Printing Industry News Digest May 28, 2011

Welcome to Printing Industry News Digest (PIND) issue 54, the summary of major news stories from the printing, packaging, digital and communication sectors. Welcome to the latest edition of PIND incorporating brief summaries and links to the week's key news stories so that you can look up that all important detail. Do also take a look at our automated GenesisNews Print Daily publication; why not take out a free subscription for a daily delivery!

Plenty of post-Northprint, spring/early summer mini-shows going on in print-land in the UK over the coming weeks: it’s just that time of year! Our focus is on the forthcoming Morgana “evolution” event taking place at the company’s Milton Keynes showroom and HQ. The UK’s leading manufacturer for finishing equipment focused on the digital print sector will be showing off a comprehensive range of product, including four new devices, and featuring the new DocuFold Pro, which will be exhibited for the first time. The event will also showcase product from DI press specialist Presstek and digital MIS company, TimeHarvest. It takes place next week on June 8 and 9.

Following on from our focus on QR code extravaganza last week, the Morgana invite happens to include one on the front cover! It takes you to the relevant page of the company’s web site where you can register for the above “evolution” event. In a more general QR sense, we are offered from other sources 12 steps to create your own successful QR code campaign.

We also made mention of the Starbucks/Gaga promotion last week (but got the link wrong - apologies; this one is good!): this week QR codes come to cans of Coca-Cola, with a music promotion in Germany. Perhaps they are beginning to catch on?!

Whilst we have mentioned this concept before, Blippar is a new name on the block as far as we are concerned. The company expects to move on from QR codes by making a specific object recognisable to your phone.

Talking of technology, the next time you think that things are moving a bit quick for you, refer back to this link: it details the creation of the originals for The Musalman newspaper, which are handwritten! It is the job of four urdu calligraphers to create this publication in India on a daily basis. As the link says, don’t go asking for an iPad app just yet.

Referencing our recent thoughts on cloud storage, you might remember that we are keen on Dropbox. So are quite a few others by the look of things: Dropbox users now save 1 million files every five seconds! Mind you, there are some 25 million users now, which helps to explain the big numbers. Users have saved a total in excess of 100 billion files. If you need an enhanced user interface for Dropbox on your Mac, by the way, Dropin is just such a tool available from the Mac app store. Looks well worth checking out.

In tablet talk, HP is certainly not shy in making big claims for its forthcoming TouchPad. News from this week says that they are suggesting that it will be “better than number one. We call it number one plus.” Plus what we are not sure. One wag recently suggested that this might mean number one plus five, equating to the TouchPad actually sitting in 6^th position in the tablet world (roughly where it sits right now!). With Computex imminent, the guys at Asus are telling us that they plan to break the rules with a new tablet. We will watch this introduction with interest, and report just as soon as we work out what they mean!

If you fancy a bit of a refresher course on where we have been in recent decades, why not check out this great infographic on the History of the Internet. It’s a great story with a huge cast!

It must be time for a new miracle material. How about giving graphene a go and see if it fits the bill. Certainly sounds interesting enough: a mobile phone the size of a credit card? Worth investigating!

Finally, do keep checking back to see what will be featured in our next edition, PIND 55. Details of our next edition will be added to this link during the course of the week. For an RSS feed of PIND, copy this link into your feed reeder; and for the GenesisNews Print Daily, take a look at the link and take out a free subscription!

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Want to read issue 53? Click Here!

Printing Industry News Digest May 21, 2011

Welcome to Printing Industry News Digest (PIND) issue 53, the summary of major news stories from the printing, packaging, digital and communication sectors. Welcome to the latest edition of PIND incorporating brief summaries and links to the week's key news stories so that you can look up that all important detail. Do also take a look at our automated GenesisNews Print Daily publication; why not take out a free subscription for a daily delivery!

Publishing news from Wired advises us that Conde Nast is moving ahead swiftly with four more titles taking advantage of Apple’s digital subscription solution: Vanity Fair, Glamour, Golf Digest, and Allure. These follow the recent debut of The New Yorker. Self, GQ and Wired are to follow with their June editions.

Whilst cloud computing might be the flavour of the year, Seagate is seeking to prove that the personal hard drive is far from dead with this latest introduction: a portable drive with wi-fi. That means that your portable computing device (iPad, iPhone, netbook, etc) can access any file from the device without cables.

On the subject of cloud computing, however, this great infographic illustrates that it is far from new. It also suggests that it is far from being the ultimate answer too, in that indications are that we are already overcapacity with info for the amount of storage space available.

QR codes continue to make the news with an ever increasing number of posts detailing how they are being used for new and exciting marketing promotions. There is a bit of misinformation about, however. This post offering 8 ideas for using QR codes was a bit off the mark in my opinion. You need to be seeking areas of print where QR codes can be inserted to provide an opportunity for readers to go and gather further information, or get further product views, or offers. QR codes can enhance a printed product; take a static media and bring it to life. The great thing for marketing folk is that you can also keep tabs on how your project is performing. SmartyTags has been posting this week about its QR code monitoring tool.

Evidence of just how big QR codes are getting can be seen in this great story detailing a promotion for Starbucks where the company has teamed up with the promotional power of Lady Gaga to create a two-week scavenger hunt with QR codes in store as a starting point.

For those still learning, here is one very simple example of QR codes in action: this code is printed on the back of the new batch of my own business cards. Add a QR code reader app to your smartphone (use i-nigma if you are running an iPhone 4). Point your smartphone camera at the code, the software will read it and bring up more in-depth detail about Genesis Marketing, including a whole bunch of online links, allowing you to connect with news from many sectors of the print industry. Just have a play with the links offered: you will soon get a clear understanding of the potential power of the QR code. Remember too that as the creator of that “About Genesis Marketing” web page, I can change its contents at any time, hopefully keeping it up to date and relevant to people scanning the code tomorrow, or next week (ie, same code, different information if I desire).

Tablet talk has to start with some troubles with RIM’s PlayBook device. News from Reuters is that 1,000 tablets have been recalled due to a flawed operating system build. We are also advised that reading news on iPad’s is inferior to a real newspaper, on the grounds that we actually do retain more of the information that we read from the hard copy. We also find out this week that Dell’s Streak Pro tablet should be with us by June.

On the subject of consuming news, as mentioned above, Mashable offers us 13 alternative ways to get your news input. It is actually focusing on the various apps available really, rather than different ways. From those mentioned PIND can recommend Zite. How do you get your news? Tell us more by e-mailing PINDeditor@gmail.com with your method (TV, PC, iPad, phone, newpaper, etc) or favourite software.

Adding to a number of recent stories detailing the rise and rise of e-books, Amazon themselves tell us this week that Kindle books sales have now overtaken their own printed book sales. It even puts some kind of numbers down for this: for every 100 printed books sold by Amazon (hardback and paperback combined) it now sells 105 Kindle books, and that excludes the download of free titles.

Print points: more great business cards for you to enjoy; clever logo's; 40 creative resume (or CV) designs; explorations in typography: mastering the art of fine typesetting; free handwriting fonts.

A little something for all you networkers out there: I saw this great post that suggests seven essential skills for networking. There is nothing especially new, or "thunder and lightening" about any of them, but it does just remind you how important these skills are. The key point mentioned here I think is that the reception of any event (especially a sit down dinner) IS the event! That's where you network and get true benefit of attendance from. Sat at table you probably have just the people on either side of you.

Almost finally, something to bring us all down to earth with a bump: five tech products that will be dead in five years (just to prove that technology never stands still!). Or, on a more positive note, 70 bits of gadget info you might enjoy; or, on an even brighter note, possibly the best job application ever!

Finally, do keep checking back to see what will be featured in our next edition, PIND 54. Details of our next edition will be added to this link during the course of the week. For an RSS feed of PIND, copy this link into your feed reeder; and for the GenesisNews Print Daily, take a look at the link and take out a free subscription!

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Want to read issue 52? Click Here!

Printing Industry News Digest May 14, 2011

Welcome to Printing Industry News Digest (PIND) issue 52, the summary of major news stories from the printing, packaging, digital and communication sectors. Welcome to the latest edition of PIND incorporating brief summaries and links to the week's key news stories so that you can look up that all important detail. Do also take a look at our automated GenesisNews Print Daily publication; why not take out a free subscription for a daily delivery!

Google’s announcement regarding the imminent availability of Chromebooks running Chrome OS hoists a further flag for the future of computing: it’s in the cloud. The two newly detailed bits of hardware are designed basically as web based platforms – they are not there to store files or programs, but to interface with cloud based services and storage. Effectively this is what tablet computing has also been based on, so it really should come as no surprise, but it certainly does help to point the way forward. If you don’t want to buy another netbook, by the way, Chromium OS is available as freeware, and can be downloaded to a memory stick and installed on an existing machine (in theory – we haven’t tested it!).

If you are all going to be working in the cloud then you will need some storage space to put your files in. A new one came to our attention this week in MiMedia. You get 7Gb free, which is a pretty reasonable starting point, and is probably sufficient for many to use as a back-up facility. For general cloud space for current projects check out Dropbox, with 2Gb free, and Boxnet, providing you with 5Gb of easily synced space. Actually add them all together and you will probably have enough space for most of your needs! Just for the record, much of this publication has been keyed remotely via an iPhone, Apple Bluetooth keyboard, and cloud space from Dropbox, swiftly synced on return to base using QuickSync. If you need more free space than these services offer, you can always buy more from each of them, or those dear chaps at Microsoft can provide you with SkyDrive to give you a whopping 25Gb online for free!

Regular computing might require the very best of browsers to take advantage of cloud services, and this latest test of the best offers some interesting results. Google’s Chrome browser takes the top two positions, and Opera then bounds into 3rd and 4th slots, before a Beta version of the next Firefox. Note the lowly position of various versions of Internet Explorer. If you are using these, then maybe you urgently need to get something from higher up the listing! Just for the record, this week Google Chrome celebrated hitting 160 million users.
 
In tablet talk, as Google was giving a shed load of these devices away this week at its I/O conference, we had to take a closer look at the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. Running Google’s latest Android variant – Honeycomb, specifically devised for tablets – this unit has been given some very positive comments. Perhaps here Samsung has its first serious contender in the tablet market.

In the UK a new campaign has been launched to help get more people onto the net. Some 100,000 volunteers will help Race Online 2012 to get millions more people online – it is suggested that over 9 million people in the UK have never used the internet. Strangely the number is roughly similar to those people in the over 65 (men) and over 60 (women) age group. Good luck to the volunteers – sorry, but I think it could be hard going!

Getting back to the more mundane subject of books, one potentially huge sector of the e-book market is in student text arena. The guys at Mashable tell us this week about six companies aiming to digitize the textbook industry.

Meanwhile, in newspaper world: The Sun has decided against a paywall for its web based offering; whilst Metro has produced an A5 “pocket sized” guide to summer entertainment – the first such publication that it has produced as a giveaway with its free paper. Some 300,000 guides were produced with distribution taking place on Friday May 13.

QR codes continue to grow at an astonishing rate, and continue to find new applications - 101 are on offer in that little link! One digital guru forecasts a QR explosion over the next two years.

Meanwhile, some interesting numbers from Business Insider suggest, in their words, that the iPad is becoming the only PC that matters. Forbes seems to agree with its take on why publishers are finally saying “yes” to Apple.

In the world of digital print equipment, the team at Morgana are celebrating a record quarter at the beginning of 2011. With worldwide sales reaching a record high, it would certainly appear that recent product introductions have had the desired effect.

Finally, do keep checking back to see what will be featured in our next edition, PIND 53. Details of our next edition will be added to this link during the course of the week. For an RSS feed of PIND, copy this link into your feed reeder; and for the GenesisNews Print Daily, take a look at the link and take out a free subscription!

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Want to read issue 51? Click Here!

Printing Industry News Digest May 7, 2011

Welcome to Printing Industry News Digest (PIND) issue 51, the summary of major news stories from the printing, packaging, digital and communication sectors. Welcome to the latest edition of PIND incorporating brief summaries and links to the week's key news stories so that you can look up that all important detail. Do also take a look at our automated GenesisNews Print Daily publication; why not take out a free subscription for a daily delivery!

First on the agenda this week (for a change!) is print. A few great design ideas have come to our attention this week, so we thought we would group them together, starting with “How to make your business cards look great!”; to help with this and other projects, eight best free fonts can be found here; thoughts on meaningful typography; and 30 stunning and creative uses of typography in print might also provide plenty of inspiration (something that is always useful!).

This coming week, printers in the UK will be descending on Harrogate in Yorkshire to enjoy the wonders of the Northprint exhibition. A couple of late additions to the show were announced this week. Firstly, the French digital kit of MGI will be given a platform at the show, enabling it to illustrate its significant points of differentiation; staff from M Partners will be on hand to explain. Even more recently, the chaps from Centurfax and Ripware have announced that they will use Northprint as a platform to unveil their new combined Centurfax Customised Dotmeters Ltd business.

Also this coming week, Split-it, the new environmentally friendly packaging solution, makes a worldwide debut at Interpack in Dusseldorf, Germany. Sadly, we won’t be able to make it to the event, but we hope to be able to Tweet details of a successful launch as the show unfolds. Certainly Split-it is all over the web like a rash at the moment, which will hopefully help!

We are advised that the recently withdrawn Sunday Sport is back in full colour this very weekend. After a five week absence former owner David Sullivan has bought back the title.

In the world of publishing, it was revealed that iOS publication The Daily has racked up a $10 million loss in its first quarter. The US-only "magazine" (or newspaper?) is a Murdoch owned title that is exclusively available on Apple’s iPad.

Far more accessible is The GenesisNews Print Daily publication (as mentioned in the header!). Distribution started this week, and interest is steadily growing. As many of you will already know, the paper.li product is assembled automatically from Tweets in the GenesisNews feed. Why not subscribe to the daily? Whilst content is slightly different from this weekly digest, it’s still focused on the same basic topics, and makes for a good read!

In the less print friendly news this week we can report that e-book sales have taken another leap forward in the UK. We are also advised, however, that this is just the tip of the iceberg in relation to the volume of books currently being sold, so print has some life left in it yet, thankfully!

In tablet talk, we are pleased to be able to confirm our thoughts re the Asus Eee Pad Transformer product, as mentioned in last week PIND. It is so popular, you can’t get one! 100,000 for May and 200,000 for June are the production targets. Meanwhile, we are told that Android apps are working just fine on RIM’s PlayBook, which gives it a reasonable suite of software from the off, though there is debate as to whether this is the right product now that it has finally seen the light of day.

In other tablet news, we learn that we will buy nearly $3 billion worth of apps this year, $425 million of that on Android apps; the Guardian tells us about the increasingly more tactile nature of book apps on the iPad; and Amazon looks likely to move into the tablet market before the end of the year.

In the world of syncing software, it is good to see Syncdocs, a great little product that provides for the easy syncing of GoogleDocs. We like the idea. Also you might like to check out Pogoplug: a software solution for personal cloud computing.

Firefox has not been on our radar for a little while: we did mention the eagerly awaited arrival on Firefox 4.0, of course, and we have been busy getting used to it here at PIND. You may have also found that far less add-ons were required to really make the new version sing, but the chaps at Tripwire magazine have managed to come up with 25 that they think are useful. We quite liked Tab Scope, which shows a thumbnail of the tab content. Perhaps more meaty is “What's That Preference”, an add-on that links to the MozillaZine Knowledge Base and provides the user with details of an item within the about:config menu. Takes the guesswork out of making changes or tweaks to the basic browser!

Great news for QR code fans: a neat little bit of software to help you to create your own product labels with QR code incorporated! You might even surprise yourself at how much you use this!

Finally, do keep checking back to see what will be featured in our next edition, PIND 52. Details of our next edition will be added to this link during the course of the week. For an RSS feed of PIND, copy this link into your feed reeder; and for the GenesisNews Print Daily, take a look at the link and take out a free subscription!

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Want to read issue 50? Click Here!

Printing Industry News Digest April 30, 2011

Welcome to Printing Industry News Digest (PIND) issue 50, the summary of major news stories from the printing, packaging, digital and communication sectors. Welcome to the latest edition of PIND, incorporating brief summaries and links to the week’s key news stories so that you can look up that all important detail.

Having put hardware in focus last week, there are still a fair few platform issues to clear up at the start of this, our 50^th edition. First of all, the ultra-slinky Asus Epad Transformer – the first real all-in-one cross between a tablet and a notebook. The screen detaches from the base keyboard unit to provide the 10.1 inch screen tablet form, and all of this could arrive at your finger-tips for just £380? That is very competitive in our view, especially for such a flexible format. This unit will impress.

Acer has also been busy on the tablet front with the introduction of the Iconia running Adroid 3.0, Honeycomb, but at £450 a throw, you will already be asking yourself how good a deal is on offer compared to the above Transformer product.

Perhaps something that Apple will be more wary of is news that Sony are set to enter the tablet market in a big way, aiming to be second to Apple in terms of sales volume within the first year of its entry to the market. Ambitious, but then this is Sony – mass market is their thing!

Tablet talk, however, might all be in vein according to a market review from the team at CrunchGear, as they ask the question “Why Can’t Anyone Make a Popular Tablet?” [apart from Apple, we assume they mean!]. John Biggs offers some interesting thoughts. One other interesting post offer some suggestions on how to beat Apple. Interesting! The opposing view says that people don't want to buy prototypes. Harsh, but a good arguement.

Interestingly, one writer takes us back to 1994 when a newspaper think-tank is believed to have forecast the development of the tablet computer. This is quite an eerie view into the future: they seem to have thought through many of the features of such a device. The size is certainly tablet like, and the team viewed such a device as something for consuming rather than creating.

In the desktop PC arena, Acer has also been busy here with the creation of the Asprire Z5763 all-in-one unit. This one has some interesting innovations on offer, with 3D images and Kinect-like gesture recognition.

Bringing us right up to date in the hardware market, Microsoft’s quarterly profits and revenues were eclipsed for the first time in 20 years by Apple as a slowdown in the PC business and continuing huge losses in its search division held it back. This led to the suggestion that Apple has more money than God!

Whilst we are going all Apple-y we ought to mention the recent buy of the iCloud name – it certainly would appear to be a pointer re what’s to come, if anyone still had any doubts!

Moving on from platform, we now examine the latest in publishing, beginning with some more useful input on making your own iPad magazine. In slightly sharper focus, the Guardian asks if trade magazines have come to the end of their useful life: we certainly hope not, but it’s worth a read. On a more general iPad publishing issue: how to create an app in minutes [as usual, the title is a little optimistic!]
Apps, however, should most certainly be on the publishers agenda. The team at TechCrunch tell us that 44 billion apps will be downloaded in the next five years. App stores will spread, consumption will rise: get publishing!

Best we link some printing into all of this if we can! How about an excellent infographic for starters. This one charts life from the origins of the printing press through to the iPad.

One reference – but an excellent one – for QR codes before we finish. This post is an excellent use of the QR code, and might just switch a few more folk onto the benefits. Very creative!

Finally, do keep checking back to see what will be featured in our next edition, PIND 51. Details of our next edition will be added to this link during the course of the week. For an RSS feed of PIND, copy this link into your feed reeder; and for the GenesisNews Print Daily, take a look at the link and subscribe!

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Want to read issue 49? Click Here!