Berg Cloud's adorable Little Printer poised to ship!

Late last year I wrote here about a company called Berg Cloud, developing a really fun little intelligent printer, appropriately named "Little Printer".

Well, yesterday I got a note saying they are about the ship the product. Here's the announcement verbatim:

"It’s been an amazing few months working on Little Printer. Since we made the announcement last November, Little Printer has received loads of attention. The introductory video received half a million views in the first five days alone. Over 60,000 of you signed up to hear news, and we’re very happy to be able to bring you some.

For eight months we've been getting a mirror finish on the plastic, folding steel, fixing radio interference bugs (there are some war stories there), designing characters, creating beautiful packaging, making the best possible API for developers, getting set up with credit cards... and today, finally, we're manufacturing." Which means:

Little Printer can now be pre-ordered from the BERG Cloud shop!

Congratulations to Berg Cloud and I wish them all the best.  I didn't place a pre-order, so I guess I'll have to get in line now!

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.

The Era of the Hard Drive in the Sky has Begun!

Yesterday, Google announced Google Drive, a cloud storage system that is among the most anticipated features of any software system, ever. Industry analysts, pundits and gadflies have been predicting the eventuality of this capability for years. In it's initial launch incarnation, Google drive is simple to install and easy to use, and as far as I'm concerned, totally lives up to the expectations built-up around it! Out of the gate, anyone who signs up gets 5GB of online storage for free. Upgrade to 20gb, 100gb or even a terabyte for very affordable incremental fees. It makes storing files to the cloud and syncing them among multiple devices seamless (PCs, Macintosh and Android Smartphones today, Apple iOS and other OS/devices later). Google Drive acts just like another drive on Windows or the Mac. You can copy or move files to it, and even create new files and folders in it. I installed it on my Macintosh first, and when I logged in, I just saw all my Google Docs files in a native OS window on my MacBook Air. It could not have been simpler.

The timing of the Google announcement may have been planned to steal the thunder of a Microsoft announcement only two days earlier-- of a similar solution, the new version of SkyDrive, which gives MSFT a competitive offering in the cloud storage arena. Notable in the announcement are new storage applications, new support for devices running Mac OS X Lion and iOS, as well as support for Windows phones. SkyDrive automatically synchronizes the devices to which it is connected. Files and folders are organized in SkyDrive in the same manner to which we've all become accustomed on our local devices.

While Google and Microsoft are well-known as rivals to one another, they are both equally wary of startups who might come along and eat their lunch. In this case, those companies are Dropbox and to a lesser extent Box (formerly box.net). Dropbox was founded in 2007, and has a good head start on both of the (in the case of MSFT relatively) new competitors. Dropbox has more than 25 million people using the service, which works on Windows, Mac and Linux computers, as well as with mobile apps on iPhone, Android and Blackberry. Drew Houston, Dropbox's Co-Founder and CEO, upon hearing the announcement of Google Drive, tweeted, "In other news, @Dropbox is launching a search engine." I'm not sure if this response is hubris or real fear. Prior to the announcement, Dropbox's private company valuation was speculated to be about $4 Billion. It remains to be seen if it can maintain that sky high valuation in light of the fact that two of the biggest tech companies in the world just came out with respective "features" that come close to duplicating Dropbox's entire business. That is sort of the key: for MSFT and Google, this is a feature among many thousands of other features, not the whole company or even the most important part. On the flip side, though, Dropbox has been expecting this kind of competition for a long, long time. Now its here and it is formidable. For example, Google Drive's pricing is roughly 1/4 of Dropbox's pricing today. That could dramatically change the game, in terms of acquisition of customers for Google, and loss of revenue for Dropbox. Furthermore, the integration between Google Drive and Google Apps, though a bit minimalistic today, is already very useful for companies like my own who have been using Google Apps almost exclusively for the last couple of years.

For consumers of this technology, it's going to be exciting to watch this competition between industry giants. In addition to simple storage and backup in the cloud, these services offer great collaboration and sharing possibilities-- both intracompany and between companies. It's hard to believe that in this day and age high-tech companies would still be using technologies like FTP to share files, but they are. Replacing such primitive services with these new technologies is good for everyone-- the creator, the user, the printer, the IT guys, everyone. With the large files we consume daily in the graphic arts industry, these services offer a really affordable and easy to use alternative to old fashioned, error-prone methods that our customers don't want to understand and shouldn't have to!

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.)

64th TAGA Annual Technical Conference

It’s hard to say “there’s something for everything” about the TAGA Annual Technical Conference, the global graphics arts industries’ most elite technical conference. It’s specifically NOT for everyone—unless you are an academic, engineer, scientist, or technical practitioner of printing. In which case you will certainly find things that you need to know being discussed at this year’s 64th annual event, to be held in Jacksonville, Florida, on March 18-21. If you are a CEO, COO or Owner of a printing company or industry equipment or software manufacturer, I would strongly advise that you send a couple of your key technical people. I’ll explain why.

My personal involvement in the industry is in the creation of software for printing applications, and there are always a few great talks on this topic. But for me, what I find incredibly invigorating about TAGA is the fact that there are so many topics discussed that I am not directly engaged in as a professional. These topics are as far ranging as ink, paper, mechanical engineering, chemistry, physics, photography, light—but not limited to these. In fact, there are almost no limits. The result for me has been broadened horizons—I learn what I don’t know, and approach problems I face in my work with a new perspective.

The keynotes this year include some of the most interesting leaders from some of the most exciting companies in the graphic communications business today. Starting with Marc Olin of EFI, who has been travelling the world buying up printing-related software companies while other former industry leaders are suffering, to Mike Puyot from Memjet, a company which is finally shipping product via OEMs and is poised to dramatically change everyone’s business, after existing as a virtual “urban legend” for almost 10 years! These are followed by the most complete, robust technical program available this year at any conference in the industry.

One of the coolest things about TAGA is the questions from the audience after the presentations. As you can imagine with a group of this make up, there are many opinions and TAGA encourages an intellectually charged environment. There are no assumptions, and this is not a love-in where PR rules-- people are often challenged on the statements they make from the dais. It’s exciting!

Another really important aspect of the event is the student chapter participation, and the annual student competitions. To the printing company owner: here is the most important reason for you to send you top technical stakeholder or two to TAGA: recruiting. Plug your company into the top printing schools in the WORLD—Cal Poly SLO, Clemson, RIT, Western Michigan, as well as Ryerson in Canada, and leading global schools Grenoble Institute of Technology in France, and Linköping University in Sweden, to name just a few. They will be sending teams of their best students (usually Juniors and Seniors, who will soon be looking for a career position) to compete for awards in our annual technical competitions.

The program includes talks from some of the recipients of the Printing Industries of America’s prestigious Intertech Awards, an opportunity to learn about some of the industry’s latest and most advanced, game-changing commercial product developments.

Beyond all the important content, there is the “real world” social platform as well-- the three day conference is loaded with great networking opportunities, including luncheons, the association’s annual business meeting, and a gala awards banquet. TAGA’s annual event has been a “can’t miss” for the industry’s tech community for a long time, and I’d encourage anyone who hasn’t attended in the past to make it a new annual tradition. There is still time to register and attend, visit TAGA's Web Site.