Tag: print

Impact Lab > print
Breakthrough Thinking, Ecological Products, Green Friendly, Historical Perspectives, Latest Trend

$2 erasable e-paper aims to replace paper

i2r_paper-580x195

e-Paper goes a long ways at replacing current paper sheets.

The paperless office is a myth. We all still need to print stuff out occasionally, but a new form of e-paper may go a long way towards replacing the paper sheets we put in our printers and use once before recycling.

The new flexible e-paper is called i2R e-Paper and can be printed on using a thermal printer. It can also be wiped in the same way, or just by supplying electricity to the sheet. That reuse could save on a lot of paper, especially as one sheet is good for 260 re-prints and they only cost $2 each at A4 size…

Continue reading… “$2 erasable e-paper aims to replace paper”

Breakthrough Thinking, Food, New Inventions, Science & Technology News

The Future of Food – 3D Food Printers Will One Day Allow Users to ‘Print’ Their Meals

frenchfab

“Printing” meals using “raw food inks” inside syringes.

The team at Cornell University’s Computational Synthesis Lab (CCSL) are building a 3D food printer, as part of the bigger Fab@home project, which they hope one day will be as commonplace as the microwave oven or blender.  They are developing a commercially-available “3D food printer” that would allow users to “print” meals using “raw food ‘inks'” inside syringes.

 

Continue reading… “The Future of Food – 3D Food Printers Will One Day Allow Users to ‘Print’ Their Meals”

Education, Entertainment, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

More Bibliophiles Turning to Digital Readers

ereader

E-book sales are up 193% over a year ago.

Jamie Groves has doubled his reading — up to more than 40 books a year — since he began downloading e-books on his Kindle.Sandra Hines calls her Nook her “best Mother’s Day present ever,” after initially worrying, “It wouldn’t feel like I was reading a real book.”

 

Continue reading… “More Bibliophiles Turning to Digital Readers”

Art, Breakthrough Thinking, Great New Product, Health & Fitness

Cornucopia: Print Your Food with MIT’s Food Printer

food-printer 543
Print your food!

Hungry? Don’t just harvest food … print ‘em! Behold, Cornucopia, a “food printer” concept by Amit Zoran and MIT Media Lab:

While digital media has transformed every facet of society, the fundamental technologies we encounter in the kitchen today provide only incremental improvements to the tools we have been using for hundreds of years. In order to bring our cooking technologies to the digital age, we have developed three concept designs…

Continue reading… “Cornucopia: Print Your Food with MIT’s Food Printer”

Business, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

eBook Sales Will Overtake Print Books Within Five Years

ebooks

Sony says sales of ebooks will overtake print books within the next five years.

Steve Haber, president of Sony’s digital reading business division, said: “Within five years there will be more digital content sold than physical content. Three years ago, I said within ten years but I realised that was wrong – it’s within five.”

Art

‘Your Photo on Canvas’ Website Turns Photos into Art for Less

5 photos on canvas 470

Search online for canvas prints — those art-gallery-like, huge renderings of your photos — and there are dozens of choices. Specialists such as Canvas on Demand, Photogonia and CanvasPop and traditional photo labs such as Mpix, Shutterfly and Snapfish all let you upload your images and put them directly onto stretched canvas. And the pricing rarely differs: 16-by-20s for about $90.
John Doe (his real name), the owner of newcomer Your Photo on Canvas, is trying to get atop the market with one of the most popular marketing concepts of all time — drastically lower prices.
His website still offers 16-by-20s at the standard $90, but he has a marketing arrangement with retail giant Costco offering the same prints via Costco’s website (and 50 California Costco retail stores) for $39.99. (The prices on other sizes are also dramatically lower than competitors’.)
Great positioning on Google (his site pops up near the top of search results), word-of-mouth and the Costco arrangement have paid off. Sales for privately held Your Photo on Canvas have exploded. In March, for instance, Doe saw $210,000 in sales, up from $9,000 at the same time last year. He’s doing an average 250 canvas prints a day.
Canvas prints are pricey, premium products, yet Doe can chalk up his good fortune to the recession. Before starting Your Photo on Canvas, Doe for 20 years made canvas reproductions of fine art for art galleries.
“But the gallery business got hit really hard,” he says. “Instead of making prints for galleries, I decided to go directly to consumers, with their photos.”
Zvi Margalit, a sales rep for a San Francisco-based tech company, ordered his first canvas print after seeing the team from Your Photo on Canvas demonstrate their offerings at his local Costco.
“The colors were so vivid and real,” he says.
He picked up a huge 60-by-40 print for about $200 and says he saved a great deal because he didn’t have to get it framed.
“I ran over to the framing store around the corner before I ordered it, just to check, and they told me it would cost $400 just to frame it,” he says. “With a canvas print, I didn’t have to spend time and money hanging a heavy picture on the wall.”
Joe Schmidt, co-founder of Raleigh, N.C.-based Canvas on Demand, one of the Web’s most popular canvas retailers, started in business seven years ago at a time when “There were just two of us out there, just us and a guy out of his garage. Those were good days.”
Still, he says that even with the increased competition, his company grew 20% in 2009 and has made more than 350,000 canvas prints to date. “We ship out thousands a day.”
As more photo enthusiasts find out about canvas prints (or “gallery wraps,” as they’re also called) sales are up not just for the specialists but for traditional photo labs, as well.
Mpix, a unit of popular photography lab Miller’s Professional Imaging, says canvas sales are up 130% this year. “The growth is unbelievable,” says Joe Dellasega, Mpix’s marketing director.
Chris Chute, an analyst at researcher IDC, says that canvas prints account for just 2.5% of the $400 million photo accessory market, but he sees that growing in coming years.
“Buying a print on canvas adds more dimensionality to the image and gives it a more artistic bent than you could ever get with a frame and glass,” he says.
“In the old days, the only way you could get a good family portrait for the wall was to hire someone to paint it. The technology makes this much more accessible.”
Cranking out canvas
It also makes it easier for mom-and-pops to enter the business. “The cost to actually produce a canvas and get started in the market is not incredibly expensive,” says Schmidt. “Anyone can get a printer and produce one nice canvas. The difference is whether you can produce a thousand in a day and have all of them be of impeccable quality.”
The crowded market for canvas prints does more harm than good, Chute says. “This is a more pricey product, and if it turns out badly, you’re less likely to order a second one.”
Doe has a 50,000-square-foot facility in Anaheim, where he does nothing but make canvas prints.
The process begins with the photo enthusiast uploading a picture to Doe’s website, where it is pulled down by a computer technician and tweaked, and gets a bar code added for delivery. It is then sent to a large industrial inkjet printer that compiles several images from different orders onto large canvas sheets. The images then are chopped up and stretched separately onto wood frames. Then the print is packed up and sent out for delivery.
Doe says he saw bigger revenue when the art business was good but that by next year, his photo business likely will surpass what he was seeing from the galleries.

Search online for canvas prints — those art-gallery-like, huge renderings of your photos — and there are dozens of choices. Specialists such as Canvas on Demand, Photogonia and CanvasPop and traditional photo labs such as Mpix, Shutterfly and Snapfish all let you upload your images and put them directly onto stretched canvas. And the pricing rarely differs: 16-by-20s for about $90.

John Doe (his real name), the owner of newcomer Your Photo on Canvas, is trying to get atop the market with one of the most popular marketing concepts of all time — drastically lower prices.

Continue reading… “‘Your Photo on Canvas’ Website Turns Photos into Art for Less”

Breakthrough Thinking, Business, Corporate Manipulation, Current Events, Great New Product, New Discoveries, New Inventions, People Making a Difference

Late For Work? No Problem! Check In With Your Fake Fingerprint

Fingerprint faux 15342

Getting fingered on the job.

A special silica film that can help white-collar employees check in on time at office has been selling well in China recently.

One of its users is a woman surnamed Liu who works for an advertisement company in Fuzhou, capital of Fujian province. Often late for work, Ms. Liu has suffered heavy fines, paying as much as 200 yuan in October alone.

However, she said her “suffering” ended as soon as she spotted the silica film which help latecomers to fool their office’s finger print check-in system. Ms. Liu took her fingerprints with plasticine and mailed them to the designated address.

Continue reading… “Late For Work? No Problem! Check In With Your Fake Fingerprint”

Breakthrough Thinking, Business, Science & Technology News

Video Ad To Run In Print Magazine

081909-CBSMonday-bg

CBS and Pepsi will tout ‘Monday to the Max’ in a video ad set to run in some copies of Entertainment Weekly.

To hawk its fall season, CBS has teamed with PepsiCo and Entertainment Weekly to create a video ad that will run in the magazine.

CBS will insert a paper-thin interactive video player into copies of the Sept. 18 issue of Time Inc.’s Entertainment Weekly sent to Los Angeles- and New York-area subscribers. The issue previews the 2009-2010 TV season. As part of a unique marketing partnership, PepsiCo will join with CBS to promote its Pepsi Max diet cola for men in the print ads and sponsor the fall debut of CBS’s Monday-night comedies on Sept. 21.

 

Continue reading… “Video Ad To Run In Print Magazine”

Analysis, Big Problems, Business, Economy, Historical Perspectives, Science & Technology News

Desperately clinging to the past, Newspapers struggle to preserve their legacy

Desperately clinging to the past, Newspapers struggle to preserve their legacy

Newspapers struggle to preserve their legacy

Raymond Alvarez:  The White House says there will be no bailout for newspapers.

The media has languished in the grips of depression for 15 years, shedding jobs, and losing ad dollars and subscribers. Indeed, print publishers lately are showing themselves to be yet another example of an old line business that won’t survive.

Continue reading… “Desperately clinging to the past, Newspapers struggle to preserve their legacy”

Discover the Hidden Patterns of Tomorrow with Futurist Thomas Frey
Unlock Your Potential, Ignite Your Success.

By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.

Learn More about this exciting program.