If Stream printheads can do QR codes you can blow this whole thing wide open. Imagine, neighborhood versioned pURLs at web offset production costs and speeds.
You have all the relationships with every newspaper production person in the business. If you talk to Goss that will get you very close to 80% of the people you need to get to who will anser your email.
Talk to Oce and you can fast track versioned newspapers in color and give HP a real run for their money. If you have to give up or slow down Stream Inkjet, it might be worth it. With Oce, HP and Screen boxes already in place, is more investment really going to pay off?
Newspaper front pages as lottery tickets. Win-win-win = why wouldn't I do that?
Everybody willingly pays from $2 to $5 dollars for a lottery ticket. Put a lottery ticket on the front page. A QR code that takes the user to a website to find out what they won. Start with a free 3 week subscription as the "thank you." Then $10, $25 etc with a $10,000 weekly prize. Make sure that there is a $250 winner in every community you want to be in.
Newspaper wins by getting people to willingly pay a $1 to buy a lottery ticket/newspaper. Plus identifying a new subscription base.
Customer wins because $1 for having a day to dream about what they will do with the money is value received.
Kodak wins by selling Stream Printheads.
Digital, shmigital.
It makes sense that you drank the digital Kool-Aid. Kool-aid is just the right beverage during a land grab. During dot.com days we had Pets.com and funny money. We also had Amazon and real money. But the land grab is over for digital printing. It's too crowded to get any margins. Between HP and Xerox in the production space, the landscape is pretty settled.
You still have the photos on line piece. That's a great piece. 30,000,000 users at Kodak Gallery? Facebook has a nominal value of $10 billion and they still haven't earned a penny. You have people's most treasured images and a raft of products that they are happy to buy and receive. One of your calendars has been my traditional holiday gift from the kid since the Ofoto days.
Meanwhile Stream printheads are game changing. The dirty little secret is that large scale direct mail doesn't need color images and fancy stuff. Just the right message to the right person at the right time. With Stream printheads on a web offset press it's good enough. The general rule of getting to scale is good enough is good enough.
Now that you have a Creo person heading up the print piece, it should be better. Now that we're seeing the end of the "End of Print", offset will be coming back. Smaller, but totally redefined.
Go Rochester! C'mon Kodak. I'm still betting that you are the little engine that could.
Kodak Announces First Stream Printhead Install in Europe - Printing Industry News from WhatTheyThink:
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
ROCHESTER, N.Y. -- meiller direct, one of Europe's largest providers of direct marketing services, is the first European beta customer for Kodak's Stream Printhead.
Kodak's Stream Printhead is a monochrome continuous inkjet solution for inline digital printing on high-speed web devices such as offset presses and inline finishing equipment. The technology enables commercial printers to bridge between offset and digital printing, extending business and revenue opportunities by adding value to printed pages."
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