Printing Industry News Digest No.95, April 7, 2012

Welcome to Printing Industry News Digest (PIND) issue 95, 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.

Ryobi and Miyakoshi have been busy this week announcing details of the latest runner in the B2 digital stakes at the forthcoming Drupa. This one appears to have the rest stuffed into a cocked hat with regard to potential productivity, with an 8,000 sheets per hour throughput. UK Ryobi distributor Apex Digital Graphics adds its thoughts.

Matthew Parker examines the whole topic of B2 digital presses and what they will bring to the market, and specifically to the print buyer. Perhaps it is the personalisation opportunities above all else that provide the stand out potential, but print buyers will need the associated data to make this work for them of course.

Print Media Centr offered up this wonderful infographic on print: Print is Big might help to convince you or your customers that print still has a critical role to play in marketing and communications.

Whilst still in print, this interesting article from PrintWeek regarding technology patents caught our eye recently. Patents are very much in focus with Apple doing battle with just about everybody. Adam Hooker examines the value of such tactics in the print world and to the less well off.

In a Guardian article that is headed “The death of printing has been greatly exaggerated” you sadly won’t find too much good cheer with regard to our ink on paper variant. This feature is more focused on your desktop printer, and its workload. It does make you think though: we believe that our printers at PIND are certainly used a lot less than once was the case. It’s more often the case that we will send an article to “Read It Later” rather than to the printer these days.

Printer RR Donnelley is making waves in the tech world with the purchase of Real Value Corporation, makers of the iPad shopping app CoffeeTable. An interesting move for one so big in putting ink on paper.

Another newsstand anyone? A group of leading publishers think we need one, and have created Next Issue to provide a common format for their digital publications.

Meanwhile, publishers are preparing to sue as Boundless Learning shapes up for an open alternative to the textbook market. An interesting one!

The jury would still appear to be out as to whether Apple with drop down in size to the 7-inch tablet market. TechCrunch offers some possible clues and some very persuasive arguments as to why it will. Despite our initial objection to a 7-inch slate of any kind, this posting makes us think twice.

Need to send the occasional file that is a bit bigger that your e-mail account will allow? Sure, Dropbox might help, or the cavernous capabilities of Box, but maybe the easiest solution found to date is one that we were introduced to this week: DropSend. Free for up to five files per month, $5 will allow for 15 per month, whilst $19 offers unlimited sends. All options cater for files of up to 2Gb, with various storage options also available on the pay-for product.

For those who have never experimented, Lifehacker offers us this week an article dedicated to customising any folder or app icon in Windows. Take a look. It really can make finding key items so much easier. Also, don’t wait for Windows 8 we are told: this selection of Windows enhancements is available now!

For typography geeks only: a limited edition of Scrabble will be available from August of this year, at a price of $199; get your orders in now!

Almost finally, we do have to light the candles, as this is our second anniversary! Two years of PIND and we sail on briskly towards issue 100!

Finally, do keep checking back to see what will be featured in our next edition, PIND 96. 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!

PIND095

Missed Issue 94, including DM Screening and Morgana Charity Ride? Then simply click here!

Issue 93: Latest digital for Drupa
Issue 92: HP’s B2 digital press
Issue 91: print v. e-books debate



Follow @GenesisNews on Twitter for regular updates.

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

Printing Industry News Digest No.83, January 14, 2012

Welcome to Printing Industry News Digest (PIND) issue 83, 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. 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!

Lots of little tech snippets this week, including a very good question from the Guardian: where would be without Microsoft Word? The word processing programme in the hands of many a wordsmith, including the starting point for every PIND document, many newspaper articles, and, as pointed out by the author of the Guardian’s comment, most new books!

In the world of tech TechCrunch sums up 2011, and tells us that many of the products that have been pipe-dreams for such a long time actually came into the real world this last year.

Many Siri-like software products have been unleashed on the world in the last few months, and whilst many have been found wanting Vlingo seems to cover the basic bases pretty well for iOS users. Mashable offers us four alternative Siri-like products, including both Vlingo and the voice control already built-in to the iPhone 4. We wouldn't go as far as recommending that one! You can always take a closer look at SRI, the original creators of Siri.

Another software given the PIND seal of approval this week is CameraSync. The product provides an effortless way to get your iPhone pictures semi-automatically despatched to your home PC or Mac via Dropbox or BoxNet.

The dawning of 2012 left your design lakes dry? Take a look at these 10 inspirational typography design blogs – they might just help! Just for good measure, you might want a similarly inspirational set of business card designs.

Plenty going on at CES 2012 during this week of course, with new Asus Eee PC netbooks being revealed for starters. Samsung offers us future-proof voice-controlled television too.

Orange launches the Tahiti in the UK, described as seven inches of Huawei hardware heaven! Yes, well that might be a bit overboard. It’s a seven inch tablet, but Orange is hooking in one expensive contract in our opinion. Let us know what you think of course: PIND.editor@gmail.com

This computer-in-your-desk project from Lifehacker caught our imagination. A neat, space saving solution for sure!

In the world of print, Xeikon has been busy acquiring this week, with the flexographic CtP manufacturer Flexolaser moving into their camp along with the rights to the Thermoflex trademark, which have been acquired from Eastman Kodak.

Finally, do keep checking back to see what will be featured in our next edition, PIND 84. 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!

PIND083

Missed Issue 82, including Kodak news and publishing topics? Then simply click here!
Issue 81: Manroland, newspapers and cloud
Issue 80: Further update on Manroland
Issue 79: Manroland update plus KBA at Luton



Get Your Print News Every Day!

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

PIND051

Want to read issue 50? Click Here!