Oct 11
25
Wish You Were Here: Innovate with Mobile-to-Print Postcard iPhone Apps
One of the implicit themes of my latest book with Dr. Joe Webb, Getting Business—and the explicit theme of our previous book, Disrupting the Future—is that printers need to focus less and less on the status quo (aka “business as usual”) and recapture the entrepreneurial spirit. A big part of that entrepreneurial spirit is looking for new types of print products and market niches.
One new application that has been hitherto unexplored by many printers—but exploited by former photo labs and marketing companies, and now even Apple—is what I refer to as mobile-to-print. This has become one of my favorite topics to talk and write about, not only because I think it is exceedingly exciting and, well, cool, but because it represents a new type of print product that ties in closely with one of the hottest technology product categories today: mobile smartphones.
Here’s one example of how mobile-to-print works. A few weeks ago, I was in Nice, France, delivering a keynote address at the annual Pira International Executive Retreat. After the event, I had the weekend off to explore the city. Part of any exotic travel is sending postcards to friends and family back home, ostensibly to prove to them that they’re in one’s thoughts, but really just to gloat. “Guess where I am? Nyah-nyah.” But maybe that’s just me.
Anyway, rather than buy prefab postcards and then hunt for the nearest post office (or, more commonly, mail the cards after I get home), I decided to send a custom postcard from my iPhone using a mobile-to-print app called SnapShot Postcard. Here’s how it works. I climbed to the top of the local chateau, whose ramparts offer an excellent birds-eye view of the city. I snapped a photo with my iPhone, and then opened the SnapShot Postcard app, which lets me customize the front and back of a postcard that will then be printed and mailed—yes, printed and mailed; this is no e-card.
So I imported my scenic view of Nice, added a caption to the front (because the card was for my niece and I love wordplay, my caption was “It’s spelled Nice, but pronounced niece, Niece.”) For the reverse, I added some history of the city I found on Wikipedia. The app links to the iPhone’s Contacts so it’s easy to import mailing addresses. When I was ready, I agreed to have my account debited $1, hit Send, and uploaded the card to a print server back in the States. It was printed and mailed and was received less than a week after I had sent it. (I send copies to myself to check the print quality, which is generally very good, although it must be stressed that an iPhone display looked at while atop a chateau in France beneath the Mediterranean sun is not exactly an ideal environment for proofing, although it’s an ideal environment for just about anything else …)
What I like about the app, as well as a similar one called Simply Postcards, is that I can take photos and create postcards that are relevant to a given recipient. If one friend I know is a restaurant-o-phile, I can take a picture of the best restaurant I ate at and add appropriate comments. If another is a history buff, I can snap a photo of a famous landmark and add historical details. And so on.
As I was writing this blog post, Apple announced the new iPhone 4S and a new version of the iOS (5.0). One other item mentioned in the announcement perked up my ears: an app called Cards that lets iPhone and iPod Touch users print and mail customized greeting cards. I downloaded it as soon as it became available and, just like the postcard apps, it lets you take a smartphone photo, import it into a greeting card template (templates are divided into some of the usual greeting card categories like Thank You, Birthday, Travel, etc.), customize the text inside the card, add selected Contacts to the envelope, and, for $2.99, print and mail the greeting card (cards mailed outside the U.S. cost $4.99). Apple does all its own printing using 100% cotton paper, and the print quality is really quite good. Admittedly, Cards is a 1.0 product with some interface anomalies, but it’s easy to see how much better it can become in a few revs.
What I find vexing about these apps is that none of them were actually developed or implemented by commercial printers. Cards is all Apple. Simply Postcards was developed by a former photo lab, although SnapShot Postcard is developed by NSN Solutions, a “marketing and printing automation company.” There are tremendous opportunities to be had in merging the latest mobile technology with print. But then I recall that it took Web-to-print a long time to gain traction in the industry, so perhaps I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.
Still, as I look at some of the cutting-edge print apps being developed, I can’t help but say to the industry, “Having a lovely time, wish you were here.”
Richard Romano is managing editor of WhatTheyThink’s Going Green, and is a writer and analyst for the graphic communications industry.
