HP Join Forces With Yahoo June 17, 2010 17:01 by Matt Bird
After recently announcing their Web-Connected, Cloud Aware printers, HP have now teamed up with Yahoo for a quite controversial scheme which is sure to split opinions.
A quick summary for those of you unaware of HP’s previous announcement. The new range of Web-Connected machines enables the user to print directly from the internet, and email content to print straight to the printers unique email address. Something with huge potential especially when considering the future Google plans for printing. HP also announced a feature in these printers called "Scheduled Delivery", which enabled users to schedule daily print requests.
How Does This Tie in to Yahoo?
Web-Connected printers utilising Scheduled Delivery will generally be printing external content such as newspapers and magazines. HP have seen a chance to pump advertisements into this content. For the concept of Web-Connection to work, your printer will require its very own, unique, IP address. This address enables your rough geographical location to be isolated, meaning area-specific advertisements can be placed into your printed copy, and this is exactly where Yahoo comes in.
Yahoos Role - Advertisement!
So location specific advertisements, such as nearby activities and companies, can be put into your printed magazine article. Not too bad a concept, opening a consumers eyes up to local interests they may not have been aware of. Senior vice president of HP's Imaging and Printing Group, Stephen Nigro, even said test groups experiencing the advertisements have not had a negative reaction (most likely due to our intense-consumer-driven world literally slapping us in the face with advertising everywhere we look).
However the following comment by an employee raises slight concerns
"Ads can also be targeted based on a user's behavior as well as the content"
Those who fear a Big Brother world may not be pleased at this additional step, and it will be interesting to see how HP get around the obvious privacy issues this would encounter. However there is one even larger issue which is sure to cause uproar about this agreement, and one which I am not sure HP have fully predicted the backlash from.
The Main Issue
What kind of advertisements catch your eye in newspapers? Ones with black and white text similar to the article you are reading? Or ones with Beautiful Coloured Text and Backgrounds? I bet when you loaded this article your vision went straight to the HP and Yahoo logos at the top, not the article itself?
Colour draws attention....
Colour is great for advertisements.....
And oh my is colour expensive in inkjet printers.
How would it be controlled?
- Would you be able to control the amount of ads in your content?
- An ad every 500 characters?
- Am I going to have to print every single Scheduled item in greyscale to save my cartridges?
Not that I doubt the morals of huge commercial entities, but what would stop HP having a global "sale" of their cyan cartridges, whilst subtly opting to pump out lots of advertisements for deep sea diving in the nice dark blue ocean?
My Opinion
For a company so derided for small cartridge capacities and extreme profiteering at the expense of normal consumers this really is a surprising move. The first to release true Web-Connected printers was a great accolade for the company and had such huge potential. But unless they step forward and provide some form of evidence of protecting the general user, instead of pushing ads through with no thought or consideration of customers valuable consumables in the deal, I fear this is going to do much more damage to HP than good.
Do my comments come across as scaremongering and a blatant over reaction? Or completely agree with me? Post your ideas below and please join in the debate.
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June 17, 2010 17:06
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