TMN 30 October 2001

Graphic Industry News with a Piquant Point of View

This is our 142nd issue, thanks for reading it!

TMN is an online newsletter 'dedicated to individuals in the printing and graphic arts industry for the purpose of their self development, their companies success and the enhancement of the printing and graphic arts industry in society.  It does this through education, information and research.' *

* From the Mission Statement of the IAPHC

Industry News

Totalling Up the Terror

We found this full page ad on the back cover of Southwest Graphics magazine in its September/October edition:

"The stories of our demise are greatly exaggerated.  One Source Digital Solutions was the victim of an armed robbery on July 16th, 2001.  Most of our prepress equipment was taken, including our scanner, color printers, supplies and etc.  They even tried to take our newest Indigo Press.

What they didn't take was our spirit, our drive or our integrity.  The stolen and damaged equipment has been replaced with comparable or better equipment and we're up to speed.....Our clients never wavered, and we took care of all their needs and we did not turn away a single job.  Incredible.  Thanks, to all of you, for your support."

One Source Digital Solutions in Phoenix is the home of long time IAPHC member Mike Chiricuzio.  The announcement stunned us.  A digital print shop victimized by an armed robbery?  Who would have thought it possible?

Which means all printers everywhere need to be assessing the likely increased costs of doing business which will arise from insurance rate hikes and other impacts of the events of September 11.

We wish Mike and his fellow workers in Phoenix the very best, and we offer one experts view that the attacks of September 11 may be an unanticipated watershed for the printing industry:

"This year will always give us a sad, sinking feeling as we think about the loss of thousands at the World Trade Center.....but it will also be the year that we look back upon as the year that the role of print publishing changed.  Most won't realize the importance of 2001 on graphic communications until more time passes.

I believe the attacks will work to accelerate acceptance and use of electronic communications and electronic publishing.  The acceptance was already growing.  Now it is assured."

From the speech delivered by Dr. Joseph Webb, at the Chairman's Reception for students and faculty of the New York University Center for Graphic Communications Management and Technology, on 15 October, 2001.

The mantra is:  The Network, The Network, The Network

1) Network Publishing is key

We begin with a definition we noted in the 30 April 2001 issue of TMN:  "Network Publishing:  Making visually rich, personalized content, reliably available anytime, anywhere, on any device."  From the International Prepress Association.

Dr. Webb exhorts us to recognize that electronic publishing is here to stay.

Network Publishing is a strategy for printers who agree with Dr. Webb that the role of print publishing has been changed by the Internet and by the terror attacks.  By becoming part of the network, printers can survive and even thrive.

2) The Kinko's lesson

Past IAPHC International President Jim Dick relocated to Arizona recently.  He sent us an e-mail on 22 October:

"Just had to write you about this.

In one of your seminars in Lansing, Michigan a few years ago (1993) you said to watch out for Kinko's.  That with all the Kinko's put up around the universities, once the college kids got into business their bosses would tell them to go get 500 copies made of a given job and they would gravitate to Kinko's by force of habit.

In an article in the Tucson Citizen by Rhonda Abrams titled:  "Make the most of your business cards as marketing device" she writes:  "How you print your cards influences many other decisions because it affects how many versions of your card you can afford and whether you'll use color."

She continues:  "I have a strong opinion about this -- Use Kinko's or another good copy shop.  It's much faster and much cheaper for both small quantities and four color cards than a commercial printer, and it gives you the ability to produce different versions of your card or create cards specifically for particular events.  Ask your graphic designer (or the designer at Kinko's) to create a '10-up' layout for business cards with crop marks and give you the disk."

The little vignette may seem insignificant but it underscores two aspects of the power of the network. 

The Kinko's network of locations is not only seemingly omnipresent, it has achieved brand awareness with an important constituency -- your future customers; moreover, what can be done (printed) in one location (node) on the Kinko's network can be replicated by any other node, or so it appears to the unwashed proletariat of college aged future customers.

We have long posited that much as the days of instant printing have returned with an unwanted vengeance to bedevil even the largest commercial printers; so too, the possibility of networks of printers based anywhere, capable of any job, any time, in any language, in any media, seems more real every day.  Perhaps the little chain print shops or Kinko's styled chains have something to teach us about the network

Indeed, the late October announcements from Electronics for Imaging and from Hewlett Packard seem to foretell the network ascendant.

But before we look at those perhaps seminal developments, let's note too that it isn't only Rhonda Abrams taking potshots at commercial printers for being customer unfriendly.

3) Love thy customers

Consider this blurb from Spectrum newsletter, published in New York City by a firm specializing in multi-language communications:

"Under the newly revised SWOP (Specifications for Web Offset Printing) standards, many publications and printers will no longer accept ads or other files in native applications such as Quark XPress or Adobe PageMaker, nor traditional film and matchprints.

Spectrum now has the proprietary software and the know-how required to convert your Mac composite CMYK files into the SWOP preferred TIFF/IT-P1 format in any of the hundreds of languages in which we work...."

The article is unassailably technically accurate, except that we know scads of printers who would be tickled pink if they could, just once, before they go to the big pressroom in the sky, get to deal with blessed film and matchprints instead of those pesky files on disks!

Our point is simply that commercial printing is getting a rap sheet as being tough to deal with.

The network is needed.

EFI and HP to the rescue?

1) The Law Of Networks

Our friends at the Digital Print Initiative (PODi) Doug Johnston and Dave deBronkhart published a tightly reasoned article called "Digital Print is coming of Age" in a recent issue of Printing and Converting Decisions International.  They refer to a concept we have mentioned before in TMN, the immutable and perhaps too often inscrutable theorem known as "The Law of Networks."

They write:  "The law of Networks -- as more devices utilise any new technology, the value of each connected device quickly increases.  (The first fax machine was worth nothing, the second increased the value of both; widespread adoption gave great utility to each machine.)"

Now consider, gentle reader, substituting the phrase 'printing plant' for the word device in the definition of the law of networks and allow your mind to wander and to wonder as you contemplate the further argument that every additional node on a network magnifies the value of the network by a factor of ten.

2) EFI calls: PrintMe!

On 22 October, Electronics for Imaging debuted PrintMe Networks, the first Internet printing solution that enables remote printing without requiring print drivers, cables or complex setups.

The concept according to an article in the online edition of the Wall Street Journal works as follows:

PrintMe will assign a network address to printers in offices, print shops and other service providers.  (Imagine a network address to be the equivalent of your e-mail address or the URL address of your favorite website.)

A user of the PrintMe network could then e-mail documents she needed printed (wherever, whenever) to the PrintMe network address closest to her then physical location.  She might be traveling in Eugene, Oregon and need to print a document.
PrintMe allows her to do so.  She can send the document from her laptop or even her cell phone or pager.

The user, our traveler in Oregon for example, would not be charged for the service, but would pay per page fees to the print shop in Eugene that printed her document(s).

Reportedly, EFI plans to charge a fee of $20 to $35 dollars per month to companies or shops that use EFI software to connect to the PrintMe network, and that EFI may also desire to share in the print revenue generated by PrintMe.

Among the beta test sites for PrintMe are locations in the Sir Speedy chain; The Printing House chain with some 60 locations across Canada; Yahoo!; The Troy Group (provides MICR checks) and others.

Among the partners in the rollout of the new technology are Adobe Systems and Xerox and Research in Motion (the maker of the Blackberry wireless device.)

Adobe's CEO Bruce Chizen was quoted:  "For more than a decade, Adobe and EFI have shared a common vision of bringing high performance, color accuracy and ease of use to the print world.  This powerful and convenient solution brings the Network Publishing
vision to the millions of Adobe users around the world."

In the vision of Adobe Systems, Network Publishing includes creating, managing and delivering visually rich, reliable content using Web, ePaper, print, video, wireless and broadband applications.  Which is, of course, remarkably close to the definition of Network Publishing we quoted earlier courtesy of the International Prepress Association.

In the current Mac & Micro Warehouse catalog we found the following vision statement authored by Adobe Systems: 

"Network Publishing is not a specific technology, but a vision for how technologies from various creation, content, management and delivery providers will work together to deliver information to consumers, anywhere, any time, on any device.

With the explosion of e-commerce, a global increase in bandwidth, industry wide Web standards and more devices on the market, Network Publishing will drive new business models and entirely new applications for businesses to reach and engage customers more easily and cost efficiently."

And we remind our readers again of the words of publishing eminence grise Thad MacIlroy who told a Toronto audience in February of 2001 that two advances will alter the printing landscape in the coming years.  The first is e-books and the second is called Network Publishing.

3) Why should you connect to Network Publishing?

Is there any value to becoming part of the network?

Remember that experts in the field of enterprise printing have long argued that control of the disk assures control of the customer.

If you can provide remote printing capabilities to your clients (and perhaps clients of their clients) via the PrintMe Networks, you may have unlocked another means to gain control of the disk.

If you are part of a network, ala Kinko's, or Sir Speedy, or The Printing House in Canada, then you leverage that connection, in perhaps an exponential manner, as a client who needs a document printed remotely may then need hundreds of more copies for a local speech, a trade show or whatever.

And it isn't just small shops that are becoming part of networks.  The collections of commercial printing plants being acquired by Consolidated Graphics and Mail-Well Inc. and others see the potential of the network as well.  Visit the Consolidated Graphics website to learn more about CGXmedia and COIN for example. (http://www.consolidatedgraphics.com/)

This is hot stuff, and is not being missed by other players, albeit the language may be slightly different.

CreoScitex reported great interest at Print '01 in the CreoScitex Networked Graphic Production vision, which involves an integrated production environment that expands the range of conventional prepress workflow from the creative desktop to the delivery of the finished product.

4) Can Printing be a Real-Time Enterprise?

The highest evolution of the Networked printer may yet be in the offing.

As Dr. Joe Webb urged at Print 01, "Like it or not the Internet is having a huge impact on print."

The intriguing aspect however may be adapting or even grafting lessons from enterprise printing onto the concept of a real time enterprise.

Ray Lane was president and COO of Oracle Corporation.  A year ago September, he resigned to join the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.  He said:  "After I left Oracle I started to think about the Internet from a broader perspective.
Out of that thinking came my vision of the 'real time enterprise.'  That's a fancy tag line for a company that uses Internet technology to drive out manual business processes, to eliminate guesswork, and to reduce costs.

The key feature of a real time enterprise is spontaneous transaction flow.  In most businesses today, an event like a customer order spawns thousands of transactions that go through a series of vertically organized departments.  As a result, most companies have a highly fragmented view of their customers.  A real-time enterprise addresses that problem.

The Internet is still the most important business platform of the past century.  Nothing rivals the net when it comes to reinventing business processes.  Size begets complexity and complexity loses.  But the Internet can enable big companies to behave like the small, homespun companies they once were."

At the tony Agenda 2002 tech conference held in Scottsdale, Arizona in mid-October, Vinod Khosla of Kleiner Perkins predicted that the only companies destined to survive are real time enterprises.  In his view, these are firms in which information and action are immediately known throughout the corporation.  For example: when components are delivered, the information systems make sure that anyone who needs to know -- such as finance, manufacturing, sales and marketing, even the customer -- knows.  Khosla says that to achieve real time success, firms will need to spend heavily on information technologies (IT), perhaps as much as 10% of sales.

Long time readers of TMN know of our belief that the day has arrived for the Director of IT to take her place at the table with the VP of Sales and the VP of Production in any printing business of size.  Especially one aiming to become a real time enterprise.

We were fascinated then to see Hewlett Packard (fresh off its acquisition of Indigo Digital Presses) make a statement on 24 October when HP said it was partnering with Banta Corporation in launching a comprehensive enterprise printing solution targeted at Fortune 500 companies to help them streamline the capture, management, distribution and publishing of digital information. (i.e., Digital Asset Management)

Banta is actually already providing this concept for HP's Design Jet website.  HP is able to deliver personalized communications to its world wide customer base.  Something like a product announcement is customized by country, vertical market and then delivered via e-mail in the customer's native language.

Market research firm Frost and Sullivan predicts that the digital asset management industry will surge from $210 million in sales in 2000 to $5.2 billion in 2007.  "HP and Banta are moving into a sphere of digital asset management that is going to grow phenomenally over the next few years," said Mukul Krishna of Frost and Sullivan.

5)  Network Nirvana or MeToo Murky?

While we remain steadfastly convinced that there is something afoot in the concept of networked printing and publishing, fairness compels a thought or three about the other face of this trend. 

The advertising agency industry is also undergoing massive consolidation while at the same time attempting to become integrated -- i.e., adding non mass media advertising disciplines such as graphic design, sales promotion, public relations, direct and Internet marketing among other things.

The intent behind integrated marketing is to capture as much of the client's ad dollars as is possible by becoming a one-stop shop.  And in that effort, ad agencies are much like printing firms.

Jan Apple is a Minneapolis based ad-world expert.  Her concern about integrated ad agencies may apply just as much to printing firms.  She says the me-too mentality that is driving ad businesses to integrate other marketing disciplines has a downside.

"What integrated marketing does I think, is make everybody more of the same than they used to be."  Which in turn makes it harder to distinguish one ad firm from the other.  Sort of a Kinko-ization effect if you will.

6)  The world is a smaller oyster, dig in!

From Steve Miller of ColorMax:

"For several years I have been enjoying your information packed newsletter.  Until now, I have had nothing to share.

There is a new technology from Prolatus (http://www.prolatus.com/) which is being used by a number of large printing companies to load balance and offer remote color services.  These printers include R.R. Donnelley, Quadgraphics, QuebecorWorld, Hallmark and more. 

Our company, ColorMax, is an established prepress shop.   We purchased web technology from Prolatus and branded it for ColorMax (http://www.colormax.com/)

As you are aware, as it becomes easier and cheaper for almost anyone to create digital images, the quality of the image has generally suffered.  Using the Prolatus technology ColorMax can now offer global, convenient access to professional color."

That's the printing business model of the future:  anywhere, any time, in any language, in any media.

Industry Blurbs

A) One of our long time readers has bemoaned the lack of news about the Bindery.  We note that on 27 September, the PIA reported that profits at trade binders remain slightly above the average for the printing industry as a whole.  Trade binders reported profits of 3.66% for the past year.

B) From John Jennings based in the Southeast of the United Kingdom:  Your readers might enjoy taking a look at my website (http://www.mbofoldingskills.freeservers.com/)
The site is mainly for the print finishing/trade bindery.  It gets about 3000 page views a month from all over the world.  If I can't answer a certain query, I have the e-mail addresses of most of the MBO engineers and demonstrators and can usually obtain the right answer.

We applaud John for a very useful site and once again thank Mr. Hans Max for the sponsorship support of MBO America for the International Gallery of Superb Printing.

C) Presstek reported on 12 October that it had formed a new partnership with Koenig & Bauer (KBA) of Wurzburg, Germany.  As part of the deal, KBA will be selling its new digital press, the 46 Karat, utilising Presstek's ProFire imaging technology.  The 46 Karat is the little brother of the 74 Karat, and will be available in Europe next month.
KBA North America - Karat Digital Press Division is another of our valued sponsors of the International Gallery of Superb Printing.

Presstek has been very successful in lining up digital press users of its various imaging technologies.  At Print '01, name plates from Heidelberg, Sakurai, Adast, KBA, Xerox and Ryobi were all showing Presstek enabling technology.  If the razor blade theory still holds, then as the installed base of digital presses reaches critical mass, the demand for Presstek consumables may grow in lockstep.

Club and IAPHC News

CraftNet Changes

CraftNet Chairman Donald Landers III reports that the new database driven CraftNet website has gone live.  As we transition from the old site to the new version there will be unexpected hiccups, which will require our patience and our attention.  For example, Club events calendars will need to be re-entered.  Ultimately, a database driven website will become a powerful tool for communication among members and for delivering on our Mission Statement.  If you experience problems or discover opportunities for clarification or correction of errors, please be so kind as to notify Chairman Landers at dlanders3@earthlink.net or IAPHC Head Office staff members, so your concern can be appropriately looked after.  Your understanding as we develop an improved web presence is appreciated.  If a Club needs to complete manual reports for membership changes and the like, we will be happy to process them via fax to 763/560/1350.