The Future of Printing

Even the word sounds boring: printing.

Yes our world may not be the paperless environment we were led to believe it would be by now, but certainly the printing industry is feeling the squeeze of Cloud computing and ever more mobile devices. Even wave after wave of company email signatures warn against environmental impacts of printing.

So how will printing survive? Should it survive? I spoke to Brother UK marketing and sales director Phil Jones who not only had an answer, but also a genuinely exciting vision for the printing industry as a whole. ‘Exciting’? Printers?! Just watch…

Guide: Should You Take a Tablet?

Originally published on the TalkTalkBlog. Reprinted with permission from TalkTalk.

Tablets are the talk of the technology sector, a seemingly exciting middle ground between smartphone and laptop. Apple, Dell, Toshiba, HP and Asus have all committed to the form factor and it is expected to challenge netbooks as the new must-have product of 2010. So with wave after wave of tablet marketing hype set to hit us between now and Christmas the big question is: should you buy one?

The Weight of History

I’d love to give you a one word answer, but the question is more complicated than that. Why? Because until recently the tablet was a largely abandoned idea, a product type which had clocked up failure after failure. Most famously Apple had tried with the Newton in 1998 and Microsoft was foiled in 2006 with the UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC). In fact the closest any practical form of ‘tablet’ has come to success is as a laptop hybrid where their lids are modified to swivel 180 degrees and be folded back onto the keyboard screen size up. TheThinkPad X Series has long offered this, but its appeal is decidedly niche. The pure form of tablet was dismissed long ago as ‘cool but impractical’ and that was that.

The iPad

So what changed? Apple changed. After years of speculation the company finally announced itsNewton avenger in January, the ‘iPad’. For all intents and purposes it is little more than a 10in iPod touch with extra power and it was ridiculed by everyone from the technology press to mainstream comedians. The iPad even got its own Downfall parody. One group wasn’t laughing, however: PC makers.

What they realised was Apple had managed to capitalise on the ease of use intrinsic to the iPod touch and iPhone and bring it to a sector capable of competing with cheap laptops. Never before had basic entry level computing (email, web browsing, media consumption) been made so simple and accessible to the general public at truly affordable prices. Forget having to learn Windows, Mac OS X or Linux, the iPad can be used by a two year old. PC makers realised if consumers around the world bite then Apple will have made the Nintendo Wii of computers.

The Reponse

The response from Apple’s rivals has been fierce. They are making tablets which capitalise on what the iPad lacks: a web camera, industry standard connections like USB and HDMI, expandable storage and multi-tasking (a major omission which will be addressed by the much publicised iPhone OS 4.0 software update due later this year). Billions of dollars are being poured into a market which just a few months ago barely existed, but the bigger question is: Should it?

The Pros and Cons

For all intents and purposes, no. The primary reasons tablets failed so many times in the past are still painfully present. In fact they always will be. Most obvious is a tablet requires two hands to hold securely yet two hands to operate effectively and it cannot stand up on its own. Oh dear. Furthermore, while tablets are smaller than laptops and slightly lighter than netbooks, they can’t be carried in a pocket so require an additional bag anyway. As a form factor it actually appears to fall short of the convenience of smartphones and the practicality of netbooks. Argument over.

Or is it? You see the appeal of tablets goes beyond logic because they appeal to our inner child. They tie into that futuristic vision of a single sheet of glass delivering all the information and services we could ever need. As children we didn’t dream about bulky desktop computers or laptops with their physical keyboards, we dreamt about tablets. Captain James T Kirk would never be seen holding a imaginary laptop on the deck of the Starship Enterprise, he swiped at mocked up plastic tablets before passing them off dismissively to a subordinate nearby. Of course had to pass them off, tablets are unwieldy and impractical!

That said the failure of past tablets has just been their impractical form factor, but equally because they failed to live up to our futuristic visions for them. With modern technology and – most importantly – modern finger friendly interfaces, they now can.

The Bottom Line

I started out writing this post in order to tell you whether you should or shouldn’t buy a tablet, but I’ve come to realise this is an impossible task. I’m a professional technology journalist, a critic, an analyst who looks at things logically and weighs up the pros and cons. I’d argue tablets are pointless, ridiculous creations worthy of every parody thrown at them and you’d be better off sticking to a smartphone and a netbook or laptop. Yet the appeal of owning a tablet isn’t formed from such considered roots. For those feeling the innate urge to buy a tablet, whatever I say won’t stop you, it has been hardwired into your DNA for years now. For those who are flummoxed by them, I can understand why.

The bottom line is tablets are coming yet again and they will divide consumer opinion like never before. As for me, I’m sticking with my laptop until everything becomes holographic.

Pitching to Journalists

I should have posted this a lot earlier: an interview I conducted with RunMarketing in November last year.

Contacting journalists can be a daunting prospect if you’re new to approaching the media. However, building up strong relationships with the media is critical to overall marketing success and is a must for any business. To help understand how small businesses and start-ups can best approach the media, RunMarketing spoke to freelance journalist and blogger Gordon Kelly.

Click to listen to this episode (right click and save to download)

For more on writing press releases and pitching to media, visit RunMarketing’s Resources page.

Why Google missed a beat with Buzz

Reprinted with permission from my original article featured on the TalkTalk Blog

The attraction of social networking is undeniable. Posting status updates, photo tagging, ‘poking’ and telling each other how pretty we look has been like catnip to web surfers for many years now. In fact, if Facebook were a country its 400m members would make it the third largest country in the World behind China and India and 25% larger than the United States. Understandably, as widely recognised king of the Internet, Google felt it was being left behind. It wanted to catch up, and – as is Google’s obsession – fast.

From the moment it made this decision, however, the problems started. The cleverly named Google ‘Buzz’ was launched on 9 February to widespread disdain. At best, Buzz was deemed a me-too service with little to distinguish it from Facebook or Twitter, and at worst an invasive, assumptive robot that led to genuine privacy concerns and even fears over personal safety.

Buzz off

What had gone so terribly wrong? On the outside Buzz is a simple, almost Twitter-like, status update service which allows users to share their thoughts across other Google offerings such as Picasa, Reader, Blogger and YouTube as well as integrating with Flickr and Twitter. The key message: that Buzz would bridge the gapbetween work and leisure.

The problem, to my mind, was that Google hadn’t thought enough about the ‘social’ element of ‘social networking’ – that, at heart, it is founded on people’s need to interact and to do this with all of the quirky, illogical, endearing and infuriating methods that make up the human condition. Google isn’t a company based around the quirky, illogical, endearing and infuriating. It isn’t even really a fan of the human condition. To me, Google is more of a fan of ones and zeros, of computer logic and crunching the numbers, of building by formula and that silicon chip approach is ill-fitting with the unscientific heart at the centre of social networking.

Consequently the key message was the most fundamentally misplaced: the gap between work and leisure is often there for a reason. Those who we email most often are not necessarily our friends or the most important people in our lives; in fact they may be the people we least want to know out innermost thoughts and ramblings. Computers don’t pick up on this and neither did Google.

Consequently Buzz automatically conscripted all Gmail users, their friends lists were determined by frequency of communication and their personal information spread between them. The result? Your boss was suddenly told about the slacking you did in the afternoon, your parents about how drunk you were at the weekend, you ex-partner about your latest love life revelations. Understandably, criticism flooded in and emotions ran high.

Back to the drawing board

Thankfully Google was quick to respond to feedback. Within 48 hours it had added privacy options to hide personal information from so-called ‘friends’ and introduced the most basic of human needs: the ability to block people who start following you. Another 48 hours passed and on 13 February yet more changes appeared with fundamentals such as giving users the right not to automatically follow their most emailed contacts. Your personal Picasa Web Albums and Google Reader stories of interest were also not fair game to anyone who had reason to speak with you regularly.

To anyone not using the world’s most powerful collection of servers to make their business decisions these would have been obvious omissions from the start and Buzz product manager Todd Jackson spoke to BBC News acknowledging “tens of millions” of users were “rightfully upset” and that it was “very, very sorry”. I wonder why everything was so rushed? Perhaps Google was upset that Orkut, its previous attempt to hop on the social networking bus, lags far behind Facebook with just 100m users (the majority of which, famously, live in Brazil). Perhaps it didn’t want to rely on the importance of Twitter for real time search. Or perhaps it was just a little frustrated and desperate – two very real, but unfamiliar emotions during its meteoric rise.

Google is famous for launching products unfinished, but this is dangerous with social networking. And you can’t make up for lost time by forcing a social network together out of Gmail users, anymore than you can force users of the same telephone company into a room and tell them to be friends.

The irony in all this is sublime. Google is a company obsessed with collecting and analysing data on human behaviour, yet when it came to the crunch I don’t think it really understands us at all…

PRWeek Video Podcast: the relationship between PRs & Journalists

What makes for a good relationship between PRs and journalists? I sit on the PRWeek sofa with Paul Borge, head of digital at Consolidated PR, to discuss this. Comments welcome.

How Twitter will change internet search forever

Reprinted with permission from my original article featured on the TalkTalk official blog…

The name alone instantly polarises reactions, but ‘Twitter’ looks set to have a far greater impact on our lives than anyone could have imagined.

If you haven’t heard the phrase already, ‘Real Time Search’ is likely to become one of the buzz words of 2010. What it refers to is the ability to search for information published on the Internet as it happens and it is something Twitter has perfected as it sought to organise the tens of millions of tweets sent through the service every day. Consequently Twitter users can immediately see what the ‘trending topics’ (read: hot topics) of the minute/hour/day/week are, read about developments and get involved.

High profile examples of this during 2009 include the breaking news of Michael Jackson’s death, the Hudson river plane crash and the Trafigura waste dumping scandal. In fact multiple heavyweight news organisations now scan Twitter on a daily basis for breaking news and trends in public opinion – all of which is pulling traffic away from traditional search engines. After all, why use Google to find what the weather is like in Madrid when a Twitter search can pinpoint a local who made comment on it in the last five minutes and posted a picture?

The keyword in all this is ‘relevancy’. The battle for web supremacy lies in the service which can provide the most relevant information to the user and a key aspect of this is speed. So while traditional search engines work by web search crawls which index them into a logical order, the delay can take hours when the goal is seconds. Consequently the Twitter licensing deal will initially see users Tweets integrated into Google and Bing search results (Twitter users have the right to opt out) and the impact of this is profound.

While what Ashton Kutcher or Stephen Fry had for breakfast is unlikely to trouble CNN, it means the on-location reports from (for example) the Hudson River crash would now break through search engines not the BBC or Reuters. Never before has such people power been harnessed. Of course such a system is also open to great abuse, the recent tasteless fad for spreading fake celebrity deaths on Twitter is a prime example, but with this door now open it is extremely unlikely to ever be closed.

Still not convinced? YouTube and Facebook have recently both announced plans to integrate this technology into their respective sites. So that’s Microsoft, Google, Facebook, YouTube (Google by proxy) and Twitter all focused on real time search. Resistance is understandable, but in the long run it’s futile.

First A-Team Cast Photo Doesn’t Bode Well

Comingsoon.net has managed to grab the first on set photo from the new A-Team film and it looks like yet another of our fondest childhood memories is going to be put through the mincer. Directed by Joe Carnahan, it stars Liam Neeson as John “Hannibal” Smith, Bradley Cooper as Lt. Templeton “Faceman” Peck, Sharlto Copley as Captain “Howling Mad” Murdock and Quinton ‘Rampage’ Jackson as Sergeant “B.A.” Baracus.

So the obvious question to all: why does Hannibal look like Steve Martin, Howling Mad Murdock look like Face and Face & B.A. look like no-one?! Ho and indeed hum.

via Comingsoon.net

Upgrade fever hits Mac and Windows worlds

Reprinted with permission from my original article featured on the TalkTalk official blog…

Unless you live in a bunker on the far side of the Moon (in which case, congratulations on finding your way here) then you’ll know we are entering a huge couple of months for the computer industry with the launch of Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.6 ‘Snow Leopard’. Windows 7 arrives on 22 October and Snow Leopard is already here having touched down on 28 August.

Both are expected to help drive computer sales during this wretched global recession of ours. Each has more things in common than either Microsoft or Apple fans would care to admit, but perhaps the biggest is this: both are essentially service packs with price tags.

Yes, there are plenty of counter arguments to this controversial viewpoint and many can argue Windows 7 in particular offers far more upgrade benefits to PCs than Snow Leopard does to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard users. I’d say that’s because there was far more to fix in Vista than there ever was in Leopard. Whatever your standpoint however we are ultimately looking at spring cleans not root and branch surgery.

Now before I incur too much wrath, or get into a tit for tat feature comparison battle, let me say I think this is a good thing. It’s the way software should be – or at least it’s a step in the right direction. Gone should be the days of waiting 3 – 5 years for your next OS. In fact, ideally there shouldn’t even be a ‘next’ OS. Whatever platform we choose should see continual evolution and be as seamless to the user as possible. After all, what version of Gmail are we on now or Google Search? iPhone OS may be up to its third major iteration, but new and old iPhone models alike continue to benefit.

There are practical applications too. Incremental improvements mean end users don’t need retraining on wholly different systems – they are constantly learning as changes are made little step by little step. I’d also argue there would be less resilience to a small monthly fee than singular upgrades dumped upon us at hundreds of pounds (though Snow Leopard’s £25 RRP is a notable exception here), it would also make piracy more difficult.

The web will play a huge role in this vision with real time updates, virus protection and the continual offloading of processing onto farms of remote servers as witnessed every time you perform a Internet search (you really didn’t think your computer was doing those immense calculations did you?). I believe we don’t want Windows XP, Vista, 7 and Mac OS X 10.4, 10.5, 10.6 we want ‘Windows’ and ‘Mac OS’: smoothly evolving platforms that detect your hardware and optimise appropriately for computers old and new.

Of course, there is one group where I’m largely preaching to the converted. Many Linux distributions have long worked in this way and current Linux leader Ubuntu releases upgradeable versions free of charge every six months under such fabulous code names as Fiesty Fawn, Hardy Heron and Jaunty Jackalope. Ubuntu is free, technical support and services earn it revenues.

The obvious (though not necessarily inevitable) next step to all this is Cloud Computing, a system whereby the bulk of the OS is hosted online and users can forget entirely about such matters as updates and upgrades. It also makes the bulk of an OS mobile, allowing users to hop from one computer to another as if they were all the same machine. Cloud Computing is something Google hopes we will latch onto with Chrome OS (which I discussed back in July), but its weak point is the reliance on a reliable and near-constant Internet connection.

In the meantime and despite the furore surrounding Windows 7 and Snow Leopard, I’d be happy just to see the back of these generational OSes…

Opera Unite takes home PCs into the cloud

Reprinted with permission from my original article featured on the TalkTalk official blog…

Accessibility. It is perhaps the main drive behind the first wave of Cloud computing. It’s something that the exciting new Google Chrome OS is keen to promote and a factor which will come to simplify the lives of millions. In short it means having the ability to access your digital content from any web connected computer in any place at any time. Think of the possibilities. Never would you forget that important document or presentation, never would you be caught short without our favourite music, movies, television shows or eBooks. Sure, Cloud Computing hopes to achieve this by storing all our information securely online but its widespread acceptance will be measured in years, not weeks or months. Likewise expe

Accessibility. It is perhaps the main drive behind the first wave of Cloud computing. It’s something that the exciting new Google Chrome OS is keen to promote and a factor which will come to simplify the lives of millions. In short it means having the ability to access your digital content from any web connected computer in any place at any time.

Think of the possibilities. Never would you forget that important document or presentation, never would you be caught short without our favourite music, movies, television shows or eBooks. Sure, Cloud Computing hopes to achieve this by storing all our information securely online but its widespread acceptance will be measured in years, not weeks or months. Likewise expensive web servers can perform much the same task but they require technical expertise and ongoing monthly costs. So what if there was an easier and free way to do all this right now…?

This is what ‘Opera Unite’ looks to do. It is the brainchild of Opera, the innovative software developer behind the browser of the same name. The two minute tutorial video above provides a simple walkthrough of how it works but the fundamental point is you can easily share and remotely access folders on your computer using nothing more than the latest version of the Opera web browser.

To provide user security the content you share can be set with three access levels: public, limited and private and Opera Unite will create a URL and optional password for you that can be passed onto friends, family and colleagues. So what can you share?

On the most basic level documents, music and photos but more advanced users can host websites, chat rooms and even create a secure environment to securely exchange data. And Opera assures us this is only the beginning.

“Today, we are opening the full potential of the Web for everyone,” said Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner at the launch of the service. “Technology moves in distinct cycles. PCs decentralized computing away from large mainframes. Opera Unite now decentralizes and democratizes the cloud… consumers have the flexibility to choose private and efficient ways of sharing information. We believe Opera Unite is one of our most significant innovations yet, because it changes forever the fundamental fabric of the Web.”

Needless to say this is a big claim but Tetzchner may not be far wrong. Certainly there are limits with the inherent simplicity of Opera Unite – namely the PC hosting the information needs to remain on and the Opera browser must be used – but it does indeed flip around the traditional fabric of the web. After all, in the beginning the internet was solely about consuming the data provided by others, then ‘Web 2.0′ brought social networking and user generated content. Now the consumer friendly approach of Opera Unite could drive a third stage: decentralisation and accessibility.

Or in other words: your data under your control available anyplace, anywhere, anytime.

Google Chrome OS and what it means for you

Reprinted with permission from my original article featured on the TalkTalk official blog…

There is a new operating system in town and it’s built by Google…

This month the search giant announced ‘Chrome OS’ – a strange name you’d think because it is named after the Google Chrome web browser. Surely what is usually just one component of an operating system should not be the inspiration for it? After all you don’t see Microsoft announcing ‘Internet Explorer OS’.

In actual fact however this is exactly what Chrome OS is, an operating system named after a web browser which is its inspiration and core. The argument is simple: research shows users now spend the majority of their time on a computer using the web browser and Google believes elements traditionally outside it can be seamlessly integrated in time. This strategy includes an impending redesign of Google Docs which it hopes will tempt users away from Microsoft Office.

So is Google OS simply an operating system which loads a web browser? In short we don’t know. What we do know it is will be open source so anyone can develop for it and that it will be built upon Linux, the same core behind the increasingly popular Ubuntu platform. Google says the benefits of Chrome OS will be extremely fast boot times and much faster operation on old and low powered PCs compared to Windows.

Moving your data onto the internet means that users will be able to access it from any computer and the theory is it should be much more secure with the might of Google looking after it (conspiracy theories aside). Furthermore, if your computer breaks or is stolen then that data is safe. Critically it will also be free.

The drawbacks? We simply don’t know enough about Chrome OS yet. Google recently published a Chrome OS FAQ which confirmed major PC makers such as Acer, Asus, HP, Lenovo and Toshiba are interested but up to now we haven’t been presented with so much as a screenshot. Google Gears will allow common online tasks such as Gmail and Google Docs to be used offline but it is still awaiting widespread industry acceptance. It is also unclear how Google will tackle popular pastimes such as gaming with Chrome OS though the OnLive Cloud based streaming model may become paramount here.

The relevance of Chrome OS however is clear. Google sees the future of computing online. As the most powerful company on the Internet that could be expected but the cost savings, performance benefits and accessibility of information online does make for a compelling argument. That said, I would stress expectations are tempered, at least initially. The first version of Chrome OS will not arrive until the second half of 2010 and Google is a company which famously likes to beta test in public so expect things to be extremely rough and ready at first.

In the meantime, whether Google or Microsoft has the right approach, there is one indisputable fact which cannot be ignored: in future we’re going to be spending even more of our time online and what we do with it will become ever more advanced. So be sure to grab yourself a fast and reliable broadband connection and hold on tight!

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