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 By Kevin Keane, IAPHC CEO On BabeWatch and other Baloney "Sure, we may have half of all online users, but that's still only a drop in the bucket. After all, the total number of users online is still only 4% of the worldwide audience for Baywatch." AOL Chairman Steve Case in a March, 1998 speech. The comments of Case may be used by some folks as proof that the impacts of e- mail and other forms of digital communication are still very small. Those folks are wishing on a dream that is fast receding in the rear view mirror of others who are embracing the new opportunities in the digital age. What's in a Name? LaserMaster Technologies, Inc., announced a second straight quarter of profitability at its shareholder meeting on 2 April, 1998. The firm attributed its turnaround to the sale of its DisplayMaker HiRes 8-color printers and the related consumables. Also announced was the change of the company's name to VirtualFund.com, Inc. That is not a web address, nor the name of a new mutual fund, that's the new legal name of the company. LaserMaster started out making large format laser printers, then shifted to wide format digital color printers. At VirtualFund's web address, one finds these statements: "VirtualFund.com provides an alternative to traditional venture capital funding for cutting edge Internet technologies. For thirteen years, the professionals at VFC have been creating world class printing and publishing tools for Macintosh and Windows operating systems. VirtualFund.com is focused on identifying and developing new and innovative Internet-based concepts in order to bring them to market using existing corporate resources to accelerate the growth of revenues without committing massive capital outlays for the personnel and infrastructure that is typical of most high tech startup ventures." www.virtualfund.com 1000th Xeikon sold by PrimeSource Corporation Also on 2 April, Xeikon N.V. announced the sale of its 1000th digital color press. The buyer was the Regent Group, New York, USA a subsidiary of Unidigital Inc. Regent actually bought a Xeikon DCP/32D as well as a DCP/50D, both of which were sold by PrimeSource Corporation. "Unidigital is one of the country's premier digital pre-press and printing companies." said John Goddard, Executive Vice President of PrimeSource. Which tells us that we better make sure William Dye, Chairman and CEO of Unidigital gets a copy of the Call for Entries for the International Gallery of Superb Printing, with a note drawing his attention to the emerging technologies entry categories F-56 through F-59. PrimeSource Corporation is the sponsor of the International Gallery Best of Show Award and one suspects the time is not far off when the Best of Show will be produced in a digital format. More Digital Items - On 31 March, Presstek announced that production of Direct Imaging kits for the Heidelberg Quickmaster DI will be reduced from 1997 levels. The firm pointed out that Heidelberg had increased its orders for the production of Quickmaster DI kits to 4 per day or 80 per month in the last quarter of 1997, and suggested that orders for the press had slowed to a point where Presstek will either slow its production rate or maybe even stop production of the kits for a time until Heidelberg's inventory of kits is depleted. On Monday 6 April, Presstek's stock price dipped below $14.00, which is a 52 week low. - On 25 March, Printware, Inc., announced that it had received an order worth several hundred thousand dollars from Mitsubishi Imaging Inc., for platesetters. Mitsubishi is one of the leaders in providing computer to plate material and technology and has long partnered with Printware. - On 22 and 23 April, Heidelberg USA is conducting a series of Direct Imaging Inforums which will feature a live demonstration of remote printing technology that will electronically distribute a digitally developed job to Quickmaster DI installations in North America for on-demand production. The job will originate at famed ad agency Leo Burnett in downtown Chicago and be digitally transmitted as an Adobe Acrobat PDF file via WAM!NET to the Heidelberg Technology Centers where the file will be RIPped and printed. - On 1 April, TrendWatch dropped us an e-note pointing out that despite rumours of the impending demise of the prepress industry, when one combines service bureaus, separators and platemakers together, one finds an industry with $6.8 billion in estimated total shipments in 1998. - On 25 March, the Colorado based investment research house of Chatfield Dean and Company reiterated its Strong Buy recommendation for the stock of Electronics for Imaging. We have written often about EFII, including the effects of the "Asian Flu" in halving the EFII market cap in December of 1997 (see mid-December issues of Tuesday Morning News as well as the 17 March issue of TMN) and then mentioned EFII's OEM arrangement with Agfa in the 24 March issue of TMN. In specific, the research report spoke in glowing terms about EFII's Fiery ZX product line which purportedly increases processing speed five times faster than the XJ product line. On 6 April Konica announced that it was entering the desktop color laser printer market (in this case, one can distinguish the desktop color laser printer from the service printing segment color laser printers by speed of copy output --the new Konica KL-3015 does 3 pages per minute in full color.) The Konica KL-3015 is based on EFII's Fiery X2e print controller. It's In the Cards We helped a fellow recovering attorney, Lynella Grant, with some of the research for her new book (a two pound book, no less) titled The Business Card Book, What your Business Card reveals about you ...and how to fix it. This 500 page book is chock full of examples of good cards, design tips and novel ways to improve most any card. If you are in design, have a retail print shop where you sell business cards, are in the thermography business etc, you may want to get a copy(ies). Discounted IAPHC member price is $15.00 (US) plus shipping through the end of 1998. Upcoming Trade Shows Just a reminder that our world class and award winning website CraftNet includes a listing of upcoming graphic arts industry trade shows. We look forward to seeing old friends in Minneapolis at Midwest Graphics 14-16 April and encourage our West Coast membership to check out The Gutenberg Festival 13-16 May in Long Beach, California. Chris Jacobson is the Gutenberg Expo Show Manager, and he along with two other of his employees are the newest members of the Los Angeles Club of Printing House Craftsmen.
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