Cary Sherburne says we need to replace "Web 2 Print." How about "printernet?" Consider HP + CGX + National Geographic

In today's WhatTheyThink, I found Cary Sherburne's column.

Web-to-Print: We need a new name:
WhatTheyThink:

"These days, however, what we were calling “Web-to-print” has morphed into something much more sophisticated and we really need a new name.
. . . . It is more about managing business communications or marketing collateral, which is likely to include some print.

In 2008, Graph Expo’s Must See’ems expert panel identified Web-to-print as number six in its list of the Top Six Survival Technologies for 2009. Number 1 was MIS, Number 2 was Information Technology as a core competency, and Number 4 was workflow."

My Quibble
The problem here is that printers cannot choose MIS or IT as a "core competency." It's like me "choosing" to make a million dollars. It would be nice, but choosing is only the necessary, but not sufficient, condition to make it happen. There is a well developed profession of trained, experienced experts who do MIS and IT. The idea that it is an easily earned competency makes no sense. Partnering with an MIS or IT outfit may be reasonable. But growing your own from a standing start is silly on the face.

At any rate, Cary goes on to frame the question about Web to Print.

In my mind, all four of these are tightly linked and almost need to be grouped as a must-have megasolution for the modern provider of printing services—or is it business communications services, marketing communications services, marketing services? It’s pretty confusing out there in this time of dynamic change.

The appropriate term in my mind is Printer. Printers have been around for 500 years. They improve every year. They weather every storm and come out better on the other end. The names change, but the job doesn't. As it says at the top of this blog. Printers print.

The rest of the column is a great quick survey of 14 of the 34 solutions to the web to print problem. I recommend the click.

And then the question:

As you read through what each of these does, you will see why we need a new category. Care to submit your suggestions?

My suggestion
Do what they did in Australia at PacPrint. Use the printernet idea to frame the discussion. Every printer is potentially part of a network of printers. A network printers supplies the speed and scale to compete against web media. No printer can do it alone but in a network, we can again redefine the industry and put Print in the middle of the game.

Add CodeZ QR codes and TinyPurls and Web2Print is complemented by Print2Web with a tool that generates click streams from physical objects. Click streams mean informatics. Informatics is the valuable commodity for every enterprise, commercial or non commercial going forward. That's the idea I've been trying to capture with Clickable Print.

One use case for Clickable Print, Printernet Published
Google and the other Internet titans are in a ferocious fight for control of the mobile web OS. Microsoft and Yahoo attacking search. Chrome OS attacking the desktop.

Consider the value created by 50,000,000 postcards printed and delivered in two days with a minmal carb on footprint. Each postcard takes the user to a video on the web. Some will get there by typing in a human readable URL, the TinyPurl. The really cool kids will just scan the QR and watch the video on their cell phone.

In either case, consider the clickstream generated by 50,000,000 potential clicks. Each click means someone is interested. By analyzing where and when the interested appeared, Google et al know where the interested live. If it's done with a little foresight by getting folks to opt in to receive postcards the connection with the interested is made.

Every marketing campaign needs to locate, nurture and help their evangelists. Locate them with clickable postcards. Nurture and help is for a later post.

In any case a little search and replace may help define what this market might look like. Every global brand needs the same thing. Every politician needs the same thing. Every education enterprise needs the same thing. Every health and government agency needs the same thing.

There are only two push mass media.
One is TV. The other is Print.
It's not web to print.
It's Print to TV.
1 + 1 = 3


Here's the HP + Consolidated Graphics + National Geographic piece.

The Web is a pull media for a niche market. Print is a push media for the mass market. Media is not zero sum. It's the more, the more.

Online Media: Why Time Spent on Internet Is Leveling Off -
Advertising Age - Digital:

"NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Time spent with the internet, as it turns out, doesn't balloon indefinitely.

That might sound obvious, but this is the year web surfing leveled off at 12 hours a week after growing from less than six hours a week in 2004, according to Forrester's annual survey of more than 40,000 American consumers' self-reported media habits. The report, released Monday, also indicates relative stabilization in other media channels, most notably newspaper and magazine reading.

Ad Age: For years we've heard prognosticators talk about the internet's virtually limitless growth -- and the byproduct of that, the shrinking time people spend with non-internet media. Do you think this "stagnation" challenges the assumptions many people have about how we're moving to an all-digital world?

Ms. Rousseau-Anderson: People aren't giving up traditional media yet. Again, it's all about specialization. So there is still a lot of room for growth, but people are going to seek content that specifically speaks to them. Understanding target groups becomes the key to that growth

Ad Age: Some traditional media have actually shown less decline than what one might think, from the headlines. People reported no change in their TV habits from 2004 to 2009; they reported a 6% drop in magazine reading, although it appeared flat over the past year; and while newspaper reading has dropped 17% since 2004, it appears flat over the past year.

Microsoft and Yahoo agree search deal. The Opportunity for MPS is Google Apps.

The rule of business in a user network economy is crush them, buy them or partner with them. It seems that Microsoft has moved to "partner with them."

FT.com / Technology - Microsoft and Yahoo agree search deal:
"Microsoft and Yahoo agreed on Wednesday to an online alliance that could create a more formidable rival to Google in the search business.

In a joint statement, the companies confirmed the widely expected deal, which will give Microsoft a 10-year licence to integrate Yahoo’s search technology into its exisitng search platforms, while Yahoo will become the “relationship sales force” for advertisers for both companies."

The opportunity for MPS
Become the "relationship sales force" for Google Apps and help fix bottom of the education pyramid and all levels of the health delivery pyramid in the process.

It will drive the IT guys nuts.

Andy Tribute Weighs in on Kodak Prosper. My two cents is that "Good enough" now, Is better than "Better," later. Black ink only is good enough.

When Noel Ward posted at WTT describing the Kodak Prosper technology last Friday, it sounded to me that the tech was a game changer. At the time I commented:

If I read it correctly a tabloid page in color would be appx .008 x 2 = 1.6 cents and .0015 x 2 for .003 per black and white tabloid page. That translates into 24 page tabloid in black only for .072 plus paper and folding.

If those numbers check out I think it might open up a market for the versioned newspapers to eat into the high school textbook market.

I don’t know the pricing on the infoprint, hp or oce machines, but a selling cost of less than 20 cents a copy should find it’s place in the education marketplace.

Or my math could be wrong.

In today's WTT, Andy Tribute has a column entitled Kodak - On Stream to Prosper. Following are some excerpt:

Before going further with this analysis one needs to outline that Stream is a new technology for continuous inkjet printing, and that Kodak has been developing this new technology for many years. a brilliant concise history of the tech follows at the click

Here, I want to draw attention to two points:

The first of these products has now entered the market, this being the Kodak Prosper S10 Imprinting System. This is a monochrome only imprinting system with a print width of 4.16 inches, a resolution of 600 dpi and a running speed of up to 1,000 ft/minute

If this system were used to embedd TinyUrls and CodeZ QR codes into offset printing, no matter what the substrate, it brings Clickable Print to a mass market. It can be implemented now merely by joining well defined technologies in the service of a new capability for Print.

The next Kodak Prosper product will be the first press on this platform. This will be the Kodak Prosper Black Press and it is targeted for introduction in 1^st quarter of 2010. This is a press targeted mainly at the book market with a print width of 24.5 inches that allows for three-up perfecting on 8 x 10 inch pages to produce 12 page signatures, or four-up perfecting on 6 x 9 inch pages to produce 16 page signatures

This might be real competition for Oce in large scale book printing. But will it be able to penetrate the installed base? My bet is that it's going to take lots of time and money. While the TCO of Prosper might be better now, there is little doubt that going forward Oce will continue to improve and thus lower operating costs.

In my not so humble opinion,
Kodak has to solve the Innovator's Dilemma. In successful large corporations, disruptive innovation can not grow because the culture of the company is focused on improving the product/services for their best customers. From what I read at Andy's column Kodak Prosper might well turn out to be a disruptive technology.

Christensen outlines case after case after case to demonstrate that disruptive technology has to mature by meeting the needs of a market of non consumers. For previously unserved customers, the choice is between nothing and a "good enough." The black ink only technology is good enough.

The non consumers for high school education are the drop outs and the adolescents incarcerated in the US prison system. There are few benefits that accrue to any one in the education industrial complex by serving this population, and thus there is no competition.

Color is allegedly important for advertising at the top of the pyramid .(Although I question the common wisdom after considering on the track record of Google AdSense.)

Consider clickable one color versioned print product and one color CodeZ QR in 4c offset to replace textbooks at the bottom of the pyramid. It might be just the revenue stream to buy some time. Also consider turning Prosper into it's own business unit. Give it the space to develop the business rules that make sense for a disruptive technology.

Full Disclosure: Long on Kodak.

If transpromo needs awesome recomendation engines, the answer might be movies+a contest. Or call Gravity . . and lowering SAG

Imagine a recommendation engine for education. as in "if you liked reading this, then consider reading this." Or if you enjoyed working out this problem, consider working out this one."

In general a recommendation engine takes the form of "If you liked doing X, consider doing Y." That might turn out to be the operational definition of being a coach or a mentor.

Netflix Competitors Learn the Power of Teamwork -
from NYTimes.com July 28, 2009:
"A contest set up by Netflix, which offered a $1 million prize to anyone who could significantly improve its movie recommendation system, ended on Sunday with two teams in a virtual dead heat, and no winner to be declared until September.

But the contest, which began in October 2006, has already produced an impressive legacy. It has shaped careers, spawned at least one start-up company and inspired research papers. It has also changed conventional wisdom about the best way to build the automated systems that increasingly help people make online choices about movies, books, clothing, restaurants, news and other goods and services.

These so-called recommendation engines are computing models that predict what a person might enjoy based on statistical scoring of that person’s stated preferences, past consumption patterns and similar choices made by many others — all made possible by the ease of data collection and tracking on the Web.

“The Netflix prize contest will be looked at for years by people studying how to do predictive modeling,” said Chris Volinsky, a scientist at AT&T Research and a leader of one of the two highest-ranked teams in the competition.

. . .

Software recommendation systems, Mr. Mackey said, will increasingly become common tools to help people find useful information and products amid the explosion of information and offerings competing for their attention on the Web. “A lot of these techniques will propagate across the Internet,” he predicted.

That is certainly the hope of Domonkos Tikk, a Hungarian computer scientist and a member of the Ensemble. Mr. Tikk, 39, and three younger colleagues started working on the contest shortly after it began, and in 2007 they teamed up with the Princeton group. “When we entered the Netflix competition, we had no experience in collaborative filtering,” Mr. Tikk said.

Yet based on what they learned, Mr. Tikk and his colleagues founded a start-up, Gravity, which is developing recommendation systems for commercial clients, including e-commerce Web sites and a European cellphone company.

The best and brightest from many disciplines joined together. The didn't deliver a paper or an approach or information. They solved a well measured problem at a total cost of $1,000,000. There was no additional overhead, health care or pension benefits.

That's just one way to get SAG down,down,down, fast, fast, fast.

More on the XRX Earnings Call when I get the chance. Short story..nice.

At Seeking Alpha the rule is "

You may quote up to 400 words of any transcript on the condition that you attribute the transcript to Seeking Alpha and either link to the original transcript or to www.SeekingAlpha.com.

Here's the link to the call transcript. You can read the full thing over there if you like. Ursula gives a nice, clear picture of what it looks like from the mountain top.

Meanwhile, anyone notice that XRX closed at 7.93 yesterday.

Go Ursula!
Go Xerox!

And some of my not so humble suggestions from last Thursday to get the SAG down, down, down , fast, fast, fast , all the while increasing our ability to take advantage of the turn around when it comes along. It's about harnessing XRX dna on the loose, setting up PARC University and fixing high school education.

Full disclosure: Long on Xerox.

Nobody needs more data. Everybody needs more maps. Education needs Print2Web.

Spreadsheets tell you what was. Maps help you get from here to there. Spreadsheets capture a moment. Maps articulate a process. Education, marketing and managing complexity is all about process flow. Any baby boomer - once a hippie - will tell you that "You have to go with the flow."

The process:

The product:


see more at Maps of Science : Better Maps, Better Decisions

From Wired Magazine:

The pursuit of human knowledge has a shape.

By crunching data from more than a billion user interactions on scholarly databases, Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers produced a high-resolution map of the relationships between different fields of science.

They’re not the first to map science, though they insist that their map is best. Other topographers of knowledge, they say, aren’t up to date on what modern scholars search for, and rely too much on natural science databases.

(Maybe that’s why the Los Alamos map, published in Public Library of Science ONE , looks a bit like the Milky Way, while this lovely scientific paradigm map — a favorite of Nature and Seed magazine — looks like an amoeba.)

The Los Alamos team analyzed click streams from 23 databases — Thomson Scientific, Elsevier, Jstor, Ingenta and multiple campuses of the University of Texas and California State University — and mapped patterns of interest and cross-journal citations.

Education is not about training.
Training is about training. Education is about managing access to knowledge in the service of learning. High School education is in the service of High School kids learning.

Clickable Print + Clickable Web generate click streams.
It's not just Web2Print. It's also Print2Web.

Why I learned to love twitter and a theme song for traditional newspapers

Here's the tweet:

scoopingthenews#musicmonday A little special song for newspapers in debt and on brink of closing http://bit.ly/2ZkzO

The video embedding is disabled so you'll have to go there.

OOPS! Auto Marketing: GM Shops Sweat . . C'mon globals tell'em about clickable print and printernet publishing and cell phones. Lutz will love it.

If you think you are a Market Service Provider or do Solutions Selling, why not give a call to every agency in the world that is going to make a pitch for GM's business? That would be a nice service to provide a marketer or selling a solution that someone could use this afternoon.

The latest YouTube videos for GM were awesome! With clickable print every kid in the States would love to watch them and others you come up with on their smartphones.

And even if they don't, you'll get "metrics" if you use CodeZ QR. And even if you don't, the suits on the Board of Directors will think Lutz is a genius.

And we all know that's what gets the deal in the end anyway.

Auto Marketing: GM Shops Sweat as Lutz Heads to Caribbean - Advertising Age - News: "DETROIT (AdAge.com) -- GM's new marketing top gun, Bob Lutz, met with the automaker's brand teams on July 14, spent 10 to 20 minutes critiquing the work for each brand and, in the words of someone in the know, 'crapped all over the advertising.' Then he jetted off to the Caribbean island of Montserrat on holiday, leaving some scared individuals in his wake."

An Evolutionary Approach to Print in the Communication Ecology

A gene in biology is like a meme in culture. They are both self replicators. Self replicators drive evolution. Looking at a communication ecology from the point of view of the meme is a good way to generate word/mathematical strings than can be disproved by empirical evidence. The essence of science is to produce disprovable symbolic strings.

The rule of evolution is random mutation, selective destruction under changing constraints of time and energy. The rule of communication is the more, the more.

"Evolves to a collection of," shortened to ETACO to make it easier to write, is the area where the mechanisms of evolution happen. Articulating the mechanisms of change is the key to managing unintended consequences, manage risk and create wealth.

Sound ETACO Words ETACO Sentences ETACO Memes ETACO Narratives ETACO Language Culture

This is NOT a linear process. It would be better visualized as cloudy sky or schools of fish rather than a spread sheet or functions in n dimensions.

Print evolution in media systems

In the beginning was the Word . . .King James Version, John 1:1.

A tool that speeds replication

True writing is only thought to have developed independently in four different civilizations in the world, namely Mesopotamia, China, Egypt and Mesoamerica, from Wikipedia

A tool that leads to a phase change in replication speed and scale

The history of the alphabet begins in Ancient Egypt, more than a millennium into the history of writing. The first pure alphabet emerged around 2000 BCE to represent the language of Semitic workers in Egypt (see Middle Bronze Age alphabets), and was derived from the alphabetic principles of the Egyptian hieroglyphs from Wikipedia

A tool that leads to a phase change in replication speed and scale

Around 1450, Johannes Gutenberg introduced what is regarded as an independent invention of movable type in Europe (see printing press), along with innovations in casting the type based on a matrix and hand mould. Gutenberg was the first to create his type pieces from an alloy of lead, tin and antimony – the same components still used today.^[5]

The tool set evolves

The Gutenberg press was much more efficient than manual copying and still was largely unchanged in the eras of John Baskerville and Giambattista Bodoni—over 300 years later.^[9] By 1800, Lord Stanhope had constructed a press completely from cast iron, reducing the force required by 90% while doubling the size of the printed area.^[9] While Stanhope's "mechanical theory" had improved the efficiency of the press, it still was only capable of 250 sheets per hour.^[9] German printer Friedrich Koenig would be the first to design a non-manpowered machine—using steam.^[9]

The tool evolves again