How I became a magazine publisher

I never thought that a chance meeting on a Boston bus would lead to me having anything in common with Steve Forbes, Oprah Winfrey and Jann Wenner. But, like the publishers of FORBES, O and Rolling Stone, I’m now a magazine publisher.

It all began the day I met Udi Chatow, part of the MagCloud project team at Hewlett-Packard. We were attending the annual HP TechCon symposium. Udi told me how MagCloud enables anyone to publish a magazine. The team were looking for non-profit associations to test the service. As the President of the non-profit Northern California National Speakers Association I knew our association needed a showcase for members’ articles about public speaking. Within a few short weeks we had selected five articles, sourced some illustrations from a stock photo website and, with design help from Meghan Kennedy in HP Labs, created the inaugural edition. Professionally Speaking is a 20-page color magazine that’s available for purchase from magcloud.com. Best of all, there was none of the up-front cost associated with printing.

We announced the Summer 2008 edition of Professionally Speaking on June 13, 2008. Our Fall 2008 edition will be published in September.

MagCloud: the future of magazine publishing

MagCloud is a new business incubation resulting from collaboration between HP Labs and HP’s Corporate Ventures team. It’s where the world wide web meets the world of printing. MagCloud offers publishers the ability to take digitized magazines and economically promote, sell, print and fulfill them on demand.

It costs you nothing to publish a magazine on MagCloud.com. The service lets you upload a high-resolution PDF and MagCloud takes care of the rest: printing, mailing, subscription management and more. The MagCloud website functions as a virtual newsstand, where readers can browse and, using PayPal or a credit card, order publications. The publisher specifies a markup on each copy sold, which MagCloud collects and pays the publisher at the end of each month.

MagCloud uses HP Indigo digital press technology to custom-print each issue when it’s ordered. Printing on demand means no big print runs, which means no pre-publication expense. The resulting magazines are in gorgeous full color on 80lb paper.

This is a breakthrough for niche publications – the small ‘zines’ which form the long tail of the magazine publishing world. It’s also an interesting opportunity for large publishers. They are now free to experiment and create riskier products and see if they can find an audience.

The New Economics of Magazines

The MagCloud development team is looking at much more than printing technology. They are researching the fundamental economics of magazine publishing. Team member and economist Kay-Yut Chen states:

“MagCloud is enabling a completely new kind of print economics. It is reducing the distance between the publisher, the subscriber and the advertiser compared to traditional magazines. In the traditional model, someone who wants to run an advertisement in, say TIME Magazine, has to engage in a labor-intensive negotiation with high transaction costs. The automation we’re building into the MagCloud system means even a very small publisher and small advertiser can do business cost-effectively.”

By simplifying all aspects of the publishing process MagCloud benefits publishers, subscribers and advertisers – making a whole Print 2.0 ecosystem much more efficient than the existing model.

MagCloud’s Guiding Principle

The guiding principle of the project is that anyone can be a publisher. What they will do as publishers remains to be seen. “MagCloud is an enabling platform,” states Udi Chatow. “People are finding new opportunities that did not exist before. We don’t want to second guess what they will be.”

MagCloud Today

The project is still in early Beta stage. What this means in practice is that anyone can register on the site and browse and purchase magazines. Publisher capability is by invitation only, though rumor has it that invitations are distributed liberally. The reason is the development team is seeding a new market. They are looking for publishers who serve specific niches.

The world first heard about MagCloud when a couple of blogs broke the news in mid-June. Since then literally thousands of requests to publish have been received. They come from an astounding variety of organizations – from juggling associations to Stanford University athletics; from cartoonists to photographers.

SFentrepreneur visits HP Labs

Following a June 24th visit by 20 members of the Northern California Chapter of the National Speakers Association to HP Labs, SFentrepreneur founder Edith Yeung organized a visit by 40 members of her organization on August 21st.

The evening visit took in a talk by Udi and a tour of the Indigo printing press and a panel session where magazine publishers shared insights. I spoke about the experience of creating Professionally Speaking. Edith gave every member of the audience a complimentary copy of SFentrepreneur.

There was an incredible level of interest by these entrepreneurs. Many saw how a magazine could serve their niche.

The highlight of the evening was when the MagCloud team surprised us with a special 8-page souvenir magazine of photographs of the event they’d taken during the reception and tour. This is a great example of how MagCloud extends the boundaries of publishing. Training program managers and conference organizers can create just-in-time magazines for events.

What’s unique about MagCloud

Publishers can repurpose and monetize online and user-generated content. Printing costs are lower for small magazine and promotional runs of a few dozen, a few hundred or even a few thousand copies. There are automated web based ordering and print management services to take the headaches out of production. Financial transactions between buyers and the publishers are handled automatically to ease the flow of money to the bottom line. The site also offers a unique demand creation vehicle that publishers can showcase. It all adds up to the pleasure and prestige of seeing yourself in print at very low cost. It’s the people’s printing press.

Finally, it solves the back-issue problem for publishers. Virtual magazines never go out of print and readers can order any copy at any time from any where as long as it remains posted to magcloud.com.

Readers are free to enjoy a virtual magazine newsstand in the cloud. They can access a wide array of specialized and unique content in a printed magazine format that is not readily available elsewhere. If they find something they would like to order, it’s printed on demand and delivered directly to their mailbox.

Green Magazine Publishing

By taking advantage of print on demand, magazines are only printed by people who actually intend to read them.. This is much more environmentally friendly than the current magazine industry where an incredible 60% of the 3.8 billion magazines delivered to news-stands in the USA are never sold (or read). That’s over 2.3 billion wasted magazines that end up in recycling.

Variable print technology and future of MagCloud

This online marketplace of digital magazines holds the same promise as iTunes for music lovers. It allows readers the opportunity to sample content and purchase only what they need to read. iTunes means you no longer buy a whole album to just listen to a song or two. MagCloud means publishers have the opportunity to offer readers the option to just purchase the one or two articles they are interested in from any issue.

Imagine a future magazine marketplace where readers are free to create ‘mash-ups’ of content from a wide variety of sources. Magazines will be tailored from news articles, blog postings, book excerpts, event schedules, even friends’ recommendations for music, movies, books and more. The magazine is personal again.

No amount of marketing analysis can predict where MagCloud will go. Expect the unexpected. Variable print technology allows the freedom to experiment. “Every page can be different,” says MagCloud engineer Wei Koh. “A publisher is no longer limited to designing only one magazine. They have the option to personalize copies for each subscriber. This has exciting possibilities. We’ve only just scratched the surface.”

Consider a few options:

• Targeted advertising by zip code give national publications the option to insert low cost ads from regional companies.
• Editorial pages geared to certain consumers. A restaurant review for your town inserted in a national food publication.
• Photographs of subscribers on a one-off cover (Congratulations! You are Person of the Year.)

Your call

If you’ve read this far you are obviously interested in MagCloud. You probably have interests, hobbies, association colleagues or an attic filled with grandfather’s photographs which could be digitized and published. Perhaps your kids soccer team needs an end of season souvenir with articles and photographs. Or you could thrill your relatives at this summer’s family reunion with a magazine of the clan. Or perhaps you want to launch a magazine to support your neighborhood or other political campaign. What are you waiting for? Simply go to www.magcloud.com, and complete the request for a publisher invitation.

There’s a publishers guide that walks you through the process.

It’s available as a free download from the site, or for purchase as a printed magazine. What else did you expect?

Every summer, the best and brightest science and engineering students from across the country and around the world spend a summer interning at Silicon Valley companies. This select bunch of students are mostly post-graduates with a handful of undergraduates. PARC, SAP Labs, Sun Labs, Microsoft Research, Google and HP Labs host a series of visits and social networking events. These events culminate in a visit to HP Labs and a reception for the students.

I helped organize the visit to HP this year and took the opportunity to ask the students where they were from, which company they were interning at and a little about their research interests. To hear what excites the next generation of Silicon Valley scientists and engineers, click on the podcast icon below.

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I’ve had a lot of fun working with The Singer’s Gym, a San Francisco based group of musicians and voice coaches who are dedicated to inspired, connected singing. They work with professional and non-professional singers in an environment that allows each singer experience full involvement, spontaneity and vitality in the practice and performance of vocal music. They call this their Gym. They work out in their gym, challenge people, who get stronger — at singing.

Now, as someone who is tone deaf and never been able to carry a tune for more than a couple of bars in my life (maybe why I like singing along with Bob Dylan?) I was not working on my vocal chords with them.

Rather, I helped Ben and the team craft a Vision Statement Movie to express the essence of what they are, and what they offer. I used the technology developed by Malcolm Cohan and the Rocketship. We call it Consensus – offering any group a way to communicate their vision and inspire others to share it. The result is a Vision Statement Movie created by a group. The participants hold a positive vision for a specific outcome, or when a challenge is resolved, or an endeavor realized. Participants volunteer a Brave Statement of their own vision, and the movie is written, compiled and produced as the result of a simple hour-long meeting.

The result can be seen below. Take a look. Compare it to the usual ‘mission statement’ organizations and teams offer to the world. If you like what you see and you’d like to discuss how your team can develop a movie like this, drop me a line.

I’m delighted to have helped publish a new magazine from the Northern California Chapter of the National Speakers Association (NSA/NC). This full-color magazine is a first for an NSA chapter.

The inaugural edition features articles by prominent members of NSA/NC. Our Chapter members are experts in many areas, from performance skills coaching to negotiation tactics, speechwriting, life balance, teambuilding and more.

Why Professionally Speaking?

First, let me say I did *not* name the magazine after my own blog! The name was taken from the last printed newsletter the chapter produced in 2003.

The intended purpose of the magazine is to showcase our chapter as an association of experts. It gives members a professionally produced vehicle in which to publish. The magazine helps us to build connections to key decision makers in the meetings industry and our affiliate associations.

Buy your copy today

We plan to make Professionally Speaking a quarterly publication. It will be distributed free of charge to chapter members. Costs will be covered by sales to non-members and by advertising. Copies are available for purchase at $4.50 + postage. Go to www.nsanc.org and buy a copy right now!

Publishing your own magazine

The opportunity to produce and print this magazine arose unexpectedly in mid-May when we were approached by Hewlett-Packard (HP). They were interested in finding a small association to help test their new “MagCloud” technology for print-on-demand. HP offered us support to help produce the magazine, but we had to go to press by early June when they announced MagCloud to the world (www.magcloud.com.)

Print on demand will revolutionize the magazine industry

MagCloud opens up the ‘long tail’ of magazine publishing for small associations like NSA/NC (we have 120 members) or even individuals. It represents an interesting new business opportunity. The MagCloud system from HP allows anyone to create and publish a high-quality color magazine with very little in the way of up-front costs.

HP’s innovative MagCloud system makes magazine publishing available to anyone with a message to share. This describes most of the members of the National Speakers Association. Until now many color magazines have been printed on traditional offset litho presses which, like books, require costly set-up and a large minimum print run. HP’s commercial digital printing technology makes it economical to print a single copy of a magazine whenever a subscriber orders one.

This means people who currently produce ezines or online newsletters can now consider offering content to their audience in the form of a printed magazine. Many of us are finding it increasingly difficult to grab people’s attention online. There’s value in a color magazine delivered to the door.

Make money with your own magazine

MagCloud allows you to focus on creating the content for your own magazine. All you have to do is upload a PDF and MagCloud takes care of the rest: printing, mailing, subscription management, and more. There’s none of the hassles with distribution, bulk mailing and minimum print runs. Charge subscribers a mark-up above the production cost to earn a profit on each copy sold. Carry advertising for yet another source of income.

(Full disclosure: I work as a speechwriter in the executive communications department at HP and support the director of HP’s research labs, where MagCloud was developed.)

MagCloud is currently open to publishers by invitation only.

Sooner or later all good things come to an end. Winners stumble, the mighty are fallen. People are at the top of their game for only so long. Companies that are the biggest, bestest, fastest growing one year are in the toilet the next.

Literature is filled with stories that teach this lesson. Shakespearean tragedies like Lear and Macbeth detail the challenges faced by those in positions of power.

In contrast, the message of the motivational speakers and books in the modern business world teach how to win, win, win. It’s all upside, baby. They ignore, or minimize, the downside.

So it is refreshing to read Stall Points: Most Companies Stop Growing–Yours Doesn’t Have To by Matthew Olsen and Derek van Bever. This book examines the fundamental reasons why revenue growth often stalls in successful companies. They identify four main reasons:

1. “Premium position captivity” – when a market leader fails to respond to a low-cost competitor.
2. “Innovation Management Breakdown” – where new product development fails to deliver an ROI.
3. “Premature core abandonment” – where growth opportunities in the core franchise are not exploited or new competitive challenges are ignored.
4. “Talent bench shortfall” – where a company withers due to a lack of leaders and staff able to execute strategy.

It’s interesting to review the history Silicon Valley companies and spot candidates for each of these mistakes. I would suggest that, in turn, we can see Sun Microsystems’s failure to anticipate the effect of Linux (#1); Xerox PARC’s famous inability to capitalize on everything from the mouse to the GUI (#2); MicroPro’s failure to hold on to the WordStar franchise in the 1980’s (#3); HP’s decision to go outside the company for the last two CEO’s (#4). In the latter case it can be argued that the stall resulting from the actions of the first candidate has been amply rectified by the actions of the second. The company Board learned from their mistakes.

(Full disclosure: I have not worked for Xerox PARC; at the others I had a ringside seat.)

What’s fascinating to consider are some of Olsen & van Bever’s prescriptions to avoid these all-to-common errors. These include:

• Being willing to review “belief’s that are so obvious and accepted that it is no longer politic to debate them.” Something most business cultures are loath to do.
• Writing a “pre-mortem analysis” – a newspaper account five years in the future describing why the company succeeded, and another account detailing why it failed. Not a prescribed activity by the power-of-positive-thinking brigade.
• Setting up a high-level “Shadow Cabinet” to discuss alternatives to current strategy and look for red flag indicators.

These are challenging ideas. One wonders if the mainstream American attitude of winning at all costs can stomach the process. In many organizations it’s considered career suicide to point out when the Emperor has no clothes. Think the DoD and Department of State. Likewise, East Coast financial institutions at the core of the current credit market melt-down seemed to lack anyone with this ability. They don’t hand out no stinkin’ bonus packages down on Wall Street for pointing out how things could go pear shaped. But at least they have the option to short the future and make a dime in the process.

Fortunately, it’s more in the nature of Silicon Valley to encourage and reward disruptive innovation. Out here, companies don’t stall as much as crash and burn. Out of the ashes, new ones are built. In the current wave of consolidations around the high-tech landscape there’s plenty of people making a good living catching the guys who are in stall mode and revving up the engines. In doing this, they often implement many of the solutions Olsen and van Bever proscribe: reviewing core assumptions; testing alternatives; scenario planning; zero-sum budgeting.

Driven by the relentless pace of technological change, business models learn from failure and reinvent. This is the competitive advantage of Silicon Valley.

One of the five themes of newly re-branded HP Labs is ‘content transformation’ – digitizing analog content from books and other printed matter into files stored on computers. Then transferring these digital files between devices (laptop, Kindle, iPAQ, iPod) and, finally, transforming the digital files (documents, photos) back to analog via digital printing technology.

Sounds marvelous. What’s not to like?

Well, the hubris of the high-tech industry is exposed by a telling comment in a book review in this weekend’s Financial Times. Lavinia Greenlaw, in reviewing The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel, discusses the joy of “tumbling over authors” in libraries. The great libraries are, barring disaster such as fire (as famously happened at Alexandria), places where books endure for centuries. This has not been so with digitized content. Manguel notes:

In 1986, the BBC created a multimedia edition of the Domesday Book that is now unreadable as the technology with which it was made is obsolete. The actual book, almost 1,000 years old, is still perfectly legible.

Moreover, the Web, in contrast to physical libraries, delivers ephemera; 70% of its communications are destroyed after four months. “On the Web, where all texts are equal and alike in form, they become nothing but phantom text and photographic image.”

It’s been noted that the world will produce more content in the next five years than in all recorded history to date. Are we any the wiser for the flood of emails, instant messages, structured and unstructured data that this represents? Are we capable of absorbing the relevance of this digitized distraction?

The challenge for those who will provision the virtual libraries of the future, which could easily contain every book ever published for instant download and printing on demand, will be to ensure that the storage is as timeless as the shelves of the great libraries of history. No small feat in a world where uncertain supplies of energy power the vast datacenters where these digital records will be archived.

Just after I finished talking with Art Fong, my colleague Barbara Waugh introduced me to another distinguished HP retiree – Zvonko Fazarinc.

Dr. Fazarinc emigrated from Yugoslavia and started working at HP Labs in 1965. He remembers clearly the impact that Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett’s management style had on Labs – which they used to visit every morning when arriving at work.

Listen to the podcast to hear some amazing stories – such as the time he tried to convince Dave Packard that he found more socialism in action with the HP Way than back home in Yugoslavia!

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One of the unexpected delights in the HP Labs event in Palo Alto today was the opportunity to meet many of the retired employees who were invited to attend.

It was a great honor to talk with Art Fong. He was recruited to the company back in 1946 by Bill Hewlett over a home-cooked spaghetti dinner. He was one of the first 100 employees at what is now a 172,000 person company.

He shared some stories of his years at HP and how inventions he created helped change history. His opinion of the research being done today? “Real cool!”

To hear Art discuss unique moments in HP history, click on the podcast icon below.

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E Pluribus Unum – Out of One, Many
HP Labs Pluribus – Out of Many projectors, One super-screen

Super-bright, large-scale, and very high-resolution digital projectors are indispensable tools of modern communication. They help CEOs wow audiences of analysts. They make rock concerts intimate. They turn computer gaming into a spectator sport. And they can make digital cinema an instant reality.

They are also very expensive. Prices for high-end projectors run into tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, which keeps these devices from being widely used.

HP Labs’ Nelson Chang and Niranjan Damera-Venkata had a hunch they could make a much cheaper projection system by combining the outputs of several smaller projectors to create a single, high-quality image. They work in the Multimedia Interaction and Understanding Lab in Palo Alto on a project code-named Pluribus.

Seeing Pluribus in action, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the huge, crystal-clear picture it creates. Hook a 16-foot screen up to a game of Madden NFL Football, for example, and the players are life-size – putting you front row and center at the same scale as the real thing.
Although Pluribus looks great, its true appeal lies in the cost savings it offers anyone in the business of projecting large images. How so? For example, Pluribus can combine ten off-the-shelf projectors costing $1,000 each to project an image as bright and sharp as that created by a single high-grade projector costing $100,000.

Once this technology reaches your local Best Buy it will cause the prices of what is possible with high-end home theatre to be reset to a new price-point. You’ll just have to be patient. Hear Nelson and Niranjan discuss their work in the podcast.

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Bernardo Huberman is one of only four Senior Fellows at HP Labs – the most distinguished technologists in the company. He runs the Social Computing Lab. His research focus is on the behavior of millions of people using the internet and how this can be analyzed and predicted. He is recognized around the world as an authority on how people communicate and collaborate on the Internet. His lab has recently developed Cloudprint, which lets you store documents in the cloud so you can retrieve and print them on any printer using a mobile phone.

One amusing way of illustrating his research in everyday terms is the choices people make when they place bets. Using the patters of behavior that the bookmakers need to understand to make a living, he looks at predictions we can make in corporate purchasing departments and other business settings.

To hear Bernardo’s remarks click on the podcast icon below.

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