m-Bossed

Social Media = New Buried Treasure

Talking about other people is second only to the need to talk about ourselves. If you are thinking this couldn't possibly be me, think again. Facebook's gazillion users talk to a "Wall" about themselves. Blogs, Twitter, and more, give us the cheapest and largest megaphones ever to shout about ourselves. What this says about our society or the compulsory need to mimic Narcissus is beyond the scope of this argument. The point is there is a treasure trove of intimate marketing and demographic information on the Web for all to see.

Up until this point, marketers had to rely on market research and demographic information to determine the typical  profile of the "customer" and design expensive advertising campaigns around that information. The motion of acquiring, filtering, and interpreting, the raw data was expensive. An unbelievable amount of personal information can now be gathered instantaneously over the Internet. We can use Guy Kawasaki, a former Apple Evangelist and technology advocate, as a case in point. What does social media tell us about Guy's interest?

1. From LinkedIn
   • Current and past companies include Apple, Fog City, Forbes, and Garage Technology Ventures
   • Personal mantra is "empower entrepreneurs."
   • Went to school Cal and Stanford
   • Author of 8 books
   • Joined to only one group - Next Gen Market Research
2. From Twitter
   • 200,000+ followers
   • Co-founder of Alltop - Magazine Rack for the Internet
   • Guy was recently at the SXSW conference in Austin, TX
3. From Facebook
   • Photos including cow reverence in India?
   • Being from Hawaii, Guy is a fan of Hamura Saiman restaurant on Kauai
4. From How to Change the World blog
   • Guy was at the winter Olympics in Canada

Social media can gather invaluable insights into a persons life that can translate into 1-to-1 marketing. If you were opening a Japanese style noodle house in the greater San Francisco area, you would want to send Guy an invite. The direct mailer could say "Hamura Saiman without the travel!" A hotelier in Whistler, BC, could send a brochure inviting Guy to visit this coming winter without the crowds of the Olympics. A startup venture could ask for a connection from SXSW. The possibilities are infinite.

The printing industry, like many others, has yet to fully capitalize on the information freely available in the social media playground. Imagine the level of print personalization that is possible if the right software ecosystem were assembled. Relevant text, graphics, and pictures, could be sliced into pinpoint targeted data about any individual. Such as system would become the digital asset management platform of individuals. The only question is who will make it easy to dig up this buried treasure?

photos by: _e.t, Robert Scoble, and David Boyle

Future of Print: The QR Code 411

        

By now, you have probably seen a QR codes cropping up on websites you visit, magazines you read, and stores you visit. Quick Response codes allow the properly equipped smartphone to scan a type of barcode to retrieve web enabled information. Scan the code from Esquire and Robert Downey Jr talks up his Sherlock Holmes movie. Scan the window decal from your neighborhood restaurant to view the menu. Scan the burger wrapper to get nutritional information. Scan the mannequin at the mall to receive a promotional coupon. The options are endless.

Besides being ugly, QR codes are kinda dumb. Proprietors and marketers receive very little information about who is on the other side of the code. Sure the responses can be tailored somewhat by using personalized URLs instead of a generic website address, but for cost, technical, and logistical reasons most QR implementations cannot slice the data at a 1-to-1 ratio. Direct mail campaigns, where a postcard is mailed to a specific individual, are probably the only method for 1-to-1 QR marketing. On the other hand, pURLs in the magazine at the news stand are ineffective since the purchaser is random. The same is true for most of the other situations listed above.

If QR codes are destined to be mentally challenged, the back end marketing systems do not have to be! A mobile phone is almost a necessity for using QR codes but it should not be viewed as a limitation. The combination of smartphone and a QR code unlocks the possibility of targeted marketing once geolocation data is a reality. By merging the QR Code with location specific data from the phone, the server response could be personalized for more purposes.

QR Codes + Geolocation Data = Print & Marketing's Next Step

As an example, a scan from a window decal of the neighborhood restaurant might offer a link to an instant dining coupon. The same restaurant's online or print advertisement might redirect users not walking by the restraurant to view the online menu, etc.

(Developer Challange: A Mac based QR reading software needs to be made.)

Future of Print: A New Standard

Standards are like the grease that allows the wheels of a locomotive to turn. Standards can be a part of a companies ethos as in having "high standards." Johnson & Johnson and Toyota, until recently, have epitomized this version of a standard. Standards can also be an generally accepted specification on how to do something as in ISO or SWOP standards.

For the prepress world, the unofficial, defacto standard is the Portable Document Format or PDF from Adobe. The PDF file format has pushed the boundaries of easy document exchange and accessibility. Designers could easily output a print ready PDF to pass onto their printer while also repurposing the file for electronic distribution. Print vendors, then shops, adopted PDFs for print production, not long after the designers latched on to the inherent advantages.

Of course, PDF files can contain elements that are not destined for print output such as embedded video and web content (URLs). This type of document is typically not accepted forcing the designer to create two or more versions of the same file. Without the extra work, the final print would be visually ugly because of the missing pieces.

Let's drastically REthink the possibilities!

There are plenty of cloud applications (SaaS) companies offering online file based sharing and storage - Evernote, Adobe, and Scribd to name a few. Although each service varies in its purpose and functionality, they generally offer a way to upload a document and distribute it via e-mail, share online through their respective portals, and embed web friendly code into a blog or website. These services collectively represent the beginning iterations of document distribution on the Internet or DocuNet 1.0.

Imagine a service that extended this functionality by creating a media bin app for mobile smartphones. As users upload new content, a customizable, branded smartphone app is created for download. Customizable iPhone apps created from RSS news feeds are already possible through services such as iSites. Each subsequent document upload to the media bin would automatically be pushed out to each users smartphone. Since the original document resides in the cloud, the user could choose to have the document printed. Proprietary software, running in the cloud, could intelligently repurpose the document for print. The document could be "cleaned up" by replacing all non-print data like hyperlinks and movies with scannable QR codes.

Such an application could be the next big thing for businesses, professionals, and the out-of-the-box thinking printer.

photo by: hyku

Print's Darwinian Evolution

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Print's Darwinian Evolution:
Overview | Printers | Vendors | Print Professionals

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Charles Darwin taught us that the smarter, faster, and stronger are the winners in the game of life. The process of natural selection ensures the "survival of the fittest." These changes, spanning millennia, in human evolution are often categorized by ages. The Stone Age where humans mastered the use of rudimentary tools is personified by the recent Capitol One commercials. Stones were eventually replaced by the Copper, Bronze, and Iron Ages, as our knowledge base and mastery of tools progressed.

Every Age has disruptors along the way. These "revolutions" are marked by relatively short periods of rapid change. The Industrial Revolution during the 18th and 19th centuries had profound and lasting effects on society, cultures, and economies. According to Wikipedia, "It started with the mechanisation of the textile industries, the development of iron-making techniques and the increased use of refined coal. Trade expansion was enabled by the introduction of canals, improved roads and railways. The introduction of steam power fueled primarily by coal, wider utilization of water wheels and powered machinery (mainly in textile manufacturing) underpinned the dramatic increases in production capacity. The development of all-metal machine tools in the first two decades of the 19th century facilitated the manufacture of more production machines for manufacturing in other industries. The effects spread throughout Western Europe and North America during the 19th century, eventually affecting most of the world, a process that continues as industrialisation. The impact of this change on society was enormous."

The Industrial Revolution conveniently coincided with the Golden Age of Print. The tremendous changes and knowledge of this period needed to be shared, debated, and recorded for posterity. Print was the perfect medium for the job. Print was relatively fast and cheap as compared with previous methods and could be easily distributed. As a result, print as a communication platform flourished and would remain a dominant medium until the dawn of the Information Age.

Blame the microprocessor and the Internet for the rapid change in communication and information exchange. The Internet as a distribution network has been adept at reducing the need for printed material. Online forms with back end databases have replaced form printing. Advertising collateral such as direct mailers, posters, flyers, are supplemented by social media and mobile campaigns (text, QR, apps). A portion, yet to be determined, of book and magazine printers' work is being distributed digitally on Kindles and the soon to be released iPad. No amount of optimism or dreaming will revert the tide of printing lost to bits and bytes, but stop blaming what cannot be controlled and contained. Companies and individuals involved in print need to quit dwelling on recent "woes" and focus on getting "fit."

This is not a sad story, nor is it printing's swan song. Contrary to The Buggles song, video did not kill the radio star. Just as TV did not kill radio, all-things-digital will not kill printing. New technology simply causes existing technology to adapt - to evolve.  After all, the medium that delivers the intended message to the targeted audience with the best cost to action ratio is the winner.

How are you getting fit?

photo by: Corey Ann

A Book of Tweets

Continuing in the trend of bytes becoming things, there is a service that allows you to print a 200 page book of your tweets. A Tweetbookz is roughly 28,000 characters on 200 pages wrapped in a hardbound cover. For around $30, a Twitterer can save their tweets from the "fail whale."

Personally, I think the price and customization are lacking for Tweetbookz as compared to photo book offerings. More importantly, Tweetbookz represents a larger trend of users wanting to print their digital lives for sharing and archiving.

Since our tweets are not necessarily poetic masterpieces, most of us will probably not shell out the money for this printed record. Looking back at your tweets, after all, is probably like looking at your school yearbooks - shockingly funny and disturbing at once.

Watch this guy unwrapping his Tweetbookz to get the idea.

Sharing Twitter Tweet Book with the world from TweetBookz on Vimeo.

DIY Printing

Cloud Software + Digital Printing + Distribution Channel = Rise of DIY Printing

photo by: rynosoft

Legions of do-it-yourselfers are creating and selling goods over the Web since technology and infrastructure have driven down the barriers of entry to almost nil. Stay at home Moms and other crafty people are making small batch products to sale sell on Etsy. Tinkerers familiar with computer aided design (CAD) are selling design plans and products from lamps to toys on Ponoko. As of now, there is no marketplace with equal sophistication for printing but might be possible.

Do you use Yahoo! Mail, gMail, or maybe even Hotmail? Each of these is a cloud based application that is used remotely from any computer with an Internet connection accessing the "cloud." Flash, XML, CSS, PHP, HTML5, et al., represent the nerdy backbone that powers all of the sophisticated uses of the web we know and love from checking e-mail to watching Hulu. These sites provide one basic functionality, respectively e-mail and video streaming, but there are cloud based applications that are quite advanced. Salesforce and Google Docs are just two examples that are full featured, cloud replacements for traditional software. Software as a service (SaaS) offers many benefits to the end users such as accessibility, price, maintenance, backup, and overhead. As for a print application, the key is in the ability to make the software accessible and sophisticated yet overly simplistic for the end user. The application would also need to interface on the back end with a number of digital printing devices. EFI's recently released Fiery Vue (movie) application shows promise in two of the three areas but still requires client software installation.

The second issue to address for DIY Printing is the actual printing devices. Whether it is a digital proofer or digital press, the device itself is dumb! It is the software interfaces that drives the true capabilities and output of the machine. Such software must be able to control and monitor every aspect of the device to offer absolute automation. The machines must also be equipped to offer the most automation similar to what has been done with the Espresso Book Machine. With the correct mix of software and hardware end users using a web interface could submit, pay, and monitor their printed creativity.

Unlike Etsy or Ebay, a DIY Printing operation needs physical equipment to produce the goods instead of pooling a a vast amount of finished goods from individuals. If you want to offer pickup service instead of shipping the printed product, which could be cost prohibitive, a DIY Printing operation would need the infrastructure and distribution possibilities of a FedEx Office (formerly Kinko's). Contrary to what you may be thinking FedEx Office or similar does not currently offer this type of service. At these outfits, you need to upload or hand over your files to an operator and pay high rates in return for your printed product - no cloud, no end user control, no automation. Naturally this leaves two possibilities, partner with an existing national outfit or possibly franchise a low cost, high profit outfit similar to the promises of the Social Print Experiment.

Services and marketplaces like Etsy and Ponoko suggest a market exists for DIY Printing, the only question is who will build it?

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This is Ponoco.


This is a part of manufacturing's new frontier.


This could be print.

Manufacturing's New Frontier

It has sliced and diced business markets with the efficiency of a Ginzu knife toting mercenary. The dissected industries of publishing, broadcasting, journalism, and b2c commerce have at finally recognized the Internet's potency, while scratching the surface of its potential. Like the killer in the night, the Internet has found a new target - manufacturing. This point is highlighted in an article by Chris Anderson in this month's Wired Magazine. (Read it when you have 15 minutes, but do read it.)

If the past 10 years have been about discovering post-institutional social models on the Web, then the next 10 years will be about applying them to the real world. - Chris Anderson

In a twist of fate befitting a Dan Brown novel, the very entity that vaporized atoms (real things) into the cloud (Web) is now enabling the manufacturing platform for tomorrow. The platform allows the curious, the dejected, the mavericks, and the DIYers to create products with a sophistication, cost, and scale never before possible. Manufacturing can now be dispersed, global, expertly crowdsourced, and small batched. This is where dreams can come true, not Disneyland.

Printers, who are not afraid of technology and change, stand to be rewarded by taking a bite out of the bits. While photo sharing and printing sites have been around for years, the Internet provides a massive amount of data that can be printed that is growing daily. Sites like Lulu or Booksmart allow you to print your XML blog into a finished book. Anything that can be digitized and standardized (such as XML) can be printed.

The printer's arsenal of equipment could also be another cog in the self manufacturer's toolbox. With the right software and hardware combination, these DIYers could virtually rent time or purchase sheets (aka click charges) to print schematics, marketing materials, or anything needing ink on paper. Such a business model would require extreme automation in job submission, production, tracking, billing, and shipping. These are not futile dreams of the imagination as a New Zealand company, Ponoko, is already proving the business model with CNC machines.

photo by: _phogra_