Cloud Printing

How hard could it be to find a useful web to print solution?
If you can print on a printer attached to your computer, you can surely print on a printer that is NOT connected to your computer but online! It’s easy to hunt and print on a web to print portal online but not all the web to print options are best and offer value for your money.

Having worked with internet companies for more than 8 years and being involved in this web to print start up for more than a year, I thought I would share my experience pointing out where things go wrong and what could help you, as a consumer, benefit.

The reason for my joining this company was not just for the sake of paying my bills but for the very idea they bore for changing how this print industry works today. The idea where consumers are not kept in dark and they have the freedom of choice along with an eco-friendly / green aspect to it. Unlike other online portals where you land and the only printers you can print to are the ones on their premises.

What if you had a design for your business cards, brochures, flyers, postcards, but you needed a choice as to where you would want to send your print job to? What if you didn’t have a design and wanted to use a template / design available online and use that design to have it printed by the printer of your choice? What if you wanted to place the print job online and collect the same on your way to somewhere?

Answers to above questions lead to a system that takes the advantage of today’s cutting edge technologies along with the offerings of the internet cloud, which has nothing to do with rain.

When we initially developed this system, we didn’t have the idea that it would be accepted by a huge mass and people will embrace our idea to the extent that it will push us hard to expand our initial application architecture to offer services through / on cloud. We faced lots of challenges on this trip and came through with what you see today, a robust and secured online system using the latest technology stack from Microsoft .NET platform.Our transition to cloud is an on-going process. We have moved our document storage from database systems to file system / server, the next obvious step of which would be to take the file server to cloud which will give faster access to files unbound by geographical limits. We have successfully moved our services on cloud and are using these services from within our application modules. We also plan to open these services to vendors who are interested in building a white label solution on top of the ecosystem powered by Earthtone.

What do you benefit from this? It allows you to not only order your print jobs online, but also compare the pricing from various print providers based on your location and choose the one that suits your needs and budget. This is the freedom that a consumer deserves. Of course this is not the perfect web to print portal, there are lots of exciting new features we are working on for our next release.

But is this something that would fill the cavity for today’s needs? Or there is something more you would like? Please do not refrain from sharing your ideas (in comments below), because that is what has helped us reach where we are today.

from Siraj Salim

Saving the environment, one coffee cup at a time

For me, being an ‘intern’, has always conjured up horror images of nightmare bosses, vis-à-vis the “Devil Wears Prada” or a sea of faceless suits who see me as little more than a human coffee machine. In light of this view, Earthtone has been a breath of fresh air. For one, the office itself is small, and there are eleven of us, including three other interns. From day one I was made to feel welcome, and the CEO and CFO, Nader and David, were a world away from the ‘dragon lady’ I’d previously imagined. Everyone at Earthtone makes an effort, and despite missing both the company lunch and the Go-Karting trip due to an unfortunate bout of Swine Flu (or maybe just a glorified cold), the young, relaxed atmosphere helped me settle in right away. Of course, it’s important not to be too laid-back, not least because of an office ‘Wall of Shame’ which captures those moments when employees might not be one hundred per cent focused. Fortunately, I never made it on, though my fellow intern managed it after dozing off in his first week.

But it’s not all funny pictures and snoozing interns; being a History student at Newcastle, though interesting, does not teach you much about the business world and I’ve learned a great deal from my time here. I’ve investigated the concept of ‘going green’ as a significant factor when constructing a business model, particularly for a printer.

I was asked to do a presentation to the whole company on how it was relevant to Earthtone, a prospect I certainly didn’t relish at the time, but proved to be a great experience and confidence booster. I only hope my co-workers found it an equally positive experience!

So what did I find out? Obviously the printing industry needs to use paper, but in a world that is increasingly concerned about our planet, they need to make sure they have genuine structures in place that minimizes their environmental impact. At Earthtone we do our bit and try and encourage our members to do the same, whether they are a print provider or a print buyer, because not only does it help our environment, it really can help your business.

Having spoken with green printers such as Pepper Printing and Printing For Less, I’ve learned there’s a great deal that can be done to reduce your impact. It can be as simple as recycling a cup or turning off a light, and already you’ve cut down on your waste and saved some cash in the process. I was also asked to research the certification which is available to printers. Most people will have seen an FSC logo at some point in their life, as it’s the crème-de-la crème of sustainable forestry, but what does it mean? FSC, which stands for the Forest-Stewardship Council, as well as the PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification) and the SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative), make sure your paper is coming from a forest which is handled responsibly.

I’ve never been much of an eco-warrior, but as a print buyer I know that I would want to know that all efforts were being made to preserve the earth’s natural beauty. The really dedicated environmentalist might also know about ISO14001 or EMAS certification. Having either of these shows the world that you’ve transformed the way you manage your business to help save the earth. Any printer who achieves one of these certifications proves they are up there with the green elite, and soon Earthtone will have a system by which a buyer can recognise the greenest printers out there. Also on the research side, I’ve also looked into the world of social networking as a business tool, and was surprised to discover that Twitter is far more than just a way of following cat-fights between celebrities.

My experience with Earthtone has been a fun, thought-provoking and challenging experience, a combination any intern would hope for, and I only hope my final year at university proves to be a similar experience. Thank you to everyone there and best of luck to the future, if I ever need to find a list of eco-friendly printers up in Newcastle, you’ll be the first to know!

Lucy Dauman

Internships

With the internship season in full flow, economic decline, a contracting job market and drastically curtailed graduate intakes provide the context for polemicists, politicians and commentators to contribute their 2 cents to an unusually spicy annual debate about internships.

In many instances, their contributions offer valuable insights and practical recommendations that merit attention. For example, a UK government commissioned report, entitled ‘Unleashing Aspiration’, reflects on how internships drive social mobility and offers recommendations that it believes will contribute to wider access to the professions.

Conversely and all too often, commentators’ opinions demonstrate ignorance of and disregard for the practical, nuanced considerations that matter to individual businesses and individual internship applicants. For example, in a recent column in the Financial Times, Michael Skapinker argues that “...if companies are serious about interns, they should pay them... Some may object that many companies are hardly in a position at present to incur the expense. Maybe. In that case, let them leave internships to those companies that are already making the commitment.”

Commentators are right to raise questions about whether interns should be paid? Whether it is unethical to base intern selection on ‘grace-and-favour’ rather than meritocratic principles? Whether internships should be built around the needs of the business or the needs of the intern?

But companies and interns are individual. Their motivations depend on their circumstances and the one size fits all approach to regulating internships is extremely problematic.

From an intern’s perspective, time, like money, is equity. For many young entrepreneurs, investing that equity in an unpaid internship can provide far more valuable returns than the few hundred pounds or the brand name on a CV that a structured internship at a bigger company would offer. Taking on significant responsibility, contributing to commercial decision making and working closely with founders and senior managers with entrepreneurial experience offer interns a return on interns’ investment that commentators like Skapinker fail to account for.

From a small business’s perspective, deciding whether or not to recruit interns is a business decision that’s motivated by our desire to maximise returns on the time (and the money) we invest in our interns.

We spent several weeks interviewing candidates and developing a plan that would help the successful candidates to achieve their personal objectives and allow the company to leverage their skills and interests in pursuit of our commercial objectives.

Planning is essential if an internship is to succeed. But providing day to day line management, mentorship, and feedback; and nurturing potential and offering learning opportunities are essential to motivating interns to contribute as much as they can to the company’s broader objectives.

Armchair commentators who argue in favour of regulating against unpaid internships and politicians who frame internships as a tool for promoting social mobility miss the point entirely. Interns should be able to invest their time-equity according to their own objectives and the value of an internship shouldn’t equate to how much money a company can afford to pay interns whose motivation may lay elsewhere.

Companies and interns are investors in a common project but each is motivated by individual, unique considerations and each measures returns relative to its own objectives. Inexperienced commentators and far removed regulators must refrain from imposing their views on how companies and interns assign value to the returns on their investment in one another.

Regardless of the theory, it’s great to have a committed and hugely talented group of interns involved in our project. They’ve all contributed meaningfully to our progress and I hope that we’ve been able to offer them the kind of opportunities they wanted to get out of investing their
time in Earthtone.

From the CEO's Desk.

Mobile Printing for the Immobile Professional

I do a fair amount of traveling and even when I’m “in town”, I revel in the freedom that my laptop, combined with public Wi-Fi or a mobile Internet connection, affords me.

I sometimes wonder whether people make too much of the mobile/immobile divide. What I mean is that I use mobile technology when I’m lying in my bed; and conversely, I find nothing more irritating than being forced to be mobile when I’m on my travels.

Those of you who regularly travel to unfamiliar cities will know how it feels when you get to your hotel, only to find out that there’s no room service when all you want is a quick bite or that theprinter in the business center is out of order when all you need is the latest version of your presentation in hardcopy.

We all love the convenience that the internet offers. No matter where you are, as long as you have an internet connection, you can have that meal delivered to your door. And in fact, the chances are you’ll have half a dozen restaurants to choose from.

You can use a virtual workspace to prepare a presentation with colleagues in another continent. You can deliver that presentation to clients across the country. You can update that presentation with real-time information from across the globe. All from the comfort of your hotel room!

But more often than not, getting that presentation printed means getting back on the road, and as we all know, there’s no road more annoying than the one from your hotel to the local printer. So why can’t I get prints as easily as I can book flights, pay bills, get that meal or order any book I want using the internet?

Well, I can. Sort of.

I can struggle with a crappy web-to-print website. I can spend days waiting for a net-to-mail printer to send me my prints from across the country. And I can spend weeks lamenting the fact that one of the big brand printers charged me an arm and a leg because they knew my options were limited.

But what I really want is:

• Choice. When I want to listen to Mozart, Amazon lets me decide whether the San Francisco Philharmonic, the London Symphony or a college band is best for me.
  

• Efficiency. When I’m in Dubois, Idaho, I’m not interested in taxi services in Boise (unless they can pick me up in 30 minutes) and I don’t want to have to waste time trawling through irrelevant listings.

• Convenience. When I’m in a comfortable room, having to navigate my way around an unfamiliar city to pick up my dinner is distinctly unappealing. I want it delivered to me where I am.
  

• Certainty. When I’m choosing an insurance policy, I want to be sure that I’m doing business with a reputable company – one won’t let me down.

• Value. When I’m deciding which cell phone plan to buy, I want to know that I’m getting the best deal based on my specific requirements.

It doesn’t matter whether I’m mobile or immobile – I can use theinternet to get what I want, when and where I need. So why should I compromisewhen it comes to getting that presentation printed?

Mark Bonacorso is Founder and President of Media Ink, a public relations firm that serves needs of the technology, printing, graphic arts and imaging markets as well advocacy services to the non-profit sector and a public policy practice including candidate, elected official and voter education.

Why ‘Print Anywhere’ makes sense?

Convergence is the focal trend in mobile devices these days. Smart phones/PDAs today are able to do everything from recording video, watching TV to editing and sharing documents. These advances in technology have allowed business consumers to carry their office around in their pockets. From having mobile access to their CRM systems to being able to collaborate and present business plans while in transit, these devices have helped boost the productivity of mobile professionals.

It is fact that among the things mobile workers most miss when out of office, printing ranks on top. Earthtone fills in this gap by providing an accessible, convenient and mobile-optimized solution taking online printing to a new level.

Imagine being able to email your retouched presentation to your Earthtone document library from your mobile phone and then logging on to the mobile portal to find the printer closest to your conference and finally being able to pay for the job on the go so that it is ready to collect when you reach your destination. It's all possible with Earthtone. Now compare that with lugging around your documents on a USB drive and frantically searching for a printer after you've arrived and paying through the nose to just get your presentation printed.

Nonetheless, these devices have also allowed the savvy consumer to enjoy the convenience of the internet anywhere. For many of today's discerning online customers, choice, value and user experience are the key attributes that impact their shopping decisions. With a seamless and intuitive user interface, printing on Earthtone is as easy as shopping at your grocery store.

We do understand that printing on the go is a new concept and will take some time in getting assimilated by the online shopping community. However, we are always looking for ground-breaking ideas to put Earthtone as the one stop shop for printing online.

For example, a mobile application for printing may not make much business sense to many people, but we at Earthtone go to great lengths to ensure our customers get the best user experience in online printing. After all disruptive technology cannot be appreciated by everyone.

Technology: Helping Earthtone Users Get On with their Printing

At Earthtone, we believe that innovation should serve a purpose. We’ve worked hard to identify the technologies best suited to our users’ requirements. We understood what discerning online shoppers expected and we understood why smaller, independent print businesses weren’t able to meet their needs.

And working with world-class partners like GotCoders, Deepend, BigMouth Media and others, we’ve optimised Earthtone based this understanding of what our users want.

We’ve used the latest Microsoft enterprise products to build the modular, extensible and scalable e-commerce platform that underpins our solution. From our use of robust .NET technologies, Silverlight, and Ajax to our ability to deliver the kinds of all-terrain printing that businesses and their mobile workforces need, we’re at the cutting edge of technology.

We’ve combined software development best practice with a focus on user experience, ensuring that from design to production, deployment and operation, Earthtone does what it’s supposed to do, which is to connect buyers and sellers of print efficiently and reliably over the web.

But there’s more to Earthtone than a simple printing as a service. What sets us apart is that our business model depends on our ability to add value. We’ve built useful features like free online document storage, easy file sharing and mobile optimisation. We’ve simplified the job creation

process, using easy to understand terms like ‘Economy’, ‘Standard’, ‘Premium’, etc in place of confusing and complex things like paper weight, opacity, brightness and so on. And we’ve made it easy to search for printers according to your particular needs.

On the vendor side, the optimal solution for smaller, independent printers helps them reach out to online customers who wouldn’t otherwise be able to find them easily. We’ve implemented a thorough search engine optimisation and online advertising programme to make it easier for online customers to find the printers on our network.

We know peoples’ needs change rapidly, especially in the online environment. We’ve designed Earthtone with the future in mind and we’ve got very exciting product development plans in the pipeline! Right now we’re looking at integrating templates and advanced speccing options that will allow the creation of complex, personalised jobs without compromising Earthtone’s ease-of-use.

Looking forward, real-world feedback from our users will be central to Earthtone’s development. We value your comments, criticisms, suggestions and questions you may have – please email me your thoughts and stay tuned for updates!

Does the Digital Age spell the end of Print?

As the person primarily responsible for engaging with the Print Industry to populate Earthtone’s growing network of print providers, I frequently get asked this question. Before answering, I ought to provide some context.

I have spent the last two years meeting with print service providers to gain firsthand knowledge of their needs, challenges and concerns. Whether I’m meeting with a large commercial printer in Long Island, or a quick printer in Austin, people are always surprised to find a young person in their 20s speaking passionately about the future of printing. Some would brand me “naïve” and “foolish” for genuinely believing that his company can make a real difference in helping print providers overcome today’s growing list of challenges.

Although I’m the first to admit that my experience of dealing with this industry has been relatively brief, I happen to believe that this factor combined with my youth provides me with a uniquely fresh perspective. In fact, the team here at Earthtone all share this trait, and as such are able to view the industry’s wide range of services and output from the perspective of end-users. By understanding and prioritizing their needs, we can help our print providers in their battle to profit.

As for the question at hand, the answer is no. Countless surveys by respected bodies suggest I’m not alone in preferring to consume information on paper. Whether it be sharing presentations, reviewing brochures, reading books and newspapers or transferring contact information on business cards, the next generation will continue to make use of the print industry’s hard work. Nonetheless the businesses who will last long enough to realize this will be those who learn to adopt the latest technologies when servicing and marketing to the up and coming Facebook generation.