It is surely inconceivable that Manroland will not
continue in some form. Surely???
That said, up until Friday it seemed inconceivable that
this bastion of the German equipment engineering industry with a history
stretching back more than 160 years would be allowed to fall into insolvency.
Intrigued to see
that CeWe has ambitions for the online greetings card business with its new Card Town
offering.
Given Moonpig’s
envy-inducing growth and profit performance it’s little wonder that so many
others are keen to gain a piece of the personalised greetings card pie. Such is
the success of Moonpig, I’ve even seen one company offering an online poster
service that uses the tongue-in-cheek strapline ‘bigger than Moonpig’.
Is the newspaper printing market as ripe for
consolidation as web offset was? (And perhaps continues to be.)
News that Guardian Media Group is considering its options re the
future printing of The Guardian and Observer titles, with talk of a partnership
with Trinity Mirror mooted, is not a surprise. What is surprising, especially
with the 20:20 vision of hindsight, is that a media group that is pinning so much on digital content chose to spend the
best part of �100m setting up its own print operations just six years ago.
Saw a sobering tweet the other day that
gave me pause for thought about the way print touches pretty much every aspect
of a person’s life, and death.
It came from Mike Handley at
Graphic Results in Belper (@graphic_results) and the tweet said: “Today sorted
out the printing of the order of service for the funeral of a 23 year lad, our
thoughts are with the family.”
Will the Prosper inkjet system “save” Kodak? Industry
analyst Andrew Tribute believes it can.
In this video posted on Kodak’s B2B YouTube channel Andy asserts
that Prosper and the associated technologies around it will change the Kodak
business model: “Whatever’s happening on the financial side, this is going to
sort it, it’ll get solved,” he states, while waxing lyrical about Kodak’s
overall offering compared with what’s available from competitors.
Gosh, aren’t things getting busy in the world of
web-to-print?
Most intrigued to read about Tangent’s plans to create some
sort of B2B print supersite (or should that be superwebsite) with its Printed.com
offering, which will replace the Digital Print Partnership. The bit of Tangent
that includes the print ops grew sales by 27% to �17.6m in its most recent
results, wonder what sort of growth they can put on with this revamped
offering?
A curious juxtaposition occurred by chance on the bus
home last night. I was reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs in all
its casebound, 650-plus page glory. The bloke sitting next to me was reading
The Guardian on his iPad.
This story about Creative FX carrying out a bit of
transformational vehicle wrapping on a Rover Metro brought back, erm, happy
memories of my own metallic green variant of said car many moons ago. It also reminded
me of something snazzy I saw the other week, while doing some research for
PrintWeek’s recent Wide-Format Report.
© MA Business & Leisure Limited 2013. Published by MA Business & Leisure Limited, Jesses Farm, Snow Hill, Dinton, SP3 5HN, a company registered in England and Wales no. 02923699. MA Business & Leisure is part of the Mark Allen Group.