Google + Grameen in Uganda + it's all about cell phones

The more the cell phones, the bigger the market for clickable print.

New SMS Services in Uganda from Grameen, Google & MTN | WhiteAfrican:
by HASH on June 29, 2009

Grameen Foundation’s AppLab has released a new suite of mobile phone applications developed in Uganda, using Google SMS Search and in partnership with MTN Uganda as the mobile operator. The services include . . . "

Dr Joe Webb has it right again! It's not "lean and mean." It's "sleak and adaptive." And a quibble and a question.

Meanwhile, nobody video taped the Frank and Dr Joe Show. What a mistake! Put it on YouTube and WTT could get every print junkie to tune in. The folks who have iPhone could watch it during that next really boring meeting or while they are waiting for a customer to get off the phone. They really should do Clickable Postcards to build traffic. Plus it would be a natural for PSPs to use as free marketing material. But that's their problem. My problem is my IRA.

Anyway, the full column is well woth the click. Some out of order excerpts, my quibble and question are below.

Printing Industry News, Commentary & Analysis, Research and Consulting from WhatTheyThink:

". . . find it somewhat amusing that, after all this time in the Internet age, printing companies and their vendors keep thinking that changes in the economy are the prime reasons for the state of their businesses. We know that the economy and print disconnected about 12 years ago in terms of the GDP relationship. It's hard to believe that something that started more than a decade ago is still stubbornly resisted by this kind of natural businessperson's analytical urge.

First, the quibble
Clickable Print ( Print + 2d codes + cell phones) can connect newspapers, cable channels, and newspapers to enable commerce and get local advertising. The only defensible value is the network. Everything else is a commodity. Check out my blabla at The Digital Nirvana.

If newspaper inserts lose their relevance (that is, newspaper circulation goes down so much that some retailers abandon them), printers wonder what print product would benefit. The benefit to direct mail will be minimal. The big beneficiary would probably be local cable TV. I doubt that newspaper inserts will disappear quickly, though.

Then, the question re: Money Supply

The Conference Board's Leading Indicators uses changes in the money supply in its calculations. The rise in the money supply is so incredibly huge, I suspect the LEI is giving us false signals of an upturn.

But if you take a global perspective isn't it about taking trillions out of the money supply?

Spot on: Globals and Earnings Calls

When entrepreneurs own a business, finger pointing at others for failures is one luxury they can never have. That's only a strategy for publicly held companies with big boards of directors.

Human nature is always at work in the way we attribute the causes of success and failure. If business is great, it's because we have superior management and the insightful decisions we made; business is bad because the economy is against us.

Spot on: Direct Mail

. . got a rise out of the audience at one of the recent NPES Regional Meetings when I said that I thought "do not mail" legislation would pass, and the first time would be in any of these four states: California, Vermont, Oregon, or Washington.

That's what happened to textbooks, so why not "do not mail?"

Spot on: Mergers and Acquisitions

There is a lot of interest in mergers & acquisitions as a means to cope with the recession and our own downturn. In the end, it may actually be counterproductive for the industry. Capital that would otherwise be used to update technology, worker skills, and other key attributes of successful businesses are instead used to pay for existing businesses that may turn out to have the right business model for 2008 but not 2012. Who is to say that what made a print business successful recently will guarantee success just a few years from now?

How did that work out for Anderson and Cenveo?

Twitter Plus Clickable Print = a different classroom experience

They haven't figured out the print part, but use your imagination.

Want to have College Student like you? Important Causes are not the environment. It's education.

MediaPost Publications Cause C
06/26/2009:
"What ranks at the top of the list? Education is considered very important by 81%, followed by child endangerment/abuse prevention at 68%. The fact that education leads the list shows how concerned students are about protecting and furthering their academic careers. Rape prevention (65%), civil/human rights (65%) and cancer (62%) round out the top five, with drunk driving prevention (61%), genocide (59%), domestic violence (57%), AIDS (57%) and environment/conservation (54%) completing the list of the causes that college students find important."

Gen Y has higher expectations of the products that it uses and consumes, demanding that brands not only perform to perfection but help make the world a better place at the same time. The rising popularity of cause-based marketing reflects a fundamental shift in the way that Gen Y is changing consumerism.

While most marketers reflexively reach to the "environment" when they outline their cause-based marketing efforts, a study conducted by SurveyU in May shows that the environment is merely the 10th most-important cause in the minds of current college student.

Watch out Apple, Here comes Samsung

The better they get, the better for Clickable Print. It's in Dubai, Singapore and the UK. Coming to a State near you soon...

Wireless Watch Japan spent an interesting week in Singapore at the annual CommunicAsia conference and trade show recently where we managed to shoot this demo of the latest Samsung Jet offering which made it’s debut there on June 15th. Billed as ‘Smarter than a Smartphone’ the AMOLED display is super crisp at 480dpi and it’s 800MHz processor lends power to the speedy brand name. The companies Touch Whiz UI, with drag and drop widgets, and the newly minted Dolphin browser featuring one finger zoom while enabling tabbed browsing of up to five web pages at one time were all impressive additions. Watch the video and see for yourself — Special thanks to Mr. Shin from Samsung for taking the time!

More High Schools that Work

Found at twitter: fcpsnews : Official Twitter site of Fairfax County Public Schools, Fairfax, VASomeone should call Cox Communications or the Fairfax County Schools to tell them about Clickable Print and Printernet Publishing.

Fairfax County Public Schools : Video : Cable TV:
"'smart campaign informs viewers about Fairfax County Public Schools' (FCPS) efforts and initiatives through public service announcements (PSAs) while reinforcing their awareness of everything that is great about this school system.

Through the important messages conveyed in these PSAs, and with the support of Cox Communications and Comcast Cablevision, FCPS is able to reach thousands of television viewers throughout Fairfax County. 'smart' PSAs are aired on over 40 cable channels and on the school system's flagship station Red Apple 21 at no cost to taxpayers. That's smart!"

Want to fix high schools? Just do what they're doing in Camden, N.J. .

It's really not that hard. Go to the link to get the story. It's about continuous focus, respect and very clear norms of behavior. And it's not about heroic behavior.

It would probably also work in globals and printing companies.

Urban high school's rare feat: No dropouts -
Education- msnbc.com:
"'Our students have the same issues, dilemmas and challenges as students at the larger high schools,' says principal Timothy Jenkins. The graduating class includes students who became pregnant or homeless but still made it through school.

All 30 students who began as freshman at MetEast four years ago have graduated from high school somewhere, including a handful that have moved or transferred, Jenkins says.

That's a contrast to what happens in the city's two traditional high schools.

According to state Education Department figures, nearly 1 in 7 Camden High students dropped out in the 2007-08 school year. At Woodrow Wilson High, it was almost 1 in 11. Critics say those dropout rates are understated, but still, both schools were among the 20 in the state with the highest dropout rates.

All 28 students graduating from MetEast have been accepted to at least one college. Jenkins expects most of them to attend in the fall."

McGraw Hill takes first step to getting it right, but they need printernet publishing

The response to College Textbook meltdown is the M-Series. It's a great step in the right direction. Changing the heavy textbook into an illustrated magazine.

Most instructors will love it. It supplies the talk for chalk and talk. If it also has quizzes it should be a runaway success. Barnes and Noble's will hate it. It's much harder to resell a magazine.

But McGraw are still missing the learning part. Teachable moments are when learning happens. Teachable moments come and go unpredictably. If the content is static, it's still too slow to take advanatge of them when they happen.

McGraw Hill is struggling with the problem of having a huge investment in legacy content that earned it's creditability in a different age. Creditability for "Generation Next" is about access, relevance and timeliness. It's not about being called an expert in XYZ.

It could be a really neat opportunity for Barnes and Noble. Printernet published books and newspapers with the instructor pulling the content from the web, supported by ads for public health and government. XML to PDF is well defined. PDF to print anywhere in any format is well defined. The infrastructure for a printernet is in place.

Go Barnes and Noble? Borders? Staples? AlphaGraphics? CGX? RRD? Xerox? Oce?

The Story of the McGraw-Hill M Series:
"The traditional textbook is created from a relationship between instructors, authors, and publishers.

With the M Series, McGraw-Hill brings the student into that traditional equation to create a new generation of textbooks.

Here, you'll find that scholar and instructor preferences and teaching expectations have been married to the results of in-depth research into today's student study habits, learning behaviors, and reading goals.

Through this effort, McGraw-Hill has re-invented the textbook learning experience to meet today's students where they are, so instructors can take them where they want them to be."

As Mosaic was to the Internet, so Clickable Print is to the Printernet

Assumptions:
1. Print and TV are the mass media.
2. The internet is to buy things, search and talk.
3. The business rules are buy, search, and talk for free and pay for stuff.
4. Print, t shirts, posters et al. are information rich stuff.
5. The printernet enables the speed and scale that can make them valuable.

Printernet
Massive parallel local/global print manufacturing .
At the MFP or CRD or PSP or a gezillion PSPS.

Mosiac
Easy access to the internet

Clickable print (Print + 2d Codes + PC cameras or Smart Phones)
Easy access to the printernet

Some use cases:
Clickable maps connected to OnStar or Sirius Radio.
Clickable TV guides to find just the right video at just the right time.
Clickable club cards and postcards to support viral marketing.
Clickable club cards, postcards and flyers to support political campaigns.
Clickable newspapers to replace high school textbooks.
Clickable labels in museums and art galleries to find out more.
Clickable supermarket shoppers to carry through the store.
Clickable menus to get the ingredients and the chain of production of the food.
Clickable production machines to get the carbon footprints.
Clickable manuals for doctors, plumbers and electricians.
Clickable drug labeling to monitor compliance.

And my personal favorites:
Clickable curriculum guides to get just the right video on the flat screen in the classroom and then the kids watching the video on their smartphones and then the family watching the video in the living room. And then talking about it.

Clickable ID's for High School kids to make it easy to send an SMS to mom when junior acts up. It will fix the "attendance problem" in about 2 weeks. It should fix the "stop acting like an asshole problem" in about a month.

Data points:
1. The new iPhone sold over a 1 million units in a couple of days.
2. Social marketing is marketing.
3. Whispernet + Amazon makes one button purchase of books easy.
4. Automobiles are connected to the Cloud.
5. Textbooks are disappearing from California.
6. The newspaper industry is coming back from the "end of the world."
7. HP TouchSmart is connected to HP Apps.
8. The global economic engine is moving to BRIC and G20.
9. The person who sells mobile phones at my Costco referring to his cell phone with a 2" by 5" keyboard said, "This never leaves my hand. I spent last weekend watching the Mets on the flat screen and Family Guy on my phone. It was the best vacation I've had in a long time. I used it type my resume.
10. A couple of my high school students used their cell phones to write the essays that appeared at the class wiki.
11. Barack Obama is number 6 on twitter with 1,573,800 followers as of this morning.

Likely data points:
1. Apple will release a big iPhone which will be the killer app tablet computer.
2. Newspapers will find a business model enabling commerce in addition to advertising.
3. Legacy video will be tagged for educational uses.
4. High school education will get much cheaper, faster and better.
5. Newspapers will publish versioned papers for communities of interest.

Maybe future data points:
1. Android, Apple OS ,MSFT will compete to be the OS of the mobile web.
2. Smartphones, netbooks and X+whispernet will be the access points to the web.
3. Thirty second commercials will be harnessed to help fix high school education.
4. Clickable newspapers will publish versioned papers for the communities of learners, starting with high school, then moving to everyone.

Digital leads to offset leads to offset leads to . . .

Picked up on Twitter following BP_Outsourcing, who in real life is Steve Baer. Steve says "For every $1 spent on print another $6 is wasted on obsolesence, storage, waste and handling. Business Process expertise is the solution in the New economy."

I say, "You've got that right!"

The tweet:
The offset revolution - Pixart style http://bit.ly/sAOXF

At the click:

Pixart.it, the European leader in Web-to-print based digital printing services, has announced the installation of a new four-colour Komori LS 29 offset press at the company's Marghera production facility. The Komori is the company's first foray into commercial litho printing and joins a fleet of digital printing machines which is unrivalled in Europe and has made the company one of the continent's digital printing powerhouses.

Matteo Rigamonti, managing director, Pixart.it explained the rationale behind the Italian company's latest investment, ‘In January 2009 we introduced a new offset printing services to our customers. The response from the market has been tremendous and in a very short time we achieved the high volumes which more than justified this major investment. With this inhouse litho production capacity we can now ensure we maintain print quality and control over production times for longer run work, both of which are so essential to our core proposition – to offer quality printing at competitive prices and a 24/48 hour delivery service throughout Europe.’