Print 2.0
by Craig Le Clair.
I expect to see consumer products jumping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon soon. "Butter 2.0" perhaps — to make your family dinner more of a conversation. This week I am at HP’s annual imaging and printing conference. They unveiled "Print 2.0" — HP’s strategy for making printing relevant as content moves from the desktop to the Web. This is how HP intends to capture a significant share of the 53 trillion digital pages forecasted for 2010.
The three key areas of focus are to make it easier to print from Web sites, such as blogs and travel sites; extend the companies digital content creation (think Snapfish and Logoworks), across consumers and business; and deliver lower cost and higher speed digital printing platforms. Making the Web more print friendly is a great idea, and HP is teaming with the right crowd such as ViaMichelin, a map provider in Europe.
Are you happy with how your online map is printed today? Six Apart, Ltd., creator of the blogging platform Movable Type, is even better. HP is beta testing a blog-printing widget that will let you pick and choose the posts you want to print. With over 100,000 blogs created each day, there must be something worth printing.
On the SMB and enterprise side HP gets it. Complete output solutions based on tailored portals is the way things will go. These will not be your father’s "Web to print" applications. All in all, I’d have to say HP’s direction is a good one. Pass the butter please.