February 2012
3 posts
Transactions vs. Relationships
The world of online print is dominated by only a handful of large national companies. They target an easy-to-reach, audience with unsophisticated needs. They focus on offering only simple products with limited options that are less error-prone in production. In addition, these products don’t cost a lot to ship, are not time sensitive, and are of “good enough” quality for the long-tail consumer...
10 tags
Dog-fooding it - the tools we use to run Keen
Keen is a solution, in large part, designed to remove the burden of software and IT resource management for our print service provider customers. The fact is that most companies we work with find it prohibitively expensive and difficult to deal with in-house software infrastructure. This is where Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is the ultimate equalizer that can solve complex problems while being...
December 2011
2 posts
7 tags
ASP ≠ SaaS and why you should care
Cloud computing has only begun to show its profound effect on the way software and services will be consumed from this point forward. Already many business productivity software categories such as CRM (Salesforce), Project Management (Basecamp), and even Word Processing (Google Docs, Microsoft Office 365) are either completely or well on their way into the cloud. Acceptance of...
7 tags
Vitaly M. Golomb, CEO of Keen to Speak at Venture...
Keen Systems’ CEO, Vitaly M. Golomb, will speak at Venture Summit Silicon Valley in Half Moon Bay, CA (Dec 13-14).
Venture Summit Silicon Valley (registration link) is a two-day gathering where 500 cutting-edge Internet CEOs in Digital Media and OnDemand computing meet top venture investors, corporate strategic partners, government and university officials, and members of the press and...
November 2011
2 posts
5 tags
Little Printer, a little bit of print awesome
Print personal mini-newspapers from your smartphone. What a great idea and execution!
Hello Little Printer, available 2012 from BERG on Vimeo.
Vitaly M. Golomb, CEO of Keen to Speak at CPrint...
Keen Systems’ CEO, Vitaly M Golomb, will speak at CPrint International Production Conference in Chicago (Nov 9-12). CPrint is a professional alliance (and unique franchise) of printers certified to higher standards located throughout the United States and Canada. CPrint is a recognized resource in helping print companies defy gravity and achieve profitability far beyond the industry average.
...
October 2011
1 post
Vitaly M. Golomb, CEO of Keen to Speak at...
Keen Systems’ CEO, Vitaly M Golomb, will speak at Print Industries of America’s first annual Integrated Print Forum in Pittsburgh, PA (Oct 24-25).
The information-filled session is called “Demystifying eCommerce for Print Service Providers – Selling Online is Not Just for the Big Boys”. Vitaly will walk the audience of print company and equipment company executives through...
September 2011
6 posts
5 tags
Time to Evolve
Rampant innovation and demanding customers are rapidly changing commerce norms, Printers take heed. This week’s pervasive news vividly illustrates one company’s ballsy approach to remain relevant in these rough waters.
Do you recall the innovative company who’s disruptive approach to the movie rental business once dethroned the biggest players in the space? Yes, Netflix’s...
5 tags
Recap of Keen launch at Graph Expo
The Keen team is back from an incredible launch at Graph Expo in Chicago
Some members of Keen’s Engineering and Marketing Teams at the last supper before pushing the go-live version of our application From Left Andrew Kaleshka, Yuri Tolstik, Andrea Roesch, Vitaly M. Golomb, Nima Adelkhani, Tim Weber, Eric LeDuc
Our demonstrations drew in crowds
We held a press conference, and won...
Rolling off the 3D printing press... the world's... →
9 tags
The History of Print
28,000 BC – Earliest known symbols found written by humans.
3000 BC - First image duplication through the impression of round cylinders.
220 AD – First operation of woodblock printing.
1440 AD – Creation of the first known Printing Press.
1837 AD – Production of the first color printer.
1983 AD – Invention of the Internet.
2011 AD – On September 10th, Keen launches the first-ever multi-tenant SaaS...
8 tags
Sorry, but you're not Vistaprint.
Many print companies are under the assumption that by merely putting their print shop online they can become an online printing powerhouse. They won’t. In reality, it takes a considerable amount of time and money to drive web traffic. The average print shop does not have the knowledge or budget to successfully drive traffic to their online print store, because a typical print shop has...
6 tags
Take the Blue Pill, Avoid the Matrix
We despise feature matrices. They are a gaudy and biased technique that publishers employ to inflate their product above the competition. Often there is a laundry list of features that the publisher’s product contains, without explanation of the actual use of the product itself. For example, the majority of matrices look something like this:
See how the rock obliterates the iPad...
July 2011
2 posts
The Print Industry's Internet Problem
My name is Tim; I’m currently a junior at UC Davis studying economics and political science. During my time as a community management intern here at Keen, I realized just how far behind the printing industry is in terms of internet technology – specifically ecommerce. My generation grew up with internet as a given and it is remarkable how difficult it is to interact with the print industry in that...
April 2011
1 post
Lessons from Pepsi's Social Media Campaign Failure...
Last month The Wall Street Journal highlighted Pepsi’s 5% marketshare loss in a number of articles. For the first time Pepsi went down to number three after Coca-Cola and Diet Coke. What Pepsi called the “Pepsi Refresh Project” is getting most of the blame. Despite the social media experiment’s empirical success of generating 3.5M Facebook “likes”, 60,000...
March 2011
3 posts
Shutterfly Acquires Tiny Prints
The consolidation of ecommerce-driven direct-to-consumer printing companies continues with Shutterfly’s acquisition of Tiny Prints. A $333M outcome for a printing company less than 7 years old is a result most 30 year old printing companies can envy. Scale to be found only online. Print company owners take note.
Printing A Kidney: A Glimpse At The Future http://t.co/skqurnC
A geeky milestone
Keen is a bit over 1/4MLOC (aka 250,000 lines of code) now and should grow quite a few KLOCs more before official release, soon.
February 2011
8 posts
THE NEXT TRILLION DOLLAR INDUSTRY: 3D Printing http://t.co/ULNrDEA via @businessinsider
Print is the opposite of dead: “Researchers aim to ‘print’ human skin” via CNN: http://t.co/qyX9Dck
RT @BernardSlede: Who said printing is 17th century? Tales of manufacturing disruption:
http://econ.st/hns5vy
1 tag
Featured Customer: Momentum
Lead by its multi-talented owner Cory Richmond and located in Smyrna, Tennessee, Momentum Media brings quality and convenience to a unique market. Momentum specializes in design and large format printing for America’s places of worship.
The Keen-powered online store allows Cory and his staff to communicate with their direct and reseller customers 24 hours a day and to capture new business...
Efficiency: “@whattheythink: Economics & Research: Printing Employment Shrinks, Shipments per Employee Rise http://t.co/VXPDh1h”
“@infotrends: Survey shows printers gearing up for year of growth http://ow.ly/3TRwV #wideformat”
According to @whattheythink, Dec 2010 US commercial print segment did $7.48B up $347M (+4.9%) from 09. 2010 totaled $86.7B
Check out: TeamUpForAutism.com every retweet Samsung donates $5 to Dan Marino Foundation, so please RT!!! #teamautism #fb
January 2011
4 posts
Rethinking the print biz: iPhone App Lets Users Order Prints of Mobile Photos http://t.co/tT6laD0
How App-Like Design Can Turn Your Site Visitors Into Customers http://t.co/vkZeMOe via @mashdevdesign @mashable
J.P. Morgan: Global E-Commerce Revenue To Grow By 19 Percent In 2011 To $680B: http://me.lt/6H0qw
Over a ton of printed confetti dropped on Times Square in NYC. Happy and Prosperous 2011 to all!
December 2010
7 posts
AppleInsider | After initial success, magazine purchases on Apple iPad decline: http://me.lt/8x8yk
Market Busting the Printing Industry
We wanted share an excerpt from a Harvard Business Review article “MarketBusting - Strategies for Exceptional Business Growth” written by Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian C. MacMillan. Itself an excerpt from their book by the same name. In it they describe the eight moves (forty in the full book) companies can make to redefine their profit drivers and realize low-risk growth. As you wind...
Tiny Prints, an ecommerce-driven printing company...
Tiny Prints is a sizable (250 full-time, 200 part-time employees) and mostly digital printing company based in Silicon Valley. They’ve been an ecommerce-driven model from day one, much like the also local psprint.com (started in 1997). Yet more proof-points that “traditional” printing companies (serving both consumers and businesses) need to go where the customers are, online.
...
RT @whattheythink: Going Green: WWF Jumps the Shark http://blogs.whattheythink.com/going-green/2010/12/wwf-jumps-the-shark/
U.S. government hits snag printing new $100 bills, prints old ones instead — Engadget: http://me.lt/6t747
Our blog RethinkPrint.biz has been down since yesterday due to a massive @tumblr outage, sorry :-( #butnotassorryastheyare
Cyber Monday sales crush Black Friday with $1B spent in 24 hours | VentureBeat: http://me.lt/27Ls
November 2010
7 posts
RT @forrester: happy Cyber Monday! Forrester projects 16% growth in online holiday retail sales this year http://forr.com/hJe4Zm
1 tag
Important details from HP's latest earnings report
HP services revenue grew 0.4 percent to $9 billion in the quarter. Enterprise Storage and Servers grew revenue 25 percent to $5.3 billion; HP software grew 1 percent to $974 million. Personal systems group revenue grew 4 percent to $10.3 billion. Notebook revenue was down 3 percent in the quarter, but desktop revenue was up 13 percent. The printer division saw revenue rise 8 percent to $7...
Attention Printers: The State of Small Business... →
Highlight from the article below… visit Mashable.com for details.
Watch
1 tag
Keen will be presenting at: Startup Demo Night...
Tuesday November 16th, 6:30pm at Plug & Play (440 North Wolfe Road, Sunnyvale, CA 94085)
Keen will be presenting along side seven other international start-ups showcasing their mobile, software, SaaS, and Cloud Computing ventures. Join us and other technology entrepreneurs. Hear and mingle with a new generation of tech visionaries bent on delivering a better future while achieving business...
5 tags
Five Paths to Success Online for Print Service...
Keen is currently in private beta and will be opening up a bit wider soon. Our goal is to help our customers (print service providers) to flourish online. We will be doing some free online courses, and here is the first lecture (if you can call it that). There is nothing print service providers are afraid of more and know about less today than the web. There are however highly successful paths...