The Digital Solutions Cooperative (Dscoop), an HP Indigo users group, will host its meeting on 22-25 August 2011 at the Resorts World Sentosa in Singapore.

Hundreds of attendees are expected to be present, which would include current and prospective Indigo customers, Hewlett-Packard executives and technical experts, and representatives from 34 HP vendor partners. HP experts shall address digital wide-format opportunities for commercial and digital printers. This year, Scitex users have been invited to join the conference and benefit from sessions about business and operations.

Dscoop has established its presence in the Asia Pacific region, built on and headed by a steering committee from around the region. The Indigo user event, which has been running in the US for the past five years, came to Asia Pacific with its first edition in September 2010 and had Indigo founder Benny Landa as the keynote speaker. Landa had said: "If present trends continue, I believe Indigo will be the largest printing business in the world."

With David Minnett as committee chairman and Yukinori Okamoto as our conference chairman, Dscoop is an interactive platform for sharing best practices, exchanging ideas and experiences to learn from and take our respective businesses to the next level. The first Dscoop Conference in Asia in Seoul was mind-blowing. For me, Dscoop is the most valuable platform we have to learn, get tips and ideas, go back home, and grow our businesses. In 2010, there were more than 1,000 attendees at the first Dscoop conference in Seoul Korea.

Dscoop Asia 2011 agenda
For the second edition, there will be 29 sessions with over 40 speakers who will talk on various topics like general commercial printing, business and marketing, signages and displays, labels and packaging, publishing, photo and direct marketing. The speakers include: James Lafferty, CEO of Coca-Cola Bottling in West Africa, Alon Bar-Shany, vice president and general manager of the HP Indigo Digital Press Division, Brendon Cook, founder of OOH! Media Australia, Chris Thomas, CEO of BBDO in Asia Pacific. Sameer Bindra, president of BuzzIMC and Dr Anil Lamba are the speakers from India.

The conference will get kick started with a visit to the HP centre and HP ink plant for a tour of their sites. On 22 and 24 August, a visit to eight customer sites in four segment-focused tracks to provide an insight at how print service providers in Singapore are creating business opportunities using HP Graphic Arts and digital front-end solutions. The four segments include: photo printing and finishing,  general commercial printing and publishing, labels and packaging and Scitex.

This year, the fourth edition of Asia-Pacific / Japan HP Digital Print Awards will be held in Singapore in conjunction with Dscoop Asia 2011 on the second day of the event on 23 August 2011. Entries will be judged by a team of internationally qualified industry leaders from the graphic arts, packaging and media industries based on degree of innovation and creativity, marketing appeal, best use of digital technology, paper selection, best use of ink and colour, finishing and packaging, and, overall aesthetics. Winning entries from 18 different categories across HP Indigo and Scitex presses will be showcased at the Print Awards Dinner.

Day four of Dscoop Asia 2011, titled Customer Training, is focussed on eight customer courses focusing on marketing and selling digital. There are four full day courses with focus on marketing digital print. Additionally there are  four half day courses in English are categorised under topics like; transpromo today: making powerful statements, getting started: three paths to launch your transpromo, low cost and no cost strategies for effective social media marketing for businesses, and cost management.
 
As a part of the conferences, Dscoop will showcase live and recorded webinars about business and operational topics; discussion forums with more than 100,000 searchable postings on suggestions, tips and tricks, and Q&A; business and technical discussion groups; business development tools and marketing templates; case studies and white papers; educational events and materials, prepared and delivered by Indigo users – for Indigo users.

United we stand
The best part about Dscoop is that it offers education and networking opportunities for Indigo users, including business owners, sales teams, technical and operational experts, as well as label and packaging specialists.

Dscoop provides several tracks of conference sessions designed to inspire, educate and enable attendees to better understand the marketplace while benefiting from the continuously evolving Indigo printing platform.

Dscoop user group community continues to grow throughout the world, taking on a life of its own as people continue to hear about the benefits of being involved. It is really quite a unique forum. It's all about printers working with one another – and there's a wider lesson for our traditionally cautious industry. Whether offset or digital users, large printers, SMEs or copy shops, every print professional holds a wealth of knowledge. The Dscoop members seem thrilled to open up and learn from one another.

As they say, a problem shared is a problem halved.  Can’t wait for Dscoop in Singapore!