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MagCloud – Do It Yourself Magazine Publishing …a Cool Idea with Loads of Microbusiness Potential

March 31, 2009 by Brian Hurley 1 Comment

HP is currently running a beta of a new online service called “MagCloud“.  The service allows anyone to produce a magazine and print it – on demand – for $0.20 a page.  The service also offers an online store to allow publishers to sell their magazines.  The service will take care of printing, mailing, subscription management, and more.

HP’s longer-term plan is to sell their specialized printers and inks to businesses who will offer regional on-demand printing services.

This ability to do on-demand printing of magazines can allow smaller operations and professional service organizations to offer new services to businesses which need to quickly and cheaply produce magazines.  One of the benefits offered by the service is the ability to do tweaks to the magazine master document much more quickly and with less cost then traditional methods of producing magazines.

Best practices, Business, Canada, Commercialization, Computing, Creative Class, Economy, Ecosystems, Entreprenuerism, General Interest, HP, Information Technology, Innovation, Jobs, Microbusiness, New Media, Ontario, Opportunities, Regional Economic Development, Trends, Unemployment, United States, US, Web 2.0
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Networks vs. Servers: The truce has ended, war is coming

February 16, 2009 by Brian Hurley 0 Comments

It is interesting to note that the computing and the networking industry is now starting to compete openly in each other’s backyard.

HP started going after networking aggressively in 2005, and it’s Procurve business unit has been growing faster then the overall networking market and has been slowly taking away Cisco market share.  Further, on Feb 18, 2009, HP announced the formation of a business unit to consolidate it’s telecommunications and media products.  The new unit will be called HP Communications and Media Solutions (CMS).

Cisco has stated its intention to aggressively go after virtualizing the entire datacenter (including computing and networking) and is expected to announce a virtualization-enabled blade system this spring.  According to the trade press – the new blade system is code-named “California”. There is also rumors of friction between IBM and Cisco as Cisco’s actions put serious strain Cisco-IBM channel partnerships.

This will change the landscape for many virtualization and utility computing oriented startups.  This war is expected to result in a price war for networking equipment and blade systems.  This will also result in  significant industry consolidation.

Business, Cisco, Computing, Convergence, Economy, General Interest, HP, Information Technology, Innovation, Networking, Silicon Valley, Trends, United States, Venture Capital
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