Eddie Paul, president of E.P. Industries, Inc., is used to producing extraordinary results in a very short amount of time. He and his company specialize in leading edge, high tech design and have engineered systems for the U.S. military as well as for pure entertainment.

A Hollywood industry icon, Eddie has produced vehicles for many famous movies and television series, including Grease, E.T., The Dukes of Hazzard, and The Fast and the Furious. Eddie and his team begin from the ground up, constructing and restyling vehicles to the specifications of the movie and television production companies they serve. When he got the call from Disney to revamp the showcase cars he’d made to promote Pixar’s movie, Cars, Eddie placed a call of his own – to Roland’s headquarters.

Has your shop ever donated part or all of a wrap for a charitable cause? It should, and not only for the reason of doing good. Your shop could also do well by showing off its wrap chops (in addition to its generosity) to the community. And if you’ve just started in your market or have only recently taken on offering wraps, donating a wrap for a charitable cause will get you noticed – by the people supporting the cause itself, by the other sponsors and by the local public. Two companies that did wraps for different causes behind fighting breast cancer are featured here.

Having a business or other college degree does not guarantee any amount of success or sustainability in the wrap business. Nor is there a manual that spells it all out for you when courting brand new projects. This industry is ever-changing, and you have to learn how to invest in and adapt to the latest trends, printers, tools, vinyl film, installation techniques, etc.

Why use decals? The better question is why not when they are such a quick and easy source of revenue for many graphics providers. In fact, there are numerous Roland users who have built their whole business on print and cut stickers and labels for logo branding, vehicles, product promotions and other popular applications.

Delivering the best-in-class features and productivity, Roland DG Corporation has announced the launch of the GR-640/540/420 professional vinyl cutters, the latest additions to its CAMM-1 series.

SGIA president & CEO Ford Bowers met with representatives of Durst North America, EFI, Fujifilm North America, HP, and Inca Digital this month to discuss the need for a space in the industry to present to the packaging community the new and transformative digital printing technologies coming to market. “Just as SGIA served as a key resource and catalyst for the wide-format screen print conversion to digital, it stands ready to do the same with packaging,” says Bowers.

It was perhaps the largest EFI Connect yet. Upwards of 1,500 customers, dealers, and media types gathered at the Wynn Resort in Las Vegas last week to get caught up on the latest in EFI’s rapidly evolving arsenal of hardware and software.

EFI CEO Guy Gecht kicked things off Tuesday afternoon with a keynote called “The Next Big Thing In Technology is Huge...and Scary.” That next big thing is artificial intelligence (AI), which is evolving at a rapid pace—perhaps alarmingly so. From so simple a beginning as Deep Blue, the chess-playing computer that “learned” how to beat chessmaster Gary Kasparov, to Jeopardy!-winning Watson, to self-driving cars, to a robot being interviewed on CNBC, it’s possible we’re being introduced to our future overlords (this book could be required reading). Thanks to advances in machine learning, we are barreling headlong toward what technologists call “the Singularity,” the point at which technology progresses of its own accord faster than humans will be able to adapt to it.