BERG Cloud revitalizes the whole idea of printing with Little Printer

BERG, a design studio in London, UK, is focused on product invention. For the last year or so, they've been working on a new concept they call Berg Cloud. BERG Cloud is their technology to "move the smarts" of (apparently physical) products onto the internet. On their website, you'll read a bunch of grandiose statements about their plans for BERG Cloud, but meanwhile, the exciting announcement they shared is about a product called Little Printer, which is just that-- and they say is the first of a family of connected products for the home.

Little Printer is an adorable inkless thermal printer in a tiny box that "lives in your front room and scours the Web on your behalf". The software in the BERG Cloud apparently assembling content you've told it to care about into pre-designated deliveries/outputs.

On BERG Cloud's site, you'll see plenty of mobile phone screens showing how you configure Little Printer from your phone. The company has built a network of content partners for their launch, including companies like Arup, foursquare, Google, the Guardian, and Nike.



My favorite part of the whole announcement is this statement:

"Paper is like a screen that never turns off. You can stick to the fridge or tuck it in your wallet. You can scribble on it or tear it and give it to a friend."

Excitement about print. That's not something we hear much these days, is it? In several years of trying, the Print Council hasn't come up with a statement that cool. Making a favorable comparison of Print to a screen, in an awesomely positive way.

There are a lot of applications for this, which is actually somewhat surprising since this the printed form factor is pretty much a cash register tape! Some of the applications shown by BERG are a tiny bit unlikely-- like a "to do" being put into a wallet. Why would you need a printed to-do list when you have a smart phone? (Which, presumably you have, since you used it to configure the Little Printer.)



Others are great, though, like the idea of printing out a slip for a workout or run, and taking that with you-- I, for one, never take a wallet or a phone with me when I'm working out. I know too many people who have dropped their iPhone while exercising, nightmare. Grocery list is another example. I have used an App for it, but it's cumbersome. Right now, I write down my list and give it to one of my kids who reads it to me while we shop. A little printed reminder is extremely useful sometimes.

Much bigger companies like HP have been trying to print news on personal printers for years now, including with the recent HP ePrint initiative. The jury is still out on whether anyone wants to do this (at all), let alone whether someone will want to do it on a cash register tape! In any case, though, I am a big fan of a Little Printer.

Little Printer is a "small thing", but it is a big idea. And it is super cool. I'm going to buy one just to support their energy, and I hope 2012 brings much more exciting innovation to print in a variety of shapes and sizes!

Printfriendly.com Makes Web Pages "Print Friendly"

I’m always on the lookout for interesting applications that combine print and the internet in unique ways. There are many unique web 2.0 applications emerging, adding value to both the web and print. I recently stumbled upon a cool site, called Printfriendly.com, and I tried it out.

With Printfriendly, you can create a nicely print-formatted version of a web page, and instantly print it or turn it into a PDF. Making PDF files isn’t all that hard these days, but formatting Webpages for print has significant challenges. You generally cannot just file-print web pages and have them output without garbage. Printfriendly solves this problem by analyzing the page, and removing "junk".

You simply hit the website, and type or paste the URL of the page you want to print into the browser. You can then print to an attached printer, or generate a PDF.



Printfriendly even lets you do simple editing of its generated version of the page, by allowing you to delete things—this can help you format the page better, and also remove unwanted content.

I actually had a nice use for Printfriendly. I had found some javascript tutorials that I wanted to print and share with colleagues. I used the site to generate printable PDF pages, then uploaded them to Mimeo and printed them with bindings and tabs. They came out beautiful. Converting the web pages into PDF was more than friendly: it was really completely automatic.



This made me a fan pretty quickly, so I contacted one of the principals of the company, Taylor Norrish, to get some background on what they are doing. Taylor has been building sites “since web 1.0”! He told me he was frustrated with the waste and quality when he would print webpages. It's expensive and bad for the environment. So he spent six months building PrintFriendly.com.

Says Taylor, “Our number focus is to just make something that works. So the most important features are: the algorithm that finds and removes junk, speed, and reliability.“ I can vouch for the fact that it is very fast, removes the junk “smartly”, and is very reliable. Printfriendly generates good PDF pages. They loaded into Mimeo and printed in color with no issues whatsoever.

Adds Taylor, “If you looked at the site/service two years ago, it wouldn't appear that different visually (features). However, it's faster, more reliable, and works on many more pages. We've completely rewritten the application 3 times and making constant iterations. For example, we just launched localized/ international versions. If you speak French, you'll see "Imprimer" instead of "Print" in the controls.

Printfriendly runs on Ruby On Rails (a popular language for Web2.0 applications), MySQL (the venerable open source database), and is hosted on a CDN (Content Delivery Network) for performance and availability. And, Taylor tells me Printfriendly is actually a nice business. He says printing and PDF generation has tripled since last year, and they are generating over a million prints/PDFs every month. The button is featured on thousands of sites like hubpages.com, socialmediaexaminer.com, skinnytaste.com, and makeuseof.com. They also have a Browser Tool/Bookmarklet.

Some great articles have been written about PrintFriendly on Mashable, LifeHacker, and the Sunday Times (print edition). Further evidence there is life after web for print media!

Breakthrough Open Source JDF Toolkit

Recently, On Point On Demand, a small company in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, did something none of the larger industry vendors have yet done. They took source code from currently relevant commercial software, and made it available as Open Source.

The company has several popular commercial products and is led by Tom Cabanski, who was previously a partner in the well regarded and pioneering JDF automation firm Objective Advantage. The products make for logical partnerships with Web2Print vendors whose print service provider (PSP) customers require back-end automation for an increased volume of work coming in from the web.

Commercial products available from the company include On Point Connect Shipping, which automates shipping via UPS, FedEx, DHL, USPS, company truck and local courier, is integrated with WebToPrint solutions from Aleyant Pressero, PageDNA, Printable nee PTI, and PagePath solutions; as well as On Point Symbio, which is a POD production automation system for commercial printers that automates many of the steps in the prepress, production, finishing and shipping process for POD jobs.

On August 5, 2011, Onpoint On Demand announced that it released its Fluent JDF for .NET toolkit as open source, "making it quick and easy for PSPs and ISVs to create valid JDF for client applications."

According to the company's press release, Fluent JDF is an "expert in-a-box, providing all the rules, syntax, packaging and structure to make JDF creation and delivery very easy for software engineers."

"We've released Fluent JDF under a commercial-friendly, open source license to make it easy for our customers and partners to create JDF client applications", stated Tom Cabanski, VP of Technology. "This is another way Onpoint On Demand is helping the industry take advantage of the power of JDF to build fully integrated supply chains that enhance productivity and profitability."

Fluent JDF is delivered as a .NET Library and is available for download at Microsoft's online open source repository CodePlex. There is some very "getting started" documentation, with good suggestions for new developers, and there is a discussion group (albeit, with not much activity since at this writing Fluent JDF has not been available very long.)

This announcement didn't get a lot of press coverage, most likely because many industry journalists don't understand what it is! Alas, in addition to this particular software being targeted at techies exclusively, this lack of real understanding has been JDF's problem in the PSP community for a long time now. Early on, it could be said that JDF wasn't actually useful; those days are long past (i.e., like 8 years ago at this point) -- JDF is SUPREMELY useful today. But it is hard to implement and still has a lack of understanding among printers as to the benefits and how to deploy (this, despite much work done on education by the CIP4 Organization.)

It's very much worth noting that a lot of the work and code samples that are available (such as JDF examples CIP4's own toolkit) are not coded for the .NET framework and since MSFT is the dominant player in the desktop and networks of most printing companies, this in itself creates a barrier to use.

Bottom line, this is a breakthrough development by little On Point On Demand. We haven't used the Fluent JDF software at Mimeo, but we are becoming a major JDF developer across our platform, and we are a .NET shop. A couple of our engineers took a quick look at Fluent JDF recently and told me that it looks like it could be very valuable. Stay tuned for future updates on this important development!

While we're on the subject of JDF, I should mention that Mimeo is hosting the Printing Industries of America's Automated Solutions Network meeting at our facility in Memphis, TN, next January. We're also in the process of arranging a tour of the amazing FedEX Memphis global hub for the same event.

From the Printing Industries - "The Automation Solutions Network has established itself as the premiere event to exchange ideas and solutions for JDF workflows. The Automation Solutions Network focuses on the development and practical implementation of JDF-enabled systems and cross-vendor implementations. The group welcomes a wide range of users of JDF-enabled systems as well as the suppliers of those systems. The steering committee of the Automation Solutions Network is made up entirely of printers who have either implemented systems or are in the process of doing so."

Facebook is a Publisher

There has been a lot of press around the recent acquisition by Facebook of Push Pop Press, an iPad book creator founded by two former Apple employees, Mike Matas and Kimon Tsinteris. They are best known for publishing Al Gore's recent Our Choice, a book about climate change. I was actually surprised to hear about this particular acquisition. The company is very young, and while the technology looks cool, I wasn't totally blown away by it when I first looked.

But I haven't looked at the book that closely, and the fact that they won the prestigious Apple 2011 Design Award at the WWDC in June says something very significant about what they have accomplished.

Facebook is characterizing the acquisition as a talent and technology play, which does make a lot of sense. So now they are known in the tech world as people who are smart enough for Mark Zuckerberg to hire them!

From the statement:

"We're thrilled to confirm that we've acquired Push Pop Press, a startup whose groundbreaking software challenges the way people publish and consume digital content," Facebook said in a statement.

"We can't wait for co-founders Mike Matas and Kimon Tsinteris to get started and for some of the technology, ideas and inspiration behind Push Pop Press to become part of how millions of people connect and share with each other on Facebook."

The statement goes on to say that "Facebook isn’t planning to get into the digital book business..."

The fact is, Facebook is already significant publisher, with a huge audience. The way I read this acquisition, Push Pop is a different kind of book and Facebook is a different kind of publisher. Facebook has a global audience of 700+ million people (at this writing) to which it can push content of many forms. Facebook is, as an example, the defacto "publisher" of Zynga's games, if you look at the way their agreement is structured and where the game company's revenue comes from (this is now all over the web due to Zynga's planned IPO).

There are many moving parts in the publishing supply chain. I've been reading numerous analysis pieces lately about the changing role of the publisher, and how their ability to move books has been diminished by a variety of forces in the marketplace and technology. Clearly, "traditional" publishers are working very hard to re-invent themselves. One example that makes it quite clear here in New York is to look at what software developers are working on. Two years ago, developers in New York media engagements were working on the web. Today, they are working on iPad and mobile.

Back in early 2009 when David and I started this blog, one of the big trends we saw emerging was the idea that content increasingly originates on the web, then may or may not be printed. This acquisition is very much an example of that trend, and it's starting to accelerate. This kind of paradigm shift is a big reason why traditional publishers are freaking -- their employees mindsets, their workflows and their technology all target print intrinsically and first. I will look for some additional examples of this and do another post in the near future.

Facebook is clearly a lot more than a publisher porting their content to new technology platforms. Do they need to make "ebooks"? Why should they, when they can re-invent "publishing" by pushing rich content to a gigantic audience in a new, exciting and interactive way? This acquisition of Push Pop Press is only the beginning.

EFI Acquires Entrac - Money at the Edge of the Print Cloud

It's so great to see EFI on the move and their stock price strong! But I better find some other companies and technology to write about here soon, or this will start looking like an EFI-centric Blog!

EFI wasted no time in putting their brand on Entrac's minimalist www site, but it looks like a very complementary story coming out of this low-key Toronto company.

According to Toby Weiss, EFI Fiery business unit GM and senior vice president, "...the Entrac payment technology offers new possibilities for future EFI products in both our traditional print-for-pay markets as well as the enterprise markets. For example, adding EFI's PrintMe cloud printing to existing Entrac products will make it even easier for customers to begin offering self-service printing to mobile workers, students, guests, and patrons."

The company's products consist of attractive hardware that connect to output devices like copiers and fax machines. The devices come in a variety of shapes and sizes, ranging from small color screen "terminals" (my description) that sit next to a copier, to a full Kiosk.

In a print for pay situation, the terminals decrease the amount of "babysitting" that staffers need to do to support self-service customers. In enterprise and institutional environments, these types of devices would enable cost control, allow enhanced services to be provided to users, and provide the ability to capture payments in a variety of ways that weren't possible before.

I'm looking forward to seeing how EFI expands the market and technology of these products. At some point, I would think they would integrate this with FieryVue and the functionality of their SendMe products. Exciting Stuff!

EFI Direct Mobile Printing

Today, EFI is in the news announcing that Canon is now supporting EFI's direct mobile print technology in their imageRUNNER ADVANCE lineup of color and black & white office systems utilizing Fiery-based imagePASS and ColorPASS controllers.

EFI's direct mobile print technology enables printing directly from Apple iPad, iPhone and iPod touch devices. Read the entire release regarding the Canon partnership on Whattheythink.

Apparently, software has also been available for a few months to support this with some Xerox devices, including the Color 550/560.

I didn't see an official announcement of this, but when I searched the web for this technology, I also found it referenced in an EFI datasheet about a product called EFI PrintMe Server, which apparently is a privately accessible version of PrintMe, or some kind of end-point for output of PrintMe-submitted jobs. The datasheet is a little unclear as to who the target market is-- it talks about "Your Customers", almost making it sound like "you" are a print for pay establishment, and your customers are going to mobile print to your "company". But the photo is of a MFP, so maybe you are a hotel (one of the core markets for the PrintMe service), and your customers are actually "guests." I guess I'm going to have to get someone at EFI to explain it to me!

Back to the point, though, this PrintMe Server apparently also includes Direct Mobile Printing to Xerox EIP-enabled MFPs without a mobile device application and without using the PrintMe Cloud. Xerox EIP MFPs are automatically discovered by the PrintMe Server software and presented as an available printer from within the user’s mobile application. See prior RichInternetPrinting blog posts for more discussion of mobile printing and Xerox EIP.

Cisco, Xerox and Cloud Printing

Back in January, at the Consumer Electronics Association's venerable CES show, an “Innovation Power Panel" took place, featuring Cisco CEO John Chambers, GE Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt, and Xerox Chairman and CEO Ursula Burns. Among other topics, the CEOs talked about how their respective companies innovate. Things like decentralized management; investing in R&D, focusing on human resources and shortening their time to market for new products. Perhaps after the session, the two vendors and their big customer got together to talk about the difficulty of printing in the enterprise today.

Last month, Cisco Systems and Xerox announced that they would partner to create a mobile printing system, to allow users to print from any device to any printer. The uniqueness of this announcement is that, while virtually “everyone” is now talking about making printing easier for mobile employees, no one is really talking about the underlying network and infrastructure, which is Cisco's forte, and the system integration necessary to make it happen, which is clearly a strength that Xerox brings to the table with the powerful capabilities the ACS acquisition provides.

Unless you are a serious tech geek, you probably haven’t even heard of Cisco's UCS (Unified Computing System), which is a key hardware and software component to the relationship. Cisco’s very extensive network of channel partners will resell the technology and a managed service that will be delivered from a Xerox data center.

According to the announcement, which focused on mobile printing, an employee can send a document from a smartphone, tablet or other device to a Cloud service that will make that document available to any printer in an organization. The employee can go to one of those printers, punch in the code for that document, and have it printed out.

This isn’t a particularly earth-shattering revelation. Several other companies have extolled the virtues of this kind of capability for at least a couple of years. Last month, I talked about PrintMe, which is a Cloud service from EFI that provides remarkably similar functionality. Furthermore, roughly two years ago I attended an HP event in NYC that described exactly this, focusing on HP’s enterprise print server and a concept they called “pull printing”, albeit without reference at the time to mobile applications.

However, the combination of the resources of Cisco and Xerox definitely can help address the growing issues of printing associated with mobile devices and virtual desktops in far-flung enterprise deployments. It shouldn’t be hard for an employee to print, no matter where they are. But alas, today it can be quite difficult.

We've all done it "the hard way". The typical method for getting a document printed from a mobile device is to email it to someone who sits near a printer and have them print it out. This is both cumbersome and time-consuming, and in many companies, introduces document security risks. In fact, in many organizations, there still is no “guest” network access, so even sending the email from a laptop or mobile device to a local user can be challenging, unless you have an aircard or something.

Xerox introduced their Mobile Printing System last year, which I’ve discussed in previous posts, but seemed to leave it up to enterprises or third-party system integrators to deploy and configure.

According to the partnership announcement, the companies will build print agents into Cisco routers and switches, starting with the ISR (Integrated Services Router.) They will use Cisco's wide-area network acceleration products to help print jobs travel faster, and Cisco security tools to make sure information doesn't end up in the wrong hands, the announcement said.

Cisco and Xerox will deliver the mobile printing capability in three products. Xerox Managed Print Services (MPS) over Cisco Borderless Networks is a software product from Xerox that provides the tools for an enterprise to implement mobile printing services to its own employees. The software, which takes advantage of IOS (Internetwork Operating System) on Cisco network equipment, provides the security, WAN optimization and print monitoring for mobile printing. Cisco channel partners will also be able to use Xerox MPS to offer these services to enterprises. Xerox MPS should be offered through Cisco channel partners in the U.S. starting in July or August and in Europe next January.

Xerox Cloud ITO Services is a set of services, including mobile printing, that Xerox will offer to enterprises and small and medium-sized businesses. The services grow out Xerox's acquisition of ACS. They will run on Xerox data centers built with Cisco's UCS servers and the Vblock infrastructure made up of Cisco networking and computing, EMC storage and VMware virtualization software. These services will also be sold through Cisco's channels. They are available on a limited basis now and are likely to be generally available next January, the companies said.

There will be client software for Cisco's Cius tablet and for Cisco Virtualization Experience Client devices, which is installed on desktop computers. This Xerox Mobile Print Solution will allow users of those clients to securely print documents on any printer in the enterprise.

In summary, this partnership appears to glue together a number of important pieces for enterprise Cloud printing into a complete hardware, software and services offering that previously would have required enormous amounts of labor and expense for customers contemplating enterprise deployments. Cisco and Xerox's ACS acquisition have long been partnered, with ACS being a top Cisco reseller for many years. Stay tuned for more as deployments begin to roll-out.