At the HP annual Imaging and Printing Conference for industry analysts held in New York the company unveiled "Print 2.0," the strategy for making printing relevant and empowering as both personal and professional content increasingly moves from the desktop to the web. This is designed to link up with the new developments on the web known as Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is the empowering of the user to participate in the creation of web content through social networking, blogs, photo sites, etc.

This strategy that is well detailed on the HP web site (www.hp.com/go/2007ipgconference) is defined to make it easier for web users to print content from the web. For HP it is a strategy to increase the volume of printing done on its equipment and to increase its share of the increasing volume of digital printing. HP is generating a number of new services to assist users and is also working with developers to make it easier for them to add printing to their web sites. In this case it is not just printing but selective printing to allow a user to select the content they want to print and how they want to print it.

Examples quoted at the conference were work HP has carried out with the ViaMichelin's website to offer customers improved map-printing by better aligning what is seen on-screen with what is printed on the page, as well as with how maps are used once people are on the road. HP also has teamed with leading weblog software and services company SixApart, Ltd., creators of Movable Type, the blogging platform, to enable bloggers to add a print button on their blogs. Movable Type powers many of the world's most popular blogs.

HP has tested out this Print 2.0 strategy within their digital photographic imaging business. At this stage however no other business within the HP Imaging and Printing Group has implemented anything utilizing the web to enhance their operations. This was very graphically and embarrassingly demonstrated in a Q&A session at the conference with seven senior vice presidents when they were asked how they were using the web for enhancing the operations of their business areas. All of them with the exception of Larry Lesley who heads up digital photography and entertainment had no answer to the question. For these other six business operations Print 2.0 is a strategy for the future - not a current implementation.

In addition to this empowering of web users to get into print, HP also added a range of new service offerings for enhancing and managing the print services of different types of corporate, government and educational organisations. In this it is in reality more in a catch up mode to match the offerings of competitors like Kodak, Oce and Xerox.