Visionaries see wireless, suppliers still riding Y2K wave

MIAMI BEACH, Fla. -- Despite dire predictions of low turnout (mostly from this quarter), a healthy 779 people attended the Newspaper Association of America's SuperConference, held here Jan. 23-28.

SuperConference annually embodies meetings on pre-press, press and post-press, as well as materials and health and safety, and this year's event had a jaunty air. Most of the attendees had successfully combatted the year 2000 bug, many had brand new systems as a result and all were interested in learning new ways to publish papers. The pre-press segment of the meeting, with 279 attendees, provided a number of interesting topics.

Knowledge is the key
Saying that year 2000 "forced everybody to replace or upgrade their back-office systems" and that it's time to "leverage all that stuff," Scott Cooper of Lotus Development Corp. used his pre-press keynote slot to discuss the concept of "knowledge management."

Cooper, vice president and general manager of knowledge management products at Cambridge, Mass.-based Lotus and a former executive with Eastman Kodak Co., talked about companies crossing the "e-line" -- the difference between conducting traditional commerce and e-commerce -- and companies crossing the "k-line" -- those businesses that have come to embrace knowledge management.

"Eighty-eight percent of top chief executive officers say they give a high priority to improving knowledge management," Cooper told the pre-press crowd.

Knowledge management has been an evolution, he said, starting with e-mail and messages and progressing to the World-Wide Web and groupware products (not unlike his company's own Lotus Notes).

"These products created a sense of community," that didn't exist before, Cooper said.

Cooper compared knowledge management to the well-known and understood principle of information management. The fundamental technologies of knowledge management, he said, "allow the abstraction of text the way we applied abstractions to numbers decades ago."

What gets lost today, Cooper said, are the "nuggets of insight" that a large organization has acquired over the course of doing business. An individual somewhere within your company may have solved a problem similar to the one with which you are currently confronted, but how do you know that? As Cooper put it, there is no place to go to say, "Find me the person who can answer my question."

A knowledge management system builds relationships between not only documents but people, he explained. Such a system allows you to perform a search on all the memos written in a company, for example, and provides the salient ones as well as links to their authors, helping you to get in touch with your corporation's experts on a given topic.

Cooper described knowledge management as "a collaborative space" that should be thought of as "people, places and things." Its goal is "finding stuff" and doing profiling and skills assessments of staff. It also builds electronic communities and electronic teams.

Summing up, Cooper said that "searching technologies are evolving into knowledge management" which works to answer these questions: "What do we know? Who knows it? How do we connect them?"

Digital homes, digital publishing
It was overcast and rainy on the first morning of SuperConference 2000, but blue skies prevailed in the auditorium.

Three futurists shared their visions of the completely "wired" home, and conflicting views on whether electronic ink or electronic paper will ultimately win the day.

The "Hot New Technologies" session gave Intel Corp.'s David Nash, director of marketing for Intel's Connected.Home initiative, the opportunity to show a brief video on some near-term products and services that will be available for the totally wired home.

Nash's video detailed the activities of a mature couple who ran a web-publishing business out of their home, equipped with such wonders as wireless Internet access, digital videocam phones, digital newspapers and even data exchange between an exercise machine and the home's central server. The story was rounded out by real-time motion-video conversations with the couple's daughter and grandson.

The suburban Portland Ore.-based executive remarked that "everything in that video is available today -- it's not necessarily economical, though."

Referring to networks within the home, Nash commented that "people will buy benefits, not plumbing." In a show of hands, more than a quarter of the attendees 'fessed up that they had a home Ethernet network.

"Always on, always connected changes everything," Nash said, contrasting Internet connection technologies such as the cable modem and digital subscriber line (DSL) with dial-up access. Cable and DSL are "profound new pipelines," he said.

Research indicates that "women wanna shop and men want financial news and [sports] scores," from their Internet access, according to Nash.

The video featured a variety of technologies that were obviously meant to illustrate wireless Internet access, such as a pad for video phone calls and a digital "paper" from which concert tickets could be ordered. Nash said that "consumers demand no new wires" in their homes, and talked about "punching Ethernet through walls."

The future will be wireless, Nash concluded, but multiple networking technologies will "co-exist" within the home of the future.

Nash's presentation, with its illustration of a type of digital newspaper that retained many of the qualities of a traditional newspaper -- it was thin, flat and lightweight -- led naturally into the two competing visions for digital ink and digital paper.

E Ink Corp. of Cambridge, Mass. -- with a raft of high-profile investors that include Central Newspapers Inc. of Phoenix, The McClatchy Co. of Sacramento and the Hearst Corp. (not to mention Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen) -- appeared to be further along with its product.

E Ink Chief Executive James Iuliano said the challenge was to "update on demand, over and over again." The company has developed a whole new class of displays and devices, said Iuliano, and he backed up the claim by demonstrating his product, which clearly showed from the back of the hall, text changing on a sign.

In E Ink's new technology, charged white particles reveal or hide themselves depending upon a small electrical charge applied to one side of the paper or the other.

The resolution of an E Ink device, said Iuliano, "is dependent upon the size of the electronic addressing." The first implementation of E Ink will be in large area displays, but, working with a variety of partners including Lucent Technologies, E Ink anticipates developing small-scale devices that could easily handle a newspaper or magazine.

Iuliano summarized by saying, "For digital media to be truly accepted, digital e-ink is necessary."

Next came Nick Sheridon, a scientist from California's Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, who discussed his company's "gyricon" technology for electronic paper. A gyricon sheet is a thin layer of transparent plastic in which millions of small beads are randomly dispersed. The beads -- somewhat like laser printer toner particles -- are contained in an oil-filled cavity and are free to rotate. The beads have hemispheres of contrasting color -- for example, black and white. When a voltage is applied to the surface of the sheet, the beads rotate to present one colored side or the other to the viewer. A pattern of voltages can be applied to the surface in a bit-wise fashion to create text and pictures.

The Xerox e-paper product did not provide the visual contrast shown by the E Ink product, but the concept was impressive nonetheless.

Mass production of e-paper became a "reality," said Sheridon, with last summer's licensing of Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Co. -- 3M of St. Paul -- as the maker of electronic paper. The scientist envisions a world where wand "printers" or other portable devices would be able to erase and encode new information to be read.

An e-paper newspaper, for example, could offer breaking news, incoming sports scores and up-to-the-minute stock quotes, even while the paper is being read.

"You could have a 'printer' or you could have an addressing system," Sheridon said, suggesting that some type of wireless updating could be implemented. Showing a prop that looked something like a pull-down window shade, he said to imagine that each time he pulled the paper out of the roller, a new newspaper page would be displayed.

Sheridon added that work was progressing on color reproduction, using transparent spheres with cyan, magenta and yellow filters.

Jazzed on the potential of e-paper, Sheridon called it "the moral equivalent of printer's ink on paper."

Supplier scenarios
A panel of industry suppliers painted a rosy picture for newspaper technology in the coming years, though in private the executives weren't quite so sanguine.

The panel seemed to be truthful when they were talking about last year's performance -- all said they did well -- but predictions for the future seemed to fly in the face of reality.

While many newspapers spent heavily on technology last year for Year 2000 fixes (which, in some instances, meant they replaced systems wholesale), the question is whether papers will continue to invest in capital now that Year 2000 has rolled over. Several suppliers have indicated that a number of newspaper groups are looking to keep capital spending to a minimum this year. For example, one major group that normally green-lights a dozen system replacements annually will only do six this year.

Roberto Antoniotti, chief executive of Tera S.p.a. of Milan, Italy -- makers of the GoodNews editorial system -- said that 1999 turned in an "excellent performance" and that the company was moving to increase its business in markets where it already had a presence. Toward that end, Tera recently opened an office in Bedford, N.H.

Bernard Grinberg, vice president of product marketing at Geac Publishing Systems in Tampa, Fla., said that his company was "building a global business specializing in your industry." Geac -- which acquired Grinberg's old company, Australia's Cybergraphic, shortly after NEXPO '99 and shortly after that acquired Matrix Publishing Systems Ltd. of Nottingham, United Kingdom -- now has "a wide range of products that are relevant to the future of the business."

Last year was also a good one for system developer CText Inc. of Ann Arbor, Mich., said Larry Moore, the company's chief executive. CText saw a 28 percent revenue increase, year-over-year, and 2000 looks to be even better. "Our backlog so far for this year is equal to our revenues for last year," he said.

Frank Washington, chief executive officer at System Integrators Inc. of Sacramento, conceded that SII had probably dropped off the radar screens of most newspapers, which he said was "well-deserved." He predicts, however, that the company's new line of editorial systems, Insiight, will help papers, whose world is challenged because barriers to entry are "starting to fall." Washington said the beleaguered company had just completed a second year of profitability and that new investors had recently come into the company with a "seven-figure" investment.

"Phenomenal and exciting" were the words used by Karen Weltchek, the new chief executive and president of Beford, Mass.-based Atex Media Solutions Inc., to characterize her company's 1999 performance. Though she acknowledged that there had been some "rough challenges," she didn't specifically address the layoff of 15 percent of the company's workers late last year (see The Cole Papers, December 1999). She did announce that the company was moving its Prestige editorial product -- the mainstay of Atex's European sales efforts in recent years -- over to North America, and that it would supplant DewarView, one of the industry's first standards-based editorial front-end systems.

Geac's Grinberg wrapped up the session with the notion that newspapers should begin looking at the whole operation. "Papers should think about enterprise-wide buying of a single environment, if not a single system. They must adopt a philosophy of change."

-- dmc

Return on investment will no longer be calculated by "the number of noses by the cost per nose."
-- Karen Weltchek, Atex Media Solutions

Atex Media Solutions Inc.,
(781) 275-2323,
e-mail: info@atex.com;
CText Inc.,
(313) 677-4700,
e-mail: sales@ctext.com;
Geac Publishing Systems,
(813) 872-9990,
e-mail: vsinfo@geac.com;
System Integrators Inc.,
(916) 929-9481,
e-mail: sii@sii.com;
Tera U.S.,
(603) 624-9160,
e-mail: tim@tera-us.com.

See also E Ink vs. e-paper

From THE COLE PAPERS, February 2000, Copyright © 2000, All Rights Reserved.