Sunday, May 24, 2009

HometownTimes.com + Alphagraphics = Versioned Newspapers = Community Based Printernets

HometownTimes.com:
"Hometowntimes.com is now offering a franchise opportunity, with all the support, training, and proven business and marketing experience that has been our foundation since 2003. Now, we're ready to offer our formula for local online news and advertising to thousands of entrepreneurs across America ..."

Printer Broker + MFP = MPS = VAR in the Printernet

If you take the click in the snippet, you'll quickly recognize that the "new" business of Print Management Company = Print Broker. If he sold MFP's it would be PMC + MFP = MPS. If he sold business supplies it would be Staples.

Here's the value prop:
Whether you’re looking to create 300 variable data postcards, print, bind and assemble 5,000 marketing collateral kits, a few thousand hard cover books or print and deliver 3 million newspaper inserts to 20 different locations, ENVISION can fulfill your needs. Plus your project will be on time and on budget.
You say tomato, I say tomahto.
Beating the recession: Risk proves fruitful for young print-management company -
@Central Penn Business Journal:
By Eric Veronikis
5/21/2009 3:41 PM

Starting a business in an economy heading south is daunting.

But Brian Hess said he felt confident with a different, yet sound, business model and a wealth of printing experience.

So he took that and some clients to call on from a former business partnership and founded a print-management company called Envision in November 2007."

Oops! The AP is toast. Maybe they will go into the K-12 education business.

Charging a long term fee for information in an internet world is not going to work. Then two years to get out of the lease? How can this possibly make sense.
How one newspaper is adjusting to life without the Associated Press
@Nieman Journalism Lab
: "In the comments on one of our posts, I heard about one paper that had already cut AP entirely out of its pages: The Norwalk Reflector, a 9,000-circ daily between Toledo and Cleveland in northern Ohio. Publisher Andy Prutsok decided two years ago, shortly after taking office, to drop out of AP, which was costing the paper $48,000 a year.

The two-year mark eventually passed, and the switch became official about three weeks ago. He says he hasn’t gotten a single complaint from readers about it — and that his readers expect local news from their local newspaper, not national or international headlines. If they want news from far beyond Huron County, they have other options."

Everything you need to know about the value of Print, the future of newspapers. All brought to you by the CBS Sunday Morning Show.

Hal Wright has been running a one person newspaper for forty years. He is 90. He does everything except for the printing. Even for him print is easy for a printer, hard for everyone else. Easy for me, hard for you is the basis of the division of labor and natural evolution. It's the reason I invest my IRA in companies that print and/or supply printers.

It's the only thing that Mr Wright can't do.

Watch the video:

or read the script, Hal Wright, Solo Newsman -
from BS News:
"In the Sierra Nevada Mountains sits an out-of-the-way corner of California where scant few even pass through, and fewer still stick. Hal Wright stuck, in the little town of Loyalton, where he was a gold digger who fell down a mine shaft, and once he got out, stayed out. He missed newspapers out here, so Hal started one: The Sierra Booster. He was answering the phone when we visited.

Hall showed us a copy of the paper's very first edition, which features a line in its masthead: 'To be published fortnightly at Loyalton, California, until further notice.'

'You're coming up on half a century later, and you haven't given notice that you're quitting yet,' Geist said."


HP, Xerox, Ricoh and other Globals: How to get the stock price to pop.

Get on list at http://dividendsvalue.com

The issue is risk mitigation going forward. Instead of hiring more marketing people, hire more actuaries. While you searching for markets, don't forget to search for alpha. Face the fact that the era (error?) of funny money and under priced risk is over. The new game is earning a profit AND increasing the dividend whenever you can. It's a much easier way to manage the analysts.

Oce gives a regular dividend. Their stock popped over 100% since February 17, 2009. Recently Xerox has started up with regular dividends I put 1000 more shares in the IRA on Friday. The best signal-for-me is money-for-me. All the rest is nice, but blablabla. Money-for-me is dividends. Color cube(qube), XPS and Ursula Burns is very nice, but still noisy. Dividends, like compensation, on the other hand, are simple signals that almost always get through any noise.

I buy/hold/and sometimes kibbutz. (this blog.) I rarely gamble. I hate risk. Every once in a while a Black Swan with a minimum risk appears. (That's the C+P in the IRA.) I'm a fan of the market because I never got into being a sports fan, politics is becoming a less interesting sport, teaching is a young person's game and only boomers are still interested in Bob Dylan and the Beattles.

Since the only thing that I think I know anything about is my beloved print industry, that's where I put the IRA.

At Dividends Value it says:
The following is a combined list of the S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats [Aristocrat], US Broad Dividend Achievers [Achiever], International Dividend Achievers [Intl. Achiever] and U.S. Dividend Champions [Champion]. The duplications have been eliminated and stocks are crossed out when I learn that they have either cut their dividend or fail to raise it. For additional information on each of the above lists, please click here.
Over here at Tough Love, I say that ones on the list that caught my interest were
Pitney Bowes Inc. (PBI) - [Aristocrat] - [Achiever] - [Champion]
McGraw-Hill Cos. Inc. (MHP) - [Aristocrat] - [Achiever] - [Champion]
John Wiley & Sons Inc. (Cl A) (JW.A) - [Achiever]
Courier Corp. (CRRC) - [Achiever]
H&R Block Inc. (HRB) - [Achiever]
And especially the ones that no longer make the cut, but might get back someday
New York Times Co. (NYT) - [Achiever] - Cut 11/08
Avery Dennison Corp. (AVY) - [Aristocrat] - [Achiever] - [Champion] - Flat since 12/07..

BP: Evolution in virus, human and business . . . and why education is in for a tipping point

The question is "Why do 'smart/good' people do 'stupid/evil' things? Failing high school, crashing a global and having wars are all caused by smart/good people doing stupid/evil things.

Smart-stupid and good-evil is most likely similarly distributed at all levels of the pyramid. Attributing 'smart-good' to just the top is frankly, 'stupid.' Attributing "stupid-evil" to just the top of the pyramid is also dumb. Contrary to the populist common wisdom, Congress, Boards of Directors, High School Principals, Printers and their customers have no monopoly on stupid.

Smart-stupid is most often used as an explanation from the top. Good-evil is used as an explanation from the bottom. Smart-stupid and good-evil are often used the same way as persistent-lazy. Wi

Without the qualifier "when" they are all useless words /memes/thought models if the job is to get from here to there. They are useless in government, education, business and selling stuff. Evolutionary words /memes/thought models, on the other hand are useful. Smart-stupid are not things. They point of situational responses. When used to analyze a communication ecology, the appropriate construction is smart-stupid-when X.

Random mutation > differentiation > selective destruction > selective retention
Since it's the 150th anniversary of Origin of the Species there have been numerous publishing events that have captured the evolutionary framework in Print. Once so captured it is easily accessible to those not in the various guilds that talk about this kind of stuff as their day job. It was true when movable type > Printed books. It is still true today.

The most interesting recent book that has gotten onto my radar is the Art Instinct, by Denis Dutton. In it, he makes a very compelling argument that the mechanism of sexual selection is at the base of language and art. Thus it helps clarify the mechanisms that led to the evolved patterns in the brain that make humans predisposed to use language and experience proximate rewards from humor, fashion, love and the other specific human manifestations we call consciousness.

Evolution is driven by two forces, not one. Darwin himself articulated the thought model. But it has been under appreciated in the public discourse. One mechanism is adapting to ever changing proximate physical environments. The other mechanisms surround sexual selection. Adapting to changing physical environment is about minimizing risk. Sexual selection is about taking risks.

As the two mechanisms play out, some evolved characteristics of living bodies have no real effects on either. Consider a tank of tropical fish. Some characteristics seem to make no sense for survival by minimizing risk.

But then consider the peacock's tail. It has been convincingly argued that the enormous energy required to create the peacock's tail has been evolutionarily selected as a signal to the pea hen of health. It takes lots of invested energy to get to the peacock's tail. The DNA that presented in living bodies as that big tail increased in the gene pool because more peacocks with that tail were chosen by mates.

Viruses
Viruses replicate asexually. They are single purpose DNA whose only activity is to replicate. They thrive in living bodies. But they are not burdened by the overhead or the slow cycle time of generations necessitated by living bodies. They can iterate a gezillion times in the cycle time that it takes a living bodies to iterate. The cycle time of random mutation, differentiation and selective destruction is very short. The AID virus is just the most recent example of a DNA virus that thrives by being able to take advantage of these short cycle times to change faster than humans can design ways to stop it.

Humans
Humans iterate slowly in human measured time. The time to get from infant to adult is very long. The amount of focused energy required is massive. Human mating decisions are critical path decisions that must be made in with imperfect information. Compared to mating decision, a high stakes test or a business decisions is a walk in the park. At any rate, the point is that human generations have a very long cycle time.

In the couple of hundred iterations since humans evolved to make a living from agriculture instead of hunting, the change in human DNA is relatively small. It took the many thousands of generations in the Pleistocene era to get to humans from the various living bodies that preceded them.

Business
Businesses have much faster cycle times than living bodies. Since a business is merely a set of mutual expectations that enable exchange, they are a merely a product of culture.

Community based exchange has been an evolutionarily significant activity of humans since at least the emergence of cities in the Fertile Crescent and of course at other locations around the glove. Exchanges grow fastest in the informal economy. But to scale means risk has to be managed at a much larger scale. So exchanges evolve most reliably in formal economies governed by laws. It seems likely that economies will grow both quickly with the minimum risk as law becomes better to minimize risk of exchange failure at the bottom of the pyramid.

Money
Once the large scale use of physical money emerged, it signaled less risky and easier exchanges. Less risk and easier leads to more iterations.

As is now well recognized, money is not a thing. Money is a signal that a specific exchange has acceptable risk. Now that the internet is replacing physical money with Cloud based signals of trust, the cycle time of exchange keeps moving towards zero. As the cycle time of exchanges move towards zero, money-in=the-Cloud can lose it's value as a signal of trust. Without constraint, money replicates like a virus. Sometimes that virus presents in living bodies as cancer. It presents in business as financial meltdowns.

Education
In order to get from here to there, the blablabla is very important. Sometimes the words that are the stuff of blablabla are useful to point to a piece of reality. The overwhelming amount of the blablabla is only a good signal of the stories they tell themselves to create meaning about what they are doing and what is happening. If carefully considered blablabla can also be useful signals about what they might do as they get from here to there.

The real levers of getting to new behavior are about opportunity, constraints, proximate rewards and aligned incentives. At it's base it is about organizing the time and space in which humans move using their Pleistocene era evolved brain to deal with the changing environment of the 21st century.

That's why education can be fixed much more easily and quickly than is commonly believed. While it's almost impossible to change what people believe and hard, but not impossible to change how they think, it's pretty easy to change time and space constraints.

Consider
1. The effects of $4.00 gasoline on US driving habits vs the gezillion of dollars spent on blablabla about sustainability and conservation.

2. That the US savings rate went from -6% to +4% in eight months when real risk entered the picture v the gezillion dollars that were spent on blablabla about getting Americans to save.

3. That it took just a couple of months for GM to get out of banking business and refocus on the car business vs the gezillions of blablabla about ROI and good management.

4. That it took about 6 months to go from Financial Meltdown to merely Serious Recession for some and a once in a lifetime opportunity for others.

Saturday, May 23, 2009

VCE vs UNE, Online education and printernet publishing

VCE = Value Chain Economy. UNE = User Network Economy.

The snippet will take you to a story about how expensive on line education has become for Universities.

Q: Given the essentially free cost of wiki's, blogs, and project management sites in the Cloud, how can this possibly be true?

A: When Cloud based technology is delivered through value chain commercial models it doesn't work. When Cloud capabilities are delivered through a user network commercial model it does.

Once it works, it will want printernet publishing.
Online Education Grows, but Painfully - @Chronicle.com: "Fast forward to 2009: With budgets strained, every state is looking at how it pays for online learning, which can be a big expense."
The first stage of online education was supported by grants for collaboration at the top of the pyramid. The second stage is described below:
Some virtual universities have found financial footing through entrepreneurial savvy, per-course fees, revenue-sharing deals, and other income sources. Texas may join them. It is exploring a plan to build large bachelor’s-degree programs for adults who never finished college. With its experience, says the online-education analyst Richard Garrett, Texas has “a strong hand to play.”

How the New York Times + Versioned Newspapers + Printernet Publishing Can Fix Bottom of the Pyramid High School Education

Note: This also works for legacy K -12 textbook publishers who are trying to figure out what to do next.

1. Translate the content of the NY Times into Basic English. see snippet below

2. Add some age appropriate quizzes.

3. Use excess print capacity to print a library of unit specific versioned newspapers. A 24 page tab should do it. Store the edited, written to National Standards, unprinted stuff in the Cloud.

4. Sell versioned newspapers in Basic English with current event content to replace K - 12 textbooks.

5. Slice and dice the content. Use education printernet publishing to replace supplementals.

About Basic English
from Encyclopedia Americana Volume 3
BASIC ENGLISH, ba'sik ing'glish, is the product of a new kind of functional thinking about language that shows how we may improve and reshape our linguistic instruments. It is not an invented language but a system of 850 English words, setting up restrictions of its own within accepted English usage, to be used for certain defined purposes. The system was on originated and between 1925 and 1932 by the English scholar C.K. Ogden, who was director of the Orthological Institute and editor of the International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method.

Purposes and Character. The primary object of Basic English is to provide an international secondary language for general and technical communication. Its qualifications for this purpose are that it is an undistorted form of what is practically a world language, and that it is simple enough to be quickly and easily learned, yet sufficiently flexible to be adequate for conveying information and expressing ideas. Its systematic character and selectivity make it also an effective introduction to English for the foreign learner, while the principles underlying the limitation of its vocabulary fit it for use as an antidote to confused thinking and verbal abuses by the English-speaking peoples themselves. By implication it is not intended as a substitute for any language or as a literary medium, or for any purposes to which the persuasive and evocative uses of language are appropriate.

Ogden was indebted to Jeremy Bentham, who studied the question of an international language and invented the word international, for some of the fundamental ideas on which the system is based. Particularly valuable were Bentham's investigation of linguistic fictions, his analysis of emotive language, and his penetrating observations on the verb.

Although Basic English is not just an English course, or even a method, but a language in itself, it is associated with certain teaching principles which are essential for its easy assimilation. These concern the proper grading of the material presented to the learner-the relating of expanded senses to root meanings, the logical building up of constructions, and so on. These teaching principles are developed most fully in The Basic Teacher (see Bibliography), a textbook for European adults.

They have been applied to the preparation of an introductory oral course commissioned for use in Gambia, where children are taught English in the schools before they are fully literate. Teaching aids of many kinds have also been developed, including a set of wall pictures embodying new techniques of visual presentation. The teaching principles first developed in connection with Basic English have profoundly influenced studies on the teaching of English as a foreign language by focusing attention on vocabulary control and scientific grading. Whether the diffusion of these Basic teaching concepts would prepare the way for the wider diffusion of the system itself remained to be seen, but improved methods of teaching are not a substitute, and no alternative to Basic English had appeared by the mid-1960's.

Maybe an even more stripped version of this e reader is the one to eliminate textbooks

I found this at the German version of Beyond Print (thank goodness for Google translate. It was enough for me to get the gist and link to the info I wanted.) For our German language visitors:

Der „Cool-er“ kommt vor dem Kindle nach Europa | The "Cool-er" comes before the Kindle to Europe |
Bildquelle: www.coolreaders.com
Bildquelle: www.coolreaders.com Image source: www.coolreaders.com

(19. Mai 2009 – dk) Ende Mai wird ein neuer E-Book Firma Interead in England auf den Markt kommen. (May 19, 2009 - dk) at the end of May, a new e-book reader Interead Company in England on the market. Der „Cool-er“ spricht durch sein Design jüngere Zielgruppen an und weist ein vergleichsweise geringes Gewicht sowie einen geringeren Preis als die derzeitigen E-Book Reader auf.
The link to coolreaders.com.


Do you think a kid would rather have a bunch of heavy textbooks or the stuff in the picture?

Good enough and fast always beats perfect and not so fast.
The point is that by eliminating the wireless connection and the keyboard, the MSP is 259 USD. So I would assume an even more vanilla box version could go for 200USD. And maybe someday 100 USD in bulk purchases.

For college textbooks, the wireless and the IP clearance is critical. For K - 12 wireless is not necessary, keyboards are not necessary, and IP clearance is much less important since the content in textbooks is too old too fast to be useful anyway. If someone includes quizzes for the teachers, this scales, in my not so humble opinion.

The other likely replacement for K -12 textbooks is the e reader that Hearst is working on. Since there is now so much activity in the ereader space, sooner or later one or a combination of them is going to get to market. When that happens, whoever has the print piece ready to go, wins. Again, in my not so humble opinion.

The Present Market Cap of Kodak is less than what Ricoh paid for Ikon and Xerox Paid for Global Imaging..

No problem with the underlying value. 30,000,000 users at Kodak Gallery + the largest high res library on the Cloud. Number one player in offset workflow in the States. Plus one of the most respected and valuable brands on the planet. Either this Board of Directors or the next one will get it right. With over 90% of the common held by institutions maybe present Money will be the trigger. But you never know with Money.

My IRA doesn't care and I only buy and hold, so I'm not betting on market price blablablabla.
At Xerox, Mulcahy Passes Torch to Burns --
from Seeking Alpha:
". . . the $1.5 billion purchase of Global Imaging Systems Inc. in 2007"