Print 2.0 Blog by Patrick Scaglia

» Interesting Products of 2007

It’s January 2008, a good time to look back at 2007! What did catch my eye?

      

This is my list: OLPC’s XO, Apple iPhone, Amazon’s Kindle and HP’s Kitchen Kiosk (A826). I have some personal experience using each of them. Yes, this is my hand next to the Kindle, to give you a sense of size. I found most people have some pre-conceived idea about how big or small it must be. Much has been written about these since their introduction, my intent isn’t to give you yet another review. Instead, I want to share why I find them “interesting”: they all have one thing in common: they redefined our expectations.

» Innovation at HP

In case you might have missed it, I want to point to an excellent Business Week article on HP’s Cultural Revolution.   I was interviewed, along with others, by Jana Reena, the Innovation Editor for Business Week for this article. Jana did a remarkably thorough job of discovering how innovation at HP was working now. Jana interviewed a lot of HPers and spent a lot of time with us.

One of the themes she develops in the article: “innovation by absorption” (referring to the acquisition of small or early stage companies) is certainly becoming a tool for many companies. From my point of view, it is a critical tool: Innovation in the Web Age is a tight coupling between business model innovation and technology innovation. This means you have to learn to think differently about how you do business and which technology to invent. It is definitely a cultural transformation. To learn it, you have to see it happen by living next to someone doing it every day. Incorporating a team with that experience is a way to achieve that learning.

We have seen some early success with this in the deployment of our Print 2.0 strategy. But of course, it is a long road. . . may be all the way to the North Pole…

Happy Holidays!

» John Battelle’s conversation with HP's Vyomesh Joshi

John posted the interviews from last week’s Web 2.0 story. I love John’s introduction of VJ: “I had never seen a guy so excited about printing!”. As John pointed out, printing is one of the edges of the web. VJ covers a lot of ground in this chat. But predictably, he never answered John’s question about what Yahoo should do.

One of his insightful comments was that on the web, you need to have a very solid business model as a foundation.

John noted that Snapfish is now approximately the size of Facebook (45 million user), something to think about. As VJ commented “we don’t talk about it”. John also noted VJ was talking as a media company: is there an advertising opportunity?

I want to come back to some of the points in a follow up blog. In the meanwhile, it’s worth watching. Here is VJ’s interview . Remember to select the conversation on the right side navigation bar. It does not point to the right conversation by default.

» Print 2.0, a non Executive view

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

Enjoy!

» Kachayu.com

You may wonder, what’s this about?

Here is a hint: Kacha is the sound a camera shutter makes, in Chinese. Yu is the word for fish.

With kachayu.com, HP has expanded the Snapfish network to China. It’s also available in 19 other countries.

I have a great deal of curiosity about this one. The market for digital photo in China is largely driven by camera phones. There are 220 million children in primary and secondary schools.

It’s exciting !

» Snapshot-less photography

Another invited post. This post is from Phil McCoog, Chief Technologist for HP’s Digital Photography business. There are a lot of touch points for HP in Digital Photography: online services, retail photo solutions, home and professional printers, cameras. Phil’s role is to understand the integration of these assets. In my job, I do meet a lot of interesting people. When I get an insightful answer to a simple question it makes me think. The simple question I asked Phil was “what does Digital Photography mean to you now?” Phil’s answer was that the explosive growth and future of photography is in the combination of personal, community, and professional content that is professionally fulfilled. For Phil, the photography part of “digital photography” is where change is happening now. It’s a new creative medium, not just a way to capture a snapshot. I can see that. After all, YouTube did not end up being the place we store traditional home videos. Instead, it became a new publishing and expression medium. Could the same happen to photography?

I said, interesting, but this answer needs more explanation. I decided to share it with you here.

» Antonio Rodriguez: "My impressions of Print 2.0"

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

Here it is:

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

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

» Web applications, are they for real?

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

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

» On iPhone

» VJ's "Uncut" Video

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

Enjoy!

» When 2% Leads to a Major Industry Shift

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

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

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

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

For a blog, it can work like this:


get 4 choices for a print output:


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




Print is one thing, what about publishing?

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

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

» Print is Exciting Again !

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

» Riding a New Wave

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

» Welcome to my Print 2.0 blog !

It’s an interesting name. Do I mean “2.0” like in… “Web 2.0”? But what does print have to do with the Web you might ask?

As the CTO of the Imaging & Printing Group of HP (IPG), I have had first hand experience with this question, both asking it and trying to answer it. We started this journey a couple years ago, experimented, invested, debated and here we are, furthering our “Print 2.0” vision in New York City on August 28.

» Cloudprint

Printing from the Cloud?

If you are like me, the computer you carry around is a laptop. Increasingly I find that all I carry is my phone. Maybe you have an iPhone. The phone is often where I receive my mail, most of the time with some document attached. Or maybe you just found an interesting blog that you wish to read or a nice satellite photo. If only you could print it now. Wouldn’t it be easier to see? and carry? Paper is light. But you might be anywhere. Where is the printer . . . ?

» Print 2.0: Unlocking the POWER OF PRINT