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.

More on PrintMe, and Xerox Cloud Mobile Print

Over at Whattheythink.com today, another great video interview by Cary Sherburne with Toby Weiss, EFI Fiery GM. Cary must have been very busy at Connect, I bet we're going to see many hours of great footage over the next few weeks! Good stuff.

The new interview, which you can see here, has additional information about PrintMe that I hadn't heard prior to writing my post last week.

Notably, Toby says that Xerox MFPs (Multi-Function Peripheral/Printer) are "out of the box" capable of working directly with PrintMe (which we discussed here last week) via the Xerox Extensible Interface Platform (EIP). Xerox describes EIP as "a software platform upon which developers can use standard web-based tools to create server-based applications that can be configured for the MFP’s touch-screen user interface." For detailed information, visit the Xerox EIP page.

Xerox describes many applications for EIP besides printing. Enterprise applications like searching a client database or submitting forms to corporate departments; configuring personal preferences for output by swiping an ID badge, or scanning documents into a enterprise document management system. They also speak of the applications HP has promoted so heavily recently, like printing the news or stock reports off the Internet directly via interacting with the Xerox MFP touch-screen.

While we're on the subject of mobile printing and the Xerox MFP interface, check out this video demo from an event almost a year ago in Amsterdam. This Xerox Mobile Print interface, which appears to use this EIP technology, sounds more like HP ePrint by virtue of being based on email, than like PrintMe. Cool demo, though. It shows a lady (customer? XRX employee? shill?) who appears to have just walked up to the stand and prints something from her Blackberry, with no advance preparation. She's excited!

My next post is likely to be regarding the recent Xerox/Cisco announcement. I want to say that Xerox is getting very aggressive, and it does appear they are going to leverage all their relationships in this area. It's kind of funny, though, that HP and Google have gotten all the buzz, and here's Xerox demoing stuff a year ago that quite frankly very few people have heard about.

It may well be a factor of the level of embrace of the developer community-- Google gets thousands of bright people (i.e., software developers) to generate grass roots publicity, by making things "open". With XRX, it seems like you kind of have to be Cisco or SAP (or I guess EFI now) to participate in their ecosystem.

EFI PrintMe Emerges From Obscurity

Those of you who read this blog on a fairly regular basis may know that David and I have written a bit on the subject of mobile printing, notably from Smart Phones and Tablets. Our colleague Kin Lane, who is Mimeo's API Evangelist, joined forces with us this past winter to write a paper for TAGA, the Technical Association of the Graphic Arts, that provides an inventory of Cloud Printing technologies. The paper is primarily focused on Apple AirPrint, Google Cloud Print and HP ePrint, which are clearly the leaders in this area. That "semi-academic" treatise will be published in the TAGA 63rd Annual Technical Conference Proceedings, which will come out later in the summer. You can contact TAGA if you want a copy of it.

In addition to the things the "big three" are developing in this area, there are quite a few other smaller companies developing Cloud Printing technology and capabilities, and one we felt we had to at least mention in our paper was EFI. Unlike the three companies mentioned, EFI is not known for doing much in the mobile arena. But EFI actually invented the idea that has become the mobile component of "Cloud Printing", way back during the "dot com" era. They didn't use the term Cloud, because it hadn't been coined yet. Instead, they gave it a "fun dotcom" name, PrintMe. I'd venture to say that most people who ever knew about PrintMe don't know that it has continued to exist over the years since it's announcement in October 2001.



PrintMe was literally 10 years ahead of its time. It partnered EFI with leading companies like Adobe, who actually provided a button in Acrobat reader that connected to PrintMe, Sir Speedy, Xerox, and Yahoo, as well as early hotel Internet provider STSN (now iBAHN), and even Mimeo.com. For several reasons, including timing, the service never became as ubiquitous as would have befitted its innovative nature.

Perhaps in another post, we'll talk about all the reasons why PrintMe didn't achieve world domination the first time out, but let's focus on today and the future here. With the new excitement around the Cloud, and the emerging need for printing on mobile devices, it makes sense that EFI would restart marketing and make new investments in the development of this platform.

Originally, Printme was brought to market by a separate "Enterprise" team at EFI, with its own GM, etc. Today, according to a recent update from Cary Sherburne at Whattheythink.com, the technology is part of the Fiery group, led by Senior Vice President Toby Weiss. This should mean it will garner more resources, and be able to leverage EFI's world-leading technology, more than in the past 10 years.

In a press release from the original launch, PrintMe was described as “the first complete Internet printing solution that enables remote printing without requiring print drivers, cables or complex setup.” The company further described the solution as enabling "users to print documents from their personal computers, personal digital assistant (PDA) devices, two-way pagers and even cell phones by simply “dialing” in to any printer on the PrintMe Network.”

EFI has always been very forward-looking, and PrintMe is no exception. It was launched literally a decade ahead of its time. The message in that press release from so long ago is pretty much exactly what Google and HP are talking about in their Cloud Printing initiatives today. EFI could re-launch the service and pretty much just copy and paste the original press release into PR Newswire, with few edits!

PrintMe now appears to be poised to fulfill its original promise. A user sends their "print job" to PrintMe Cloud, and obtains a code which allows them to retrieve their output on a PrintMe enabled printer. This is similar to how other technologies are doing this now, although the need for a user to have a unique "code" that identifies their job, and requiring them to remember and enter that code somewhere is absent from other developer's implementations.

A unique feature of PrintMe is that it has a hardware component for the output device. EFI today says that "terminals" can be purchased for almost any copier/printer and can also be embedded in Fiery controllers. According to EFI, this makes the service brand agnostic, and allows it to work with any output device. Frankly I was surprised to read that this "feature" of the original service is still being offered today. In a world where every device is Internet-connected, and Printers have web browsers and touch screens, it seems a bit unnecessary and expensive to have additional hardware attached to a printer. Google Cloud Print, for example, offers similar support for legacy printers and can be supported with a tiny piece of software that can be embedded into any printer, as well. That same code snippet extends Google Cloud Print to other applications, as well, including opening it up to commercial printing applications-- something else EFI dabbled with back in the early days.

PrintMe is an enduringly cool idea and I am really looking forward to EFI's progress in this area. I hope they make the appropriate level of investment to get this adopted broadly because it is a huge opportunity. They invented this, and they deserve to capitalize on it. There is much more competition now from big companies who are similarly extremely innovative like EFI, so the bar has been raised.

EFI has proven over the years they are a tough competitor, so it's going to be interesting to see what they do!

Lulu API Launches

I read a press release early this week that Lulu.com's API, which delivers it's Open Publishing Platform is now ready for prime time with the addition of two major components.

Lulu's APIs enable publishers, Website builders and entrepreneurial content owners to easily publish the books they and their authors have created. According to Lulu, their Open Publication APIs enable publishers, businesses and developers to create Web applications, powered by Lulu, and marketed under their own brand names.

The first of two final components of the API program is a Document Conversion API, that converts Word, RTF and HTML document into print-ready PDF files. The second is a new E-Commerce API. This will allow developers to place orders with Lulu on behalf of their users, programmatically. This will enable their partners to sell their books from their own web sites.

Bruce Watermann Talks About Blurb.com Technology

Blurb is an online “self-publishing” company based in San Francisco. The company launched their first products in 2006. I had seen Eileen Gittins, the company’s founder, speak at DSCOOP6 a couple of months ago, so I was thrilled to see Bruce Watermann was appearing on a panel at the Digital Book Printing Forum in New York last week.

Bruce is the company’s SVP, Print Operations. He’s been there since 2005. Before joining Blurb, he worked at Corbis, and before that at a high end photo lab in Seattle, Pacific Color.

Bruce started out with some of the company’s current “vital statistics”, telling us that their annual revenue is now over $50M, and that in 2010, they paid nearly $2M to authors. Almost 50% of the company’s business now originates outside of the US. They have a London office, in addition to SF HQ. They ship to 70 countries, and they’ve just recently begun to localize their web site, starting with French in 2010, and more to come this year. Bruce explained they are very careful about the translations, so they get the nuances of the culture and communicate their brand value in the locality.

But let’s talk about the fun part, the technology. Bruce built a really cool digital network for producing the many products consumers purchase on the company’s web site. They call it the Print Partner Network, or PPN.

The print service providers in the PPN are handpicked. Once an order/job “lands” at one of the PPN companies, they have three days to produce and ship it. Blurb expects less than 1% manufacturing defects, and enforces this with an SLA. Bruce tells us this is being achieved!

The company insists their partners use 100% HP Indigo digital presses for color, and 100% Oce equipment for B&W when producing Blurb products. In the network, partners have Indigo 5000 series, 7000s and 7500s, as well as WS6000s and W7200s. They have even standardized RIPs, insisting on HP SmartStream Ultra or Production Pro.

Bruce told us, however, that the actual printing is “the easy part”. I think most printers would agree with this— when a job is on the press, you’re making money, it is smooth sailing. It’s everything before and after that kills you. Because of this, Bruce told us that the beyond being able to print with the highest quality, the thing that separates the partners they have chosen is Information Technology (IT) expertise, particular binding equipment and skills, and being able to fulfill a quantity of one.

Getting the jobs to the PPN partner consists of three files: XML (job ticket), book cover, book guts. They use the venerable PrintTalk specification (now part of CIP4 JDF, but formerly an industry e-commerce spec originally developed as a standalone consortium in the dotcom era.) Blurb decides where the job will be printed. One ready, the PPN partner pulls the job down to their facility.

Finishing is also standardized, with Blurb requiring partners to utilize ODM and GP2 binding gear; CP Bourg and Horizon for book block creation, and LBS for materials. As an aside, the paper is also dictated, with Blurb working exclusively with NewPage and Mohawk at this time.

Printers are able to dictate their own internal workflow, but fulfillment is prescribed by Blurb, featuring a global shipping partnership with FedEx. Bruce said they hit their high water mark one day in 2010 when they shipped 10,000 packages in a single day!

Self-publishing consumers in their own homes and offices use one of three separate methods to create their books: BookSmart is a desktop client, Bookify is an online creator application, and PDF to Book provides templates for Adobe InDesign. Customers then send their ready-to-publish creations over to Blurb.

Blurb’s creation tools plug into a RESTful API interface that provides pricing, preview, preflight and plugs into e-commerce functionality. From there, the orders flow into a business layer, and then finally into Blurb’s backend system, which they call “BookServe”, that provides routing and other services.

It’s really damn exciting stuff. I consider companies like Blurb, and Lulu (see my recent post about Bob Young’s talk at the Digital Book Printing Forum) to be part of the “new printing industry”, a group in which I also include my own employer, Mimeo.com.

In my opinion, our industry would have a much more vibrant ecosystem if more companies were doing the things we are doing. We’d be able to attract better talent, and explain our place in the digital media landscape much better if more participants had the tech capabilities and the ability to explain those capabilities, like Bruce Watermann did at this event.

Lulu Founder & CEO Bob Young keynotes the Digital Book Printing Forum 2011

Most stories on the blogs and Internet news feeds I read that pay any attention at all to the publishing world are focused on eBooks. Not particularly surprising, since I mostly read tech blogs. So I was thrilled to learn that while the eBook world is growing incredibly rapidly—and the growth is accelerating—the vast majority of books are still printed on paper. Of particularly more interest to me is that the percentage of books printed “on demand”, or digitally in small (less than 10,000) quantities, is very small, but also growing very rapidly. Not as fast as eBooks, but at a good clip. So it’s a robust segment of the printing business, and I like that.

Last Tuesday, April 5^th, I attended the Digital Book Printing Forum in New York. I’d never attended this event before and one big draw for me was Bob Young, who I recognized as the CEO of RedHat (the Linux company.) Bob was previously not someone I associated with the book business. I’m very glad I attended. I really enjoyed his talk. Here is some of what I captured. Bob is also the Founder and CEO of Lulu, a company founded in 2002 that continues to pioneering in the publishing and book business. According to the company's website, more than 1.1 million creators from more than 200 countries and territories have signed up them.

It was a small room at the Marriott Marquis, probably held about 200 people. But before Bob came on to give the keynote, the room was full. I was somewhat surprised, but it wasn't a high cost event, a one-day thing, and NYC is certainly a place where the topic of book printing is still popular.

Bob didn’t have slides. He started out by telling us a very “down home” kind of founding story about Lulu, telling us about how he started the company sort of on a whim in his wife's knitting closet. He further explained to the audience that “he's not a data guy”, so he can’t be held to the predictions and pronouncements he makes in the room.

However, Bob did go out on a limb, and what he said was fascinating. First, he explained that a company called Webcom (which happened to be attending the conference) had at one time printed 1 million manuals for RedHat Linux annually. They did this for 4 years, and then in year 5 of the relationship they printed zero. Computer software manuals had completely disappeared.

Moving on to the eBook market, he basically said Kindle is dead and the sales of the iPad to date prove this, although he and Interquest said that only 5% of iPad purchasers last year were planning to use them for eBook reading. He also said that he thinks that Android will be the dominant eBook platform within 12 months. That’s quite a pronouncement, we shall see!

Then he went on to tell us about Lulu’s business, which is evolving in a fascinating way. Bob said they have about $40M revenue, and publish 20,000 new titles per month. But the really interesting thing is that he said that "self-publishing", meaning "personal self-publishing", which Lulu and a couple of others pretty much invented, is tapped out. He said this has come about due to intense competition, notably from large companies like Amazon. This may also explain why he's cheer-leading the demise of Kindle.

Bob explained that Books are “sold”, not “bought”, like vegetables at the supermarket. He said that the publisher's primary role is sales efforts. I think this may have been part of a talk Bob gives regularly, because in the New York market, I am pretty sure everyone in the room found this very obvious.

But a really interesting thing Bob said about printed books is that they are the "same" as eBooks; I.e., the printed book is another type of delivery mechanism, just like the eBook reader. Only it is paper, and presumably disposable.

Explaining further, he pointed out that there is so much free, high quality content on the internet, on virtually any topic you wish to explore, that one can never consume it all. So for books to be relevant, authors need help selling. And that is Lulu’s role, to help an author sell whether e-delivery or physical delivery is most appropriate; not competing with the author. He was very specific about this.

Bob told us that this self-publishing market is a $200 million market with annual growth of 20% in a $10 billion global publishing business. This sounds pretty good on the surface, but he says that kind of growth is too gradual to be exciting to a company like Lulu (or perhaps, their investors). Interestingly, he says young people don't care much about books at all (it’s an “old school” format for content delivery), instead reading blogs and getting free content on the internet. Data backs this up so far, with eBook reader sales much more robust to older people (>35 years of age).

So where are the opportunities? Bob says newer or more precise content, is the growth area. He gave a very good example of a niche book about photography. Man goes into a camera store where they have 50 books about taking pictures. He wants one about taking pictures of the night sky and finds that such a book doesn't exist. Why doesn’t it exist? The reason, Bob explains, is that the author says "I have 300 pages on how to take pictures of the night sky"; the publisher responds by saying, "that sounds like a short chapter in the book we want you to write". So the book the consumer desired never gets published.

In the wrap up, Bob explains this is the problem Lulu wants to solve. And Bob thinks it’s an exciting, large market, growing rapidly. The company is going to help people, with specific content and their own specific audience (that is unattainable to general interest publishers,) use Lulu’s new APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to create specific books and then market them. Lulu will be the production and distribution method. More on this as details emerge, great topic for this blog!

HP's Cloud Printing Strategy Nicely Articulated

Check out this super article by Louella Fernandez, principal analyst at QuoCirca, via IT-Director.com.

The venue was HP's recent Analyst Summit in San Francisco. The topics ranged from the ePrint web aware printers, photo products and services like SnapFish, new managed print services (MPS) initiatives and the commercial print arena. Fernandez says HP demonstrated a range of products and services and an integrated go-to-market strategy that will enable it to extend the reach for its vast portfolio.

Really fascinating stuff, according to Fernandez, HP‘s Imaging and Printing Group’s (IPG) revenues grew by 7% in 2010, and overall, IPG accounted for 20% of HP’s revenue. Supplies revenue represents 67% of overall IPG revenue, with commercial printer hardware and consumer printer hardware accounting for 22% and 11% respectively.

Fernandez calls out Ricoh and Xerox as the competitors HP most critically needs to address, but also gives them high marks in terms of "breadth and scale" that sets the company apart from the others.

Samsung and Mobile Printing

I must say that Samsung is not the first name I think of when it comes to printing. From my point of view, they have a pretty generic line of relatively low cost monochrome and color laser printers, for individual and workgroup applications. Nothing to get too worked up about in general. I do love their LCD screens, though, owning several of them.

And recently, they've made quite a splash with their Android phones and the Galaxy Tab. These have been well received, albeit not to the same degree as the iPhone and iPad, but that's at least partially because they don't have Steve Jobs whipping up the fan boys into a frenzy.

At CES (the Consumer Electronics Show), held in Las Vegas last week, Samsung introduced wireless mobile printing for Android, ala Apple's AirPrint. Apparently, this is not the first announcement of this kind for Android, with Motorola pre-announcing something called "Motoprint" at the CTIA (the cell phone industry's big confab) last October. This does not seem to be available yet, so we will stay tuned for that.

Samsung's MobilePrint app, as they call it, is available for both Android and iOS mobile devices to connect and print to Samsung wireless printers.

The press release, dated January 5th, 2011, claims that the apps will be free, and will be "built-in" to the Galaxy Tab beginning in 2011. The company claims the application will be compatible with all existing and new Samsung wireless and network printers.

I don't have much in the way of technical details, but the two things that set this announcement apart are the claimed backward compatibility (which is interesting but may also mean the actual printing functionality could be limited) and the availability of the app on both the Google and Apple platforms. Read the press release here.

iPad is... Printing (via AirPrint)

I must say I was pretty blown away when I first saw the Apple "iPad is Amazing" commercial, although since I've seen it about 1,000 times now, I find the music a little annoying. What impressed me about it initially is the fact that it starts out with an "iPad is..." premise, and the first thing it proclaims the iPad to be is, printing! I never doubted that Apple knew the lack of printing was a big gap at launch, but it's still nice to see them promoting it in a big way in a major TV commercial that has now been seen by millions and millions of people. And putting it before the other "amazing" things about the iPad, in fact, is kind of amazing. If you haven't seen the commercial, check it out on YouTube, here.

So let's talk for a moment about what makes this possible on the iPad, which is the technology called AirPrint, requiring Apple IOS 4.2 or later, and an HP ePrint-compatible printer. Today, AirPrint itself only works with HP printers that support ePrint (more on this later.)

According to HP, ePrint evolved from CloudPrint, an innovative technology created by HP Labs, the company's central research and development group. Apple AirPrint on an IOS 4.2 and later device (like an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad) finds printers on WiFi networks and then allows printing text, photos and graphics to them without the need to install drivers or special software.

iPad, iPhone and iPod touch users running IOS 4.2 and later will find a new print function within apps on their device. They can simply tap the "action" icon, then tap the "Print" button, configure printing options, then tap "Print".

A printer must be specifically ePrint enabled. Printing to a device attached to another computer is not possible with AirPrint. There are now several HP printers that support ePrint, and HP maintains a growing list of such devices. The latest one to catch my eye at this writing is the Laserjet Pro CM1415FNW, which is an amazing color laser desktop MFP, at a very attractive price, with an incredible feature set. I believe this is the first Laserjet to support ePrint, the other printers being inkjets. Get the datasheet here.