I look forward to learning more about this new show, although I am “ELD” European Language Disabled so I’ll probably have to depend on Google translate to keep up with what’s going on.

Two data points I wanted to share.

Pediapress.org who is delivering Google Books in print on demand Niiu who launched personal newspapers, with content pulled from the web and delivered overnight for a 2 Euro /per issue subscription are both in Germany. From my point of view these are two of the most interesting digital print applications I’ve seen.

The other point is that I have to disagree with the idea that

“The challenge for print service providers or marketing services providers, or whatever we are calling ourselves today, is to engage with marketers and agency folks much earlier in the value chain, and that is difficult to do leading with a print message.”

Instead I think it makes most sense to focus on Print centric innovation that creates new value. Sometimes that value is for marketers. But the much more interesting to me and I think larger opportunities is to produce print products that are valued by the people who purchase them.

There are, without a doubt, already many events for digital or multichannel publishing. But that is exactly where the problem lies: Each of these only reaches a partial target group and never covers the entire spectrum, and this certainly not on an international level. Contrary to the numerous other events, digi:media reflects the entire gamut of themes associated with digital communication. And precisely for this reason, technology is not the sole or primary focus of digi:media. Instead, it is about the entire field of digital publishing, the cross-medial preparation of content, and the important current topic of media convergence.

One additional note regarding visitor marketing: It goes without saying that digi:media is naturally conceived as an international trade show. In the first stage, however, we are concentrating exclusively on marketing to the German-speaking visitor. Specifically, this means that we are contacting potential visitors from Germany, Austria and Switzerland, as well as the Benelux and to some extent Poland and the Czech Republic. Incidentally, the drupacube at the last drupa also began with solely German-speaking acquisition and was nonetheless a huge success.