Hi, this is Frank Romano from WhatTheyThink.com.  Two things that I saw that were interesting this week, A Practical Guide for Making Invisibility Cloaks, yes, yes, I said that right, a practical way to make invisibility cloaks, although I don’t know if there is an impractical to make, but who knows.

In any case, they have a sample there.  You can just barely see it and says that they print—they found a new way to print on a meta-material that can bend near infrared light backwards.  Now this is getting way beyond me.  I wasn’t that good in physics in school to begin with.  As a result you get what is known as a negative index of refraction.  Now they can only print very small pieces at the present time, three inches by four inches or so, but they say this new printing technology will allow them to print large sheets of this; cloaks if you will that at night if you put it over yourself you would become invisible.  

Now I thought about this for awhile and I said you know this is the greatest thing that could happen to printing industry, invisible printing.  Who cares about color management now?  Now have you ever watched how some print buyers when they look at samples they go no, those dots are not quite right, no, no, no?  Well we don’t have to worry about that anymore.  We can get rid of all the woops.  We don’t have to have any quality control.  It’s invisible.  Nobody is going to argue about whether the color matches or not.  It’s invisible.  This is the greatest thing that could possibly happen to the printing industry.  It will change everything, so keep it in mind, invisible printing.  

Okay, this one is a little bit different.  Coupons.com raises 200 million dollars.  By the way, have you found any printers out there that print coupons that have raised 200 million dollars?  Let me know.  What is happening is called the Groupon effect.  Groupon, as you know, is a company where they offer you deals, so they’ll put online a deal for you that some store is having a special sale on whatever the item is and if you watch these deals they’re phenomenal because they are being sponsored by the store to get you to learn about the store and go to the store.  This company Coupons.com does something very similar.  There is a company called Upon that does it for the travel industry, so Coupons.com, Groupon, Upon.  I guess for crappy printing it would be Poopon.  But this online coupon thing is really starting to get traction.  Now the scary thing is of course that you print the coupons out yourself, so it’s your paper, your ink, your printer, but in some cases you can actually bring your cell phone, PDA and have it scanned or shown at the store and that is acceptable in some cases, so maybe there won’t be any paper at all.

The coupon market is a gigantic market.  Of course that is what Sunday newspapers and inserts are all about, coupons give you a discount, a reason to go to the store and then perhaps you’ll buy other stuff.  Now a lot of that stuff is going online and that is sort of changing the paradigm within the coupon industry.  Again another electronic alternative to print, that is why printers have to find new things to print that are different, unique and value added and one of them of course is invisible printing.  And that is my opinion.  Thanks a lot.

This paper could be used in inkjet machines and toner based machines and even perhaps in offset machines.