Search results matching tag 'Kodak'

Has Apple taken shine off Kodak's patents?

2288289 — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 10:58:00 GMT

News that Kodak now hopes to fast-track its patent sell-off is super-significant for the future of one of the industry's major suppliers.

Realising maximum value for the 1,100 patents under the hammer is vital for Kodak to be able to execute its transformation plans and successfully emerge from the Chapter 11 process.

If the requisite amount of dollars doesn't roll in via the auction process, things will be much, much trickier for the company.

The patent sale is complicated by the fact that a company one might reasonably view as a potential purchaser, Apple, is also embroiled in a lengthy legal battle with Kodak over the validity and ownership of 10 key patents among those being sold off.

Kodak believes Apple owes it some $1bn in licensing fees, Apple thinks differently.

Apple could of course buy all 1,100 patents out of petty cash if it so chose, but it chooses not to. Instead, it's playing hard ball. In the 1990s the two companies worked together on digital camera development and Apple claims Kodak took the know-how it gleaned from Apple, and then patented it. Can imagine the sort of Steve Jobs rant that would have ensued.

The patents in question must be some of the most valuable in the batch, but other potential purchasers will surely be wary of buying something with an Apple-sized caveat attached.

And although the sell-off has the whiff of a fire sale about it, Kodak doesn't have to accept the ‘winning' bid if it feels the price isn't suitably commensurate with the patents' value. Though that course of action wouldn't help it resolve its financial predicament.

All-in-all a crucial couple of months ahead. The one certain thing is that the next batch of Kodak lawyers' bills will be ENORMOUS.

High-speed inkjet is hot and happening

2288289 — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 13:04:00 GMT

HP was holding its pre-Drupa press conference at the time of typing, with headline news including the much-anticipated launch of a new B2-format Indigo (this time around it seems rather more likely this product will come to market than with Indigo's previous B2 foray in 2000-2004).

Exciting stuff for HP's Indigo operation. Among the other announcements came news of progress in HP's high-speed inkjet wing. Back at Drupa 2008 HP rocked up with a fully-functioning inkjet web press, which must have scared the pants off a host of competitors in the high-volume inkjet space, most notably Kodak.

Today HP parked its tanks even further up Kodak's lawn by announcing a new inkjet imprinting system for offset presses, too.

We've also learned that HP now has 60 of its high-speed inkjet presses installed, with lots of customers - such as Communisis and CPI - opting for multi-unit installations. Impressive.

Kodak claims "hundreds" of installs now for its Prosper inkjet heads, but that's the heads as opposed to entire Stream presses, so not readily comparable.

Océ is also busy in this space, too, but you might be surprised to learn that it's Screen who claims market leadership in high-speed inkjet, with some 400 Truepress Jet520s installed since this system was launched in 2006. They're not all under its own brand, due to Screen's OEM deal with Ricoh/Infoprint.

All of this means that come Drupa in 50 day's time there'll be no shortage of high-speed inkjet action.

And it's also worth checking out developments at clever integrators such as Matti Technology. They usually have some clever stuff up their Swiss sleeves.

Kodak looking for a new momentum

2288289 — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 12:54:00 GMT

So. Kodak. It got to the point where it would have been more surprising if the firm hadn't filed for Chapter 11, such was the overwhelming inevitability of this move.

The iconic nature of the Kodak brand, forever associated with film-based photography and that ‘Kodak moment' (now rewritten after this week's events as ‘the end of that Kodak moment') has of course resulted in acres of end-of-an-era coverage after the firm's bankruptcy filing.

Far cleverer people than I have commented extensively about what went wrong at Kodak. Some believe that the rapid decline of its once-hugely profitable film business was such a fundamental shift that it was simply impossible to grow, or indeed buy, a new money-making replacement. However, this thought-provoking piece from The Economist contrasting the fortunes of Fujifilm and Kodak (written before the Chapter 11 filing) shows that it is possible for huge companies to adapt to huge changes in their markets. Kodak didn't do this quickly, or effectively enough.

Kodak's management over the past couple of decades have also come in for some stick. Since 2005 former HP man Antonio Perez has been the man at the top. He appointed a raft of HP colleagues to senior roles, proving at least one thing: a bunch of ex-HP people does not HP make.

What next? It seems that the Chapter 11 process will continue for at least a year, maybe more. Kodak's international operations are, technically, not affected. Not least because the local equivalents of Chapter 11 would all be different. But of course the rest of the Kodak world will, ultimately, be affected by how it restructures.

I've listened to Antonio Perez's statement on the Chapter 11 filing and looked at the accompanying documents . Unsurprisingly there's a positive spin on the whole thing ("Much like a number of successful US companies before us, Kodak will use the Chapter 11 process to achieve important goals...").

One of those goals will be to eliminate or reduce legacy issues, and the $800m promised to its UK pension scheme over the next decade is one such issue, as are the benefits currently being paid to retirees in the States ("the company will be examining these costs and, as necessary, will seek to adjust them").

Kodak intends to rake in funds by pursuing its intellectual property rights, as evidenced by fresh claims against Samsung and Fujifilm, joining existing long-running actions against Apple and RIM ("when it comes to intellectual property assets we have seen certain key industry players following a litigation strategy of delay, and this has resulted in Kodak not being paid what it was rightfully owed"). And it will now be able to sell off its ‘spare' patents, too.

It's also possible the new-shape Kodak that emerges from all of this will be a graphic arts company. Perez talks of a future where Kodak will be "competing in large markets where we have fundamental technology advantages, such as digital printing, packaging, functional printing..." with no mention at all of the group's consumer offerings.

The $2.7bn turnover graphics wing is going to be the subject of considerable scrutiny, one way or another. As will the much-mooted Prosper inkjet technology on which Kodak has bet, and lost, so much thus far.

Prosper prospects crucial for Kodak

2288289 — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 12:13:00 GMT

Will the Prosper inkjet system "save" Kodak? Industry analyst Andrew Tribute believes it can.

In this video posted on Kodak's B2B YouTube channel Andy asserts that Prosper and the associated technologies around it will change the Kodak business model: "Whatever's happening on the financial side, this is going to sort it, it'll get solved," he states, while waxing lyrical about Kodak's overall offering compared with what's available from competitors.

That is a pretty bold claim given the actuality of the numbers and the amount of fretting in the financial pages about whether Kodak can come up with enough cash to keep going. Q3 losses that were double market expectations didn't help things much, alongside a warning that losses for the full year could be $200m greater than the top end of the previous forecast.

However, Kodak boss Antonio Perez says people shouldn't read too much into the statutory filings about its liquidity position, in which the firm warned that it would have to raise more cash to survive the next year, because, well, it's just a statutory thing.

Since then, the firm has sold its image sensor business to Platinum Equity for an undisclosed sum, and it's also in the process of selling off a bunch of digital imaging patents that could rake in as much as $3bn.

The positive news is that Kodak has now sold a fair few Prosper presses and imprinting systems, with Prosper sales up 40% according to the latest quarterly report, and "hundreds" of printheads installed according to Perez. Customers for the Prosper press, in either colour or black-and-white guise, include DaeMyung of Korea; China's Phoenix Publishing and Media Group; Consolidated Graphics, Fenske Media and Mercury Print Productions in the States; Spain's Servinform; and an as-yet unnamed Japanese printco.

Here on the small island Prosper technology is being used by Lettershop Group and St Ives Clays, Howard Hunt has a 5000XL on test, and Prosper kit will soon be making its way to Anton Group.

Perez also says the Prosper-related start-up problems that cost the company millions in Q2 and that made up the bulk of the $20m increase in year-on-year operating losses posted by its Graphic Communications Group in Q3, are now, and I quote, "done with" and the company just has to get the money in for the installed systems that are now working according to spec.

If Kodak can indeed be "saved", and by a range of printing equipment at that, it will result in one of the greatest corporate turnaround stories of our times, right up there with Steve Jobs' rescue job on Apple. Although in Kodak's case there is no sign of a visionary, obsessive, genius waiting in the wings on a white charger.

Either way, I can say one thing with as much confidence as that voiced by Mr Tribute - it won't be long before we find out.

Hornby's the man to get Kodak out of a jam

2288289 — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 09:34:00 GMT

Kodak is promising great things for its Prosper inkjet press. When it comes to the jam tomorrow assurances emanating from the company's management, Prosper is a high fruit content luxe strawberry preserve.

Unfortunately, its Q2 results last week revealed that the company has experienced something of a sticky patch commercialising the product.

A $32m fall in gross profit at Kodak's Graphic Communication Group was primarily down to additional Prosper-based costs, because it seems the folks at Kodak hadn't fully appreciated the details of the sort of clean room conditions Prosper requires to work properly, and also the fact that users want to, err, print onto all sorts of different substrates.

Chairman and chief executive Antonio Perez wins a special prize for understatement of the year for saying "it's unfortunate that we didn't figure that out before".

Yes, a $32m hit is indeed pretty unfortunate. Especially considering the Stream inkjet technology used in Prosper was first shown way back at Drupa 2004 so one might imagine there has been plenty of time to get to grips with any vagaries.

I have a top tip for Perez. He should get on the blower (or, more likely, get a minion on the blower) to John Hornby at Lettershop group. Hornby and his team have created their own bespoke system using Stream heads, it works, it doesn't require lab conditions and they can print onto all sorts of normal commercial stocks.

I'm sure for a reasonable fee - 10% of that $32m would be a bargain - John could provide the sort of information that would help Kodak ‘preserve' some profits.

Self-Publishing: eBooks & The London Book Fair

1852287 — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 12:19:00 GMT

I sat on the tube this morning and read with great interest the headline story in the Metro titled Ebook piracy ‘is colossal threat’ – especially after my visit to the London Book Fair last week.

During my visit to the Earls Court show, I took in a Self-Publishing Masterclass seminar, and the full extent of the eBook revolution was laid out with some impressive stats:

Amazon now sell more eBooks than physical books for its top 1,000 titles
In 2010, Amazon sold more Kindles than copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
There are 115 eBooks sold for every paperback

So it is perhaps not a great surprise that eBooks are now suffering the same fate as the music industry did when iPods and MP3 players first took off. However, it is not all bad news. As Leila Dewji, editorial director at Acorn Independent Press Ltd, said during the presentation: “During this same period of growth for eBooks, paperback and hardback sales have increased.’

And it was only last week in a printweek.com article that self-publishing giant Lulu.com said it expects its print-on-demand sales to grow almost as fast as eBooks. Self-publishing is a global phenomenon, and not only is this good news for the printing industry, but it is great for first-time authors like me.

I spoke with Danny Bowman, marketing manager at Pen Press Ltd where I am publishing my first novel, and he said:

“The energy of this year’s book fair was palpable, with representatives of many fine companies visiting our stall and visibly keen on getting involved with us. While all our titles received a great deal of interest, it was fascinating to note that Party People by David Jamilly was a very popular focus point for rights’ buyers from the Asian Pacific Market.”

“Also very noticeable this year was the sheer amount of authors stopping by to express interest in our services. We found on perusing some of the samples shown to us that the overall quality of these authors was very high indeed. Several of the authors we spoke to had, in fact, been published by mainstream houses before but were keen to consider self-publishing with the flexibility and artistic control this option affords. This just goes to show that self-publishing continues to shed the stigma that has previously been attached to it and becoming an increasingly popular choice for those serious about getting their books read.”

Digital technology is certainly revolutionising the book printing industry, as PrintWeek editor Darryl Danielli pointed out in his comment piece on Friday. Self-publishing has given book printing a new lease of life, and clearly this is being recognised by some of the major players in the digital sector, with both HP and Kodak exhibiting at the London Book Fair for the first time this year.

At the Dispelling the Myths of Self-Publishing seminar, Simon Potter from Fast Print said: “Authors are now in control of their own destiny and technology has allowed this change. Print on Demand is taking over the publishing world. In the US, more than half of the books published were self-published.”

HP put on a series of seminars to highlight the printing capabilities of their digital technology, including a talk from Teresa Pereira from Blurb, who highlighted the affordable nature of self-publishing for things such as photobooks. Kodak, meanwhile, had an impressive display of POD samples. For someone like me, it was exciting to see the quality of a self-published product – it makes the whole purpose of self-publishing more worthwhile to know that a product I created will be printed to the highest possible standard.

Today I emailed the final copy of my manuscript to Pen Press. Over the next few weeks, all of the hard work that goes into creating a successful printed product will engulf my life. And I can’t wait!

Plaudits for Lettershop

2288289 — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 11:17:00 GMT

It's always nice to have a cheery end to the week, and it comes in the shape of the story in today's issue of PrintWeek about Lettershop Group and its use of high-speed colour inkjet.

It was my privilege to be among the delegation that visited Leeds to learn about a project that has involved two years' worth of legwork by the company, and a seven-figure investment.

I love the fact that these home-grown experts in innovation and engineering have taken Kodak's Stream colour inkjet heads and created something that is arguably cleverer than what Kodak itself has achieved thus far with Stream technology. Not least the fact that Lettershop can print onto a wide range of standard offset paper grades, something that's essential for the firm's model involving sophisticated, but affordable, colour personalisation to work.

A 4.25 inch print width might not sound much, but once you realise the vast array of variable image options it allows them to conjure up, in combination with litho pre-print and their magical origami-like offline finishing lines, then the potential really is incredible.

The Lettershop system is the sort of thing that one might imagine coming out of the R&D department at an industry giant like an RR Donnelley, or a Quad/Graphics. That it's been developed by an independent UK printing business makes it worthy of an extra-special hoorah in my book. Well done chaps.

HP prospering with head-start

2288289 — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 08:13:00 GMT

Putting aside Communisis' results for a moment (in summary: horrible year, no surprise that Blundell et al have shoved everything possible into the last period that took place under Vaughan's watch), I did utter an audible "oooh" when I saw that the group has bought an HP inkjet web.

Regular readers will recall that this piece of kit, which I must get used to calling the HP T300, was one of the must-see items at Drupa 2008. CPI was due to have installed a book printing version here last year, but instead the kit ended up going to one of its French facilities. This was terribly disappointing as I was so looking forward to seeing it in its full-blown commercial guise here in the UK.

Now Communisis has quietly installed one at its Leeds DM site, and the group says it will be producing live customer work in April. Oooh.

In securing this sale, HP really has parked its tanks firmly on Kodak's lawn. They must be spitting feathers in Dayton. Communisis is a long-standing user of Kodak's Versamark heads for personalising work on its conventional web presses, and would surely have been on Kodak's target list of customers for the Prosper inkjet system. As with the installation at Rotomail parent Rotolitho Lombardi in Italy, referenced by our esteemed columnist Andrew Tribute here, it's clear that HP is all over Kodak's customer base like a rash. Kodak has some Prosper imprinting heads installed, including a beta site for the mono version at Lettershop in Leeds, but commercialisation of the full blown press is still "upcoming".

In the race to market for the sort of inkjet printing technology that is billed as "changing print forever", HP is establishing a significant lead.

Aussies focusing on photo gift opportunity

2288289 — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 11:37:00 GMT

Further musings on the photobooks and photo gifts market, and the opportunities therein, have been sparked by some news from down under involving HP.

HP has scored something of a coup by displacing Kodak as the digital photo supplier to retailer Kmart.

The new HP solution involves the installation of photo kiosks at the best part of 200 stores, with some of the larger outlets being furnished with as many as 10 units. Kmart will also add a photo gift facility to its website, powered by HP's successful Snapfish site.

The retailer is quoted as saying that it is "moving beyond just printing digital photos", and customers will in the future be able to print items such as photobooks, posters and calendars from a straightforward kiosk interface. Said items will be ready for collection in just an hour at the majority of shops, which is a bit boggling. The question that immediately springs to mind is the production logistics of this work beyond straightforward prints, for example the finishing and binding of page-per-month calendars. Has HP developed some fancy kit that can do all that at the touch of a button?

The new service will be rolled out at selected stores from next month, with the entire project set to be completed by spring 2010. I'm itching to see it in action, and am already fantasising about a fact-finding trip timed to coincide with the Aussie summer. Meanwhile, back in the real world, if HP has anything similarly sophisticated installed within a more reasonable distance of Hammersmith then let's hear about it.

Clays' digi move is one to watch

2288289 — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 11:36:00 GMT

Changes are afoot in the world of digital book printing here in the UK. For us print dweebs it's something of a disappointment that CPI's decision to install its first HP Inkjet Web in France means we won't get to crawl all over this intriguing press at a convenient UK location any time soon, but reading between the lines it seems likely that - assuming of course it functions as expected - CPI will put one in here eventually.

But in the meantime St Ives is doing something just as interesting up at Clays, also with inkjet but with an integrated system involving a high-speed black-and-white Kodak Versamark print engine linked to Muller Martini's Sigma binding line so that the two machines function as one unit. When St Ives announced its year-end results last October the company said it was talking to customers about a suitable economic model for digital book printing, and it seems to have found it.

I must add a note of appreciation for the work of group technical director John Charnock, who's been so active in getting the bosses of print power players such as HP, Kodak, and Muller Martini to sit down and talk to each other to ensure some joined up thinking about future print systems.

While it's easy to think about Clays as some sort of book printing powerhouse, and of course with the capacity to produce 400m books a year it is, it isn't always churning out thousands and thousands of copies of the same book in a Harry Potter stylee. In fact, the firm is engaged in constantly making things to order, and they're often very short-run orders. Even with its conventional presses it's producing runs as low as 250, so one of the interesting things about the upcoming digital installation is that it's not going to be some sort of separate or special department only to be used for certain types of short-run work. Rather, it will function as a continuation of Clays' total service offering. That's not about printing books more cheaply, but is instead focused on helping customers reduce their risk by guaranteeing the supply chain.

St Ives also has the option to upgrade to Kodak's much-vaunted Stream inkjet technology (now renamed Prosper), if the Prosper kit performs as stated. Earlier this year Kodak's executives were showing Prosper book samples produced on an integrated book production line that they said would ship in early 2010. Assuming Prosper does shape up as planned then ultimately the print engine will be able to keep up with Muller's amazing binder, which can produce 1,000 books an hour at full whack. I can't wait to see it.