Ric Richardson

I may only be an Inventor with a hand full of media centric inventions at the fringe of the media business, but I am also close to all the major technologies available to the newspaper business and have had some first hand exposure to people at the top of the newspaper business. Hopefully this gives me the credibility to make some pretty strong assertions regarding the future of the Newspaper business. And these are: Rupert Murdoch is right “content should be paid for”. Google needs to be stopped. A media owned and operated search engine is needed. Collaborative ubiquitous micropayment is key. A system that crosses all media, every newspaper and magazine. The newspaper businesses need to stop using web pages and hypertext links (extreme?). 1. Rupert Murdoch is right “Content should be paid for.” The modern news consumer is being trained by search engines that news is a commodity… that news is paid for by the adverts in its pages and therefore the customer shou...

The local newspaper for one of Australia’s favourite vacation locations has featured a zkimmer edition of their newspaper. The Byron Bay Echo has agreed to publishing the zkimmer edition to accompany an upcoming article about this new technology as it is prepared for sale to unnamed publishers in Australia and the US. The  zkimmer edition utilizes Ric Richardson’s patent pending technique of laying out a newspaper as a plan view of all the pages of the newspaper that then capitalizes on the power of tiles which is the technology that allows Google Maps to deliver satellite imagery so quickly and efficiently. The technology also utilizes the Deep Zoom tile management system that allows tiles of different magnification level to be smoothly transitioned. Ric explains that “zkimmer is designed to do digitally what people do when they look at newspapers in real life… moving the paper from close up to arms length as they trade context for clarity… zooming in and zooming out...

The main zkimmer patent is now lodged as a full application. For visitors with access it can be seen here: https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B8eWAXMBWrHFNDAxMWM2OWYtMjMxNy00ODQ0LTg3ZWItN2Y5OGRjNzgzN2Ix&hl=en Re:       U.S. Patent Application No. 12/247,165 Filed:          October 7, 2008 Title:           System and Method for Displaying Digital Editions of Periodicals and Publications Applicant:    Ric B. Richardson Assignee:    zkimmer Inc. Our Ref:      70333-00002 Subject:      U.S. Publication No. US 2010/0002935 Ric, Sky: The above-referenced U.S. patent application has published as Publication No. US 2010/0002935 on January 7, 2010.  Attached for your records is a copy of the publication. We will keep you informed of further developmen...

This video shows the newer version of the technology we are using to display online publications. Basically it is an adaptation of the the satellite imagery technology used in sites like Google Maps but adapted to the viewing of multi-page online publications. Everything from newspapers to photo albums to textbooks.

The zkimmer project is now being bundled up to hand off to a management team that will take it to the next level. In the meantime we have added page navigation where the user can go to the next page and previous page by clicking a button in addition to the original map-like hand tool navigation. Additionally the user can navigate in single pages or double-page-spreads. We are also doubling the number of magnification levels to allow users to view the publication at the most comfortable zoom level be they on an 29" Apple Cinema display, a laptop or an iPhone.

This video shows some of the key reasons that we decided to migrate to OpenLayers as our base graphic management technology.

Later today, we are going to open the doors on our new upload site that will allow anybody with a PDF or consequitavly numbered JPEGs to publish in zkimmer format.... we hope you think it's cool. The site will be swapped over to http://zkimmer.com tomorrow afternoon PST. Come and try it out. Thanks for visiting.

Today we decided to move from Google's Map API to OpenLayers and started to even tinker with developing our own proprietary tiling technology. The more we invest in tweaking the user experience around the specific needs of online documents, the more apparent it is that we need to make major changes to the standard map-type tiling user experience. Specific things we are doing include: * zlayers for text and positional Google text search/ location. * page by page and direct to page number navigation * shift and hold rectangle drawing that allows user to fill screen with the selected area. Amongst others... We tried to hand on and use the Google API due to the large user base and the instant recognition but the cons are outweighing th pros to continue. Openlayers here we come.

In the last week there has been 3,500+ page views to the zkimmer web site and a jump from a few hundred to over 1300 web mentions according to Google. Things are starting to warm up for zkimmer.

After reading the first few chapters of the book Search, it is now dawning on me how truly innovative the Google Search algorithm is. The whole analogy of treating web pages as if they are technical whitepapers with their citations and references is a true masterstroke. But therein also is its weakness. Over the next few weeks I intend to test some base theories about how Google does its ranking . One test is to involve one of our latest projects called zkimmer . Theoretically this is a graphics based mapping engine that has been adapted for publication display… I will be testing my theories ability to make specific zkimmer publications climb quickly up the Google Page ranking list. I will also experiment with the name of a person that has allowed me to experiment with his mention on Google page ranking. If these two experiments work out successfully then I fully intend to capitalize on it with the zkimmer publication list and then role out a separate standalone company to capitalize...

During the course of our constant due dilligence to track competing or similar technologies to zkimmer we run into various winners and losers… unfortunatley DigiPage is a big loser. Junky slow user interface and a really junky web site… zkimmers variable zoom level just beats all these kinds of attempts hands down. Digipage. Create stunning Flash page-turning brochures online in seconds from a single PDF upload. Video and dynamic content available. State-of-the-art Flash-based control panel. Dedicated servers, automation services and bespoke client work available on request. digipage - online flash page turning brochures created from PDFs and dynamic data .

We are finally under way with an invention I developed back in June of 2007... it's called zkimmer and can be found at zkimmer.com. The cool thing about zkimmer is that it takes a system we all know and use (google Maps) and applies it to pages of a magazine.. its so simple and easy to use and one of those obvious ideas that no ones thought of before.... Please have a look and tell me what you think.....

Today Newspaper veteran Chris Anderson joined the zkimmer team as ambassador for the company to the newspaper and magazine publishing industry. Chris recently left Freedom (the publishers of the Orange County Register) where he served as the publisher of the Newspaper and worked in the industry for 25 years. He is a brilliant, affable and discerning man who I am honored to work along side.

In June 2007, Ric was sitting with his brother, Raece who was lamenting over the sad state of the online magazine technology available to him as a publisher of a high end lifestyle magazine called Space Magazine . Upon investigation Ric found that the majority of the technology focused on animated page turning using flash and switching between low and hi res images of magazine pages. None of it worked! Either the zoom was too big or too small to be comfortably viewed and the page loading was ssssslllllooooowwwwww. In a typical inventors epiphany, Ric saw the publishing of online magazines as a pure high resolution graphic function and immediately saw that the most advanced and developed technology out there is being used for managing map images... ie Google Maps satellite imagery. Over the next weekend Ric commissioned a RentAcoder project to rip a map using Googles API but to use scans from a magazine instead of map data and zkimmer was born.