Ring in the new...

New Year heralded something of a milestone for PCS. We’re officially into our 40^th year and already looking forward to the big Four-O celebrations in 2013.

As ever, the turn of the year heralds much excitement and optimism. There’s always a sense of change and renewal and this year’s no different.

Standing at the gates of 1972, who would have expected the release of the first hand-held calculator, introduced at a starting price a little under 400 dollars (just over 2,000 dollars at today’s rates)?

Mid year came the demonstration of the Magnavox Oddyssey gaming system that signalled the dawn of the video gaming age; then there was Atari’s release of the fabulous ‘Pong’ later in the year – as big a sensation in its way as the iPad.

In 1972 PCS was still the equivalent of a technological twinkle in the eyes of its parent company, the Express & Star, but in 1973 we bounced into life with a bright little bundle of our own, the ‘electronic’ publishing system, Press 11.

Gazing ahead in 2012? Well, who knows...

Remembering that it’s still less than two years since Apple shook up the tablet market with iPad, we come into this new year anticipating even further developments.

In the UK, the first milestone will be the launch of the Kindle Fire (currently available at less than 200 dollars), which has already started to make inroads into the iPad market in the USA. That’s currently slated to be sometime in February, but then we’ve been told to expect an iPad 3, an iPad ‘mini’ and a Google tablet this year year – probably sooner rather than later, too.

The tablet market’s still in a highly agitated state, but we’re actually more excited about that than we are concerned.

Last year we took the decision to face the volatility of the tablet landscape head on by giving ourselves the option of building digital content delivery mechanisms in our Knowledge digital content management and publishing solution in HTML5, so giving ourselves and our customers more options for their web, tablet and smart phone offerings.

We have an idea what’s coming and we’re ready for the opportunities they will bring. That doesn’t mean, of course, that there won’t be some other disruptive technology ready to smack the industry straight between the eyes all over again.

We’d like to think we’d be ready for that, too.

We’re actually quite excited about what lies ahead – and we might just have some more exciting news of our own to announce in the very near future.

So, it’s a Happy New Year from us. Bring it on...