July 10, 2002 -- The PrintTalk industry consortium elected new officers and directors at a meeting May 31 during the GUTENBERG FESTIVAL in Long Beach, California. Charles Gehman, Chief Technology Officer of Printable Technologies, and Ronald Berg, Vice President of Profit Control Systems, were elected to the Board. The PrintTalk Board consists of nine seats and the following seven directors were re-elected: Krishna Pillai, CTO of httprint; Alan Butler. Senior Project Manager of Noosh, Inc.; Oliver Pflug, CEO of printChannel.com; Paul Greico, President of Printers Software, Inc.; Laurence Snyder, President of Streamline Solutions; Vincent Lawrence, President of Graphic Arts IT, and Steve Hallberg, President of Parsec. Elected as officers were: * James Mekis, consultant, Chairman; * Carol Anderson, President of Prism USA, Vice Chairman; * Dr. Christian Blumenroehr, Software Engineer of Heidelberg, Technical Secretary; * William K. "Kip" Smythe, Vice President of NPES, President. Ms. Anderson will also serve as PrintTalk's marketing secretary, a position in which she will be responsible, with the support of a working group, for developing new content for the PrintTalk web site, plus new material for articles and press releases and other promotional information about the activities of PrintTalk. PrintTalk is a community formed by print management systems and e-commerce companies to define a "best practice" common and open communications interface between their products. The PrintTalk interface specification is distributed free of any license fees or royalties, in order to address the need for end-to-end connectivity in the printing industry. The specification and information about PrintTalk are available through the organization's web site at www.printtalk.org . The PrintTalk consortium is working closely with CIP4 to support that organization's Job Definition Format (JDF). The next version of the PrintTalk interface specification, PrintTalk 1.1, is being developed to be compatible with the latest version of JDF. "To JDF, PrintTalk adds a standards-based means of business-to-business communication with both customers and suppliers," according to Dr. Rainer Prosi, CIP4's Chief Technology Officer. PrintTalk's next general business meeting will take place during GRAPH EXPO and CONVERTING EXPO 2002 in Chicago in October. Regular bi-monthly technical meetings take place via conference call. The following companies are current members of PrintTalk: Avanti Computer Systems; Document Management Industries Association; Fuji Photo Film U.S.A., Graphic Arts IT, Heidelberg USA, httprint, IKON Office Solutions; Noosh, Inc.; Pace Systems Group, Inc.; Parsec Corporation; Printable Technologies; printChannel.com; Printers Software, Inc.; Prism-USA, PROFIT Control Systems, Inc., Streamline Solutions and TripleArc Limited. NPES The Association for Suppliers of Printing, Publishing and Converting Technologies serves as secretariat for PrintTalk.