Blog Archives




 

  • Making More With Less
    By Bob Hall - Monday May 9, 2011
    Last week I had the pleasure of speaking to a group of franchise leaders at the Ricoh Franchise Print Council in San Francisco. It was a little strange, since I had known some of them for many years and had learned a great deal of what I know about the quick and small commercial printing industry from them. One of the topics I addressed was the changing face of both the franchise segment and the top companies as monitored in QP’s annual Top 100 survey over the past 20 years. For the franchise segment, the total number of franchise systems declined from 23 in 1991 to 14 in 2001 to six in 2011. Of course, not all of the 1991 systems have disappeared. Many have been acquired by the remaining systems and operate under their...

  • Keyboard Nostalgia?
    By Bob Hall - Monday May 2, 2011
    If I were to mention Royal, you’d probably immediately think of a wedding. Here in West Virginia, if I were to mention Remington, the first thought would probably be shotguns. However, I’m talking about typewriters – for those of you who remember these now ancient machines. In their day, typewriters were the bee’s knees of technology. The steno pool morphed into the typing pool, and this mechanical marvel ruled the world of written communications for decades. I was even forced to take a typing course in high school, although I suspect it was as much about my handwriting as it was about course requirements. Nowadays if you want extra copies of a document, you just hit the print button. In the typewriter era, you...

  • How Do You Define a Small Printer?
    By Bob Hall - Monday April 25, 2011
    Last week I got the inaugural copy of NAPL’s [P]REVIEW magazine, a quarterly publication for association members. It was pretty slick with a lot more information aimed at the smaller and medium sized printer than in previous NAPL publications. That is a good thing, since these printers make up a very significant portion of NAPL’s membership. The printing industry is often segregated into categories according to the number of employees, amount of sales, or size of equipment. What NAPL’s new magazine has done is to emphasize the idea of small businesses. A couple of years back, Heidelberg advanced that same notion by separating the industry into large corporate type printers and smaller entrepreneurial printers. At...

  • Portal Power
    By Bob Hall - Monday April 11, 2011
    If any of you have logged on to www.quickprinting.com since last Friday, you probably were a little surprised when the MyPrintResource site popped up instead. Don’t worry; no glitches here. MyPrintResource is the new portal for all three magazines in the Cygnus Graphics Media Group—Quick Printing, Printing News, and Wide-Format Imaging. The new site combines the power and resources of all three brands into one “super” location. At MyPrintResource.com you can find all the latest industry news for all segments of the printing and graphic arts industry. You can also access articles from all three magazines, not to mention videos, blogs, podcasts, and much, much more. One of the major strengths of this new portal is the ability to...

  • Pioneers and Settlers
    By Bob Hall - Monday April 4, 2011
    Today is my birthday. Don’t ask which one because I won’t tell. Let’s just say it’s the new 40 or something like that. By no stretch of the imagination can I be counted among the elders of the industry—those folks who kicked the whole quick printing thing off many years ago. Sadly, many of them are no longer with us. Most recently we lost Frank Schochet, the founder of the Insty-Prints franchise system which was later folded into the Allegra Network. A couple of years back Karen got to spend time with Frank at a celebration in Shreveport, LA, for Jim and Gene Elliot’s 25th anniversary as Insty-Prints franchisees. She found him “ornery, challenging, and an absolute delight.†That sounds a...

  • Expense or Investment?
    By Bob Hall - Tuesday March 29, 2011
    Shortly after we climbed through 10,000 feet, I took out my netbook and logged onto Gogo to re-check some statistics for the keynote presentation I was to give the next day at the PostNet convention in Las Vegas. I usually don't wait until the last minute to finalize presentations, but I had been on the road at the Vision 3 Summit and On Demand in the days immediately prior to this late night flight. After confirming some numbers, I double checked a quote from NAPL's new State of the Industry report: "We must clearly distinguish between what's an expense and what's an investment in our business." While doing so, I realized that I had just spent nearly two weeks observing people who were investing in their businesses and in...

  • 20/20 Eyesight at Vision 3
    By Bob Hall - Monday March 21, 2011
    As any writer worth his or her salt knows, there can never be a “first annual” anything. There are only second, third, fourth, etc annual events – of course that hasn’t stopped giddy copywriters from crowing about first annual happenings. So, let’s call the Vision 3 Summit an inaugural event and then crow about it. Some 440 printers, vendors, and industry luminaries showed up last week at the Marriott resort in Palm Desert, CA. They were greeted with sunny weather. They also brought a considerably sunnier attitude to the event than I have seen for a while. The educational program was varied and meaty and the sessions were very well attended. Oh, sure, some folks played hooky for a couple of hours to get in some greens time, but...

  • Mix and Mingle
    By Bob Hall - Monday March 14, 2011
    Its going to be a busy two weeks. As you read this I am in Palm Desert, CA, at the Vision 3 Summit with Printing News editor Mark Vruno. After that wraps up, I’ll be taking a red-eye flight home for a couple of days before leaving for On Demand in Washington, DC. As soon as that finishes, I’m off to Las Vegas to speak at the PostNet convention. I’ll be returning home on another red-eye on Saturday the 26th and plan to sleep most of Sunday. Already this year I’ve been to printing events in Boca Raton, Houston, and Dallas. Others from the Cygnus Graphics Media group have attended events and meetings in Atlanta, Las Vegas, and Orlando and the year is not even one-quarter over. One of the reasons we do this much traveling is that it is...

  • Cross-Media at the Crossroads
    By Bob Hall - Monday March 7, 2011
    When On Demand first came on the trade show scene, digital printing was just getting up a head of steam. The debate over digital’s place in the printing industry was lively and the offset faction was aggressively defensive. Today, it is obvious that digital and offset need to co-exist and both need to face the reality of communication alternatives that don’t involve marks on paper. That’s what makes this year’s On Demand particularly interesting. The latest On Demand add-on is the Publishing Xchange Conference which, according to the promoters, will bring together “for the first time the full expanse of Digital Publishing, Digital Print, and Enterprise Information Management.†(I have no idea why...

  • Ricoh Emerges as Heidelberg Digital Partner
    By Bob Hall - Tuesday March 1, 2011
    Last week I noted that Heidelberg would soon announce a new hybrid offset/digital solution which “is expected to team a Heidelberg Speedmaster SM 52 with a digital color output device in the 80 to 90 ppm range—presumably from a current digital vendor.” We now know that the digital vendor is Ricoh and the digital device is their Ricoh Pro C901 Graphic Arts Edition. We also know where you can first see that solution – at the digi:media trade show in Dusseldorf. I’m not planning on packing my bags to get to the April show, but am interested in what the reaction will be to this new hybrid approach from Heidelberg. As I noted last week, this idea of paring digital and offset devices is nothing really new. In fact vendors from both...

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