Quick Printing

Recently, there was an article this week on ComputerWorld.com titled “Have your avatar call my avatar: Doing business virtually.” It led off with a report on a Xerox meeting and product rollout that was held simultaneously at Boston’s Fenway Park and at Xerox Inspiration Island in Second Life. (One Xerox exec supposedly made a rather spectacular crash landing there in her virtual personal jetpack.) The object of this event was to both showcase the new product and to test out Second Life as a vehicle for meetings.

While noting that the melding of the virtual world with the real world is still in its infancy, the author says: “Be warned. Many think it’s just a matter of time before being ‘in-world’ becomes as important for business as having a Web site and standard teleconferencing is.”

Be still, my foolish heart. It seems to me we already have enough ways to avoid actual contact with other human beings. Emails, and chat rooms, and FaceBook, oh my! Let’s see how many days we can go without having to actually interact in person. Even without Second Life, I know cubicled office workers who seldom interact face-to-face with each other unless somebody calls a meeting or they can’t avoid each other at the coffee pot. (I don’t consider the prairie dog pop-up a real face-to-face encounter.)

Maybe avatar-to-avatar contact is the future of business communications, but I won’t go down that road without kicking and screaming—at least until they figure out how to provide real cold beer in their virtual worlds.

* One of the concerns about inkjet production printing is the durability of the printing heads. Maybe that’s why every vendor of said equipment was certain to mention their machine’s robust heads. For some reason that made me think of sturdy plumbing in a Navy bathroom.

* You can’t really say some vendors were green-washing their offerings, but some did go out of their way to slap a green tag on everything but the kitchen sink. Our industry is based on putting marks on paper, so the real green is energy efficiency, sustainability, and recycling. The latter might put inkjet at a disadvantage since some substrates can’t be recycled and inkjet ink is more difficult to deal with than other inks—at least for now.

* In the attempt to attract the attention of attendees, some vendors blasted loud music and broadcast loud demos. Couple that with the noise of the various machines, and in some halls, talking to someone was like trying to hold a conversation during a Led Zeppelin concert.

* The biggest non-news news item came on the first day of the show when the front page headline of the show daily breathlessly announced that MAN Roland had changed its name to manroland. I was so overcome with emotion that I went to the beer tent to recover.

* I have to wonder how many pounds of printed materials wound up being left behind in hotel rooms by departing trade journalists. Sure, we work in an industry that prints stuff, but those memory sticks certainly are more convenient for travel than any nice, embossed, pocket folder full of press releases.