The Blog from Mercian Labels & Security Labels International

Netbooks have become increasingly poplar over the past year, and it has become apparent over the past few weeks that having a ‘pool’ one would be very useful for the business for a few reasons:

• Rich (our IT manager) can take it when he is away from home in case he needs remote access ‘in case of emergency’
• I can use it when travelling on business and holiday to work more efficiently than I can do on my Nokia e90, particularly on the train.
• My co-diretor can use it when overseas or on client visits.

My criteria are:

• it must be a small and light netbook type device
• it must have 3g support, as in many places there just isnt wifi
• it must run ubuntu, preferably the ubuntu UNR version designed for netbooks

I’ve really struggled to fit this brief, as there sem to be so few netbooks with 3g.  The Acer Aspire One A110-A 3G seems possible, but it does not ship with ubuntu and seems quote dear.  There is a Asus Eee PC 3.5g modem listed on its website, but I cannt see anywhere to buy it.

The idea of a small, SSD drive netbook device just for mobile use is quite attractive, but it must come with 3g to make it viable for me.  Can anybody recommend such a device?

When you visit the supermarket or liquor store you will see thousands of different product labels. But hone in on just one product and you will notice every label for that product is identical. Well of course it is, you are probably thinking, because the product is the same. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Take Jones Soda (http://www.jonessoda.com/), the American soft drink maker, for example. If you see Jones Soda on the shelf in a retail store you will see many different labels on the same product. Jones Soda has made custom labels a part of their brand. They encourage their customers to upload wacky photos and they use these photos on their bottles. They use digital label printing to print different photos on their labels so each six-pack will have a different looking label. Since this program launched back in 1996 they have received over one million customer photos for use on their bottles.

St. Francis Winery in California (http://www.stfrancisred.com/) has taken a slightly different approach but is still leveraging variable data label printing. Their “RED” wine comes with 12 different background designs on their wine labels, so when a customer orders a case of wine they will see a different label on every bottle. And on the shelf in the liquor store customers will also see the different labels.

With digital printing technology it is very easy to make every label different. But there are so few companies taking advantage of this. Yet. In the two examples above these companies have made their unique labels an integral part of their brand. Of course, it is important to keep some components of your label the same so you can have a somewhat consistent look but having a part of your product label be variable can really differentiate your product from the competition.

Let’s take an example to illustrate this point. Say you sell premium coffee sourced from Brazil. You could feature beautiful photos of Brazil on your coffee bag labels. Stock photography is so inexpensive these days you could buy photos on places like istockphoto.com for just a few dollars each. You could then position your coffee as the company that has the beautiful photos of Brazil and make this part of your promotion for the brand.

In a few years time this kind of branding will be common place. But there is a window of opportunity right now that allows companies to stand out from their competition by leveraging the power of variable data labels. It is becoming more difficult for companies to do something really different that can attract the attention of consumers. Take advantage of the digital printing technology in this window of opportunity and do something different with your product labels.

Peter Renton is the founder of Lightning Labels, an all-digital label printer based in Denver, Colorado. He writes regularly about the label industry on their company blog at http://blog.lightninglabels.com.

Last night, whilst I was asleep, I set my laptop to download and upgrade by laptop from 8.10 to 9.04 on my Compaq nx6125 laptop.  It just worked.  You can find out more about the new release here.  After 20 mins of use, I cannt see a lot of big new features as most of the work on this release appears to be at the kernel level with faster load times and more support for wireless / 3G cards.  Its nice to have the latest Open Office 3.0 release and Firefox 3.0.9 though.

It is just quite amazing that the community has provides such good software for “free”, and I an very pleased to use and advocate it.  Thank you to the community for your work in relation to this latest release.

Yesterday Peter Renton from Lightning Labels in the USA has agreed to do a guest post here. One of the labelling industry’s most popular bloggers, Peter is well known for his excellent blog focussing on labelling issues and design.  Watch this space!

PRESS RELEASE
11 April 2009
Cannock, Staffordshire, UK

Mercian Labels Ltd reaches 40 year anniversary

Short run labelling specialists Mercian Labels Ltd are celebrating after reaching their 40th anniversary. Opened on 11 April 1969, the company has grown from strength to strength as is now the UK market leader in short run labelling and breaking new ground with its innovative Label Lock^TM range of secutiy seals.

Managing Director Dr Adrian Steele said “It is very pleasing for all the team here to reach this milestone. In an economic downturn there are inevitably difficulties for many companies, but I am proud of the continuing growth in demand for our products that has enabled us to reach our 40th anniversary.”

The Mercian Labels Group is experiencing rapid domestic and export growth with the success of Label Lock, launched last year as a flagship brand of the Security Labels International division, and continued expansion of Mercian Labels, the UK market leader in fast-response short run labelling.

- – - ENDS – - -

- – - CONTACT – -

Mercian Labels Ltd

Watling Street

Cannock

WS11 0BD

UK

+44 (0)1543 431 070

Contact: Dr Adrian Steele

sales@mercianlabels.com

http://www.www.mercianlabels.com/

I love my nokia E90, its the best business communication tool I have ever seen.  The restriction is often rendering full content websites over 3G, on a small screen and with a small processor.  I have a selection of favorite mobile websites that are specific to small screen devices, but I’d like to know more.  Any suggestions, or do you know of any other lists?

• news.bbc.co.uk/text_only.stm
• www.thetimes.mobi
• m.ft.com/uk/
• www.telegraph.co.uk/mobile
• m.guardian.co.uk

Its a shame that there are not more travel related sites, motorway trafffic  updates etc, but I’d like to hear of any more to add to the list please.

This article on the BBC today got me thinking – what will microsot sell when the world becomes more focussed on browsers than operating systems?  Already I actually already spend 95%+ of my time on my laptop in Firefox (Zimbra, Toodledo, our MIS and other websites), and as long as the operating system supports this, I’m pretty happy.

Maybe Ive missed the point, but is Microsoft’s Midori a downloadable operating environment?  What a world it would be if every client machine just booted up into a browser only, and you downloaded your “desktop” and “user space” over the web, meaning your online world was remotely stored whereever you go.  A sort of remote desktop world for everybody by default, where all the processing was server side and there was an immense “cloud” of “thin terminals”.

Time to up my medication…

A story by Matt Asay prompted me to look up this graph from statcounter.com

and according to this story, Firefox (v3) is now the most widely used browser in Europe, surpassing IE (v7).  Thats a fantastic achievement for the community who built, develop and maintain Firefox.  Its my browser of choice by far, its superb, and I’m really pleased to see it get the adoption it deserves.