Saturday, April 28, 2007
Chameleon Federation Notes
I just returned from the Chameleon Federation's 2007 Digital Publishing Workshop and Community Meeting where a group of 45+ academics (from around the world) and corporate researchers from HP Labs spent the week presenting research, engaging in group discussions, and networking.
Interesting Tidbits from the Meeting
David Blakesley an associate professor of English and director of professional writing at Purdue University runs Parlor Press a small publishing business. David is taking advantage of web-enabled print on demand technology and eBook to produce and distribute scholarly works.
Jim Vanides is responsible for HP's philanthropic grants to faculty in colleges and universities around the world. He is interested in applications of technology in the classroom (specifically the Tablet PCs). Jim has a blog on Teaching, Learning, & Technology in Higher Education and wrote up his thoughts on the Chameleon Federation meeting.
I had the opportunity to sit at the same dinner table as David and Jim on one of the evenings and we had some interesting discussions on the new opportunities being created by the emergence of web-enbaled print.
HP is doing some cool things with web-to-print (printing stuff from the web). They are building a tool set that enables users to mange what elements of a web page are printed (removing ads or other ink consuming objects). Its acquisition of Tabblo will provide some the enabling technology.
John Meyer, Director of the Digital Printing and Imaging Lab at HP Labs ended the event with a presentation on the history of printing at HP and where they are going. Some interesting points from his presentation was that HP had no idea what people would do with HP's ink jet printers when they were were first released. They went on to sell millions of printers.
John also provided some insight into new technology being developed by HP including embedded color control systems (spectrophotometers integrated into the printer), scalable printheads that uses an array of ink nozzles to deliver ink to the substrate and printed bistable color displays.
Posted in: Digital Publishing
