Print and ePublishing Conference 2011 (PePCon) report
Joe Mathia and I (Chris Ryland) provided Em’s presence at the (now apparently annual) InDesign Secrets Live! Print and ePublishing Conference designed and implemented by David Blatner and Anne-Marie Concepción. David and Anne-Marie are just plain great people, and were wonderful hosts for the conference. (They (and other speakers) very kindly pointed people to us several times in general and specific sessions.)
We had a couple of tables in the registration / eating area of the conference (upstairs at the Westin Alexandria, Virginia) with some signs and a couple of large monitors to show off our software. (That’s Joe holding one of our brochures.)
The two days were pretty intense, and we met a whole bunch of great people. Many of them have been using our software for years, and more than one even expressed a desire to find more work involving our tools because they’re such fun to use! Many hadn’t seen the tools before and were excited to see them demonstrated on real projects. (Joe has a great collection of demos that we’re planning to add to our showcase listings.)
I was showing DocsFlow, our new Google Docs live linking InDesign plug-in, and we had a phenomenal response, with a lot of enthusiastic requests to join our public beta. DocsFlow’s ability to merge editorial changes on the Google Docs side with editorial and formatting changes on the InDesign side is what really caught people’s attention. Additionally, we discovered that Google Docs usage in the publishing business is exploding, so there’s a huge amount of interest in connecting InDesign. (The fact that the per-editorial-seat cost of Google Docs is $0 doesn’t hurt. Though we did change our screen signage from “the poor man’s editorial solution” to “the cost-effective editorial solution” at Chris Kitchener’s suggestion.)
(Meanwhile, back at home, Chris Roueche and John Whitney were madly debugging and fixing things in DocsFlow as we went along, since the software had just started working a few days before. It was great to have their support and virtual presence.)
As we told people at the show, we hope to have a public beta of DocsFlow starting in a couple of weeks; the demo was working quite well, and we just need to work on packaging, documentation, and edge cases.
If we saw you there, thanks for stopping by! It’s always great to meet you in person, and we hope to do more of these kinds of shows.
David and Anne-Marie, and all the good folks involved with the show, thanks again!
