Printing Industry News Digest No.102, June 30, 2012

Welcome to Printing Industry News Digest (PIND) issue 102, providing a summary of major news items from the printing, publishing, 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.

We have to start this week with British banks. Not as focused as our normal subject matter I know, but no business, and virtually no individual can function without a bank account. How have we allowed British banks, therefore, to become so apparently morally corrupt and incompetent? Even the leader of the Labour party has criticised them! This has been one crazy week. I say one: for two weeks now one major organisation has not been able to sort out an upgrade to its computer systems! Barclays, we are now told, has been making up its own inter-bank interest rates, and yet another mis-selling issue has now come to the fore as well, regarding complex packages for small businesses that have led to excessive interest rate charges. Something has to be done and quickly!

I am glad not to be banking with Barclays I have to say, and no, I don’t fancy taking on their PR business either! This year alone we have seen the bank paying a £500 million chunk of tax that it had tried to avoid; an increase in the PPI mis-selling bill to £1.3 billion; this week’s £290 million fine for fixing Libor rates; and all of the flack re Mr Diamond’s reported £17 million annual salary. If the Barclays boss does end up leaving – and that, at time of writing, is only an “if” – he is unlikely to be signing on at the job centre me thinks. He will surely be able to struggle through with his multi-million pound fortune! Are you a Barclay banker like Bob?

Meanwhile, back on planet earth, Forbes is posing the question regarding the death of print: not yet is says. There: one bit of good news for the week! One item brushed on by Forbes is the ability of QR codes to link print in with the internet. Mobile Marketing Watch tells us more about making QR codes work for you.

Printed books are certainly still alive and kicking according the Daily Telegraph. It advises that the “Mommy Porn” book Fifty Shades of Grey has become one of the fastest selling adult paperbacks as it moved swiftly past one million printed copies. In the same breath, it has also whacked up a million sales on Kindle too, illustrating that such publications are not chained to one specific format!

Whilst bankers have been fiddling, Google has been busy with a host of announcements at its own I/O event. Headline act: the 7-inch Google Nexus tablet, which will hit the stores very swiftly. UK launch of two products during the next month! It sounds like a good competitor for the Kindle Fire, which of course we still can’t get on this side of the pond. Basics: 8Gb mid-July £159; 16Gb July 27, £199.

In response, Amazon is strongly rumoured to be launching a 10-inch quad-core tablet, with a late-July release date. PR puff? Could be. Watch this space, or even better, watch Tech&Comms for a daily update on this sort of stuff!

Other Google talk: offline editing for Docs and Drive Apps for iOS and Chrome OS; Chrome browser for iOS; Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.

Mr Murdoch is splitting the New Corp empire into two businesses: entertainment and media in one pot, and print and publishing in a second. Looks like a smart move, say some, in order to keep the modern, future focused business away from the old print and publishing stuff. “This could not be further from the truth,” says Murdoch. He says that the paywalls for his newspapers are working, and that they are going to be pushed even harder.

Manage a digital print business and have the golf bug? Good news, especially if you are in the Bristol area of the UK! Morgana is launching its Pro Series roadshows with an event in this neck of the woods. Morgana Pro finishing products coupled with a bit of tuition from the golf pro at the Bristol Golf Club, July 24 and 25. Sounding good! Sign up now.

Finally, 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 update on print, publishing, packaging news and associated technology!

PIND102

Missed Issue 101, Including Microsoft Surface launch? Then simply click here!
 

Issue 100: latest newspaper news? 
Issue 99: PIND Drupa 2012 wrap-up
Issue 98: Cloud space offerings compared



Updated daily, get Tech News as it relates to print and publishing.
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Printing Industry News Digest No.101, June 23, 2012

Welcome to Printing Industry News Digest (PIND) issue 101, providing a summary of major news items from the printing, publishing, 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.

Those 100^th edition celebrations took it out of the PIND team! But we are back now for edition 101; the start of our next 100 editions I guess you could say! And what a week it has been in the tech world: Microsoft release hardware that they have made! The Microsoft Surface tablet has got some way to go to catch up with the iPad of course. Starting from zero that is a heck of a catch up they need to consider! It would be great to see that product in real life to start comparisons, but some of our on-line friends offer you their opinions for starters. Date and accurate pricing? Well, not yet, sorry!

Google has already named the day for its tablet release. Well, OK, month then: and we are nearly in it! July will bloom with 7-inches worth of Nexus, a product jointly developed by Google and Asus. It will be fan-fared June 27 at Google I/O we are told. Expect a $199 price tag, which would come in at about £128 in real money. That’s competitive.

Competitive with a Kindle Fire we mean of course! TechCrunch says that we are getting closer to the Kindle slate coming to the rest of the world because an international portal for the Appstore has opened up. It’s a start.

On the subject of e-books we saw another one of those “e-books are winning” stories in the Guardian this week. The numbers show that in the US e-books are now outselling hardbacks for the first time. Really? I thought we had this headline last year (and the year before?). How many books are released in hardback these days?

Elsewhere in digital land, HP appears to have scrubbed its stand for IPEX 2014. What does this say about HP, and what does this say about IPEX? Comments via e-mail to PIND.Editor@gmail.com would be more than welcome.

Our own Tech&Comms blog site recently highlighted changes taking place in Australia with the Sydney Morning Herald changing shape (last of the broadsheets trimming down to tabloid!). Interesting post-script: a Wall Street Journal article this week quotes a Deutsche Bank analyst saying that there is still a nil value given the metro print business. Interesting.

Business Insider tells us that there is a demographic that gets excited by QR codes. We knew there would be somewhere one day! More will surely follow.

We mentioned recently the price of memory sticks falling through the floor: the Guardian concurs with its focus on solid state drives (SSD’s) this week. SD cards too a getting more competitive for bigger space.

At PIND we are now fully Apple focused: we didn’t realise however that Macs still don’t have the ability to cut and paste folders and files in the Finder (until we read this posting from the good people of Lifehacker!). The good news is that you can now, and Cut with Drag & Drop is free too!

On the subject of Macs, Drobo has debuted two new Thunderbolt drives. Techies can read the delicious detail here.

Finally, 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 update on print, publishing, packaging news and associated technology!

PIND101

Missed Issue 100, including latest newspaper news? Then simply click here!

Issue 99: PIND Drupa 2012 wrap-up
Issue 98: Cloud space offerings compared
Issue 97: PrintWeek’s Drupa app



Updated daily, get Tech News as it relates to print and publishing.
Got friends that might like GenesisNews? Tweet them now: click here!

Printing Industry News Digest No.100, June 9, 2012

Welcome to Printing Industry News Digest (PIND) issue 100, providing a summary of major news items from the printing, publishing, 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.

With our Royal hat on, it seemed only polite and honorable to give last week a miss, with the UK knee deep in Diamond Jubilee celebrations (and rain!), and a large chunk of our readership taking days away from the coal-face in order to join in the festivities. It seemed wrong for us to divert attention away from Her Majesty in order to celebrate our own major event: 100 editions of PIND! Yes, we have clocked up a century of digital news summaries, and probably deserve a medal for so doing (hint, hint to Queenie!). We thought it only right and proper to revisit some of the topics that have been regulars for us over the two-and-a-bit-years of news coverage.

One topic that certainly isn’t going away any time soon is that of newspapers in the digital age. A number of items have again focused on this issue in the last week. Regular contributor Roy Greenslade, writing for the Guardian, debates the “magic of print” as digital continues its inexorable march as the dominant delivery method.

Money man Warren Buffet is still pumping cash into the traditional arena: he still sees potential in a localised hard copy publication. A digital local news variant is discussed by Roy Greenslade again. Johnston Press, meanwhile, as been busy with its first wave of redesigned product.

The topic of paywalls gets some interesting feedback from journalism students. They are certainly not convinced, and bearing in mind we are talking their future pay packets, this is comment to take note of!

Worth noting, if you are an IFRA Expo fan, that the 2012 show has moved! It was to be held in the financially stricken Spanish capital of Madrid, but the October 29 to 31 dates have been moved over to the cash rich Frankfurt exhibition centre instread!

I guess also under that broad umbrella of companies trying to come to terms with the digital age, camera maker Olympus has hit the headlines in the last few days with savage cuts to its workforce in order to re-shape itself for today’s market. This follows a £10m settlement for its British ex-Chief Exec Michael Woodford, whose sacking led to an 80% fall in share value.

The huge development in the e-book market since our launch ensures that sectors place in our 100^th edition. The Wall Street Journal’s Market Watch provided an excellent summary recently, in which the five years of the Kindle is the starting point.

Our Antipodean friends at Print 21 takes a more print friendly view of things, citing the lower lending levels by students in schools that have gone all digital.

On the hardware front, touchscreen Ultrabook’s running Windows 8 seem to have stolen the show at this year’s Computex event, suggesting that this is going to be the hardware form for laptop’s over this coming 12 months.

Memory prices have almost fallen through the floor in the last couple of years, and with so much cloud storage space now being given away for zilch (see our recent Issue 98 for more details), even memory sticks are now almost being given away. For those who want to keep their portable data “physical”, grab a 32Gb thumb drive for a £10 note: yes, £1 now buys you 3.2Gb of space!

Tablets of course have to feature here. Our tablet talk started right from day one of PIND, as edition one carried news of the US and UK release of the iPad: yes, that is just over two years ago, nothing more! How the media space has changed in that time, and how rapidly the tablet as a product has developed in such a short space of time (and how rapidly the market for tablets has mushroomed!). The third iteration of the iPad is now on a lot of people’s wish list, and Android variants by the dozen have been tossed into the market (and out of the market again in quite a few cases).

The iPad is still dominant in the tablet world, both in terms of sales and sophistication (in our opinion). Yes, we have dabbled with both products: iPad is still a superior piece of hardware, and is backed by equally superior software. Android tablets have come on a long way. The software, however, still has much catching up to do. We have highlighted in PIND the wide variety of OS versions still in the market. This makes it difficult for developers.

Microsoft might muddy the waters a little with Windows 8 on tablets. Price wars continue with Android products, with the Kindle Fire a key product that has caused major 7-inch ripples around Cupertino. This exciting market has some way to go, and developments will continue at some pace. It will be good to review the tablet world in another 12 months. We think that Apple will have a 7-inch (or so!) product, and will still dominate the high-end of the sector; we think that the Kindle Fire will have further eaten into the smaller format end of the market; we think that other Android products will still be floundering around, but will be even cheaper (to compete with Amazon); and we think that Windows tablets will still be struggling to gain traction due to high pricing (compared with Amazon and Android kit). PIND will report back in 2013!

Finally, 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 update on print, publishing, packaging news and associated technology!

PIND100

Missed Issue 99, including our Drupa 2012 wrap-up? Then simply click here!
Issue 98: Cloud space offerings compared
Issue 97: PrintWeek’s Drupa app
Issue 96: The role of print in communications



Updated daily, get Tech News as it relates to print and publishing.

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