Category Archives: Opinion

Put your hand up if you don’t know who delivers your mail!

Posted on by

In case there is any doubt I can tell you that it’s most likely Royal Mail.  Surprised?  You shouldn’t be!  Of course the mail may have the usual Royal Mail Postage Paid Impression (PPI) or it may have the PPI used by one of the downstream providers such as TNT or UKMail.  In any case the PPI will tell you who it was that picked up the mail and injected it into the Royal Mail system.  What it won’t tell you is who actually put the letter through your letterbox and just so we’re clear on this; it’s very likely that it was the Royal Mail.

Continue reading →

‘Mr Complete’

Posted on by

You know when you have an idea and then you find out that someone else had a similar idea and perhaps it worked out but not in exactly the way you had imagined?!  OK, well that’s Mr Complete.

About eight years ago I came up with the idea that SOLO should offer Origami services to our clients.  Bear with me here because its not as daft as it sounds.  The idea was that we could print a letter, fold that letter into a shape, an animal or a tree or a penguin (you get the idea) and send it in an envelope for 2D pieces or a box for 3D.  Perhaps the letter would have instructions on how to make the document into a shape or the shape could be unfolded to reveal the letter.

Continue reading →

Microsoft Tags. You gotta Love ‘em!

Posted on by

SOLO Website Tag

There’s a bit of quiet argy bargy going on in the 2D barcode world.  It’s so quiet that most people are unaware of it.  I mentioned QR codes a few weeks ago when the Marketing Week magazine mentioned a Royal Mail press item that seemed to be about QR Codes.   For the uninitiated QR Codes are little blocks of dots which, read by a QR reader, take you to a specific web site.  The important thing to remember about QR Codes is that they are static.  That bears repeating as its so fundamental to the QR Code design.  QR Codes are static and if you produce one today to take a reader to http:www.solo-uk.com then that’s where they will go any time the code is scanned.  The printed symbol decodes directly to the web address.

Microsoft tags on the other hand are entirely dynamic .  I’m not usually a big Microsoft fan.  I like the stuff that works but I don’t own a Microsoft T shirt and I don’t have a direct line to Bill.  Microsoft tags I like a lot!  When I first encountered them I thought they were just silly and that they were just adding a new standard for the sake of it.  It turns out though that I was very much mistaken. Continue reading →

The difference between a day out and a move!

Posted on by

In February we posted a news article to our blog about Royal Mails decision to raise prices.  Chris Combemale of the DMA said, in the article, that he felt that once a company had ‘migrated’ to other media they don’t come back.  Well, all things considered I’m afraid I have to disagree with Mr. Combemail. Continue reading →