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Hewlett-Packard is announcing two projects
at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday it hopes will give new life to print–books and magazines in particular. Additions to two projects, BookPrep and MagCloud, let content that’s been too expensive or difficult to print get out to readers more easily.

Andrew Bolwell, director of new business initiatives at HP, told me these products are based on an understand that the publishing industry is undergoing a fundamental shift, which he sees as the move away from printing things ahead of time, distributing them to locations in the hopes that people will buy them, and then disposing of the products that are unsold, into the more contemporary model of printing on demand. Each year in the U.S., Bolwell says, 2 billion magazines, 62 percent of all printed, end up unsold and in landfills.

Books are printed in advance in the same way, for the most part, and unsold copies are likewise destroyed. Furthermore, most of the books ever printed are unavailable to buy: Bolwell says only 4 percent of the 90 million books ever printed are available to purchase.

BookPrep

HP is set to rescue old books, making them fit to print again.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

HP’s BookPrep is built to address that. The service takes in scans of book pages, cleans them up automatically, and preps them for sale as print-on-demand editions.

The service, which has been in testing for about a year at a university library, is getting some high-profile partners, and a business model. The service now gets scanned books from Google and from the Internet Archive, and sells its books on Amazon.

The books are printed by various on-demand book printing houses. The covers are done on HP Indigo printers, but the book pages themselves are created on who-knows-what printer. Bolwell doesn’t care, as the revenue comes from the sale of the books via Amazon royalties. HP says it will share a portion of its revenues back to source of each book’s scan–in most cases, a library.

Unlike the Archive’s more disruptive Book Server project, which is about making current books available electronically online, BookPrep is about older, public-domain books. And the BookPrep service does not index the actual text in books–it leaves that to Google, Amazon, and the Internet Archive. All BookPrep does is take crufty scans of old books and make them presentable enough for print. It also can create nice covers for print editions.

So if you want a print edition of the 1887 White House Cook Book, this is how a surviving, aging copy of the book can appear new again.

MagCloud

The company also has a way for today's magazine publishers to print for less.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

The MagCloud business addresses magazine printing. It’s a custom magazine printing site, like Lulu but for glossy magazines, that’s been live since February. The service lets anyone create their own print publication, and customize single copies for users based on location or other factors. When a reader buys an issue, MagCloud prints their copy at a printer as close to their location as possible, to save shipping costs and time.

The new addition to the product is a link into Wikia blogs. Users can now print “magazines” of Wikia pages, and the service will format them so they look nice. It reminds me of Offbeat Guides to an extent.

MagCloud isn’t a complete magainze publishing system in the sense that it helps people create periodical publications. It doesn’t do subscription mangement nor does it automate print advertising. But it does look like a nice way to get a fancy-looking color magazine-like publication created and distributed easily.

MagCloud publications are printed on HP’s Indigo printers, but HP says it’s agnostic to printing engine.

Taping up old pages

Bolwell has a modern yet conflicted apprecation for print, which is not suprising for a guy who works at a one of the largest printer manufacturers. He belives that people will continue to love and want printed products, that, “especially for rich four-color content, the experience of the printed page is the preferred way of reading content.” However, he also believes that the process for creating a printed product must change: “It’s only a matter of time until the entire [magazine] industry moves to print on demand,” he adds.

Both BookPrep and MagCloud seem to be Band-Aids for patients that are likely terminal. The demand for printed books and magazines won’t vanish tomorrow. Nor will it for newspapers, but that’s an industry even Bolwell doesn’t think printing technology should try to fix. There’s clearly money left in printing things, esepcially if it can be done more efficiently. The question is to what level this industry, even streamlined, will decline, and how fast it will get there. I hope Bolwell has exit plans for this business, and I don’t mean selling it to Google.

Originally posted at Rafe’s Radar

Here is the original post:
HP can’t save print. But big props for trying

Hewlett-Packard is announcing two projects Wednesday at the Web 2.0 Summit that it hopes will give new life to print–books and magazines in particular.

BookPrep and MagCloud let content that’s been too expensive or difficult to print reach readers more easily.

Andrew Bolwell, director of new business initiatives at HP, told me these products are based on an understanding that the publishing industry is undergoing a fundamental shift–which he sees as the move away from printing items ahead of time, distributing them to locations in the hopes that people will buy them, and then disposing of the products that are unsold–into the more contemporary model of printing on demand. Each year in the U.S., 2 billion magazines, or 62 percent of all those printed, end up unsold and in landfills, Bolwell said.

Books are printed in advance in the same way, for the most part, and unsold copies are likewise destroyed. Furthermore, most of the books ever printed are unavailable to buy: Bolwell said only 4 percent of the 90 million books ever printed are available to purchase.

BookPrep

HP is set to rescue old books, making them fit to print again.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

HP’s BookPrep is built to address that. The service takes in scans of book pages, cleans them up automatically, and preps them for sale as print-on-demand paperback editions.

The service, which has been in testing for about a year at a university library, is getting some high-profile partners and a business model. The service now gets scanned books from Google and from the Internet Archive, and sells its books on Amazon.com.

The books are printed by various on-demand book printing houses. The covers are done on HP Indigo printers, but the book pages themselves are created on who-knows-what printer. Bolwell doesn’t care, as the revenue comes from the sale of the books via Amazon royalties. HP said it will share a portion of its revenue with the source of each book’s scan–in most cases, a library.

Unlike the Archive’s more disruptive Book Server project, which is about making current books available online, BookPrep is about older, public-domain books. And the BookPrep service does not index the actual text in books–it leaves that to Google, Amazon, and the Internet Archive. All BookPrep does is take crufty scans of old books and make them presentable enough for print. It also can create nice covers for print editions.

So if you want a print edition of the 1887 White House Cook Book, this is how a surviving, aging copy of the book can appear new again.

MagCloud

The company also has a way for today's magazine publishers to print for less.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

The MagCloud business addresses magazine printing. It’s a custom magazine printing site, like Lulu but for glossy magazines, that’s been live since February. The service lets people create their own print publication and customize single copies for users based on location or other factors. When a reader buys an issue, MagCloud prints a copy at a printer as close to the person’s location as possible to save shipping costs and time.

The new addition to the product is a link into Wikia blogs. Users can now print “magazines” of Wikia pages, and the service will format them so they look nice. It reminds me of Offbeat Guides to an extent.

MagCloud isn’t a complete magazine publishing system in the sense that it helps people create periodical publications. It doesn’t do subscription management nor does it automate print advertising. But it does look like a nice way to get a fancy-looking color magazine-like publication created and distributed easily.

MagCloud publications are printed on HP’s Indigo printers, but HP said it’s agnostic to printing engine.

Taping up old pages

Bolwell has a modern yet conflicted appreciation for print, which is not surprising for someone who works at a one of the largest printer manufacturers. He believes that people will continue to love and want printed products and that, “especially for rich four-color content, the experience of the printed page is the preferred way of reading content.” However, he also believes that the process for creating a printed product must change: “It’s only a matter of time until the entire (magazine) industry moves to print on demand,” he adds.

Both BookPrep and MagCloud seem to be Band-Aids for likely terminal patients. The demand for printed books and magazines won’t vanish tomorrow. Nor will the demand for newspapers evaporate suddenly, though that’s an industry even Bolwell doesn’t think printing technology should try to fix.

The question is to what level the book and magazine printing industries, even streamlined, will decline, and how fast they will get there. I hope Bolwell has exit plans for this business, and I don’t mean selling it to Google.

Originally posted at Rafe’s Radar

Source:
HP can’t save print industry, but big props for trying

Evan Williams (left) and John Battelle (right)

(Credit:
James Martin/CNET)

SAN FRANCISCO–In anticipation of an onstage interview with Twitter CEO Evan Williams at the Web 2.0 Summit on Tuesday afternoon, conference organizer and Federated Media CEO John Battelle told the audience to expect “a surprise” during the talk.

Turns out that “surprise” was actually a recently unearthed video clip of Williams in 1994, explaining the Internet on behalf of a company called Illumination Labs and sporting a haircut that looked like it belonged on the set of ’90s alterna-teen flick “Empire Records.” (No, we don’t have a snapshot of it yet.)

Williams didn’t really say a whole lot else about where Twitter’s going, beyond what the world already knows: it’s been growing fast. It turned down a buyout offer from Facebook. It just raised a ton of money. It still hasn’t disclosed a long-term revenue model.

Evan Williams

(Credit:
James Martin/CNET)

“It’s not like we’re spending our days looking in the couch cushions for the elusive revenue model, but obviously we’ve done a lot of thinking about it,” Williams said, declining to comment on the potential of search deals with Google or Microsoft. “I can’t tell you exactly what the model is, but it’s pretty obvious to you that there may be some advertising that makes sense…there’s a lot of commercial activity on Twitter today, there’s a lot of brand marketers who use Twitter today, and it works. We think of Twitter (as) not a social network, it’s an information network…a substantial part of that is commercial and theoretically monetizable information.”

Williams, who previously founded Pyra Labs and sold its flagship Blogger product to Google, took over as CEO of Twitter from fellow co-founder Jack Dorsey last year. Dorsey, who remains Twitter chairman, is working on a new mobile commerce start-up called Square.

In his talk at Web 2.0 Summit, Williams mentioned new features like user-generated “lists,” currently in beta, and said that they may end up replacing the site’s current (and much-maligned) “suggested user” list altogether. (“It’s gone on too long, and I desperately want to kill it or evolve it.”) He also said that “some things we’re launching” may counteract recent slowdowns in Twitter’s U.S. Web-based traffic, which was growing exponentially not so long ago.

“We are seeing slowing of growth in some areas and accelerating growth in other areas. Twitter is very hard to measure, even for us,” Williams said. “The biggest two areas that we’re seeing growth is on mobile and internationally.” Last week, the company inked new mobile deals in India and Japan; currently, its five biggest markets are the U.S., the U.K., Japan, Brazil, and Indonesia, which has been “growing like crazy lately.”

So what does he think of the other players in the real-time Web? He’s not sure what to make of Google Wave (“I sure as hell don’t know what Google Wave is going to be. I haven’t wrapped my head around it yet”) but underscored that in Twitter’s early days he wasn’t sure what that would turn out to be either. And as for Facebook, he shrugged off speculation that the social-networking giant started aping Twitter when it was unable to actually buy it.

“I don’t know how Facebook’s feature prioritization works. I suspect that they came to a lot of the same conclusions we did,” Williams said. “In the global sense, I’m pretty sure the world is big enough for Facebook and Twitter, and fundamentally I think they’re good at different things. Facebook is phenomenal at communications among people who know each other.”

Facebook ultimately purchased a far smaller streaming-information start-up, FriendFeed, this summer.

“We had a few conversations with our friends in Palo Alto (Facebook) and ultimately I just didn’t see a reason to sell if that opportunity would have presented itself because it’s not the point,” he continued regarding the failed acquisition. “The point is really to see what we can build. We believe very strongly in that at Twitter, and enabling the open exchange of information is a good thing for the world.”

It’s his usual schpiel. Aside from the Nirvana-era haircut, there wasn’t a whole lot to tweet about here.

Originally posted at The Social

Source:
Not much to tweet about in Twitter CEO talk

Yahoo revenue is still down compared to last year, but stabilized in the third quarter while profits surged.

(Credit:
Yahoo)

Updated 1:40 p.m. PDT with additional details from the release, and throughout at 3:45 p.m. PDT following the earnings call.

Yahoo’s cost-cutting moves this year are starting to show up in the bottom line, as the company’s third-quarter profit exceeded analyst expectations by a wide margin.

Revenue is still declining at Yahoo, which recorded $1.6 billion in revenue, down 12 percent from last year. Excluding traffic acquisition costs paid to partners, revenue was $1.1 billion, in line with analyst estimates.

But following several rounds of layoffs and belt-tightening, Yahoo’s net income came in at $186 million, a 244 percent increase over last year’s third-quarter net income of $54 million or $0.13 in earnings per share. And when you factor out special items, net income was $213 million or $0.15 in earnings per share. Analysts were looking for $0.07 in earnings per share on average, and even the most optimistic estimates didn’t cross $0.10.

Some of the unexpected increase can be chalked up to Yahoo’s decision to sell its 1 percent stake in Alibaba.com during the quarter, on which it gained about $98 million. UBS analyst Brian Pitz estimated that one-time gain accounted for about $0.03 in earnings per share, according to Tech Trader Daily.

But Yahoo has shed 2,000 jobs since the third quarter of 2008, now employing 13,200 people around the world. It has signaled a willingness to cut further, currently in the process of shedding divisions of the company that it no longer considers important to focus on others.

CFO Tim Morse–who led the call unexpectedly after CEO Carol Bartz came down with the flu–said that Yahoo will continue to wring costs from anything and everything. “There’s a change occurring at Yahoo that will value that kind of work,” he said, referring to efforts to find more efficient ways of operating Yahoo’s core properties.

Yahoo’s results will give further credence to the notion that Internet advertising is coming back after a dreadful year. Google’s financial results last week signaled such a shift was in place, and while Yahoo isn’t nearly as strong in search advertising, it is a major player in display advertising, which was not expected to recover as quickly as search advertising.

Morse said that Yahoo is starting to see some “loosening” of ad spending budgets as the economy recovers. Still, Yahoo is still a long way away from the revenue heights it reached last year and the needle is not moving in the right direction just yet.

Search advertising declined by 19 percent in the third quarter to hit $354 million on Yahoo’s owned and operated sites, while display advertising declined 8 percent to $399 million. The good-news/bad-news scenario here is that while the rate of decline in the display business is slowing down, the rate of decline in the search business is increasing, perhaps fallout from Yahoo’s decision to enter into a pending agreement with Microsoft to outsource search on Yahoo sites.

Morse, however, preferred to focus on the results as compared to the second quarter of this year. Looking at it that way, display advertising grew slightly and search advertising declined slightly. That’s not anything to get excited about, but it’s not as bad a picture as painted by the year-over-year comparisons.

Getting back to the Microsoft deal, Morse said Yahoo still expects the deal to close early next year, reiterating the support the companies received Monday from the advertising industry. Yahoo knows the migration will take a while; it expects to move only one or two significant markets to the Microsoft search technology in 2009 if approved soon. However, Morse wryly noted that not only has Yahoo done this before–when it introduced its Panama search ad platform in 2007–but many of the engineers that worked on Panama now work for Microsoft.

The company said it expected to record between $1.6 billion and $1.7 billion in revenue during the upcoming fourth quarter, which would be a slight decrease compared to the fourth quarter of 2008. However, coming into the third quarter the financial community was only expecting Yahoo to record $1.2 billion during the fourth quarter.

Originally posted at Relevant Results

Go here to read the rest:
Yahoo profits up, revenue still declining

Are Web users going to get tired of paying for kitschy virtual items to pimp out each others’ profiles? Social-site creator Ning sure doesn’t think so. On Tuesday, it announced the debut of its virtual goods platform, so that network owners can offer virtual profile items for sale (much like Facebook does) and pull in half the revenue generated.

“From giving each other bloody chainsaws to shock troop dog tags, our members are having a blast recognizing each other for their contributions to the Lost Zombies Ning Network,” said Scot Leach, founder of the ‘Lost Zombies‘ network on Ning, in a release provided by the company. “Creating custom gifts around our shared love of everything zombie adds a new level of fun and excitement for our members.”

Some analysts have estimated that the virtual goods market will hit $1 billion this year.

Participating networks’ members can buy the gifts for one another and they’ll be displayed on the recipient’s profiles. Payments are processed with PayPal, and then revenues are split 50-50 between Ning and the site owner after PayPal’s transaction fees are taken into account. But Ning site owners won’t be able to price their own gifts–all will cost 75 “credits,” or approximately $1.50–something that might not go over so well with site owners who want to sell really expensive bloody chainsaws.

Ning, which says that a total of 1.6 million “networks” have been created with its technology and counts 36 million active users overall, launched a third-party applications platform last month.

Originally posted at The Social

Here is the original:
Bloody chainsaws? Ning launches virtual gifts platform