Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Weekend MFP Industry Notes 5/10/09

Special thanks to the Print4Pay Hotel Member that supplied us with this update.

Canon may restart construction on its gigantic new headquarters building in Melville, NY. The company originally planned to move from Lake Success, NY to the new site, but then stopped its preparation for the new site, when the economy slowed. Now the state of New York and Suffolk County are offering $100 million in tax incentives to convince Canon to complete the project.

Oce’ announced it is now offering MICR toner capability for the VarioStream 8000 series of continuous feed production systems for high-speed check printing.

Konica Minolta now offers an option for its MFPs to use HID employee badges to authenticate to track and control usage and security. What some may not know is the origins of the HID cards:
- HID is acronym that stands for Hughes Identification Device
- Was invented by Hughes Aircraft, founded by inventor Howard Hughes
- This radio frequency technology was invented using 125 kilohertz to track aircraft parts
- Company was spun off and is now headquartered in Irvine, CA with 2000 employees and operates offices in 1,000 countries
- There are currently 500 million licensed cards in use

EFI announced its last quarter’s earnings:
- Total revenue down 28.9%
- Fiery revenue down 30%
- Inkjet products revenue down 33%

Xerox announced it has sold one of its iGen4 production color systems to Unite the Union, a trade union in England.

Xerox raised $750 million by selling senior notes, to help the company.

A collation of print shop owners is meeting with Hewlett Packard to express their displeasure over the new HP MarketSplash website, which sells printing on-line.

Hewlett Packard gave out details on its last quarter’s financials:
- total revenue of $27.4 billion, a decline 19%
- sales of PCs and laptops to fall more than 23%

During a demonstration of its color inkjet press, Hewlett Packard revealed that it takes 48 blade servers to RIP data fast enough to keep up with the speed of the 30” wide printing system.

A company is marketing business cards made out of beef jerky, using a 150 watt laser to etch an image into the surface. The company name is MeatCard.

After the company announced that it would sell more stock to raise $5 billion, Toshiba executive HP, Fumio Muraoka said; “If we don’t take any measures, we won’t get out of the gloom.”

After watching its sales decline by 6-8Oce’ in another cost cutting move, announced it would lay off another 800 employees.

A company in India has turned a vacuum cleaner into a printer. The Roomba, was originally a small device that was invented to clean floors, but a company in India has outfitted it with a printhead, and a container of powder. It is used to create patterns on the floor with greetings to guests who arrive for occasions like a wedding.

Fujitsu announced that it will now offer embedded software applications for its desktop, high-speed scanners, using a LCD control panel. It now offers applications from DocuWare and ABBY to allowing scanning directly into document management programs.

Pitney Bowes launched an advertising campaign to promote its managed print services. It is now offering the 13th month free if a customer signs up for 12 months of the program. The company claims it can service HP, Lexmark, Lexmark, Zebra and Datamax printers.

Lexmark released the results of a survey it conducted. It suggests that the federal government wastes more than $1 million daily on printing:
- The total amount it spends is $1.3 billion on printing.
- 92% of the employees surveyed say that they don’t need all the documents that
they print during the day
- average employee prints 7,200 pages annually
- 35% of pages are discarded the same day they are printed

Another copier dealer that sold out to IKON is back in the business. Gray & Creech, which was the largest copier dealer in North Carolina, sold out to IKON in 1994. Now the company has acquired Precise Business Solutions of Greensboro, and will change name to Gray & Creech Office Systems.

In an effort to cut costs, Citibank sent out a memo to its employees that said;
- “The use of color copying and printing dramatically increases our copying and printing costs. Color presentations are unnecessary for internal purposes’ therefore going forward color copying and printing should only be used for client presentations. Also whenever possible, presentations should be printed double sided to reduce unnecessary paper usage. Over time, we will be removing color copiers and printers from the locations where they are not essential for purposes of preparing client presentations”

- “As previously announced, in order to reduce costs and improve efficiency, Global Procurement Services (GPS) will retrieve all employee convenience desktop printers globally in favor of networked group or shared floor printers. Starting the week of May 18, members of IT Desktop Services will remove identified existing desktop printers at your location. We ask that you fully cooperate and provide the team with full access to your desktop printers. We will provide all employees whose printers are removed with detailed instructions on mapping to networked or shared printers and how to print confidential documents.”

Ricoh announced it is now offering classes in Georgia for version 8 of the EFI MicroPress system and the connection that allows it to drive the Ricoh Pro C900 production color system.

Paul Rickett was arrested at the Embers Bar & Grill in Sacramento when he was caught using fake $20 bills created on a color copier.

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