October Observations aptiQmobile™ gives a boost to Pull Printing

October 2013 Observations

aptiQmobile™ gives a boost to Pull Printing

As readers of my monthly “Observations” contribution might recognize, it takes a certain combination of factors to really get me excited about writing a column. (And I still use the term “column” for my monthly blog posts just because I always have, I guess.)

For 95 straight months now, I have been fortunate to find topics, at least some of the time, that bring together a little industry history as well as look to the future – ideally with a congruence of topics that I have covered previously. Sometimes I throw in a touch of irony or surprise too. Add a good basic marketing or business principle or two, and I’m in blogger heaven. When it all lines up, the research and the writing just flow, and my biggest issue will be keeping my word count down to a reasonable level that won’t chase away readers.

History

This month’s connections start at the DEMO Fall conference held earlier this month in Santa Clara, Calif. One of my favorite haunts to find new products and solutions, I have attended DEMO conferences for nearly 20 years – often once, sometimes twice a year. The first 10 years or so were from the vendor side, but since 2006, I have attended as a member of the press in an effort to share these connections with my readers. Google “DEMO” and “Jim Lyons Observations,” and you will find many of these summaries from DEMOs past.

Pull printing

One of the emerging features among enterprise-oriented print solutions over the last few years has been that of pull printing. Touted as a labor-saving, resource-conserving, security-focused feature, “pull printing” describes the capability for users to print to a shared device anywhere in a building or a campus, then retrieve the print job by entering a PIN or, even slicker, with the wave of a user’s security card at the selected printer. The use case fits nicely with evolving office environments, including more shared printer/MFP/copiers, and stresses management control, security and mobility.

aptiQMobile

One of the companies demonstrating this year at DEMO struck a familiar chord for me, though not through the normal channels. Ingersoll Rand, a North Carolina-based industrial firm, was a customer of my employer’s in a long-ago previous life, and one of its business sectors, Ingersoll Rand Security Technologies, was on the agenda with its aptiQmobile (pronounced “ap-teek” mobile) solution, nestled among other companies in DEMO’s “Payment and Entry” section.

Its solution is described as turning “your smartphone into a mobile credential” that can then be used to open doors and other applications in lieu of a badge ID card. Using near field communication (NFC) technology, it allows selected smartphones (many Androids, though the iPhone requires an NFC-enabled sleeve) to take the place of custom-made security cards. Their demo (at DEMO) only ran for the standard four minutes, covering many typical solutions such as acting as a card key for doors. But a conversation with company officials later revealed that, indeed, enabling pull printing via smartphone and aptiQmobile’s technology is a potential use application.

Diane Kehlenbeck, director of technology alliances, explained the company’s long-standing business in these areas – such as being a leader in the receiving side of the security credential system – has allowed the company to creatively use the smartphone as a security credential. In this $1-billion business, mobile credentials are used more and more all the time, and one of aptiQmobile’s demo videos highlights its advantages in terms of cost and turnaround times in a university setting. In addition to “pull printing,” as we see in enterprises, smart cards or their equivalent are often used for enabling (and accounting for) student printing.

Near field communication (NFC)

From my industry perspective, until recently I was most aware of NFC positioned as a potential “replacement” for QR codes, which have been one of the “shining stars” of the hard-copy business over the past few years. (See “January 2010 Observations -- From the QR Code Sandbox — and Will QR Codes Help Printing?”). But, of course, NFC capability has recently become built in to printers, where users can “touch and print” with their mobile devices. It’s an interesting development, essentially adding a new i/o. (Remember when the first Wi-Fi or even USB printers seemed amazing?) We would expect a common new communications interface to be added to printers, just like other devices. But aptiQmobile does one better, I maintain, by taking advantage of the pervasiveness of smartphones and adding them to an expanding ecosystem that already includes pull printing.

Example of NFC used as a new printer connectivity option

Marketing principle: The first application of new technology mimics the old … but just wait!

With smartphones and mobile devices, generally, most of us in the business have immediately locked on to the train of thought that “printing from mobile” is a direct analogy to printing from PCs, which has driven the industry for so many years. If smartphones are replacing desktops, how (and how much) will they print? There has been a great deal of speculation on the topic. One recent industry report on printing from mobile devices is titled “Mobile Devices: Friend or Foe of the Printing Industry.” I also wrote a recent piece on the Mopria Alliance and will be leading a seminar titled “How, Why and When (and When Not) to Print From a Mobile Environment" at the upcoming Business Imaging Expo on Dec. 10-12 in Las Vegas.

Conclusion

What we see with aptiQmobile, as stated above, is a relatively new ecosystem in which pull printing has a role (if a somewhat limited one so far). And smartphones, based on both their capabilities and pervasiveness, are available, via creative and competent vendors like Ingersoll Rand, to change the printing landscape in an indirect but potentially very important way.

With smartphones, we have a world that has changed completely and forever, and printing habits and patterns will not simply migrate from how we have done it in the past to how we will do it now and in the future. But without painting the game as a simple “win-loss” template, printing and imaging has a chance to prosper in some still unimaginable ways.

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Print on Demand everywhere not always a great idea

For years, really decades now, I have been a big fan of "print on demand" - trading off pre-printed matter for that can be generated "on the fly", when and it what quantity the material is needed. It just seems like such a natural, harkening back to the initial popularity of the overall "just in time" (JIT) supply chain philosophy that took off back in the 1980s and 1990s.

It reduces waste, assures the latest and greatest will be printed, and overall, moves the printing closer to the end-user, which all makes terrific sense. Granted, sometimes the aesthetics are compromised (think of a classically printed book versus a toner-on-paper, or more likely these days, ink-on-paper version), but we can usually live with that. Especially when referring to the book publishing world, the ability to get a printed copy of something obscure and often out-of-print leaves no real alternative.

BUT...this one just makes me a little sad. Our local post office has had one of their wonderful automated machines for years, and I have long been a fan, at least on my rare trips to the PO. Especially when it comes to weighing a large envelope or package, then dispensing the exact postage on peel-off adhesive media, and charging the credit card, its hard to beat, compared to standing in line and getting human help to do the same thing, ending with traditional a metered postage label affixed to your item.

They have recently upgraded the machine, and added one, and while the old one always dispensed regular postage stamps, vending-machine-style, this new pair spits out $4.80 sheets of print-on-demand "stamps" - see below. And I am sorry, and maybe it goes back to philatelic interest of my youth, I feel my quality of life took a hit! I want my basic flag stamps (as well as colorful commemoratives) back!

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HP NYSE HPQ results in a 19 revenue decline in printing and imaging

HP (NYSE HPQ) is out with Q1 earnings after todays market close, and overall, in keeping with the times, the company is reporting some somewhat stunning numbers, both good and bad. Overall the company is up in quarterly revenue by 1%, year over year, and EPS (non-GAPP diluted) actually increased 8%.

And the imaging and printing story is a bit mixed, with a (to me anyway) stunning 19% decline in quarterly revenue, to $6.0 Billion, but a similarly amazing flat operating profit, at $1.1 Billion, on the back of hugely improved profit margin (18.5%!).

More to follow!

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January Observations Paper as a Metaphor exploring Tweet based paper li

The Hard Copy Observer, January 2011

Observations: Paper as a Metaphor - exploring Tweet-based paper.li

by Jim Lyons

[January 27, 2011] As mentioned in my November column (see “Observations: All That Glitters…”), I am commonly drawn to learning more about innovative solutions in the social media and mobile apps space that have “paper” or “print” in their names. I explored the iPhone/iPad app ACTPrinter and learned that its “printing” capability was really more about the ability to create simple PDF-like versions of materials that would normally be reduced to hard copy form (think tickets, receipts, etc.) but could be transferred and displayed on mobile device screens, thus avoiding hard copy usage altogether. ACTPrinter’s founder learned that his app had gone from a tool used for airline and train tickets to one that could “mobile-ize” other documents, like articles and reports, for “consumption” on iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads.

I promised then to explore paper.li, a Twitter-based solution I discovered that really is using “paper” in a metaphorical sense. Nonetheless, in the same vein as the viewing-based magazine-equivalents I have covered in the past (for example, see “From the Magazine Rack and What a Difference a Year Makes!”), paper.li offers some great insight into where printing opportunities (or at least printer industry opportunities) might exist, more like my July 2009 column (see “Print Those Tweets”http://jimlyonsobservations.blogspot.com/2009/04/observations-ultimate-countertrendthe.html), where I pointed out that it was possible to print tweets and that many people were actually doing just that.

So what is paper.li, and why should you care? Like Flipboard (see the aforementioned “Magazine Rack” post), paper.li is a program that organizes your incoming Twitter feed into a format that resembles traditional media (the front page of a newspaper in the case of paper.li) but also takes advantage of the interactivity of hyperlinks and multimedia. Note that while I continue to concentrate on the Twitter aspect of paper.li, the software is capable of organizing Twitter and Facebook streams; paper.li simply suits my use of the two platforms as a Twitter-only solution.

The creator of paper.li’s is SmallRivers, a Lausanne, Switzerland-based firm, and the company’s Web site describes its advertising-supported service as follows, “paper.li organizes links shared on Twitter and Facebook into an easy to read newspaper-style format. A great way to discover content that matters to you—even if you are not connected 24/7!” The more I learned about paper.li, I realized that the “paper” in the solution’s name stood for “newspaper” formatting (and that the “.li” suffix roughly translates to “personalized”). However, paper.li seemed to produce a format that may indeed still lend itself to printing, not unlike “The Printed Blog” (see “Ultimate Countertrend, The Printed Blog”). The images at *** are examples of paper.li’s daily output.

When asked about the fit between paper.li and actual, physical printing, Iskander Pols, co-founder of SmallRivers, commented, “Hard copy was not part of the original design. We did have some users show interest in such an option though. While it may become an option at some time, you have to realize that paper.li is particularly well suited to the Web, in so far that we facilitate content discovery, pushing readers to the original content wherever it is on the Web, i.e. the actual reading of articles is done on the source Web site, not so much on paper.li.” Regarding that future hard copy option, Pols added, “We will be looking into creating PDF-friendly versions of papers. Unfortunately, no timing for such a feature is available.”

Even @JFLYONS made this paper.li edition - by VitalyG - though below the fold

So perhaps a dead end, and another example of retaining the “paper” moniker as a metaphorical and historical artifact rather than a physical description, much like the academic “papers” I have written about several times in the past that rarely if ever are converted to hard copy form. But as social media becomes more pervasive across industries as an outbound communications tool for marketers and an inbound source for keeping abreast of the world and the industry, paper.li may become very important.

The Printers Daily paper.li by @graphicstart from January 19 2011

As seen from the sample paper.li images, setting up and building off your investment in your Twitter (and perhaps Facebook) following can be a great way to monitor and stay current on developing trends in the industry. There is also the serendipity aspect to it—the two examples I show here are owned by two tweeters who happen to follow me, meaning that when one of my tweets shows up on their “front page,” I get notified in the form of a link to access their papers. Therefore, without even setting up a paper.li of my own, I get the benefit, a network effect of sorts, of being followed by virtue of tweeting enough material of interest to show up in my colleagues’ summaries. (Editor’s note: Jim has since started his own paper, which can be found at http://paper.li/jflyons.)

In summary, paper.li, whether truly a “paper” in physical form or not, should be a valuable tool for industry members to recognize and begin to use regularly. The year is 2011 after all—time to be up on the ever-changing world of social media.

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