Quad Graphics buys into Yudu. Maybe they will take on the lead on textbbooks 09?

Today American Printer ran this:

Quad/Graphics, Sussex, WI, became a minority shareholder in London-based Yudu Media and will market the digital publishing firm's solutions under the name Quad/Graphics Digital Edition.Yudu provides digital publishing products to magazine, newspaper, catalog and book publishers.

at the Yudu blog, I found this:

YUDU Media will be exhibiting at the World of Learning in NEC Birmingham, UK from 30 September - 1 October, 2009. At the show, we will be showcasing YUDU Pro technology for anyone interested in creating digital catalogues, text books, prospectuses, training manuals, and any publication used in learning and education.

at the World of Learning website I found this:

The World of Learning Conference & Exhibition is the essential event for all senior learning decision-makers and buyers. Now there is no better time to ensure you are using the most cost-effective methods and solutions to deliver more successful learning results.

The point is that while the focus is magazine publishers, the under appreciated opportunity for print is in the education business. It seems to me that Yudu may have just the right dna to understand how to grow in the education space and Quad has exactly the right dna to stay one step ahead of their customers offering solutions to the next series of challenges.

It will be very interesting to see how this plays out.

Go Xerox ! Earnings Report Q3. Keep your eye on the second derivative.

From Seeking Alpha:

(XRX): Q3 EPS of $0.14 beats by $0.02. Revenue of $3.67B (-15.9%) in-line. Sees full-year EPS of $0.55-0.57 vs. consensus of $0.53. (8-K)

If anyone can turn the mother ship around, I'm betting it's going to be Ursula Burns.

Full disclosure: Long XRX.

The underappreciated player in 2d is a newspaper press manufacturer. Goss.

Back in June, I did a post about GossRSVP. Today this got on my radar.

Karen Charlesworth is impressed with an initiative to push upcodes to printers - from an unexpected but nonetheless brilliant sourc

Some snippets:

I’ve been incredibly impressed with the efforts of one company in particular to get printers thinking about their use.

The programme uses 2D barcodes embedded in the printed product, with text message interactions and response data handled as part of a scalable, low-capital service.

In fact the company behind RSVP is none other than Goss International, hitherto known mainly for its portfolio of web presses beloved by the world’s top newspaper printing houses.

Goss's vision in knitting together innovation, value and marketing opportunities for itself, its customers and its customers’ customers is nothing short of brilliant. Let’s see more manufacturers of printing kit heading in this direction.

The unique value of Print to help #HSdropouts. It's not about content. It's about analyzing clickstreams.

The issue for the education system to mitigate the high school dropout epidemic in the States is early warning and appropriate intervention.

The research is very clear that if a kid fails a class as a high school freshman it's an early warning sign of dropping out. The other early warning sign are bad attendance.

The under appreciated problem is that these early signs get lost in the noise of managing a school. As for many organizational problems, the issue is getting the signal on someone's radar fast enough and to be able to deliver the least expensive, most effective intervention when it's needed.

From me at twitter:

The real power of social media is that for the first time, conversation is "doing" and thus can be measured.

But for all the blah blah, social media does not yet have the reach of print. The people who "talk" loudest about social media are a self-selected group of early adopters. All interesting and useful, but blind to what it means to scale a good innovation in the real world to solve massive public problems.

The "educators" are blind to the fact that low income parents are deeply motivated by their children's success. But instead of focusing on keeping in touch with mom or guardian, they are trapped in a bubble that finds more and more fault with the culture of low income people.

Once 2d codes and Purls are in print they will create the clickstreams that can give real time information on the early predictors of dropping out of high school. If they are coupled with real time communication with parents, perhaps through SMS, and most definitely in personalized print, the power of mom, can be harnessed to slow down and eventually stop the dropout epidemic.

Me at twitter:

Measure doing, not learning in school. Print + QR yields clickstreams that can be shared with mom when jr gets lazy.

Great read at OutputLInks: Understanding Xerox + ACS and the new opportunity for Print.

This morning I got a great article from Output Links.

"Is the Trend Now Toward Transactional Output Outsourcing?" S. Gerschwer, OutputLinks| MUST read to figure out XRX + ACS http://ilnk.me/3de

The money paragraph:

Outsourcing HVTO is a trend to keep an eye on, especially as it will be conducted as a component of a greater whole. This means that, perhaps for the first time, C-Level executives will come to view their transactional output as a vital strategic asset. The data center is no longer a lonely outpost: it is the hub of the most core business process that the organization relies on: customer communication.

It's worth the click to get the full story.

A sustainable path for Print and MPS in Education and helping with the #HSdropouts problem.

An under appreciated fact is that print has grown as literacy grows. From Guttenberg to the emergence of high schools in the early part of the 20th century, when people are expected to learn to read it means more print.

Even during the advertising explosion of the last 50 years, much of the industry has been supported by printing textbooks, teaching collateral and testing material. The noise from the internet has obscured the signal that print is the medium of logical thought. The only place that logical thought is required is in school.

Since most of our visitors are from advanced economies, I'll focus on how it could play out in that context. (In a global context, it's pretty clear that literacy will continue to explode.)

Formal education in 2030

http://ilnk.me/18f is a link to a paper coming out of the National Association of Scholars at Princeton. It's worth a considered read.

For the sake of grammatical clarity, I will write from the perspective of 2030, putting these events-to-come in the past tense.

The crux of the argument:

In 2024, the movement to close state colleges and universities crested. . . . Online education had been thriving long before this, of course, but the huge new demand for online courses and programs turned online education into something like the railroad boom of the nineteenth century.

The issue is that formal education in the States is not sustainable in College nor in K - 12. It uses to many resources to justify the outcomes produced.

@ToughLoveforX well, with the astronomical rise in higher education, you have to wonder if colleges are fair value this day and age

e-learning = signif process change in orgs" http://bit.ly/HsrgM via @etutoria | "Process change" = old biz models -> new biz models.

The outcomes produced.

In Detroit "fewer than six of 10 HS seniors graduated in 2008, while the dropout rate was just over 27 percent." http://ilnk.me/379 WTF?

By 2007, a female #hsdroputs chance of being a single mother had jumped to 49 percent NYTimes http://ilnk.me/372

"Oregon has five "dropout factories" - high schools that don't get even 60 percent of their freshmen to senior year." http://ilnk.me/38d

It looks to me that Xerox is presently in the lead coming from the top.

RSA & #Xerox help Manatee School District. view at RealWorldPrint. http://ilnk.me/354 MUST see TV for #MPS

But the disruptive technology is coming from Google, energizing the bottom.

RT @tucksoon @web20classroom: The Power of Potential: 19 Educational Uses for Google Wave http://j.mp/25vazD

IM-not-so-HO, the first global to integrate MPS with the Google Wave will gain a huge first mover advantage. Most likely it's not going to be a global.

It's going to be the Independents.

Go Oce! World’s first customized daily newspaper . Versioned newspapers instead of textbooks can't be far behind.

It's now just one small step to versioned clickable newspapers to replace textbooks.

Instead of the content being pulled by the reader, it will be selected by the teacher. In addition to news stories for sections in regional, national, international newspapers, there would be an approved library of content aligned to educational standards.

My bet is that versioned newspapers for learning will emerge someplace in Northern Europe or Australia. It's now only a matter of time.

From Graphic Arts Magazine:

Called the Niiu Project, the first individualized newspaper in the world will be launched at the Ifra Expo 2009 newspaper exhibition in Vienna, Austria.

Niiu Subscribers will be able to log on to the site and create their own daily paper by selecting only the information and topics that they want to read. Content can be chosen from a variety of sections in regional, national and international newspapers, as well as the internet and the user’s social networking websites such as Facebook or Twitter.

The selected material is then merged into one single newspaper that will be delivered to postboxes in the morning.