Investors around the world have provided almost $700 million of funds to print and print related start up businesses. Is this the dotcom boom of the 1990s repeating itself or is something else going on? Certainly the investors think the latter. Nobody wants to throw their money away on companies like Noosh, Printable, ImageX, Collabria, 58k and so on that tried to disrupt print, but in many cases ended up being absorbed by it. They could not sustain the promises.
This time around the situation is different. The internet itself is a mature beast, while the trend now is less about the worldwide web than the collaborative power of the cloud and social interaction. Take Canva; online design templates have existed before and still do but without the huge valuation. Perhaps it is the timing, the acceleration provided by work from home during the pandemic and the proliferation of small scale businesses and ventures that need designs for their social media, their presentations, their websites as well as their printed marketing collateral. The new dimension is the cloud and the ease of collaboration it enables.
Likewise our familiarity with internet technology and trust in the platforms like Amazon, Ebay and Etsy make it possible to start small online businesses based on creating new products, like posters, photobooks or maps, that are absolutely unique to one customer. These were impossible to print before digital printing arrived; they were impossible to market before the internet reached its current maturity with its proliferation of applications to sell, be paid for and to create the products that printers can produce. The first dotcoms failed to change the world because they stuck to the rules about volumes and standard products. They were not really changing much. The new crop might change the world because what they enable is not more of the same, but less of something rather more personal.
New generation dotcom boom or bust
Investors around the world have provided almost $700 million of funds to print and print related start up businesses. Is this the dotcom boom of the 1990s repeating itself or is something else going on? Certainly the investors think the latter. Nobody wants to throw their money away on companies like Noosh, Printable, ImageX, Collabria, 58k and so on that tried to disrupt print, but in many cases ended up being absorbed by it. They could not sustain the promises.
This time around the situation is different. The internet itself is a mature beast, while the trend now is less about the worldwide web than the collaborative power of the cloud and social interaction. Take Canva; online design templates have existed before and still do but without the huge valuation. Perhaps it is the timing, the acceleration provided by work from home during the pandemic and the proliferation of small scale businesses and ventures that need designs for their social media, their presentations, their websites as well as their printed marketing collateral. The new dimension is the cloud and the ease of collaboration it enables.
Likewise our familiarity with internet technology and trust in the platforms like Amazon, Ebay and Etsy make it possible to start small online businesses based on creating new products, like posters, photobooks or maps, that are absolutely unique to one customer. These were impossible to print before digital printing arrived; they were impossible to market before the internet reached its current maturity with its proliferation of applications to sell, be paid for and to create the products that printers can produce. The first dotcoms failed to change the world because they stuck to the rules about volumes and standard products. They were not really changing much. The new crop might change the world because what they enable is not more of the same, but less of something rather more personal.
Gareth Ward
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