We are once again privileged to be associated with The Knowledge Foundation and the Startup movement called Proto.in.
This time too, we did the pre-press and printing of the Proto.in booklet. Because of systematic timely action, we were able to incorporate the agenda and the Notes page in the booklet.
Ramanunjam did a excellent job of coordinating the content and approving, proof checking the layout.
We are much privileged, as we anticipate this booklet will emerge in stature similar to merit list of top educational institutions.
Here is the electronic version of Proto booklet in pdf format
IFRA’s Asia focus is taking IFRA events to China - ‘Profitability through Customer-Centric Publishing Strategies’ is scheduled for first week April 08.
Here are the full details:
Dear Publishing Industry Associates
On 2 and 3 April 2008 and for the 8th consecutive year, Publish Asia –
the no. 1 networking platform in Asia – will take place at the Wynn Resort
in Macau, China.
Top industry experts and innovative thinkers will equip delegates from
more than 20 countries
from Asia Pacific and the Middle East with quality ideas for expanding
their business and profitability.
Macau, with its centuries-old tradition as a meeting point of cultures,
one of the most beautiful golf courses
in Asia, nice beaches and a World Heritage historic centre, is the perfect
setting for this exciting event.
Conference Key Topics:
Threats and opportunities of partnerships with Internet pure-players
Cashing in with community sites
Going hyper local! The Washington Post experience
Web analytics, segmentation, profiling, enterprise marketing…
Reaching new audiences, creating new revenue streams: The daily magazine
model
Creating value on multimedia advertising platforms
Is the free sheet model a valid and sustainable business model for Asia?
Integrated mobile media and the consumer
Social media & hyper targeting: customer knowledge as an asset
Confirmed International Speakers:
Lara Ayoub, Harry Bouwman, Mark Challinor, Jim Chisholm, Rob Curley, Gert
Edlinge,
Mario Garcia, Paul Ginocchio, Steve Yelvington, and many more…
1. From where you sit in the worldl, how has social media changed your business, biz outlook?
We are in the Graphic Art business for the past thirty years. Images and image manipulation techniques fascinate us. I’m amazed by the volume and quality of photos and images in photo sharing sites like flickr.Phixr( http://www.phixr.com/ ) like services, that define the shift towards do everything online intrigues me. Phixr is in sharp contrast with an era when we employed many people just to draw images.Now, we are slowly realizing that early adoption game is not limited to investing in the latest equipment. Indeed, more than equipment, investing in people adapt to fast changing technology landscape is very relevant. In the early days, our business operated even with no telephone at all, and responding within a day was considered quick response then. Now the number of channels of communications have multiplied and response time expectations have narrowed down. Yet in Chennai, doing day to day business using social media is yet to catch up in a big way. But it will happen soon enough.
2. From where you sit in the world, how do you think your personal and business lives will change over the next five years? How about for the rest of your family?
I’m not familiar with many aspects of social media. This is exactly what we are trying to figure out.
3. The folks at SAP are particularly interested in social media’s impact on the global enterprise as well as small to medium-sized corporations. Do you have any knowledge or advice for them?
We believe social media based interaction will become ubiquitous sooner than latter. When our customers wake up to this reality we don’t want to be caught napping. Just like telephone skills are taken for granted now, soon workforce will have to be social media savvy.Some time back we encouraged our people to explore game like social media viz. SecondLife with the brief of making them learn social media quickly. [The choice of SecondLife as a starting point for social media exploration is unique to our situation: Our people use 2D graphics tools like Photoshop day in and day out. These tools are handy in exploring advanced/pro usage of SecondLife like dress making and building.] We are happy to share that, an initiative started as manpower upgrade exercise, is now promising to be an exciting business opportunity, marketing channel, and a small revenue stream too. Graphic arts is illustration biz, with social media the market has expanded. The machinima video above is our jab at illustrating with the new tools.
There is a lot SAP can help to make doing business through Social Media sustainable. There is a lot of drudgery in engaging with multiple social media. For instance, uploading photos and tagging each one of them takes a lot of time. SAP with its tight involvement with the internal and external ‘business process plumbing’ can make Living the Business Aloud easy and drudgery free. For example, workflow could auto generate a draft of a blog post summarizing the work done for a customer, with pictures and link to relevant customer public profiles, relevant tags, etc. This draft could be further embellished with human interest elements by a human and published.
I have high hopes on SAP in helping SME businesses ride two significant trends, viz., Mashability and Serendipity. Let me explain.
Make Our SME Business Mashup Ready. I believe judicious exposition of capacity through mashup(interface) is a good technology antidote for technology driven rapid commoditization. I believe mashup is an attractive channel to graduate cold calls into revenue generating relationships. An ERP with built in support for mashup exposure: a doorway that knows both sides – the internal business process, as well as the Wild Wild Web, will be very attractive.I believe mashup is a potent strategic tool to increase capacity utilization as well as a low cost business development method.
Enhance Serendipity for Our Network of Suppliers and Customers.When Geography is History, Serendipity is the new Geography. This, I believe,again is a strategic tool that will prevent premium erosion. With our continued practice ofLiving our Business Aloud, our social media engagements will increase the findability of whoever that has done business with us. In other words we want ‘Doing/Done business with UPSL’ as a social networking factor just like musical preference, interest in books, pet ownership, etc. And of course the ERP will have to help in achieving it in a sustainable manner.
4. Do you have any interesting case studies of unique uses of social media?
Being in the publishing pre-press business, the concept of Wiki has immense attractions. Last minute minor content change and getting the proof sign off are part of our regular work. A Wiki has immense potential to ease this process.Just to experiment and learn about Wiki, we initiated a Wiki2Booklet experiment. It was a grand success and a very rich learning experience. There were some interesting conversations around it too. What our team members did with the learning from Wiki2Booklet is even more interesting.
5. What social media tools do you use? Which are your favorites? Why?
As mentioned earlier, we love Wiki. But our staff are not prose savvy to be Wikipedians. They are visual people with good color and image sense, thus SecondLife attracts them better. SecondLife is also a wiki in many ways. SecondLife has an added bonus of an integrated micro-payment mechanism. Given our Graphic Art background, and SecondLife’s micro-payment, and Second Life as a video( Machinima) making platform, it is our natural favorite.
Apart from regular Social Media tools, we are a big fans of Unconferences. Much of what we learned about social media is through the vibrant Unconference community in Chennai. We participated in them and ended up sponsoring pre-press and publishing services for the events.
6. Do you see language as a barrier for social media? Will English become the global language of the Internet? Should it?
Language is indeed a barrier. Within our organization, the Intranet Wiki is bilingual( English and Tamil).We find that language integration is still non-trivial and can do well with better design and ease of use mantras from web2.0 trends. The shift away from text to video, podcasting and virtual space likeSecondLife creates opportunity to overcome language barrier. English will play a role in serendipity of non-english content.Should English be the de facto language? Social Media is about inclusion, celebration of the fringes. Anything that creates exclusion will naturally fall out of favor.
7. Write a question(s) for yourself and answer it.
Why are you so excited about Mashups? How will it help your business?
There is lot commonality shared between pre-press business and the art of mashups. When we are doing a brochure, we play with the basic text, images, color and other elements to bring out what the customer wants to say in an aesthetic way. Social media brings in a wider variety of elements to the pallet and we will thrive as mashup artists.
We are also keen on making our business mashable. The rationale for making our business mashable is same as rationale of a Bank installing ATMs. Just like ATMs, Mashables make common transactions frictionless. By making our business mashable,
We are increasing our capacity utilization. ( We continue to be inspired by Amazon Web Services. Amazon as always a good place to watch trends translated to practice)
We are pro-actively acknowledging the rapid commoditization.
We cut down our cost (and our customer’s too) of negotiation and discussion over a commodity offering – the time/effort can be better spent on adding value to the same customer.
We will be able to cost effectively acquire customers and also widen our customer base.
8. Additional comments
Alison Bolen’scomment inspired us to plunge into the Survey. I’m also thankful to Balaji Sowmyanarayanan, our Social Media coach and our long time tech consultant for brainstorming and executing our social media initiatives. I appreciate our team member Maha’s effort in assisting in linking.
Pre-press and last minute action/value addition go together. And that is why we are participating in the survey in at the tail end . By the Way, we need better collaboration tools for doinglast minute changes/value adds painlessly.
… Talking to newsmen here on Wednesday, Ifra India Managing Director R.V. Rajan said the conference would dwell on subjects such as branding, new products and advertising and also look at issues affecting the production of the daily newspaper such as industrialised production and quality in newspaper printing.
“While the conference will help media professionals understand the dynamics of the industry, Expo will provide them a platform to interact with the world’s leading vendors of products and services to the newspaper and publishing industry,” he said.
Over 100 of the world’s leading suppliers to the newspaper publishing industry such Adobe, Agfa, Fuji Photo Film, Kodak, MAN Roland, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Nippon, Siemens Information Systems, PPI among others are taking part in the expo and there will be a large Indian presence too.
Over 3,000 people are expected to visit the expo.
We are very excited to be part of the expo.We will be featuring Screen PlateRite News 2000 there.
We are also excited to learn from the industry thought leaders perspective on threats and opportunities in the fast changing digital era through the conference tracks. Here is an interesting video on(by Ifra) convergence and how Newspapers can leverage convergence to their advantage.
Will India become the hub of innovation and production of print ecosystem equipments?
Are some of the questions we want to explore in the event on the side. Apart from explaining the awesome features of Screen Plate Rite 2000 News that is.
For the print equipment oriented, the Plant Visit trip to the all new The Hindu’s Maraimalar Nagar plant will be very interesting. Rush, it is first come first served! And don’t miss the futuristic Ifra Newsplex too.
SecondLife is an interesting Machinima making tool. ‘Gmail: A Behind the Scene Video‘ is an interesting community engagement initiated by Gmail team.
Our SecondLife/Social media team specializes in SecondLife machinima making. The video engagement presented itself as an opportunity to showcase the team’s talent. With just Fraps and a few AV modifications a cool looking video is rapidly assembled!
Whachout for the pink flamingo and birds circling while the magical white horse delivers the mail.
Or watch the M-velope bird fly and dive underwater and fly again.
M-velope rides the toy train…
We will be updating the SLURL of Sims used in the above videos shortly.
SecondLife machinima indeed add new dimension to SecondLife.com’s theme: Your World, Your Imagination!
Participating in events organized by The Knowledge Foundation is always fun and educative experience. We got a taste of social media and its potential through TKF’s blogcamp.in last September. In the latest proto.in Summer edition, our participation was a very intense and exhilirating experience. We designed and assembled the Proto.in booklet - it was like a roller coaster ride + suspense thriller mashup! Speaking of mashups we got introduced to them through the TKF and we are not sleeping on it. Watch this space for a 4-way mashup that will magically teleport a virtual tree-sapling from the 3D virtual metaverse SecondLife and effect a tree sapling planting in the real world - Tamil Nadu!
Our team members who participated in the WikiCamp.in were so thrilled with the Wiki concept and its possibilities that they made sure that it is available to the rest of the UPSL team. They realized that language barrier will come in the way of sharing the wonders of the wiki. The energy level after the event was so high that it was enough to overcome all the technical difficulties associated with getting Tamil work with all machines/browsers.
The wiki is a simple dokuwiki with a javascript based romanized translitration keyboard on the side panel. The Romainzed keyboard area is shown in red markings. And the tamil translitration is shown in green markings. The user will have to type in the tamil content and copy paste to the wiki area. The team is presently exploring ways for seamless integration of tamil language in the wiki itself.
We look forward to participate and learn from future events of The Knowledge Foundation. And sincere thanks and cheers to everyone of the its team members!
The Indian Tech industry is coming of an age. There is a lot of startup action in the recent times. And startups need all the support from the ecosystem to thrive. Proto.in an initiative by The Knowledge Foundation to bootstrap and vitalize the ecosystem itself. The emergence of The Knowledge Foundation itself is a microcosm of the emergence of tech Industry. We are proud to be associated with the The Knowledge Foundation in providing pre-press, publishing support. We emerged richer with every participation of TKF event.
With our SecondLife exploration maturing, we are happy to cover/feature Proto.in in secondlife. While the physical attendance for the event is sold out, anyone can attend the event via secondlife. And participate as if being there at the convinence of broadband enabled PC near you.
Visit proto.in at SecondLife coverage Petrel(http://slurl.com/secondlife/Petrel/165/80/24/) or while in SecondLife IM upsl Pink or Labsji Link for teleport.
In our social media exploration, we are closely following the ‘Gurrilla Public Service announcement’ as part of our learning and inspiration. UPSL being an award winning pioneers in Label Manufacturing, we thought printing and distributing the labels worldwide will be the right salutation for the initiative. We are very inspired by the experiment on how a small label can create an impact and how the whole campaing is carried out( right from ‘Open Sourcing’ the artwork through Creative Commons - that is how we can print it!)
I as an intern learing this is a wonderful experience.
Here, I am going to give the steps in whole process of printing to make you aware of …
Image Rework
The Artwork was taken from the link thesecomefromtrees.blogspot.com. It needs to be reworked since the quality of the artwork was not sufficient for printing. This process is done in the versatile Adobe Illustrator. We went through a thousand types of fonts to match the used font and recreated the label. One single label of size 3× 5 inch [actual size], along with die line [a line which gives the shape of the sticker] and the cutmarks is pictured below
Layout Preparation
Since the size of artwork is 3×5 inch, it is not possible to print a single label per sheet in printing. So we need to keep ups [multiples copies of the label] in a single document, in order to print many labels in a single sheet. The size used for printing was 15 x20 inch. We got 8 ups for a sheet. The final layout was given in encapsulated post script format (.eps) and it will look as below…
We incorporated our logo and website address for self-pride…
Before printing, this document must be converted to film and then plate…
The further process will be in next post :)…
Film Processing
After finishing the layout, we took the document for RIP[Raster Image Processing]. It was done in application named HQ 510 . Through this software we can add eps, postscript and pdf files. As printing is done in 4-colour [Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black (cmyk)], special colour or single colour process, there is a need to take separate films for each colour. HQ 510 helps us to separate the colours and also special colours. We took single film in Imagesetter [Tanto 6870, the machine used for film exposing] as it has to be printed in special colour [leaf green]. Another film was taken for die making that is to the shape of the label as for ups.
Plate Making
The film is taken to the plate making department. The film is cleaned with CTC [carbon tetra chloride] to remove the unwanted dust and finger prints. We first load the ps plate of size 21×25.5 inch, on the plate exposing machine [Screen] then place the film on ps plate. First by vacuum option, machine removes the air between the machine bed, plate and the film. Then the plate will be exposed by passing ultra violet light for 5 minutes. The plates are developed through a solution prepared in the ratio of 1:3 [developer:water]. The unexposed areas are removed. Now the plates are ready for printing.
Printing
The printing is done on Offset machine with LeafGreen (Pantone shade 354C).
Lamination
The printed sheets were gloss laminated through laminating machine.
Die Punching
Laminated sheets are punched through Kiss punching process to get the shape of the label.
Final Trimming
As the sheet has 8 nos., it is cut into two to get four nos per sheet.
Labels are ready to use and conserve our eco-system.
With that the stickers are ready. How we are going to mash these up with SecondLife and other social media is going to be interesting. Whatch this space for more updates.
One interesting aspect of SecondLife is it offers rich 3d visual that will make a good setting for a video. The gener of video made using gaming platforms is called machinima. As part of our secondlife exploration, we created a few machinima. PodWorks.in is a good platform to explore machinimas in the context of podcasting and videocasting. The commanality of the tools used in podcasting/videoblogging and machinima makes PodWorks.in an interesting event to learn the tricks form the mavens.
Here is a Machinima that showcases an Avatar that runs a tree teleportation service between SecondLife and the RealLife.
From the business point of view, UPSL is a graphics art/illustration expert. Machinima is yet another medium to make available our graphic art expertise to our customers. We will be more than glad to discuss a Machinima based video brochure for your business/venture/concept/theme. Just holler “Machinima” in the event, we will be there rightaway!
