Chili_publish to launch superfast v6.0 smart templates

Chili_publish will launch version 6.0 of its Chili_publisher Smart Template software before the end of the year, promising turbo-charged speed, and spot colour reproduction from CMYK.

Speaking at the company's annual user community SpicyTalks conference in Berlin this week, which focused on Smart Templates, CEO Kevin Goeminne said that the company was driving forward with its mission to automate the document creation process, saying that typically 24 per cent of a company's marketing budget was spent on manual labour, and the Chili software would take an axe to that through rules-based automation.

He said the company had developed what he called dynamic formulas - the concept similar to those used in Excel - which slashes the creation time for multiple versions of the same graphic layout.

Its chief technical officer Ward De Langhe said a new PDF engine would enable a complex job that previously took 37 minutes to go through the data engine to now take just 33 seconds, or 70 times faster. He also said the file size went from 4GB down to 21MB, and that all this was achieved on a regular server that costs $2 an hour. De Langhe said overall cost reduction was 98 per cent.

Among the innovations is a new GS1 barcode generator for packaging. De Langhe went on to show the audience a host of new functionality, all created to automate the design process.

Chili believes that there is a significant amount of waste in design creation, and says by creating automated production tools it will slash costs from the print price. Its rules based software enables jobs that were previously manual-heavy to be completed in seconds, with no errors.

Goeminne said brand owners faced myriad shape and platform requirements for their marketing collateral, with brochures, posters, flyers, websites, emails and the like – but that the Chili_publish software could auto fit all the elements of a design into appropriate locations on any sized and shaped printed or digital space, saving huge amounts of time and money. De Langhe gave what he said was a typical example of a brand that is using Google Display Network, which requires 14 different sizes, and said there may be 15 different speakers for the promotion he had in mind – which meant more than 200 variants. With its rules-based software, each document was automatically populated.

The SpicyTalks conference took place in Berlin as the city celebrated the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Chili said it wants to tear down walls in production through automation, with Chili_publisher essentially setting out to enable print businesses and brand owners to automate complex tasks via a front end or API, combining data with print for maximum impact and opportunity.

Some 200 printers, designers, developers, and brand owners attended the conference, including Australians Mike Grehan and Lynn White from Life Art, the innovative business looking to personalise coffins through web-to-print design software. Grehan, CEO of LifeArt said, “We are just a few weeks away from launching design-your-own coffin graphics. The Chili_publish software forms an integral part of the LifeArt solution."

Alan Dixon, CEO of Workflowz which supplies Chili in Australia, was also at the event, to which a handful of leading trade press from around the world, incuding Print21, were also invited.

The conference included a presentation from UK printer Precision Marketing, which is using Chili_publish software with both the Labour and Conservative political parties in their current UK election campaigns. Gary Howard from Precision said, “They each get three mailshots to all 27 million households, which they want to target as precisely as possible. Chili Smart Tempates with smart data makes this possible.” He quipped that Chili could pull the plug on the whole UK election, which he said would probably come as a relief to the citizens.

Other presentations came from Airbus, B-Post (the Belgian post service), Philips, and leading German print trade magazine Deutsche Drucker among others.