touch a band’s name to hear a clip of the art- ist and buy tickets to the show.
Another prototype is an interactive greet- ing card. Far more advanced than singing birthday cards, the recipient can blow out birthday candles on a card via a breath sen- sor created by conductive ink.
And in the not-too-distant future, you might have your magazine actually do the reading for you. Out loud.
At the University of Central Lancashire in England, a group of researchers are testing what they call Interactive Newsprint, or a ‘smart’ newspaper. In prototypes, readers can touch a ‘button’ in a print version of the Lancashire Evening Post and hear the article.
But Paper Four is not the only game in town when it comes to bringing print content to life.
Imagine this: You open your favourite maga- zine and flip through the pages, reading ar- ticles and looking at advertisements. You come upon a page with a screen about the size of an iPhone. The page is just a tiny bit thicker than the typical page. A video with sound starts to play, similar to an ad you’d see on TV.
The August 2012 UK issue of Marie Claire featured this ‘video in print’ concept in an ad for Dolce & Gabbana. Print Power, an or- ganisation that specialises in
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Graphene is translucent, conductive, hard as a diamond and flexible.
promoting print media. Print Power be- lieves in changing the face of print adver- tising to incorporate new media techniques in order to bridge the gap between the print experience and digital experience.
But why should print news companies be interested in these new print technologies?
A 2009 study by Dynamic Logic showed that using print magazine ads, along with TV and internet ads, raises the favourability of the brand by 44 per cent and intent to purchase by 15 per cent. Another study in 2011 by the Financial Times found that mixing online and newspapers has a 26 per cent higher brand engagement than using just one of them. And it also provides a ‘wow’ factor for the magazine.
And then, of course, there is the bendable, transparent tablet made possible by gra- phene.
Graphene could be technology’s next great revolution, with the po- tential to rocket the print indus- try forward in a way not seen since the invention of the print- ing press. Graphene of-