Weekend MFP Industry Notes Newsletter
8-22-2010
- Canon wastes up to $1.7 billion dollars according to Wall Street Journal. Canon announced in Tokyo it is giving up on its plans to enter the flatscreen HDTV market:
o Canon thought it had a new competitive technology, called SED (silicon emitter display)
o The plan was to launch the new Canon TVs during the 2008 Summer Olympics in Bejing, China with an expensive world-wide TV advertising campaign
o It also was planning on letting Toshiba relabel the TVs
o A Texas company, Nano Proprietary, sued for patent infringement and won.
o Canon has now decided to liquidate the division, and end the project
- Hewlett Packard announced it is acquiring Fortify Software, which specializing in making products that finds security vulnerabilities.
- Hewlett Packard announced it won a contract worth $200 million from the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to improve Medicare Part B claims processing.
- Hewlett Packard gave out details of last quarter’s financials from Imaging & Printing Group:
o Total revenue up 9% to $6.2 billion
o Supplies revenue up 5%
o Commercial hardware revenue (printers & MFPs, mostly made by Canon) up 4%
o Commercial hardware units up 44%
o Operating profit was $1 billion
- Oracle Corp. filed a lawsuit against Google Corp. over alleged patent violations.
o Since Oracle, run by Larry Ellison, purchased Sun Microsystems, it also now owns Sun’s Java software intellectual property (IP)
o Java originally invented by James Gosling, a former Sun engineer
o Java serves as the foundation for many business applications, including Google’s new Android cell phone operating system, according to Oracle
o Many manufacturers are fearful that Oracle will file suit against them as well, including IBM.
o Java is used as part of the embedded system architecture in copiers from Canon, Ricoh and others
- Dell announced that it plans on purchasing 3PAR Inc., a data storage company, for $1.15 billion in cash.
- GE Capital may be brought under potentially stricter federal government oversight, due to the new Dodd-Frank Act, which aims to overhaul the financial sector. Some regulatory experts believe that it will be treated as a bank, which may impact its ability to lend. GE Capital has $41 billion lent out currently.
- Japan loses its place as the world’s No. 2 economy to China in the second quarter.
o China’s economy will almost certainly be bigger than Japan’s at the end of 2010 because of the huge difference in each country’s growth rate.
o Japan’s GDP was $1.286 trillion last quarter, while China’s was $1.335 trillion
o Japan’s per capita income is $37,800 while China’s is $3,600 (U.S. is $42,240)
- Accounting rule makers are proposing big changes to lease accounting:
o will affect some $1.2 trillion in leased assets worldwide
o under current rules, companies can keep equipment leases off their balance sheet and hidden from an investor’s view
o new rule will force companies to bring these assets onto corporate balance sheets
o companies would likely have to recognize a liability for future payments
o many companies are fearful that the change will force their balance sheets to balloon overnight, and change their leverage and debt ratios, forcing them to renegotiate covenants with their lenders
o “I guarantee it’s going to change return-on-asset formulas, return-on-equity formulas and debt servicing”, stated Jeffrey Taylor, an Arizona-based author of lease accounting.
“People in the leasing industry think they can’t keep things off the balance sheet and operating leases disappear that it’s going to devastate not only equipment leasing, but also real estate leasing” said Taylor.
“You’ll probably see a lot of people get out of the leasing business” said Taylor.
o The new standard would likely not take effect for several years.
- Paul Shin Devine, a purchasing manager from Apple, was arrested in Sunnyvale, CA and accusing of accepting more than $1 million in kickbacks from Asian suppliers of parts for the iPhone and iPod.
- During a recent dealer meeting, Toshiba invited a representative from Digital Copier Security Inc. to be a guest speaker. Digital Copier Security is the company responsible for the CBS Evening News feature on copier hard drive security that has caused a panic since it was aired in April, featuring Toshiba copiers.
- Toshiba Corp. announced that it will implement plans to cut costs by $11.6 billion over the next 3 years. It hopes to accomplish this by negotiating better pricing from its suppliers.
- Toshiba announced it won a 5 year copier contract from Cerritos College of California.
- Toshiba announced that the e-STUDIO™181/182/242 b/w MFPs were awarded a Spring 2010 BERTL®’s “Best” award for Best Value for Price Segment One MFP, as well as an outstanding BERTL “4.5 Star” rating.
- Toshiba continues its nuclear ambitions.
o At the end of October last year, executives of Saudi Arabia toured a Toshiba design facility and factory in Yokohama. There they saw a model of a state-of-the-art nuclear power plant and the shop floor of a steam turbine manufacturing plant. Toshiba hopes to win the bid to build nuclear power plant in that country.
o Toshiba also will send representatives to Vietnam for a nuclear plant bid.
o Lead delegates are Toshiba chairman, Tsunehisa Katsumata and president Norio Sasaki.
- Microsoft announced that it has sold 100 million licenses for Windows 7 operating system, making it the fastest selling Windows OS in history. Gartner Corp. has recommended that companies should upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7 before end of 2012 to avoid compatibility problems. Microsoft will shut off support for XP on 4/1/2014. (Windows 7 has the new XPS print driver)
- Fuji announced it hired former Canon executive, Peter Brittliff, as its Marketing Manager for Production Printing Systems in Australia.
- Kyocera (aka Kyoto Ceramic Company) launched two new A4 desktop color MFPs, the FS-C2026MFP and FS-C2126MFP featuring:
o 28ppm top speed color or b/w
o Base MSRPs of $3549 and $3999 respectively
o FS-C2126MFP comes standard with analog fax board
o 200,000 page PM schedule
o 65K/month maximum duty cycle
o Up to 90lb. index in drawers and up to 120lb. index in bypass
o 29 second warmup time
o 12 second first color page out time
o Auto duplex up to 90lb. index
o 20 department codes
o 600x600dpi (not 8 bits per pixel)
o Document feeder holds up to 50 originals, top scan speed of 35opm
o 50 sheet stack bypass and 200 sheet paper drawer standard
User can add up to two 500 sheet paper drawers
o Built-in print controller
Made by Peerless
IBM PowerPC446 processor running at 667MHz
768MB RAM
• Can upgrade to 1792MB RAM
USB & 10/100BaseT ports standard (no gigabit Ethernet)
Can print from or scan to USB memory stick (thumb drive)
Comes standard with PCL, PostScript and XPS print drivers
Scan to PC/email/FTP/USB/TWAIN
Scans in color and b/w
- Xerox announced it sold an iGen4 production color systems to:
o Braintree Printing, of Braintree, Massachusetts
o San Luis Print and Copy of San Luis Obispo, CA
o OC Direct Marketing of Santa Ana, CA
o Master Print Communications of San Diego, CA
- Xerox announced that it is now offering a new print controller for the iGen4 from EFI.
o the EFI Fiery EX Print Server is based on the new Fiery System 9 R2 platform
o 35 percent increase in RIP speed over the previous generation
o new Fiery Image Enhance feature improves the output quality of digital images by applying automatic corrections to optimize each image individually
o automated workflow saves prepress time by eliminating lengthy image editing and file manipulation tasks yet ensuring images look their best
o included in the solution is the newest version of Fiery Color Profiler Suite, which gives users the ability to control color quality at every stage of the printing workflow.
o Fiery System 9 R2 fully supports Adobe® PDF Print Engine 2 (APPE), giving users another choice for end-to-end PDF workflows in addition to the conventional PostScript interpreter. APPE enables integrated PDF workflows for high-end graphics content and variable data printing, ensuring reliability and delivering expected results every time.
- Within the next five years, 64 percent of Professional Employer Organizations (PEO)* plan to eliminate printed materials from their communications with worksite employees. Of those, 26 percent are committed to moving all materials online this year, according to Aon Consulting.
- Industry author explains Xerox’s claim that their color systems offer 2400dpi:
o the print controller used (Fiery, Creo or generic) only sends 600x600dpi to the print engine
o Xerox VCSEL is using 32 laser beams to draw the image (vertical cavity surface emitting laser)
o toner particles are 8 microns each
o engine divides each pixel into 4 quadrants, to simulate 2400dpi (one pixel from 600dpi, divided into fourths equals 2400)
- Xerox investors marked the 32nd anniversary of a date that changed the copier industry which was on 8/16/1978.
o On that date, the U.S. Federal Trade commission levied a $25.6 million fine on Xerox for anti-competitive behavior.
o The company was charged with using technical patents to lock-up the market for photocopiers and prevent competitors from getting a start.
o The company was forced to share some of the patented technology. Many of these licenses ended up in the hands of Japanese companies that quickly filled in the lower-end copy market.
o Although Xerox continued to hold onto the top-end segment for years, the loss of its patents severely shortened Xerox's ability to enjoy outsized profits for its years of R&D.
- Xerox inventor passes away. Robert W. Gundlach was one of Xerox Corp .'s most prolific inventors, while his pioneering work in the science of photocopying made him a 2005 inductee into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
o Mr. Gundlach died of aspiration pneumonia at The Shore Winds nursing home in Charlotte. He was 84.
o Mr. Gundlach was born Sept. 7, 1926. He earned a bachelor's degree in physics in 1949 from the University at Buffalo, where he did additional graduate studies in physics.
o He started with Xerox predecessor Haloid Co. in 1952, where he worked with Chester Carlson, the inventor of xerography, the science behind photocopying.
o Mr. Gundlach received 155 patents, with the technology he developed making possible advances such as desktop copiers.
o When he retired in 1995, he had 12 patent applications pending and he received his 155th in 2002.
o He received an additional eight U.S. patents outside of Xerox for inventions including a water-based heat pump system and a type of backpack.
- The city of Indianapolis has selected Xerox affiliate ACS to operate its public parking system as part of a previously announced overhaul. The contract will net the city $400 million over 50 years, but unknown what Xerox’s cut is.
- Oce’, a division of Canon, announced it sold a JetStream production color inkjet system to Accord Post, a printshop in Russia.
- Some industry reporters are speculating that EFI is an acquisition target.
o The company has $490 million market capitalization and $200 million in cash.
o It is speculated that the board is currently reviewing its strategic options to boost enterprise value including buyouts by management or private equity.
o It is believed the board may be interested in a buyout proposal exceeding $600 million.
o EFI reported $ 400 million in revenue and a $2 million net loss in 2009.
- Okidata announced it is now shipping the first toner-based color printer that uses a roll of paper. The “OKI pro510DW digital color web press” has an MSRP of $46,000, and can print up to 30 feet per minute from a 2,500 roll of paper.
- Intel announced that it would acquire antivirus/security firm McAfee for about $7.68 billion, placing a price on the company’s common stock of about $48 per share.
o Santa Clara, Calif.-based McAfee will become a fully-owned subsidiary of Intel, and become a part of Intel’s Software and Services Group.
o The deal will close pending McAfee shareholder approval and regulatory clearance.
o Intel is apparently planning on using McAfee’s technology to add security to its Atom chip.
o Intel’s objective may be to grow its low-powered chip sales, by offering more and more functionality right on the chip (i.e. security, GPS, fax, scan, print, etc.)
- InfoTrends has released its annual United States Production and Copying Market Forecast, covering 2009 to 2014.
o This year's forecast predicts color printing will erode the monochrome market in placements and impressions during the next four years, rising from a 65% revenue share in 2009 to 77% in 2014.
o Light coverage color pages will become more cost effective and account for a higher percentage of color pages, particularly on high-speed roll-fed color devices
- Fraser Advanced Information Systems, a Canon/Sharp dealer in Pennsylvania, announced it won a bid from the North Penn School District. School Business Director, Robert Schoch, stated that the school hopes to save $300,000 by reducing its cost per copy from $0.015 to $0.0074, which also includes the staple cartridges.
- The founder of Minuteman Press International, Roy W. Titus, passed away on 8/12/2010. He started the print-for-pay franchise chain in 1974, which now has 940 locations world-wide.
- Rice University announced it is ending its printshop’s experiment to go all digital:
o was launched in 2006
o Eugene Levy, Rice provost, said; “The hope was that, without the burden of having to maintain a print inventory, the press might sustain itself largely on revenues from print-on-demand book sales. Unfortunately, book sales remained very slow, and projections discouraged the anticipation that revenues would, in the foreseeable future, grow to a level that oculd materially cover even the minimal costs of operations.”
o The digital press was costing $150,000 to $200,000 a year.
- The State of Wisconsin is joining 4 other states in filing a lawsuit claiming illegal price fixing by Sharp & Samsung of LCD screens. (other states include Missouri, Arkansas, Michigan and West Virginia)
- Fujitsu announced it is now offering a new option for some of its scanners, the NSi AutoStore middleware software. This allows customers to use Fujitsu scanners and through AutoStore, have the images OCR’d and forwarded to document management systems.
- NSi (Notable Solutions Inc.) notified its customers of an issue it has with the OCR function of AutoStore. Apparently, it sources the optical character recognition (OCR) software from ABBYY of Russia (called FineReader), and recommends that customers do not use a setting below 70% for JPEG data compression, due to image quality issues. (in contract, Nuance eCopy uses OmniPage for OCR)
- Shares of Pitney Bowes booked a new 52 week low by trading below $19.50 per share.
- Pitney Bowes Management Services, the FM arm of Pitney Bowes, announced that it was named a Clearwell Systems Gold Certified Partner, for using the eDiscovery software as part of its litigation support outsourcing service it provides to law firms.
- World Software Corporation, maker of Worldox, a very popular document management system (DMS) for law firms, announced launch of Worldox CompleteCloud, a secure virtual data center for law firms.
o Powered through a partnership with cloud provider CoreBanc Inc.
o CompleteCloud is a hosted environment complete with server and desktop software including Worldox, Microsoft® Office Professional and Microsoft Exchange – a full Windows desktop for one monthly price.
- Document management software maker, Hyland, announced it has promoted Brenda Kirk to VP of Strategy. Former Microsoft and SAP employee, Nancy Stickney, was hired as VP of Sales.
o Founded by A. J. Hyland
o Annual revenue of $133.5 million
o Main product is OnBase
- IBM announced it is acquiring Datacap Inc., but purchase price not announced. Details:
o Datacap was founded in 1988 by Scott Blau in Tarrytown, NY
o Mr. Blau will now be Director of Electronic Content Management for IBM.
o Main products are TaskMaster & FastDoc Capture, middleware data capture applications
o In 2006, IBM acquired FileNet, which is a successful document management system (DSM) that could tie in with Datacap products
o FileNet already works with Kofax middleware
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- IPRO Tech, a leader litigation support and e-Discovery software for law firms, today announced that the official name of its early case assessment software will be "IPRO Allegro."
o The software application will be shown in IPRO Booth 829 at the Annual ILTA Conference, to take place August 23rd-26th in Las Vegas, NV.
o Coming from music, the term "allegro" is used to convey "a brisk and lively tempo," relating directly to the application's ability to speed up the litigation process by providing early insight into the size, scope, and composition of data collections.
o The IPRO Allegro product is an early case assessment application designed to save time and money in the litigation process by quickly identifying items that need to be moved forward into the review and production process.
o Features include high speed distributed indexing, metadata filtering, multi-language support, and a report driven user interface.
o The new offering will integrate seamlessly with IPRO eCapture, a powerful, scalable e-Discovery tool. It can also function as a standalone application.
o "The name is intended to communicate the idea of momentum, something that is crucial in today's quick moving world of e-Discovery," says Jim King, President of IPRO Tech.
o When dealing with litigation, time is money and every second counts. We're confident this application will live up to its name by speeding up the e-Discovery process and saving time and money for law firms, corporations, and service providers around the globe."
o The application can be ordered at ILTA 2010, with shipments set to arrive early September.
- AAA (Triple-A) announced it purchased a document management system (DMS) from DocPath
o AAA processes more than 160,000 member transactions annually including invoices, receipts and checks at its national headquarters in Heathrow, Fla.
o Using DocPath technology, AAA estimates a savings of $110,000 each year in costs associated with generating, printing, managing, distributing and storing this documentation.
- Thomas Jefferson University Hospital chose to acquire its EHR system from 3M Health Information Systems, including a document management system.
- According to some industry trade reporters, the Department of Defense is considering mothballing its multi-billion dollar AHLTA EMR system, and considering commercial alternatives.
- The Sacramento Maternal-Fetal Medicine facility and Sandhills Pediatrics, SC, have chosen to acquire an EHR system from SRSsoft Inc. of Montvale, NJ.
- An Australian doctor is being accused of defrauding Medicare in 90% of her hormone testing patients.
- Methodist Hospitals of Indiana announced they have chosen to get their EHR system from Epic (of Verona, WI). In addition, Epic also sold a system to St. Edward Mercy Medical Center of Arkansas.
- Meditech announced its EHR system was chosen by Summit Healthcare and Southwest Medical Center of Kansas. The system was also purchased by Redlands Community Hospital of California.
- North Idaho College of Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, announced it is offering a program to train students to construct and use EHR systems. According to federal officials, at least 51,000 health IT professionals will be required over the next 5 years.
- Kaiser Permanente of California, announced it is acquiring an EHR system from Epic, and has called their system, KP HealthConnect.
- GE announced that its Centricity Practice Solution v9.5 has been inspected by the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT) and has conditionally received the CCHIT Certified 2011 Ambulatory EHR certification. It was awarded a 5 star rating, and will launch the product in fall of 2010.
- athenahealth, Inc. a leading provider of web-based practice management, electronic health record (EHR), and patient communication services to medical groups, today announced that it will offer its web-based EHR service, athenaClinicalsSM, as a stand-alone offering. –
o athenaClinicals EHR service, Version 10.6, had been inspected by the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT®) and is a certified EHR technology under IFR Stage 1,
- Looking for info on health practices? Visit www.healthgrades.com
- About 80% of IT professionals at hospitals in the survey, conducted by Imprivata, say locking down patient information from breaches and unauthorized access is a top priority, up from 62% last year.
o 76% are most worried about confidential data breaches or abuse of their clinical applications as their biggest security concerns.
o 62% say they are able to track inappropriate access to data in order to comply with the HITECH Act's disclosure rules, while 38% cannot.
o 48% of the hospitals say they aren't sure whether their EMR deployment qualifies for the funding
o More than 80% use passwords for their strong authentication; 37 percent, biometrics; 35 percent, facility access cards; and 17 percent, tokens.
o 74% of the hospitals in the survey say they plan to spend more on security this year than they did in 2009.
o Around 97% say their purchasing decisions are driven by HIPAA and HITECH Act regulations.
- Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal announced that his office is investigating a data breach linked to a reported theft by Yale Medical School of a laptop computer containing personal health information on as many as 1,000 people
- Breach fine. Health Net, a Woodland Hills, Calif., health plan that does business in Connecticut, agreed to pay $250,000 to settle a lawsuit Blumenthal brought after a hard drive containing information of 1.5 million current and former members went missing.
- A Toledo businessman in Cleveland was found guilty Tuesday morning of being part of a scheme that resulted in the theft of nearly $150,000 from Toledo Hospital.
o John Briggle's Toledo printing company, Superior Offset Supplies, billed the hospital for supplies and services that were not delivered.
o Briggle appeared before Lucas County Common Pleas Court Judge James Bates and pleaded no contest to aggravated theft.
o He faces up to five years in prison when sentenced Aug. 31
- A study of California hospitals shows minimal positive effects of EMRs.
o It concludes: “EMR implementation was associated with 6-10 percent higher cost per discharge in medical-surgical acute units.
o EMR stage 2 increased registered nurse hours per patient day by 15-26 percent and reduced licensed vocational nurse cost per hour by 2-4 percent.
o EMR stage 3 was associated with 3-4 percent lower rates of in-hospital mortality for conditions
- A man has been charged with smashing in a store window after they refused to refill his printer cartridges.
o Police said back in April, Scott Damsgard, 42, went into a business located in the 1300 block of Mendota Road in Inver Grove Heights, Minn., to get his printer cartridge refilled.
o Employees told Damsgard that they do refill cartridges, but only if they have a special sticker on them that shows they were bought there. His didn't have the sticker and he didn't have a receipt.
o Damsgard got upset and got into a heated exchange with employees and started swearing at them. Then while leaving the store, Damsgard picked up some landscaping stones and threw them at the windows.
o The windows smashed and had to be replaced. In all he cause more than $1,345 in damages. Damsgard was charged with first degree damage to property which can have a punishment of up to 5 years in jail and/or up to a $10,000 fine.
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