Vistaprint

Recently, a partner company we are working with at SR tried to compare us to Vistaprint in a slide deck talking about an upcoming project.  They got the comparison completely wrong. In fact, there is no comparison to made between our two companies, whatsoever. When I worked at Mimeo, people were always trying to compare us to VistaPrint, too-- also two companies that could not be more different.  The only thing the three of us have in common is that we do manufacture print, and we all do business via the Internet.  It's like comparing Yahoo, Google and AOL... there are certainly dummies out there who think those three companies are roughly the same.  But those who are students of the Internet know they could not be less similar.

I am a big fan of what Vistaprint has done. Even without the aforementioned ignorant comparisons, this is a company that is really misunderstood inside and outside the industry.  Here is an answer I just wrote for Quora. Since many of my friends and colleagues don't "do Quora" (yet), I thought I'd push it over here as well. It's about one of the differentiating factors that Vistaprint possesses.  Though actually, both SR and Mimeo have great power in this area, albeit serving different markets and using different techniques and technologies.

Is there anything unique about Vistaprint's actual printing process that enables it to print more efficiently than others?

There are several things that make them unique.  

The printed products they produce are constrained in shape, size, material and graphic layout.  They offer these discrete products only via the web.  Most printers, in contrast, attempt to print virtually any shape and size. 

The reason they can do this, unlike other printers is because they have a laser-like focus on their target market.  They test when they add new products, and they know people will buy them. So they can invest in the automation to produce those products.

Their equipment is deployed and used in a standardized way across their manufacturing footprint, and they've automated processes to the point where all the "manual" tasks are cleverly prescribed and performed by the minimum number of humans. For example, when producing business cards, the person who loads paper onto the press is also the person pulls the trigger on the imaging of the next set of printing plates for the press.

The automation results in few touches.  They run multiple customers jobs together, and then cut and sort them, and send them down conveyor belts to a logistics area where they will await other order items, or simply address them and send them to the trucks waiting to send them on their way to the customer. Practically no one in the printing industry has this level of automation across jobs.  Only elite printing companies have this kind of automation for single jobs, for single customers.

They also have some patents.

So, in summary, the answer is a resounding yes.

Upcoming: Automation Solutions Network in Minneapolis

The most recent meeting of the Printing Industries of America's Automation Solutions Network (ASN) was held this past February in Memphis and featured a tour of Mimeo, and after that, a once-in-a-lifetime late night tour of the Fedex Global Superhub, to watch "the sort"-- when all the packages get unloaded, sorted and loaded onto new planes and then start flying out. For printing nerds, Mimeo was probably the more fun part of the visit, but no one could leave the Fedex experience without being absolutely astounded!

ASN is a great industry user group.  It's a unique venue by virtue of the the presentations and tours, and just as important in my book, it's an unparalleled networking event for technical people involved in factory automation and integration projects. The group welcomes a wide range of users of JDF-enabled systems as well as the suppliers of those systems. The Automation Solutions Network steering committee includes printers who have implemented successful automated workflow systems or are in the process of doing so.  There's really nothing better than talking with a peer and discovering they have the same issues you have-- or conversely, they've already solved that problem and are willing to share the solution.

The next ASN meeting will be held in Minneapolis on September 18th and 19th, 2012. There are two very special parts of the meeting agenda that are great reasons for anyone involved in print technology to attend.

First, on September 18th, there will be a tour hosted by Japs-Olson. This legendary firm was founded in 1907,  and has steadily grown to be the worldwide leader in direct mail services and commercial printing they are today, employing more than 700 people in a facility that occupies more than 500,000 square feet operating 24/7.  The company serves global customers managing campaigns from a few thousand pieces to tens of millions. The company has long been a leader in creating and implementing automation applications to support their continuously evolving business.

Second, my fellow Dscoop Operations committee member Bill Wieners, president of Digital Lizard, will give a talk about his company's use of automation.If you've never heard Bill speak, I  strongly encourage you to sign up for this event.  Bill and I did a joint presentation to a full house at Dscoop7, the HP Graphics Arts Users Group meeting, this past March in Washington, DC. As Bill and I were planning our talk, it was startling clear how similar our approaches to automation are.  Even though Digital Lizard is smaller than Mimeo, we share many of the same challenges and have approached solving those problems similarly.But different! For me, there will always be more to understand about what Bill has done, and what's he's planning on doing next. And he's an engaging speaker.

Located in a remote corner of Idaho, Digital Lizard’s experience should make every company take notice. Their Web2Print software has allowed them to scale from 175 orders to over 400 orders per day. Automated workflows for production and back end business tasks have eliminated and reduced labor and streamlined processes. The company has 14 Indigos, and a variety of other devices and finishing equipment, but a surprising low headcount.  The company was recently purchased by venerable Creel Printing in Las Vegas.

There are only 40 spots available for the meeting.  I'm going to take one of them.  Sign up now!

How Automation Benefits Mimeo

Automation is critically important to what we do at Mimeo, and touches every aspect of a job—even when there are manual processes involved in producing parts of it.  The automation begins with the customer on our web site, and extends to the delivery of their job.

Automation delivers many features and benefits to them and to us.  Every document we produce originates as an order placed on our website. The customer brings their content and uses our interface to tell us how they want their print product produced— organizing the content, telling us what paper and binding they want, specifying finishing options like folding or covers.  As they create their piece on the screen, we show them exactly what it will look like, and provide them with their price in real time. 

Automation means the website can look at the choices they are making, and determine when we can produce the job, so we can tell them during the process “Submit this order by 10pm Eastern for delivery as early as 8:30AM tomorrow”, or conversely telling them that a particularly option they’ve chosen might take us an extra few hours to produce, so will not be able to be delivered until the next day.

When the order is placed, we already know how much it will cost to produce, and how much we’re selling it for.  We’ve often already collected the money.  The best part is: it automatically goes into production (although some jobs can be automatically routed to preflight or prepress, if necessary or desirable). In many cases, a job could literally appear on the workstation of a press operator seconds after the customer clicks. People throughout the organization have visibility of the job’s status at all times. Once printing is complete, the job moves through the plant for finishing, then on to shipping. 

Once the job is finished and shipped, a number of different groups throughout the company take advantage of the data we’ve collected about the job and our performance to make decisions and continuously improve our products and operations.

drupa every 4 years, but always once in a lifetime

I returned from spending a week in Germany at the every-four-years drupa trade printing and paper trade fair.  I was there with HP and  Dscoop. We had more than 1,000 Dscoop members present at the fair. HP played an amazing host and kept us busy with events and tours throughout the week.  They were showcasing several new presses including their new B2 presses, the 10,000 20,000 and 30,000, to which our group had been introduced in March at the Dscoop7 conference in Washington, DC (see previous post here.)

Here's a quick video from Whatheythink.com that editor Cary Sherburne and I shot while I was at the show.

This show always surprises, and this time around was no exception. I saw a tremendous amount of exciting technology, and had a lot of really great conversations with industry colleagues.  I am hoping to take a few minutes next week to catalog some of what I brought back from the show next week.

HP Graphic Arts Users Group, Dscoop

I just returned from Dscoop7 in Washington, DC. This was the 7th annual face-to-face meeting of the Digital Solutions Cooperative, founded in 2005. Dscoop is the independent global community of graphic arts business owners and technical professionals who use HP Indigo and Scitex equipment and related solutions. Dscoop7 had over 2,000 attendees and more than 150 sessions. More than 90 vendors showcased their solutions in addition to HP, and we also had a pre-conference program for graphic designers this year called DSee, which was wildly successful.

I'm proud to say that the Operations Committee (of which I am the incoming chairman) was responsible for a track of 10 sessions over 2 days, all of which were delivered to full house crowds! Kudos to Mike Blanco (with GPA), our outgoing chairman who led our group into the conference and Amy Biedenharn at Dscoop HQ, who facilities our every move.

I put together two sessions for this year's event. My first session was a "201-level" panel discussion called Fine Tuning Web-To-Print: Implementation and Operation. We realized going into the conference that a lot of technical and operations folks already know the basics of W2P, because these things are becoming part of how we all do business. A lot of companies now run more than one system or are in their second or third implementation.

So we put together a panel of experts to discuss the challenges and opportunities and talk about the nuts and bolts of such topics as storefronts, cross-media capabilities, e-commerce, workflow and business system integration, variable data printing and customization online, hosting decisions and more.

I wanted to have representatives of all the great Web-To-Print solutions present at the event. Logistically-speaking, it's awfully hard these days to get technical people from printing companies to commit to speaking at events. Thanks to Leslie Wengenroth at PageFlex, the well known VDP and storefront vendor, we got Paul O'Brien, CTO of Acculink, a leading-edge printer in Greenville, NC to join us. I managed to round up a nice cadre of technical people from most of the solutions present at Dscoop7: Alex Boissezon from Pixfizz; Chris Young from XMPie, a Xerox company; Greg Salzman- CEO of Aleyant Systems; Steven Enstad- one of the founders of PageDNA; and Becky Schick from HiFlex, now an HP company as a result of their recent acquisition.

There was a time in the not too distant past when a panel like this would have seen the vendors bickering over small points and vying for the microphone to get the last word in. This panel was nothing like that, in fact there was much agreement on many points, little contention. These companies all have powerful solutions: Paul and I as the users on the panel could easily see the value in each of their products and technologies. In the recent past, software vendors had more of the approach that the marketplace was a zero sum game, and to win you had to squash the competition. This isn't the case any longer. Today, you must pick and choose among solutions that fit your target customer and market, and they must work together. That was the overriding message of the session. I had 3 pages of "seed" questions I put together in advance with the help of the panel. I only made it through a handful. We had fantastic audience interaction, many great topics arose. The session could have continued for the entire afternoon if the time had been available!

The second session I presented was called Printing is Easy, Everything Else is Hard (Workflow Automation), and was somewhere in between introductory and 201 level. I partnered with Bill Weiners from Digital Lizard, who is a kindred spirit and well known in the group. Digital Lizard is owned by venerable Las Vegas offset printer Creel, and while smaller than Mimeo, Digital Lizard is very advanced from a technology standpoint-- and they own almost as many Indigo presses as we do! Like Mimeo, they produce both documents on demand as well as photo products.

The premise behind the session was that when you have powerful equipment on your floor, printing is the easy part. The hard part is getting the work from the customer onto the press, tracking it throughout the steps in your operation, getting it finished and out the door, finally delivered and billed. The solution for many of these challenges lies with advanced workflow automation.

Bill and I presented case studies of the way we do things at our respective companies. We talked about key building blocks for implementing solutions to help our attendees streamline their operation, while improving efficiency, quality and profitability. This session was in the last time slot of the event on a Saturday afternoon, and I am happy to report that the room was completely full. Bill and I can't take full credit for the topic or the speakers being such an exciting draw-- it's just as much a product of the fact that the Dscoop audience is definitely the best and brightest, and most dedicated, group of printers in the industry!

There were many, many other highlights at the the event. Notable among these, the introduction of new HP Indigo Presses, the Indigo 10000, Indigo 20000 and Indigo 30000 the "biggest" among them, in more ways than one-- these new machines can print in the popular 29" or B2 sizes, and applications include commercial printing, labeling and packaging. There were many other announcements, including software upgrades and new workflow solutions. HiFlex was highlighted in a couple of sessions, and in the solutions showcase. I will talk more about the software aspects in an upcoming post.

Keynote marketer Sally Hogshead provided an exciting and fun kickstart to the event. It's the first time I've seen a Keynote presenter at an industry conference do a shot on stage! HP Indigo GM Alon Bar-Shany, presented a fantastic "state of the industry" report, with terrific insight. Bar-Shany paints a very good picture for adopters of the technology, and HP Indigo as an organization is well positioned to help printers capitalize on the opportunities ahead. Along with all the data, Alon pointed out that Dscoop7 began on March 22nd, which was the 10th anniversary of HP's acquisition of Indigo. Resting on the laurels of the past 10 years is not in the cards, though, as the company charges forward!

Even though Dscoop7 has just ended, I'm already looking forward to Dscoop8 next February in Dallas, Texas!

(photo credit Bryan Yeager, Associate Director, Infotrends, from pre-Drupa festivities at HP in Israel the week prior to Dscoop7.)

HP Web Print Roadshow Hits Hong Kong

Reuters and several other news agencies are covering the arrival of the HP Cloud Printing/Web Print roadshow in Hong Kong. I found a good interview with VJ by Yun-Hee Kim on the Wall Street Journal Blogs (read it here)and Reuters reported that HP plans an App Store focused on printing apps. The only thing I would take issue with is the characterization in the WSJ piece about this initiative being a "gamble" for HP, maybe it's just a language thing but I would say that these printers and even more important the ecosystem HP is creating, are a sure thing.

HP APP STORE (Clip from Reuters, their whole Reuters piece can be found here).

Like peers Nokia and Apple, Palo Alto- headquartered HP will launch its own version of an app store designed to work with its printers, enabling customers to print directly from the app.

The company will take 30 percent of the revenue gained from the store, with 70 percent going to the software developer.

"If we try to develop all the software from the U.S., it's going to take years," said Joshi, who has been with HP since 1980. "Because we are making it open, there'll be some smart young kid in college who'll figure out what is the best thing for printers."

PRINT IS GREEN!

Joshi also rubbished talk that the printer was on its way out as more people begin depending on computers for their communication and learning needs, and amid concern that increased use of paper was causing deforestation.

"Do you think this computer is more green than that?" he said, as he waved a piece of paper. "It is not. People are missing the whole point. This (paper) is more green than anything else."

-- End Reuters clip

I can tell you that my company, Mimeo, is very likely to put some exciting applications into that HP App Store over the next year.

Mimeo and SlideRocket: Printing In The Cloud

A great example of Rich Internet Printing is the collaboration between my company, Mimeo.com, and SlideRocket. In this case, our two companies had to work together to invent a way that Sliderocket presentations could be professionally printed by Mimeo. SlideRocket is part of this new generation of RIAs. It is a Web 2.0 online presentation application that allows users to produce slideshows that have some advantages over creating presentations in desktop applications like Microsoft PowerPoint. SlideRocket runs in a web browser, instead of requiring the installation of software on your computer. It features collaboration tools that let users share slides and other assets (like graphics and movies) between presentations. Because the application is Internet-based, these users can be geographically dispersed and still share nicely. This collaboration, and user-generated content sharing, is what makes SlideRocket a unique and powerful Web 2.0 application. The company recently announced that Chuck Dietrich, former VP GM at Salesforce.com, joined the company as CEO, see the TechCrunch article here.

The SlideRocket relationship with Mimeo involved the use of the MimeoConnect SOAP API technology. This is a set of Web Services that let partners submit files, define product intent, get quotes and proofs, and submit orders, recipient addresses, shipping methods and payments. This technology solves the problem of delivering content files and placing orders; primarily the communication between our two applications in the cloud (i.e., cloud to cloud).

With that connectivity in hand, we then needed to solve how SlideRocket would take their rich content (screen-based Flash presentations) and turn it into PDF files to send to Mimeo (this was a Mimeo requirement, due to our automated PDF-based production workflow). Finally, we needed to create a way to let the non-technical SlideRocket user to specify the product intent to communicate to Mimeo for manufacturing.

To solve the former problem, SlideRocket created a server-based application that “printed” the “slide deck” to a PDF file. To solve the latter problem, Mimeo created a special interface designed to reside within the SlideRocket Flash application. When the user chooses “Print” from the SlideRocket menu, they can either choose to print on their local printer, or print “high quality with finishing options” via Mimeo.

The interface we built incorporates a subset of Mimeo’s new photo-realistic document viewer. We call it MimeoProof, because it is about as close as one can get to holding a print product in their hands by viewing it as an image on the screen. The Sliderocket version lets the user see their presentation, visually depicting paper stocks, covers and binding choices. This is an important part of helping the non-technical user specify product intent, it gives them the confidence they need to proceed with the order.

Once the user places their order on the SlideRocket site, e-commerce and print-specific transactions flow: we are sent a PDF file containing the slides, and an XML transaction containing the order information (desired quantity of books, destination, shipping method, etc.) The next day, or at some point in the near future depending on the user’s choice, a beautiful bound version of the Sliderocket slides shows up on the user’s doorstep in whatever quantity they specified.