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At a recent Smithers Pira conference I was jolted from my post lunch somnolence by someone describing smartphones as “supplementary packaging”. Had I misheard? I mean how can you wrap cornflakes with an iPhone or bottle coke in a Nexus?!

My wife hates flying; she is convinced the plane will crash. In fact she hates it so much that she refuses to do it anymore, which makes getting to our holiday home near Malaga in Spain quite a journey.

Apparently hindsight is a wonderful asset, but not nearly as useful as foresight. I tend to agree – if I could see into the future I would probably have entered one of the Euro lotteries by now and be enjoying some of the fruits of winning. Instead I was asked to give my views recently to an industry think tank, forecasting the future of digital printing in the 21st century. Where would you start?

We all appreciate the complexities and challenges facing printers and converters. Plus, spending countless hours navigating the vast regions of the Web to gather information isn’t always the best use of your valuable time. If you’ve heard about Nanography^® and want to know more, we understand that you want to hear what your peers have to say. In fact, we encourage it! That’s why we created Landa's pioneering Social Hub – a single destination on the Landa website for accessing and interacting with all of our social media feeds.

A marketing manager for a big brand owner described to me recently that he wanted his products to be shiny and sticky. As he was describing tea bags at the time, I was, to say the least, puzzled until he explained what he meant. He wanted his product to stand out on the supermarket shelf. He wanted it to be the one that caught the customer’s eye when they were browsing the selection on offer. It had to be the most attractively packaged product out of all the choices. Shiny – in other words.

I have always believed that suppliers are people of the utmost importance in a business, at least as important as customers and employees but with an added essential difference.

I recently attended the annual meeting of the Paperboard Packaging Council (PPC) in Dallas, Texas with Sharon Rothschild, Landa’s Product Manager for the folding carton segment.

I cannot claim to be a good cook. Far from it. What little skill I possess is owed entirely to time spent in my youth as a Boy Scout. Today, the ability to produce a meal in a mud oven in a field has become a lot less useful in this microwave age than it was fifty years ago.