Print 2.0 Blog : Print 2.0

Innovation at HP

BlogArchive — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 20:05:00 GMT

In case you might have missed it, I want to point to an excellent Business Week article on HP’s cultural revolution. I was interviewed, along with others, by Jana Reena, the Innovation Editor for Business Week for this article. Jana did a remarkably thorough job of discovering how innovation at HP was working now. Jana interviewed a lot of HPers and spent a lot of time with us. One of the themes she develops in the article: “innovation by absorption” (referring to the acquisition of small or early stage companies) is certainly becoming a tool for many companies. From my point of view, it is a critical tool: Innovation in the Web Age is a tight coupling between business model innovation and technology innovation. This means you have to learn to think differently about how you do business and which technology to invent. It is definitely a cultural transformation. To learn it, you have to see it happen by living next to someone doing it every day. Incorporating a team with that experience is a way to achieve that learning. We have seen some early success with this in the deployment of our Print 2.0 strategy. But of course, it is a long road…. may be all the way to the North Pole…

Happy Holidays!

Print 2.0, a non Executive view

BlogArchive — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 20:56:00 GMT

I have shared my excitement about Print 2.0 in this blog. But what about other HP employees, how do they see Print 2.0? I thought you might want to hear directly from some of them. These short interviews were recorded on various HP sites. I find these stories very compelling.

Enjoy!

Antonio Rodriguez: "My impressions of Print 2.0"

BlogArchive — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 15:04:00 GMT

I am trying something new (for me): hosting other writers I believe have something to say and that you might want to meet. Today it’s Antonio Rodriguez. I first met Antonio when he was the CEO (and founder) of Tabblo.com. Now Tabblo is part of HP and the Print 2.0 strategy. Antonio is a proven web entrepreneur who understands publishing really well. That makes a fascinating combination. You can discover more about Antonio on The Onda.

In the piece below, Antonio is asking a really good question: what should a print 2.0 platform look like. We have learned from Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and others what a successful web advertisement platform should look like, but we are very early in the process of inventing the print 2.0 platform. There is as much business in print as in advertisement.

Here it is:

My impressions of Print 2.0 in the age of the Unwitting Blogger (invited blog by Antonio Rodriguez)

There are a variety of threads floating around our new Print 2.0 strategy that are worth thinking about in the age of the unwitting blogger. I first wrote about this back at the beginning of Tabblo, arguing that regular people were becoming authors of content online without even knowing they were— in some cases doing the kinds of things that bloggers were, steadily producing content for small but interested audiences. And if anything, since then the explosion of social networking sites like Facebook, and microblogging apps like Twitter have but accelerated this process.

The line between communication and publishing continues to blur for the simple reason that the tools for creating, distributing, and consuming content have become so cheap and ubiquitous. Combined with the almost insatiable appetite we have to connect with each other, and the way in which Internet time accelerates these types of trends, we're really seeing the beginning of some incredible stuff (if you want to see just how far the Internet has brought us along this spectrum of communications/publishing, check out these two presentations).

The last time we had such a revolution in publishing, the "Desktop Publishing" revolution, the group that I now work for, IPG (Imaging and Printing), rode a wave that combined the PC with cheap printing to enable a whole new group of people publish content in a way that looked as good as was as well-finished as that of professional publishers. These folks put out content that was as varied as restaurant menus and poetry books and billions of dollars of industry value were created. Ten years later, millions of people felt empowered to "author content," even if this meant sending Christmas letters that looked like ransom notes from all of the different typefaces used.

But that was a more deliberate process for two key reasons: first, the devices for generating the output cost money (even if the prices have dropped like a rock over the last two decades). Second, the physical nature of the distribution of the content was limited to moving atoms around from printer to consumer. Today, the Internet obviates the need for the publisher to worry about the mechanics of distribution even when the final product is meant to be consumed on paper. In fact thanks to the huge success that HP (and others) experienced during the PC/Desktop boom, there are now more than 400M deployed personal fabricators (printers) ready to turn all of those bits right back to atoms right in people's homes.

So when Patrick writes about Cloudprint, or about the importance of web applications, it is not just because they are cool technologies. It is because each of them enables today's casual publisher to take yet another step into creating and moving content in a digital world. Cloudprint to me is Twitter for documents and printers (leveraging a lot of the same casual publisher characteristics), and the eventual rise of webapps as content authoring environments is much less about the death of the desktop app than it is about portable interfaces for dealing with specific types of experiences around publishing that can be collaborative while living very close to the communities that benefit the most from them.

The trick that all of us involved in the Print 2.0 implementation are trying to figure out is how to inject key pieces of functionality into the content creation, selection, distribution, and consumption process that help to accelerate the process by which we make everyone into an unwitting blogger. We've all got stories to tell across a range of mediums and to audiences of all sizes, and as IPG has learned, opening up these possibilities are the way that billion dollar industries are made.

Web applications, are they for real?

BlogArchive — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 15:32:00 GMT

I have written about the key underlying assumption behind Print 2.0: content is created, shared and distributed on the web. Print 1.0 was about riding the wave of the desktop applications. Print 2.0 is about riding the wave of the Web. Sometimes, when I say this, there is some controversy in the audience. While most would agree Web applications are a reality for each of us as consumers, the controversy tends to be centered on professional or business use.

SAP announced a few days ago their new suite of On Demand Services. While it is hardly unexpected, I find it significant, perhaps as significant as the launch of Live by Microsoft. These are the giants of the software industry. You know a shift happens when it is embraced by the giants. Henning Kagermann, SAP’s CEO described it as “the most important announcement I have made in my career here [at SAP]”. May be Henning thinks the same way I do. Granted, both SAP and Microsoft have so far targeted the mid- market (smaller enterprises and small business) rather than the larger enterprises. But you would expect this, for practical reasons (volume and speed of adoption). It’s also the way technology is developed and adopted currently: first consumers and small business, followed by mid-size enterprises and larger enterprises.

I found these two videos on Google video. They are sales pitches, I guess, but they bring an interesting perspective on the new way of thinking. Too often we tend to look at technology shifts in the context of the old model. A rich and complete feature set was key to desktop applications: they had to handle an extremely wide range of use. Yes, the equivalent web application isn’t nearly as rich. But does it matter? Instead, it is important to think in terms of the new use models or the new priorities. Marc Benioff makes the point in his video: for his enterprise, how fast you can deploy business applications to new employees matters enormously. Having an employee base all on the same release of software, all the time (because it is delivered on line) matters. We work in large, widely distributed teams these days, real time collaboration built into the tools matters.

In our Print 2.0 context, we see the same thing. I was asked recently whether our photo book editing web application that we used for the Gwen Stefani book was competing with some of Adobe’s well known applications. Maybe, if you think of Gwen as a photo editor application, but in reality not, it has a different priority: a targeted instantiation that is well tuned for the group of users that might be interested by Gwen. It does not come close to the power of an Adobe application but for the 14 year-old girl putting her concert picture into the Gwen book, it just works perfect.

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff Speaks about Google Apps

Eric Schmidt and Douglas Merrill talk about Google Apps

I wouldn’t be complete without the contrarian view, so here it is, Don Reisinger news blog on CNET : Will free office suites supplant Microsoft as the industry leader? . Don says: may be not after all.

Enjoy!

VJ's "Uncut" Video

BlogArchive — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 19:59:00 GMT

Here is an interesting video from VJ, the executive vice president for HP’s Imaging and Printing Group. I think it’s cool. VJ’s passion for the Print 2.0 journey does come across. I also can’t remember a precedent for an HP Executive VP.

Enjoy!

When 2% Leads to a Major Industry Shift

BlogArchive — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 21:24:00 GMT

I was just about to write my last report on our Print 2.0 event in New York, on my way home. I was looking at clouds outside the plane, the real ones, not the Internet cloud when an interesting quote from Vyomesh Joshi’s keynote on Tuesday came back to the surface: “we [HP’s Imaging and Printing Group] only have 2% of worldwide pages, if I could add another lousy 2%, I could double the business”. We are talking about the potential to double a $30 billion business. Of course it was also meant to get a smile from the audience but the data is accurate. HP has a massive footprint in the digital print market (expressed in printer units or business volume), but very few pages are printed with digital printers (less than 9% of the 45 trillion pages printed in 2005). As a result we do represent only 2% of worldwide printed pages. Digital print technology is improving rapidly to compete with traditional print technology. We will be ready with digital production means. But what does it take to get pages to go digital in the first place?

We have proposed an answer: Print 2.0, the combination of digital content, the web and digital print. It’s one of the platforms that support the “conversation economy” and allows us to express “what we have to say”. We are expanding HP’s web service platform: HP’s Snapfish is powering our consumer services, but also others such as Wal-Mart’s photo service, and now Microsoft Live Spaces (available in the fall). This week we announced our partnership with Meiers, connecting online and retail with kiosks and microlabs. Small business can get branding and identity needs served by HP’s Logoworks online or with our partnership with Office Depot. In addition to video download of movies, you can now purchase a DVD at retail with your favorite TV show thanks to HP’s NextDayTV.

We are also enabling the larger web to offer users a rich experience to create prints, posters, books and other products. It is worth it! There are more than 100 million web sites in the world.

Creating for the web does not have a good model for repurposing content for print products. A typical well formatted blog will simply look ugly and hard to read once committed to paper (and a lot of paper will have been wasted). The Tabblo print toolkit provides a service that web site can mash up to: the “HP Print it” button will be found in the Yahoo toolbar for example or allow Boing Boing readers to print individual posts.

For a blog, it can work like this:

get 4 choices for a print output:

one of the outputs is an itinerary, the other is travel log, or it could be a photo album, you get the idea: same web content, very different outputs.

Print is one thing, what about publishing?

Anyone can be their own publisher. The Tabblo platform can help users create their way, from the site of their choice: a poster with their personal photo, a coffee table photo book or a simple pocket book. We live in a world of mashed media. A book might be created by a community. Before the Holiday season, Tabblo will be powering Flickr to offer a rich array of print products to the Flickr user community. Disney.com will be offering Hanna Montana “my concert album” thanks to Tabblo. It will be available at the start of the concert tour on October 18^th.

Maybe you would like your site to use the power of Tabblo. What would you want to say with it?

Print is Exciting Again !

BlogArchive — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 16:03:00 GMT

This is how I feel, along with many of the attendees here in New York, on day 2 of HP’s “What do You have to say?” campaign launch. My fellow HP blogger Eric Kintz wrote an excellent summary of the event: HP Ignites the Print 2.0 Revolution . A lot of facts, links to the launch sites and videos can also be found on the press release.

Printing is exciting again because… it’s not about print! Instead, it’s about what each of us has to say. The combination of digital content, the web and digital print is remarkably powerful. I like the way John Batelle in the panel session spoke about the “conversation economy”. John described the 3 bumps of IT:

- bump 1: digitized the back office. The interface was the command line: C:\
- bump 2: digitized the front office. A PC on everyone desk, Windows and GUI were the new interface
- bump 3: today. Every interaction with customers is digital. Search is how we ask questions of technology now. Search is the beginning of a new interface. It is the transition from packaged good to a conversation economy. Everyone is in the media business now and that media is conversation.

This is how I see the role of print: it is a powerful tool for this conversation. I saw many examples in the last 2 days. I’ll highlight one that I think demonstrates the power of including the physical output of print in this digital conversation: Letters From Katrina by Mark Hoog, a United Airlines pilot and executive director of the Children's Leadership Institute. This book is a set of letters from children in Colorado and California to children of the Gulf Coast touched by the Katrina tragedy. This is user generated content that touches your heart, and it is not YouTube. Self publishing and the capability to digitally produce (through Lightning Source) made this book a reality. It is available on Amazon. 100% of the proceeds from the sale of this book is placed in an endowment that will create a lifetime of scholarships and opportunity for children throughout Mississippi and the Gulf Coast.

Customers are now in control in this conversation economy. In this spirit, as part of the marketing campaign, HP is offering experiences inspired by personalities, in the form of web sites where customers can mash their content with professional content from these personalities. Gwen Stefani ‘s experience is going beyond the web site. In New York, you can watch the Reuters sign in Times Square ands start interacting with it, using your mobile phone. You create your personalized doll, with 60 seconds to do it. Once done, a text message will lead you to the web site, from which you can print (once you get home) the paper doll you just designed. I saw people playing with this sign yesterday night. They seemed to have a great time, took pictures, it was very cool.

It’s also symbolic of a trend. I had written in a previous post on the increasing role of the mobile phone as our interface to digital content and print. At the time I wrote about a simple print service from the cloud. John Markoff wrote this NYT article on Cloudprint that you might enjoy. Melissa Perenson in her blog also gave her perspective on this experimental service.

In the conversation economy, print is increasingly “un-hooked”!

Riding a New Wave

BlogArchive — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 14:31:00 GMT

I am a technologist so I like to connect long term financial success with technology shifts. When I reflect on the success of the Imaging and Printing Group (IPG) over the past 22 years, I can connect it to one major technology shift: the desktop PC. The inkjet and laserjet printers had a market because of the explosion of applications developed for the PC platform. It started with desktop publishing and spreadsheet, and then came digital photos and other graphic intensive applications. Content was being created on the PC, it needed a digital output. We provided low cost high quality color print with a steady improvement in quality and speed that matched the increasing complexity and quality of digital content. Like the PC, it was affordable and to date IPG has shipped more than 400 million printers across the world.

This is the wave we rode and it created an entire digital print industry.

Today 48% of printed content come from the Web. Content is created, stored and distributed on the Web. The new application platform is the Internet. This is the new wave we are riding. It is not “if” or “when”. It’s now and it’s happening fast!

What’s the meaning of print on the web?

Remarkably, the explosion of content on the web is in a large part due to you, me and the billion plus internet users. We are the content creators. Now that we have all this digital content, we not only like to look at it, read it, share it, but we increasingly like to make “things” out of it. We may want to convert the pile of photos from this vacation into a nicely bound book, or get a few unique T-shirts for this birthday party. Why shouldn’t the stamp on the letter have your picture? What about the cool buttons you could give. Could you put a unique skin on your car?

That is the way I see it: “print” on the web is about making products from digital content. Cool products. It is the connection between the virtual and the physical world. Digital production makes the ultimate long tail (our creation) practical and economical. The same digital infrastructure that allows Amazon to sell you a book can allow you to produce your own personal book too.

If you have never tried, have a look at the products that can be created on HP’s Snapfish photo service where 40 million users create products, on line, from simple prints to Shrek the Third themed products where user generated content is mixed with content from DreamWorks Animation. These products are manufactured by a network of print service providers and shipped to you, or you can pick them up at a retailer of choice.

You might also want to sell the content or products you create. Cafepress is a great example of a user driven trading community. This too is the meaning of print on the web..

The web coupled with digital production can also bring to Small Business design and marketing capabilities that were only accessible to large enterprises not long ago. Logoworks is HP’s service for small and medium business. It brings together business users and a network of professional designers to create the marketing identity of those businesses and the associated products, from brochures to web sites.

Content takes many forms, increasingly, its video. Earlier this year IPG launched a new video service with Wal-Mart that brings movies to consumers.

Early success with Snapfish, Logoworks, and Video Download services taught us that we can build compelling internet interfaces and we need to build more. But could we enable the larger web? How can we bring print and product creation to the 100 million web sites on the World Wide Web?

That’s a story for my next blog!

Print 2.0: Unlocking the POWER OF PRINT

BlogArchive — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 17:14:00 GMT

Here's a great presentation on Print 2.0. . .