Ricoh yesterday unveiled the clickable paper app for the South African market at Montecasino in Johannesburg, as a way to bridge the offline- online gap
According to Vaughan Patterson, sales manager, production print, with the rise of digital multimedia channels, there needs to be a compelling reason to keep customers buying print instead of moving their business online.
Clickable Paper is a cross-media printing service that links traditionally printed materials with online content through customers' smartphone or tablet devices, said Patterson.
It is based on Ricoh Visual Search, an image recognition technology.
Clickable Paper consists of three elements: authoring, cloud server and mobile apps. Authoring makes the material Clickable Paper-enabled. The user can undertake the creative work and Ricoh will make each piece of material Clickable Paper-enabled on its cloud server.
The cloud server stores and manages document links, and smartphone and tablet users download the app, which displays the media results.
Users simply download the free Clickable Paper app and point their smartphone or tablet at the Clickable Paper-enabled material and take a picture. The app identifies the material and automatically initiates multichannel media on the device.
Each scanned image can enable the instant activation of up to six multimedia services of your choice including Web sites, social media and video.
According to Ricoh, newspapers, magazines books, images and posters can all be recognised by Clickable Paper, whether they were printed in the past or will be printed in the future. As long as you can provide the original source PDF, the authoring process is the same.
"People now prefer the instant gratification that comes from online interaction and adding cross-media value to printed pages can help maintain client loyalty," said Patterson.
"The app is a huge opportunity for anyone who has a product they want their customers to interact with, it's a cost-effective way of getting information to your customers about your company or product."
It is available to download free on Apple and Android platforms and Ricoh expects to have it available for Windows soon.
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