At this week's drupa trade show in Germany, Ricoh has demonstrated a future cross-media service whereby printed material features 'clickable hotspots' that link to related online content when scanned with a smartphone. Called Clickable Paper, the demonstration is being given at drupa by Ricoh and web-to-print service provider PTI Marketing Technologies.

"Clickable Paper is an exciting new development in cross-media services," explains PTI chief executive Coleman Kane. "Integrating the authoring process into our MarcomCentral platform will provide customers with a simple and elegant means of adding value to their printed media."

Ricoh states that 'any kind of printed media' can be linked to 'all types of digital information or services' with Clickable Paper, including social networks, websites and e-commerce. An icon will alert readers to a clickable page.

Each document can contain multiple hotspots without the original source material requiring editing or reformatting, and the service offers an elegant authoring tool' to allow online content to be linked to each hotspot. The service also offers 'fast and robust recognition of content' such as images, photographs and text in any language, or combination of types.