Sunday, November 13, 2011

Printing Industry News Digest No.77, November 12, 2011

Welcome to Printing Industry News Digest (PIND) issue 77, providing a summary of major news items from the printing, packaging, digital and communications technology sectors. PIND incorporates brief summaries and links to the week's key news stories so that you can look up that all important detail, digging deeper behind the headline. Do also take a look at our automated Twitter-based GenesisNews Print Daily publication; why not take out a free subscription for a daily digital delivery!

One question that we are regularly asked by readers here at PIND is: “What’s that got to do with printing?” In answer, we say: this publication was established to monitor the issues both within print and around it, including publishing, communications and technical news. Many of our stories reflect the “outer reaches” of new technologies, such as the recent review of Apple’s Siri technology (PIND No.75). Siri is actually a good case in point: we had a higher than average number of “What’s that got to do with print?” queries that week! Our opinion: Siri’s voice recognition technology mark’s the early days of a sea-change in the way we search the internet. The way we search has a huge effect on the way advertising revenue’s will be spent. The way that the ad budgets of big-business are spent has a major impact on the world of publishing. Anything that is likely to change the way that publishers think has a significant effect on the world of print, and printing equipment. This week we celebrated the 50,000th visit to our carrier, the GenesisNews site. This is largely due to the interest in the weekly publication of PIND, so hopefully there are quite a few of our visitors that do understand this broad look at the world we live in today!

To expand a little further on the above points, Eric Schmidt, Google Executive Chairman, in trying to illustrate his company’s lack of real dominance of search (as explained to a Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust), said of Siri that it was: “an entirely new approach to search technology,” and a “significant development”. It is well worth reading this posting from TechCrunch incorporating comment from Gary Morgenthaler, an original investor in Siri back in 2008. It is, according to TechCrunch also an important time for the search advertising market – full details here.

The UK voice of Siri has also been making the news. The Telegraph introduces us to Jon Briggs. Perhaps with a male voice in command most UK men won’t be tempted to ask as many strange questions as the US asks the female version of Siri.

Meanwhile, the Guardian raises a question to itself: “Why doesn’t the Guardian write more about Android apps?” A good question: we will read with interest, as PIND has just invested in a Samsung Galaxy 10.1 inch tab for comparative purposes. We might well want to quiz the Guardian more ourselves! We will report more on how the Galaxy measures up against the iPad in future editions!

Elsewhere in the tablet world, Amazon is cutting a path for its own app store ahead of the release of its Kindle Fire 7 inch tab. There are a number of the usual suspects already signed up and in place.

Here’s an interesting offshoot from our normal range of focus: the effects on journalists as well as journalism. Printers are well versed with the issues that they face from shifts in technology. Printers might want to put themselves into journalist’s shoes for a short while to see how similar and different are the challenges faced by the two!

On a very slightly different tack, it was also interesting to see this note from the Guardian this week suggesting that UK Facebook and Twitter users are rejecting the marketing of big branded products through these channels.

Marrying the last two comments almost, Gigaom is suggesting that recent complications raised between journalists and platforms such as Twitter have to be overcome.

Almost finally, in a small jump from journalists to the use of words, US publication Forbes offers advice on what you might want to trim from your CV. Worth a deep digest if you are in job hunting mode right now.

Almost, almost finally, as we have been on a very platform platform this week, it must be well worth advising you, dear reader, of Sony’s latest approach to market: a new four-screen platform that it suggests will be able to compete with Apple. We have to add, by the way, that we did like the official launch of the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime this week. Take a look: neat kit!

Finally, do keep checking back to see what will be featured in our next edition, PIND 78. We aim to add details of our next edition this link during the course of the week. For an RSS feed of PIND, copy this link into your feed reader; and click here for the GenesisNews Print Daily – you can even take out a free subscription for this daily news update on print, publishing, packaging and associated technology!

PIND077

Missed Issue 76, including a look at PUR binding for digital print? Then simply click here!

Issue 75: In my command? Apple’s Siri
Issue 74: Newsstand: good for publishers?
Issue 73: iOS5 and the iPhone 4S



Get Your Print News Every Day!

Got friends that might like GenesisNews? Tweet them now: click here!

No comments:

Post a Comment