Dr Joe's Printing Industry Blog: Video of an Epaper Device in Action... and When You Assume (You Know the Rest)... and other goodies

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Video of an Epaper Device in Action... and When You Assume (You Know the Rest)... and other goodies

Don't believe e-paper is coming... read this and watch the video
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/gadgets/philips-readus-ereader-scroll-prototype-197227.php
The video is hosted on youtube.com which is one of the hottest web sites for the past year; video is the next frontier as broadband becomes cheaper, faster, wider, ubiquitous.

Technological change challenges the most basic of our assumptions, and the definitions of terms we use every day. Dr. Samir Husni (Mr. Magazine) discusses that in this article.
http://www.mrmagazine.com/news-views/August27-publishing360.html
A newspaper is no longer enough; a magazine is no longer enough; a television show is no longer enough; instead, the newspaper must take the reader from the newsprint to the internet, from the internet to the magazine, from the magazine to the television. Our media must never give a dead end to our readers. We must be constantly sending them to other vehicles where they can consume our product. Otherwise we will be label irrelevant and out of touch with our audience. Welcome to the Publishing 360 World. It is here for now…

Interesting background on the Knight-Ridder sale and what led up to it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/27/business/yourmoney/27knight.html?_r=3&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&ref=business&adxnnlx=1156720642-2JSnmF7laypQOESDYUdeZg&oref=slogin
“The real story of the fall and decline of Knight Ridder is not Bruce Sherman,” said James M. Naughton, once executive editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, formerly a Knight Ridder paper, and a retired president of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. “It’s the notion that you can continue whittling and paring and reducing and degrading the quality of your product and not pay any price. Tony’s legacy is that he destroyed a great company.”
I don't think so... this is what it looked like from the inside. From the outside? They got out when the "gettin' was good," as they say. K-R had a habit of doing things at the wrong time in the most expensive way. Online research service Dialog was a good example. They were Googled into oblivion (or more accurately "specialty niche"), when they should have led the charge. Big companies protect their bureaucracies and their bonuses first. That's why upstarts, who have nothing to protect, end up killing them. Well, not exactly... they end up grabbing their growth opportunities.

Will a backlash against the Blackberry be coming? I doubt it, but this article seems to imply that.
http://money.cnn.com/2006/08/24/technology/blackberry.reut/index.htm?cnn=yes
It's funny how every technology that takes hold will be the ruination of everything and the initiation of some kind of psychological trauma. If anything, humans have proven to be more resilient than anyone thought, and are probably more so. I don't have a Blackberry, since I work at home, and find wireless wherever I go for my notebook (or at least I seek out wireless places). I'm anxious, though, to try the new Sprint/WiMax network when it hits the market late this year/early next year. It's amazing what these communications advances allow us to do. No more coming back to an office with a pile of pink "while you were out" sheets, or looking for a payphone to call in for messages/problems, or people wanting to see you to get a decision about something actually quite minor. The best of this is e-mail: answer in a time-shifted basis, share it easily with others and bypassing copying and mailing, and being able to link to outside required resources. The real question is knowing how to secure your private, personal time, and not let it intrude on that. I've found that people who have to be connected and available all of the time... usually have no lives, and require that constant connectivity and availablility because it makes them feel needed and important. I've embraced the famous deGaulle quote: "The cemeteries are filled with indispensible men." For that reason, networking-enhanced delegation is one of the primary gifts of this new communications age. We can transcend geography, extend our reach, and choose when we want to do so, beyond the constraints of 9-5. I happen to work best in the mornings and evenings. The rest of the day is rather unproductive. Basically my day is 5-9, twice, in a sense. But stuff happens in between because of delegation, time-shifting, and trust in the people I work with. It could not have happened prior to 1995.

I've been cleaning out my office, and found one of my favorite slides (yes, I've been tossing all of my transparencies)... this is what it said, for all you marketers out there: your textbooks are all wrong... here's...

The real product life cycle: