Ahmadinejad Re-Elected; Protests Flare and Clickable Print + Printernet Publishing instead of textbooks.

If the Printernet existed this A4 could be printed on Monday morning in every MFP in every school district in America with no shipping, not much hassle and a minimal carbon footprint.

Textbooks are going away in California. Soon they will go away in Texas and then the game is up. Textbooks are too slow. Clickable Print + Printernet Publishing combines the best of Print and Video to replace textbooks.

Why wouldn't they do it?

Go Microsoft! Oops Yahoo. Google: Time to get into Clickable Print + Printernet Publishing?

StatCounter Blog:

Bing Overtakes Yahoo!

June 5th, 2009 Microsoft’s Bing overtook Yahoo! as the number two search engine in the United States and worldwide on Thursday (4th June) according to our StatCounter Global Stats data. Bing grabbed market share from Google. . .

“It remains to be seen if Bing falls away after the initial novelty and promotion but at first sight it looks like Microsoft is on to a winner,” commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. “Steve Ballmer is quoted as saying that he wanted Microsoft to become the second biggest search engine within five years. Following the breakdown in talks to acquire Yahoo! at a cost of $40bn it looks as if he may have just achieved that with Bing much sooner and a lot cheaper"

But, on the other hand:

StatCounter Blog � Blog Archive � FF3 Gains Ground on IE: "Mozilla Firefox 3 overtook Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 for the first time in February in the Internet Browser Wars according to monthly data from StatCounter Global Stats - our new free analysis tool.

Internet Explorer 7 continues to lead globally with 41% market share. However, Firefox 3 is now in second place with 24% replacing IE 6."

http://clickableprint.blogspot.com

OR

http://tinyurl.com/lml8vr

OR

Go Big X! If it worked to sell autos in Germany. No reason it shouldn't work here.

From Print4Pay Hotel's "MFP Solutions Blog":
"Xerox launched a trade-in program to boost sales of its desktop printers and MFPs.

Examples:
- Xerox Phaser 6360 = $300 to $600 rebate
- Xerox Phaser 7760 = $800 to $1200 rebate
- Xerox Phaser 8560 = $300 to $600 rebate-
Free shipping and recycling for the trade-in product."

As QR grows, so grows Clickable Print.

From BeQRious -
"One of the biggest news related to the QR Code technology so far in Britain is the Pepsi QR Code campaign. The colossal brand printed over four hundred million QR Codes on its products and distributed them throughout the country. What did the users get, you ask? For the Pepsi campaign, users got instant access to games, website info, videos and other exclusive entertainment that they can’t otherwise obtain. Through that campaign, they gave away prizes, coupons and all stuff free and fun."

http://clickableprint.blogspot.com

OR

http://tinyurl.com/lml8vr

OR

MPS: This is the opportunity in K -12 education !

Just in from Xippa.net . . . I think if you add in Clickable A4's to bridge the gap until they figure out what''s going to happen when textbooks go away, it should pass the "why wouldn't I do that?" test.

MHLT gets WKCE comparison results:
"Christgau also brought the board an offer from Bauernfeind Business Technologies for a new printer setup for the school.

The school will be selling its current printers and copiers. The savings are being projected in excess of $20,000 over the next five years.

One of the money-saving aspects of the printers is that to print or make copies, a personal code must be entered. In an interview with The Times, Christgau said that this is another way for MHLT to move toward being a 'greener' school.

The school will go from 28 printers and five copiers to three printers, three color copiers, two high performance black copiers and two combination copier-fax machines. After five years the school will own all the equipment.

Paper will be the only cost outside the Revinetix contract. The entire lease-to-own contract will be $22,000.

Christgau said that this year's projected cost is $26,000 for the current printing and copying system. If the school goes under the allotted color and black and white printing costs, MHLT will be credited the excess funds toward next year's contract."

What happens when FDA products are no longer allowed to do TV ads?

Senate Passes FDA Tobacco Bill - WSJ.com
"By ALICIA MUNDY and LAUREN ETTER
WASHINGTON -- The Senate overwhelmingly passed historic legislation Thursday that puts the tobacco industry under the regulation of the Food and Drug Administration."

Xerox: Nice email. Yesterday, XRX hit 7.29 and closed at 7:00. Go Xerox !

I got a nice spam email from Xerox this morning. Here's the good part.

Cut paper to save time and trees. Learn how Xerox helped Niagara Catholic Schools win this year’s InfoWorld Green 15 award by turning mountains of cumbersome, mandated records into digital files that are easier to manage and easier on the environment. > Read the full article.

I would add and save teacher's jobs + art/music programs + improve learning with Clickable A4s to replace textbooks. But that's a quibble for now.

In any case, Go Xerox! Go Ursala! Let's go Mets!

"Educating" customers, printers and high school students with an A4 document

"If only customers understood what we can do" or "If only printers saw the opportunities in our equipment" or "If only these kids would learn what I'm teaching them." Each problem is usually engaged by spending more money doing what's always been done. The fact that it doesn't work is explained by the "stupid" customer, printer or high school student.

Printers and designers need to answer Print + TV + Web 2.0 = ?
"Understand" means being able to reasonably predict what might happen next month or next year for their business. Predicting means the ability to see the principles at work without getting distracted by what is happening now. What is happening now will, by definition, not be happening next month or next year.

If the question is communication, the answer has something to do with TV + Print + the Web. One useful approach is the lens of cultural anthropology. There is no way getting around it. Kernels of wisdom from pundits/experts will not be worth it, unless there is an in-the-brain set of concepts that organize what's seen/heard to get the sequence correct for a particular situation.

The bad news is that this can be time consuming to teach. The good news is that it can be learned with minimum time investment from the trainer.

The A4 has the following elements
1. A bunch of words.
2. A link to a video
3. A couple of questions for further thought and discussion.

The "educational" webinar, meeting, round table, etc. follows this sequence
1. Email a PDF with words, links and questions to attendees.
2. The user prints it out and follows the links to the video and other web resources.
3. There is a Q&A either in a face to face meeting, or on line.

In the case of "How does Print fit into Web 2.0", the first document takes you to the video below. It is over an hour long. But if you can't spend an hour watching TV, it means you don't want to learn about it anyway. So why waste all that time on traveling and refreshments to "educate?"

Gatherings are invaluable for sharing, networking and having fun. They can be a great venue for asking/answering questions and building a common culture. But, they are not for integrating previously unfamiliar ways of looking at the world.

Easily using previously unfamiliar ways of looking at the world is at the crux of learning.

The question to consider after watching the video is
"How can we turn Print's ability to fix the ongoing conversation in time and space onto a printed page that can be the object of compare/contrast lead to higher margin business opportunities?"

A Portal to Media Literacy

End of Textbooks in California could be a Golden Opportunity for Newspapers : The Short Version

My Weekly Reader delivered via distribute and print, as opposed to print and distribute + content aligned to national education standards. If the content can be "pulled from the Cloud" all the better.

The long version is in the previous post.

End of Textbooks in California could be a Golden Opportunity for Newspapers

additional editing by Mike Rosen-Molina

My California
My California 21 is a unique history curriculum developed specifically to meet the needs of upper elementary and middle school students.

Newspaper format: 32 chronological issues resembling small newspapers present the story of California in a student-friendly, informal style that does not intimidate or repel young readers.

Some Global or PSP or MPS should really get in touch with these people. The next natural step will be The Clickable Newspaper.

Here's why:
On Wednesday, June 10, 2009, California will be phasing out textbooks for K -12 education. Instead, the so-called Digital Textbook Initiative will supposedly replace these old books with digital e-readers. Recognizing that one size fits all textbooks books were no longer the best tool to reach modern, tech-saavy students, Schwarzenegger said:

Kids, as you all know, today are very familiar with listening to their music digitally and online and to watch TV online, to watch movies online, to be on Twitter and participate in that and on Facebook. So basically kids are feeling so comfortable today, as a
matter of fact, as comfortable with their cell phones and with their keyboards as I did when I was your age, when I was a kid, with my pencils and crayons.

So this is why I think it is so important that we move on from the textbooks. The textbooks are outdated, as far as I'm concerned and there's no reason why our schools should have our students lug around these antiquated and heavy and expensive textbooks. California is the home of Silicon Valley. We are the world leader in technology and innovation, so we can do better than that.

Schwarzenegger's announcement should not be a surprise, since every state needs to save every penny it can. And it's also clear that the Obama Administration is serious about fixing education in the United States.

But what may go unnoticed is the new opportunity that this creates for newspapers struggling to find their niche in the new digital economy.

The Education Problem
A thanks to Alan Sitomer at the English Companion Ning for the point to YouTube.


The underlying problem with our public education is that it was never designed to create learning environments. It was originally grew out of the need to train a rural population to the new requirements of an industrial economy. It is no accident that most schools are organized into discrete classes that start and stop with the bell, since showing up on time, following directions, and performing well on specific tasks are the fundamental requirements of an mass market value chain industrial economy.

The other original function of our school systems was to filter and sort. The "smart kids" were filtered toward college and careers in management and the professions. The "less smart" were filtered to move first into the ever expanding manufacturing jobs supplied by ever expanding manufacturing and later into office-based service jobs. The "unruly" were consigned to doing whatever they had to do to survive.

Now that the underlying economy has changed from mass market to masses of niche markets and the real value of the workforce is its ability to respond creatively to ever changing challenges and opportunities, this old model has become obsolete. Around the country, there are the pockets of new models emerging -- and soon they will merge to create a tipping point.

The Newspaper Opportunity
Any teacher can tell you that a student really learns when the teachable moment occurs. The problem is that seeing and then taking advantage of that "teachable moment" is very difficult. A teacher must first be able to sense when it is going to happen, but even then it's almost impossible today to take advantage of that moment. The problem with textbooks is that they say do this, then do that. There is no way to leverage the teachable moments that happen in daily life -- for example, when GM crashes or the President makes a speech in Cairo -- to fit into a school curriculum.

Each of us have, at one time or another, followed a link to another link to another link. In that process, we were able to find just the appropriate story and data for us, at that time. What is interesting to me now may not be interesting to me an hour from now. That's the power of the web.

The problem for a teacher is that, for their students to learn what they need to learn, that journey needs an active mentor. Software designed interfaces are okay, but much less effective than a human who can both sense and quickly respond to needs that are felt but not yet articulated.

While undirected searching can very effective in the hands of person who already has a context in their brains, it is too unpredictable to be the primary method of educating a student who has yet to develop that same context that we take for granted. Given that different students have different learning styles, a complete reliance on computers is the same "one size fits all" approach that created the problem in the first place.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger instead seems to moving in the direction of e-readers and web access. That is a good thing. But the reality is that the web as a medium has the advantage of speed and the very serious disadvantage of making it inconvenient to do "compare and contrast." The additional problem is that e-readers are going to have be managed and will break and students will lose them.

From the educational point of view, the fact is that print is the most convenient medium for compare and contrast. The essence of logical thinking is to compare and contrast before coming to a personal judgment. The more a student practices that activity, the more robust the logical thinking function in their brain.

It's not that hard to implement
The world of newspapers is designed for speed and relevance. Producing a print product on deadline is a natural and necessary skill for any newspaper organization. The skill sets are already well defined and in place. If the editorial decisions were made on the basis of educational standards instead of the "breaking news,"

Journalists are experts at crafting just the right words, pictures and videos to communicate stories. Teachers and textbook editors and writers are not. To be clear, it's not because they don't have the talent. It's because they don't have the practice.

Teachers are experts at knowing their students. They understand just the right words and actions to allow a student to learn. As they practice their mentoring skills, instead of their class management skills, they will become increasingly more proficient at it.

In a world where newspapers take up the mantle for education, the optimal teacher/newspaper experience might be something like this:

1) The teacher goes to a website that catalogs a library of newspaper stories based on the curriculum of each grade. They could be stored in a wiki and new stories added as they were requested by a teacher.

2) The teacher selects just the right series of stories for her class for the next week. Different classes could use learn from stories coming from different sections of the paper. Science classes would learn from stories from the science and technology beat, while English classes could benefit from great feature stories on items of community interest.

If it's good for the parents, it will be good for the kids. Maybe parents and kids could actually talk about the same thing after dinner or driving to the supermarket. The benefits to a math class might be less intuitive, but consider how much math high school kids could learn by reading business stories. Plus the stats from either baseball or wall street are completely compelling to many kids, opening up a whole slew of teachable moments.

3) The newspaper publisher delivers 200, 500, or 1000 copies of a 24 page newspaper to the school for next week's unit. This was not practical before the invention of digitally printed newspapers. But it is cost effective today.

The Business Model or Where's the Money?
The same place the money always came from -- advertising. But for delivery into the schools, the advertising is strictly limited to organizations involved in public health, safety and citizenship. Government organizations and foundations spend significant amounts of money both getting their message out and fund raising. It is a ready market that wants to change the behavior of exactly this audience.

Once California has eliminated textbooks from K -12, there is little doubt that the textbook business as it has developed over the last 40 years is done. The vacuum created could be just what a newspaper needs to get to the next stage of its development.

Terry Heaton’s PoMo Blog is the smartest stuff I've found about advertising..

Today he said,

The Web is not now, nor has it ever been a CPM medium. It’s that simple. That it has been used as one is the result of four related things . . .

go to Terry Heaton’s PoMo Blog to read the rest.

He also said

"Moreover, Madison Avenue has been ignoring the wisdom of web usability guru Jakob Nielsen, who has proven that nobody even sees the bloody CPM-based ads anyway, so this sudden discovery that the CPM model is failing really can’t come as a shock to anybody.

They don’t work, and who would know that better than the people who are actually paying for the ads — the advertisers. They’re now routing around the ad industry and becoming content companies that can play in the real world of the Web.

Yes, folks, advertising is content in the Media 2.0 world. As money gets sucked away from CPMs and moved to promotions, social networking, and other forms of content, Madison Avenue is left scratching its collective head."

The good news is that Clickable Print is a great way to push social networking, promotions and other forms of content.

Go Print!

Quark fights back in the K -12 Education Space

Thanks to BR at Graphic Communications Network: for pointing to the post:

Quark offers special volume licensing for K-12 schools. -
"Quark offers special volume licensing for K-12 schools. As a part of the volume licensing program, K-12 schools can purchase 250 seats of QuarkXPress 8 for less than $1,500 or 500 seats of QuarkXPress 8 for less than $2,500."

It's ironic because when Quark had the monopoly, they were ruthless with their pricing. They got awesome margins from creatives and especially schools. Then Adobe ate their lunch with better pricing and better customer service. And a better revision cycle.

But that was then. This is now.

Now that competition is afoot in K -12 education the margins are going to get lower and lower. For everyone Adobe, Quark and all the global OEM's.

Welcome to the new world.

Wow! What a week and it's only Wednesday. Yesterday textbooks are done. Friday comes digital TV.

TV is the real mass media. Even Print, the runner up, pales in comparison to TV. This Friday America goes 100% digital TV. See snippet below. The elimination of textbooks in K -12 education is only the first step to the delivery of just the right TV at the just the right moment to just the right classroom's flat screen TV.

The next opportunity for print is a Clickable Print TV guide printed in the classroom or the workgroup or the CRD as appropriate.

The teacher chooses the right show. "Clicks" on the bar code with a scanner pen or a PC camera, and voila, the right program appears.

No time fumbling with keyboards as she loses the attention of the class. No blablabla about new technology that doesn't work when it's supposed to. No complaints about IT that doesn't blablabla.

If it's a 2D code with embedded information, it will also emit data that can be harvested to produce a record of who watched what in which classroom when. All without an AP walking around poking their nose in other people's business.

Go Print!

MediaPost Publications Digital Transition Will Remake TV Experience For Diverse Group Of Viewers 06/10/2009:
Often we only recognize important moments in retrospect -- but we already know that this Friday will be a watershed day in media. . . .
Thanks to the transition to digital TV, new technologies and channels are coming into a variety of homes -- including lower-income and ethnic ones. Something tells me we will be tracking the effects of this new TV world for many years to come."

Google is in the game. Maybe they will use the printernet to replace textbooks?

Google News experimenting with links to Wikipedia on its homepage @Nieman Journalism Lab:

Advertising is a loser. Education is winner.

I told you so.

MediaPost Publications P&G, Others Slash Ad Spending. J&J, Telecoms On The Rise 06/10/2009: "The world's largest advertiser grew considerably smaller during the first quarter of 2009. Procter & Gamble, which is about to get a new CEO who is expected to trim the packaged goods giant's advertising expenditures even more, slashed its overall advertising budget by nearly 18% during the first quarter to $674.1 million, according to estimates being released this morning by TNS Media Intelligence."

Now that K -12 textbooks are going away in the States, it could be the tipping point for versioned newspapers and magazines.

The short story is that versioned newspapers edited to educational standards can be selected by classroom teachers or curriculum advisors to fill the vacuum. Then supported by ads from public health agencies.

This should work for Oce, HP, Stream and maybe InfoPrint. It should also work for the New York Times, WaPo, Gannet and McClatchey.

The tests and curriculum pieces should work for the textbook oligopoly and independent MPS, Xerox, HP, Ricoh, Canon and anyone else who is in the MFP business.

Go Print! Go Education Printernet!

The next step is clickable print, with lots of margins for everyone.

I'm feeling the sun shining on my IRA.

Now that K -12 textbooks are going away, here's what a global OEM should do.

see previous post about California eliminating K -12 textbooks.

The dirty little secret is that the value that textbook supplies to a teacher are that they are a curriculum guide and they supply tests for each unit.

The opportunity is to print the curriculum guides and the unit tests and forget about the rest of it. You can get the information from the appropriate websites in California. The publishers secret weapon is not the content, it is the quizzes at the end of each chapter.

So some global should get in touch with some K -12 textbook publisher. Then get a printernet set up in the school building or the school district. The teacher gets a monthly printed version of the quizzes. The kids get a machine scorable quiz.

If you have the tech ready for prime time today. Not next year. The test scores can be stored on the web, Then accessed there or in print for open school night to give the parents.

Once you get to clickable print, there are products and margins galore.

more to come. . .

K -12 Textbooks terminated in Califronia

I told you this was going to happen this year and the window of opportunity is about a year for versioned newspapers and educational printernets, so don't say "nobody could have predicted it." I've been on the same little soapbox since at least 2006.

Arnold Schwarzenegger issues total recall of California's textbooks -
Times Online:
"Californian schoolkids have been told to throw away their textbooks to help the state avoid bankruptcy.

The States don't have any money to spend on stuff that don't work. K - 12 textbooks haven't worked for years.

Anyway, the Governor says that K -12 textbooks are history, starting next year. One blogger says,

If reports are correct, Schwarzenegger intends to provide Californian schoolchildren with an ebook reader – a device, such as the Sony Reader or the Amazon Kindle, that can hold the equivalent of 160 books. Such devices, which cost about £200, are light and portable and have screens that are much gentler on the eye than the typical computer screen.

The Center for Public Integrity needs a clickable postcard. Today. But not next week.

The subject line of the email is

"Would you be interested in getting 50,000 of the enclosed postcard in the mail tomorrow afternoon?"

In the body of the email,

Here's the link to see what I'm trying to explain.

If it gets there tomorrow there's a chance it might work. If you can get a designer to do an awesome type treatment, it should be relatively easy. Plus you don't have to make a phone call.

DP: Still one more physical to web connection. Vizitag!

Someone really should get in touch with Microsoft.

Anyway, the opportunity for print is that we manufacture the best information artifacts in the physical world : postcards, posters, signs. Do you know anyone who doesn't like postcards, posters and signs? Newsletters, magazines and books are a somewhat smaller audience, but once Clickable Print connects them to the Cloud, I'm thinking they will fit in very nicely.

Vizitag:
"World First: Vizitag as MS Tag or QR Code!
A few people have twittered about whether Vizitag is some sort of Microsoft affiliate/pawn. But nothing could be further from the truth. Altho' we love Microsoft Tags - they're colourful and fast to resolve - we are tag agnostic. Vizitag is all about managing tag content not about which tag format you have to use to get it."

From Visitag How It Works

Vizitag manages the connection between your audience and your content.

Vizitag is a tag management application that lets you manage the information
and services linked to your tag and track the performance of your tags.

What you do:

• define the information and services your tag links to
• download your tags to your local PC
• deploy your tags wherever you want

After you have deployed your tags there's no need to download the tag and re-deploy
it if you change the content linked to the tag.

Click here to try it with 3 different types of Vizitag.

Define your tags

Use myVizitag to create and manage up to six free Vizitags.

Download your tag

Download your Vizitag images from your My Tags page to your local PC.

Deploy your tag

Paste your Vizitag image wherever you want to - in print, online, anywhere...

Oops! The last time Unions struck newspapers we got cold type. This time versioned newspapers?

Oce, HP, Screen and/or Alpha Graphics should follow this up.

Unlike the auto companies, the NYT has never been good at talking to unions. So it looks like the brinksmanship is going to blow up in their face. If they close the Globe there are hundreds of competitors just waiting for the smoke to clear.

My bet is that they will move in with versioned newspapers linked to community journalism and/or independent blogs. And the Christian Science Monitor could do versioned clickable print 24 pager for the international piece. With lots and lots of ads for books, movies and TV.

Boston Globe union rejects cuts, Times to slash pay
@ Reuters:
"NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Boston Globe's largest union narrowly rejected concessions on Monday that owner New York Times Co said would save $10 million, raising the possibility of the 137-year-old daily newspaper's demise.

Members of the Boston Newspaper Guild voted 277-265 against accepting the concessions, which include an 8.4 percent pay cut, one-week unpaid furloughs and other cuts."

Re Apple Smart Phones and Clickable Print

I told you so. Apple v Google for the OS of the mobile web.

Follow the link to Ad Age to get the smart phone for marketers story. Take the link to Clickable Print to get that part of the story.

And don't forget about the printernet part. That's the way to get to the scale that can attract a global.

How Apple's New iPhone Changes Mobile Marketing - Advertising Age - Digital: "SAN FRANCISCO (AdAge.com) -- . . . the iterative changes hidden within a new, faster iPhone -- and the previously announced software upgrade -- could change not just consumer but also advertiser behavior. Here's a run-down of what's new and what it means to marketers."

Necessity is the mother of innovation.

Now if they could all agree on a way to reduce alot of the redundant Association Overhead it could be much less expensive for vendors and much more useful for everyone.

It sounds far fetched, but Obama's press conference on fuel economy was much more far fetched given who was in the room.

Converge Conference Partners with DMA and IPA
@from WhatTheyThink: "Tuesday, June 09, 2009
Sewickley, PA -- Printing Industries of America today announces that IPA, the Association of Graphic Solutions Providers, and the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) will join it as association partners for the 2009 Converge Conference -- the program focused on the next generation of print and communication services. The event will be held November 7-10, 2009, at the Hilton Orlando Bonnet Creek in Orlando, Florida."

It's not a decline in literacy. It's an expansion of logical thinking.

The reality is that reading has two parts. One part is the intake of words, pictures and diagrams. The other part is the ability to compare and contrast which results in logical thinking. The internet is great for huge intakes of words, pictures and diagrams. Print is the medium of compare and contrast.

At any rate, the fact is that previously the measure of literacy was the ease of intake. The more advanced measure of literacy is the ability to compare and contrast and then make a personal judgment. In that sense, more people than ever before in human history are becoming literate.

It's still a niche market. But it's rapidly growing. The center of growth is in the education industry. That's why the sooner printers help reinvent education, the more clicks for everyone.

Print is a good read:
@Print 21 magazine article
Thursday, 04 June 2009

Is the shift in communication to an online world responsible for a decline in standards of literacy? Phillip Lawrence thinks so and believes that printers should be telling their customers the same thing too."

MarketSplash, Schmarket Splash. Watch out HP, you are going to get blindsided again.

The new thing is that they are pitching design business with a Bolt-on Franchise. Sound like a printernet?

Got an existing design business?

Investigate opening a printing.com Bolt-on Franchise. It lets you get on with running your existing print, design or marketing business, while adding a great new facet. Use our branding, methodology, technology and production capabilities to sell full-color printing at the same low prices that our stores do. It’s a powerful proposition.

Printing.com (follow the click from the snippet below) is using a printernet user network business model. They started in the UK and are now setting up stores in the US and France. The competition are the franchises.

MarketSplash, meanwhile, is still trapped by a value chain mindset. Maybe they will stumble on to the right approach with the White Label version. Maybe they won't. But in any case, user network models have the David advantage in the battle between the Davids and the Goliaths.

Whether you call it the printernet or the schminternet it still means more clicks for OEMs. But it also means the globals don't control channels. They just make stuff and supply the intelligence that printers need.

About printing.com:
"We Like To Do Things Differently

We started from a clean slate. You told us what you want. We designed ourselves around your demands. Everything we do is geared towards offering the best possible service at the lowest possible price. We also cook a mean risotto.
Local Service

printing.com full color printing is available from our dedicated stores and franchise partners. Stores are opening near you – find your nearest location with our Store Finder, or call 1-877-858-8732. It’s an ever-expanding network and sometimes even we lose track."

What They Think Sets Up a Website for Prowling Money. Nice.

M&A drives evolution in the Print space. The natural result of the random mutations and selective destruction/retention is going to be based on distribute and print and something that looks a lot like a printernet.

Printing Industy Merger And Acquisitions from WhatTheyThink:

In this challenging economy, mergers and acquisitions are headed in a new direction. WhatTheyThink has partnered with New Direction Partners, the leading investment banking and financial advisory firm serving the printing industry, to offer a Website for printing executives dedicated to merger and acquisition (M&A) content."

tmp directional marketing needs to know about clickable postcards

If the globals would tell their PSPs about clickable print everyone could probably get lots of clicks. And my IRA would deliver sustainable returns over a long time frame. And nobody would have to change into anything they aren't already.

As Mr. Fred Rodgers used to say "I love you just the way you are."

TMPDM:

We are the largest agency offering integrated online, offline and mobile search solutions to top national brands. Our clients call us indispensable. Whatever you decide to call us, know that we are the experts at getting customers to call you.

As directional media professionals, we provide lead generation solutions that present your brand and your local sales outlets to customers who are actively searching to fulfill their needs. Right place at the right time? It’s no coincidence."

Mayor Mike Will Love Clickable Postcards. Somebody really should call the campaign.

The Front of the Postcard:


The Back of the Postcard:

Mayor Mike Bloomberg receives an endorsement from the Local 1500 Chapter of the United Food & Commercial Workers Union for re-election at the Pathmark Supermarket at 125th Street and Lexington ...


Then the TinyUrl and/or QR code that goes to this video.


And . . . if the TinyUrl is a pURL in disguise, imagine how much information Mayor Mike would get.

Instead of spending millions for millions of brochures send through the USPS, he could give out gezillions of clickable postcards. And get some useful real time information, by coding the area info in the pURL. And develop some predictive metrics on which local offices are doing the job and which are not so much do the job.

Everyone should know there is nothing Mayor Mike likes more than predictive analytics.

Ricoh-InfoPrint gets into Mainstream media. Nice.

From B to B magazine:

Transpromo’: Can it adapt to a b-to-b world? :
" . . .transpromo can only work if it’s tied tightly with database marketing analysis. The reason is its customizable nature, its ability to include a tailored message to the recipient based on customer profiles contained in a CRM system or marketing database.

That message could accurately reflect each customer’s previous behavior, buying pattern, need, geography and the like, with improved relevancy to drive customer action.

“What I focus on 99% of the time is database marketing, to help our clients leverage existing data about their own customers, to generate personalized, individualized communications that can build loyalty, up-sell and cross-sell,” said Lee Gallagher, worldwide manager for direct marketing with transpromo-service provider InfoPrint Solutions, a joint venture between International Business Machines and Ricoh Co."

Targeting a customer based on past behavior is a good way to make a sale today. But the secret sauce is harvesting the incoming information.

If you do it enough times, you get to the real super secret sauce - predictive analytics.

Selling CMO's a program for every better predictive analytics should be a lot easier than trying to sell transpromo, which " in a recent study by the Chief Marketing Officer Council, 75% of senior marketers didn’t have a clue about the word, although they probably were aware of the technique."

They probably know what predictive analytics means. Don't sell a zebra if the man wants to buy a horse.

MSNBC and Morning Joe needs Clickable Postcards

Somebody should make the call or send the email.

The Front of the Postcard is the Agency's job.

The Back of the Postcard is a QR code, a tinyurl, and/or a message from one of their sponsors. Starbucks is the natural. They could distribute them at the stores, embed location information, then get the use patterns in real time. The sponsor gets the metrics they need. They could pay MSNBC by click.

Click and watch the video. On the computer or the cell phone. Then harvest the incoming data from CodeZ QR.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Go Infoprint! CMO Council to Keynote at InfoPrint "Making Your Mark" Forum

Imagine the reach and continuing engagment, if you distribute clickable postcards at the forum. Then follow up with clickable newsletters + printernet published to every prospect at all levels of the pyramid, anywhere in the world. Even CEO's and CMO's will take a look at a newsletter sooner or later.

Just think of the rich data harvest that can give you the predictive analytics to guide the marketing campaign going forward. Plus you can give your sales force up to date leave behinds at a minimal cost. And get clicks to your PSPs at the same time. Meanwhile it will be the laboratory you can use to experiment with information rich QR codes, Tiny Url's and lots of other stuff that hasn't yet been invented.

And of course, everything is printed on Ricoh/Infoprint boxes so all the prospects can see what you can do, instead of telling them what you will do.

CMO Council to Keynote at InfoPrint "Making Your Mark" Forum -
Printing Industry News from WhatTheyThink:

Friday, June 05, 2009

BOULDER, Colo. -- InfoPrint Solutions Company, the joint venture between IBM and Ricoh, today announced that Liz Miller, Vice President of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council will be the keynote speaker to a global audience at InfoPrint's upcoming forum, 'Make Your Mark.' This two-day interactive session will be held at InfoPrint's recently launched Innovation Center, in Boulder, Colorado, and is aimed at customers in service bureaus and the direct mail industry."

Go Xerox! . . .But, while the "past 15 months" is great for corporate time .. .

I love "I tell people I bought a relationship," he said. See snippet below. Buying relationships have sustainable reasonable margins and get all the incentives nicely in place. Very nice!

But, clickable print and printernet publishing could get business in the door in a month. That's real time, not corporate time. Plus you don't have to spend all the time, energy and focus on "educating" printers and running webinars. You can focus on developing new products for Printers to print and make it very easy for them to find out how to manufacture those products.

Printers, like high school kids are autodidacts. As soon as they need it, they teach themselves anything they have to learn, Three designers over a period of two weeks asking for clickable print, will have the printers educating themselves, overnight. If it makes sense to them, they will call the Xerox sales reps so they can also "buy a relationship." The particular box they need will change as it makes sense for them.

Besides, given the last 15 months, who knows what the world will look like 15 months from now?

What happens when Apple or Lenovo or LG or Samsung delivers big smart phones that are called tablet computers? Or Ricoh, et al builds community based or school district based printernets? Or HP, Oce and Screen are delivering versioned newspapers? Or Amazon releases Kindle 4.0 and K -12 textbooks have been replaced by ereaders + Clickable Print + Flat Sreen TV + tablet computers? Or . . .

Xerox Business Development Programs Offer Print Providers Ways to Drive Profits
from WhatTheyThink: "During a recent 15-month period, Xerox iGen3� Digital Production Press customers who used Xerox Business Development Services saw their print volumes grow by 12 to 35 percent compared to 0 to 4 percent growth for those who didn’t. Jonathan Waters, owner, A-1 Printing Plus, is among those who have worked closely with Xerox to develop his business. “I tell people I bought a relationship,” he said."

Cell phone to smart phone to tablet computer

That's why Clickable Print is the next big thing. It's a transitional technology. But there only are transitional technology.

Cell phones to talk, SMS and sometimes buy. Smart phones adds typing, twitter, viewing text websites and sometimes videos. Touch screen tablets to do everything you can do at the desktop or a smart phone.

Epaper readers and Print will always be the best way to read. It's a niche market, but huge.

Clickable Print is the best way to push messages and nurture viral marketing. Education is all about pushing messages and viral marketing.

In Euromerica it was D Day. In Asia v Euromerica it was Islands, then Hiroshima/Nagaski. In Asia v Asia it was something else.

Wherever it was, it was high drama and the depths of Hell.

That's the front of the postcard. The back of the postcard is a 2D barcode.

It can be read by a scanner pen connected to a flat screen in the classroom. Or a smart phone. The kid watches it in class, then watches it on the way home. In the living room, the remote has been replaced by a smart phone or scanner pen connected to the TV. Then it can be shared with the family after dinner.

Click and watch the video. 10:43

If CBS could do clickable postcards for the Tony Award Show, I bet they would.

The front is a picture. The back is this QR code. This bar code. This tinyUrl. They would distribute to everyone who walked past a Broadway theater for the last two weeks. And they would do a special run for everyone who bought a ticket.

Then they could harvest the info of which show on what day, so they could start the conversation and support the word of mouth.

Solving the Print Advertising Problem and If the question is "What do you want to watch?" The answer is clickable print + printernet publishing.

The version for journalists + academics at
QR Codes Connect Print to the Web, at PBS.MediaShift

The version of this post for newspaper publishers
+ Vertis + CGX + RRD + InfoPrint + Oce + HP + Screen
at Print in the Communication Ecology Blog.

The version of this for MPS is in the sidebar at The Clickcable Print Blog.

Textbooks publishers jump to the bottom of this post. The paragraph that starts A High School.

There is now little doubt that on demand TV is quickly moving to anytime, anywhere.

The computer screen is the TV for YouTube, Mind.tv, Fora.tv, Hulu, the Comedy Channel, etc etc etc. The TV is the TV for networks and cable channels. Now that the USA has switched to digital TV it will become "any movie ever made, any time, any place."

As America evolves into a mature wireless communication ecology, TV will be on the cell phone for private viewing of short form video. The living room will be for shared viewing of either short form or long form or multi part long form video. Flat screens distributed around the home will be background TV.

The paradox is that the "What to watch?" problem will only get more difficult. Anyone who has used the remote to select that night's programing, understands the nature of the problem today. Imagine the babel created with a virtually unlimited number of offerings.

Consider how much you might value a single piece of Paper with 2d codes, either QR or any of the other bar codes, where the click is a scanning pen or cell phone? On the computer this is not a problem. You click on the link. But searching the computer for that "interesting-to-me-now" video is very inconvenient. Clicking on print, is very convenient.

Q: What's the missing piece?
A: A living room friendly scanner connected to the TV Cloud.
It's likely that the technology is already there in many different contexts. Light pens are cheap and easy to use. Remote bar code readers have well established connections to the Cloud. Cell phones have the tech. Very soon someone will connect that technology to the digital cable box and it's done.

It might come first from the Wii or Nokia or Apple or Amazon. It might be Yahoo or Google or Microsoft. But it seems obvious that it will come. When the first one is introduced, within a year the better, faster, cheaper versions will come to market. Within a year after that the copy cats will deliver the same functionality with ever increasing usability at ever decreasing prices.

Solving the advertising media problem
It's now clear that only a few can profit from web advertising. Google can earn huge revenue because they have the scale and the automated ability to receive and deliver ads on an unimaginable scale. The web advertising is business is tiny margins on each transaction, massive number of transactions. It works for Google because the marginal cost of receiving and delivering ads is very close to zero.

But everyone else in "Euromerica" is just too small. Since I'm not familiar with Asia, I can only guess that the real competition will come from there. Yes, it is plausible to believe that Facebook in the mass market and Linked In in the professional market might get to the appropriate scale and might invent a way to deliver ads in social networks. But that is still to be seen. It's hard to get rent, when the real estate is unlimited.

The tipping point opportunity for Print is Clickable Print + Printernet Publishing
Real estate in print is limited and therefore valuable. From the user's point of view, the defensible advertising advantage of Print is that it is the least expensive, most convenient way to find something that you didn't know you were looking for.

Print advertising does not require search by fingers. It enables search by eye. It sits quietly in a magazine, newspaper or flyer waiting. Consider the side bars in the New Yorker or the fashion magazines. Users thumb through Print when they are bored. "Bored" is the state of scanning for something interesting.

As the real problems of metrics, real time messaging and scale are solved, the communication ecology moves back to Print's advantage. Clickable Print solves metrics. Printernet Publishing solves real time messaging and scale.

Consider
A local newspaper + cable + radio station enterprise. Four pages of the newspaper is devoted to clickable print TV listings. The appropriate categories after sports, cooking and parenting could be based on a web survey or better even, harvesting the "what article was viewed and emailed" data from their website.

A high school with versioned clickable newspapers , newsletters, flyers and posters that are aligned with national educational standards and pulled from the Cloud by classroom teachers or curriculum supervisors. And an wireless Flat Screen in every classroom.

A local hospital with health information on clickable flyers and posters.

A non profit organization with a long tail of content who can do outreach, fundraising and serve their clients with clickable postcards and newsletters.


More to come.

WYBE Channel 35 in Philadelphia + Mind TV needs clickable print + printernet publishing

Clickable Print + Printernet Publishing

Around the World

MiND reaches worldwide audiences via our “click to play” mirror internet stream and internet video on demand here, at www.mindtv.org

• MiND is free to watch!
• MiND can be watched by approximately 70 million English speaking broadband internet users worldwide.

• 
  

from About page @MiND:
"MiND: Media Independence is the newest initiative of Independence Media, the non-profit organization which owns and operates WYBE Channel 35 in Philadelphia, PA. In 1990, WYBE debuted as one of the nation’s only independent public TV stations. WYBE has served its community with international news, documentaries, and unique programs on diverse topics.

In 2005, Independence Media started developing MiND, a new multi-platform television and internet channel. Deeply rooted in WYBE’s local and global community orientation, MiND emphasizes learning, social awareness, and a hands-on approach to media.

MiND’s schedule is filled with 5-minute programs, half of them are made by MiND members. The 5-minute program length reduces the cost and complexity of making programs, and provides MiND’s viewers with an extraordinarily wide range of ideas. Every MiND program plays on-air and online for two years. MiND's 5-minute program schedule is also seen in a mirror stream and on-demand at www.mindtv.org.

By providing access to individuals, non-profit organizations, and businesses, MiND is reinventing television. Working within some basic rules set by the FCC and within standards set by the local community, MiND is TV by the people and for the people. MiND’s agenda is set by the community, not by unseen program executives or corporate owners. In truth, MiND has no agenda, except this: we believe that MiND and its viewers should be open to all sorts of ideas, and we hope that some of those ideas will result in making the world a better place.

Key Facts about MiND:

• A service of Independence Media, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization
• MiND is a community asset
• Reaches nearly 6 million people every day via TV in the Philadelphia DMA
• Every program is available, free, on TV and worldwide at www.mindtv.org
• Every program is 5 minutes long
• It’s all about learning, community, and social awareness
• Members make half of MiND’s programs
• Membership is open to all: individuals, non-profits, businesses, etc.