Bill Esler

Real Players Helping Printers
January 14, 2008

Tombstone Cards, a Boulder, CO firm that, while not a printer, is a good friend of the industry. Tombstone Cards wanted to sell personalized playing cards, to cash in on the craze for poker and blackjack. In case no one has noticed, that’s not an online activity, though it draws huge spectator audiences—and it employs an ink-on-paper product.

Tombstone says it was faced with print-industry solutions that required $50,000 investments to build online utilities for consumers to order these cards. And it realized there was an unmet market need here.

So president John Harris and his associates built their own solution. It has filed a patent application for OIEPrint, a web-based graphics customization software that it says will be low-cost, and extend the range of design for print services that any printer can provide through the web. 
Developed over the last two years, it allows customers to create high-resolution, print-ready graphics for any purpose. Designed for use by print shops and product customizers, OIEPrint users can start the design process by selecting from customizable templates, upload graphics from desktops and then add rich text or even text-along-a-path (type that curves along a picture).

Final output provides print-ready graphics and saves the design work in separate layers in a database for future editing. It will see public release planned next month.

What is interesting is the company’s go-to-market strategy. Tombstone Cards created a front end business that will funnel work to the largest U.S. printer of playing cards for the casino market (unnamed, but you can guess who it is if you’ve opened a deck of cards lately). The Tombstone Cards gambit serves as a technical and business proof of concept. “We are now expanding our offerings, seeking technology partners and entering new markets because we know that our revolutionary software works and can attract a wide variety of customers.”

“The demand for online customization tools will continue to grow exponentially as global mass-market penetration of high-speed Internet access increases,” says Neil Cox, Tombstone Cards chairman and CFO.

Posted by Bill Esler on January 14, 2008 | Comments (0)