THE COLE PAPERS, June 2001

June 2001, Vol. 12, No. 6
House of blues -- NEXPO may have light attendance, but the technology will be there

Quantity should not be the issue -- quality should be the issue.

The phone calls and the e-mail message traffic have all indicated that attendance will be down at the 73rd

incarnation of the newspaper industry's technical exposition and conference -- contracted from the words "newspaper exposition" to become NEXPO -- to be held June 16-19 in New Orleans.

How far down, nobody knows (I've heard predictions ranging anywhere from 20 percent to 80 percent).

And while not as hot a topic as newspaper attendance, there are many supplier names missing from the show this year: Atex and Quark are on-going concerns that elected not to exhibit, while companies like CompuText, CText, Cybergraphic, Freedom System Integrators, FutureTense, Gazette Technologies, System Integrators and Total Systems Engineering -- all exhibitors within the last two years -- have merged into other businesses (those eight companies are this year represented in five booths).

When all is said and done, the show is down 20 pre-press and new-media booths from last year and 30 from 1999.

The consolidation of the businesses is offset only by the new and shining faces that you'll see at NEXPO 2001.

But the number of warm bodies in New Orleans should not be the bugaboo. The real question, to quote a fast-food restaurant television commercial from 20 years ago, should be, "Where's the beef?"

If my reading of what the exhibitors have to say is anywhere near accurate, this will be one of the meatiest Nexpos in recent memory.

The trends, as I see them:

Hand-held wireless computers, whether for circulation, advertising sales or the newsroom, are an interesting twist on the client-server environment. There will be more than a handful of companies showing hand-held devices -- either for the first time or more mature products -- and any technology that gets staff out of the building and out mingling with (pick the appropriate constituency) distributors, customers or news sources is good technology.

Thin-client technology -- which is a great marriage of the client-server world with the Internet -- is becoming more and more prevalent. Suppliers are eschewing proprietary client software and relying more upon the alphabet soup of standards to achieve their goals.

Computer-to-plate is now ubiquitous (certainly from an availability standpoint if not an installed base). The debates about run-lengths of plates are now behind us, and more and more publishers are abandoning their film-based pre-press environments to work with an entire digital workflow. This transition is requiring a lot of change in the back end of the pre-press world and suppliers are coming forward with good workflow systems.

Adobe InDesign, while maybe not yet "ubiquitous," is certainly gaining support. More and more pre-press suppliers are finding ways to integrate InDesign.

We've picked a few purveyors of some of these trendy technologies -- plus one or two old ones -- and put together a list of the top 50 NEXPO 2001 booths to for you visit. Acknowledging that many cash-strapped papers will be parachuting in people for just one day, we've also picked the top seven booths to visit (and seven in one day is a push).

To supplement these lists, we have concocted our traditional (11th year) double-truck, four-color map of the trade-show floor, rendered by Joe Shoulak, who used corporate logos to give readers and visitors a sense of where they are on the showroom floor.

We anticipate that next month (and the month after and maybe even into September), we'll bring you what we thought were the highlights of the show.

Back to that '80s TV commercial: The beef will be in New Orleans. There's no reason to cry the blues over attendance, because we attend NEXPO to get exposed to new publishing technology (and perhaps buy some), not to mingle in large crowds.

-- David M. Cole, dmc@colepapers.net

Index

Confab
Exhibits 1-16
Exhibits 17-34
Exhibits 35-50
Map
Hellbox
Now you know

Illustration: Joe Shoulak

Top seven exhibits to visit:

7. Autologic Information International: Editorial front-end now complements solid output systems.

8. Brainworks Software Development Corp.: Now a soup-to-nuts supplier, from editorial to advertising to business.

9. CCI Europe: Front-end systems against which you measure all the others.

13. Digital Technology International: Adobe InDesign integration makes DTI exciting.

19. IBM and NewsEngin Inc.: Variety of interesting technologies and services.

28. Managing Editor Inc. and Five-Fifteen Ltd.: Advertising is the specialty here -- layout, order entry, contact management, tracking, etc.

37. Olive Software Inc.: Compelling archive technology converts microfilm.

Index

Top seven exhibits to visit:

From THE COLE PAPERS, June 2001, Copyright © 2001, All Rights Reserved.