HP today unveiled the world’s first web-connected home printer: The HP Photosmart Premium with TouchSmart Web.

HP is bringing the power of the web directly to the printer and combining it with HP’s TouchSmart technology to give people quick, easy, touchscreen access to popular digital content.

Designed for the digital generation and connected households, the HP Photosmart Premium with TouchSmart Web features an entirely new web-based printing platform with HP applications (apps). Similar to other Internet-connected devices, these apps, which are viewable on an extra-large, intuitive-to-use TouchSmart panel, allow people to connect instantly with fun, informative and personal content.

View the entire Release Here

Printcasting is a first of its kind online tool that assists users in dynamically creating customized newspapers and magazines comprised of information gathered from local news sources such as blogs, newsletters, news organizations, user content, and other Contributors.  Creating your own publication is as simple as adding the elements you want included in your publication through the easy to use Printcasting.com interface.  Without having to hire a team of editors, graphic artists, or authors you will be able to create your own, professional publication for distribution.

Publishers will also be able to allow Advertisers to place targeted advertisements in their publications and, in the future, receive a portion of revenue generated from those advertisements.  Publications created by the user may then be available for print, download, and distribution to Subscribers.

I wrote about the years-ago-created RSS to print application FeedJournal and it’s potential for a digital newspaper application last year, so Printcasting’s claim to be the “first of its kind” in this realm isn’t necessarily true, what is unique though is their attempt to monetize the resulting product with a simple ad creation tool (among other things).

Printcasting is a Knight News Challenge winner and their website is inviting so I decided to give it a try for Metaprinter.  I want to emphasize that the Printcasting site was in open Beta / preview mode when I did this so don’t judge too harshly.

Step 1. Definitely watch this instructional video before doing anything.

Printcast Your Blog from Dan Pacheco on Vimeo.

Step 2. Publish your blog and tweak the layout.

I had a problem with this part in that I wanted to use my Metaprinter logo in the header.  No problem with the upload but the Printcasting interface commands the blog Title and Tagline on, there’s no way to remove them from the header.  I got around this by resizing my header logo smaller and turning the text to white.  If you look closely though you can see the white type cutting into the bottom of the words “news media” in the screen capture below.  Not a huge deal but maybe in the future they will allow publishers to turn off the text in these locations.  Here’s a closeup of how the header looked before I tweaked it.

Step 3. Done!

When you are completely done a screen pops up giving you the option to email up to 100 people a link to your new Printcast and also gives you the embed codes for several different widgets like the one below.

How does the completed product look?  Pretty good except I didn’t expect the PDF to cut off my articles (I’m not that wordy am I?).  When they reach a certain word count (I guess), an automatically created tinyurl is placed at the end of the offending article and redirects the reader to the Printcasting site to complete reading the article.  Also all my hyperlinks in my articles are dropped which I can understand if the product is destined for print, but they’re dropped everywhere, the pdf version, the magazine view, and the quick read view.  Hyperlinks are a huge part of blogging, sometimes being unable to link out makes an article less usefull to the point of uselessness.    Here’s the PDF if you want to see how it turned out.

Step 4. Advertising

Just for kicks I started putting together an advertisement to see how easy it was and I am happy to report that the experience is pretty straightforward and intuitive.

What did I like?

• The entire process was straightforward and intuitive.
• I like the idea of being able to offer my readers a print version of my blog.
• Creating an advertisement was easy.
• I might be able to sell advertising on my printcast.

What didn’t I like?

• Not being able to turn off the Title and Tagline text in the header.
• My hyperlinks disappearing everywhere.
• My blog posts being cut off despite using only 5 pages in my pdf.
• Not being able to read the small text in  “magazine view” despite zooming in and viewing on a 24″ monitor.
• Not knowing what ads will appear in my printcast.

What I’m not sure about.

• #25 in the Terms of Use says Printcasting is for California Use Only.  um… can you explain this layman terms?  What am I, as an out of stater, opening my self up to here?
• Specifically, how is advertising revenue shared?
• How can I sell ad space on my printcast?

I hope to get someone from Printcasting or Bakersfield.com to respond in the comments section to clarify my issues.   What I’d like to see in the future is a paid feature where publishers can eliminate all ads from their printcast or select which ones appear / add their own.   If I can get the above problems corrected and gain control over the ad space or eliminate it altogether I might consider Printcasting as the print solution for Metaprinter.

UPDATE:

See Printcasting creator Dan Pacheco’s response below and check out his new post about revenue streams at MediaShift Idea Lab

“We have agreed to create an environment where a certain number of customers can go online and customize their weekly edition of The Washington Times by adding or subtracting content on the fly,” he said. “We are shooting to do that four times and then we will go back to readers and take a poll as to their reactions.”

The results of the poll will be released at the Summer 2009 Individuated News Conference in June.

Related:

Hewlett Packard Inkjet Web Press For Newspapers

Syntops Technology: fully automated workflow

Océ Digital Presses

For those of you who don’t know, Amazon’s CreateSpace is offering cd, dvd, book, print on demand, and self publishing services. They are the first big competitor to challenge Lulu.com.

I want to thank Lulu for agreeing to answer my questions and without further ado I give you Lulu.

1. When Amazon announced it was buying large quantities of Indigo presses (Dec. 4, 2006), you must have had some inclination this direct competition was coming. How did you prepare for it?
This is a highly competitive industry. We have known that for some time and there are a lot of respected competitors out there; recent announcements just further validate what Lulu has been working diligently on for the past 4+ years. Our focus is to continue to create products and solutions that best serve our customers while managing the areas we look to expand into strategically.

2. How do you differentiate yourself from Amazon’s service?

Lulu has grown to be an industry leader in the print-on-demand and self publishing areas with a focus on empowering creators. Over the last year, Lulu has expanded those product and services offerings to larger content creators, corporations, educational institutions and rights-holders. The ability of Lulu’s platform and product offerings to scale to meet the needs of such a wide ranging group of users is a distinct competitive advantage.

With a solid and growing foundation of our core community – more than 1.2 million registered users and more than 4000 new works published each week – Lulu now also has partnerships with Universal Press Syndicate, Getty Images, the National Institue for Staff and Organizational Development (NISOD, the Association of National Advertisers, and many others who leverage Lulu’s scalable platform to buy, sell, create and manage digital content.

Lulu also provides creators with access to the most extensive distribution system available all the while allowing them to retain complete control over their content and pricing. With Lulu’s unique Published By You services, creators literally become their own publisher. Their books are listed on the three major industry databases and available to more than 60,000 retailers, both online and brick and mortar, as well as added to the Google Book Search database.

Lulu also takes a very global view of our business. The site is currently translated into six languages and with offices in Raleigh, NC (headquarters) as well as London, England and Hamilton, Ontario (CA), we are committed to remaining aggressive with our international focus.

3. What can we expect in the future from lulu?

Lulu will be going through a major site re-launch, targeted for late August. The new architecture will be reflective of Lulu’s growth and be geared to work to better meet the needs of our growing and diversified user base. With the new release, Lulu will also be unveiling the Lulu StudioTM , a web-based publishing application; Our primary goal for this tool is enabling our users to create projects that result in professional-quality physical products through the utilization of industry standard typesetting methods and technology. This leading-edge solution will allow users for the first time to incorporate licensed content from Getty Images, Collegiate Images and others on a per image, per use basis to enhance their works with professional, high-quality images. The Lulu StudioTM will be launched as a photobook application, with calendars and full typesetting functionality (images + text) coming in future releases, providing Lulu users with more content creation flexibility than ever before.

4. Any closing remarks?

Thanks for your interest in Lulu and if we can answer any additional questions, please let us know.

Metapriter thanks you for this interview. I personally would like to see where Lulu gets 80% of their revenue and to pump that up as much as possible. Abandon what is not working and move ahead. A monstrous company like Amazon can squash smaller endeavors without much effort. Time will tell, what do you think?