Cary Sherburne: Hi, I’m Cary Sherburne, Senior Editor at WhatTheyThink; and I’m here with Ralph Nappi, who is President of the Graphic Arts Show Company and NPES. I’m sure you don’t need an introduction, but we did it anyway.

Ralph Nappi: Well, that’s very kind, thank you. I’m glad to be with you, Cary.

Cary Sherburne: Now, we’re headed towards, obviously towards October for Graph Expo and then next year…

Ralph Nappi: Print.

Cary Sherburne: Print 13, 2013, so for folk that weren’t able to attend drupa, do you think they’ll be able to see a lot of the same stuff and then for people that did attend it, is there going to be new stuff?

Ralph Nappi: Well, I would say there’s two things. First of all, drupa was exciting. And the good news is there was no real surprises. But that’s both good news and bad news. But most people know in our industry that except for a few items which this nano ink that Landa was talking about, that was the only thing. And it’s still needs to come out. There will be a lot of the technologies that were at drupa at Graph Expo. The participation from the U.S., not surprising, wasn’t very strong, but they were…

Cary Sherburne: But they were at drupa.

Ralph Nappi: Yeah. At drupa, exactly. So the good news is, as you said, Cary, if you didn’t get to drupa that’s fine because Graphic Expo has always been the position to have some of those technologies and announcements that were at drupa. For those of you that were at drupa, you’re always welcome and there’s always new stuff going on. Cary and I was just talking about Executive Outlook is new there, we have conference program. I think a lot of the things we do in particular the co-locations, we continue to grow the number of co-located events.

Cary Sherburne: Yes. And that’s great.

Ralph Nappi: The last three years has been phenomenal from 22 to 34, we’re going to be over 40 for this Graph Expo.

Cary Sherburne: Wow.

Ralph Nappi: Which says a lot. It’s the place for the graphic communication, the graphic arts industry in the broader sense, which includes marketing, ePublishing, lots of things to be in Chicago during those four days.

Cary Sherburne: And the marathon is happening.

Ralph Nappi: The marathon is happening, and both you and I are going to run it this year, right?

Cary Sherburne: That’s right, that’s right.

Ralph Nappi: But no, kidding aside, the marathon is that Sunday; we will start actually Graph Expo a little later than usual. Usually it starts at 10:00 on Sunday, we’re going to move that to Noon this year because of that. But otherwise it’s going to look and feel a lot like most Graph Expos with the new announcements in technologies from here.

Cary Sherburne: Yeah, that’s great. And then do you have some special plans for Print 2013?

Ralph Nappi: We do, thanks for asking. At drupa we announced our Print 13 plan and there are three particular areas that will be unique to this Print. Number one, we’re actually going to reduce it from six days to five days.

Cary Sherburne: Okay.

Ralph Nappi: We’re going to adjust the number of days from the days we start. So we’ll open up on a Sunday and go through a Thursday.

Cary Sherburne: Okay.

Ralph Nappi: That’s been particularly important because of our co-located events. Which we’ve done at Graph Expo and they like those weekends. So we felt like it continue having them growing in number have said we want to be continued, but we need a weekend. And so that’s why we shifted that and we think we’ll be as many as – our goal to have 50 co-located events.

Cary Sherburne: Great.

Ralph Nappi: Too many to talk about now, but they’re in all 12 segments that we touch.

Cary Sherburne: Okay.

Ralph Nappi: So that will be one thing. The second thing will be is we will be offering a machinery package. So from the exhibitor standpoint, once again, we’re going to help with the…

Cary Sherburne: Oh right.

Ralph Nappi: … costs of getting the equipment into the show, which is very important.

Cary Sherburne: Great.

Ralph Nappi: You know as many customers and exhibitors certainly know that the primary reason people attend Graph Expo and most of our industry shows, just like drupa, IPEX, I guess others, is to see running equipment. We want to help that. The market in the US is still challenged. We want to help as much as we can to get that equipment there.

Cary Sherburne: That’s great.

Ralph Nappi: So that’s another exciting thing. We’ll be doing RFID name tags.

Cary Sherburne: Oh, good.

Ralph Nappi: First time ever. We’re going to bait it with Graph Expo this year, but by Print we fully expect to have some of those new technologies and things and there’s a lot of good things that we’ll do that will help, both from the exhibitor and attendee perspective.

Cary Sherburne: That’s great.

Ralph Nappi: Isn’t it, isn’t it. Yeah, good.

Cary Sherburne: Thanks for sharing that with us.

Ralph Nappi: My pleasure.