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!

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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



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Printing Industry News Digest No.57, June 18, 2011

Welcome to Printing Industry News Digest (PIND) issue 57, 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!

The Google Chromebook has landed as of Wednesday of this week. Who should worry? Who should get excited? The Guardian does an excellent job of defining the corporate market that the Chromebook thin client is squarely targeted at and outlining what it is about the product that will already be worrying the big-wigs at Microsoft, and possibly the providers of anti-virus software too.

The team at Mashable then take a close look at some of the hardware that is required for Chromebook to be a winner, making a detailed examination of the Samsung Chromebook Series 5 3G.

For a more detailed look at the thinking behind Google Chromebook, we return to The Guardian to advise why we might need hassle free computing. Maybe it can also answer the question of whether we are talking about a product that competes with the tablet or the PC or both!

OK, this is bound to be a bit biased, but it never hurts when seeking a full rounded debate on a new product or concept to let the originator have a word. Here is the Chromebook world according to Google.

Most current PC users won’t consider buying Chromebook, or so says some back-of-a-cigarette-pack research from US-based Betanews; are they right to think that way? Most PC users don’t actually back-up their work, and most don’t want to have to run their own computer department, but they do! Chromebook could eliminate both of those problems to start with . . .

Convinced that this could be a good step? PC World asks which Chromebook is right for you, comparing the hardware platforms.

June 17, Friday night, 21:00 UK time: an hour’s worth of the delightful and clever Lady Gaga on the ITV channel. Nothing for PIND to report on here you might think, apart from advert break number 1 which went immediately into this Google Chrome / Chromebooks advert featuring the said Lady and her fans in action. Great ad placement and a great ad really. Like her or not, you surely have to admit that she is one smart mother monster! On the subject of video, and to close this Chromebooks sub-feature, take a look at Google’s specific short film on the benefits of this new venture.

Meanwhile, back in newspaper world, The Guardian, much quoted above, is now suggesting via Press Gazette that staff are to prioritise digital over print. The numbers currently tell a different story, with Press Gazette telling us that just £40 million digital contribution is included in a total turnover of £221 million. Sharp declines in paper sales, however, do point to digital being critical. My iPhone Guardian app, which cost something like £2.60 for a lifetime’s news, and still only costs £3.99 for a one year subscription, would seem to be unlikely to make too much cash compared to the £1 per day cost of the paper version.

Something of a saviour for printers in this week’s news is a story from PrintWeek detailing an opportunity for printers to get involved in printing electronics. Go take a look; this could be one of your best bets for the future!

Finally, do keep checking back to see what will be featured in our next edition, PIND 58. 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 reader; 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 56? 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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