the development team, we were able totag 150+ documents in one batch upload without any hiccups, just to show thepower of the TagMyDoc platform.

For the beta launch of TagMyDoc, a Premium account is only$1.99/mo and a Premium Plus account is only a buck more at $2.99/mo. We believein micro-payments for our customers so that’s why these are incredible pricesfor the features you get. We plan to support the other popular Officeapplication, Microsoft Excel [in addition to the “coming soon” Word and PowerPointadd-ins]. Tagging Excel files will be very easy. An added benefit of Excel isthat you will be able to specify the cell and column of your tag instead ofselecting between corners. We plan to make further integration with ScanMyDoc,our QR code scanner, the fastest one in the App Store.

JLO: Do you have plans to work with other cloudstorage sites or document repositories (Scribd comes to mind – see“Observations May 2008 – Scribd, the YouTube for Documents?”)?

Knova: TagMyDoc’s primary use is to tag documents asmentioned. Because of wanting to keep track of your documents, it became ahosting service as well. It quickly became more important for us to make this ahosting service without neglecting the tagging that goes on, so we addedfeatures like folders for organizing your documents, sharing documents, sharingfolders, deleting documents and folders, renaming folders, password-protectingdocuments, settings, batch uploading, versioning of documents. Because peoplesee Scribd, Dropbox, Box.net as a general file hosting and sharing service, wecan’t say that we are in the same space. But we are already being approaches bysome of those to add the TagMyDoc solutions to their applications, so for surewe are looking for a partnership but waiting for the most valuable for us andthe other companies.

JLO: Are you familiar with past efforts inprinting/document management that have inspired or offered "how not todo" insight (Xerox Smartpaper comes to mind in this case)?

Knova: Yes, we took a look to previous inventionsthat were done in the printing/sharing documents industry. Especially whenyou’re making a patent, you have to look to the art within from other patentsin your domains. So then we knew about what was available before TagMyDoc andhow it is different from the others’ inventions. The things we always foundswith other inventions such as Xerox Smartpaper, is that there was a bigeducation of the market to be done, people need to act in a different way andbuy other instruments to benefit from the inventions.

TagMyDoc use technology such as QR codes, which is the mostcommonly known and used 2D tag, it also depends on Smartphone and cloudcomputing. To benefit from TagMyDoc, we wanted peoples to use technology that theyalready know and use and most importantly, like! At the beginning we werethinking about creating 2D tags that can be only read by our own QR reader app,Scanmydoc. But we judged that this was a “how not to do it” way, even if wewould have more Scanmydoc users by now. We are thinking long term and this wayit is making this app easy to use and practical for everyone.

___________________

As of two weeks following the Business Insiderreview, the ScanMyDoc app still has not warranted a user rating or review, butas the Knova executives acknowledged, these solutions take some time foreducation and awareness, even in the case of building upon existing standards.It is an appealing solution to me, if only because it incorporates some manytechnologies and solutions I have covered in the past several years. It is alsointeresting in revealing changing industry priorities – for example launchingthe smartphone-based solution first, with the Microsoft Office versions tofollow – not something that would always have been the case! It will beinteresting to keep an eye on this firm and its apps/solutions to see howthings develop!

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

2011-11-29T09:13:00.001-08:00

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.

Find more of my posts at Lyra Insider blog

2011-11-27T14:02:00.001-08:00

While I continue to post here, at least monthly, and also direct my tweets this way as well, I also am a regular contributor at the Lyra Insider blog, including this post from last week, on the first of the end-of-the-year awards and Memjet's honor.

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

2011-10-28T09:50:00.000-07:00

also published in The Hard Copy Observer, October 2011

by Jim Lyons

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

According to thenew authorized biography, Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson, the legendaryand recently deceased Apple CEO can take credit for revolutionizing six ormaybe seven industries (the “maybe” being retail). Included on the list, asmentioned during Isaacson’s October 23 appearance on the American televisionshow 60 Minutes and in the earlypages of the book, which was released Monday, October 24, is digitalpublishing. While as a printing insider, I might refine that to desktoppublishing (and in fact thought that was what I first heard during the liveviewing of the show), that difference really might just come down to semantics.Along with the other industries on the list, like music, animated movies, andpersonal 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 wholeof digital publishing and along the way, helped make the Macintosh a virtualstandard in that industry.

The desktoppublishing revolution goes back 25 years now (see “TheGreatest Printer Story Ever Told”), and Steve Jobs’ influence duringthose heady early days was clear. Launching the original solution, whichincluded 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 tirelesslobbyists for DTP and its ability to transform publishing workflows. In theprocess, Jobs and Scully probably saved Apple and helped create a largerindustry with beneficiaries like HP and Microsoft taking the solution (orperhaps a lower-end version of it) to the masses.

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

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

A more recentJobs innovation involves the Macintosh and Apple’s iPhoto application,originally introduced just as digital photography was hitting its inflectionpoint a little less than ten years ago. This initiative was part of anothermarketing 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 moreMacintosh computers, which Apple did. As part of the value proposition, iPhotocould help you organize your digital photos and create on-screen slide shows,plus the software included the ability for users to order a photobook—aprofessionally bound, hard-copy volume that would be produced off-site andshipped in a few days to the user. The photobook was a big part of themarketing campaign (including television commercials) that brought joy toanyone from the hard copy business that happened to notice them (me, for one).Apple continues with iPhoto today, and version 11 still prominently featuresthis photobook capability. Similar to DTP, others have followed suit, withphotobooks being one of the bright spots in digital photo printing andretailing (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 thecase of a very prominent customer complaint, in 2002, as remembered by BillMcGlynn, who is a former HP senior vice president and was head of the GraphicsArts group for HP’s Imaging and Printing Group (IPG) at the time, a group whichincluded the then-recently acquired Indigo digital typesetter product line.(McGlynn is now president of Memjet Home & Office.) The Apple CEO, with hischaracteristic passion for design and quality, got right into the middle of a qualityissue. McGlynn remembers the 2002 conference call he was summoned to, alongwith his boss, Vyomesh Joshi, who remains head of IPG.

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

“We had a magentacolor shift issue at the time, especially on the older (TurboStream) machines,and Jobs wanted to know how we planned to fix it,” McGlynn continues. Heremembers, “Steve even warned us, as he was in his car, returning from a dentalappointment while taking the call, that he was likely to be in an even morecantankerous mood than normal.” McGlynn remembers an irate but passionate Jobs,and in the end, MyPublisher got a new (HP Indigo 3000) machine, McCartney got replacementbooks, 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 hadto 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 whichpresses are being used to print the cards. The app itself, only available recently, is a very “light” app so far, offering 20 or socard styles in a limited number of categories. Users have the ability to send aphysical greeting card, customized and mailed conventionally (from Apple’spublishing vendor), to the recipient of their choice (see “Life Imitates Art”). When we askedabout Apple’s choice of print vendor (and HP’s digital presses) this time, acurrent HP vice president became a bit flustered, commenting on how secretiveApple can be, but he assured us, with a virtual wink at least, that “the finestquality digital press available” was behind Apple’s latest hard-copyinitiative.

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

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

September Observations: “There Will Always Be a Need for Hard Copy, No Matter What”

2011-09-27T06:58:00.000-07:00

also published in The Hard Copy Observer, September 2011

by Jim Lyons

[September 27, 2011] A quote like, “There will always be a need for hard copy, no matter what,” just cannot help but make someone perk up their ears and take notice, at least if that person is in the printing and imaging industry. This situation is just what happened to me the other day, when I was half-listening to the radio, with the other half of my attention focused elsewhere, during an interview on National Public Radio’s (NPR’s) Morning Edition. The host, Steve Inskeep, was talking to the United States Postmaster General, Patrick Donahoe, about some of the troubles that his organization, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), has been facing lately.

Donahoe currently holds the top position (how cool to have a job formerly held by Benjamin Franklin, among others?) in what is now described as an “independent agency of the U.S. Government,” and his personal story about starting his career in a lowly mail-sorting position is inspiring. But he has a far bigger challenge these days, compared to figuring out those hand-scrawled zip codes at the beginning of his career. As has been well documented in the news recently, the U.S. Postal Service is facing huge deficits and dealing with the same issues as so many other businesses, like lower demand, higher costs, and labor unrest as the result of potential layoffs, not to mention the local-office closures which seem to so often bring out the NIMBY (Not In My BackYard) response among local citizenry.

So when I went back and listened to the entire Morning Edition piece, I found some very provocative and interesting material (click here to read the transcript). Donahoe starts by assessing much of the USPS’s troubles, at least on the demand side, with respect to the Internet and the conversion of households to online bill-paying. He tells NPR, “Back in 2000, about five percent of Americans paid their bills online. Today it’s 60 percent. And slowly but surely, that first-class mail volume eroded.”

As many in our industry are accustomed, our business categories are highly dependent on economic activity. For example, beginning with the downturn of the financial/mortgage/insurance sectors in 2007/2008, overall document printing volume fell sharply, and the correlation with overall unemployment metrics is irrefutable—people not on the job, particularly in an office, are not going to be printing and copying! The USPS sees this same scenario with first-class mail as well. Donahoe said, “The key indicator for first-class mail is the employment numbers. And we thought, by now, we’d probably see, you know, six to seven percent, versus nine percent unemployment.”

Direct marketing levels are also tied to economic activity, of course, and we often hear about bulk mailing as the real cash cow for the USPS. This segment is an area, too, where we see innovations in our industry (and indeed, reported right here in the Observer), that offer more efficient, more personalized approaches to this category. And while the NPR interview did not get into that side of things, Donahoe discussed other points about innovations and opportunities.

USPS Innovations

Before getting into specific recent past and future innovations, I wondered whether the sometimes-mocked USPS really has the DNA to innovate. In the “History of the USPS,” a 2007 document on the organization’s past available on its Web site, the USPS states (with my emphasis), “The Postal Service has seized upon and immediately investigated new technology to see if it would improve service—mail distribution cases in the 18th century; steamboats, trains, and automobiles in the 19th century; and planes, letter sorting machines, and automation in the 20th century. Today, computerized equipment helps sort and distribute hundreds of millions of pieces of mail each day.”

Is the USPS really an innovative organization? Actually, we do not have to look too far within our own world of desktop printers to see recent innovations that the USPS developed via its own technology and with the cooperation of other firms to bring convenience to customers by letting them take more control of the printing involved in postal services. The USPS’s “click and ship” solution (***see illustration) has been available for at least a decade, arrangements with creative start-up companies like Stamps.com www.stamps.com have endured over even a longer period of time, and more familiar partnerships include Adobe and HP.

Donahoe tells NPR (including context from before and after that column-leading quote above), “The Internet is the absolute—that’s the change…We think we are a business that’s got a very big future. Number one, there will always be a need for hard copy, no matter what…We also think that there’s a need for the postal service in the digital world. The digital world, right now, you know, bill payment, bill presentment, sending stuff through the Internet is the Wild, Wild West, truthfully. And I think that we will have a very interesting part to play there in the secure messaging environment.”

The broader printing and imaging industry can certainly relate to the USPS’s dilemma in dealing with changing consumer habits and the ongoing encroachment of alternate technologies, which is mindful of the old marketing myopia example of the railroads forgetting they were really in the transportation business and clinging to the notion they were all about trains. There are vital lessons here for all of us—and after learning much more about the USPS, especially in reading about its colorful and patriotic history, I must admit I am pulling for them to succeed.

Jim is a regular contributor of news and analysis and the author of a monthly column, Observations, for The Hard Copy Observer, a publication of Lyra Research. He also blogs and tweets on developments in the printer industry. In addition, Jim is a faculty member at the University of Phoenix, teaching marketing and economics in the school’s MBA program. Past columns, links, and other musings may be found at http://www.jimlyonsobservations.com/. Follow Jim on Twitter, @jflyons.

August Observations: End of Summer 2011—Getting Those Memories Organized via Photobooks

2011-08-22T07:05:00.000-07:00

also published in The Hard Copy Observer, August 2011

by Jim Lyons

[August 18, 2011] Like me, you may be hard pressed to believe that we are getting near the end of another glorious summer. Hopefully though, at least for many of us, now is also the time to look back on some great memories and perhaps do something about making those memories—many captured in digital pictures—a little more tangible and long lasting.

For most of us from the analog age, a myriad of photos inhabit drawers and shoe boxes with those photo-processor-provided envelopes full of prints and negatives, while a few more disciplined folks have put together photo albums to organize those memories. Now in the digital photo age, hard drives and cloud-based storage services have replaced those desk drawers and shoeboxes, with computer file folders rather than envelopes now containing the photos. (And then there are some of us who have combined both worlds and ended up with two disorganized morasses: the digital files and the physical renditions of at least the “best of” those digital prints.) Perhaps this urge to organize and “albumize” is the season-ending equivalent of a New Year’s resolution, as in “I must organize my pictures” in place of “I must get in shape/lose weight/quit smoking.”

The good news? That minority who actually take action to turn those organizational desires into reality and actually create the books will find that today’s many popular photobook vendors promise the opportunity to do so fast and easily, for a price, of course. As an interested user, dedicated digital shutterbug, and occasional procrastinator, I pushed myself to take the chance to try out three different solutions from three well-known vendors as a paying customer, and in this column, I will share some of my results.

First, though, a little industry perspective. Although not quite the “hot new thing” in the overall printing and imaging industry, photobooks and their kin have certainly risen to the top of photo-printing discussions during the last few years. As the number of basic 4 × 6-inch photo prints has declined, whether through home printing or other means, photobooks (and their proportionately higher revenues and profit margins) have been seen as somewhat of a savior for at least some segments of the photo business. For example, at the Lyra Symposium this past January, Steve Hoffenberg, director of Consumer Imaging Research (CII) and senior analyst for Lyra Research, summarized this hot product category, noting that photobooks are a booming market, with more than 50 million photobooks produced in 2010, a figure that is expected to grow to more than 90 million by 2014 (see “2011 Lyra Imaging Symposium: The Gloom of the Recession is Replaced by Excitement Over Cloud Printing, Commercial Ink Jet, MPS, and More”). So photobooks are big business and definitely worth my participation and observations.

My Results

Not quite by design, I ended up with three photobook projects recently, and beyond two summer-vacation-photo efforts, the third one deserves at least an asterisk as a bound book of my first five-and-a-half years of Observations columns. This project, while developed via the same process and with a similar price, is the exception to the other two that contain the more typical pretty photos and captions. All three projects were created from relatively long-established companies in the industry.

From Blurb, I designed a book comprised of a collection of cool photos to commemorate a summer visit to the home city of my sister and brother-in-law, and the one-of-a-kind classic car exhibit where my brother-in-law was chief docent. The book turned out great, despite “low resolution” warnings during the final pre-order stages. Assuming he is not a regular reader of this column (no worries), brother-in-law Dan will be pleasantly surprised come holiday time when he unwraps this photobook with all its memories of vintage cars, his passion.

Next from Shutterfly, my wife and I collaborated from afar with another couple who had converged with us at the resort-area home of a third long-time acquaintance in a reunion of graduate school friends who go back decades. Our host, seemingly the “man who has everything,” is a big collector of coffee table books, so the choice to thank him with a personalized commemorative book from the memory-filled weekend seemed like the perfect choice as a token of our appreciation for his hospitality. Additional copies made nice keepsakes for us and the other couple, too. The book, indeed, was the perfect thank-you gift, as it turned out.

Lastly from SharedBook, my urge to commemorate my first five years of Observations columns (published by Lyra Research as part of The Hard Copy Observer and in my blog) lent itself to that vendor’s blog-friendly format in terms of ease of production. Admittedly a “vanity” project, this effort satisfied my desire to answer the question, “Wouldn’t it be fun to see all my Observations columns in a book?” Like many of you out there, I am a long-time “wannabe” book author, and it was a revelation to realize that I have written enough column material to make up several books, so why not create one? SharedBook made the project easy and relatively inexpensive, and having a book of my work lying around the office cannot be all bad for creating an impression on prospective consulting clients.

Conclusions?

Actually while the excitement involved with each of the three projects would lead one to believe this is “early adopter” stuff that usually gets me going, in many ways this process is old hat. I originally covered Blurb’s launch from the Demo conference in 2006 (click here), and SharedBook followed them in early 2007 (click here). Shutterfly has been around much longer.

As a marketing professor (and student), I should examine what led to my brand choices. My selections, handily spread out over three suppliers, were driven by a variety of factors.

A great offer from Blurb became available via Groupon

SharedBook has effective e-mail offers, and one that I received (for something like 15 percent off and/or free shipping) caught my attention after my collection of Observations had hit what I considered critical mass (five plus years). Shutterfly was our friends’ choice—they had the lead on the book creative—as the service with which they were familiar. (In our family’s case, that choice probably would have gone to Snapfish, again based on tradition.) And Blurb? They participated in an enticing Groupon offer that I snapped up and banked earlier in the year, knowing I would want to do a photobook of one sort or another soon enough.

All the books are very satisfactory, as is the pleasure gained from putting together your own photobooks, and I recommend the services that produced them. While pricing is hard to compare, one firm does not seem to have a particular edge (though look for frequent “deals” and other offers from all of them), and quality and service levels, including communications and speed of fulfillment, seem quite good in all cases. These projects were not my first photobooks, and while I cannot see myself making a regular habit out of creating them, these three will not be my last.

One final observation as I thought about the photo content in these books, compared to past efforts: virtually all the photos, even in the collaborative one, were taken with a standard iPhone 4 camera. I would hate to be in the standalone digital still camera business these days! And my next project—getting back to that early adopter thing? I am quite intrigued by the newly emerging Instagram photo books!

July Observations: The Greatest (Printer) Story Ever Told

2011-07-30T06:43:00.000-07:00

also published in The Hard Copy Observer, July 2011

[July 29, 2011] In these days of seemingly ever-growing and changing social media platforms and behaviors, with micro-second attention spans and the attempt (demand?) to say everything that needs to be said in 140 characters, where does that leave the old-as-time oral tradition, and what about good old-fashioned, around-the-campfire-style storytelling?

This question has long interested me, especially the contrast between the impact of today’s technology on human communication and deep-in-the-DNA human nature. And I have lots of company, with a surge of interest in storytelling throughout the country inspired by such favorites as Public Radio International’s This American Life, hosted by Ira Glass and heard on many NPR stations, and the New York-based The Moth story-telling group and its corresponding live events and podcast/radio show. I personally have become involved locally with a Boise-based group that hosts monthly “performances” (Story, Story Night) and workshops (Story, Story Studio), and from the look of things, these types of activities are sprouting up in communities all over the country.

While much of the interest in stories is universal in nature (with themes about such matters as love, life, and loss), the important role of storytelling in business has not been lost. Many advertisements attempt to “tell a story,” for example, and strong company cultures are often reinforced by in-house storytellers. We can all recognize that the printer industry has many memorable stories, which prompted me to explore some of the fundamentals behind what makes a story great, and then take a look at a few tales that come to mind as among the greatest printer stories ever told.

Peter Guber, of business fame, has authored a book, published earlier this year, Tell to Win: Connect, Persuade, and Triumph with the Hidden Power of Story, which is a much-expanded version of his Harvard Business Review article, “The Four Truths of the Story Teller”. (By the way, one of my favorite professorial pieces of advice these days? In a case like this, start with the article. If you end up wanting more, there’s always the book, but six pages—rather than 200 or more—might just be enough. And more and more, I suggest looking for the TED video first.).

Guber’s article puts forth four “truths” that a good business story must satisfy: truth to the teller, truth to the audience, truth to the moment, and truth to the mission. He also offers insight into the strong correlation between leadership and storytelling and the importance of humility in the role of the storyteller. In addition, Guber hits on that paradox that intrigues me so much: the contrast between ancient storytelling customs and modern communications, especially social media. From HBR, December 2007, page 59:

“Technological breakthroughs—movable type, movies, radio, television, the Internet—have provided new ways of recording, presenting, and disseminating stories. But it isn’t special effects or the 0’s and 1’s of the digital revolution that matter most—it’s the ooh’s and aah’s that the storyteller evokes from an audience. State-of-the-art technology is a great tool for capturing and transmitting words, images, and ideas, but the power of storytelling resides most fundamentally in ‘state-of-the-heart’ technology.”

With this premise, Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and the rest are seemingly just new ways to tell old stories.

While my research was very helpful in understanding what makes a great story as told by an individual and perhaps how I can seek to master or at least improve my personal storytelling, my quest to identify great industry stories goes beyond individual storytellers to the legacies left by some of our most dramatic game-changers. One can see that Guber’s “truths” about what we collectively believe as far as the role of our business—past, present, and future—apply to each of the three stories I offer. Left to the individual, each can be embellished and honed to fit his or her audience, but let me throw three basic ideas out there for my greatest industry stories.

Mid-1980’s – Introduction of Desktop Laser Printers and The Birth of Desktop Publishing. One can argue that these innovative printers from the likes of Apple, Canon, and HP (and the fascinating tale of “coop-etition” among these vendors), along with the supporting cast of computers, operating systems, and applications, changed the face of printing and publishing, and information dissemination, forever and brought “killer app” success to graphical user interfaces (GUIs) on Macintosh and Windows computers that are so pervasive today I can hardly remember when they were new and novel.

1990’s – Upstart IBM Spinoff in Kentucky Becomes Lexmark, Challenges Industry Dominance by HP. Having celebrated the 20th anniversary of its original (and IBM-originated) 4019 LaserPrinter in October 2009, Lexmark continues to be an industry stalwart years after the company’s exit from IBM and eventual “declaration of independence” under the Lexmark name. The firm, like so many others, has had its ups and downs, but Lexmark’s challenge to industry-leader HP is ongoing…and the stuff of legends.

2000’s –Ink Jet Printers from Out-of-Nowhere, Memjet Threatens to Put Mega-Billion Industry on Its Head. The stir in the industry caused by Memjet’s dramatic entry onto the printing stage in 2007 has to be among the industry’s greatest stories. Lyra’s own Charles LeCompte made the case. “I’ve been following this industry for 20 years, and I’ve never seen anything of this scale: 10 times faster, 20 times cheaper, all at once.” LeCompte was quoted by PC Magazine (see above) and similarly in many other articles. After fits-and-starts associated with “the last mile” of commercialization, Memjet printers—first of the industrial variety and more recently home-and-office oriented—have just begun shipping in the last year, and their disruptive potential remains an open question.

So, readers, what do you think? Is one of the three stories I have included here the greatest in the history of our business, or do you have one of your own? Please comment below, or better yet tweet with your ideas. And keep telling those stories!

June Observations: More Reverse Migration? Social Media Marketing Magazine to Add Print Versions to Its Online Presence

2011-06-29T09:12:00.000-07:00

also published in The Hard Copy Observer, June 2011

[June 29, 2011] These days we are accustomed to accepting that definitions are changing—once familiar, comfortable terms that evoked physical objects, like “books” and “magazines,” now have a much more fluid meaning. Huge and growing categories like ebooks and iPad-based ezines have taught us that these terms are more likely to be thought of as virtual receptacles of words and images, which may or may not ever take a physical hard copy form. And of course the “may not ever” part of the equation seems to be winning the day, more all the time.

However, sometimes the trend is reversed, and when I hear about one of these “exceptions,” I like to explore the why’s and why not’s behind the potential paradox. In May, I had such a familiar moment when I saw a reference to a video interview with Kent Huffman (on Twitter at @KentHuffman), who serves as co-publisher at Social Media Marketing Magazine in addition to his “day job” as chief marketing officer (CMO) at BearCom Wireless, in Dallas. Before even viewing the video, the text summary on Splash Media’s SplashCast, hosted by Renay San Miguel, really got my attention: “It started with new media and Twitter. It will end with the publication of an old-media magazine.”

I first became aware of Huffman prior to his launch of the magazine when I received an e-mail from him in July 2009 that asked my permission to be placed on his list of “top marketing professors on Twitter,” which was posted on his “Systemic Marketing” Web site, a precursor to the current SMMmagazine.com http://www.smmmagazine.com. Shortly before contacting me, Huffman had started this list by identifying marketing professors on Twitter and ranking them based on their number of followers. (Huffman also compiles lists of Twitter-ensconced authors of marketing-related books and his fellow CMO’s who tweet.) I was pleased and flattered to be number 17 (out of about 30) on the first list on which I appeared (based on about 500 followers at the time). The lists (along with overall Twitter participation, of course) have expanded greatly since then, and while I remain on the list of marketing professors, I am now grateful to cling to a spot near 50 (with my 2,000+ followers), out of the 100 or so marketing professors worldwide who tweet at a certain minimum threshold (click here for the most recent list).

Huffman’s publication, Social Media Marketing Magazine (on Twitter at @SMMMagazine), launched earlier this year (with co-publisher Chuck Martin, @chuckmartin1) as an online-only publication and covers the use of social media—Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube, for example—in the broad field of marketing and their ever-growing importance in a myriad of marketing applications. As far as the magazine content itself, the members of those aforementioned lists provide great sources for contributors of material, and in addition to more traditional magazine articles, a series of guest blog posts are added at the clip of about two per week (and including one so far by yours truly).

But despite content and format that lend themselves to the online-only world, Huffman sees print versions of SMM Magazine developing in the near future. We recently talked to Huffman to get some insight on this move into print, which brought to mind other recent Observations columns on counter-trends such as The Printed Blog (see “The Ultimate Countertrend”http://jimlyonsobservations.blogspot.com/2009/04/observations-ultimate-countertrendthe.html).

Huffman admits that printed magazines seem to constitute, in his words, an “old school” approach, especially in today’s fast-changing world of social media, and notes, “The material in the magazine would seem to be changing too often to consider doing in print form. Actually, though, print offers some unique value to our readers, and the solution is ‘in the middle’ somewhere.” Huffman originally set up his online magazine so that readers could print it themselves, at first only in HTML and then as a PDF, but he did not rule out actually going to a print version.

With SMM Magazine now in its fifth issue, Huffman comments, “Starting with our third issue, we had more and more questions about the magazine being printed. This is especially true with international markets. We are now in discussions with three different organizations--one in Europe, one in India, and one in South America--to potentially produce special issues for social media events in those regions in late 2011 and early 2012. They will be customized to the needs of those markets and will be published in the appropriate languages.” When asked about longer term plans, Huffman responded, “We want to do special editions, industry-specific, for example, that will be made available in print form.”

As a bit of an aside, but offered as a comfort to readers who have tried Twitter, but still have their questions about it. What about the view from close-up, to one of the masters of Social Media Marketing? Huffman, like many of us, finds Twitter to have its frustrations, but also an allure that makes it impossible to ignore. “With Twitter, there really is just too much information, and it can be overwhelming. But on the other hand, Twitter is so valuable that it's worth the effort that's required to dig through the pile to find those important nuggets of information.” I concur!

We opened with a mention of our dynamic times and how definitions have become very fluid, and this column takes a look at magazines, but with all the ebooks and self-publishing these days, just what is a book? According to Huffman, the keeper of top marketing book authors on Twitter, “To make it on the ‘Top Marketing Authors on Twitter’ list means they have at least one book that has passed the ‘Amazon hurdle,’ . In other words, at least one of their books is available on Amazon.com.”

I like that definition, and I like thinking about having magazines in print, at least some of the time. In a fast-changing and tumultuous world, it is indeed nice to have some things back as part of the physical world.

May Observations: Up Close with a Memjet Printer

2011-05-23T09:18:00.000-07:00

also published in The Hard Copy Observer, May 2011

For the last month or so, I have had the opportunity to use a prototype Memjet home-and-office printer, first in my downtown office, and then more recently in my home office. While not a rigorous or official, full-blown evaluation or review, I have a number of observations about my printing experiences that I would like to share in my May 2011 Observations column. I will also offer a little marketing advice for the somewhat mysterious almost mythical company that sprang onto the industry scene in 2007 from Down Under (originating from Australia’s Silverbrook Research) with a formidable threat to seriously disrupt the printer industry.

In the full disclosure department, Lyra Research and the Hard Copy Observer were among the earliest in the industry to be on the Memjet story and have followed the company’s somewhat circuitous march to market with great interest ever since. For me personally, prior to be being employed by Lyra, I was an independent consultant and did some marketing work for Memjet in its very early days. Also, like with many other companies in the industry, I have a number of friends and acquaintances currently employed by Memjet.

Getting hold of an evaluation unit, however, was more of a personal favor on Memjet’s part combined with curiosity on my part about what it would be like to have this oft-discussed super-fast printer at my immediate disposal. What would I think, and would the printer’s performance change my behavior relative to what I print and when? As far as the charge for the marketing advice to Memjet and its go-to-market partners, this time—strictly gratis!

I received the previously used prototype unit via the Eagle, Idaho-based Home and Office division of the San Diego-based company, and this machine already showed 35,000 pages printed on its “odometer,” which came via standardized out-sourced reliability testing prior to my use. So my unit is a bit of a scratch-and-dent model, which I found I appreciated—much like I have learned with buying a car, as I have often remarked that I would rather start with a year-old, “pre-dinged” model because that first little flaw incurred in a brand new car can be so emotionally painful.

Putting Print Speed into Historical Perspective

Memjet’s original promise of delivering 60 ppm color printing to the home and office for $200-$300 has morphed into a machine that offers the same breakthrough speed but at a price point that is multiplied by a factor of two or more. Note that Memjet has not identified any U.S. partners, and of the firm’s Asian and European partners, only Lenovo in China has published target per-page costs of 0.1-0.15 Yuan (2 cents) for monochrome and 0.3-0.5 Yuan (6 cents) for color, compared to color laser printing costs of 10-15 cents for a color page and 1-2 cents for a monochrome page. Early indications on hardware pricing for the Lenovo RJ600N point to a range of $770 to $925 in U.S. dollars.

During the last decades, unlike in semiconductor-driven areas, like computer memory and processors, printers and their technology curves have remained somewhat constrained by factors in the physical world. The speed of drying ink and melting toner and the physics of moving paper comprise some of the factors that work against a pure Moore’s Law progression among printers. So we do not see the many-orders-of-magnitude changes we have seen over the decades with processors or storage. Nevertheless, if Memjet can deliver on even its revised price/performance goal, the impact to the home- and office-printing market could be significant.

Handouts for university classes are potentially a great application for
the speed and economy of Memjet-based ink jet printers

My Positive Experience

Unquestionably, having the Memjet printer has increased my interest in printing. I have enjoyed printing full-page photos (and confirmed the company’s advice that media type is a huge determinant of photo quality, as with every other product in the industry). I print articles and book sections for my teaching work and have also had good results printing from my Apple iPad using EuroSmartz Ltd’s Print n Share (see “Observations: Interview with Ian Schenkel of EuroSmartz”).

However, my most positive or at least most dramatically positive experience with the printer came one morning a few weeks ago. I was running behind, getting my final presentation materials in place for a university-based event where I was lecturing on using social media for marketing. My handouts, based on my slides, were the last thing I needed on the morning of the presentation, and I was at least 30 minutes behind schedule, with a colleague depending on me for a ride. I needed 60 pages of color (mixed text and graphics), and I had only minutes to print the pages before leaving my home office and making my appointed time for the pick-up. Quite frankly, this seemingly risky schedule, was not really so accidental, as I knew I had a very fast printer that I could use. And so, within the time it took to click “OK” on the print dialog box, which issued the command to print the 60 pages, and move from my upstairs laptop to my downstairs office printer, those 60 printed sheets were peacefully waiting for me on the Memjet printer’s output tray.

On a side note, the prototype printer I am testing is not always quiet, as the ink-management system involved in keeping the page-wide print head ready to go at 60 ppm requires quite a bit of hydraulic magic—even seemingly on an intermittent basis while idle—but the company assures me they are working to minimize the noise. Size-wise, all the fluid and paper movement clearly requires an industrial design that at first look seems quite a bit larger and more substantial than the commonly seen low-end ink jets and lasers of today. A closer look, however, reveals this size issue to be more in reference to the printer’s overall mass (height, weight, and depth) rather than its footprint. In terms of desk space, my HP Officejet Pro 8000 takes up nearly the same square footage. Finally, although supplies cost are not my concern at this point, the company has stated that the average cost per page will be half that of a typical ink jet or color laser printer (see above for target per-page costs of the Memjet-based Lenovo RJ600N).

Print speed demos via video have created excitement around Memjet's print speed capabilities

Of course, speed is not the only consideration, but it is the main focus of Memjet’s promotional materials (see below). The printer’s 60 ppm performance, whether viewed via the company’s many videos, but especially in person, is almost other-worldly. However, given that HP OfficeJets (including one I have been using for several years now) have a rating of 30+ ppm, is a doubling of that speed combined with a potential halving of the supplies cost going to transform the home- and office-printing market? My answer is a big “yes,” at least for situations like the morning when I needed a big stack of handouts in a hurry. Granted the raw (theoretical) speed comparisons indicate only a minute’s time-savings, but setup and processing time and the variability of print speed among competitive printers based on the content of the page should also be factored into the equation. The Memjet printer roars through all pages with the same gusto, and as can be seen from the comparison videos, others do not.

Memjet's current tag line and branding emphasize the breakthrough print speed of the firm's technology

The reality, based on my recent experience with the Memjet and in the past with myriad inkjet and laser printers from other suppliers, is that the 2:1 theoretical performance improvement could actually net out at something more like 10:1. And what if I needed 600 pages and not just 60 pages? Regardless, the fact that the necessary pages appeared almost instantly made a big difference in my day.

Marketing Basics—Benefits Versus Features

Thus we near the end of my Memjet observations, and I cannot end without offering a little marketing, specifically product positioning, advice that applies to Memjet and its partners, and equally well to everyone else in our industry: Understand and stress the unique benefits of your technology, target those customers who will appreciate and reward you for those benefits, and try to remember the features are just enablers to deliver those benefits.

Regular readers will know I devote quite a bit of time and energy these days to teaching university-level marketing, and in actuality, devote even more time and energy in thinking about marketing and related subjects. After consulting the experts, here’s what perhaps the world’s most consulted marketing text (Kotler & Armstrong, 9th edition, “Marketing: An Introduction,” 2009, Prentice-Hall) says about putting benefits into market positioning.

“[Positioning based on] Benefits Sought: A powerful form of segmentation is to group buyers according to the different benefits that they seek from the product. Benefit segmentation requires finding the major benefits people look for in the product class, the kinds of people who look for each benefit, and the major brands that deliver each benefit.”

So Memjet (and partners), who are the buyers that value knocking out reasonably large volumes of color pages in rapid fashion? The team at Memjet includes marketing pros who are top-notch thinkers and practitioners, so none of this analysis is new to them, but I cannot resist reinforcing the idea that finding enough of those users and communicating the benefits of print speed will go a long way toward success for Memjet and its go-to-market partners – by no means an easy challenge, but one worth pursuing nonetheless.

HP Printer Metrics, Q2 FY2011

2011-05-17T13:25:00.000-07:00

Wow - it really snuck up on me this time, and the pull-in to this morning (based on a leaked CEO email) really made it seem early! Here are the numbers, while waiting for the transcript of the conference call. All in all, pretty good quarter for IPG, despite the HPQ overall picture not looking so good and the shares being savaged today.

April Observations: Print More E-mails – Save the Earth

2011-04-22T08:14:00.000-07:00

The Hard Copy Observer, April 2011

Observations: Print More E-mails – Save the Earth

by Jim Lyons

When does printing e-mail help save the Earth? In honor of 2011 Earth Day, I thought this seemingly curious connection deserved some follow-up.

The idea for this column started with a tweet* that recently came to my attention, linking me to a Wall Street Journal editorial that opined on why, of all things, printing e-mails is good for the Earth. The article is titled, “Save a forest, print your emails,” and one of the authors of the op-ed piece is none other than Chuck Leavell, keyboardist with the Allman Brothers Band who is also now a tree farmer in his native Georgia and author of a recent book, Growing A Better America: Smart, Strong, Sustainable. Leavell’s WSJ column’s co-author is Carlton Owen, a forester and CEO of the U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities.

The article’s major point is that printing e-mails is good for the environment, as the behavior takes advantage of a renewable resource (trees for paper), and by printing more, we help assure that those green spaces (tree farms) will remain part of our environment rather than going idle due to lack of demand and giving way to more urbanized activities. The authors were reacting to a recent tech “innovation,” a new file format from the World Wildlife Fund (WFF) announced in November 2010, which is essentially an unprintable form of PDF file. The authors’ argument is that the WFF format is a “step too far” from the “please consider the environment” messages adorning the bottom of many e-mails during the last few years.

The WWF format had escaped my attention until now, and from what I can gather, much of the conventional printer industry. (Lyra covered this development in an article on the 2011 PaperWorld/Remax that was published on the Journal Online Web site in February.) To me, the idea of an “unprintable” file or image actually seems to be a throw-back—remember those Web-browser windows from the past decade, which due to their Java nature were unprintable though not intentionally. Getting most Web content into a printable state has been a sign of progress, not just for the printer side but for the entire browser/printer/operating system ecosystem -—witness the progress in allowing mobile devices to print during just the last year or so.

With respect to those “please consider the environment” warnings on e-mails that began popping up a few years ago, I blogged about them back then (March 2008) in a post titled, “Please Consider the Environment.” As part of my research behind that blog, I “Googled” the entire phrase, “Please Consider the Environment before Printing this Email,” and came up with less than 1,000 hits. This month, a Google search yields nearly half-a-million hits on the same phrase (see screen shot below). I will leave it up to the search engine optimization (SEO) experts to explain the roughly 500-fold increase in the search results, but needless to say, a certain institutionalization of this phrase has taken hold.

As for as the actual demand for printing of e-mails, I believe that smartphones and devices like the iPad make “consuming” e-mails much more of an immediate virtual experience than a physical one these days. That said, I admit to printing an e-mail just in the last few days when attending a function at our local university and needing logistics information, including a parking code. Printing the e-mail just seemed to make more sense because I would have the piece of paper folded in my jacket pocket, ready to produce when needed rather than fumbling for my iPhone at the parking-lot entrance. Yes, there are still those times for printing e-mails, but this was a rather unusual exception.

As a college-level professor of marketing and economics these last few years, I cannot resist doing a little analysis on the strategy and logic in the WSJ piece, in spite of my great admiration for Leavell as a musician and an activist and as a fellow lover of green spaces and nature. From an economics standpoint, considering “supply and demand” theories, I am inclined think a few more steps are involved in the conversion of forests, human-cultivated or natural, into strip malls, however demand for printing of e-mails changes over the years. And from a marketing standpoint, conventional wisdom is that competitive comparisons in advertising or other promotional efforts (like op-ed columns) should be done with caution – as they run the risk of promoting not only the “the home team” but also the competition, and in the case of market leaders, the strategy is often to act as if there is no competition. I am a case in point – I could have gone along unaware of the WFF file format, but this promotional effort from the other side has actually made me curious about it.

That said, I am happy to know that we generally continue to have the choice to print and that the printing is fast, friendly, and not so bad for the environment after all.

Happy Earth Day!

*A note on my discovery of this piece -- I mentioned a tweet (a message on Twitter) and in this case it came to my attention as a re-tweet from no less than @NeenahPaper - one of the most active Twitter users in our industry, and well worth following.

March Observations: 'Where Are They Now?' – The Printed Blog

2011-03-30T08:42:00.000-07:00

The Hard Copy Observer, March 2011

Observations: 'Where Are They Now?' – The Printed Blog

by Jim Lyons

I had been planning to write another “Where Are They Now” column for some time now, about some of the companies covered in this column (Observations) over the past five years. But the news in late March about Shutterfly’s acquisition (for over $300 million) of online stationery supplier Tiny Prints really motivated me! And though I could have sworn I had written about them (Tiny Prints) previously, a search of both the Observer archives as well as this blog’s past postings turned out negative. I usually don't let many companies or products with “print” or something related in their names go unnoticed, but, alas, Tiny Prints crossed my mental radar but didn’t make it as a story. But fortunately, there is another one that did, multiple times, and who is due for a re-visit.

The Printed Blog is the subject of this column, and it’s currently another success story that if not yet on the scale of Tiny Prints, is heading in that direction. This is a company which has gone from darling, to dead, to alive again and is doing some great things and on the verge of others. I recently talked to the founder and CEO Joshua Karp about what's new, and what's different from their first time around, about two years ago.

That was when The Printed Blog first caught my attention (see “The Printed Blog – Ultimate Counter Trend?”, April 2009), along with many others including the mainstream media, two years ago their idea to do a localized newspaper-like printed product that included “great blog content” along with local news and information on goings-on. They got off to a quick start in several cities, however less than six months later they had suspended operation as the advertiser-supported model broke down. But another year or so later they were back in business, with an altered business model, which I again faithfully reported as part of my “From the Magazine Rack” wrapup in August 2010.

I hadn’t had the chance to get the latest directly from the source until recently, however, so in a brief but high-bandwidth conversation with Karp, I got the latest to share with JLO readers. In looking back, Karp first talked about his inspiration from a talk by Dell CEO Michael Dell, which he heard ten or more years ago, and Dell’s point that great entrepreneurs know when to give up. (But then he also adds parenthetically, “Great entrepreneurs are also extremely tenacious!”) By tweaking the business model, Karp was able to come back, and grow again. Now a weekly magazine, altered from the daily newspaper model of the previous iteration, and purely subscription-based relying on mailing centrally printing issues. Karp explains, comparing the original model and its “local community-focused content, which was originally a daily with hyper-local content written for them, combined with the more general blog content of national interest” to now the more broadly-applicable magazine-style format. His inspiration continues to come from, in his judgment, the “tremendous amount of blog content, that could or should be produced in paper form, in blogs.” And it’s still based on another primary concept – the level playing field. In a recent issue, for example, “We had (communications expert and pundit) Jeff Jarvis, and some of his writing, right next to the work of unknowns. This proves the point, if you produce something worth reading – it will be read.”

In terms of numbers, Karp was very candid about this latest Printed Blog incarnation. “We are currently [late March 2011] at the tail-end of our first subscription drive with 3,000 paying subscribers. We are 3-4 weeks away from reaching or exceeding our subscriber goals. We are currently on our 5th of 6 promotional issues, and we expect to sail right past our goals with a combination of weekly and monthly subscribers. We see being at five figures by the end of the year.”

Local Printing Option

Going back 2009, but I wanted to know what had happened to the “local printing” option in covered in our original interview? In that two-year-old column, I described Karp’s vision as follows: “As far as printing details, local print shops currently produce TPB, but the vision includes many partners who will do their own printing along with local distribution and advertising through local offices, storefronts, and even home offices. The printing devices they deploy may be branded ‘The Printed Blog’ but will be based on printers from Canon, HP, Xerox, and others.” He now states that while that hasn’t become reality, and the business has gone in a different direction, it still has merit.

International Licensees

And another exciting development? Karp has two international licensees to talk about. “This is relatively recent, just in the past 4-6 weeks, we have licensing groups which have formed around the world. In Saint Petersburg, Russia

a group is up to production of 50,000 copies of relevant Russian content. Their license to pertains to all of Russia. And a second license will be to a group in Portugal, to be official in the next few days – with their publication launching on Liberty Day – it’s a combination of advertiser supported plus subscription model – and they have already lined up big advertisers. The two groups of licensees are quite different, with young entrepreneurs in Russia, and seasoned media professionals in Portugal, who want to spread TPB across Europe, publishing the world’s most successful photogs and bloggers.”

Topsheet.com

And as far as more new ideas? Karp offered in a follow-up email, “We also launched a new daily print newspaper called The Top Sheet - we tested it in December, and we'll be launching it any day now. If you're interested, you can learn more at www.thetopsheet.com.”

Never short of new ideas, Joshua Karp and the Printed Blog, originally inspired by a speech by Michael Dell, now inspires many of us in the print industry to be persistent and creative. I firmly believe this is not my last column about the Printed Blog and their habit of zagging when it seems like all the rest of the world is zigging.

http://twitter.com/theprintedblog
http://www.facebook.com/ThePrintedBlog

February Observations: If It Sounds Like Print and Looks Like Print, Is It Printing?

2011-02-24T10:06:00.000-08:00

The Hard Copy Observer, February 2011

Observations: If It Sounds Like Print and Looks Like Print, Is It Printing?

by Jim Lyons

[February 24, 2011] Since my November 2010 Observations column on ACTPrinter (“All That Glitters...”) and January 2011 Observations column on paper.li (“Paper as a Metaphor”), I have been tempted to fall back on the old saw, “If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck...” and conclude that these products confirm the importance of printing in our new world, but this is not the case! In fact, these two solutions with print or paper in their names do not actually mean paper or printing in any material sense at all. In the same vein, I offer the conclusion of my three-part series with this month’s feature attraction, Instapaper, the very popular viewing app for iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch (Apple iOS) and other platforms, including Web browsers and Amazon Kindles.

At first glance, this popular app (featured in much press coverage, including The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times) with the prominent inclusion of the word “paper” in its name, makes a long-time printer industry member like me take quick notice. But while the $5 version (a free one is also available), named by the Times’ Damon Darlin as “One of the best values in the Apple App Store” in December 2010 and by fellow Times writer Bob Tedeschi as one of “Ten Apps That Make Magic on Your iPad,” also in December, meets user needs in virtually the same fashion as physically printing and then reading the content, Instapaper precludes the trip to the printer and the corresponding depletion of paper and toner or ink.

The description of Instapaper available from the app’s listing on the Apple iTunes App Store has a familiar ring to it: “Great for long articles and blog posts that you find during the day and would like to read, but don’t have the time when you find them. Save with Instapaper, then read later, when you’re commuting, in a meeting, or waiting in line.” This description could have just as easily been ascribed to HP’s original Web Printsmart or Canon’s WebRecord (and was, just not in so many words), back in the days when information availability was exploding via the Web and e-mail, and printer industry types were assured that content must be printed on paper before being consumed, at least in a large number of cases. Apparently, in the decade or more since those first Web-printing attempts (see “Printing from the Web – Are we reaching the end point?”), the physical act of printing has more often been replaced by the virtual equivalent.

The Instaprint App Store description of the application’s core features also states, “Saves most webpages as text only, stripping away the full-sized layout to optimize for the iPhone and iPad screens; distraction-free reading environment gets out of your way so you can focus on the content; everything you download is then available off-line so you can read whatever you want even on airplanes or on Wi-Fi only devices away from Internet connections.” Substitute “letter-sized and A4 paper” for “iPhone and iPad screens” in that feature list and you would have a description of the Web-tuned printing apps of recent history.

So just as the electronic viewing of photos has become more customary, via social media platforms like Facebook, photo sites like Flickr, and even digital photo frames, electronic document viewing continues its march toward popularity and pervasiveness. These “substitutes,” as economists label them, are replacing printed photos and documents, leaving our industry with the hope that net growth in prints coming from the total number of photos taken and documents distributed increases faster than the decline in printed content.

Plays Well with Others

With respect to inter-application versatility (i.e. send-to-Instapaper capability), the App Store description notes that “sending to Instapaper is supported by over 135 other iPhone and iPad apps! You can even send long emails to Instapaper.” So within the iOS environment, many apps “get along” and can provide source content to the Instapaper viewer. This behavior is different than that of those previously-mentioned browser-based print apps and reflects the app-driven (as opposed to browser-driven) world of today’s mobile platforms. (As a note, Instapaper, according to Darlin’s Times article, is holding back from doing Android versions to avoid further complexity for the one-person company.)

Instapaper’s one person is the charismatic Marco Arment, a developer of social media platform Tumblr and an influential force in the app universe. When initially contacted, Arment was responsive but concerned on the fit of Instapaper in an article for a printer-industry publication. Despite his busy schedule (while we were researching this piece, Arment was an outspoken industry voice on the newly-announced enforcement of Apple’s in-app purchase (IAP) program), Arment was friendly enough but offered, “I’d be happy to do a brief interview, but are you sure Instapaper is relevant to the article? It doesn’t really have anything to do with physical paper or printing.”

But, a “print” option displayed to logged-in users on Instapaper’s Web site (and described pre-login, see screenshots below) offers a glimmer of hope.

While couched with cautions, this capability became the subject our first-ever Twitter interview (see below) when we tweeted to Arment, “Will the print function on Instapaper web site evolve beyond ‘very beta?’ ” Arment tweeted back almost immediately, “Probably not. Hardly anyone ever uses it. But I love printing off a few pages before air travel for taxi, takeoff, and landing.”

This twitter exchange just goes to show that like the “everything will be printed” assumptions of a more than a decade ago, today’s “nothing will be printed” assertions will not come to pass—the world does not work like that. Finding the right time, place, and applications for each medium is the important issue that will let creative forces prevail in our industry and others.

HP Printer Comments and Metrics, Q1 2011

2011-02-24T07:33:00.000-08:00

First of, my print-related excerpts of the analysts conference call transcript, available at Investor Relations at HP.com. And then the inclusion of my customary updated metrics table.
_________________

From CEO Leo Apotheker’s opening remarks:

[Regarding consumer businesses,] The enthusiasm and anticipation for webOS exceeded even our most optimistic expectations. We look forward to providing a differentiated seamless experience across our tablets, smartphones, printers, PCs, and future form factors.

[As far as top line revenue,] We continued to see good performance in our commercial hardware businesses, led by strength in converged infrastructure and commercial printers and PCs. We posted solid double-digit revenue growth across these businesses, with Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking growing 22%, and commercial printer hardware and PSG commercial revenue increasing 13% and 11%, respectively.

The Imaging and Printing business delivered strong performance in the first quarter with revenue growth of 7% to $6.6 billion, led by commercial revenue growth of 13% and supplies growth of 7%. Segment operating profit totaled $1.1 billion, or 17% of revenue. Total printer unit shipments increased 13% with commercial and consumer printer units up 33% and 7%, respectively, as we gained market share across all printing categories with particular strength in higher usage segments.

We continue to see solid momentum in our growth initiatives and to lead the market with innovative new products. Our graphic arts business grew double- digits and we are pleased with the momentum in our web press business. Our color laser and multi-function printer units grew 20% and 63%, respectively, while business inkjet unit shipments increased double- digits from the prior year and shipments of wireless printer units more than doubled. In addition, we shipped more than 3 million web-connected printers in the quarter. We will continue to target these markets aggressively, leveraging our technology leadership to drive the shift from analog to digital printing.

Q&A between Aaron Rakers, analyst of Stifel Nicolaus and Cathie Lesjak, HP CFO, and Apotheker – since it was the final question, Apotheker wrapped up the day’s remarks:

Rakers: Yes, thanks, guys. I apologize, I'm going to go back to actually Keith's question earlier. So just to be clear, Cathie, you talked about low single digit growth now in the Services business. I think at the Analyst Day you talked about 2% to 4%. If I do the backwards math, that would be about $700 million, $750 million in revenue shortfall. That leaves you about $1 billion left spread across the segments. I guess my question is, are you still confirming your 7% to 9% growth expectation in Enterprise, Server, Storage and Networking as well as the 3% to 4% growth target for the Imaging and Printing segment for fiscal 2011? Thank you.

Lesjak: So, Aaron, on earnings calls, we don't typically update our guidance relative to the segments. I've laid out for you, or we've laid out for you, the guidance for Q2 and a full fiscal year from a revenue perspective. I don't have anything more to add to that.

Apotheker: So this is -- let me just wrap this call up by sharing with you some final thoughts. HP delivered strong margins, earnings and cash flow performance in the quarter and our operational discipline is intact. We continue to show strength in our core markets. We're winning in the data center, we're capturing the share of the printed pages moving from analog to digital and we're well positioned as the world of cloud and connectivity converge. As we discussed, we have some work to do in a couple of areas and I'm confident in our ability to execute our plan. I look forward to sharing more of our strategy with you at our March 14 Summit.

_________________

HP's First Quarter 2011 Results

2011-02-22T15:25:00.000-08:00

HP announced their numbers tonight after the closing bell, and while a mixed picture by most accounts, the stock immediately sold off double-digit percentages, wiping out the gains since the first of the year. I will have a closer look at some of the printing-related comments and numbers here, tomorrow, but for now take a look at the IPG slide - with all the muss and fuss about the economy, drop-off in printing, etc., it's interesting to me that it's a relatively placid-looking big-picture view.

January Observations: Paper as a Metaphor - exploring Tweet-based paper.li

2011-01-31T08:25:00.000-08:00

The Hard Copy Observer, January 2011

Observations: Paper as a Metaphor - exploring Tweet-based paper.li

by Jim Lyons

[January 27, 2011] As mentioned in my November column (see “Observations: All That Glitters…”), I am commonly drawn to learning more about innovative solutions in the social media and mobile apps space that have “paper” or “print” in their names. I explored the iPhone/iPad app ACTPrinter and learned that its “printing” capability was really more about the ability to create simple PDF-like versions of materials that would normally be reduced to hard copy form (think tickets, receipts, etc.) but could be transferred and displayed on mobile device screens, thus avoiding hard copy usage altogether. ACTPrinter’s founder learned that his app had gone from a tool used for airline and train tickets to one that could “mobile-ize” other documents, like articles and reports, for “consumption” on iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads.

I promised then to explore paper.li, a Twitter-based solution I discovered that really is using “paper” in a metaphorical sense. Nonetheless, in the same vein as the viewing-based magazine-equivalents I have covered in the past (for example, see “From the Magazine Rack and What a Difference a Year Makes!”), paper.li offers some great insight into where printing opportunities (or at least printer industry opportunities) might exist, more like my July 2009 column (see “Print Those Tweets”http://jimlyonsobservations.blogspot.com/2009/04/observations-ultimate-countertrendthe.html), where I pointed out that it was possible to print tweets and that many people were actually doing just that.

So what is paper.li, and why should you care? Like Flipboard (see the aforementioned “Magazine Rack” post), paper.li is a program that organizes your incoming Twitter feed into a format that resembles traditional media (the front page of a newspaper in the case of paper.li) but also takes advantage of the interactivity of hyperlinks and multimedia. Note that while I continue to concentrate on the Twitter aspect of paper.li, the software is capable of organizing Twitter and Facebook streams; paper.li simply suits my use of the two platforms as a Twitter-only solution.

The creator of paper.li’s is SmallRivers, a Lausanne, Switzerland-based firm, and the company’s Web site describes its advertising-supported service as follows, “paper.li organizes links shared on Twitter and Facebook into an easy to read newspaper-style format. A great way to discover content that matters to you—even if you are not connected 24/7!” The more I learned about paper.li, I realized that the “paper” in the solution’s name stood for “newspaper” formatting (and that the “.li” suffix roughly translates to “personalized”). However, paper.li seemed to produce a format that may indeed still lend itself to printing, not unlike “The Printed Blog” (see “Ultimate Countertrend, The Printed Blog”). The images at *** are examples of paper.li’s daily output.

When asked about the fit between paper.li and actual, physical printing, Iskander Pols, co-founder of SmallRivers, commented, “Hard copy was not part of the original design. We did have some users show interest in such an option though. While it may become an option at some time, you have to realize that paper.li is particularly well suited to the Web, in so far that we facilitate content discovery, pushing readers to the original content wherever it is on the Web, i.e. the actual reading of articles is done on the source Web site, not so much on paper.li.” Regarding that future hard copy option, Pols added, “We will be looking into creating PDF-friendly versions of papers. Unfortunately, no timing for such a feature is available.”

Even @JFLYONS made this paper.li edition - by VitalyG - though below the fold

So perhaps a dead end, and another example of retaining the “paper” moniker as a metaphorical and historical artifact rather than a physical description, much like the academic “papers” I have written about several times in the past that rarely if ever are converted to hard copy form. But as social media becomes more pervasive across industries as an outbound communications tool for marketers and an inbound source for keeping abreast of the world and the industry, paper.li may become very important.

The Printers Daily paper.li by @graphicstart from January 19 2011

As seen from the sample paper.li images, setting up and building off your investment in your Twitter (and perhaps Facebook) following can be a great way to monitor and stay current on developing trends in the industry. There is also the serendipity aspect to it—the two examples I show here are owned by two tweeters who happen to follow me, meaning that when one of my tweets shows up on their “front page,” I get notified in the form of a link to access their papers. Therefore, without even setting up a paper.li of my own, I get the benefit, a network effect of sorts, of being followed by virtue of tweeting enough material of interest to show up in my colleagues’ summaries. (Editor’s note: Jim has since started his own paper, which can be found at http://paper.li/jflyons.)

In summary, paper.li, whether truly a “paper” in physical form or not, should be a valuable tool for industry members to recognize and begin to use regularly. The year is 2011 after all—time to be up on the ever-changing world of social media.

Thanks to Lyra, and hoped you enjoyed the tweets!

2011-01-31T08:01:00.000-08:00

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!

First Full Day of Lyra Complete - On to Final Day

2011-01-26T07:29:00.000-08:00

The first full day of the Lyra Imaging Symposium's agenda is history, with a wide range of topics covered. My track took me to the Photo Printing session during the early afternoon, foregoing the Green discussions.

The entire group then reformed for an insightful look at the China printing market in 2010, and then a strong Managed Print Services lineup including a final panel.

My best advice for details is to follow the tweets from me, @jflyons, and @lyrainc, for updates during the day (or going back for the first day) - key points and highlights. (Note that the twitter feed here on my blog home page is not picking up retweets, so I suggest going straight to the Twitter web site or your favorite Twitter client.)

First Morning of Lyra Symposium Completed - Trends Duly Noted

2011-01-25T12:46:00.000-08:00

The first morning of this year's Lyra Printing and Imaging Symposium is complete, with a look at commercial printing from industry leader HP's perspective; a profile of the financials and trends in the copier segment of the business, firm-by-firm; a mobility solution being offered by Global Graphics and Intel; and an office printing overview, from Xerox, as well as Lyra's two analysts in the space.

Tweets at @jflyons and @lyrainc contain some great insights from each of the speakers during the morning.

If any one lasting impression lingers, it's the five key industry trends highlighted by Ann Priede during her "industry snapshot" segment (shared with Charles LeCompte). Though none are exactly knew, it can't be argued that these were front and center during the previous year, and will be of growing importance in the future:

-mobile and cloud printing
-social media and its marketing applications
-device and print management
-commercial printing
-green/environmental

And now decision time - the after-lunch program splits into photo printing and green (environment) themes - what to cover?

Another Lyra Symposium - Ready, Set, Go!

2011-01-25T06:24:00.000-08:00

It's time for another Lyra Imaging Symposium! I'm back in Rancho Mirage, blogging, and tweeting too. Check out the updates here, and at @jflyons on Twitter. I'll be commenting on a great lineup of speakers this year, starting with HP's VP and General Manager of Inkjet High-Speed and Production Solutions Division, Aurelio Maruggi.

December Observations: Five Years of Columns!

2010-12-23T11:46:00.000-08:00

The Hard Copy Observer, December 2010

Observations: Five Years of JLO Columns

by Jim Lyons

[December 23, 2010] As mentioned at the end of my November 2010 Observations, that column completed five years of monthly musings on my part, and while I am determined to continue for the foreseeable future, it is a good time to look back and reflect on those 60 columns in conjunction with our other year-in-review pieces in the Observer.

I have compiled and included a table (included at the bottom of the page) with the title, brief synopsis, and link to each column, and I will mention a few of what I consider to be the high points (and maybe a few low points). As is my usual practice, I will also try to discern a few patterns and trends that emerged and provide clues on the direction of our industry.

My very first column was titled, “Hard Copy Time Capsule” and recounts an actual incident where I found a group of ten-year-old Observers during an (obviously rare) office cleanup that accompanied a career change. The three issues were from 1995 and between them include many articles that ten years later seem very significant in what became big things in the printing and imaging industry. Also included, predictably, were articles on things that proved to be inconsequential in hindsight. In that column, I pointed out the early predictions of growth in color printing and all-in-ones, which by 2005 seemed obvious, as well as many companies who had been industry participants in 1995 that were distant memories ten years later.

Following that initial work, many of my early columns continued to draw on memories, with comparisons made to current situations. In this vein, I had fun following the comparison of the previous page description language (PDL) wars of the late 1980s to what in 2006 seemed like a major crossroads for Adobe’s PDF, with the looming threat from Microsoft Vista and its built-in XML Printer Specification (XPS). Much of the fun came from the fact that those rivals were the same, 15 years later. And little did we know then that four years later, the Adobe battlefront would involve another historic rival, Apple, though this time the battle was over the viewing technology Flash and its inclusion (or lack thereof) in Apple’s mobile devices. And as for PDF? Its role as a universal, portable format has survived quite well and is evident across the spectrum of traditional operating systems as well as the ever-growing universe of mobile platforms.

However, following some feedback about my early columns being great “back in the good old days” fodder, I was determined to be more forward-looking, a trait to which I had long practiced during my corporate days. Since then, attempting to provide inspiration by looking ahead at potential opportunities and threats in the printing and imaging industry has become a major emphasis. This process includes ferreting out up-and-coming companies and technologies, shifts in industry practices, and customer behavior that may be either coming in or going out.

On the new company/application/platform side, I am pleased to have written early about the “YouTube for Documents,” Scribd.com, and its emergence as an important new company in May 2008. In back-to-back months at the end of 2007, I wrote about the potential of WiFi printers and the new Amazon Kindle, and during the most recent two years, I have covered social media numerous times, with a special emphasis it would seem on printing-related Twitter stories. During that same time period, my interest in mobile platforms, and especially Apple’s iPhone/iPad and the printing and viewing options they bring to bear, may have become a bit tiresome for many, but for those of you in that category, ignore at your own peril! Examples include my fascination with “FlipBoard,” a new viewing app I examined in mid-2010, and which recently won Apple’s “app of the year” award, and the somewhat similarly named Google feature “FastFlip,” available on mobile devices and traditional browsers and likewise “observed” earlier in 2010 and recently “promoted” on all Google News Web pages.

Going back to my first year in 2006, I covered the existing industry practice of price rebates as I perceived this custom was beginning to fade. I also looked at the “razor and blades” pricing model, with low hardware prices and margins and manufacturers making up the difference (and more) on relatively expensive, high-margin supplies.

On the rebate front, my predictions for “the end of the rebate, as we know it” seems to have come to pass. A more or less random sample of printer deals (oriented to consumer markets where rebates have always been most prevalent) shows that, at Techbargains.com anyway, the most recent great prices for printers and all-in-ones do not include mail-in rebates, at least in the huge majority of deals from a wide variety of resellers. The razor-and-blades pricing front, however, is a different story. Despite well-documented efforts by Kodak, Lexmark and others to sell the base printer platform for higher margins to enable less expensive ink, cheap printers and costly ink still seem to rule the day. A recent Black Friday excursion yielded results that surprised even me frankly, with HP ink jet printers at Walmart starting at $29 and HP’s recently announced e-all-in-one basic model at little more than half of its original list price. Unquestionably, industry leader HP is still going with the razor-and-blades model to produce the firm’s profits.

How has the world changed? How have I changed? How has the writing changed?

So beyond the general intention to move away from a nostalgia orientation and toward future trend identifications (for the most part), what else do I detect in my 60 Observations columns?

I sincerely hope the quality of my writing as well as my research and knowledge of new technologies has improved. Taking on contract writing duties for the Observer has helped across the board, and I am grateful for that opportunity. Including a little humor, irony, and pop culture is always a goal. And the access to industry chatter via Twitter and other social media has changed the level and currency of my tech awareness, without doubt.

While I do not remember my editor ever mentioning it (bless her), one cringe-worthy “feature” of my early columns were titles that were often in rhetorical-question form, ending with a question mark. In fact, a quick review shows fully half of the titles of my first year’s pieces were in question format. Perhaps I was watching too much Jeopardy back then?

A personal/professional change for me that occurred during these last five years has been devoting an increasing proportion of my time and energy to teaching for the University of Phoenix, both in marketing and economics. I brought this knowledge to bear early, as my first-year experience with the processes at the highly-automated University of Phoenix showed me that in many academic settings, the term “paper” is really a misnomer, as an electronic document through its multiple steps of creation, submission, and evaluation (grading), is rarely reduced to physical form.

Other evidence of my growing academic bent can be found in my topic selection. In 2010, I covered “memorable industry advertising taglines” in a two-part feature and the application of “neuromarketing” techniques to understanding consumer preferences between hard copy and display formats. I trust at least some of my readers have found these forays into the modern world of marketing to be of interest and provide a good mix with my new-and-different themes about industry players and trends.

I am going to close up the “collection” at this point, as too much indulgence in reminiscing cannot be good for you! With that said, it has been a great five years, and I look forward to continuing. And as always I appreciate your readership.

November Observations: All That Glitters...

2010-11-30T07:39:00.000-08:00

The Hard Copy Observer, November 2010

Observations: All That Glitters...

by Jim Lyons

[November 30, 2010] As we begin to approach the last days of 2010, many of us are getting ready to write wrap-ups about the year’s activity, with recaps of industry developments in various categories. For me, these retrospectives include the use of social media and smartphones, or more broadly, mobile printing applications, many of which I have already covered. In addition to going back to my year’s worth of notes and articles, it is also a time to seek out those brief tickler file entries and scan the environment for new entries in these categories for solutions or products which I might have missed outright. It is a time to “make good” by including these unexplored or previously undiscovered items in their rightful place as important, or at least potentially important, to the printing and imaging industry.

These latter two categories (the previously uncovered or unexplored) include apps that carry “print,” “printer,” “paper” or the like as part of their names. Just as I have covered in some detail the companies behind “Print Central” and “Print Your Twitter” over the past year, I also have a newer, less-explored list of companies and apps like “paper.li,” “Instapaper,” and “ACTPrinter.” These names seem to imply an involvement in printing and imaging and perhaps represent an opportunity for our industry either in working directly with the companies involved or at least learning something about what these firms are doing. But, as the old saying goes, “All that glitters isn’t gold,” so what about these emerging upstarts?

The first target of my investigation is Houdah Software, and its product, ACTPrinter, which I have been using for a few months on my iPhone. In addition to being intrigued by the name of Houdah’s app, I was originally drawn to the firm’s iTunes entry and logo (see illustrations), the fact that Houdah offers Sudoku as well as printing software, and the interesting company name. This interest led me to a recent extended interview, first by e-mail and then by phone, with Pierre Bernard, founder of Houdah Software s.à r.l. of Luxembourg, where Bernard remains the company’s sole employee.

Screen-shot from iTunes App Store shows Houdah's range of apps.

JLO: Can you provide a quick description of ACTPrinter and the target users?

Bernard: ACTPrinter is best described as a virtual printer. Basically, anything that can be printed can be sent to ACTPrinter. ACTPrinter was created with electronic tickets (boarding passes, cinema tickets, etcetera) in mind. It seems quite a waste of paper to print such tickets only to discard them once you boarded the plane, entered the theater. Many airports already have machines capable of scanning bar codes off LCD displays. Their number is rapidly expanding as many airlines introduce their own digital boarding pass creators. But why have one app for each and every airline you plan on traveling with? ACTPrinter can carry the boarding passes of any airline.

Moreover ACTPrinter can hold your hotel room confirmation, printed maps, notes you made ahead of travel, etcetera.

JLO: How did Houdah get into this area? I notice your apps vary greatly—what triggered the interest in ACTPrinter? Do you have a printing or graphics/imaging background?

Bernard: Houdah Software is indeed quite unique in that I did not focus on a single area of interest. I try to create products I need myself. I either see a need or I see an existing solution that I feel I can improve upon. The first Houdah Software product was HoudahSpot: a file search tool. The next was HoudahGeo: a photo geocoding solution. On the iPhone, I started out with a Sudoku [program], a currency converter, and a tip calculator. These were followed shortly by ACTPrinter.

JLO: What are some specifics about you and Houdah ? Where are you located? How long have you been in business? How big is the company? What are your future visions/dreams?

Bernard: Houdah Software s.à r.l. is based in Luxembourg, Europe. It was founded in late 2005. It is a one-man company with some help from the family. (Although the Windows client for ACTPrinter was created by Joe Acklin of JTA Software.) [Editor’s note: the ACTPrinter software, much like many of the printing-oriented mobile apps, requires a companion app on either the user’s Mac or Windows machine, in this case for the actual rendering (virtual printing) of the ACTPrinter-readable files, and residing on the same LAN for file transfer.]

I am currently working on a Mac application, which will be sold through Apple's upcoming Mac App Store. Tembo is again a search tool based upon Apple's Spotlight engine. Its purpose is to make searching and finding both easier and faster.

JLO: Do you see ACTPrinter complementing or competing with actual printing? For example, HP's new ink jet printers feature a number of print applications (e.g. movie tickets, maps, etcetera) that would be replaced by "printing" to your smartphone and using it that way, without ever actually printing.

Bernard: ACTPrinter is surely meant to replace much of the casual / nonsense printing: tickets, will-call numbers, phone numbers, etcetera—the stuff that used to waste a full sheet of paper for only a word or two…or was used only once.

Feedback has shown that ACTPrinter went way beyond that. People save much more paper by printing all kinds of documents to ACTPrinter. What was meant as a traveler’s tool has grown into a business tool. Why waste paper to print an e-mail just so you can read it back home, during commute, etcetera?

The current HP approach to boarding passes is printing via dedicated apps - Houdah has different ideas.

JLO: Back to more on those customers. What is the feedback from your users? What else would you like to do with ACTPrinter in future versions, based on your vision and/or user feedback?

Bernard: ACTPrinter is our best-selling iOS application by a wide margin. Customer reception has been tremendous. ACTPrinter quickly outgrew its original purpose. Users use it to carry far more than the occasional e-ticket. ACTPrinter came to be the place to store all of one's travel documents.

Many users actually extend the use of ACTPrinter far beyond traveling. They print large documents to read on a commute.

ACTPrinter recently gained sections. These allow for the users to manage their documents. Newly printed documents start in the Inbox. From there one may file them to other sections (e.g. group documents by trip). One may also consider the Inbox as a list of unread documents. Upon reading one may file a printout to the "read" section or create an "action pending" section.

Folders were the most requested feature for a long time. I waited quite a long time to get moving on this. I wanted to get it exactly right. While the users were requesting folders, I always knew that creating file hierarchies as known from desktop computers would spell doom to the simplicity and ease of use of ACTPrinter. I believe collapsible sections are a good solution for mobile devices. All documents are a maximum of two taps away. The sections use up very little of the precious screen real estate.

I am surprised and delighted by the new uses our users keep discovering for ACTPrinter. Some actually get to push the limits of both the application and their devices. They try to print entire books. The thing is that iOS applications are limited in the amount of RAM they may use. Thus printing large documents may fail over the fact that ACTPrinter needs to briefly hold on to the document during printing, i.e. keep it in RAM. Once the printout is transferred, it is saved to "disk." That is only limited by how "big" the iPod/iPad is.

That is probably what is up next for ACTPrinter: find a way to break up printouts for segmented transfer, saving, and loading. Thus making it even more versatile.

JLO: Specifically, in terms of the very short-term future, what about the Apple iPhone/iPad operating system, iOS 4.2, and its feature set, including AirPrint of course?

Bernard: We are already taking advantage of the multi-tasking feature, and thinking ahead, perhaps with AirPrint, our app could work as a place for temporary document storage pending an available printer coming within the range of the smartphone or iPad.

JLO: You mention the success of ACTPrinter. Can you quantify this for us?

Bernard: The ACTPrinter software has been a great success and, including its days of being a free download [before its current pricing of $1.99], has had 92,600 downloads [as of the end of November 2010]. But the way to really measure active users is by upgrades, and since our latest version went up on the Apple App Store just a few days ago, we have had 30,000 upgrades.

JLO: And lastly, what about those names? Where do “ACTPrinter” and “Houdah” come from?

Bernard: “ACT” is an acronym for “All Cocoa Touch,” a reference to the original mobile app programming language. Houdah [pronounced How-da] is the Indian name for an elephant saddle and is in recognition of the Apple Safari Web browser and our initial Web-browsing-based product’s tie-in to that, i.e. a “comfortable” way to be on Safari.

My Thoughts

The ACTPrinter customer approach is somewhat mindful of GreenPrint and its “eliminating the last useless page” of Web print-outs, which caught the attention of Walt Mossberg several years ago, and then caught mine (see "Making it to the Top of the PR Mountain"). And of course the conversion of “what would be printed” to something more ethereal shares a lot in common with the huge trend in eBooks and other viewing technology, which have been covered numerous times during the five years of this column.

Yes, it has been five years! This is my 60th monthly column for the Observer, and it has been a pleasure. I look forward to doing many more, my Lyra bosses willing that is, and after all, I still need to write about Instapaper and Paper.li!

HPQ Q4FY2010 Printer metrics and commentary

2010-11-29T06:00:00.000-08:00

It almost snuck by us with the Thanksgiving break and all, but here are some printer-related highlights from HP's Q4 announcement, last Tuesday.

From the earnings-call transcript:

[from prepared remarks] Leo Apotheker - Hewlett-Packard - CEO, President

IPG achieved another strong quarter, including share gains in both laser and ink, and we continue to innovate around e-Print and web-connected printers. I'm very excited about the opportunity available to us to shape the cloud and mobile Instant-On platform.

[from prepared remarks] Cathie Lesjak - Hewlett-Packard - EVP, CFO

We continued to see momentum in the commercial sector, led by strength in converged infrastructure, managed print services, and commercial printers and PCs. We posted solid double-digit revenue growth across our hardware businesses,...

Commercial printer hardware and PSG commercial revenue grew 22% and 20%, respectively. Additionally, in Services our book-to-bill ratio for the trailing 12 months remains comfortably greater than one.

Imaging and Printing had a strong quarter. Revenue grew 8% to $7 billion, fueled by year-over-year hardware revenue growth of 16%, and supplies revenue growth of 6%. Segment operating profit totaled $1.2 billion, or 17.4% of revenue. Total printer unit shipments increased 14%, and we gained market share across all printing categories, with particular strength in higher-usage segments.

Commercial printer units increased 43%, with multi-function printer units up 83%.
Business ink and wireless printer units were up 22% and 53%, respectively. In addition, we shipped almost two million web-connected printers in the quarter. We continue to innovate across our portfolio. In September, we announced cloud print for businesses, using HP Print Apps, as well as new software capabilities for enterprise printing. In our hardware portfolio, we introduced new products in our Inkjet, LaserJet and Designjet categories. Finally, we are delivering on our growth initiatives in retail publishing and managed print services. During fiscal 2010, we more than doubled our retail publishing install base, and delivered very significant growth in managed print services signings.

[from Q&A]

William Fearnley - Janney Montgomery Scott - Analyst
Thanks. A question either for Cathie or VJ. How should we be thinking about the balance between IPG operating margins and unit growth? I mean operating margin was above 17% in a strong hardware quarter. Is 17 to 17.5 plus the new operating margin target, or do you see having to invest more in sales staff, promotions, things like ePrint, R&D to help keep units strong?

Vyomesh Joshi - Hewlett-Packard - EVP, Imaging and Printing Group
Well, I think IPG had a strong quarter. And we want to continue to invest into unit growth and innovation, because that's really the driving force for IPG continuing to grow revenue. If you look at the unit growth, we want to continue to drive units in 2011.

As a matter of fact, we would like to put at least 20% unit growth for LaserJet in Q1. As far as the innovation is concerned, the ePrint, we are getting very good reception. As I mentioned in the -- our Analyst call, 2 million units in Q4, and 5 million units in calendar 2010. We absolutely believe that our innovation that we are driving will help us to drive more supplies growth, and really establish IPG globally.

October Observations: Neuromarketing and Paper—Bringing Together the New and the Old

2010-10-25T06:46:00.000-07:00

The Hard Copy Observer, October 2010

Observations: Neuromarketing and Paper—Bringing Together the New and the Old

by Jim Lyons

[October 25, 2010] As readers of this column will recognize, I am drawn to new and different techniques and methodologies. This attraction has been true throughout my career in marketing printer products and is also true in my other passion of late, teaching marketing and economics to graduates and undergraduates at The University of Phoenix. This propensity for exploring the “new and exciting” (to me, anyway) has led me, in the realm of my printing industry interests, to looking at new computing platforms and information appliances, such as today’s mobile devices, and projecting their impact on the role of paper and printing. In the latter, the academic environment, I have enjoyed learning as much as I can about the related fields of behavioral economics and neuromarketing during these last few years.

So I was very happy indeed when not long ago, I was led by a Twitter link (another passion) to a post at the Neuromarketing—Where Brain Science and Marketing Meet blog, titled, “Paper Beats Digital for Emotion,” that perfectly captured the confluence of my previously stated interests. As gathered by the short name of the blog in question, neuromarketing is the study of the human brain's reaction to various marketing-related questions that have traditionally been the quest of conventional marketing research, like surveys and focus groups. By using brain science and tools such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines, marketers are beginning to probe beneath the surface of the conscious mind, with the goal of understanding consumers better, either in analyzing reactions to advertising and promotional messages (and in this case, the medium itself) or to the products’ and services’ attributes (for those familiar with the Four P’s, the “promotion” and the “product”). The premise behind neuromarketing is that while in many purchase decisions, consumers cannot really describe why they act the way they do, their reasons may be evident if brain reactions are measured.

In the blog post in question, neuromarketing expert Roger Dooley writes about a study by branding agency MillwardBrown, conducted for the UK’s Royal Mail, which reviewed measurements of consumer reactions with an fMRI machine, and concluded that paper-based direct-mail had a stronger emotional impact on respondents than digital advertising. To quote from Dooley’s post (which in turn quotes from the original study), “The research project used fMRI brain scans to show that our brains process paper-based and digital marketing in different ways, and in particular, that paper ads caused more emotional processing. According to the study, physical media left a ‘deeper footprint’ in the brain, even after for controlling for the increase in sensory processing for tangible items.”

Much of Dooley's post goes on to defend the importance of digital advertising, highlighting many of its capabilities for interactivity, for example, which are beyond the realm of paper. However, the study clearly makes the point that our attachment to paper, whether photos, office documents, or books and magazines, is linked to an indescribable but very real response to items that are tangible, familiar, and comfortable.

The Nuts and Bolts of Neuromarketing

Neuromarketing is relatively new, as the average age of the majority of work regarding the subject (and its academic cousin, neuroeconomics) is at most a few years old. The “industry standard” college marketing textbook, Marketing Management by Philip Kotler and Kevin Lane Keller, omits any mention of the term “neuromarketing” in its 12th edition (copyright 2006), but by its 13th edition (copyright 2009), the authors have included a pull-out box titled, “Marketing Insight—Understanding Brain Science,” in the chapter on conducting marketing research and forecasting demand. (Remember last month’s column on the textbook business, where we reported on frequent edition rollovers viewed by some as value-destroying profitability schemes? In this case anyway, I am pleased to see real value in a new edition!)

To quote the authoritative text (13^th edition), “As an alternative to traditional consumer research, some researchers have begun to develop sophisticated techniques from neuroscience that monitor brain activity to better gauge consumer responses to marketing stimuli...The term neuromarketing has been used to describe brain research on the effect of marketing stimuli. By adding neurological techniques to their research arsenal, marketers are trying to move toward a more complete picture of what goes on inside consumers’ heads.”

In addition to the typical caveats on the cost of conducting the research (as expected, quite high given the need to measure brain waves on one respondent at a time via an fMRI, which was done in the MillwardBrown case, as mentioned), Kotler and Keller point out caveats around complexity and ethics concerns. “Given the complexity of the human brain, however, many researchers caution that neurological research should not form the sole basis for marketing decisions. These research activities have not been universally applauded though. Critics think that such a development will only lead to more marketing manipulation by companies.”

Using the power of neuromarketing, and its measurement and interpretation of the brain’s reactions, in combination with traditional research methods may be the key to understanding our subconscious and emotional reactions to paper, and attitudes about printed material. Kotler and Keller summarize (more generally), “One major finding to emerge from neurological consumer research is that many purchase decisions are characterized less by the logical weighing of variables than was previously assumed and more [quoting a recent study] ‘as a largely unconscious habitual process, as distinct from the rational, conscious, information processing model of economists and traditional marketing textbooks.’ Even basic decisions, such as the purchase of gasoline, are influenced by brain activity at the subrational level.”

Conclusion

The future of paper is certainly a complex story and has yet to unfold (pardon the pun). But techniques related to neuromarketing, focusing on the subconscious and other deep-rooted consumer preferences and decision-making, certainly offer intriguing possibilities that can help predict when and where paper and print will survive and prosper. The Royal Mail case offers one such example and is an indication of further work that needs to be done.

September Observations -- Back to School edition -- the state of college textbooks

2010-09-20T09:08:00.000-07:00

The Hard Copy Observer, September 2010

Observations: Back to School edition -- the state of college textbooks

“I suppose I could collect my books and get on back to school,” is a familiar line from a well-known song and an extremely popular radio hit during my first year of college oh so many years ago. So when it is “Late September” (again, quoting from the same song, though where I live, the timing is typically a month or more earlier in the year), my idle thoughts are often pulled “back to school.” After many years away from academia, I am back and recently much more actively involved. I have offspring in pursuit of undergraduate and graduate degrees and have been working on the faculty side, teaching graduate marketing and undergraduate economics for the University of Phoenix (UOP). My teaching is in addition to my awareness, as writer of this column and commentator, of all things “print,” and my interest is always piqued by a printer or printing situation in a state of flux. And if there was ever a product category in flux, the college textbook market is it.

So I could not have thought of a better theme for my September 2010 Observations column than college textbooks and opportunities that may be coming to the printer industry. I am far from the only industry commentator to pick up on the many issues and changes in the textbook industry—far from it. Frankly, what started as a simple matter of pulling together sources for this column quickly became a bit overwhelming. Between traditional textbooks and new laws, the used and rental markets for texts, print-on-demand solutions, and various e-book schemes, past and present, the college textbook market is extremely dynamic, to say the least. However, I have pulled together some interesting examples, including personal experiences, and conclude that this industry has only just begun to change.

Textbook Economics

As a teacher of marketing and economics, I am always on the lookout for interesting articles to help make subjects come to life for my students. I had a major windfall earlier this year for my pricing and supply-and-demand discussions with a piece that appeared in broadcast form and also via the Web from the combined CNN-Money news organization. Titled, “America’s Nine Biggest Rip-offs,” the piece highlights such obvious “rip-offs” (mostly products and services with extremely high profit margins) including text messages, movie popcorn, and hotel minibars. And right there with them, number six on the list, are college textbooks, with students taking an average hit of $900 during a typical year of study. But unlike the examples of movie and hotel room treats, where raw material costs being a small fraction of the retail price, and thus inspiring the ire of CNN-Money, the textbook category was attacked for having overall prices rise at twice the rate of inflation (from 1986 to 2004) -- which as parents like me will attest, also sounds a lot like a typical college tuition price-escalation curve!

Also cited as part of the textbook “rip-off” are obsolescence-inducing product rollovers (called new editions in this business), where replacement versions with moderate-at-best enhancements devalue previous versions too soon after they were purchased as new, and thus severely erode the old books’ “used” (i.e. aftermarket) value. Sound familiar? And for those not directly familiar with textbook sticker shock, take a look! (See illustration…)

In my classes, I ask students to talk about why these “rip-offs” exist, and thoughts about “captive markets” and “lack of competition” often arise. The presence of these factors may indicate an opportunity for disruption or a new way of doing things and perhaps a call for regulation. And as I’ve looked around the college textbook industry for examples, all of these are present.

One of the most durable concepts in economics is that of Adam Smith’s eighteenth-century “invisible hand,” which dictates that forces in the economy and society at large will lead to suppliers meeting the needs of consumers, in this case, better bargains on textbooks that will only be used for a short period of time. The classic remedy is the presence of the aforementioned used or resale book market, with a combination of traditional intermediaries or newer ones (e.g. the college bookstore or eBay), but, again, quickly obsoleted editions may be increasingly blocking the effectiveness of this approach. Rentals of textbooks have become popular of late, too, though the rental prices often carry similar sticker shock to the new, retail purchase prices, with rentals often amounting to half of retail and including shipment costs and hassles. (The role of government and specifically government regulation might be thought of as the more visible hand – see illustration.)

The NY Times Freakonomics blog takes on recent law regarding textbook pricing disclosure

Textbook Technology

Thus, enters technology … with all the promises (and successes) of e-books over the last several years. This year’s emergence of sub-$200 Amazon Kindles and their ilk, along with the more versatile Apple iPad, which has been touted by many as the key to “the future of book publishing,” all beg the question, “What about electronic textbooks?” The electronic solution certainly argues for lower costs, though the aforementioned “rip-offs” article reminds us that the issue is really not about cost. E-books are hardly a new idea—for example, Amazon’s Kindle DX was touted as a textbook solution at its introduction several years ago, with participating universities in a trial program. (See the 2010 Reed College report for their “close but no cigar” appraisal.)

We know that a number of new tablets are poised to enter the field of electronic textbooks, which is already estimated to have generated about $40 million in sales in 2009, according to Rob Reynolds of Xplana, who is quoted in a market overview in The Wall Street Journal by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg (see “Textbooks up their game,” 8/19/2010). The piece discusses several iPad-based initiatives and points to the opportunity to make e-textbooks enhanced, multimedia learning tools and more than simply repurposed PDF versions of the hard-copy versions.

Textbook Marketing

But what about the users? There’s a bit of marketing wisdom that dictates it always pays to make sure that “the dogs eat the dog food”— no matter how many improvements, bells and whistles, packaging changes, ad campaigns, jingles, etc., testing what the customer really wants and likes is still vitally important. And so far, results, at least one notable set of results, would indicate that a majority of students prefer traditional texts. RIT’s “Print in the Mix” Web site (“a clearinghouse of research on print media effectiveness”) reported on a study at 19 campuses in the fall of 2009 which concluded, “74 percent of U.S. college students still prefer to use a printed textbook when taking a class.” While a 74 percent majority is impressive, the inclusion of the word “still” in the headline infers a future of change.

My Experiences

And what about my own hands-on experience as a faculty member, using the University of Phoenix’s completely electronic e-textbook library, for my own use as well as that of my students? I have written before about the artifact nature of the term “papers” in the UOP academic process, at least the way my classes operate. Students complete individual and team assignments once a week during our accelerated classes, which I grade and turn around within the six-day requirement. However, the papers are rarely if ever “reduced” to hard copy, at least on my end. Like my faculty peers, I have become adept at using the tools of the trade such as multiple monitors and Microsoft Word’s “comment” feature. I do not even own a red pen. So what about textbooks? Our entire assigned library is in e-book/PDF format and consists of popular (and a few obscure) titles from the catalogs of McGraw-Hill, Pearson, and other major textbook publishers.

For the most part, I use the textbooks online via Adobe’s Acrobat reader, with the occasional chapter, or more likely a section, printed locally, in my office or the University’s, for further study, perusal, and/or markup. I eagerly await an iPad or Kindle solution (based on the digital rights management solution yet to be completed – see illustration), and those occasional prints will no doubt be reduced as I read and annotate on the comfort of my iPad and free myself from the restraints of a traditional PC.

So far the lack of a Digital Rights Management solution for University of Phoenix ebooks is standing in the way of iPad access

As for my students? I have been asking their opinions and practices on a regular basis for some time, and their responses are all over the map but generally fall into three categories: read exclusively online; print chapter-by-chapter on home printers or at places like Fedex Office; or source the traditional hard-copy versions from resellers like Amazon (new or used) and go about their reading the old-fashioned way. Fittingly, the nature of their responses is one of my big lessons for all my marketing students (along with the dog-food analogy): markets are composed of segments!

Now as I reach the end of my allocated word count and go back to read my title, “The State of the College Textbook Industry,” I realize how I have only really scratched the surface, and this topic was perhaps an overly ambitious undertaking. So many more sides of the discussion remain, with future prospects for the industry and potential debates and arguments. But the end is here, and it is time to move on. Once again, sounds just like college!

Thanks Adventures in Office Imaging!

2010-09-09T14:12:00.000-07:00

My thoughts on Managed Print Services, at least a few of them, were solicited recently by Nathan Dube at the Adventures in Office Imaging blog. In MPS Interview #7 (just like Mickey Mantle), I respond to some basic questions on the state of Managed Print Services, past, present and future.

Thanks to @DubiousMonk!

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

2010-08-26T14:36:00.000-07:00

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 Apple's 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 Amazon's 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 year's 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 app's 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 I've 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, it's 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/

HPQ Q3FY2010 Printer metrics and commentary

2010-08-23T07:09:00.000-07:00

From the Earnings teleconference, here are the comments and number.

From HP Earnings Teleconference Q32010 August 19 2010

Available at HP Investor Relations site.

(Opening summary, as presented by interim CEO Cathie Lesjak)

Looking at the details of our performance by business. Revenue in the imaging and printing business grew 9% to $6.2 billion, fueled by year-over-year unit shipment growth of 16% and supplies revenue growth of 5%. Commercial hardware revenue increased 28%, while consumer hardware revenue grew 4% compared with the prior year quarter. Segment operating profit totaled $1 billion, or 16.9% of revenue. We continue to lead the market with innovative new products. In June, we launched the ePrint platform and the ePrint Center and announced we were expanding our portfolio of web-connected printers to include all printers above $99. This strategy is driving success with third quarter consumer Inkjet hardware shipments up 9% year-over-year, led by 64% growth in wireless printers and OfficeJet growth of 16%.In addition, our retail publishing footprint continues to expand both in the US and across the world. Commercial printer unit shipments grew 44% with strong mono and color laser shipments as hardware availability improved significantly from the prior quarter. We continue to see strong momentum in our growth initiative in the enterprise and commercial print market, both graphic arts and managed printer services grew double digits. Multi-function printer shipments increased 47% over the prior year period, and HP Indigo Digital Press page volume was up 22%. We will continue to aggressively target these markets, leveraging our technology leadership to drive the shift from analog to digital printing.

(Selected Q&A – printer and supplies related questons and answers)

Brian Alexander - Raymond James - Analyst

Thank you. Good evening. Cathie, you mentioned increasing investments in R&D and sales and marketing in your prepared remarks. It seems like a quite a few investors believe the next CEO might decide to noticeably step up the pace of investment as they assume the Company has systematically underinvested in recent quarters, so the concern is this would create near term margin pressure and perhaps even a reset of earnings expectations, so I'm just wondering if you could address the premise that HP has been underinvesting and do you plan to reflect the possibility of the next CEO investing more aggressively when you provide the FY 2011 outlook at your analyst day?

Vyomesh Joshi - Hewlett-Packard - EVP - Imaging & Printing Group

Brian, this is VJ. At Ipex, we introduced our next generation of Web Press, we got a phenomenal feedback. On June 6, we introduced all of our new web connected printers, that below $99, every single printer will have an e-mail address and you could see the results. We gained two points of market share in Inkjet. We had 16% unit growth in every single category, we are increasing our market share so from an innovation point of view, we are on fire. As a matter of fact, the feedback that we get that the product portfolio that we have right now is the best in the last six years.

Ben Reitzes - Barclays Capital - Analyst
Yes, thanks. Could you talk a little bit about what you're seeing in the businesses from this context? I mean, I think some might be surprised that a lot of the revenue upside was in PCs and services versus my model and obviously there's been strength in enterprise and there's been strength in printers for some, and I just would have thought maybe supplies or some of the other things might have picked up more. I was wondering if there's shortages there and if you could just talk about the segments a little more because I think PCs were a lot better than expected and services revenue as well, and some of the others look like there might still be some shortages and what not heading into the next quarter.

Cathie Lesjak - Hewlett-Packard - CFO, Interim CEO

So Ben, in terms of supplies growth, so we had 5% supplies growth year-over-year and on a constant currency basis that was8% supplies growth, so still, quite strong supplies growth and as we've talked most of this year, we have this roughly threepoints of currency headwind and we see that continuing into Q4, so if you think about supplies growth, we think about it in terms of kind of reported mid single digits and on a constant currency mid to high single digits for Q4.

Ben Reitzes - Barclays Capital - Analyst

And was there still constraints in the quarter?

Vyomesh Joshi - Hewlett-Packard - EVP - Imaging & Printing Group

No, I think-- this is VJ, Ben. There are no constraints. I think the LaserJet you can see 44% unit growth that we delivered and clearly, we have a tremendous demand here. The LaserJet brand is fantastic, and we are expecting in fourth quarter at least30% unit growth for the LaserJet, so we believe that the demand is strong, we continue to get out of the availability and in the supplies, you'll also remember that we are gaining share against refill and reman so we are really driving our supplies sell out, we absolutely believe that putting more units now and valuable units and with web connectivity and the stuff that we are doingwith ink in the office we will continue to see very good growth.

Bill Fearnley - Janney Montgomery Scott - Analyst

Yes, thanks. If I could address the question of VJ in printing. It appears that the supply chain is fixed and so with the strong hardware performance this quarter, you still came in at the high end of the 15 to 17% range, so should we start, should we bethinking about IPG operating margins in the 16 to 18% range given that the strong hardware performance and then I have aquick follow-up.

Cathie Lesjak - Hewlett-Packard - CFO, Interim CEO

Let me address that. We don't let VJ talk about those things. Our guidance for this year is 15% to 17% and we're not really changing that at this point. We will talk more about what our guidance is for 2011 at our security analyst meeting. Our goal isto get as much growth as we can in the good usage hardware units and stay within our 15 to 17%.

Bill Fearnley - Janney Montgomery Scott - Analyst

And have you seen any effect of the expanded Canon relationship any benefit there in the most recent quarter?

Vyomesh Joshi - Hewlett-Packard - EVP - Imaging & Printing Group

I think we have started with the copier lineup. We like the lineup that we got. We are selling managed print services , we had a very good quarter, sort of what total contract value for managed print services and I think the very important part is we want to continue to invest and innovate because innovation is our blood line so we want to make sure that not only do we place high usage unit but also we continue to innovate.

Jeff Fidacaro - Susquehanna Financial Group - Analyst

Great. Thanks for taking the question. Just on the supply side grew 5% in the quarter. Could you talk a little bit about how the inventory looks there? Was there any points contributed to a channel fill and I may have missed this but how is the fiscal fourth quarter shaping up, is that sort of a mid single digit type growth again?

Vyomesh Joshi - Hewlett-Packard - EVP - Imaging & Printing Group

I think the channel looks very satisfying as Cathie mentioned. We are focused on making sure that we put the right units in the place and get the right sell out. As far as the Q4 is concerned, we continue to look at the mid single digit range.

Cathie Lesjak - Hewlett-Packard - CFO, Interim CEO

And I think I should have said that we got the 8% constant currency growth without channel, the benefit of any channel fill, unlike some of our competition.

Thanks American Printer Blog -- hosting Part Two of my guest post

2010-08-11T11:36:00.000-07:00

My friends over at the American Printer In Focus blog have flattered me by hosting another guest post, Part Two in my ink-and-toner-economics series. Check it out, please! Inkjet vs Toner, Part Two.

July Observations: Memorable Hard Copy Advertising Taglines—Part Two

2010-07-28T09:43:00.000-07:00

The Hard Copy Observer, July 2010

In last month’s Observations column (see “Observations: Memorable Hard Copy Advertising Taglines—Part One”), I explored some printer industry taglines, after being inspired by an article in Forbes magazine on the “25 greatest advertising taglines.” The list was the result of voting by a group of corporate CMOs, including Xerox’s Krista Carone, who shared further thoughts about some of her company’s greatest (and longest lasting) advertising achievements. The column just did not seem to offer enough space to go beyond Xerox, so in this second part of my “tagline” observations, I look at some advertising experiences with HP and our industry at large.

HP’s “Set Your Lasers On Stun” and Dalmatians

HP's Garage is perhaps the most enduring symbol of the "original" Silcon Valley company.

HP’s LaserJet celebrated its 25th anniversary last year (see, “Observations: 25 years of the LaserJet”) and has certainly earned a role in the “product Hall of Fame,” for the printer industry and for products and marketing in general. But what about advertising? Some long-time HP employees recall an early ad, put together with Microsoft, touting the crisp, clean laser-printed copy available by combining the mid-1980 wonders of Microsoft Word (pre-Windows) with the new HP LaserJet. The ad carried the tagline, “Set your lasers on stun,” and while that line did not endure, it was a favorite with Star Trek fans. (I admit to not being a Trekkie, so I took a few years to make the association to one of Captain James Kirk’s favorite lines, “Set your phasers on stun.”)

And it was just a few years later, with the advent of new LaserJet models around the beginning of the 1990’s, when HP seemingly struck gold with the “Dalmatians” theme to advertise its new LaserJet printers. The theme was a natural, with the lovable black-and-white-spotted dogs featured in print and television ads associated with the latest and greatest monochrome-only printers of the day.

Ask The Experts

As last month’s interview with Xerox’s Carone pointed out, there are “taglines” per se, and then there are other advertising-industry descriptors for other themes. For example, Xerox’s successful “Document Company” phrase was never a tagline but a “signature statement.” So at the risk of over-simplifying, how did these two HP themes size up? While they are warmly remembered by insiders, neither has stood the test of time in the minds of the public, as HP continues to roll out new themes and taglines on a regular basis—see, for example, this year’s “Let’s Do Amazing” effort (see illustration below).Carone’s wisdom on what makes for “great” or at least memorable taglines included “an ability to transcend generations and markets.” She explained that they tend to strike a societal chord, which in turn, gives them long-term staying power and relevance. As mentioned, the Star Trek-themed “stun” ads were not meant to transcend generations but were quite focused on a techy (and trekkie) early-adopter segment, very important in the early days of a new product. But HP rolled out the Dalmatian theme to appeal to a much broader and more mainstream audience, five years following the first LaserJet printers, and the firm may have missed the opportunity for that theme to live on longer than it did.

Branding experts Lynn Parker and F. Joseph LePla, in their 2002 book “Integrated Branding,” discuss the importance of “hanging in there” with brand-related motifs and images. They cite HP’s Dalmatians campaign as a good example of not following their advice that “associations must be used for the life of the brand,” even recalling an instance that brought this example literally very close to home for me. Parker and LePla write, “Local schoolchildren in Boise, Idaho, were asked to do advertisements for Hewlett-Packard’s LaserJet printers as a school project. Even though it had been several years since HP’s LaserJet brand had featured Dalmatian dogs in its advertising campaign, most of the kids drew Dalmatians in their ads. Dalmatians had obviously become a valuable association for HP that implied professional-quality printing. However, that value was never leveraged as a lasting part of the customer experience.” While the authors’ observation sheds light on the importance of patience and consistency in marketing, does it also, give us possible insight into where HP was getting its ad ideas. But surely those school kids were not really creating the ads … were they?

YouTube Experiment

Integrated campaigns aside, the Forbes piece on best taglines highlighted memorable TV commercials, and as we are trying to recollect and/or document the memorable ones from our industry, why not query that repository of seemingly all things video, YouTube? My first search, for “Dalmatian commercial” yields a selection of ads, mostly for, you guessed it, Budweiser and Miller beer spots, with nary an HP entry in sight. I then tried a more generic search by simply entering “printer commercial” into YouTube’s search field, and came up with some interesting (if not exactly inspiring) choices. I will leave it to my readers to sample some of the clips on their own, in the privacy of their own cubicles or homes (yes, some of the examples are a bit risqué), but suffice it to say that the available evidence leads one to conclude the printer industry is still probably searching for its first true “killer ad!”

Ink vs toner blog post at American Printer

2010-07-09T10:04:00.000-07:00

Check out my musings about ink and toner in commercial and production environments. Thanks Denise Kapel and Katherine O'Brien!

June Observations: Memorable Hard Copy Advertising Taglines — Part One

2010-06-23T09:32:00.000-07:00

The Hard Copy Observer, June 2010

by Jim Lyons

I have been teaching an MBA-level consumer behavior class recently, and that may be why I gravitated so strongly to a recent online article about favorite advertising taglines. The article in Forbes was based on a survey that asked corporate chief marketing officers (CMOs) to identify the most popular advertising taglines of all time, and here is a quick question for you: What do “Think different,” “Just do it,” “A diamond is forever,” and “We try harder” all have in common? Along with 21 other entries in the “Top 25,” they have little or nothing to do with the printer industry!

The Observer [where this column also appears] does not shy away from reporting and commenting on printing and imaging companies’ advertising, including coverage of recent campaigns by Kodak, Lexmark, and HP, but do any of their taglines, i.e. “Print and Prosper,” “Outsmart Evil Ink,” or “Let’s Do Amazing,” resonate in the old brain in the same way as, “You deserve a break today,” “Got milk?” or “When you care enough to send the very best?”

Among the CMO's who participated in the survey were two from our industry, including Xerox's Christa Carone, who shared some further insights for this column—about taglines generally and some industry specifics. In addition to being on the voting panel, Carone, who has been the Xerox CMO since 2008 and was recently appointed a company vice president (May 2010), is quoted in the Forbes piece referencing Verizon’s “Can you hear me now” tagline as used recently in conversation by her 6-year-old daughter. In a follow-up conversation, Carone helped shed some light on what it took to make the list and shared a few thoughts on why the printer industry was shut out, at least from this particular list of 25. “While the process did not include a lot of science and relied more on ‘gut calls’,” Carone told us, “The favorite taglines do have in common an ability to transcend generations and markets. They tend to strike a societal chord, which in turn, gives them long-term staying power and relevance.”

Carone noted that business-to-business (B2B) campaigns, where many if not most printing and imaging ads are aimed, are typically much more targeted than mass-market, consumer-oriented advertising, so they are almost by definition not going to be as memorable, at least among a wide audience. She explains, “The telecom market, for example, is so broad that it’s possible to establish and form a single-line impression that lasts and permeates the consciousness of people from tweens and teens to older folks.” While B2B has its limits, she pointed to Xerox’s recent campaign that features the tagline, “Ready for Real Business,” and its role in welcoming the integration of recently acquired Affiliated Computer Services, Inc. (ACS) and priming the market for business services that Xerox is now ready to play on a broader scale.

This re-positioning of Xerox, from a more print- and copy-centric version of services to a more generalized offering for which ACS is known, recalls an earlier time when another effort by Xerox to transform its corporate identity comes to mind. “The Document Company” was a Xerox “signature statement” (not to be confused with a tagline), and though the phrase has been out of official usage for about ten years, it still endures. A simple but powerful slogan, “[the Document Company] was helpful in building out the services business for Xerox in the first place, that it was not all about the paper document,” according to Carone. Coming from the copier company that decades earlier saw its company name became so synonymous with its product/service that it became a verb (“Xerox-ing” a page, à la “Googling” a subject), “The Document Company” served quite effectively to help position the firm in a new light.

In terms of originally defining Xerox as the copier company and proving a tagline’s staying power, however, the endurance of the Xerox monk and the “It’s a miracle” television advertising spot is tough to beat. Although not really a tagline in the strictest sense, that slogan and the original 1976 Super Bowl commercial cling to fame, primarily via the propensity for annual recaps of memorable ads from “the big game,” says Carone. Eight years before “1984” and Apple’s famous commercial for the original Macintosh, the Monk whose need to create 500 copies for his Monsignor led him to Xerox, lives on via YouTube and those once-a-year retrospectives of memorable TV ads.

With my personal background that includes many years working in HP’s LaserJet business, I fondly remember some of the campaigns of which HP employees were particularly proud. Next month, I will share my observations about those and other memorable advertising campaigns, if not taglines, from our industry.

May Observations: Zmags—Another Online Viewing Alternative

2010-05-28T06:49:00.000-07:00

The Hard Copy Observer, May 2010

by Jim Lyons

Over the last four-and-a-half years, my Observations column has highlighted numerous alternatives and enhancements to printing. One of the most frequently covered areas, in a variety of forms, is the transition from traditional print to online, non-paper-based “information consumption.,”. I have covered e-books, smart phones, and magazines and newsletters converting to online publishing, with PC Magazine and our very own Hard Copy Observer being two notable examples from the latter category. Just last month’s Observations looked at Google’s news viewer, Fast Flip, and as I keep looking at this space, more and more continues to meet the eye.

Zmags is a growing company helping to facilitate the movement to online viewing, or “information consumption,” that I had a chance to get to know better recently. Starting out in Denmark, the company shares the same 4.5-year lifespan with this column, and helps publishers in the conversion of their magazine content from traditional paper-based to online., and Zmags also participates in the massive, if not quite as visible publishing space that includes brochures, catalogs, flyers, and other marketing collateral.

Going back about 15 years in the printing industry, we started to see the “paper pie” being used in high-level strategic presentations by printer executives. This pie chart, combining all the world’s printed pages (totaling some many trillion annually), showed by category the very small presence of digital printing (in the low single digits as originally presented), just basically office printing and copying at the time, and huge categories of traditionally-printed books, magazines, and newspapers, magazines, and brochures, catalogs, and flyers, to illustrate the opportunity for digital to supersede analog printing. Based on economies brought by electronic distribution (up until “the last mile” where digital printing would step in), customization and shorter print runs were the promise of “distribute and print.” Of course this switch to digital printing could be viewed as only the intermediate step, with non-printing solutions eventually winning out, and this end point is where we could be heading with Zmags, if the firm’s relatively early success is any clue.

Started in Denmark by current CEO Jens Karstoft and two other people, Zmags began as an individual online magazine. After some time passed, the threesome realized that the tools the firm had created were the real value and could be used as a platform by other magazines and the broad world of marketing collateral. Originally self-funded, the company raised $7 million in 2008 to get into the U.S. market and now employs 50 people globally, with about half in Denmark, 20 in the UnitedStates, and five in a small office in the UK, serving 2,500-3,000 customers. Zmags classifies the market into three categories: magazines using the Zmags online publishing platform;, marketing communications clients who publish brochures, catalogs, and flyers online for their clients;, and individual retailers and e-commerce companies either going online or starting online with catalogs and other Web-based sales materials.

When we covered the online conversion of PC Magazine at the beginning of 2009 (Observer, 2/09; /TheLyraWeb/ShowArticleFromFoundset.aspx?ID=1095), we identified its publishing platform as belonging to the vendor Zinio. While Zmags acknowledges Zinio as a primary competitor (along with a few others), at least in the magazine publishing space, Zmags highlights its self-service feature as popular among a number of customers, and assays the firm’s key differentiator is, the ability to track, analyze, and report on reader behavior (pages viewed, time spent per page, videos watched, links clicked, products added to shopping cart, etc.), in other words )—who is reading or looking, when and how often, and what actions are taken as a result, whether drilling down into advertisements in the case of magazines or ordering online in the case of e-commerce.

In a recent interview, Zmags CEO Jens Karstoft and vice president of marketing Peter Velikin described the company’s evolution and future and how they see the needs of the three market areas they have defined. In terms of the three areas of customers served by Zmags—magazines, marketing communications, and online retailers—we asked about distinctions between the latter two. Velikin explained, “Marketing communications and commerce, the difference is that there are two different purposes. The goal of e-commerce customers is to increase the volume and efficiency of their online channel— – online catalogs created with Zmags enable retailers to expose more products, in context, to their target customers and increase conversion rates. Marketers, in contrast, are trying to maximize the time customers spend with their brand and to present their product or service in the most positive light. Tracking and reporting on reader behavior is very useful to our customers in all markets.” ”

When asked to explain in further detail the actual transaction taking place, Velikin describes the Zmags business model as follows, “We are a Software as a Service (SaaS) company, i.e. there is no software for customers to install; they pay an annual subscription fee. Our customers purchase a number of ‘activations.’ An activation is a publication that is created, e.g. a monthly magazine will need 12 activations, one for every issue published, and customer service and support is included in the flat fee.” Velikin concludes, “We have a very simple business model that works to our advantage.”

Zmags and Printing—Threat or Opportunity?

With respect to specific Zmags implementations that drive printing, Karstoft explains, “Yes, there are, especially [related to] books, white papers, etc.,” which go along with the specific content being viewed. While the Zmags solution includes the facility to print locally (see image at ***), we probed a little deeper and asked whether online capabilities like Zmags take away from printing in the long run. Velikin answered, “I think that a bigger portion of information will be collected online—this means less print, more online solutions. This is happening. Zmags offers a great solution for these companies that are looking to embrace the online world but still want to leverage their investment in the offline world (i.e. materials intended for print). In this respect, even though ‘Yes, people will print less if they use Zmags,’ Zmags is synergistic to print companies because it preserves the layout and the mode of consuming information. This means that people will continue to invest in materials that would be suitable for print or online distribution.”

Going back a decade and a half, and as the Web emerged as a legitimate place to go for consumer information, much was made of the repurposing of content, with consoling words to content creators that getting print-oriented materials online was simply a matter of putting the existing print materials into an online format. This scenario led to the creation of the term, meant to be less-than-flattering, of “brochure-ware.” Today Velikin notes, “Converting hard copy to online changes expectations, not just simple conversion.” Karstoft adds, “Taking the offline version and putting it online means big changes—[the new version] needs to be an active magazine, interactive, etcetera, customized for the online reader experience.”

Karstoft continues, “Between the three areas [of magazines, marketing communications, and e-commerce, the Zmags business is] evenly split across them, [but we are] more focused on marketing corporations (collateral). [We] see the market space now with lots of people making investments, and we have customers who benefit from using Zmags in the publishing world, but a fundamental business model problem is that online rules are different. [It’s a] whole other ecosystem. [Going online, by itself,] won’t save the business! [Clients will be dealing with] different variables, distribution, biz model, etcetera...”

With the recent weeks’ tech news dominated by the Apple iPad and its lack of support for Adobe’s Flash technology developing as the major battleground in an Adobe/Apple war, we felt obliged to ask Zmags three questions on Flash, a technology currently prominently featured in the firm’s platform. Karstoft responded, “The Apple iPad is the next evolution of portable devices, covering ‘sofa surfing.’ [As a vision,] we are delivering content in a user-friendly way. We don’t convert PDF to Flash, we convert offline materials to an online experience. We have a flash viewer that is best suited for viewing on a large screen, such as a PC, and a non-flash mobile viewer, (to be released soon,) that is optimized for viewing on most mobile devices, including iPhone, iPad, and Android devices.”

Understanding customers and their needs, including the intermediate publisher as a client/customer and their customers, corporate marketers, and end users, is a key to business success. Zmags seems to have a good handle on those ever-changing user needs and has a good chance to be very successful in its pursuit of new viewing alternatives.

HPQ Q2FY2010 Printer metrics and commentary

2010-05-20T11:07:00.000-07:00

Below find the updated spreadsheet on HP's printer business, as updated during this week's earnings announcement and discussion. Some of the commentary includes:

CEO Mark Hurd, prepared remarks:

IPG continues to make significant progress in placing units with high page consumption such as ink in the office, wireless, and graphics, each of which grew more than 30%. We installed roughly 2400 retail photo kiosks this quarter and expect roughly 7,000 placements by year-end. Managed print services had strong signings and Indigo press pages grew 26%. We continue to make significant investments in this business while delivering 17.2% operating margin.

CFO Cathie Leskjak, prepared remarks:

Looking at the details of our performance by business, during the second quarter, revenue in the Imaging and Printing business grew 8% to $6.4 billion. Consumer hardware revenue increased 16% and commercial hardware revenue grew 13% compared with the prior year quarter and supplies posted solid 6% growth. Segment operating profit totaled $1.1 billion or 17.2% of revenue. Total printer unit shipments grew 9%, with consumer printer units up 15%. Commercial printer units declined 8%, reflecting constrained product availability. During the quarter, laser printer average selling prices increased as we focused on placing high value units. We expect LaserJet system availability to improve significantly in Q3 with more than 30% year-over-year unit growth next quarter. For the full year, we still expect double digit unit growth for both Inkjet and LaserJet printers.

We continue to gain significant traction in our growth initiatives with managed print services, retail publishing and commercial graphics each delivering double digit growth. Managed print services had multi-million dollar wins in every geography across diverse industries including financial services, telecommunications, and transportation. HP's managed print services offering is being recognized by customers and industry analysts for its industry leading management tools and infrastructure, and its ability to deliver focused solutions for customers. Retail publishing has had several large wins, installing approximately 2400 systems this quarter. In our commercial graphics business, growth accelerated across the portfolio with digital impressions up 26% from the prior year.

From the Q&A following, four distinct questions regarding printing and imaging, with some very interesting answers from Hurd and Lesjak.

Bill Shope - Credit Suisse - Analyst

Okay, thanks. Mark, can you walk us through your strategic rationale on the PALM deal, and then going forward should we still assume that most of your future acquisition focus will be at least more enterprise focused than consumer?

Mark Hurd - Hewlett-Packard - Chairman, CEO

Well, our enterprise -- our history has been more acquisitive certainly in the enterprise but again, Bill, like we've said before, all of our acquisitions, regardless of where they are, go through a pretty extensive filter in terms of making sure they are strategically sensible, financially sensible and that we can actually operate and get some incremental leverage in operating performance out of it. So it's got to hit all three filters.

I think in this case, of PALM and our planned acquisition of PALM, it really has more to do with the intellectual property and the fact that when you look across the HP ecosystem of interconnected devices, it is a large family of devices and we think of printers, you've now got a whole series of web connected printers and as they connect to the web you need an OS. We prefer to have that OS in our case to be our IP where we can control the customer experience, as we always have in the printing business and that's a big deal to us. You can certainly make the same case for smaller form factor products in the mobile world like Slate and some other products and again, I don't want to tell you that we're not going to have --

Microsoft is probably one of the best relationships we've got in our Company and they are still extremely important to us. There are a couple of form factors, though, that are very attractive for us and there are small form factors where we think the IP can be very additive to us. So it isn't precisely, Bill, a SmartPhone play as I've seen some people write. Clearly that's a $45billion total available market that is growing and so that is an attractive market, but it is for us strategically broader in the context of the number of HP interconnected devices where we can leverage the IP and that's what we plan to do.

Ben Reitzes - Barclays Capital - Analyst

Thanks a lot. Mark, could you talk about what's going on in printing? I was kind of stunned by the guidance for laser printer snext quarter, up 30%. It would seem like there was a significant deferral or push out and last quarter you said that the constraints would be over by this quarter and now it's by next quarter, I'm just wondering if this is a firm target or a moving target and then just how we reconcile the printing units for the year that way.

Mark Hurd - Hewlett-Packard - Chairman, CEO

Sure, thanks, Ben. Listen, we think we'll have a strong quarter this being Q3 in terms of unit placements for lasers. I'm not thrilled with the Q2 unit numbers, but I am pretty pleased with the types of units we put in the market. The ASPs were up significantly in lasers, so the units we could get, we got the right units, if you will, from a printer placement perspective. So I think you should expect a very strong back half in laser and a very strong Q3 and we have good line of sight and good visibility to that going into the quarter. Demand has continued to be strong. I think, Ben, when you talked about the broader printing business, a very strong quarter for us obviously in ink placements again, we felt very good about our ink line up of products, the growth in wireless printing and in web connected printers continues to be very strong. So I think IPG very strong in ink. As we mentioned in our script and in our opening messages, the position in retail photo kiosk, Ben, is a big deal. We installed as many retail photo kiosks in the quarter as we had for the entire life of the product, so for us this was a doubling of that base. We plan to exit at over 7,000 as we exit the year. Managed print services had another very significant quarter and again, the importance of those two businesses for us are those are long term businesses, managed print services five year contracts, retail photo kiosks staying installed nine and 10 years,100% connect of supplies to those products and they are beginning to be a meaningful part of our portfolio. So I think across IPG, when you look at the supplies growth we reported, which is the dollar number as opposed to the local number and the local number would have been yet higher. Ben, overall we felt very good about the IPG quarter, and we've worked hard to get the business in a position to be able to do what we've just reported. The one thing we really want to get done is what you opened with. We want to get the laser printer number into a position where we're driving unit growth and the demand is there.

Ben Reitzes - Barclays Capital - Analyst

It sounds like you're guiding for acceleration in the segment, so that's the bottom line, right?

Mark Hurd - Hewlett-Packard - Chairman, CEO

Yes, listen. We feel good about the position of the segment. Now, as you know, the acceleration of the segment and sometimes comes with a price and as we place more units when we see the demand opportunity, but that's one of the reasons we've worked so hard on the supply chain, to put ourselves in a position to actually get that acceleration, or if you will, seize that acceleration when the opportunity presents itself. And Ben, I think that's the position we put ourselves in.

Ben Reitzes - Barclays Capital - Analyst

Thanks a lot.

Cathie Lesjak - Hewlett-Packard - CFO
Ben, the other thing I'd add is that we did say at the end of Q2 and we still believe this is the case, that we will get double digit growth in laser units and ink units for the full year and if you actually look at the results that we teed up in terms of laser unit placements in Q2, they were not materially different than what we had expected going into Q2.

Ben Reitzes - Barclays Capital - Analyst

Okay, thank you.

Mark Hurd - Hewlett-Packard - Chairman, CEO

Yes, thanks, Ben.

Scott Craig - Banc of America Merrill Lynch - Analyst
Thanks, good afternoon. Cathie, can you maybe look at the IPG margins over the next couple of quarters as you see the hardware increasing perhaps as a percentage of sales, particularly given the laser growth that you're looking at? How does that impact the margins of that business and your thought process around the range of what possible margins could be in there throughout the rest of the year? Thanks.

Cathie Lesjak - Hewlett-Packard - CFO

Well, I'm not really going to update the guidance for the full year beyond the 15% to 17% that we think are kind of the margins for IPG this year. We believe we can definitely manage anything that's coming down the pike right now in that range. On the hardware unit placements can uptick significantly and we still absorb it and that's because we've just done a great job of frankly making operating IPG in a tighter way and getting supply chain costs and OpEx costs out of the cost structure, so that we're able to absorb these unit placements and still maintain industry leading profitability.

Mark Hurd - Hewlett-Packard - Chairman, CEO

I think to Cathie's point, this is a big point, Scott, in a very strange way 2009 was really a blessing for us and I'll emphasize in a strange way, because it really got us sharper and IPG is a really good example of that. We thought we were going in pretty sharp and we certainly sharpened up. Our ability now to deal with some of these issues has just given us more flexibility, to do the kind of unit performance that we've talked about here for the full year, forget this quarter or that quarter, but when you look at the full year unit performance and the opportunities we have in terms of placements. Again understand, Scott, we've done this while investing and placing these retail photo kiosks. So I want to make sure this is no trivial issue that we've been able to absorb the start up of the managed print services businesses, we've been able to install these retail photo kiosks, which are very similar to the printer model just bigger units, forecast the growth to take the unit growth in Inkjet, the forecast that we have in laser and do all of that within the targeted margins that we've described, and this has given us a level of flexibility that, frankly, if you went back three or four years, we simply couldn't have done this and so this is a big deal for us.

Cathie Lesjak - Hewlett-Packard - CFO

Scott, it's not just about the P&L. It's also about working capital management. We have -- we're able to operate with much lower channel inventory levels today because we've improved our efficiency on that side, and then also the owned inventory levels are down significantly year on year, again this quarter. And we expect continued improvement in that space and so it's really the entire ecosystem of the IPG business, both the income statement and the balance sheet and our partners.

Mark Hurd - Hewlett-Packard - Chairman, CEO

Great. Thank you.

Scott Craig - Banc of America Merrill Lynch - Analyst

Thanks, I'll keep it to my one question.

Brian Alexander - Raymond James & Associates - Analyst

Thanks, just to go back to the laser business, sorry for beating a dead horse, but can you just be a little more specific on what caused the core laser units to be down 8% after growing 11% last quarter while the market growth was actually accelerating? What specifically needs to improve? Seems like the product constraints have been prevalent for multiple quarters. So is any of this intentional seeding of market share due to low price points by competitors, and if you could comment on supplies, did the growth in local currency accelerate in line with your expectations and do you think that will continue for the balance of the year as placements for lasers pick up? Thanks.

Cathie Lesjak - Hewlett-Packard - CFO

Well, on the laser side it's really capacity. Just the inability to get as many laser units as we wanted and the demand that we had for them so two things have happened. One is demand has picked up and improved more than what we had expected. That's good news and it's also bad news because we haven't been able to get the capacity. We have a very strong backlog coming out of Q2, and like I said earlier, what happened in Q2 in terms of the laser unit decline is not really a surprise to us. It's materially what we had expected going into Q2. This was always going to be a back half, very strong back half unit placement for lasers in order to get to the double digits for the year that we believe is very doable.

Mark Hurd - Hewlett-Packard - Chairman, CEO

Yes, Brian, this is where we expected to be roughly speaking. There was no sort of surprise to us. I think what -- I would characterize it differently. We would like to have had more. That's probably the better way to think about it and let me make sure I'm clear with you. No, we did not do any hold back because of price points, quite the opposite. We were pushing as hard as we could towards the end of the quarter and we're pushing as hard as we can right now. The demand is strong, so to Cathie's point that's the good news.

The bad news is we haven't been able to fulfill as much customers want. The brand loyalty to HP is just, unless you're here feeling it you wouldn't get it. It is just amazing how our partners and our customers stick with us on this and we're going to get better at this and I'm telling you, I think you three will turn on it. To your point about supplies, supplies have been strong. It's good news and I think it's also not just the unit placements, as we've talked before, Brian. Getting the right units placed is actually more important than the unit -- number of units that get placed and to some degree I think you saw that show up in Q2 as well. When you look at the ASPs in the laser business, let me flip it around, what we were able to focus on was getting the right units out and that did pay dividends within the context of a number that clearly we just wish was better. Okay, well let me wrap it up here. I think the conclusion of it for us is we feel very good about the broad based growth in the quarter, 13% growth for us is, we think, a good result, not only the fact that we grew 13, but the fact that it was contributed to across regions and across our businesses we think was extremely positive. We are a stronger Company today and I want to emphasize that based on our portfolio, our scale, and our consistent execution. Now, at the same time we have more work to do to transform ourselves to reach our potential. So as good as we feel in some respects about what we've done, we are still not to our full potential and we feel good about our position, which gives us the confidence, as we described here, to raise our outlook from where we previously had it.

So thank you all for joining us. We do appreciate it.

A NYC VC Crowd-sources his new MFP

2010-05-10T06:24:00.000-07:00

Fred Wilson, a New York-based Venture Capitalist and prolific blogger (http://www.avc.com/) and tweeter (@fredwilson), recently solicited opinions on his upcoming printer/multi-function purchase. He's summarized that advice along with reporting on his decisions, in his latest post (see "Multi-Function Printer Follow-up") with somewhat surprising results.

Epson comes out the winner (as does a stand-alone scanner by Fujitsu!), with HP's marketing efforts getting props for reaching out and, unlike any other vendor, adding their own comments.

Thanks to friend Bob for the heads-up on this, and to Fred for this interesting testing of the MFP waters! (As well as his MBA Mondays!)

April Observations: Google Fast Flip — More Innovation in Magazine and Newspaper Viewing

2010-04-30T06:33:00.000-07:00

The Hard Copy Observer, April 2010

Observations: Google Fast Flip — More Innovation in Magazine and Newspaper Viewing

In the world of high-tech these days, Google is all but impossible to ignore. Whether it is the fun, such as the beginning-of-the-month April Fools’ joke over renaming itself Topeka; the flaps, such as the recent censorship issues in China; or even the flops, like the peak of interest in the firm’s new social media solution, “Google Buzz,” followed by seeming public indifference just weeks later, Google seems to be forever in the news. Nonetheless, the company still occasionally manages stealth activities that offer true innovation. One example that seems relevant to the printing industry is Google’s Fast Flip program, which is now featured as part of the regular Google News Web page.

Starting last fall, I became aware of the Google Fast Flip standalone site, as it appeared in some of my searches. I was particularly interested in the presentation of newspaper and magazine pages, grouped by subject matter or source, as that topic was parallel in many ways to the PC Magazine online conversion that I covered at the end of 2008 (click here; http://jimlyonsobservations.blogspot.com/2009/06/observations-from-magazine-rack.html). A little research proved that Fast Flip was one of many Google labs projects that may or may not become established in any meaningful way. As the official Google blog explained in September 2009, Google worked with three dozen publishers to put their content online in the form of an intuitive, easy to access newspaper/magazine style, complete with the ability to quickly flip through pages as the name suggests.

Google proceeded along, promptly but quietly, and by December, announced that it had signed up 50 additional “newspapers, magazines, Web outlets, newswires, and TV and radio broadcasters,” bringing the firm’s total number of sources to nearly 90. Early in 2010, Google quietly inserted Fast Flip into the bottom of the Google News page. One more point about this Google effort? These are cooperative relationships. Recently, much press has been given to the inevitable conflict between Google and traditional publishers, but in the case of Fast Flip, anyway, there is a cooperative agreement for revenue sharing from advertising.

As shown in some of the images below, Google combines search with the printed publication metaphor to present familiar looking magazine-type pages that viewers can scroll through, to the left or right. Another quick mouse click pulls up a full page version of the page of interest, but this is really just an enlarged thumbnail, with another click getting full browser access to the original page. And what about printing? While Google did not respond directly to questions about printing from Fast Flip, apparently the only way (for now) to print a page is to scroll to the page of interest, click through to the “real” page, and then print via traditional browser printing.

As some readers may remember when we chronicled the conversion of PC Magazine from hard copy to online, the participating online publishing company, Zinio (www.zinio.com), actually enhanced the online version to allow easier printing, including collections of pages (click here; http://jimlyonsobservations.blogspot.com/2009/02/thanks-for-listening-pc-magazine.html). Perhaps Google Labs will get the message, too, and offer enhanced printing from Fast Flip directly. Speaking of PC Magazine, one of Google’s 90 sources is that venerable publication, and by presenting the source in a continuous fashion, rather than issue by issue, I found I could gather more relevant collections, like everything PC Magazine has published on printers over several months (see below).

And speaking of news and PC Magazine, a recent piece by Michael Miller, the same industry guru I quoted last year about the history of PC Magazine's printer coverage over the years (click here; http://jimlyonsobservations.blogspot.com/2009/02/observations-new-online-pc-magazine.html), titled, “Can the iPad Save Magazines?”; (http://blogs.pcmag.com/miller/2010/04/can_the_ipad_save_magazines.php) covers a new Zinio iPad application that gives users access to Zinio’s large stable of publications.

I always enjoy Miller's smart take on things, plus he's a realist. I really enjoyed his comments about print versus on-screen reading: “I don't believe that tablets or iPads or the Web will make magazines, or newspapers for that matter, disappear, because paper still offers many advantages. It's much easier to tear out an article from a print magazine, to annotate it, to share it with someone—and you don't really worry about taking it to the beach or leaving it behind.” Paper and printing advocates may love that sentiment, but Miller also sees the advantages of E-reader-based pubs (and for this purpose, I'm including conventional PC browsers as E-readers), with the inclusion of features such as live links, as opposed to “a slavish reproduction of print on a tablet.” (Editor’s note: The Hard Copy Observer, having undergone its own online conversion recently, also understands the importance of appropriate formatting and content presentation.)

With April 2010 now in the books and remembered in tech circles as the month of the iPad, it is nice to see a “small humble company” like Google staying out of the news and quietly innovating, in this case with online publications and its Fast Flip program.
____

Follow Fast Flip’s history with these three blog posts:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/read-news-fast-with-google-fast-flip.html
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/more-great-new-sources-to-discover-in.html
http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/fast-flip-now-available-on-google-news.html

Winds of change at this blog

2010-03-30T07:48:00.000-07:00

It's appropriate to post this in March, the windy month, though the changes in this blog have been in the works for some time.

A combination of things, including my more active roles with both Twitter and The Hard Copy Observer, have led me to de-emphasize my blogging here. I am far from shutting down however, as my monthly Observations will continue to appear here as well as in the Observer, and my Tweets (on the right) are always visible here, and I've found that Twitter is a good substitute for much of what I've done here for four years, which is highlight interesting printing-industry and tech develops, and then comment on them. My Tweets still have all those links, though often my comments are of necessity a bit more brief!

Beyond my monthly column, I will continue to post other things occasionally too, such as my well-read quarterly HP printer industry metrics.

It was back March 2006 that I started this blog in earnest (backfilling with Observations columns going back to December 2005), and over 700 posts later, I'm looking forward to continuing at a more modest pace.

Thanks readers and glad to get this out before April Fool's Day!

March Observations: Greening Up This Time of Year—The Commercial Point of View

2010-03-16T07:12:00.000-07:00

by Jim Lyons

The Hard Copy Observer, March 2010

Observations: Greening Up This Time of Year — The Commercial Point of View

Here we are on the cusp of spring, with the St Patrick's Day holiday imminent and the equinox on its heels. What better time to think about a few things "green" in our industry, even if that term’s usage is a bit metaphoric?

I've been thinking about the continuing "green" trend in our part of the printer industry. The Observer has covered this in its many forms for some time now, with the 2010 Lyra Imaging Symposium devoting a major session to the topic as well. The range of green subjects has included the more environmentally-conscious "reuse, reduce, and recycle" emphasis on the device and supplies side, the energy-savings component with OEM suppliers providing more efficient printers, and the role of software and managed print services (MPS) in reducing print volumes and printing what remains more efficiently.

But what about the folks up-market in the printing business? Are the print-for-pay folks feeling the same pressures from customers, competitors and (at least potential) regulators, to "green up?" Is there harmony and/or conflict between our end of the business, i.e. home and office-oriented printing, and graphics-arts and commercial printing?

To help answer my questions, I had an opportunity to talk with Gail Nickel-Kailing, one of the key opinion leaders in that end of the business, about some of these very topics. As you will see, she provides some great perspective on when and why the high end of printing can be “greener” than our end of the market and why they are concerned about a range of issues we do not cover very often. Acknowledging, too, that the overlap between vendors is quite high (HP and Xerox come to mind), there are some key differences too.

Lyons: Gail, thanks so much for agreeing to share your thoughts with me and the Observer. Can you state some of the biggest elements of the green printing trend, from the perspective of the markets you cover? And can you clarify that last part, i.e. which markets do you cover?

Nickel-Kailing: The market segments in the graphic-arts industry that I follow most closely are equipment manufacturers, production-scale and office equipment, and paper and ink suppliers. Let’s start with paper and ink suppliers because they seem to be most visible across our industry and in the corporate market. I see three key trends in this space.
• Certified and recycled paper: The major vendors have been consistently increasing the amount of recycled content in their papers until the standard is around 30 percent, and we’re seeing a number of brands going to 100 percent. Even coated papers have reached levels exceeding 10 percent recycled content. While merchants and mills may have just one of the three certifications because their fiber comes from specific forests, printers recently have upped their certification to two or three. The major external cost of certification is the auditor, and because the three certifying bodies follow similar guidelines, it is not much more costly to get three rather than justone. Paper mills/merchants are providing many more resources, tools and services to designers to encourage the use of their products, including the certified and recycled papers. Office paper merchants and big-box stores are offering copier/desktop printer papers with 30 percent, 50 percent and 100 percent recycled content.
• Vegetable/bio-based and low VOC inks: Ink manufacturers are beginning to offer more water-based and vegetable/bio-based inks. NAPIM, the National Association of Printing Ink Manufacturers, last year developed a certification program for inks containing high amounts of bio-derived renewable content (BRC). Seventeen ink manufacturers have registered 140 brands of inks with BRC indices ranging from 20 to 90.
• Recyclability of printed pieces: At drupa 2008, the question of recyclability of ink jet printed pages was raised and has been drawing comment ever since. The crux of the issue is how deeply embedded is the ink in the fibers. Toner—both wet and dry—and inks cured by a variety of means, including UV and IR, are considered by some to be more easily de-inked than ink jet inks. The larger issue however is finishing of printed products. Most foils and laminates will push printed pieces from the recyclable to non-recyclable categories. Designers need to “design for end of life” when creating printed promotional pieces.

When I look at printing equipment manufacturers—of printers and presses—they seem to fall into three groups: those who offer production-scale equipment, those who offer office/desktop equipment, and those who offer both. Overall, the key trends appear to be in two categories: production and distribution of equipment and use of the equipment.

“Design for environment” has long been a strategy for manufacturers headquartered in Europe, particularly Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium, where environmental laws have been in place for decades. Minimized packaging, recyclability of parts, and alternative energy in production plants—these strategies have been or are now being implemented. Companies based in the U.S., like HP and Xerox are adopting many of those strategies, for competitive and economic reasons.

Office/desktop equipment manufacturers are building double-sided printing options into lower tier models, including energy efficiency such as “auto off”/sleep modes, and offering recycling of all or part of the machine. Take back programs are becoming more popular, possibly reflecting European influences where equipment must be taken back by manufacturers for recycling or reuse.

Lyons: Please describe your publications, their target audiences, focusing (especially) the Going Green newsletter.

Nickel-Kailing: I’ve been an editor and contributor to WhatTheyThink for eight years, since February 2002. And as a journalist and analyst, I write for a range of printed graphic-arts trade publications in the U.S. and Canada. WhatTheyThink subscribers and members are primarily printers (across all processes); equipment manufacturers; paper, ink and consumables suppliers; software vendors; and graphic and package designers.

Beginning in April 2008, WhatTheyThink launched the Going Green blog/Web site to provide more in-depth coverage and more resources for our readers as they look to become more sustainable companies. The weekly Going Green newsletter—a compendium of the top stories from the Going Green site—has been growing consistently since we launched it as a bi-weekly publication in May 2008 and went to weekly in May 2009.

Going Green is much more than a newsletter or a blog; on the site you will find a running list of events across a wide range of subjects (see the Events page). We might have a webinar on paper, a seminar on solar power, and a conference on green package design listed one right after the other. A recent seminar on Water Footprinting and Availability Risk Management was an especially interesting topic.
There is an extensive list of books on the Reading List that is a great reference for companies researching how they should “go green” and learn more about what other companies have done. The list ranges from classics like Natural Capitalism and Cradle to Cradle to newly published books like The Responsibility Revolution and Confessions of a Radical Industrialist. Now that I think of it, sounds like things are heating up!

Lyons: Do you see any conflicts between the world of home/desktop/office/workgroup printing and the graphics arts market in their “green” approaches? What about the idea that “taking away pages” by going short-run and digital helps prevent waste but also takes away volume from the graphics-arts side of things? How could/should the markets be uniting or working together on this?

Nickel-Kailing: Manufacturers that sell both production equipment and office equipment need to be careful that they don’t position one or the other printing process as more “green.” There needs to be a balance between the convenience of having a small office printer in every office and funneling all print projects through a central printing service. Print jobs that can be merged into a production stream, that is, those that are not extremely short and needed for immediate use, can be “greener” as a result of the benefits of scale.

Higher volume production printing can take advantage of more efficient energy use, volume purchases of paper and, perhaps, purchases of paper with a higher percentage of recycled content. Toner and ink delivered in larger quantities is also less expensive. The use of desktop printers is extremely profitable for manufacturers who also sell the consumables. Small volume ink jet ink delivered through desktop printers has been calculated to be one of the most expensive fluids available, selling for hundreds of dollars an ounce. The equipment manufacturers should be partnering with paper companies to encourage the use of hard copy only when necessary. Studies have shown that a vast majority of print coming off desktop printers is “print/view/toss;” the user simply prints for convenience. Printing on both sides is especially important, but “print onlywhen needed” is even more so.

Reflecting on Nickel-Kailing’s remarks, there are definitely some lessons to be learned and cautions to be heeded. Just as she credits European green sensibilities for setting the pace for the rest of the world when it comes to trends in energy efficiency and product take-back, perhaps our end of the industry can learn from the higher end of the market. Two examples include forging closer ties to the office paper providers and higher awareness of which inks and toners on paper lead to the easiest recycling. And that “print/view/toss” paradigm has been a bit of a quiet but volume-building secret of the business and its long-term “distribute and print” usage model— perhaps it’s not such a secret any more?

Correction -- Fandango using Datamatrix, not QR codes

2010-03-15T11:39:00.000-07:00

Thanks to a tweet from @rogersmolski, I realize my earlier post, the Fandango paperless ticket solution is based around Datamatrix codes, and not the competing QR codes. While each two-dimensional barcode technology offers similar functionality, I regret the error, as it's an important distinction for those directly involved. I suspect this kind of "innocent" mistake feels to those in the biz a little bit like when I, or another with a long printer industry background, hear someone talk about their inkjet printer's toner!

Fandango launches paperless movie ticket trial -- Love those QR Codes

2010-03-15T08:18:00.001-07:00

Thanks to Techcrunch on this one, with Eric Shonfeld's piece this morning (see "Fandango Begins Rolling Out Mobile Tickets That Let Moviegoers Go Paperless"), about an eight-city trial (my word, not theirs) launched by Fandango to accept movie "tickets" via images on customers' smart phones, using QR Codes. (See "January 2010 Observations" on QR Codes.) Fandango's blurb about their new capability touts "no need for paper, or printers" (see above), though of course, as Schonfeld points out, there's an infrastructure investment required (theaters need to be equipped to read the QR codes) which means universal acceptance in down the road a ways. However, Fandango's announcement does come less than nine months after their partnership with HP and their direct Web-Connect Printer (see "HP Reveals").

Read about Fandango's solution in their FAQs.

Scribd goes mobile

2010-02-24T09:50:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Technologizer, I'm aware of Scribd's newest feature, the ability to send their docs to mobile devices, including Kindle and iPhone. See Harry McCracken's excellent description of the process ("Scribd goes mobile"). I tried it (above), and like it! BTW the doc I used is an academic treatment of one of my favorite subjects, Neuromarketing.

HP (NYSE HPQ) 1st quarter 2010 results -- back to printing green!

2010-02-17T14:16:00.000-08:00

HP's earnings came out today after the markets closed and the company reported some major good news. In addition to an overall 25% profit increase, exceeding analyst consensus expectations, and updated positive guidance looking ahead, the Imaging and Printing Group enjoyed an impressive turnaround.

In all but two of the unit sales and revenues categories HP reports for IPG, including overall supplies revenues, commercial and consumer units sold and revenues, printer-based MFPs and Indigo digital press pages, their first quarter numbers showed ear-to-year quarterly increases versus year-to-year decreases for Q4 2009, and in many cases, for a number of quarters before that. The only two exceptions? Color laser printers were still down, but by a trifling 1%, and Indigo pages registered an up-tick over Q4's (and recent history's) consecutive series of gains.

More on the commentary in a coming blog post, but for now, congrats HP!

HP LaserJet -- dubious distinction?

2010-02-12T08:58:00.000-08:00

Some of my readers may view my efforts here as being somewhat pro-HP, understanding (or not) my background of having spent a long career with the company, mostly in their printer business. In the interest of balance, I offer this somewhat less glowing "tribute", with a LaserJet "feature" (pictured above) showing up in Technologizer's Top 15 Design Mistakes.

The long-ago "PC Load Letter" makes it as #13 on writer Benj Edward's (@benjedwards) top #15. (I will make you hit the article directly to find the other Printer entry on the list.) But one answer not revealed in the excellent summary by Edwards? What's the LaserJet model, and year of introduction? First correct answer wins a vintage piece of LaserJet memorabilia!

Observations -- HP Dips a Toe into 3D Printing

2010-02-05T07:00:00.000-08:00

by Jim Lyons

The Hard Copy Observer, February 2010

Observations: HP Dips a Toe into 3D Printing

On January 19, Stratasys, a leader in the field of 3D printing systems, announced an agreement with printing industry titan HP. Under the terms of the deal, the Eden Prairie, MN-based Stratasys will "manufacture an HP-branded 3D printer" based on the company's “patented Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) technology” that is found in products used for rapid prototyping by product designers and architects.

In a market where Stratasys (trading on NASDAQ under symbol SSYS) claims leadership while reporting 2008 revenues of just less than $125 million, what is the significance of this David-and-Goliath tie-up? Despite HP’s relative indifference to the story, based on the lack of the firm’s own press announcement and difficulty in reaching the company for comment, we believe this announcement is another case of HP’s “leave no stone unturned” strategy. For years, the Observer and other members of the press have thoroughly documented HP’s tendency to set its sights on and move into any market printing- or printer-related, and the firm’s myriad of industry competitors have firmly felt the effects of this line of attack. HP’s encroachment has been true most notably in the cases of office copiers and MFPs and related services, such as commercial printing, and graphics-arts fields—all areas where the firm has a strong and growing presence today from a base of zero not so long ago. But is 3D printing even really “printing?”

3D Printing Primer

Without going into a full description of 3D printing (check Wikipedia for a good basic description), this technology’s relationship to HP’s existing printing business actually makes a good deal of sense. I remember first hearing about “3D Printing” about ten years ago as an HP employee working with the “new and emerging businesses” unit of what is now HP’s Imaging and Printing Group (IPG). After seeing some demos and sample “output” (prototype pieces and parts made of a dried clay-like substance that were built by spraying layers of the material in a semi-liquefied state through ink jet-like heads and then drying into the hardened final product), I wondered about the investigation into 3D printing.

The “3D” made sense, even going back to my early days at HP when in the early 1980s, HP offices cranked out numerous slides and graphs using “2D” flatbed pen plotters, which were also predominately used by HP customers for drafting and design output. This was an era when office workers had a printer choice of the green-bar units in the data center and noisy daisy-wheel models that were intruding on electric typewriters, some of which were sporting tiny amounts of memory to perform a far-out task known as “word processing.” (By the way, the standard hot-air hair dryer was a convenient accessory to have on hand, especially for the stubborn-to-dry transparencies.) While the ink-filled “pens” were replaced by ink cartridges over the next several decades, their legacy lived on with the commonly used internal label of “pen” being used for the cartridges, for many, many years after their physical demise.

Based on the use of common technologies to “deposit” ink or another liquid in either one layer (with ink in 2D) or more (with liquefied modeling material in 3D), HP’s interest in looking at leveraging its investment in ink jet head technology and the related mechanics and electronics makes sense.

Marketing 101—Entering new markets

However, leveraging technology to enter new markets can be highly risky and prone to failure. Let me take you back to another personal experience gained at HP and a great example. Office printing and commercial printing were originally seen as similar as they shared a common technology, but the customers were in many ways completely different in their practices and sensitivities, and in the parlance of the marketing profession, their user needs. It has taken years for HP to learn how to be successful in commercial print by understanding those customer needs and fulfilling them.

Understanding this first step into the field by HP, 10 years after my exposure to internal investigations, sheds a bit more light on HP’s interests and leads me to a very positive interpretation of this move, as one based around customers and not technology. According to the release, “HP will begin a phased rollout of the 3D printers in the mechanical design (MCAD) market in selected countries later this year, with the right to extend distribution globally.” So the headline of a brief PC World article following the announcement, “3D Printing Coming to the Desktop,” is misleading, at least to those of us who read “desktop” and think of desktops residing in every office in the world, where millions and millions of printers and all-in-ones are already headed each year.

The press release further states that current Stratasys printers (and we assume future HP-branded versions) are “used by product designers and architects [to] create three-dimensional plastic models directly from 3D digital designs.” In addition, it is telling who and where in HP the leadership for this new entry is coming from: HP’s Large Format Printing Business. In prepared remarks, Santiago Morera, HP vice president and general manager of that group, said, “There are millions of 3D designers using 2D printers who are ready to bring their designs to life in 3D…Stratasys [offers] the ideal platform for HP to enter the 3D MCAD printing market and begin to capitalize on this untapped opportunity."

So this “toe in the water” move by HP might be exactly the right step, for a market that today is measured in hundreds of millions of dollars and not the billions of dollars that HP is accustomed to targeting. HP can add to its product portfolio in an area where the firm already has a strong customer base and provide additional products and services to a customer set where some will undoubtedly welcome an HP-branded (and supported) solution for 3D printing.

So is the 3D imaging process equal to printing? Not really, at least in terms of printing as defined as a medium for dissemination of words and images. Is it ink jet? Not really, either, at least not HP ink jet as we know it. But it is absolutely a customer base where HP already has a presence and can sell more. In addition, the long-term outlook is open-ended, as envisioned in the conclusion of the PC World piece. Writer Chris Head concludes, “Assuming HP-Stratasys can continue to lower the price of their desktop-style rapid prototyping machines, it may not be long until we're printing our own household items as-needed, and one step closer to a Star Trek-style replicator.” Now that’s a future vision!

Toner request for quote - strange!

2010-02-03T11:24:00.001-08:00

Every once in awhile, something comes along that is so off-the-wall that I just have to document it here, just to share with the outside world.

In this case, a close friend and former printer industry executive, but long moved on to bigger and better adventures, passed this email along with basically a "what the ...?" reaction.

I have no idea, except if it's spam, it's far afield from the typical ones most of us at least occasionally receive. But for posterity, here's the text of the email, with the names changed to protect the innocent (or otherwise)! (BTW a Google check of the reasonably local business name revealed no such establishment, and the address appears to be that of a private home.)

Subject: Quote request
Sent: Feb 3, 2010

Good day,

We would like to inquire if you have in stock or can help us to get any of the description inks below,

HP LASERJET TONER CARTRIDGE (OEM ONLY)

1. HP Q7553A (53A) (OEM ONLY)
2. HP Q5949A (49A) (OEM ONLY)
3. HP Q5942A (42A) (OEM ONLY)
4. HP C4092A (92A) (OEM ONLY)
5. HP C8543X (43X) (OEM ONLY)
6. HP Q3964A (64A) BLACK COULOUR ONLY (OEM ONLY)
7. HP Q6511A (11A) (OEM ONLY)
8. HP C9731A (31A) (OEM ONLY)
9. HP C9721A (21A) (OEM ONLY)
10. HP C9730A (30A) (OEM ONLY)
11. HP Q6000A (OEM ONLY)
12. HP Q6001A (OEM ONLY)
13. HP Q6002A (OEM ONLY)
14. HP Q6003A (OEM ONLY)
15. HP Q7551A (51A) (OEM ONLY)
16. HP CC364A (OEM ONLY)

Please advise your unit pricing as we would be buying up to like 10 to 20 units of each of the aforesaid items at a time on one transaction for our upcoming project.

Also let us know the type of credit or debit cards which you accepted in making payment when purchasing from your company as for us to get
prepared for the payment as soon as we receive the quotation from you.

Thanks so much for your anticipated business relationship and cooperation and hope to read from you soonext.

xxx STORE
[contact info deleted]

More on Apple iPad Printing

2010-02-02T07:29:00.000-08:00

Lyra's Hard Copy Observer is out with a story this morning, "Apple’s iPad—Is Printing Weakness an Achilles’ Heel?". Interesting thought, no? The article, which (full disclosure department, I had a hand in, in my role as contract writer for the Observer), is available as free content and I would be pleased if readers checked it out.

iPad Printing

2010-01-27T21:52:00.000-08:00

In addition to being an important day in the tech world as the final day of the 13th annual Lyra Imaging Symposium, another "minor" technology announcement happened that you might have heard about -- Apple's announcement of the iPad!

While I work on my summary of the last day of Lyra, here's a tidbit to think about, courtesy of PC World's Jason Cross. In his piece, "Will the iPad Connect to Anything?", Cross muses about his ability (or inability) to print:

Then there's printing. Clearly, one would expect to be able to print from the iPad. It has iWork, after all! You'll be typing essays and epic poems expressing your love of Apple in Pages and calculating how much money you save by not buying Windows in Numbers. Still, we haven't seen a single "print" icon or menu item yet. We don't suppose you'll be able to plug a USB printer into the device (even with a dongle for the 30-pin connector) but network printers are quite common. If the iPad could print to a network printer, one would think Apple would have mentioned so.

Will be digging into this important question!

Day One Lyra Symposium Recap

2010-01-27T07:13:00.001-08:00

This is 13th annual Lyra Imaging Symposium, and we're "at the turn", with a full day of the agenda in the books and one to go. The conference traditional brings together the latest thoughts and thinkers in the business, and covers the range of the printer industry, from consumer and home printing, through the enterprise and the corporate printing scene, and then up to print-for-pay worlds of wide-format and, this year, signage and industrial printing.

I've attended at least 10 of the 13 conferences, and have been offering a blogger's perspective for the last four, so it's tempting to think I'd have some historical perspective to add to the discussions, while throwing out the intentional bias that the Lyra staff has built in based on their selection of an agenda and speakers to go with it. For example, this year's conference title, "The Road to Recovery", implies that the worldwide economic woes of the recent past, are behind us or at least will be soon. Picking up on major themes to go along with that arc, small business and consumer printing seems to be moving ahead without much change, and moving from those realms into the office, there's a long-sought improvement in ink jet's perception compared to the perennial favorite laser. The jury is out on whether the razor-and-blades model of printer-and-supplies pricing is seeing its end, with the recent data points indicating some change, but not a radical shift at this point. Managed Print Services continues its reign as the high ground for enterprise printing activities, and the conference keynote by HP's Tom Codd, and numerous other presentations and panels, offered ample evidence. For the vendors involved, including OEMs and resellers, the long-term challenge seems to be creatively going beyond cost-cutting from fleet consolidation and less printing.

A quick summary of a full day of stimulating discussion can hardly tell the story, and as always, "you had to be here". But, I'm pleased to at least try to give a real-time update, and have found Twitter to be a great solution. Blog posts imply at least a little insight and thought (and thus, time), but the tweet streams at @jflyons and @lyrainc (mostly overlapping) tell the hour-by-hour (if not minute-by-minute) story of the conference, so stay tuned, there and here, for highlight of the symposium's final day.

2010 Lyra Imaging Symposium -- stay tuned here with live blogging

2010-01-25T21:45:00.000-08:00

Back again, in a new decade, but the same venue in lovely (and warming-up and drying-out) Rancho Mirage, California, with some definitely new ideas and upbeat feelings! Lyra's 2010 Imaging Symposium has kicked off, and I am once again honored to be the "official blogger" of the event, so watch this space for conference updates. Also, follow me on Twitter (feed is on the right of this blog too) at @jflyons for more immediate, and of course shorter, tidbits from the event. We also promise to have more tweets, from @lyrainc and others. Official sessions begin early Tuesday January 26th and continue through the day on the 27th. (With of course one eye tuned on the events with Apple's big planned announcement.)

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

2010-01-25T06:31:00.000-08:00

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 we're 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.

No stone unturned? HP enters 3D Printing Market

2010-01-19T09:30:00.000-08:00

HP continues to expand its printing industry footprint (remember when they declared it was "printing", not "printers") with today's announcement they will join forces with 3D-printer maker Stratasys of Eden Prairie, MN. We've covered this market a bit (see "3D Printers on the same downward price path as conventional printers?") and it seems inevitable, when thinking about it, that HP would enter this space. It's notable that the deal, basically a branding deal for now, comes from the Large-format/Graphics unit of IPG, and the linkage between printing designs and then modeling them in three dimensions (see quote below) makes it clear that we haven't heard the last of HP in this space.

"There are millions of 3D designers using 2D printers who are ready to bring their designs to life in 3D," said Santiago Morera, vice president and general manager of HP's Large Format Printing Business. "Stratasys FDM technology is the ideal platform for HP to enter the 3D MCAD printing market and begin to capitalize on this untapped opportunity."

PR advice based on recent pop culture trends for HP and Stratasys (not that they asked)? Play up the 3D connection with box-office movie sensation Avatar (which of course only has the label "3D" in common, except maybe for its "futuristic" aura), and downplay the recent Stratasys charity auction of a Jay Leno-autographed Dimension 3D printer...

Back in the Saddle, 2010 version

2010-01-11T07:37:00.000-08:00

Well, here it is already into the double-digits of January in a new year and decade, and I feel like I am just getting started again. With New Year's Day on a Friday, then the matter of a little Bowl game just a 1,000 mile drive away, and CES starting in Las Vegas, the first ten days of the month were hardly ordinary.

Anyway, Monday the 11th now, and back on the beat.

In just two weeks, it will be back south, this time to my umpteenth consecutive Lyra Imaging Symposium in Palm Springs, taking place from January 25th to 27th. Stay tuned here for more on that (much more) and also tweeting the lead-up and conference itself, with the hashtag #lyrasymp10 so look for those too.

Happy New Year!

2009-12-31T08:16:00.000-08:00

To all my readers, have a great 2010!

As I reflect back on my year in blogging, I am observing how my writing patterns have changed in 2009. The addition of active "micro-blogging" through Twitter has taken away from the volume of traditional blog posts, no doubt, but has hopefully provided a more real-time alternative via my tweetstream displayed here (to the right). And granted, not all my tweets are dedicated printer-industry topics, so please pardon the marketing, economics, careers, and yes, occasional football subjects.

Another change/distraction (but for the better overall) is the transition from traditional to online publishing for The Hard Copy Observer. In addition to my monthly Observations columns, which also appear here (I can't hardly believe I'm now in my fifth year of monthly columns), I also am a contract writer for the Observer, and topics I might have published here in the blog now have a tendency to end up there, as we become subject to the legendary 24-hour news cycle, at least as it exists in the printer industry!

Again, readers, thanks for stopping by on a regular basis, and see you in 2010!

December Observations -- 25 years of LaserJet

2009-12-22T09:53:00.000-08:00

by Jim Lyons

The Hard Copy Observer, December 2009

Observations: 25 Years of LaserJet

The Observer traditionally uses much of its December coverage to recap the year just passed in an attempt to interpret industry announcements and events that have filled our pages and derive some larger meaning from them. In my case, however, I am taking my column back a full quarter of a century. Actually, as I hope readers will agree, in looking back to a ground-breaking event 25 years ago, I found some historical roots to go along with one of 2009’s major industry stories.
_____________

Von Hansen, currently an HP vice president, talks about the last 25 years of the LaserJet

Earlier this year, HP celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of one of the industry’s most important products, the LaserJet printer. (At that time, The Idaho Statesman covered the story, and rather than repeat that part of the saga, see “HP celebrates 25th anniversary of its LaserJet printer”). The product line survives and even prospers today, and the HP-Canon partnership that led to the original LaserJet is still intact and in fact, by at least some accounts, is growing and prospering as well. Von Hansen is currently an HP vice president who resides in Boise, ID, and who, more than two-and-a-half decades back, was a young engineering manager working at the same HP site and leading a team that developed that first LaserJet printer. In the 25 years since, Hansen has filled a variety of key roles in HP’s Imaging and Printing Group (IPG), most of them directly related to the LaserJet business. I had a chance to discuss this history with Hansen, focusing on how things have changed and how things have stayed the same, and here is a portion of that conversation. Taking care to avoid the purely nostalgic approach, this interview also takes a look at the future of the LaserJet product line and printing in general.

Observer: How long have you been with HP, and how and when did you first get involved with the LaserJet printer?

Hansen: I’m a 34-year veteran of HP, working with printers all along, starting in June 1976 as a development engineer on the HP 2680 laser printer. I spent five years helping to develop that printer. I was focused on its electronics and formatter.

Observer: Although that product predates the LaserJet considerably, the Canon connection was there too, correct?

Hansen: Yes, key pieces were provided to HP through an agreement with Canon, for example the electrophotographic (EP) drum, so the HP-Canon printer relationship really goes back 35 years. The 2680 printer was targeted at HP 3000 minicomputer customers originally and was released in 1981 after a long development cycle. I later worked as a controller/formatter project manager for impact printers as well. [When the LaserJet concept came along,] I led the team that worked with Canon on the definition of the controller.

Observer: Leading up to the LaserJet’s introduction to the market, what were some of the factors that HP saw as critical, and what decisions in the areas of product development were important, especially in light of the fast-track nature of the project?

Hansen: Canon had the all-in-one print cartridge, which they invented for small copiers. HP worked with Canon to create a laser printer from that—centered around its all-in-one, user-replaceable cartridge. The original LaserJet had a higher level of Canon content, so in addition to the print engine, the controller and electronics came from Canon, due to the shorter development cycle.

HP specified what we wanted included in the electronics, feature set, etcetera, but the formatter and engine were developed by Canon. We took 18 months (or even a bit less) from conception to market, with a fairly small team. At that time, most of HP’s [printer engineering] staffing was committed to developing our impact printers. [Former HP employee] Jim Hall was the section manager, and Roger Archibald was the engine project manager, and I was the project manager for the electronics and printer feature set, including PCL (which stands for Printer Control Language and originated in HP impact printers). PCL 4 was needed for the first time for the LaserJet due to some of the unique things about a page printer. We were also coordinating on printer languages across our Boise and Vancouver divisions (originators of the Thinkjet thermal ink jet printer from the same era). These were neat projects to work on, but we were part of a small team, while most of our peers were working on bigger “more important” projects.

Observer: Leading up to that May 1984 announcement, what were some of the predictions/feelings/emotions behind what might happen when the LaserJet hit the market?

Hansen: Lots of the enthusiasm came from partners, including Microsoft and Bill Gates himself. On visiting Microsoft for the first time with a prototype printer, they were immediately excited to see the demo in their offices, seeing the connection to drive the growth of some of their applications, like Word (and later, desktop publishing).

Observer: When did it become clear you had a hit on your hands?

Hansen: Even before launch at the Spring 1984 Comdex show in Atlanta we were excited, but at that show it was a big hit, including an appearance on the front page of the show daily indicating lots of interest in the new product. Then sales took off, and initial sales forecasts were nowhere near close to the actual results. [Editor’s note: as a Comdex attendee and HP employee at the time, working in another area of the company—I became an HP printer guy two years later—I remember my storage colleagues and I being pleased to see HP getting some “ink” with our new printer, but we were generally focused on other aspects of the show, so Von and I have an ongoing debate on the “hit of the show” memory. See my "Happy Anniversary" blog post.]

Observer: How was the relationship with Canon viewed within the company (HP) back in those days? As something that would last, or maybe as just a stopgap until HP could do its own grounds-up design?

Hansen: HP did invest in adding more of its own value after that first printer. The LaserJet IID (in 1988) was HP’s first with an extensive change in the mix. To get the features we wanted, electronics and formatter, we needed to do them. HP had strengths in electronics, connectivity, controllers, and so forth. We continued to rely on Canon to provide the EP parts of the printers because of their great strengths in EP, optics, manufacturing, etcetera, but the IID was the breakthrough product for HP’s value-add, which then continued on.

Observer: How would you characterize the relationship with Canon over the years? How about 2009’s deal allowing HP to sell Canon copiers, is that the biggest milestone in the Canon relationship since the beginning?

Hansen: Since we started with the 2680, it has always been a unique relationship. In looking at business across the world, I’ve asked, is there anything like it? A highly successful relationship, that has lasted over 25 years, that became so huge? Where both companies have unique talents and abilities, but where the combination is bigger and better than either could do themselves? HP’s PCL, fonts and cartridges, marketing expertise, plus Canon’s manufacturing and EP process, just to name a few examples. Of course there were a few stresses and strains from time to time, but neither could do it without the other, and it’s very balanced. To have that kind of relationship, strong today as ever, is pretty unique and special. Over all this time, it’s built on a lot of trust. The legalities aren’t huge—based on a trusting relationship through the years, and working it through as a team and meeting the marketing challenges and customer demands together.

We now believe we’re entering the second major phase, with HP adding 34 models, with the Canon copiers, actually we call them MFD’s (multifunction devices), high-end MFP’s, being sold as part of HP’s offering.

Observer: Can you share any insights, thoughts, hopes, dreams, etcetera that relate to the future of the LaserJet, say for the next 25 years?

Hansen: One key thing—again, it’s more than just printer boxes, but rather HP’s ecosystem around solutions, with, for example, OXP (Open Extensibility Platform). It’s the elements that HP is adding around the boxes. We’re coupling Canon’s products with HP’s solutions, verticals, workflows, and that’s a key growth area for us. MFD’s are high-end devices. We are striving for complete compatibility across the line. Managed Print Services (MPS) ties right in ... solutions and service from HP, from SMB (small and medium-sized businesses) to large companies, help them optimize their fleets, how they manage them, how they use them, and providing workflow solutions based on an industry’s needs and coupled with HP’s printers.

_____________

There are many lessons to be learned over the last 25 years, and with the “second major phase” of HP and Canon working together, there are many trends and directions to be explored on what the next 25 years will hold. Check back in the coming months for more conversations.

Engadget covers new Zink printer

2009-12-08T12:14:00.000-08:00

Pandigital's new 4x6 photo printer, a first for Zink technology, is covered over at Engadget. (see "Pandigital crams Zink technology within Portable Photo Printer".) It's their second printer-related story in four days (see also "Epson unleashes PictureMate Show photo frame that's also a printer"), which is nice to see (maybe something to do with the time of year?), though I can't argue with their "filed under" designation, i.e. "Misc. Gadgets".

iPhone apps meet Presto

2009-12-01T08:36:00.000-08:00

Just a year ago, I devoted two successive Observations columns to a couple of companies that were targeted hard-copy devices towards applications facilitating communications between extended families, with a special emphasis on the elderly population and their needs. (see "Observations: Hard Copy Communications for Families").

This morning Presto and Doctor Marion of Elder Health Resources of America have announced two new iPhone apps, Elder911 and Elder411. (See "Why Presto and Doctor Marion developed 'Elder Apps' for iPhone"). (And thanks to Presto CEO Peter Radsliff for his LinkedIn note on the announcement.)

HPQ Q42009 Printer Metrics and commentary

2009-11-30T07:00:00.000-08:00

I have been away for a few days, so missed a prompt update on HP's announcement of quarterly results, which took place Monday, November 23rd. However, here are the summarized metrics for the Imaging and Printing Group (IPG), as well my first impressions as I get caught up on the announcement and related materials.

HP CEO Mark Hurd was quite enthusiastic about printing overall, with the presentation "Key Messages" slide claiming "IPG poised for recovery". Clearly, profits held strong, despite a number of decreases continuing on quarterly top-line unit and revenue numbers, as seen in the spreadsheet below. Obviously, as supplies continue to dominate by exhibiting lower y/y decreases than hardware (8% versus 27%), and comprised nearly 70% of overall IPG revenue in the fourth quarter of 2009. (It seems not that long ago when supplies breached the magic "50% mark".)

Other impressions? Hurd's reputation for operational efficiency is evident in the numbers as well as remarks, including this passage from an answer to a question regarding expected growth in supplies and hardware from Katy Huberty, of Morgan Stanley, as contained in the earnings call transcript.

I think, Katy, let me go up a level for you. In many ways, the tough market has been a blessing for IPG. The business is now run with stronger operational rigor than we've ever had before. As Cathie mentioned, the inventory's been leaned out. Sales in and sales out are continuing to converge. We've made progress on the cost structure. Clearly we have more work to do. To the point of the question printer demand is picking up. And we plan to grow printers materially double digits in printer units in Q1. While staying within the operating margins. A little bit will depend on what the demand looks like and how we go for the printer unit growth. We will trade off operating profit dollars no question about it. What we're talking about doing, we couldn't have done it a year and a half ago. We simply couldn't have done it at the magnitude that we are going to do it. Frankly, that the -- in a strange way the 2009 situation was a positive for us and we knew this was coming as we said through 2009, we saw strong page performance and strong supply usage through 2009.

And on the opportunities for IPG? From the prepared remarks, as reported in the transcript, Hurd identifies three areas beyond the basic printer and supplies outlook improving (with my bolding):

IPG is poised for recovery and is getting on the attack. As we enter fiscal year 2010, the headwinds in channel inventory are behind us. We expect supplies growth to improve with economic trends, and employment levels and project a flattish result in Q1. Demand is also improving for our printers. We gained share sequentially and we expect to drive further share in installed base gains with double digit printer unit growth in Q1. Due to improvements in our cost structure we can do this while remaining within the 15 to 17% operating margin that we laid out at our analyst meeting in September. IPG is also gaining significant traction with its growth initiatives. We deployed hundreds of photo kiosks this quarter at Wal-Mart and look forward to further expansion in 2010.

Recent studies released by market analysts highlight HPs leadership in managed print services with more signings than any of our competitors. We're encouraged by our Managed Print Services funnel, which is at record levels, these deals are generally for multiple years and have a high attach rate of supplies. In commercial print the analog to digital page shift is occurring and we are leveraging our technology to accelerate the transition. Partnerships with industry leaders like Pitney Bowes, RR Donnelly, and web press purchases from communication leaders, Omnicom demonstrate the power of our portfolio and capabilities. We expect you will hear more partnerships from us shortly.With our significant market leadership and broad patent portfolio, we are well positioned to capture this significant page opportunity.

Interesting to note that despite the optimism, Indigo page growth, at 13%, was at its lowest mark since it began being reported several years ago. (Though, in fairness, anything UP 13% in these economic times is pretty impressive!)

Happy Cyber Monday!

2009-11-30T05:33:00.001-08:00

Decades ago, even before I was involved directly with printers, the branch of the high-tech world where I worked (storage) often referred to $X/MB ratios. Many orders of magnitude have come and gone in that business -- for example, in the early 1980's HP shocked the world with a 400MB hard drive for a stunningly low $25,000! And of course, those same "orders" have come and gone in our printer industry as well. CNET's Cheapskate blog's post "Get a Brother HL-2140 laser printer for $49.98 shipped" makes me think back to those ratios for the first time in a long time, and how maybe the printer idustry will be crossing a dollar-per-ppm threshold sometime soon, if that means anything. Brother's 23ppm mono laser printer can be had for $50, meaning we're at a little over $2/ppm, again, if that's meaningful as anything other than as a geeky ratio.

Happy Black Friday!

2009-11-27T09:55:00.000-08:00

My friends over at Techbargains.com (Search: "Printer") have some great printer and AIO/MFP deals highlighted, but today's big find goes to the Cheapskate.com blog. Today, Rick Broida is highlighting the Polaroid PoGo Zink-based printer, covered in this blog many times for its newsworthy achievements (see example), at Amazon's door-busting price of $29.95!

Speaking of Zink, Tekla Perry has a recent in-depth piece in IEEE Spectrum on the Massachusetts-based firm.

November Observations -- Interview with Ian Schenkel of EuroSmartz

2009-11-25T07:47:00.000-08:00

by Jim Lyons

The Hard Copy Observer, November 2009

Observations: Interview with Ian Schenkel of EuroSmartz

Completing the fourth year of my monthly “Observations” column for the Observer, I find myself reflecting back on the exciting variety of subjects I have had the chance to cover. Originally, my beat included two rather broad but related areas of the printer industry—simply stated, its past and its future. The former category often includes a healthy dose of nostalgia regarding how things have changed since foregone days when we were all young but also a reminder of how things may have stayed the same. The latter category is where I point to areas I have observed that are new and emerging.

However, a third category has developed, tied to the future, which is interviewing and reporting on some of the people involved with future-looking products and technologies. These entrepreneurs have typically been contributing to the future of our industry, and this month, I had the pleasure of chatting with Ian Schenkel, co-founder of EuroSmartz Ltd., the company known for being “#1 for Printing Apps on the iPhone and iPod Touch.”

Ian, along with brother Martin, form the basis of a bi-continental team, spanning England and New Zealand, a time-zone combination that the company sees as a big advantage with respect to making good on fast-turnaround 24 × 7 product support. For cohesiveness, I have consolidated a series of international phone calls and e-mails with Ian Schenkel into one interview .

Lyons: What is your professional background?

Schenkel: EuroSmartz was formed in 1994 when we launched a sales force automation application for Mac and Windows. Over the years, it has taken a few different iterations and has now turned into mainly an iPhone-app developing company specializing in printing apps. I am based in Amersham, which is 25 miles northwest of London, and my background has pretty much all been software sales and marketing—I have also helped establish a number of U.S. software companies in Europe.

My brother Martin is based in Auckland, New Zealand and has been a developer for more years than I can remember. His background is in C, C++, Java, and many other different languages. Part of the reason we started EuroSmartz in the first place was because of our complementary skill sets, which has really paid off well for us in the app store.

You need to create great, innovative apps to sell in volume [Martin’s job], but now with 100,000 apps, you also need to make some noise to stand out [my job].

Lyons: What led you to iPhone apps and especially to those that feature printing?

Schenkel: The decision to make iPhone apps was actually pretty easy, I read a few pieces about developers that were making apps for the iPhone and how the SDK [software development kit] was pretty easy to use. I then spoke to my brother, and he downloaded the SDK, and we started making apps.

As for the specifics of printing, that came about from looking for gaps in the apps that were available and also because of our own use of the iPhone—we found there was no solution at the time to print anything, so we thought we would design and build something ourselves. It was a bit of a learning curve getting into passing information and documents to the myriad print drivers on both Mac and PC, but once that was broken down and built, the rest followed pretty easily. Most enhancements we add to our apps are customer-driven requests. Field testing is always the best way to build better products, and we now have an absolutely huge number of customers that give us great feedback.

Lyons: Without saying exactly what is “huge,” can you provide some scale on the success of your apps?

Schenkel: The "number-one" claim we make on our Web site is due to the fact we are the top selling paid printing app in the entire app store and have been for all of 2009. We have two printing apps in the top 100 of productivity, and no other printing app in the store will print the range of document formats that our apps support. Because of this position we have sold more in terms of volume across our family of apps than any other printing app vendor.

Lyons: Will you tell us about being included in one of Apple’s famous “There’s an app for that” television commercials?

Schenkel: The ad was a little out of the blue really, Apple were looking for business apps that enabled them to showcase how the iPhone is a useful business tool. Print n Share was shortlisted and eventually made its place in the Office ad. There is not a huge amount more I can say about the ad, it was all very exciting but also very easy. The biggest thing we had to prepare for was translating the app into other languages. The ad showed in the U.S., UK, Japan, and France. Seeing the app for the first time in Japanese was fun, we knew each of the buttons but could not read what they had on them. We also helped Apple with the sequence of our app in the ad, so that it all flowed correctly.

Lyons: What’s next for EuroSmartz?

Schenkel: We have a number of new apps in the pipeline, some are variations on printing, and some are a complete departure. However the biggest initiative we have in place right now is integrating with other apps to enable them to print. We have created a simple way that other app developers can use our app to print. We provide all the tools for them to build this, and best of all it is free for the developer. Once the apps are integrated, all the customer needs to do is have our app along with the other app on their iPhone, and they can print from that app. We feel this is going to bring some major new features to the iPhone. So far we have two apps integrated and quite a number more in the pipeline.

We are adding four new apps that have integrated with our printing apps in the next few weeks, so we are excited about launching those too.

Ad Age looks at the new (online) PC Magazine

2009-11-17T17:19:00.000-08:00

In a piece entitled "What Life Is Like for Titles After They Leave Print", Nat Ives of Advertising Age takes a look at publications that have converted to an online-only presence, including, among others, PC Magazine. The transition was covered in this blog in last November and this January, and Ives' follow-up nearly a year after the transition traces some of the changes the magazine has faced. An excerpt:

That meant an end to the product troubleshooting guides that once worked so well in the magazine, because countless websites, including manufacturers' own, by then offered the same thing. Professional laboratory reviews of gizmos and electronics, on the other hand, drew a lot of traffic and remained costly for competitors to match. A similar evaluation unfolded on the business side, where the reduced sales force all but gave up chasing advertisers from outside core tech categories. Partnerships with outsiders, such as a content deal with Yahoo and keyword ads from Google, became more important.

Interesting developments, and a recommended read!

Canon is buying Océ

2009-11-17T06:40:00.000-08:00

Without a great deal of perspective to add here, it still must be noted that Canon has announced its intended purchase of Océ, the Netherlands-based provider of high-end printing gear and services. Yesterday's announcement represents further consolidation in the printing industry. In a related note, Konica Minolta, another industry player and partner with Océ in various areas of the business, has stated it has no intent to counter Canon's 730-Million-Euro offer.

iPhone Printing Apps in bloom

2009-11-09T07:01:00.000-08:00

The last three or four weeks have seen a plethora of iPhone printing apps hit the market. Canon (Easy-PhotoPrint), Kodak (NYSE EK) (Pic Flick) and Lexmark (NYSE LXK) (LexPrint) have joined HP (NYSE HPQ) (iPrint Photo), as providers of photo-printing apps that 1) are free, and 2) work on a subset of their own branded printers, which are typically WiFi-enabled but in some cases simply reside on the same WiFi LAN as the user's iPhone.

The overall market hasn't totally ignored the developments either, with LexPrint gaining kudos from Gizmodo. (see photo)

Observations: Lexmark 4019—Happy Birthday to You!

2009-10-21T08:43:00.000-07:00

by Jim Lyons

The Hard Copy Observer, October 2009

Observations: Lexmark 4019—Happy Birthday to You!

As the end of the first decade of the 21st century nears, the world economy is attempting to slowly pick itself up from one of the meanest slumps in several generations. And the printer business is licking its wounds, counting on a reversal in a downturn in printer shipments and print volumes exacerbated by the slowdown in economic activities. But as it turns out, 2009 is a year to celebrate anniversaries in the printing and imaging industry.

Earlier this year, HP trumpeted the original HP LaserJet printer's 25th birthday (see "Happy 25th Anniversary HP LaserJet"), and last week, Lexmark touted the 20th anniversary of the introduction of the venerable IBM 4019. As pointed out in an excellent piece on the history of the product’s development effort by Scott Sloan in the Lexington Herald-Leader and online at Kentucky.com, and first noted in this blog in last week's "Happy 20th Anniversary, Lexmark", the 4019 was IBM’s first grounds-up laser printer design and used the combined skills of IBM people in the printer division in Boulder, CO and those in Lexington, KY, historically IBM’s typewriter facility. The headline of Sloan’s piece captures the even greater significance of the printer: “Laser printer project in ‘80s led to Lexmark.” The spinoff of IBM’s printer group and the creation of Lexmark (NYSE LXK) International occurred in 1991, coming on the back of the success of the 4019, and was a huge step in the industry. But I think it is also worthwhile to look back a little more at the product itself, its development, and the state of the laser printer business in the late 1980s.

Like stories about the original HP (NYSE HPQ) LaserJet and Apple LaserWriter, this one goes even beyond the reach of The Hard Copy Observer archives, which begin in October 1991. Fortunately, PC Magazine and its annual printer issue was there to record the emergence of the 4019, though interestingly, in the “6th annual Printer Issue” dated November 18, 1989 (see photo of cover), the product is only referred to as the IBM LaserPrinter, with nary a mention of “4019”—the name change would come later.

The 1989 PC Magazine printer issue's cover featured a "better than a LaserJet" blurb (mid-left) in a reference to the 4019, but in a warning of the competition marching on, HP's "$1,000 laser" also appears (mid-right). The IBM LaserPrinter review appears on Page 156 of the issue (incredibly, less than one-third of the way through the mammoth printer issue of 1989) and is written by M. David Stone, who 20 years later is still actively penning PC Magazine printer pieces, by the way. The printer is also highlighted with a “Better Than LaserJet—from IBM” teaser on the front cover and shares space in the Laser Printer category’s “Editor’s Choice” summation with two models each from Brother and HP and single models from QMS and Varityper. The laser printer category in the magazine included 35 models that year, representing still-present manufacturers such as Canon and Ricoh as well as LaserMaster, Printronix, Talaris, and Unisys, which are either no longer in the printer industry or no longer around period.

Publishing lead times being what they were back then may explain why the issue contains no advertisement for the IBM LaserPrinter. A two-page spread for the IBM Personal Page Printer II appears however (the firm’s previous effort aimed at the higher-end desktop publishing market), as does a similar spread for the ubiquitous (at the time) IBM Proprinter dot matrix model.

However, I personally remember TV commercials for the 4019 showing up during Monday Night Football in that same time frame, which was a sure sign that IBM was taking laser printing, and its competition with HP, very seriously. The grounds-up effort represented in the 4019 was clearly motivating IBM in the marketing end of things. And with the company's strong association and leadership in the personal computer space, going back to the original PC in 1981, many assumed that IBM had built-in advantages with many customers, given the right product offering.

Not Just (Pure) Nostalgia

Sloan’s current-day article relies on interviews featuring thoughts from Lexmark employees Paul Curlander (back then, 4019 product manager and currently CEO), Harry Cooper (then, software and firmware development manager and today, director of digital imaging systems), and Gregory Ream (originally senior engineer of electrophotographic technology development and now Lexmark Laureate in laser technology). According to these interviews, IBM was attempting to improve upon reducing product size, correct-order output, and the ability to print envelopes, vis-à-vis the HP LaserJet.

During the IBM development process beginning in 1986, which led to the new product’s introduction in the fall of 1989, HP was not standing still, of course. The LaserJet II made a huge market splash in 1987, bringing numerous improvements to the category that HP was already leading, though remaining an 8 ppm machine. By 1989, HP had extended the new platform, with an improved-paper-handling product (LaserJet IID) and the industry’s first sub-$1,000 laser printer, the compact (and slower) LaserJet IIP. However, the fact that HP could make so much progress but still leave so much room for improvement is testimony to the potential and immaturity of the laser printer market twenty years ago. In summarizing the LaserPrinter’s virtues, quoting from Stone’s summary review, “The IBM LaserPrinter is certainly a challenge to the HP LaserJet. About 20 percent faster and 40 percent smaller than the LaserJet, this IBM-designed and –manufactured laser printer features quality output. It also offers superb paper handling: it’s the first laser printer that can handle envelopes without jamming. Of course, it’s only a LaserJet clone, but it’s a clone from a highly reliable source.” Even that clone comment was a virtue, as explained in the longer review, as it assured compatibility with existing software solutions for prospective buyers.

The 4019 effort shows the success that can be achieved by deeply understanding the competition (Sloan’s article relates the story of Curlander packing the Lexington offices with multiple HP LaserJets, just for this purpose) and then going after that firm’s product deficiencies, but taking this approach against an existing market-leading product via a multi-year development effort is tricky. The development effort runs the risk of becoming an exercise in chasing old products with new product visions, and the incumbents are certainly aware of issues and working to improve their old products with efforts of their own.

While some may argue that the 4019 was at most the third biggest laser printer introduction of the 1980s, trailing the original HP LaserJet and Apple LaserWriter in significance in shaping the categories of general office printing and higher-end desktop publishing, in other ways it was the most important. Though never vaulting its parent company (old or new) to an outright lead in the business, the 4019 led to the establishment of a whole new printer company: Lexmark International. The idea of being part of a spun-off, standalone printer company without the “drag” of the larger parent (and also lacking the support during leaner times) was a very common vision among industry participants in those heady days. Former IBMers who became part of the new firm experienced the independence and the ultimately mixed blessing of which Apple and HP printer folks could only dream.

The joy of printers!

2009-10-14T10:39:00.000-07:00

I've been avoiding these hands-on posts for awhile, and when I do one, I generally try to stay clear of HP products and solutions (emphasis on try). Regular readers know I'm an HP (NYSE HPQ) alum (1981-2005), and as an analyst/writer covering the printer industry for The Hard Copy Observer, I can't get around covering the leader, Hewlett Packard. But even then, I tend to stick to covering things from the big-picture, business-strategy standpoint.

But...I have to report some rather joyful printer experiences I have had just recently. I purchased an Officejet Pro 8000 at a ridiculously (at least to me) low price from Newegg.com, plugged it right into my home LAN (Ethernet), and have been happily printing away -- reports, articles, papers -- ever since. And the ink monitor (via the printer's web page) shows miserly amounts of those precious liquids having been spilled, after several hundred pages of documents and photos. Everything has worked flawlessly, I am so pleased to report!

And while the printer itself doesn't feature WiFi, like so many HP's do these days (see "HP is wild about wireless"), my Apple iPhone picked up its presence immediately, using HP's iPrint Photo (v 1.0.3) (see "iPhone Printing boom"). I'm now even using my iPhone as a photo print server/director, of sorts, moving photos from other sources to the phone, and then to the photo printer.

And by the way, in the recently more sensitive full-disclosure department (see "FTC Publishes Final Guides Governing Endorsements, Testimonials -- Changes Affect Testimonial Advertisements, Bloggers, Celebrity Endorsements"), all the products mentioned here were either paid for, by me, or offered free.

Happy 20th anniversary, Lexmark (NYSE LXK)

2009-10-12T06:32:00.000-07:00

Scott Sloan at the Lexington Herald-Leader and Kentucky.com has an interesting piece saluting the IBM printer efforts centered in Lexington 20 years ago, that became stand-alone printer-maker Lexmark (NYSE LXK) a few years later. In "Laser printer project in '80s led to Lexmark", Sloan interviews current Lexmark and former IBMers Gregory Ream, Paul Curlander and Harry Cooper, on some of the before-and-after stories related to the introduction, on October 10, 1989, of the IBM 4019 Laser Printer. Fascinating is the focus on the industry leader HP (NYSE HPQ) and its LaserJet printer, and the improvements IBM targeted, including a product size (weight) that would be half of the HP's, and, interestingly, "correct order output", which the LaserJet didn't offer.

HP, which celebrated the 25th anniversary of the LaserJet printer earlier this year (see "HP celebrates 25th anniversary of its LaserJet printer"), remains the market leader in laser printing, with Lexmark, which split from IBM as a corporate spin-off in the early 1990's and assumed its own identity a few years afer that, continues as a major player in the category, too.

HP's Print Apps Store update

2009-10-09T11:32:00.000-07:00

A month ago I posted about the opening of HP's Printer App store (see "Printer Apps Store Launches"), and also added a first-look at the selection of apps available (see "Day One -- HP Ushers in New Era of Consumer Printing with Full Suite of Print Solutions").

Microsoft made news this week with the opening of their app store (see "Windows mobile app store, My Phone service officially opening"), albeit unlike HP and the same as the king-of-the-hill Apple iPhone app store, their effort is dedicated to phones and mobile devices. With Apple's number of apps recently reaching close to six figures, with over two billion downloads (see "85,500 iPhone apps, 2 billion downloads") it's easy to see Microsoft's nascent effort, with over 100 apps, as a reverse of the Windows/Mac days in terms of the overwhelming ratio of applications. But, even in a totally different category, how is the HP Print Apps store measuring up?

As compared to a month ago, the HP Print Apps section of the HP Creative Studio is now featuring 15 print apps, up from 14 last month (see Screen Shots above). The most popular seems to be the app from Coupons.com, with a total of nine user comments to date, average a 4+ star rating.

While web printers versus mobile phones may be an apples-to-oranges comparison (pun acknowledged but not intended), it would seem HP has a long way to go to be in the company of Microsoft apps store (acknowledged as about the sixth entry in the race), let alone the leader.

Even more on rebates

2009-10-07T13:31:00.000-07:00

I found last week's post on printer rebates so intriguing, I had to follow up a week later, this time with the most recent "dirty dozen" of great printer deals from techbargains.com, and lo and behold, this week only one rebate. The old "MIR" (i.e. mail-in rebate) seems to be a diminishing if not dying breed, at least when it comes to printers.

Rebate update

2009-10-01T09:56:00.000-07:00

Wow, it's been over three years since I penned my September 2006 Observations, "The Tipping Point -- The End of Rebates". With the promise to "check back" on the situation, Rick Broida's "Cheapskate Blog" and today's post, "The state of rebates: Has reliability improved?", prompted be to go back and look. (BTW check back on that blog as the comments mount up.)

While in 2006 I was speculating on the potential demise of the Mail-in Rebate (MIR) at least for the printer industry, a quick survey indicates they are indeed seriously on the wane. A look at techbargains.com and their ten most recent printer "deals" shows a MIR required for only two of them, veritable "Outliers" these day!

Here's the data from my unscientific but interesting study: