Things were relatively quiet at the Washington D.C. convention center this week despite the fact that there were a number of different shows and conferences taking place in conjunction with each other, including On Demand, info360, PublishingXchange and ITEX.  Somewhat surprisingly, two of the key suppliers to the industry, who have historically been anchor exhibitors at the On Demand show, were not on the floor (Xerox and Kodak), and HP did not have a lot of equipment in its booth. Exhibitors indicated that traffic was lighter than they anticipated.

Kerry Gumas, CEO of Questex (the show company), indicates that efforts have been made to make changes to the conference program to reposition it to be more tied to where the market is headed.  One element of that was a new conference, PublishingXchange, pulled together by David Zwang. Gumas said, “If you remain the same too long, you lose your relevance in the marketplace.” PublishingXchange was an effort to begin to bring together a broader base of content to attract marketers, agencies, publishers and printers, establishing a much-needed dialog among these constituencies. Zwang did an outstanding job of organizing the conference despite a short lead time—marketing for the event didn't really begin until January.

WhatTheyThink hosted a print-oriented track at PublishingXchange focused on Cross-Media, the hows and whys printers should be adding these services to their portfolios, playing to about 30 attendees who were very engaged and rated the sessions positively.  Zwang indicates that all presentation content from the PublishingXchange conference will be available for download from PublishingXchange.com, for attendees and non-attendees alike.