Printing Industry News Digest No.110, August 25, 2012

Welcome to Printing Industry News Digest (PIND) issue 110, 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.

Kodak takes the late-comers top spot this week following yesterday’s revelations regarding the bits of the business it wants to offload in the great sell off. Following the less than successful patents sale, the company now wants rid of film and its “personalised imaging” and “document imaging” businesses – which are not the print-focused bits, even though it sounds very much like it! It seems to comprise in-store photo printing kiosks and those annoying picture-taking systems at theme parks that snap you eyes-tight-shut and open-mouthed as you round the last corner of the ride of death. Read the links; more will surely follow.

Elsewhere the web printing part of the Alderson Brothers Print Group appears to have fallen on hard times, or is banking with the wrong bankers, depending on which version of the story you wish to believe. We hope it’s the bankers fault; we like Pete and Ron.

In the world of publishing the HarperCollins Chief Exec has been using the description “multimedia content providers” to describe the business. Needs further investigation!

Further to last week’s rumours, iPad Mini appears to have gotten itself a release date, if you believe everything you read. Our concerns about the probably size of this “mini” still remain.

Also further to our extensive Tablet Talk last week, we have noted a general trimming of Android tablet prices in all areas of the market. A visit to the local HMV store was followed by a stroll through the pages of Amazon. These views confirmed our thoughts that the arrival of the Google Nexus 7 has set new pricing levels for Android product right across the board. Seven, eight, nine and ten-inch Android tablets are now being heavily discounted to bring them into the same price arena as the Nexus, many dropping below the £200 mark, and closer to £150, in order to remain competitive.

Samsung might generally still be expecting higher returns, but then they have big bills to pay right now too! If you are going the wrong side of £300 for a ten-inch tablet you need very good reason not to be going the whole hog and buying an iPad, in our opinion.

These are virtually all Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich / ICS) based too, which really is the final nail in the coffin for earlier versions: retailers might as well give them away! You, being an avid reader of PIND and other tech info, would not be seen dead with one for sure, unless there was an obvious and immediate upgrade path.

For those of you that have also invested your pocket money in Google Nexus 7, here are a couple of web based forums that you might like to stick your name on. Generally quite good info, and answers to the questions that you didn’t know you had.

Keep your finger on the pulse: grab an RSS feed of PIND (copy this link into your feed reader); click here for the GenesisNews #Print Daily to get the latest daily stories; or click here for regular Tech & Comms updates in blog or RSS form. You can also connect to a free subscription of the Print Daily for an update on print, publishing, packaging and associated technology delivered straight to your in-box every day! For details on Genesis Marketing – publishers of PIND – click here.

PIND110    

Missed Issue 109, including Heidelberg IPEX exit? Then simply click here!

Issue 108: Kodak Patents
Issue 107: Olympic Print
Issue 106: Mountain Lion Launch




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Printing Industry News Digest No.109, August 18, 2012

Welcome to Printing Industry News Digest (PIND) issue 109, 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.

Late Thursday afternoon, UK time, Heidelberg announced that it was pulling out of the IPEX 2014 print exhibition in London. There will be many reactions to this news from both suppliers and printers. PrintWeek is likely to have regular updates, and comments on the additional article illustrate the range of feelings that this announcement has produced. More next week!

Our original intention for this edition of PIND, until the above, was to dedicate this mid-August newsletter to our own latest thoughts and experiences of the tablet world. Tablets continue to evolve. Another landmark (albeit a late landmark in many people’s eyes) will occur next month when Microsoft enters the fray with Surface. For now, we will focus on the major offering currently available in the market from Apple and products based on the Android operating system.

Let us begin with the latest market share news as published this last week – this was effectively the catalyst for our thinking in producing some rough kind of overview of where we are now, what products we use here at PIND, how we think they have developed, and what value we think they will be to the average print, publishing, or packaging player. CNet has also published its latest guide to tablets, which you should read.

Why tablets? Well certainly for the print and publishing sectors they have already had a major impact. Book, magazine, and newspaper publishers have had to divert their attentions away from the previous distribution bases of print and basic internet. The smartphone, the e-reader, and then the tablet have changed the dynamics of the market considerably.

Apple iPad: we were relatively early adopters of this new wonder (two years ago) from Cupertino. The iPad changed the way we look at computers, the way we look at the internet, and, as things have progressed, the way we do business. The product is a true Apple device in just about every way: well built, well designed, with robust, tested and checked software. The iPad1, as we shall call out model, was quickly been superseded by iPad2, and now iPad3 (although we are not allowed to call it that). It’s a great product, though our opinion is now getting slightly hazy, as the older machine is considerably slower than the new kit (obsolete in just two years? Ouch!). The market leader by a country mile because it is still one great product!

For a larger format Android tablet we will reference our own Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 – a product that has suddenly gone up in our estimation due to the late inclusion for this product of the Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0.4) version of the OS this last week. It now works properly! (Version 2 of this product is out UK this week). It is now a realistic alternative to the iPad. Android in our opinion takes quite a bit more learning than the highly intuitive iOS from Apple, but the overall package is a lot more flexible for the average (or maybe slightly above average – ie, a bit techy) user.

Our most recent hardware addition, as regular readers will have noted, is the Google Nexus 7, a seven-inch tablet. Built and designed around the latest Android OS (Android 4.1.1 or Jelly Bean) and the Chrome browser – both from Google of course – we see the Nexus 7 as ground breaking in both performance and form factor. Google have beaten Apple to the punch in the seven-inch world. Priced at just £159 in UK it has set both Android performance and price levels for the next year. We have added the Nova Prime launcher to both of our Android devices – it just helps to make the home screens and docks just that bit better, and adds screen gestures.

A seven-inch Apple? Well, certainly an iPad Mini is very strongly rumoured. The very latest suggestions of the size don’t make much sense to us. The biggest plus for the Nexus 7 is that it fits in a jacket inside pocket.

Then, as mentioned above, there will be the Microsoft Surface. What market share will that be able to gather, and what will be its market entry price – do mail us your thoughts please . . . PIND.Editor@gmail.com

Keep your finger on the pulse: grab an RSS feed of PIND (copy this link into your feed reader); click here for the GenesisNews #Print Daily to get the latest daily stories; or click here for regular Tech & Comms updates in blog or RSS form. You can also connect to a free subscription of the Print Daily for an update on print, publishing, packaging and associated technology delivered straight to your in-box every day!
 
PIND109    

Missed Issue 108, including Kodak Patents? Then simply click here!

Issue 107: Olympic Print
Issue 106: Mountain Lion Launch
Issue 105: Google Nexus 7



August Special Offer (UK): Buy a Morgana DigiFold Pro for just £99 per week, AND get a FREE folder, laminator, or multi-function device!
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Printing Industry News Digest No.108, August 11, 2012

Welcome to Printing Industry News Digest (PIND) issue 108, 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.

Reports suggest that the Eastman Kodak Co.’s fire sale is not going so well. Whilst both Apple and Google would appear to be interested, they are less excited about fighting each other in a bidding war. It would appear that bids for the 1,100 digital patents are well below the hoped for $500 million. Gareth Ward at the Print Business advises us of Plan B.

Meanwhile, whilst we all know that talking up company results is an essential ingredient in the mix these days, creating the headline “$82 million balance sheet turnaround for Kodak US” from a $299 million overall loss (v. a $135 million loss for the same period the year before) takes some fantastic imagination.

Cross Media 2012 is not far away! UK readers need to check out this show promoting what’s best in cross-platform marketing. Don’t get it? Then you really do need to be there to understand this huge and essential business opportunity. Six seminar theatres will showcase over 60 inspirational speakers.

New B2 press hardware from Ryobi has hit the headlines. The Ryobi 760E is a unitised version of their compact B2-format machine, which presumably opens the door for integration with Kodak’s Prosper digital heads on a compact machine, furthering the potential for printers seeking the best of both world’s. The announcement also highlighted UK Ryobi distributor Apex Digital Graphics’s involvement in the 2012 Printing Intelligently event.

Colour inkjet continues to expand in UK with Lightning Source installing Océ kit and beta-testing its kit in an on-demand service with US publisher O’Reilly Media.

It will come as no great surprise to readers of PIND, but the Guardian has highlighted the issues of failing to integrate appropriate technology in a timely and efficient manner. Whilst the article focuses on our local councils, the issues raised are appropriate to many large businesses.

To finish with we thought you might like to have a look at some forgotten Windows 7 features (according to our chums at Lifehacker that is). The same team also offer us 10 clever uses for Dropbox: if you are a fan of this cloud service it’s a good read; if you are not yet a Dropbox fan you should have a read to understand the potential power of the service.

Keep your finger on the pulse: grab an RSS feed of PIND (copy this link into your feed reader); click here for the GenesisNews #Print Daily to get the latest daily stories; or click here for regular Tech & Comms updates in blog or RSS form. You can also connect to a free subscription of the Print Daily for an update on print, publishing, packaging and associated technology delivered straight to your in-box every day!

PIND108

Missed Issue 107, including Olympic stamps? Then simply click here!

Issue 106: Mountain Lion Launch
Issue 105: Google Nexus 7
Issue 104: Kodak bosses bonuses



August Special Offer (UK): Buy a Morgana DigiFold Pro for just £99 per week, AND get a FREE folder, laminator, or multi-function device!

Our Tech & Comms News now has its own Twitter feed: click for details.

Printing Industry News Digest No.107, August 4, 2012

Welcome to Printing Industry News Digest (PIND) issue 107, 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.

Olympic fever grips GB, and print plays its part with souvenir brochures aplenty and even gold medal stamps hitting a Post Office near you just one day after presentation of the metal. Update re Super Saturday: there's going to be a lot of stamps printed!

Under the “print’s not dead” banner, The Times claims a bumper Olympic issue on the first Saturday of the games with an extra 100,000 copies sold of the July 28 souvenir edition.

Right that’s the token Olympic spot (x 2) dealt with. No further mention: promise. A “digital overtaking print” story is always a good contentious one to get things going: in newspaper world, Pearson’s FT Group advised us that online demand had exceeded that for printed copies for the first time. Digital subscriptions were up 31% to break the 300,000 mark. The FT Group, with ownership of the Financial Times and a 50% stake in The Economist, is expecting to “accelerate the shift from print to digital”.

Meanwhile Penguin publishing, also part of Pearson, has undergone a significant reshaping in recent years to adjust to the digital world. Half-year sales growth of e-books to the tune of 128% suggest they are going in the right direction perhaps, though actual profits might tell a different story.

A downer on digital from The Daily? Murdoch’s tablet newspaper has laid-off close to a third of its staff just 18 months after launch. Suggestions that pages will only format vertically from now on could help save money. Sports pages are the first to suffer. Future text will now be supplied by content partners.

Not in the cloud yet? Mashable offers three reasons why your company still hasn’t moved to the cloud. Meanwhile, if you have, Archy offers a simple Google Drive manager for Mac.

On the subject of Mac, did you get your Mountain Lion all installed and running OK? Our friends at Lifehacker encourage the use of the software update’s own built-in text expansion solution.

In tablet talk Sony’s Microsoft Surface rival is leaked (the same Sony that announced chunky losses in Q1), whilst a similar leak provides info on dock and covers for Nexus 7 (not that struck on the dock! Doesn't appear to bring much to the party).

And whilst Microsoft Windows 8 and Surface get ever closer, the “Metro” branding is now going further away. In fact the branding that has referred to the boxy, tiled layout will be changing name completely. German retailer Metro AG threatened legal action for infringing on its “Metro” trademark. No news on a new name. Any suggestions? PIND.editor@gmail.com

Following the Raspberry Pi story in tech world? The Ice Cream Sandwich version of Android can now work with it. Sounds like a great dessert at least!

You don't think some of the UK's banks had been using Raspberry Pi for their computer systems do you? Just a reminder: do keep those computer systems up-to-date and properly backed-up won’t you. Remember that who-ha with RBS and its tech glitch from a few weeks ago? They have currently put aside £125 million to pay compensation to customers affected by the breakdown. Ouch!

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!

PIND107

Missed Issue 106, including Mountain Lion OS launch? Then simply click here!

Issue 105, Google Nexus 7
Issue 104: Kodak bosses bonuses
Issue 103: Developments in printed electronics



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