Quick Printing is the only business resource serving the quick and small commercial printing niche in North America. Quick Printing is the authoritative source for business information, emerging technologies, shop profiles and management insight.
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M ay 2014 saw the annual appearance of Mary Meeker's much-anticipated Internet Trends report. Meeker is an analyst for the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Cau- field & Byers (KPCB). Her annual report is always a cause for much discussion and is a must-read for anyone who hopes to understand the present and future of media and the delivery of content. There is a lot of data to digest (164 slides this year), but one slide that stands out in the context of mobile media shows the rapid proliferation of tablet computers, such as the iPad, especially when compared to PCs in general. To put this in context, it took personal computers in general 16 years to reach the level of penetration that tablets accom- plished in just three years. Elsewhere, Meeker points out that there are 439 mil- lion tablet users worldwide. That sounds like a lot but it's only about six percent of the world population. Not that everyone in the world is going to end up using a tablet, but even so, there is still room for tremendous growth. That's just tablets. Data abound—via Meeker and others—about the rapid growth of smartphones. Be it tablet or phone, Apple or Android, more and more users are accessing content on mobile devices than on PCs. But for our purposes here, where does that leave print? Going Mobile When we think of printers and mobile devices, the first thing that usually comes to mind are Quick Response (QR) codes, which have begun to achieve a certain ubiquity. To briefly describe: a printed QR code (like a bar code, such as the UPC symbols found on all products these days) is scanned by a smartphone camera, which then sends the phone's browser to a website, launches a video, or accesses some other type of interactive or rich media content. Other types of codes exist, such as Microsoft Tag. (Chicago's Mid- way Airport hosts a display comprising a series of posters created by the Adler Planetarium that feature astronomy imag- es accompanied by Microsoft Tags that, when scanned with a smartphone, access additional content related to the subject of the poster.) There are also more elegant solutions, such as Digimarc Discover, that use invisible codes that serve the same purpose, but aren't quite so aesthetically unappealing. Also talked about, often in the same breath as QR codes, is so-called Aug- mented Reality (AR). AR can refer to any number of related technologies, but more often than not, it refers to embedding codes—invisible codes—in printed materi- als that, when scanned with a smartphone 24 Q U I C K P R I N T I N G / A u g u s t 2 0 1 4 w w w. M y P R I N T R e s o u r c e . c o m Killer Apps: Opportunities for Printers to Go Mobile Has the physical medium by which content is delivered become irrelevant? By Richard Romano © iStockphoto/Thinkstock