I've been watching Memjet for awhile now, I was alerted the other day by a Print4Pay Hotel member that they've launched a new web site (memjet)
When you arrive at the main page, you'll see three different types of systems and it's agreed that all three look like mfp's (multi functional products), however each picture appears to be an artists rendering. So, I'm thinking do they really have mfp's at this point in time?
While on the site you can also take a trip the Memjet Comparison Video page, from this page you can see how your favorite printer or mfp stacks up to the speed of the memjet printer. I'll say the speed is impressive, however if you listen closely it seems that the Memjet seems to be quite noisy, plus the fact that they are only showing a printer making prints and no mfp. There have been some naysayers that have stated "In the video, there's no power cord or data cord, can this really be true?", when looking at the videos there are no data or power cords for the competitive models either. I'll leave this up to the masses to figure out. What's truly amazing is the speed!
You may ask, who is Memjet or what is a Memjet? Silverbrook Research started in 1994, near Sydney, Australia. The inventor is Kia Silverbrook and Silverbrook holds over 2,500 patents. Currently Silverbrook employees over 500 scientists, engineers and support staff that are working on Memjet on other technologies.
I've heard from the street, that they were looking to sell the technology at first and then when there were no takers, they decided to develop the systems themselves, again this is what I heard on the street and may or may not be true. Here's what I do know, at this point in time they are looking for Partners such as OEM Brand Partners, Product Distribution and Channel Partners, Electronic Manufacturing Partners, Printing Suppliers and Developers, Ink Developers and Manufacturers, Paper Developers and Manufacturers, Supplies Distribution and Channel (Refill) Partners. I also took a trip to their job opportunities page and was hoping to see if they were doing any type of sales hiring. There were no sales jobs posted and if there was I would have jumped on it like a Koala Bear on eucalyptus leaves.
To learn more about these partnerships you can take a trip here to Memjet's Value Chain. Reaching back thru the many years of memory, it kinda reminds me of Chester Carlson, his invention took almost ten years to peddle and then another 11years for that product to finally become commercially available as a "Xerox" Copy machine. Do, I think Memjet will take almost 21 years to hit the market, where you can buy one at Staples, Office Max or you local Memjet Dealer? Heck, it's been 15 years in the making right now and it seems closer than ever to become a part of the mainstream for office machines.
Can anyone say Disruptive Technology? I for one think that this technology is bigger than HP Edgeline, and Xerox ColorQube combined. We'll have to wait a little longer to see how this develops.
-=Good Selling=-
10 comments:
No cords? Noise? Do you mind if I comment from a Memjet Home and Office perspective?
Cords: If you look really, really closely at back lower corners of the products printing, you may be able to see that we've hidden the cords behind a seperate piece of paper on the backdrop. Of course, hiding cords is an asthetic decision, meant to help create an unobstructed focus on the devices.
Noise - well, that's something we didn't focus on with our demo devices. Actually our technology is extremely quiet, because the imaging system doesn't have any moving parts. The only thing moving during printing is the paper. In production products you'll experience significantly less noise vs. traditional inkjet or laser devices for instance.
Disruptive? Fast? Well, you know our perspective! We completely agree.
Kim (Memjet Home and Office)
Kim,
Thanx for the comment! Maybe you would like to blog to our readers about whats coming down the road from Memjet!
Art
Sure Art. Happy to say a bit more.
First let me set the context. Memjet Home and Office is providing the core print engine technology to other brands who will be bringing the actual products to market. We have to be carefull about what we say, letting our brand partners drive the BIG product announcements, when they see fit. Memjet announcing a product would be like Intel announcing the next new Dell laptop! We just can't do that.
With that said, a little reality. We hoped you would see some announcements by the end of 2009. It's taking us and our partners a bit longer to get from our components to final products. What can I say....it's new technology. We probably underestimated what this final effort would require.
Our components are almost completely through the production qualification process and we are working with partners to finalize initial product designs and take them through a robust system testing effort.
If you want to track the latest Memjet Home and Office news you can visit our website: www.memjethomeandoffice.com and sign up for RSS feeds or subscribe to our email communications from our "Contact Us" page. Believe me - when we have news, you'll know! Expect to start hearing hints from us a few months prior to a big announcement.
What you will see when our partners introduce is extremely fast desktop color products that introduce a completely new choice in color printing.
We know there will naturally be a scattershot of interest from home to enterprise environments. However, with "breakthrough performance" and "cost effectiveness" key elements of value, we think we have a natural fit with small business customers and are targeting pricing and features to fit that segment initially.
From that starting point, our brands will branch out creating a diverse range of products for different customer segments and different geographies. We are really excited about what our brand partners bring to the table and the creativity and diversity this will infuse into the Memjet product family in the future.
Thanks for the opportunity.
Kim (Memjet Home and Office)
Kim:
Thanx for additional info, a question for you. Who are your "brand partners"?.The industry is awaiting some of your products and we'd love to hear more!
Art
You'll have to continue waiting for that answer Art!
With regards to partnerships overall, the link to our value chain and assumption that you made in your post, that we're looking for ALL of the partner types listed, is not quite accurate. I'll work a little harder to better clarify our intent on our partner pages.
We get a lot of inquiries from a lot of different types of partners, like channel partners for instance that do not understand where they fit in our Memjet Home and Office value chain and that they would actually do business with our brands, not directly with Memjet Home and Office.
By listing all of the potential partners and describing our value chain our hope was that the industry would better understand our model and we would get more qualified inquiries on our end.
Of course we are always open to hearing from new industry players who want to discuss a Memjet related opportunity, but this doesn't reflect anything about where we are at with our existing partnerships.
Kim:
Darn, I hate to wait, however, I can't wait to see some of your technology in the field. We are all looking forward to it, please keep us informed. Matter of fact, you can send me press releases and I'll post them and if you'd like to, we can have you as a guest blogger for our members. Let me know.
Art
Is it safe to assume that HP, Canon, and Brother are not partners since the posted videos tend to 'show up' their products? Who all does that leave in the line of potential partners besides Lexmark, Kodak, and Epson? Who are the other major players in the printer industry? It seems to me that whoever gets partnered up with Memjet stands to be a winner. I'm salivating at the chance to have a printer for my home that is that fast.
Lots of fun to see a printer spit out paper quickly. Newsprint comes out at meters per second... and looks like, well, newsprint. I notice that memjet still don't show any images of the final prints - I wonder what nasties they still have to hide?
I have been patiently waiting to buy a memjet printer for over a year now.
silverbrook people remind me of what bill gates and microsoft would have been if they had the u.s. gov't running the show...why all this trying to 'hook up' with others??? memjet, why don't you "just do it" yourself?
i figure, what with the internet and the way 'word-of-cyberspace' gets around...within six
months you would have the entire printing game
at your feet. people would beat your door down to have a product that is so darn cutting edge, productive, and if you didn't do the
'printer ink scam' thing like all the rest, and kept ink very affordable, you would probably end up branching out into the aftermarket consumables in a big way to meet the demand of what people at home and in small business would want to do with your machines...
'DREAM BIGGER' MEMJET!!! and darn it, just
get to 'doing it', rather than doing all this
"pre-flight stuff" and 'staging the opening night' mentality.
i am frustrated waiting for you! i am already a devoted future customer...and i am SURE i am NOT alone!!!!
jo nemeth
pawleys island, sc. usa
You are not alone! I too have pushed my printer needs off awaiting the end all be all memjet printers. I wanted one the second the videos came out, the idea is solid, long overdue and makes sense to me, I just hate the delays... look for something at the end of 2008... look for something at the end of 2009... I'm sure it will be pushed to 2010 now, it's too late in the year even for a x-mas release. How much for a CES demo model? We needs em!
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