by Jim Lyons

The Hard Copy Observer, November 2009

Observations: Interview with Ian Schenkel of EuroSmartz

Completing the fourth year of my monthly “Observations” column for the Observer, I find myself reflecting back on the exciting variety of subjects I have had the chance to cover. Originally, my beat included two rather broad but related areas of the printer industry—simply stated, its past and its future. The former category often includes a healthy dose of nostalgia regarding how things have changed since foregone days when we were all young but also a reminder of how things may have stayed the same. The latter category is where I point to areas I have observed that are new and emerging.

However, a third category has developed, tied to the future, which is interviewing and reporting on some of the people involved with future-looking products and technologies. These entrepreneurs have typically been contributing to the future of our industry, and this month, I had the pleasure of chatting with Ian Schenkel, co-founder of EuroSmartz Ltd., the company known for being “#1 for Printing Apps on the iPhone and iPod Touch.”

Ian, along with brother Martin, form the basis of a bi-continental team, spanning England and New Zealand, a time-zone combination that the company sees as a big advantage with respect to making good on fast-turnaround 24 × 7 product support. For cohesiveness, I have consolidated a series of international phone calls and e-mails with Ian Schenkel into one interview .

Lyons: What is your professional background?

Schenkel: EuroSmartz was formed in 1994 when we launched a sales force automation application for Mac and Windows. Over the years, it has taken a few different iterations and has now turned into mainly an iPhone-app developing company specializing in printing apps. I am based in Amersham, which is 25 miles northwest of London, and my background has pretty much all been software sales and marketing—I have also helped establish a number of U.S. software companies in Europe.

My brother Martin is based in Auckland, New Zealand and has been a developer for more years than I can remember. His background is in C, C++, Java, and many other different languages. Part of the reason we started EuroSmartz in the first place was because of our complementary skill sets, which has really paid off well for us in the app store.

You need to create great, innovative apps to sell in volume [Martin’s job], but now with 100,000 apps, you also need to make some noise to stand out [my job].

Lyons: What led you to iPhone apps and especially to those that feature printing?

Schenkel: The decision to make iPhone apps was actually pretty easy, I read a few pieces about developers that were making apps for the iPhone and how the SDK [software development kit] was pretty easy to use. I then spoke to my brother, and he downloaded the SDK, and we started making apps.

As for the specifics of printing, that came about from looking for gaps in the apps that were available and also because of our own use of the iPhone—we found there was no solution at the time to print anything, so we thought we would design and build something ourselves. It was a bit of a learning curve getting into passing information and documents to the myriad print drivers on both Mac and PC, but once that was broken down and built, the rest followed pretty easily. Most enhancements we add to our apps are customer-driven requests. Field testing is always the best way to build better products, and we now have an absolutely huge number of customers that give us great feedback.

Lyons: Without saying exactly what is “huge,” can you provide some scale on the success of your apps?

Schenkel: The "number-one" claim we make on our Web site is due to the fact we are the top selling paid printing app in the entire app store and have been for all of 2009. We have two printing apps in the top 100 of productivity, and no other printing app in the store will print the range of document formats that our apps support. Because of this position we have sold more in terms of volume across our family of apps than any other printing app vendor.

Lyons: Will you tell us about being included in one of Apple’s famous “There’s an app for that” television commercials?

Schenkel: The ad was a little out of the blue really, Apple were looking for business apps that enabled them to showcase how the iPhone is a useful business tool. Print n Share was shortlisted and eventually made its place in the Office ad. There is not a huge amount more I can say about the ad, it was all very exciting but also very easy. The biggest thing we had to prepare for was translating the app into other languages. The ad showed in the U.S., UK, Japan, and France. Seeing the app for the first time in Japanese was fun, we knew each of the buttons but could not read what they had on them. We also helped Apple with the sequence of our app in the ad, so that it all flowed correctly.

Lyons: What’s next for EuroSmartz?

Schenkel: We have a number of new apps in the pipeline, some are variations on printing, and some are a complete departure. However the biggest initiative we have in place right now is integrating with other apps to enable them to print. We have created a simple way that other app developers can use our app to print. We provide all the tools for them to build this, and best of all it is free for the developer. Once the apps are integrated, all the customer needs to do is have our app along with the other app on their iPhone, and they can print from that app. We feel this is going to bring some major new features to the iPhone. So far we have two apps integrated and quite a number more in the pipeline.

We are adding four new apps that have integrated with our printing apps in the next few weeks, so we are excited about launching those too.

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by Jim Lyons

The Hard Copy Observer, December 2008

2008 -- The Year of Printing Dangerously

Somehow, going back over the year 2008 feels mentally harrowing. Although there are reasons to celebrate, the year was also characterized by nerve-wracking crises that we cannot say are fully past. It was a momentous and historic year for the world, to be sure, but in many ways it was a quieter and more down-to-business year for the printer industry. So in reflecting on a topic for my end-of-year column, no great industry event triggered my imagination. And in fact, the title of this column was the closest thing to a breakthrough I was able to produce for some time, until the rest of the pieces began falling together to support the thesis of the danger in printing in 2008. Why was printing more “dangerous”, at least in some small ways, in 2008? I think there are numerous reasons to be examined as early indicators at least of major changes in the printing and imaging business.

Printing’s association with troubled industries and the accompanying guilt by association is one reason. During this year’s Lyra Supplies Symposium in Las Vegas in August, the expert panel that concluded the event was asked to comment on the future growth, or lack thereof, that they anticipated in the printer supplies business.

While many panelists conceded that printing had recently declined in certain markets, there were counteracting forces leading to an overall GDP-level growth in printing over the forecast period of the next few years. What was the biggest recent source of decline in printing volumes? Banking and finance-related businesses, including real estate, which have traditionally been print-heavy industries. A lull in their business levels showed up in a correlation with pages printed—and this was in August! With the economic chaos since then, it is only natural to assume that when the dust settles, print demand generated from loans, credit applications, title work, real estate bids and assessments will have fallen drastically, because the number of deals is off sharply and so many pages are printed per deal.

The growing “green” consciousness around printing, especially as it ties to cost savings is another reason. The field of managed print services (MPS) has unquestionably been a bright spot for the industry this year. And its success, in finally seeming to take hold after years of discussion, has many pointing to the green trend among end-users (as well as organizations) as the potential reason for this tipping point.

A recent example, not appearing on the Web pages and success stories of corporate MPS providers like HP or Xerox but at the “TechSoup” Web site, is titled “Choosing Print Management Software.” TechSoup bills itself as the “The Technology Place for Nonprofits,” and while its interest in saving money for its readers is not surprising, the site seems to have focused on printing for both cost and environmental reasons. TechSoup ran a special series including features like “Choosing Print Management Software” and “Creating and Distributing Electronic Annual Reports and Marketing Materials” that was presented with a high level of professionalism, although the topics lead customers in the wrong direction for the printer industry.

One further example of how printing became dangerous, or at least on the outs, comes from a Wall Street Journal article from August 22, titled, “Tech Firms Pitch Tools For Sifting Legal Records: With E-Discovery, Lawyers Face Loss Of Client Fees.” The article reports that millions in legal fees are at stake, as hyper-efficient electronic searching supplants traditional manual searching of paper records, which is time-consuming but provides lots of billable hours. While in many cases (sorry for that one) the process involves merely scanning and indexing historic paper documents, there is also much to be gained from those documents never being in paper form to begin with, and then not, at least as a rule, being re-printed from their electronic repositories for legal purposes.

HP and Xerox are two of the “tech firms” mentioned in the article, and you need look no further than the pages of the May 2008 issue of this newsletter to find a story about HP’s acquisition of Tower Software, an Australian based e-discovery firm.

An alarming October 9 article in The Economist brought further squirming from those of us in the industry. Entitled “The Paperless Office, On its Way, at Last: No longer a joke, the ‘paperless’ office is getting closer,” the article contains a case study of a small Austin, Texas administrative business (Breedlove and Associates) and its efforts to go paperless. It includes chilling quotes.

“It is that everyone—clients and staff—is sick of paper. The clients tend to be young, middle-class families…they are good with technology and already pay bills online, use e-tickets on planes, e-file their tax returns, and Google recipes rather than using cookbooks. And Breedlove’s 16 employees are in their 20s, native to Facebook and instant-messaging, and baffled by the need for paper. Now everybody is happier. Next year the firm expects to be completely paperless.”

The article concludes (spoiler alert), however, with the familiar-to-some analogy of the arrival of the “horseless carriage” and the horse population, and the fact that today’s society is home to approximately the same number of horses as 100 years ago, but they are used in radically different ways. So one might argue that paper could be used in ways that we are only now discovering, while being replaced nearly altogether in other areas.

I take the liberty to examine the state of printing about once a year, and thanks to my readers for indulging me yet again. Indeed, to me anyway, printing, or at least relying on traditional printing, does seem dangerous at the end of 2008.

Nevertheless, while trade-offs will occur, vendors will continue to find growth areas where they can prosper.

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by Jim Lyons


My last full week of July this year has been dominated by thoughts of a much-awaited package, bound to arrive at my door at anytime. And with apologies to the songwriters and performers of the title song – including The Marvelettes, The Beatles and The Carpenters – I realize I should amend my statement to reflect 2013 standards, something along the lines of "Please, Federal Express Person" instead.

What it’s not
Actually, I can recall this feeling of anticipation because I’ve had it many times in the past when I’ve ordered and then finally received a nice new gadget I’d had my eye on for quite some time. But this one is different too. And in fact, in describing what it is, it might be easier to express it in terms of what its not. While my feelings of eagerness for it to arrive compares to emotions I’ve had for new iPhones, iPads, Kindles, Nexuses (Nexii?) and Chromebooks as I awaited their arrivals, this gadget I’m currently waiting on is really nothing like any of those. Rather than a mobile information/communication device, this item is a printer!

My first order, which would’ve been from the vendor’s first “batch,” was placed and accepted in 2012, but I canceled it – albeit reluctantly – because I was suffering a bad case of “gadget fatigue” (as in “it gets too exhausting figuring out all these different gadgets at once”; see that list above of all those products that have come my way in the last few years). But I made sure to clear my calendar this year and got my order in for the second build, waiting since April 2013 for it to arrive, all the while being teased by the company’s clever communications.

And yes, I have ordered and received many a printer over the years, but theyve mostly been work-oriented replacement products that may have represented an economic and/or performance upgrade but really offered very little, if anything, which one might consider new and exciting. And back to the “what it’s not” analysis (a very key point of marketing positioning and differentiation, as I often point out to my students), the product coming my way, although technically a printer, is also very big in the “not” department. It doesnt print in color. It does not include an integrated scanner or other attributes that would qualify it as an MFP. It is neither laser nor page-wide (i.e., inkjet) technology. It features no Wi-Fi connection, nor does it do autoduplexing. And beyond all that, its so “underperforming” that it doesnt even print on plain, letter-size paper. It does originate from outside the United States (leading to some of the extended shipping time), but it’s not coming from Asia. It’s being shipped direct from the manufacturer in England, and it’s a product thats not ordered out of off-the-shelf stock, but rather preordered from infrequent batch production runs.

The reveal – July 25, 2013
Some readers of this blog might have figured out by now that Im talking about the Berg Little Printer. After some final shipping gyrations involving United States Customs requirements, of all things, it arrived at my door today. Ive been covering, here and elsewhere (see http://jimlyonsobservations.blogspot.com/2012/02/february-observations-lessons-from.html), my impressions of the Little Printer’s appeal and its ability to create momentum in the social media world.

My February 2012 Observations discussed the Berg Little Printers Social Media appeal

But thinking about the long-time mantra in the printer industry to “create and sell solutions, not hardware,” that has been much easier said than done. The Berg Little Printer, despite its name indicating a hardware bias, is actually that rare hard-copy solution – a part-hardware, part-software combination – that appeals based on what it does and the image it conveys.

The payoff? A great branded solution can command very high margin and still generate customer excitement and loyalty. The $249 (including $30 for overseas shipping) that I paid for my Little Printer is just as much or more than many of those gadgets I listed previously, and for a black-and-white printer that prints on special 2-inch-wide paper – basically a receipt printer, if one does not look beyond the hardware.

But what we really have here is the embodiment of the famous marketing saying, “Where theres mystery, theres margin.” At Photizo’s Transform conference in May 2012, the keynote guest speaker was a recent VP of communications from Harley-Davidson. He offered so many of us in the room insights into magic, mystery, margin and the real lesson in that saying. Comparing how his former firm could produce such sought-after motorcycles that commanded double (or more) the price of equivalent hardware from other vendors, it became clear the differentiation was all about service, solutions, customer loyalty and stories.

The Little Printers overseas voyage was protected by t he proverbial brown cardboard wrapper

Similarly, Berg’s clever solutions has teamed “little printing” smartphones with social media, from the look of their product and marketing materials as well as the wit of their communications. (For example, the related newsletter played heavily on the concurrent news of the Royal Birth also coming from England, with the headline “After a long labour, Little Printer is delivered. And it prints, by George!”

Berg and customers promoted the "arrival" with comparisons to that of the new royal baby

 So how does it work, you might ask? How do I like it, and can I recommend it to others? Well, Im just getting ready to open the box, set it up, plug it in and have at it. But after a few days – or, more likely, weeks or even months – I will report my findings, so stay tuned for future Jim Lyons Observations on using the Little Printer!

(This post also appears in the Jim Lyons Observations blog at The Imaging Channel.)

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also published in The Hard Copy Observer, May 2011

For the last month or so, I have had the opportunity to use a prototype Memjet home-and-office printer, first in my downtown office, and then more recently in my home office. While not a rigorous or official, full-blown evaluation or review, I have a number of observations about my printing experiences that I would like to share in my May 2011 Observations column. I will also offer a little marketing advice for the somewhat mysterious almost mythical company that sprang onto the industry scene in 2007 from Down Under (originating from Australia’s Silverbrook Research) with a formidable threat to seriously disrupt the printer industry.

In the full disclosure department, Lyra Research and the Hard Copy Observer were among the earliest in the industry to be on the Memjet story and have followed the company’s somewhat circuitous march to market with great interest ever since. For me personally, prior to be being employed by Lyra, I was an independent consultant and did some marketing work for Memjet in its very early days. Also, like with many other companies in the industry, I have a number of friends and acquaintances currently employed by Memjet.

Getting hold of an evaluation unit, however, was more of a personal favor on Memjet’s part combined with curiosity on my part about what it would be like to have this oft-discussed super-fast printer at my immediate disposal. What would I think, and would the printer’s performance change my behavior relative to what I print and when? As far as the charge for the marketing advice to Memjet and its go-to-market partners, this time—strictly gratis!

I received the previously used prototype unit via the Eagle, Idaho-based Home and Office division of the San Diego-based company, and this machine already showed 35,000 pages printed on its “odometer,” which came via standardized out-sourced reliability testing prior to my use. So my unit is a bit of a scratch-and-dent model, which I found I appreciated—much like I have learned with buying a car, as I have often remarked that I would rather start with a year-old, “pre-dinged” model because that first little flaw incurred in a brand new car can be so emotionally painful.

Putting Print Speed into Historical Perspective

Memjet’s original promise of delivering 60 ppm color printing to the home and office for $200-$300 has morphed into a machine that offers the same breakthrough speed but at a price point that is multiplied by a factor of two or more. Note that Memjet has not identified any U.S. partners, and of the firm’s Asian and European partners, only Lenovo in China has published target per-page costs of 0.1-0.15 Yuan (2 cents) for monochrome and 0.3-0.5 Yuan (6 cents) for color, compared to color laser printing costs of 10-15 cents for a color page and 1-2 cents for a monochrome page. Early indications on hardware pricing for the Lenovo RJ600N point to a range of $770 to $925 in U.S. dollars.

During the last decades, unlike in semiconductor-driven areas, like computer memory and processors, printers and their technology curves have remained somewhat constrained by factors in the physical world. The speed of drying ink and melting toner and the physics of moving paper comprise some of the factors that work against a pure Moore’s Law progression among printers. So we do not see the many-orders-of-magnitude changes we have seen over the decades with processors or storage. Nevertheless, if Memjet can deliver on even its revised price/performance goal, the impact to the home- and office-printing market could be significant.

Handouts for university classes are potentially a great application for 
the speed and economy of Memjet-based ink jet printers

My Positive Experience

Unquestionably, having the Memjet printer has increased my interest in printing. I have enjoyed printing full-page photos (and confirmed the company’s advice that media type is a huge determinant of photo quality, as with every other product in the industry). I print articles and book sections for my teaching work and have also had good results printing from my Apple iPad using EuroSmartz Ltd’s Print n Share (see “Observations: Interview with Ian Schenkel of EuroSmartz”).

However, my most positive or at least most dramatically positive experience with the printer came one morning a few weeks ago. I was running behind, getting my final presentation materials in place for a university-based event where I was lecturing on using social media for marketing. My handouts, based on my slides, were the last thing I needed on the morning of the presentation, and I was at least 30 minutes behind schedule, with a colleague depending on me for a ride. I needed 60 pages of color (mixed text and graphics), and I had only minutes to print the pages before leaving my home office and making my appointed time for the pick-up. Quite frankly, this seemingly risky schedule, was not really so accidental, as I knew I had a very fast printer that I could use. And so, within the time it took to click “OK” on the print dialog box, which issued the command to print the 60 pages, and move from my upstairs laptop to my downstairs office printer, those 60 printed sheets were peacefully waiting for me on the Memjet printer’s output tray.

On a side note, the prototype printer I am testing is not always quiet, as the ink-management system involved in keeping the page-wide print head ready to go at 60 ppm requires quite a bit of hydraulic magic—even seemingly on an intermittent basis while idle—but the company assures me they are working to minimize the noise. Size-wise, all the fluid and paper movement clearly requires an industrial design that at first look seems quite a bit larger and more substantial than the commonly seen low-end ink jets and lasers of today. A closer look, however, reveals this size issue to be more in reference to the printer’s overall mass (height, weight, and depth) rather than its footprint. In terms of desk space, my HP Officejet Pro 8000 takes up nearly the same square footage. Finally, although supplies cost are not my concern at this point, the company has stated that the average cost per page will be half that of a typical ink jet or color laser printer (see above for target per-page costs of the Memjet-based Lenovo RJ600N).

Print speed demos via video have created excitement around Memjets print speed capabilities

Of course, speed is not the only consideration, but it is the main focus of Memjet’s promotional materials (see below). The printer’s 60 ppm performance, whether viewed via the company’s many videos, but especially in person, is almost other-worldly. However, given that HP OfficeJets (including one I have been using for several years now) have a rating of 30+ ppm, is a doubling of that speed combined with a potential halving of the supplies cost going to transform the home- and office-printing market? My answer is a big “yes,” at least for situations like the morning when I needed a big stack of handouts in a hurry. Granted the raw (theoretical) speed comparisons indicate only a minute’s time-savings, but setup and processing time and the variability of print speed among competitive printers based on the content of the page should also be factored into the equation. The Memjet printer roars through all pages with the same gusto, and as can be seen from the comparison videos, others do not. 

Memjets current tag line and branding emphasize the breakthrough print speed of the firms technology

The reality, based on my recent experience with the Memjet and in the past with myriad inkjet and laser printers from other suppliers, is that the 2:1 theoretical performance improvement could actually net out at something more like 10:1. And what if I needed 600 pages and not just 60 pages? Regardless, the fact that the necessary pages appeared almost instantly made a big difference in my day.

Marketing Basics—Benefits Versus Features

Thus we near the end of my Memjet observations, and I cannot end without offering a little marketing, specifically product positioning, advice that applies to Memjet and its partners, and equally well to everyone else in our industry: Understand and stress the unique benefits of your technology, target those customers who will appreciate and reward you for those benefits, and try to remember the features are just enablers to deliver those benefits.

Regular readers will know I devote quite a bit of time and energy these days to teaching university-level marketing, and in actuality, devote even more time and energy in thinking about marketing and related subjects. After consulting the experts, here’s what perhaps the world’s most consulted marketing text (Kotler & Armstrong, 9th edition, “Marketing: An Introduction,” 2009, Prentice-Hall) says about putting benefits into market positioning.

“[Positioning based on] Benefits Sought: A powerful form of segmentation is to group buyers according to the different benefits that they seek from the product. Benefit segmentation requires finding the major benefits people look for in the product class, the kinds of people who look for each benefit, and the major brands that deliver each benefit.”

So Memjet (and partners), who are the buyers that value knocking out reasonably large volumes of color pages in rapid fashion? The team at Memjet includes marketing pros who are top-notch thinkers and practitioners, so none of this analysis is new to them, but I cannot resist reinforcing the idea that finding enough of those users and communicating the benefits of print speed will go a long way toward success for Memjet and its go-to-market partners – by no means an easy challenge, but one worth pursuing nonetheless.

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by Jim Lyons

The Hard Copy Observer, December 2007

Amazons Kindle Stirs Up E-book (and Printing and Imaging) Excitement

As readers of the year-end issue of The Hard Copy Observer [where this column appears in print form] can no doubt attest, 2007 has been a very big year for the printing and imaging business. The promises of newcomers like Zink and Memjet and new product categories as represented by HPs Edgeline have been exciting to cover. Innovation outside the purely technical, including the formidable challenge to the razor-and-blades business model mounted by players like Kodak and Xerox, have made 2007 a year to remember. Nonetheless, the pinnacle of tech-industry buzz seems to still be reserved for products and services tangential to printing (at best), with Amazons Kindle, introduced on November 19, as the latest example.

Earlier this year I was quoted in a Printer Pundit interview on the DataBazaar blog as describing our industry as "quietly going about our business", a comment that was stated frankly but also with a spirit of pride. Yes, we do great things in this business and have hundreds of millions, if not billions, of satisfied customers, but we are the strong, silent types, right? But truth be told, this stealth approach can sting a little in vain moments—after all, among all the 2007 announcements mentioned in my opening paragraph, only Kindle graced the cover of Newsweek magazine.

So, in an unapologetic attention-getting move, I am claiming the Kindle as one of our industrys own. Electronic book readers are not new after all, and many of our businesss leading companies have covered, discussed, and even invested in these devices. Since at least 2000, the Observer has covered various E-book readers and related products (e.g. see Observer 3/00). As one of the principal ways we use printed paper in our society, books are of great interest to the printer-oriented world, and in Kindles case, as noted in its voluminous press coverage in both the traditional and "new" media, the content solution offered by Amazon goes beyond books to include a selection of newspapers, magazines, and blogs. Even considering e-books primarily as a threat that have the potential to someday supplant the need for the physically printed page, these devices are undeniably an important developing area in the broader "information collection, dissemination, and consumption" industry, and serve as a caution to avoid falling victim to marketing myopia and think about ourselves as "just being in the printer industry."

And, in keeping with my ongoing theme of marketing successes and failures, I would like to point to what I believe Amazon has done right on the "product" side. For all the attention it has garnered, much of the Kindle commentary has been rather negative, starting with its retro (to be kind) industrial design. On the positive side, Amazon has put together an innovative solution. We learned from the iPod/iTunes example earlier this decade that cracking an industry, the portable digital music industry in Apple’s case, was not just about the gadget. As the E-book is about so much more than the reader itself, there are definitely some parallels.

The Kindle solution could not do better than Amazons e-commerce infrastructure for its online bookstore, and the Whispernet connectivity seems to solve the Wi-Fi hot-spot problem I have encountered with my iPhone (and its AT&T Edge network backup that has been roundly criticized as inadequate). The resulting stand-alone nature of the Kindle (no PC required) is a big plus in terms of usability and convenience compared to 2006’s Sony Reader. Closer to our printing world, Amazon had the foresight to include the handling of user-generated documents like PDFs and Word files along with books, newspapers, magazines, and blogs, which are added to the Kindles memory via e-mail. (Conversely, the Kindles inability to print snippets of books and other files is one of the knocks on it that reviewers have highlighted.)

By staying away from engineering a multi-purpose laptop-PC wannabe, Amazon seems to have nailed the design for a dedicated reading appliance that includes a monochrome, e-ink-based display and limited graphics but weighs in at well below one pound (10.3 ounces, to be exact). Of course, behavioral patterns will have a huge impact on market success in the end, and the battle still rages between dedicated (and thus multiple) specialized devices and convenient (but compromised) all-in-one machines.

To complete the marketing analysis, the Kindle has a fairly reasonable pricing scheme, including an acceptable price for the machine and aggressive prices for best sellers (though customers may soon tire of the nickel-and-dime scheme of paying for blogs and e-mail). The Kindle also benefits from the ultimate "place", i.e. distribution channel, as Amazon is one the one of the world’s most heavily trafficked and most popular e-commerce sites. So with the great promotion (including the PR blitz) still ongoing and attention to product, make that solution, details, I predict success for Amazon’s Kindle, and welcome it to our larger printing and imaging family!

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by Jim Lyons

The Hard Copy Observer, October 2008

Sharp-Eyed Hard-Copy Marketers Help the Aging

Month in and month out, the Observer’s editorial staff regularly cranks out 40-plus pages covering the steady stream of news from our industry. This includes myriad new imaging and printing products and services, along with the triumphs and travails of the companies that comprise “the business.”

Then our readers do their best to digest all of it to keep up with the state of the industry, with the goal of “staying competitive.” Keeping this in mind, for the last three years, I’ve used my monthly “Observations” column to explore less-obvious developments and trends that might be otherwise overlooked. I try to acknowledge and appreciate the role of history, looking back to how we arrived where we are today, and I like to look ahead, scan the horizon, and pick out what might seem now like a mere blip on the radar but that could someday have consequences for our world.

I also have a soft spot for passing along great marketing stories. For some this may bring to mind P.T. Barnum, but for me, it means a great application of marketing principles, where a customer need is identified and understood, and then a business is developed around satisfying that need in a unique or superior way. When all that comes together, the clever people behind it all are likely, though not guaranteed, to be rewarded in the marketplace.

Because of recent personal experience, I can relate to one of these examples that, although not specifically in the hard copy arena, is related to technology and communications. You may be familiar with the “Jitterbug” mobile phone that features a handset with very large keys and easy-to-read symbols, a bright display featuring simple messages spelled out in large characters, a sensitive microphone and extra-loud speaker, and a certain size and heft that theoretically makes it more difficult to misplace, at least compared to many of today’s mobile phones.

The Jitterbug phone service features user-friendly over-the-phone setup and support, provided by courteous English-as-a-first-language agents, and functions like populating the address book can be done voice-to-voice. The Jitterbug even has a comforting dial tone indicating it’s on and ready to use.

For our family, the experience of staying a little closer to distant, elderly relatives has improved dramatically. The Jitterbug’s combination of small things has added up to a big difference, eclipsing what had been years of frustration with conventional mobile phones and even land-line-based cordless models. It is not the cheapest telephone alternative, at least in our area, but it is by far the most valuable we have found.

The emotional need to share things visually is certainly just as real as that for voice communication, and this need helps bind family groups together. Pictures, notes, and clippings are important to the simple but critical concept of “keeping in touch.” And many of us have converted from a mostly snail-mail approach to e-mail and social networking that are so pervasive today.

But what about those who have not made this switch? For every PC-loving elder who has made the transition either with assistance from a younger-generation family member or on their own, there are those who have struggled and given up, or who never had the opportunity.

So is there a hard copy equivalent of the Jitterbug success story? Of course, or at least developing ones. There are at least two companies, CaringFamily and Presto, that have made tremendous strides in putting together a hard copy hardware- and software-based solution that satisfies at least some of the previously unmet communications needs of families with elders living remotely.

Think about the difficulty of using e-mail for anyone who is uninitiated: booting up the PC, getting on the Internet, logging into the e-mail program, and remembering user names and passwords. Then there is the confusion of reading, let alone sending, saving, and printing. Both CaringFamily and Presto, recognizing these difficulties, have set out to make the “inbox” a real physical inbox that is actually the output tray of a simplified but otherwise ordinary inkjet MFP. At its launch two years ago, Presto’s founder told a frustrating tale of setting up his own mother on e-mail, and used his experience as the inspiration to start the firm.

CaringFamily is a Louisville, CO-based company that has been pursuing the “communicating family” market since its inception in 2003. Paul Davoust, the company’s CEO, says, “The largest untapped market in the world for technology is that of the elderly population. Why has the tech industry as a whole been so poor at addressing it?” He reasons that the remedy is to start with understanding the problems through research and developing core competencies in product usability. Davoust believes that the oft-used phrase “product usability” is generally a misnomer. “Product usability is a common phrase in the industry but is typically at the margin, not built-in from the starting point like it needs to be.”

While Caring Family and Presto are on to some great discoveries and approaches in satisfying real unmet user needs, challenges remain. The world has yet to beat the proverbial “path to their door,” at least a well-worn one, in either case. In my November “Observations” column, I will take a closer look at each company and their similarities and differences. Marketing lessons to be learned include the critical importance of combining the features and benefits of products and services and how the “Four P’s” all come to play. There is even an “enterprise versus consumer” angle that might sound familiar to many of us!

Designing and delivering a hard-copy delivery system is a worthy business goal, in addition to being a meaningful way to improve people’s quality of life. Recall the famous recruiting line from Apple’s Steve Jobs to then-Pepsi CEO John Scully, “Don’t you want to do more with your life than selling sugar water to kids?” In the case of helping families communicate, it is more than just a scheme to get users to use more ink.

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