Lyra 2012: Notable and Quotable
One of the signs of a good conference is the number of sound bites that come out of it. As a journalist (among other things), it’s my job to make note of those quotes and sound bites to then succinctly wrap up the event and give those who couldn’t make it a good overview.
However, I discovered something at this year’s event: Twitter is either making my job easier or making me obsolete.
There was a “critical mass” of Tweeting going on at this year’s event (that’s a sound bite in itself from Lyra’s Frank Stefansson), so to get an overview of the event, one only has to take a look at the Twitter stream from the event. Jim Lyons, who is possibly the king of social media in this industry, created a great Storify feed of the Tweets, and you can also find them by searching the #lyra12 hash tag.
The feed tells a great story – of the innovation, intelligence, quest for knowledge and, yes, humor in this industry (Greg Walters is always good for laughs and keen insight all at once).
One of the biggest talking points/debates/conundrums? Mobile print. Is it the future? Or is it our last-ditch attempt to stay relevant in a world of tablets and mobile devices? Lyra’s Robert Palmer stated that mobile printing is unlikely to drive new, incremental print. And at a roundtable discussion I attended, which consisted of representatives from four OEMs, the consensus was that there has to be a way to make mobile printing simple and necessary for the consumer. Can it be done? “The longer users go without printing, the less they will want to print,” the MPSA tweeted in agreement with a quote from Palmer. And although I can’t remember whom this next quote is attributed to (possibly Robert Palmer again), I agree with Greg Walters that it’s a “great friggin’ quote”: “Paper is simply a competitive display device.”
As always, there was talk of the need to educate consumers to print from their mobile devices, which led to my favorite quote of the entire conference: “I cringe when I hear we need to educate consumers,” said Lyra’s Palmer (perhaps the winner of best sound bites for the conference). It’s true. Consumers don’t want to be educated. They want things to be easy, to just work. If mobile printing has a future, it’s in a simple, agnostic, cloud-based solution that meets actual needs with no education required.
The Lyra 2012 Imaging Symposium was notable for reasons beyond great quotes and active tweeting. It was the first official event of the new Photizo/Lyra merger (as someone called it, PhoLyra – or was it LyrTizo?). The Lyra Symposium has always been a great resource for hard copy and imaging supplies data and information; this year marked the addition of a Managed Print track at the end of the second day – a harbinger? Or simply a sign of the times? We look forward to our continued work with this group and hope to see everyone and their Twitter feeds not only at the Photizo event in May, but at The Imaging Channel Managed Print Summit July 17. Long live the sound bite!
Posted by Amy Weiss on 01/31/2012