Last week, I had a chance to participate in hp’s annual Imaging and Printing conference in New York City. These events, which are exceptionally well-planned, give hp a chance to review new product introductions, and share our future vision and strategies. More importantly, it gives us a chance to interact and, often times, have engaging discussions with key industry analysts from companies like IDC, Gartner, and InfoTrends, to name a few.
Some of the highlights included a vision and strategy presentation by Vyomesh Joshi (VJ), hp’s Executive Vice President for imaging and printing; an enlightening Web 2.0 presentation by John Topping, Director of Google’s B2B Technology Verticals Market Group; and John Battelle who is a an internet visionary, journalist, blogger, author, and entrepreneur. We also had a number of breakout sessions where we shared our thoughts and strategies on various markets we sell into - enterprise, supplies, graphic arts, moms-consumers, and SMB. In addition, I was fortunate to host a session on In-House Marketing, a strategy I have talked about in the past on this blog and will continue to blog about in the future.
During this event, we unveiled our Print 2.0 strategy where our company plans to make it easier to print from the web, extend the company’s digital printing content creation and publishing platform capability, and capture a greater share of high volume analog printing through increased speeds and reduced costs.
Let me say a couple of things about what hp is doing. First of all, there is a tremendous opportunity to shift pages printed elsewhere-–whether it be office documents from copiers, marketing collateral from commercial printers or photos from photo labs and re-purpose those pages on more local devices. Within certain parameters (like job length, required finishing) there are reduced costs and increased flexibility and control associated with this transformation of pages. We’re not disabling other ways to print these documents such as online or through retail.
The web is a key enabler to this document transformation. The Web 2.0 or second generation web enhancements are fueling the trend of creating-user generated content from some sites as YouTube, Wikis, Second Life, and MySpace, and making user generated content like Yahoo maps, blogs, and web images easier to print out. I'm sure all of us have been frustrated from time to time printing out web pages, when content gets chopped off on the right margin. We are also enabling web services that could serve up and deliver specific applications and solutions for certain types of customers. Finally, we’re backing-up this strategy with acquisitions that help make printing from the web easier. These include Tabblo and LogoWorks.
Tabblo is providing a tool kit for web developers that will help improve print functions on companies’ web sites. We are also working with SixApart to build technology into their Moveable Type blogging software and TypePad blogging service to add a “print” button to their products. LogoWorks helps small and medium businesses (SMBs) create professional looking logos for their business and marketing collateral. As the web branches out into “mashed media”–-words, pictures, video, and music–-people will need to new ways to be able to consume this information. We want to empower people to print this complex media as one method of consumption.
The world is changing. I think static documents of the past are transforming into digital media--rich documents, user generated content, and mashed-up information. I think we are leading the industry right now in identifying the future challenges of printing and in developing real world solutions to address them. In my next post I will share some thoughts from our leadership team on their views around Print 2.0 and how it will change their business focus and direction in the future.
What do you think about the future of printing? Are we on the right track?
Posted
06-06-2007 10:30 AM
by
Anonymous