October 4, 2004 -- “the Wizards of VDP,” a independent group of Variable Data Printing (VDP) experts, are offering a chance for anyone with a legitimate VDP problem job an to register with the Wizards for an opportunity to meet with an expert free of charge at this year’s Graph Expo 2004 in Chicago. In addition to any discussions that occur on the show floor, each registered visitor will automatically be registered to win an additional free day of consulting (valued at more than $2,000.00) with the Wizards subject to the terms and conditions as defined by the Wizards. Each day the Graph Expo show floor is open, the Wizards will select one winner, based on subjective need as identified by the Wizards during their discussions with that visitor, of the additional free day of consulting. Registration will be handled by our sponsor www.lexigraph.com . Registration is limited and available only on a first-come-first-serve basis. Automated registration will be available at www.lexigraph.com/wizards during the week of October 4th, 2004. For advance registration contact [email protected] directly. About “the Wizards of VDP” “The Wizards of VDP” is a vendor and platform neutral group of independent VDP industry experts offering support, products and services to the VDP industry. The group was formed to counter the vendor-generated hype and lack of accurate information surrounding successful, i.e., profitable, VDP applications. The group is donating the time of its members free of charge to registered visitors to review VDP applications and workflows at Graph Expo. “Our group has experience and success with traditional and digital print, database and application design and development, web-to-print web applications, finishing, and mailing,” said Todd R. Kueny, a member of the group. “We feel that today’s VDP and press vendors do a tremendous disservice to the print industry by focusing customers on one-job-at-a-time press- or platform-specific solutions. Our group believes that VDP success is measured by profitability and that treating VDP as a manufacturing process provides a far better return on investment. We help customer build cost-effective manufacturing solutions for VDP that generate profits day-in and day-out.” “Donating our time free-of-charge to actual VDP users sends a message to the other VDP equipment and software vendors. That message is simple ‘Profitable VDP ismanufacturing and success that comes from 1) having the right capabilities, capabilities such as high quality, low cost, dependability and flexibility, 2) from having management that understands how to achieve, support and utilize these capabilities, and 3) from accurately measuring the economic outcome of the manufacturing process.’ Today’s vendors inevitably fail their customers by focusing only on a single element or subset of these factors. We have seen, over and over, that unless all of these key factors are present VDP as a business proposition fails.” “Our customer have high-end VDP applications in such diverse markets as supermarket and retail shelf labels, horticultural product labels, id cards, ticketing for major sports and sporting venues at both the college and professional level, cell phone advertising, financial reporting, ad versioning for national newspapers, and casino and cruise-line marketing. Markets normally not covered by traditional VDP. However, these applications are where all the profits are generated because the industries that require this form of printing spending money buying output each and every day. We show our customers how to find manufacturing opportunities, build a cost-effective manufacturing processes, and use that process to make money,” said Kueny. Why are They Wizards? The Wizards have created, built and profitably sold successful VDP marketing companies using the same knowledge, tools and techniques now being offered to the industry free of charge. They have used these tools to make their living, literally – both in VPD services and product sales – “we eat our own dog food” every day. The Wizards of VDP have a lifetime of experience in virtually all aspects of graphic art Variable Data Printing workflows including PostScript, PDF, PPML, PPML/VDX, JLayout, and many others. In 1981 the Wizards built and sold products that drove “liquid toner” laser printers, the first laser printers ever built, and built and sold the first commercial PostScript printer driver; developed in-RIP caching for PostScript VDP print applications in 1991; created the first public-domain, open source PPML/VDX application, built the first high-performance software VDP preflight system for Barco Printstreamers, and released the fastest PDF-based, full color VDP system in the world using our own PDF Library in 2001; released the first vendor neutral, platform independent VDP benchmark in 2003; and in 2004 released VDP support for transparency and spot color separations in PDF. The Wizards have extensive database experience, not only with database applications as they relate to VDP, but also with database design, database server and application design, data cleansing, and market research and data analysis. They started by delivering automated database publishing applications (what VDP used to be called) to the legal market in 1980 using Unix, database servers and X9700 printers. These techniques have been applied to database publishing on PC’s since 1991. The Wizards have profound knowledge of traditional printing including color management, color correction, and separation in traditional and digital workflows including detailed knowledge and understanding of roll-to-roll and cut-sheet finishing in both VDP and traditional print workflows. The Wizards and their customers have been building automated commercial web sites for print ordering since 2000. These sites include PDF and JPEG preview capability and printer-ready job downloading on the back end. The Wizards and their customers produce jobs in many languages, on different continents on a regular basis, and use The Wizard’s software to manage workflow and exchange job information reliably between plant locations. The “the Wizards of VDP” exposition at 2004 Graph Expo in Chicago is sponsored by Lexigraph, Inc. If you are interested in sponsoring the Wizards for your event, please contact [email protected] or contact Gregory Pegher at 1-724-275-1230.