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Print It Yourself And Save

If you’re in business, whether you’re a small, medium or even a growing company, you need printed materials. Letterhead, brochures, business cards and signage are all still vital components to running a business. While most companies are pretty twenty-first century with their websites, on-line ordering and customer service support, many of them are still wasting gasoline driving to the print shop to order custom printing for which they pay way too much money. Why? All it takes is a little bit of your inner-geek and you’ll be printing your own business materials in no time, and saving both time and money doing it, too.

The initial cost of a decent color printer is going to be offset quickly by how much you save when you switch from the local guys doing your printing, to doing your own online printing with sites like PsPrint. On-line print vendors make it very simple for you to print your own letterhead and other paper materials right in your office. Don’t worry that the finished product is going to look amateur either. The on-line printing sites offer templates that are designed by professional artists for you to use in creating a custom look for your printed business materials. Their user-friendly design software can turn even a minor-league computer geek into an Internet printing guru in just a few easy steps. Or, if you’ve got the skills, you can upload your custom designs into their template and make the look more your own.

You can get your printed materials cheaper by doing it yourself. You get the expertise of print professionals at a fraction of the cost, too. Plus there is no shipping to pay because you print it all in house. With all of these pluses in its favor, the only reason I can see to visit the local print shop these days is if you work there.

Windows Phone 7 Series: Ballmer’s gambit

people_wpFor all the talk of the Windows Phone 7 Series, you’d think it was going to save Microsoft in the mobile market. That may be true, but it’s going to be an ugly transition. I’m sure few people missed the fact that Windows Phone 7 means everything that came before is obsolete, least of all the current Windows Mobile users. It’s gone. Kaput. None of the current Windows Mobile software will function in the Windows Phone 7 ecosystem.

A lot of people say it was necessary. I tend to agree. Windows Mobile was butt ugly and ran about as fast as an 80 year-old with an artificial hip. It had no evolutionary cycle, not to stay competitive anyway. But doing away with the old has left Windows Mobile with an 8-10 month lame duck period. Development is going to grind to a halt, likely within the week. That’s going to leave a lot very unhappy users who have been loyal to the brand to this point. I guess Microsoft expects that they’ll be willing to wait until the holidays for a phone with any new features.

The message from Microsoft today was clear: Windows Mobile is dead. We’re looking at an eight month grieving period at the very least.

Windows Phone 7: Microsoft makes the Palm mistake

wp7_startLet me start by saying this: Windows Phone 7 is the best thing Microsoft has done in the mobile market. It is the company’s first serious entrant in the smartphone category and a real and viable competitor with the iPhone and Google’s Android platform. There, I said it. Now let’s do that thing people love to do and talk about where Microsoft went wrong.

The Windows Phone 7 (I’m going to leave that god-awful name alone for a moment) is late to the party. Just as Palm did with the Pre, Microsoft waited too long for the Windows Phone 7. It’s three years after the iPhone, three years during which Redmond was constantly lambasted for its terrible mobile experience. Three years Apple took to entrench users in its iPhone OS experience. Three years that include millions of handset sales and billions in profits. Three years Apple used to build the world’s biggest mobile development community. Microsoft is way behind. The question is, can this platform make the comeback?

I’m leaning toward yes. Everything I’ve seen so far shows a beautiful user interface that looks highly intuitive. Microsoft borrowed a page from the Apple handbook and made the Windows Phone 7 experience as similar as possible to the Zune HD. It gives Zune users a level of familiarity they will appreciate. The phone also integrates other Microsoft services that have been points of criticism for other platforms. Office, Exchange, Outlook, Windows Live, Xbox Live – they all have a home with Windows Phone 7 and have been designed to function well in that platform. Any serious Windows user will feel very at home with this platform.

That’s also the platform’s biggest downside. While most of the world is using Microsoft’s operating system, I would call a very small margin of that user base “serious.” The rest are there because of a lack of options, and a lot of people, especially young people, having been drinking the Apple kool-aid of late. How do you convince a generation of Apple students, people who have grown up playing with the iPod Touch, that Windows Phone 7 is where it’s at? The features that set this experience apart from the iPhone are business oriented as I see it. Sure, the interface is organized differently, but people are already familiar with and seemingly in love with the app system – will content hubs be enough to break that paradigm?

Windows Phone 7 has a lot stacked against it (and the name isn’t helping), a problem compounded by the release schedule. The first Windows Phone 7 series won’t launch until the holidays of this year. If you’ve been paying attention to the industry, you know that “iPhone 4G” rumors are cropping up, which means we’ll probably see the next iteration of the iPhone before the Microsoft launch. While the promise of the Zune Phone be enough to keep anxious consumers from getting Apple’s latest?

Samsung Wave: The phone that should run Android

Samsung Wave.Samsung has always impressed me as a hardware manufacturer. Their phones are usually decent looking, easy to use and personally I’ve experienced minimal hardware failures. The same holds true for the Samsung Wave, which, if anything, is their most impressive handset to date.

Just unveiled at a Valentine’s Day press conference, the Wave is Samsung’s entrant into the upper tier of the smartphone market. It runs a 1 GHz processor and boasts 802.11n, an 800 x 480 AMOLED, Bluetooth 3.0, a 5MP camera, 2GB or 8GB internal storage with a microSD slot for expansion, and codec support for WMV, DivX, XviD, MP3 and 720p decoding and recording. The spec sheet is incredible, until you get to one little detail.

Bada. Samsung dropped its brand-new OS on this phone – yes, it’s the operating system that’s meant to make feature phones all fun and featurey. I tried to be understanding when Samsung launched Bada, but with a phone this fantastic there is no reason to run anything but Android.

The phone launches in April. Prices remain unannounced.

Warner cuts free music stream support

Last.fm logo.Warner’s been making a lot of noise with regard to digital media over the past several weeks. First, we had CEO Bronfman complaining about the flexibility offered to ebook publishers. Now he’s decided that the free streaming method of content delivery isn’t working for his label anymore.

Free streaming services are clearly not net positive for the industry and as far as Warner Music is concerned will not be licensed. The ‘get all your music you want for free, and then maybe with a few bells and whistles we can move you to a premium price’ strategy is not the kind of approach to business that we will be supporting in the future.

Though he’s clearly unhappy with the status quo, he didn’t really define whether he would be pulling existing licenses or simply refraining from signing new ones. It’s also not that he doesn’t like streaming – it’s the free part he’s concerned with. As long as the music is paid for by the listener, Bronfman can rest a happy man.

Source: BBC

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