In recent years, printer supply manufacturers including Xerox, Canon, and Lexmark have been battling the increased illegal distribution of counterfeit toner cartridges throughout the United States. A counterfeit toner cartridge can be defined as a toner cartridge which appears to be manufactured by a major brand (Xerox, HP, Oki, Canon, Lexmark etc) and carries the logos, packaging, and other features that may lead the end user to believe it is an actual Genuine OEM toner cartridge when in reality the toner has an unknown, unauthorized manufacturer that in most cases does not comply with today’s printing compliance standards. Using these unauthorized and untested toners can damage your printer and will not last as long or print as clear as using Genuine and / or Quality Compatible toner cartridges.

In 2004, Xerox was able to work with customs officials from multiple countries to seize more than 7,200 counterfeit toner cartridges claiming to be Genuine Xerox toner cartridges for the Xerox Phaser 780. The estimated value of these busts was worth well over $1.3 million.

counterfeit toner cartridges

“Hundreds of thousands of illegal products, worth millions of dollars, are removed from commerce each year,” said Bill Duffy, president and chief executive officer of the Imaging Supplies Coalition, a nonprofit trade association. “This is a problem that faces the entire printing industry, and is something all manufacturers must remain vigilant in fighting to help prevent damage to the ultimate victim – the customer.” The Imaging Supplies Coalition is a non-profit trade association comprised of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) of consumable imaging supplies (ribbons, toner, inks, cartridges, etc.) and equipment that have joined together to protect their customers by combating illegal activities in the Imaging Supplies Industry. The ISC currently has members including Brother, Canon, Epson, HP, Lexmark, Okidata, Samsung, Toshiba, and Xerox.

Lexmark was also successful in finding thousands of counterfeit Lexmark toner cartridges and filed suit against a New York based company named Finetone who were allegedly importing and distributing counterfeit Lexmark toner cartridges. The cartridges and packaging carried unauthorized reproductions of Lexmark’s trademarks.

In 2005, Canon conducted a civil raid of a US distributor who was engaging in the sale of counterfeit Canon toners. Canon was able to seize thousands of the counterfeit Canon supplies and the distributor has since agreed to no longer sell these types of supplies and also had to pay damages to Canon for the numerous violations. Canon encourages customers to buy Canon toner from authorized Canon dealers or distributors.

HP has taken the battle to the web and has released several informative and somewhat entertaining videos regarding the topic of counterfeit HP toner cartridges. Also, between 2005 to 2008, HP has conducted 4,620 investigations in 55 countries, resulting in 3,528 enforcement actions conducted by law enforcement officials where more than $795 million worth of counterfeit supplies products have been seized, including more than 8 million counterfeit ink cartridges and more than six million counterfeit toner cartridges – a total of more than 15 million counterfeit pieces. HP also has a great information page that will walk you through the steps on verifying that you have purchased a true Genuine HP Toner or HP Ink cartridge – click here to view the steps.

Counterfeit Product Defense (according to ISC)

“How can I tell if the product I buy is counterfeit”?
Due to the technology now available to the counterfeiters it can be difficult to distinguish counterfeit products from genuine.  You should pay close attention to the 5 P’s which are discussed below.

1. Person:  The ISC strongly encourages you to purchase imaging supplies from the OEM or one of their authorized resellers (such as The Supplies Guys ). This is the one best thing you can do to be sure you are buying genuine merchandise.
2. Price:  If the purchase price of the OEM product is substantially under the market price or looks like a deal that is too good to be true the product may not be legitimate. The ISC advises you to be very cautious with these situations.
3. Place:  Be cautious if the manner or place of the offer is different from the normal process of business or consumer transactions.
4. Packaging:  Be observant for any deviation in color, materials quality, spelling errors in the packaging. Many OEM’s have a product authentication hologram or color shift label on the packaging to assist in verification. Familiarize yourself with those used by your brand of choice and check for them.
5. Performance:  If you notice any significant variation in the performance of the product from previous experience or obvious defects in quality such as odor or leakage, the product may not be genuine.

Consumers who believe they may have purchased counterfeit imaging products can contact the ISC at (859) 278-3032 or visit www.isc-inc.org.

One way to be certain that you are not buying counterfeit ink or toner cartridges is to always buy from The Supplies Guys We only sell the highest quality Genuine OEM and Compatible ink and toner cartridges – and all of our products carry a 100% quality and satisfaction guarantee!

Did you know that the US Postal service returns 5 billion pieces of undeliverable mail each year? This cost the US postal service more than $1.8 billion dollars in 2004…

Pitney Bowes printer supplies company is leading the coalition of environmentally friendly manufacturers in the printer industry.  They are striving to become a more responsible printer supplies company and reducing their impact on the environment by improving the sustainability of the Pitney Bowes printer supplies, monitoring how the company operates and revolutionizing the printer manufacturer industry as a whole with ground breaking innovations.

Pitney Bowes is dedicated to reducing the environmental impact of our operations, products and services. – Pitney Bowes

Pitney Bowes’ Printer Supplies Green Design

Back in 1991 when their competitors were thinking about reducing costs and increasing the bottom lines, Pitney Bowes was thinking about improving the world. That is why they created the Design for Environmental Quality (DfEQ) program. The goal with the program was to minimize environmental impact at an early stage of product development and throughout the printer supplies’ life cycle starting with the material input, moving into manufacturing and ending in recycling. As a result many Pitney Bowes printer supplies are labeled as Energy-star efficient, and their products on average consume 10 to 14% less energy per life cycle than their product predecessor.

On top of their “lean green” manufacturing techniques, 95% of Pitney Bowes printer supplies are recyclable.  They make a conscious effort to recover Pitney Bowes pritner supplies which can be demonstrated in the fact that in 2008, Pitney Bowes processed nearly 8 million pounds of cooper, steel, paper and other materials through Pitney Bowes printer supplies return programs.  Lastly, Pitney Bowes developed the ecowise℠ service to help consumers identify their carbon footprint and provide find ways to reduce it!

Pitney Bowes “Lean Green” Operations

The printer supplies manufacturer is constantly on the hunt for new, innovative ways in which they can reduce their carbon footprint. In 2007, Pitney Bowes Norway began replacing their leased vehicles with ones with lower emissions. They gave employees three options: electric, hydrogen or bio-fuel.  This move resulted in 40% lower emissions.  Pitney Bowes has also established an “energy task force” to bring employee awareness about energy conservation. In 2008, Pitney Bowes was able to reduce their electricity consumption by 3 million kilowatt hours, saving $873,000 and reducing carbon footprint by 2.6K metric tons of carbon oxide. Pitney Bowes has also made energy efficiency improvements to their offices by improving heating, ventilation & A/C units as well as purchasing energy-star approved computer monitors and installing motion sensors to control lighting systems. An article on Office-Suites.com reports that Pitney Bowes is joining other large corporations such as IBM and DuPont by encouraging commercial landlords to offer competitive rates for “green office” units. The site also reports Pitney Bowes leases 362 offices in the United States alone (totaling 2.8 million sq. ft).

The last two initiatives Pitney Bowes printer supplies manufacturer has employed include; their waste management / recycling program and sustainable forest projects.  Pitney Bowes has been volunteering in the EPA’s WasteWise program, designed to reduce corporate waste, since 1996. In 2008, Pitney Bowes was named to the WasteWise Hall of Fame for their continued commitment (In 2008 alone their program diverted 7.52 thousand tons of waste from land fills) to the program. Back in 2003 Pitney Bowes entered into a partnership with the EPA and began purchasing renewable energy credits to support green power projects (solar, wind & biomass). It is also worthy to note that Pitney Bowes has a paper procurement and sustainability team that monitors the company’s paper consumption both internally and externally to decrease overall waste.

Environmental Impacts To Date?

We will let the graph below speak for itself in terms of the “hard numbers”. Bottom line, Pitney Bowes is a leader within the printer industry in terms of going green and becoming a sustainable, forward-thinking company.  Other companies, not just those in the printing business or in manufacturing for that matter should model their ethics and behavior after Pitney Bowes, who have proven time again that a company can improve the bottom-line without negatively impacting the environment. The world is a better place with Pitney Bowes.

To learn more about Pitney Bowes’ corporate responsibility visit their website which includes white papers, studies and other reports pertaining to green operations.

What makes a top Super Bowl commercial in the perspective of the advertiser?…Certainly increasing brand awareness is a goal, but  for others the goal could be to create an informative commercial. Maybe for another advertiser,  the primary metric is how controversial the ad is and or, how much viral buzz is generated from that controversial commercial. Two things that all advertisers do care about are the  Super Bowl commercial’s return on ad spend (ROAS) – they need to recoup the cost of their 30 second, $3M ad spend and the Super Bowl’s audience reach and life-time value. Nielsen has recently announced that Super Bowl 44 is the most watched Super Bowl ever with 106.6M views on television alone.

When determining an ad’s reach and life-time value, analysts must now factor internet activity into this data, on top of television viewership. This data can include query search volume, standard web analytics & e-commerce measures, and now even social media metrics such as blog posts, comments, retweets, status mentions, sentiment, video views, bookmarks, diggs, etc. etc. Taking this into consideration we thought it may be interesting to compare the five brands who created the top Super Bowl commercials of 2010 across a few of these metrics. We considered these brands to be (in no order); Denny’s (Free Grand Slam Breakfast campaign), Dockers (Free Pants campaign), Doritos (Get Yo Hands Off My Mamma et al.) Bud Light (Bud Light House et al.) and GoDaddy (Danica Patrick & the GoDaddy Girls campaign).

Top Super Bowl Commercials: Google Search Volume

Using Google Insights we determined that Doritos and Dockers were the brands that saw the biggest spike in search volume over after their Super Bowl commercials were aired. GoDaddy, Denny’s and Bud Light closed out the top five. One interesting point to note is that on Tuesday February 8th while Doritos, Dockers, GoDaddy and Bud Light traffic began to trough, Denny’s was still on the rise. It is important to note that Tuesday, February 8th was also the day that Denny’s was offering their free grand slam breakfast.

Top Super Bowl Commercials: Domain Traffic

A metric that our  advertisers were certainly looking at were the impact of the Super Bowl commercials on direct load sessions and unique visitors to their own domains. Using Alexa.com as our source it is clear that Dockers.com experienced the highest increase in terms of reach from their Super Bowl commercial and free pants campaign.  Dockers.com saw a 7-day traffic spike of 1,350%, that is incredible! Now the only questions that remains are did that traffic convert and how many new customers were generated?

Dennys.com also saw a 400% increase in reach over the past 7-days and keeping with the trend of Google Searches and Twitter mentions, that number has continued to grow after the few days following the Super Bowl.

Doritos in collaboration with the NFL had launched a site called CrashTheSuperBowl.com back in 2006 as a user-generated commercial voting site. The site has seen a 90% increase in reach over the past 7-days.  GoDaddy.com also showed a marginal 7% increase in its 7-day reach as according to Alexa.

Top Super Bowl Commercials on YouTube

So we know 106.6 million people watched Super Bowl 44, but how many tuned in after the Super Bowl to check out their favorite 2010 Super Bowl commercials? The short answer is, a lot. Doritos Super Bowl Commercial Channel, CrashTheSuperBowl, is the fourth most watched channel on YouTube this week with over 3.675 million views. Their channel also has 3,818 subscribers and the most watched video (Get Yo Hands Off My Mamma), alone has 1.718 million views, 2,805 comments, and 4,454 ratings (5-star overall) as of writing this post. The Bud Light Channel, OfficialBudLight, was the fifteenth most watched channel on YouTube this week with 1.385 million views. Not surprisingly, GoDaddy.com has also seen a increase in their GoDaddyTV channel views as it is currently the seventy-third most watched channel on YouTube this week. An un-official Denny’s channel, Denny’s SuperBowl, has generated over 1.148 million views since it’s creation on January 29th, 2009.

Top Super Bowl Commercials on Twitter

So just what commercial generated the most interest to users on Twitter? According to Trendistic, Doritos was the champion in terms of the amount of mentions in a given time. In the 6 pm EST hour during the Super Bowl, “Doritos” was mentioned in 1.2% of the all tracked tweets.

Dockers and Denny’s each maxed out at .23% and .16%. Again in the graphs below, you will see that Denny’s appeared to of had the larger life-span but that is skewed because of their Grand Slam offering on February 8th.

The mad scientists at Google unleashed their latest Google Labs experiment, People Hopper, to the world this last Wednesday on January 27th, 2010.  So what is People Hopper you ask? Basically it is an application for Google’s social networking site Orkut, which allows members to take their profile picture and morph it into a friend’s profile picture.  After you install the application you will be able to compare two of your friends (they must be Orkut members) using the People Hooper application. Simply drag your friends’ photo into the application and within a couple of seconds, People Hooper will display a clickable “path” that transitions your image to that of a friends’. Google Labs use image matching technology to power their People Hopper application.

We thought it may be interesting using People Hopper to compare Hillary Clinton with Monica Lewinsky…just for fun of course.

Why People Hopper is Interesting?

First it allows you to discover new connections with whom you resemble. Along the People Hopper path you can actually click on each image and be re-directed to that particular member’s profile. However a significant question emerges from this technology. Will Google eventually try to integrate this sort of image matching into their Google image search? If that were to happen would we really want our public images being morphed and transformed?

Send us your People Hopper Morph!

Think you can create a better People Hopper morph than us? Create your best morph (keep it clean..) and post the link in the comments section below! We’ll give you a few ideas, but we think our People Hopper morph will be pretty tough to beat! You never know the winner might just get something fun

• two clashing public figures…
• compare yourself to your pet or an animal…
• find your look-a-like…