Will Clickable Print Emerge at Print 09. My bet is yes. The real customer should be Vertis, CGX and RRD.

Riso and CodeZ working with OutputLinks demonstrated clickable print at the recent transpromo conference in Boston. I have to say I had lots of the problem with the design of the piece. But that's only a quibble since it was the first appearance at a printing industry venue.

This morning I followed a tweet. Looked at the link. Then I tweeted the following.

thx @QRpower #CGX, If Ralph Lauren gets #clickableprint Are you going to say "nobody could have predicted smart #QR? http://bit.ly/18Zt0a

I used #CGX because I think they are best positioned on the ground to move on this faster than others i know about it. It could easily be RRD, but I have a feeling they are all focused at the top of the pyramid. Way at the top, it's very risky to be a first mover. Most likely they will wait until enough demand builds then try to own the space with their massive presence.

CGX, with their distributed production capability and vigorous mix of entrepreneurial printer dna on the ground should be the first mover, in my not so humble opinion.

In the MPS world it could well be Riso. Their new boxes sound awesome, their office in Boston is hiring and they did do the first out of the box at the transpromo affair. They will be at Print 09. Or it might be Ricoh/Infoprint. They have presence from the desktop to the production printer. They also have Ricoh Innovation Laboratory who is focused on QR codes.

Or it could be Oce, waving the banner of versioned newspapers with their huge presence in on demand books.

The dark horse is Vertis.Inc.
They won't be exhibiting at Print 09. But I'm betting Quincy Allen will be around to talk to his old colleagues. Consider what might happen if Vertis sees the path that gets the FSI turn into clickable My Weekly Readers.

The shopper is a finely evolved graphic design that is optimized to get important information in front of a busy person in a delightful way. Consider if instead of ads for stringbeans and toothpaste, there were ads for cosmology and space travel. Then consider if those "ads" had QR and TinyPurls that took the student AND teacher to a video from Fora.TV of Google Tech Talks. If the smart QR is integrated into the process will emit the student's AND/OR teacher's clickstream to enter the picture in the service of compliance.

If Vertis got together with Xerox, clickable science teaching material could be delivered in quantities of 1 at the desktop, 30 at the MFP, 300 at the CRD, and 30,000,000 using the excess capacity that Vertis has on the ground.

The going forward growth opportunity in the States for Print is not advertising. It is public funded enterprise. That means education and health. The stars are aligning so that the printers who get it, can invent new ways to do very well, by doing very good.

Go Print!
Go Printernet!
Go My IRA!

Full disclosure : Long on XRX, CGX, RRD, OCE, RICOY. No position on CodeZ.