I could spend a week at the World Publishing Expo, but I can't (writes Peter Coleman).

The show runs just three days, and that seems more than enough for most visitors. Many fly out on the third day and activity on the expo floor reflects that, with mixed benefits.

Firstly exhibitors also start to leave and many to start dismantling their stands. But a benefit is that those that remain have finally, time to talk to the media.

And as always there is plenty to talk about. I’ve remarked before that breakthrough sales and new technology developments have an amazing habit of being achieved just as the show is opening. But scratch under the surface in what many are still seeing as a difficult market, and you’ll catch up with the orders which are just about to be placed.

For the Asia-Pacific market, much of the news we can’t yet publish appears to relate to systems implementations, as southeast Asian countries (especially) take advantage of relatively good times to bring their technology up-to-date. In India, there’s a suggestion that not only editorial systems – especially the few, such as the German red.web technology, which can handle multiple languages – but mobile publishing options were on the shopping list.

Live tablet systems – by which I mean those which ‘load up’ automatically from an RSS or XML feed from a content management system – have come of age and become more plentiful. One of the first movers, Agfa launched a new version of its Eversify product just before the show, with extra user and back-end options. Pagesuite’s offering – which I had seen in a fairly clunky implementation for an Archant aviation magazine – now looks a lot more stylish and functional, and French operator Aquafados seems to have all bases covered with a range which goes from low cost self-service to high end offerings.

Some of the issues in tablet publishing were also addressed in a session on responsive design in the ‘solomo’ Media Port, where contributions included Lukas Kircher, founder and owner of editorial design consultant KircherBurkhardt and Brona Kernan of the Irish Times. These and more present an opportunity to create an additional product – and an extra revenue stream – for publishers.

While aisle-hopping, I caught another, with North American publishers sharing experiences on new business models in one of the MediaPort sessions. Native advertising – a term I won’t begin to define here, since few really seem able to – cropped up a lot, and there’s a consensus that while some revenue streams are transient, they are nonetheless $$$s you’d be foolish to ignore.

Elsewhere, on the stand of Swiss control systems specialist ABB, a batonless Steve Kirk was nonetheless conducting: There’s no other way to describe the human interface which operates on the basis of eye and hand movements. First applications may be in ‘dirty hands’ environments such as oil rigs, but Kirk is pleased to have the opportunity of showing the kind of technology which calls for ‘big group’ development funds. The prototype Tobii Eye Tracker also owes part of its functionality to Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect, was demonstrating on the company’s stand during Expo.

Among the ‘heavy metal’ exhibits – and there are no newspaper presses these days – the show was my first opportunity to see the automatic plateloading function in Goss’s Magnum Compact single-width press demonstrated. While the inner working are hidden – much to the frustration of visitors from other press makers – it seems that as always, the simplest ideas are the best, and I left wondering why no-one had thought of this one before.

An idea from small Norwegian daily Avisa Nordland on getting young people involved also gained prominence, winning an editorial award in the World Young Reader Prize. It had invited 60 young people, some only 15, to be ‘special editors’ examining issues such as content, platforms and subscription schemes. As a result it expanded access and changed pricing, with the participants earning low-cost subscriptions.

Ideas generated within the Berlin Messe showground were also plentiful. Among them a ‘hackathon’ delivered apps on a variety of subjects, some of which hadn’t occurred to organisers beforehand. There was also an open media ‘innovation hub’ at another of the MediaPorts, with Lior Kodner, head of digital at Tel Aviv daily Ha'aretz among those with ideas from start-ups on a ‘transforming industry’.

Organisers WAN-Ifra reckon about 8500 people visited the show, a little more than last year’s 7000 and than they may have been expecting. They came from 90 countries and while some were very lightly represented – exhibitors apart, you could count those from Australia on the fingers of two (if not one) hand – what was missing in numbers was made up in quality. Among those I caught up with in the aisles was News Corp Australia’s Curtis Davies, whose business card burdens him with the role of ‘transformation director’.

Not keen that Rupert should read his thoughts first in these pages, he wasn’t sharing much, but would, I think, have found plenty to ponder.

There were apparently 267 exhibitors from 35 countries, and I got to only a fraction of them.

Next year, the World Publishing Expo show heads to Amsterdam. I’m hoping it will be warmer than last time.

Left: Eric Bell with the plateloading device from the Magnum Compact

On our homepage: ABB’s Steve Kirk ‘conducts’