Mike McCombs from Dantom Systems, just finishing up the summit on direct mail for Oce here at Boca Raton.  A couple of major things, one from an interesting point of view was demographics from Ken.  Just the understanding of who we are in the population and what impact it has on us from a business point of view was very good.  Just in seeing the inkjet equipment.  I’m going the be one of the first in the United States to have one of Oce’s 3700’s, but continuing to look at the technology and where they’re moving with it adjust to see the changes that have taken place over the last two years when I started looking at this has been great.  And I think everyone, you know, saw that as the future of what they’re looking for because we’re going to all end up in the color spectrum at some point in time.  And inkjet is affordable and once you get beyond the first capital outlay you can get more capacity and you can get more variety that you can do for your clients.  

Pulling it together, not just mail, but the electronic side to the world, emails, QR’s, that none of us can be in just one aspect of touching a client.  We have to be able to touch the client, both with mail, with email, and to be able to tie those services together and provide data back to our clients.  

The panel, I think we had a good discussion on where the influences of color and what we need to be taking a look at, how we’re going to transition from offset, from the toner-based into the inkjet world because it’s not exact and it’s an evolution that we’re going to be going through as they continue to perform or improve the toners and the papers as we go forward, but – and how do you sell that, how do you get it by marketing people?  How do you get it by the end users so that they will accept the slight differences or the imperfections or differences in comparisons to the toner-based products.  

Part of learning about all of this was going over to the CEC, the Customer Experience Center, and seeing the realm or the breadth of products that Oce has.  So, no matter what you want to try to do, they’ve got a product that can fit your need or can fit your niche, whether it has the small end color copier-based things all the way up to the fastest one, which is the 2200 inkjet.  

One of the values of coming to these kinds of events is the interaction we have with people, meeting new people, meeting people that are using the same technologies and applying slightly differently.  Just the interchange that you can have in comparing vendor choices, applications and then what customers and what needs that you’re meeting and being able to share ideas.  You can’t get that any place else.  I mean, you can go to have presentations done to you, you can go and have literature mailed to you, but to literally sit down and to have that interaction with people that are, you know, living and breathing what you’re doing every day, it’s a lot of good exchange of ideas and information.