Sixteen:Nine - All Digital Signage, Some Snark-logo

Sixteen:Nine - All Digital Signage, Some Snark

Technology Podcasts

This digital signage podcast is the audio extension of Sixteen:Nine, an online publication that's been documenting the growth and filtering the BS of the digital signage industry since 2006.

Location:

Canada

Description:

This digital signage podcast is the audio extension of Sixteen:Nine, an online publication that's been documenting the growth and filtering the BS of the digital signage industry since 2006.

Twitter:

@sixteennine

Language:

English

Contact:

9055921612


Episodes

Neil Chatwood, Omnivex

3/27/2024
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Using data is pretty much integral to just about any ambitious and involved digital signage network being spun up these days, but for a lot of vendors and their customers, it's still a relatively new concept and approach. That's definitely not the case for the Toronto-area CMS software firm Omnivex, which has been around for more than 30 years and has always made data-driven communications central to what it does. More than 20 years ago, the core Omnivex solution included a module called DataPipe. I know, because I was using the thing way back then for a digital ad network I launched ... probably 10 years too early, but that's a story for another time. While a lot of its competitors have developed and marketed platforms that are pretty and loaded with bling, Omnivex has resolutely stuck to its technology guns with software that's quite involved and very powerful. The net result is Omnivex gets involved in a lot of the more complicated jobs in which real-time data, and the context it provides, shapes what shows up on screens. Airports, for example, are a very active vertical. I had a long, detailed chat with Neil Chatwood, a transplanted Brit who runs the global transport file for Omnivex. We could have gone on for hours, as he has a lot of insights about data, security, and programming content for large, very involved environments. Neil, thank you for joining me. For those people who don't know Omnivex, can you just give a quick rundown on the company? Neil Chatwood: Yeah, for sure. So, Omnivex was established back in the dark ages of digital signage, 1991. It’s a privately owned organization, just outside of Toronto, Ontario and Canada. Oh, come on. It's in Toronto. Like, Toronto goes on forever. Neil Chatwood: Yeah, it's right. Pretty much right on the border. Well, it's on the subway line now. They've expanded the subway, so that finally happened. Yeah, it's not like you see countryside on the other side of the parking lot though. Neil Chatwood: Not anymore. In the last 10 years, there's been a Vaughan skyline, as depressing as that may be. But yeah, I've been around a long time in a private family owned organization and it's really grown off the back of our focus on leveraging real time data, integrating with basically any system we could possibly think of. And that pedigree has kept us in the business for over 30 years now. Yeah, I have a history in a network I started more than 20 years ago using Omnivex. So I was familiar with Omnivex products and datapipe and everything. So we were talking before we turned on the recording. I found it amusing that a lot of the software side of the industry has awakened to the idea of data integration and data handling for the last four or five years when it's something you were doing like 25 years ago. Neil Chatwood: Yeah. Back in around 2009-2010 when a lot of the industry was yelling Content is King. Right. Don't say that. Neil Chatwood: I know. You see. I do. Yeah, it's a classic. And our ownership at the time, you know, they like to have fun and they took that and changed it into Context as King and we've really kind of run with that since inception. But I joined the organization in 2010 and data and complexity is where we've always really hung our hat. We're a software vendor but the majority of our revenue comes from licensed sales. But we really do find ourselves in the trenches with our partners and our clients getting in there and providing pseudo consultancy on what data do you have in house? Like, how has it been stored? What methods can we use? And figuring out the solution in parallel with all of the stakeholders, even though at the face of it we're just slinging CMS licenses. So that's our heritage and when I'm when I start talking to someone who's interested in looking at the market or you get a lead or you're talking to someone at a trade show, my advice is always to take a look at...

Duration:00:44:17

Joe Occhipinti, ANC

3/20/2024
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT The people behind college and pro sports have increasingly focused on making events multimedia experiences that start well before fans put their bums in seats, and we're now starting to see hints of that in the way public spaces are programmed. Screens are sync'd, and content is carefully timed and triggered based on data and all kinds of variables. While most integrators and solutions providers are focused on executing on ideas and needs, the New York company ANC has for years being delivering services and software for what it calls branded entertainment. The work started with collegiate and professional sports, but more recently the company has branched into areas like retail and mass transportation - including the multi-venue, many screens experience that stretches between the Fulton Center in Lower Manhattan and underground to the World Trade Center complex. I had a great chat with Joe Occhipinti, ANC's Chief Operating Officer. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT David: Hey Joe, thank you for joining me. I've chatted with ANC in the past with Mark Stross but that's going back like six years or something like that. I'm curious, first of all, what your company does and maybe we could get into a little bit about the background of basically buying the company back from prior owners that started as a family company and now it's going back as a family-driven company, right? Joe Occhipinti: Yes. So, Mark Stross, yeah, he's obviously still our CTO. So I'm sure you two had a fun-filled conversation. But yeah, a lot has changed in those five or six years that was probably just after, just before, Learfield had purchased ANC from our initial founder, Jerry Cifarelli Sr. who was kind of a pioneer in the signage and TV visible advertisement world. When he started ANC in the late nineties, it evolved the business into a large format, technology integrator for sports and other venues. So when Learfield took over, they obviously wanted to start integrating some of our technologies into all of their properties and universities which was great. Joe Occhipinti: Yes. So, Mark Stross, yeah, he's obviously still our CTO. So I'm sure you two had a fun-filled conversation. But yeah, a lot has changed in those five or six years that was probably just after, just before, Learfield had purchased ANC from our initial founder, Jerry Cifarelli Sr. who was kind of a pioneer in the signage and TV visible advertisement world. When he started ANC in the late nineties, it evolved the business into a large format, technology integrator for sports and other venues. So when Learfield took over, they obviously wanted to start integrating some of our technologies into all of their properties and universities which was great. It was a good five or six year run we had with them. And I was with the ANC for a lot of those years. I started back in 2012. So I saw the end of Jerry's initial ownership and then into the Learfield, and then I kind of parted ways with ANC in early 2022 and found my way into a company called C10 with Jerry's son, Jerry Cifarelli Jr. and shortly into 2022, Learfield reached out to us and was interested about looking into a potential acquisition and I think Learfield's business has changed a lot, right? Joe Occhipinti: Yes. So, Mark Stross, yeah, he's obviously still our CTO. So I'm sure you two had a fun-filled conversation. But yeah, a lot has changed in those five or six years that was probably just after, just before, Learfield had purchased ANC from our initial founder, Jerry Cifarelli Sr. who was kind of a pioneer in the signage and TV visible advertisement world. When he started ANC in the late nineties, it evolved the business into a large format, technology integrator for sports and other venues. So when Learfield took over, they obviously wanted to start integrating some of our technologies into all of their properties and...

Duration:00:37:01

Rowan Brunger, Amino

3/13/2024
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Set top boxes have long been looked at, theoretically at least, as single-purpose devices that would do nicely as digital signage media players, but it's fair to say a lot of software company developer and support teams have painful memories of trying to use consumer devices from China as Android-based players. They weren't reliable in terms of performance, or even in terms of what showed up from shipment to shipment. So what if a company that was expressly in the business of commercial-grade set top boxes for the pay TV and cable markets got into digital signage? That's the deal with a UK company called Amino, which now has two lines of business - pay TV and pro AV applications like digital signage. These are devices that are engineered to last for five or six years, and in a lot of cases, they are happily ticking away for a decade and longer. High reliability and remote management are inherent in the product design, so meeting that common pro AV demand was largely automatic. I had a good chat with Rowan Brunger, Amino's UK-based Sales Director, about the hardware, how the company goes to market, and what's involved if software companies and solutions providers want to add Amino devices as a hardware option. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT David: Rowan, thank you for joining me. I bumped into you last year and basically said, what do you guys do? Cause I'd never heard of you and we'd intended to do a podcast and finally got around to it. So for those people who don't know the company, what are you all about? Rowan Brunger: Thanks, David. Thanks for having me on. So yeah, great to be here. We are a company called Amino and we've been around for about 25 years. So we have two sides to our business. Primarily, we've been a set top box manufacturer within the pay TV world and in the last few years, we've made a move to expand our enterprise TV and digital signage side of the business which is rapidly growing some momentum in terms of those 25 years we've been around, we've probably got 25 million devices in circulation and we've got quite a compelling device management system that we've tweaked from our experience in the pay TV world brought over to the pro AV arena for managing the states of media devices. David: So when you say pay TV, you basically in the context of what North Americans would understand that basically means cable TV. Rowan Brunger: Yeah, cable TV. So tier one, tier two, satellite providers where we would typically either have an Amino box or we'd OEM a box for the actual operator. So we're used to selling in big numbers to operators and what really differentiated us in that market which we're using in this one is the remote device management. So as you can imagine, if we're sending hundreds of thousands of boxes out, we want it to be relatively zero touch from the consumer's environment. We want them to plug the cables in and we do the rest remotely. So that's really what spawn orchestrate products, which is our device management platform that we've tweaked and made more applicable to the pro IV market to manage our media players. David: When you opened up the digital signage/enterprise TV market, was that based on inbound requests, Hey, we would really like to use a set top box. Do you support this market or there may be multiple answers but I'm curious if you kind of looked at where linear TV or cable TV was going, given streaming and the way that was bubbling up and realized, okay, we needed to, we need to open up a new market. Rowan Brunger: I guess a combination of the various different scenarios you've given there. I mean, it's key to say we've always had a foot within the digital signage and enterprise video world. There's amino products that have been out there for sort of 10 years plus. I guess one of the main alliances partners we had in the past was Triple Play. So we manufactured a...

Duration:00:36:25

Sebastien Boulanger, DVOX

3/6/2024
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT There are lots of reasons why digital signage and digital out of home ad networks don't have audio - the biggest reason being that the majority of people (especially staff who are in that environment all day) don't want to hear messages over and over. Many speakers have been stabbed with forks or seen their audio cables snipped by workers who could not take it day after day. But there also cases in which audio would be welcomed, and very useful. There are different technologies out there that can enhance and complement the messaging on screens, and headset devices that can be borrowed or rented, so that audio can be added to things like museums and attractions or live sports events. The challenge is that the technology used might be old and limited, or the set-up requires maintaining, cleaning, charging and keeping track of a lot of hardware. A Montreal company called DVOX is taking a different approach - making audio streams from live events and from screens available over local area networks and WiFi, so that anyone with a smartphone and headphones of some kind can launch a simple web app and start listening. The primary markets, I think, are with big sporting events and conferences, but it's also the sort of thing that has applications for digital signage and digital out of home. I spoke with DVOX president Sebastien Boulanger. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Sebastien, thank you for joining me. I know very little about DVOX. Could you give me a rundown of what the company is? Sebastien Boulanger: DVOX is a fast-growing startup at the moment that is offering a new generation technology for live audio streaming purposes in several domains. How does it work? Sebastien Boulanger: Easy enough. DVOX is taking and acquiring any analog audio source, that might be coming from a live microphone, sound desk, broadcasting trailer, audio extractor devices, or whatever you please. We're acquiring analog audio input and then converting it to digital to stream it directly over the local area network, meaning that guests or visitors have to be connected to the right WiFi to be granted access to the audio stream. We're doing so that the stream goes out through a webpage, so the end user doesn't have to install any mobile apps or whatever. It's only a web browser page, basically. So the idea is you're seeing stuff on a screen at whatever venue you're in, whether it's a sports bar or a sports stadium or some other place, you can basically hear the audio without, the having to crank the speakers to 11 for, that to happen? Sebastien Boulanger: Yeah, that is correct. Let me give you a couple of examples here that might be helpful here. Let's say you are in a sports bar, as you were just mentioning, and you have plenty of screens in front of you. So, which of those screens will be on the speaker boxes? So basically you can have ambiance, music, whatever for all the other guests, but if you feel like you want to hear a football match, you simply have to have the audio of that screen. So with DVOX what you can do is have all the different audio feeds running inside of the system And then by being connected to the right WiFi, you will be able to choose which audio feed you want to hear, so basically, through a regular webpage,, as simple as browsing, you have access to all of the audio feed that the venue is offering in live, in real-time. You only need a QR code to get onto the event page, and if you're on the right WiFi, there you go; you have all the feeds. You're using a smartphone and a web app to get this, as opposed to asking people to download our special app and go through a bunch of hoops? Sebastien Boulanger: Yeah, that is correct. And that's why we're having a lot of pull these days in the sports industries, in the congress center industries as well, educational because any audio source can be streamed through WiFi....

Duration:00:39:48

Jeff Gunderman, DOOH Academy

2/28/2024
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT I'm not really joking when I write about needing to find my decoder ring if I am going to write something about an announcement from a digital out of home ad tech company. There are exceptions, of course, but more often than not, I read this stuff and I just go cross-eyed. So I was pleased to learn of a new education-focused initiative called DOOH Academy, which exists to raise the level of understanding of how things work for operators, end-users and the people who make ad-buying and planning decisions. I was also pleased to learn - though I pretty much knew - that I'm not the only one confused as hell by how technology like programmatic is marketed. The Academy is the smiling, weeks-old baby of ad industry veteran Jeff Gunderman, who saw a need to get quality, vendor-neutral educational material out there that helps people get up a steep and slippery learning curve. He has an interesting model - in that the academy is subsidized by companies in this business who also understand everyone benefits from better awareness and deeper knowledge. We had a really good chat about the roots of the online academy, how it works, and also how the industry has responded. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Jeff, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown on what DOOH Academy is all about? Jeff Gunderman: Yes, the DOOH Academy is the Digital Out of Home Academy, and it is an education initiative I started that is designed to help people understand all of the advances going on in digital and programmatic media for the out-of-home media industry. I had been a media operator for about 15 years running a company called Eye Corp Media, which was an Australian-based media company, we did both static and digital signage around the country and places like shopping malls, bars, restaurants, and cinema lobbies, and when I sold that business, I essentially was talking with a number of individuals in the industry and recognized that there was a real gap in education and understanding around digital and place-based media, and at the same time, when I sold my company, I started to have some requests from media companies and ad tech firms for consulting work and that clarified for me, really the gap that existed in our industry as we are moving to more of a digital and programmatic world, people are very confused, and so after talking with a number of people in the industry, I felt that we really needed a single point of education to help people understand digital place-based media. I get asked quite a bit if I'm doing any consulting, I don't really do much these days, but when I get asked specifically about doing consulting around digital out-of-home networks, I just say, I really can't help you because I don't fully understand what's going on, I don't understand the nomenclature, everybody seems to market themselves a little bit differently, even if they're doing the same damn thing. It's just overwhelmingly complicated to me, so I do one of these things with my hands up beside me going, I don't even want to touch that. Jeff Gunderman: You know what? It's much simpler than it seems, but because it's such a massive change from the way we used to plan media with spreadsheets we used to sell a location, or a billboard on the side of a street corner, You used to sell location and audience. Jeff Gunderman: Location and audience, and now, really what we're selling is I'll use the term audience again, but audience and impressions. So it used to be more boards and ad loops and you'd sell a flip on a board, and nowadays people, especially advertisers, and marketers are really looking to maximize their reach of a very particular audience and the beautiful part about it is that data companies have come in and enabled out-of-home media operators to sell their media based on the audience that's in front of that media, they've enabled the ability to...

Duration:00:38:41

Thibaut Duverneix, Gentilhomme

2/13/2024
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT When Terminal C was opened at Orlando's sprawling main airport, I was intrigued from a distance by the experiential digital features integrated into the new space. They got my attention because they were genuinely interesting, but also because they were put together by a company completely unfamiliar to me - Gentilhomme, from Montreal. In the time since that project went live, and won numerous awards, Gentilhomme (which is French for Gentleman) has also delivered experiential work for Nashville's airport. And the team is in the middle of a job for Houston's airport, and another airport on the US east coast that's NDA'd for now. I've been trying to organize a podcast chat with founder Thibaut Duverneix for a while now, and we finally got it together recently. We spoke about signature projects, and the ideation and design process. But we also get into the background of the company, which has roots in things like rock band tours, and has some direct ties to a couple of very well-known Montreal companies that are also all about experience - Cirque du Soleil and Moment Factory. NOTE - This interview was recorded before ISE, where the company picked up an armload of trophies at the global Digital Signage Awards. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Thibaut, thank you for joining me. You describe Gentilhomme as an Earth-based multimedia studio. What does that encompass? Because you guys are into a whole bunch of things. Thibaut Duverneix: Hey David, It's a really good question. The idea is that the studio was built around my own practice as an artist and as a multimedia director at first, and I come from fine arts and computer science, so I like to do all things that are very different and, it's been very hard to describe what the studio does because the studio was built using that philosophy, and most of the time people would ask you, don't you want to specialize in anything, like video content and I was like, no, I don't, we like to do a lot of different things and they go from interactive sculpture or inflatables to building placemaking for airports and content for rock shows. So I guess the best description was, around that, we want to create experiences, and the medium doesn't really matter. So when people come into the office, they never quite know what they're coming into, right? Thibaut Duverneix: Pretty much, but luckily, the casting at the studio is very broad, and everybody's like a Swiss Army knife. How and why did it get started? Thibaut Duverneix: This is my second studio. I had another one before, and we were doing a lot of the first experiential work on the web in Flash at the time. I had forgotten about Flash, for a good reason. Thibaut Duverneix: Yeah, exactly. But I was also doing music videos and rock shows, and eventually, I wanted to focus more on directing and doing things in real life with people. So I went my own way, and I built Gentilhomme more like my holding company in a way for what I was doing, and one-day Cirque du Soleil called me, and they had this show in France they wanted to do it for a theme park, which was a multimedia show while heavily relying on multimedia and I thought I was just going to direct it. but then they were like, no, we have five weeks, and we need turnkey. Can you also just make it happen? So I built a pop-up studio to do that, and then they said, Hey, do you want to do our next big top tour? And I said, yeah, and then I had a choice of do I keep doing my director work or do I build a studio with the people that I want, and do it the way I want it because it's never a one-man show, you need a team to do that, and that's what I did because I wanted to capitalize on my knowledge. And Cirque is in Montreal as you are. Thibaut Duverneix: Exactly. We're all children of Cirque du Soleil in Montreal. Yeah. I was going to ask about that later, but we might as well get into...

Duration:00:34:32

Chris Johns, PassageWay

1/17/2024
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT The UK startup PassageWay operates with the interesting mission of using technology that nudges people to make well-informed and more sustainable decisions about how they get from A to B. That's done by thinking through and developing the presentation layer for Real-Time Passenger Information content that's then run on digital signs, most notably for the bus systems around the city of London. PassageWay's business model is - in simple terms - taking the rich, real-time data available for routes and stops and making it presentable and digestible for transport authorities, like Transport For London, which pays the start-up to do so. The logical notion is that the more that good, real-time information is made available to people, the more the transport services will be used. While London Underground stations are well-equipped with information and the services are pretty predictable, there's not as much available to the millions who use less-predictable surface transport services like the iconic double-decker red buses. I had a good chat about all this recently with PassageWay co-founder Chris Johns. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Chris, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what PassageWay is all about? Chris Johns: Thanks so much for inviting us to your podcast today. PassageWay is all about generating demand for public transport by leveraging real-time information. We do this by putting it onto digital signs that are displayed on host-supplied screens and typically these screens only require a modern browser to display the digital sign. You made a point of saying the host supplied. There's been a history through the years of companies who've done things like put in the infrastructure, the screens, and so on and then run content on them with the idea that content would be Interrupted so to speak by advertising. You're not going down that path. Chris Johns: No, we're not. Typically those sorts of plays are similar to JC Decaux or Clear Channel who have long had this relationship with transport authorities whereby they will fund the deployment of bus shelters in return for an ad revenue share. We supply transport for London with digital signs that are displayed at bus shelters but also within their other infrastructure like bus stations. But really we're more citywide about putting digital signs into places such as schools, hospitals, workplaces, offices, and such in order to generate demand from the sort of non-traditional locations and encouraging the people within those locations to consider public transport. So this doesn't sound like a traditional business, you said, this is about generating demand to use public transport services and so on versus, more traditionally, this is about making money somehow or other. Chris Johns: Yeah. I think that's the difference, a lot of those traditional plays actually put the real-time information secondary to their primary objective which is to earn revenue from the display of ads. And to my mind, that means a poor customer experience and the poor customer experience means reduced demand. If you think about traditional bus shelters, they are actually incredibly complex for many people trying to navigate the public transport information. If you're coming to London, for example, trying to find out which is the right bus? Is it going to go to your preferred stop? How long is it going to take? Is there any disruption information? If you don't have it, it will make you want to go and choose a different mode of transport. So, you probably take a taxi or you may end up using your own car, for example. Actually what we're trying to do is to show people that public transport is really easy to use. It's really accessible. It can get you from A to B pretty fast. And if you're aware of the onward travel information from the stop you're trying to get to, then actually, you can make...

Duration:00:34:57

Eric Henry, Carousel Digital Signage

1/10/2024
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT A LOT of digital signage software companies have identified education as a key vertical market, but very few have the history, experience and platform for education like Carousel Digital Signage, which got into the business in 1997 because of an ask from a public school system. I had a really good chat, one that flew by, with Eric Henry, the president of Carousel, which is the digital signage side of a larger Minneapolis company called Tightrope Media Systems. The Tightrope side of the business focuses on broadcast. In our chat, Eric and I get into the opportunities and challenges of working with K-12 schools, what typically goes in, and the types of content that help create a sense of community. He has some interesting thoughts about taking marketer's approach to messaging in schools, and getting beyond the predictable. We also touch towards the end on the higher ed market, which has some core similarities in terms of need, but is also quite different. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Eric, thank you for joining me. Happy New Year. Eric Henry: Happy New Year. I've done a podcast in the past with your colleague, JJ, but it's been a few years. For those who don't know much about Carousel, can you give me the background? I know that you grew out of tightrope media systems. Some people will know that, but others won't. You've been around since 1997, maybe not you personally but the company. Eric Henry: Yeah, correct. Personally, I haven't been at the company since 97, but I've certainly been around since 1997. But yeah, Carousel started out as Tightrope Media Systems, actually still a division of Tightrope Media Systems. So there are two divisions of the company, Carousel, which is the digital signage group and then Cablecast, which is actually our community television broadcast, part of the company and so I actually run the Carousel business. We did start in 97. 1996-97, It's debatable in terms of paperwork and those types of things, but after a long time, it actually came out of the education space. So, our first customer was Wayzata Public Schools in Minnesota for Carousel some 26 years ago, and we've been in that space for quite a long time. Obviously signage lends to many other vertical markets, so we are certainly in other verticals but our founder story is rooted in the education space And going way back to the late nineties, what was a school district looking for at that point? And is it pretty much what they're looking for today? Eric Henry: Quite a bit different today. So back in the late nineties, there were certainly much more tube televisions and we could update lunch menus and those types of things and that was really very early days of putting content on screens that wasn't broadcast. So that was really the early days where schools were looking for a solution that wasn't really hard because there were only a couple of things that could actually put content on screens but they were fairly prohibitive because a lot of them were designed for much more retail, graphic intensive folks and not necessarily teachers. Right. Yeah. I remember back to the mid to late nineties, there were early-stage quasi digital out of home companies that were in the business of going to school districts and schools in general and saying, Hey, we'll put a TV in the classrooms of your school and you can run school messaging on there. But by the way, there's going to be advertising there too, to pay for the technology. That's a model that didn't work. Eric Henry: No, it did not. And I think we've really been trying to find our way as an industry, for quite a long time. If you look at the early days, I remember being at a trade show and there were two higher eds from the same state. And I asked them why they wanted to do a digital signage project and the answer was basically because the other one was going to do it. So, that's...

Duration:00:35:29

Meghan Athavale, LUMO Interactive

1/3/2024
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Interactive floor projections and video walls have been around for well more than a decade now, but there hasn't really been widespread adoption for a bunch of reasons - like cost, complication and the simple reality that a lot of what's been shown to date hasn't had much of a point. A Canadian company, Lumo Interactive, is in a nice position to change all of that. The hardware is simple, the software is affordable and scalable, and the solution comes with some 300 templated content apps that help users tune the visual experience to the needs of the venue and audience. Instead of visual eye candy, these apps are things like fun, engaging games. The straightforward pitch for the product, LUMOplay, is that the software can make any digital display interactive. The top-end for the software side of the solution is $74 US a month, so it is very affordable. And the developers have put years of work into ensuring the set-ups are hyper-stable and can be managed remotely. We've all walked through flagship retail spaces and seen one-off experiential set-ups that were hung up or sitting unused because they were more about short term bling than ongoing usage. The other interesting aspect of LUMOplay is that the main intended use-case is classrooms, with these interactive pieces used as a way to engage kids in schools, particularly kids who have sensory issues, autism or ADHD. I had a great chat right before Christmas with Founder and CEO Meghan Athavale. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Meghan, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what LUMO does, and is LUMOplay the product and LUMO Interactive the company? Meghan Athavale: Yes, LUMO Interactive is the company, LUMOplay is the product, and what we do is we make it easy to scale large-scale interactive digital experiences. These are experiences on digital displays that react either through motion, touch, or gesture. Okay, this would be everything from something on a video wall to something on the floor, and a lot of digital signage people, if they've been around this space for a good long time, they may recall through the years seeing “activations” where there's a floor projection. I remember there was a company called Reactrix back in the mid-2000s that was doing this sort of thing. So it's like that, but I'm sure a lot more advanced and different, just because of the years and technology. Meghan Athavale: Yeah, it's pretty much exactly like that; where it comes from the days of Reactrix and the early days of companies like GestureTek and Eyeclick is that we've moved more towards a software-only platform. When this technology first hit the scene, you needed to have special hardware. You couldn't just go down to Best Buy and buy a 3D camera. Now that the hardware is more ubiquitous and more affordable, it's possible to have a hardware-agnostic, software-only solution, and that's what we are. So this kind of, to borrow a phrase, democratizes this whole thing in that in the old days, it would have been incredibly expensive and complicated to do, and now it's not, right? Meghan Athavale: That's right, yeah. I think we also just have multiple decades of information about what people are using this technology for so we're able to templatize a lot of the experiences so that companies don't need to have development teams in order to make some of these simpler interactions, they can just do an asset swap. It's the natural progression of a lot of these things where websites used to be hand-coded and then we went into WYSIWYG and then we went into systems like Wix and Squarespace. We're like the Wix or Squarespace of interactive digital displays. So if I want to do an interactive digital display, it's like me using WordPress and buying a theme? Meghan Athavale: Yeah, to a certain extent, exactly. So you guys have done all the heavy lifting, so to speak, in terms of the backend...

Duration:00:39:08

Jason Lu And Grace Kuo, Cecoceco

12/14/2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT I have written and blabbered away about how LED technology is maturing to a level that it is becoming a design consideration for architects and the people who create the look and feel of built spaces. But that thinking always assumed that clever creative could make the black surface of a big video wall, loaded with the right content, take on the look of its surroundings. Now a spin-out from a company with deep roots in LED display tech has gone the next step, by coming up with LED display tiles that look like wall finishes. Imagine a building lobby wall that, in its off state, looks like stone or tile or decorative wood, but lights up - with animations or messaging that appears out of that decorative surface. That's the pitch for a new company called CECOCECO, which is a subsidiary of Chinese LED giant Unilumin. The company was founded by Jason Lu, who years earlier founded ROE, which is widely considered top of the heap for rental LED displays used by touring acts. Lu was getting bored with that business and wanted to innovate again. So with his wife Grace Kuo, they've come up with and are now marketing something called ArtMorph. We get into a good discussion here about the origins of the product, how it works, and who is interested. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Jason and Grace, thank you for joining me. First of all, can you tell me what Cecoceco is all about? Jason Lu: I'm very happy to share the story about Cecoceco with you. I think, 16 years ago, I founded a company named ROE, and this company develops and manufactures LED displays, so we have 16 years of experience in that industry. To be honest, after 16 years, I got a little bit bored with that traditional business, and I wanted to do something different, but I didn't know what kind of product I could develop. So, one day, I found out that the traditional LED is always a black cabinet. It's difficult to put it in an indoor environment. So I hope we can do something new and put a traditional cabinet with some new masks together to 100 percent match. Grace Kuo: So the story is, one day, Jason came into a hotel and he suddenly said, “Oh, that LED looks so ugly. Why do these beautiful hotels have this ugly black LED? It's not really part of this hotel. You can really tell this is not a part of the hotel.” So he thought, why can't we build these kinds of things that have the lighting or video source but you won't see that ugly? You can take it as part of these decorations. You can make it as part of these buildings, which is how the idea came out. He thinks, oh, I should create some innovation, stuff which can make this environment look more material and beautiful and not only for the hotels, but also for restaurants, and also for libraries, every place should have those kinds of stuff, instead of the ugly black LED for atmosphere. So, for context, just so people understand, ROE is very highly regarded as the best rental temporary LED displays on the market, and your company was acquired by Unilumin, correct? Grace Kuo: Yes. Were you still with the company until recently? Grace Kuo: Jason's still with the company because you know the story is like he said two years earlier, when he felt bored with this traditional business, he felt oh I should stop it. I should get out of this business and continue my passion for innovation so he left for two years, but at the end of last year, he came back and continued his leadership at ROE and then he also brought back the Cecoceco team to ROE Visual. So, right now, Cecoceco is a subsidiary company of ROE Visual as well. So ultimately you're owned by Unilumin? Grace Kuo: Yes. So we'll make the assumption then that the underlying LED infrastructure technology is Unilumin? Grace Kuo: We are very independent. We develop everything and do everything by ourselves, even the manufacturing, so they're basically only...

Duration:00:29:16

David Thomas, BudSense

12/8/2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT When cannabis started being legalized in US states like Colorado, and more recently across Canada, it struck me that it was a very interesting new vertical for digital signage companies to chase - because it was a greenfields industry that had retail environments offering up products wholly unfamiliar to a lot of the people walking in the door. It's grown pretty clear, though, that while there may indeed be big long-term opportunity, cannabis retailing is also a very complicated industry - with rules and regulations changing by jurisdiction, a whole bunch of vendors and SKUs, and widely variable supply chains. While there might be a common perception that getting the OK to sell cannabis is a license to print money, a lot of operators are struggling financially, and both retailers and the tech ecosystem underpinning cannabis are coming in and dropping out all the time. A Canadian company called BudSense has a particularly interesting story to tell. The company, based in Regina, Saskatchewan, started out as a retailer, but found its way into technology to fill the gaps in what they needed to effectively manage stores and communicate to customers. Now, software is the main business, and BudSense has a SaaS software product that is all about managing menus and other screens around dispensaries, and is very specifically tuned to cannabis retailing - as opposed to general digital signage software that could also drive cannabis store menus. Canada has been the main focus to date, but co-founder David Thomas says BudSense has business in the US, and plans to grow that. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT David, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me a little bit about BudSense? David Thomas: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Dave. BudSense is a menu merchandising company in the cannabis industry. It solves the problem for our retailers of menu management. And are you focused just on menus or are you doing in-store promotion, all kinds of other things within these dispensaries? David Thomas: Yeah, we do some in-store promotion tool sets as well, pretty much anything that involves merchandising is the solution that we want to solve. Your company's in Saskatchewan, right? David Thomas: Yes, we're based out of Regina, Saskatchewan, where we got our start in dispensary operation. So when you say dispensary operations, you mean you're actually running a dispensary? David Thomas: We were, and we still are. I partnered with my brother, John, around legalization in Canada. We started by running four stores in Saskatchewan. We've since sold those stores and moved on to other retail footprints but that's when we started developing the software that is now BudSense. What set you down that path? Because being a retailer is very different from being a software company? David Thomas: Absolutely. So I have a background in engineering. My brother has a background in pharmacy. We actually started our business partnership before cannabis in real estate and we have an entrepreneurial spirit. We were always looking for opportunities and when cannabis was announced for legalization, we saw it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and we wanted to participate so that was the catalyst that pushed us into the cannabis space. We went into retail because of our real estate and pharmacy background. I have a lot of experience running teams and building systems. So we just put our skill set to use in a brand new industry. So did you write your own software to run your store and that's what got you down the path or was it the absence of good software to do what you needed? David Thomas: It was both. We solved whatever problem was directly in front of us. So it wasn't like we wanted to solve digital menus. It was more of a necessity and then we had the skillset to do it in that way. So when we started, we had four stores to run and that's very atypical...

Duration:00:36:51

Sebastian Kryh, Dise

11/28/2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Dise is an acronym for Digital In Store Experience, and that nicely sums up what the Swedish software firm Dise is all about. Around for 20 years now, the company is heavily focused on a retail-centric communications platform sold through solutions providers and other partners in its channel. Now everybody and their sister identifies retail as a main target vertical solution for their platform, but most software options are designed to serve a wide variety of interests that might include everything from factories and airports to hospitals and schools. Dise says it's all about retail. I had a good chat with CEO Sebastian Kryh about what makes his company's product offer distinct, and how Dise defines retail experience. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Sebastian, thank you very much for joining me. Can you give me a rundown of your company? Sebastian Kryh: Sure thing. Thank you for having me, Dave. So Dise (Digital in-store experience) is a Swedish company that was founded back in 2003. So we've been at it for a while. For digital signage, we like to distinguish that by saying in-store experience or digital in-store experience, right? Because it's so much more than just a digital poster it's sold purely through a network of selected partners with the goal of connecting the online and physical world to the physical space by improving the customer experience. With the mission to build a user experience to love with intuitive and easy software as a tool. So would you describe Dise as a software company or more of a solutions company that has software? Sebastian Kryh: Interesting distinction there, I would describe it as a software company where we build on a product company. So, we build the platform or the suite, which has three parts, CMS being the shining star in the playout. We work with partners to create their experiences their offers, and opportunities to work with their brands and their customers. Okay. So, if you say you have a suite, what else is in the suite? Sebastian Kryh: There’s the CMS. It's a cloud-based and intuitive CMS. We have a design tool to build dynamic content and templates in general, used in the CMS and then we have the software that runs on the media players. Both external ones like Windows, Linux, and Brightside and SOCs like the big ones, Samsung and LG. So when you're working with largely retail customers and you start an engagement with them. What does your company take on, and what's taken on by partners? Sebastian Kryh: So what we do is that we only work with partners. So, from time to time, of course, we interact with the brands and do that. The perfect Dise partner is a full-service partner that takes care of all the pieces in the offering to the brands. Everything from creating the content to the consultancy of creating the concepts, installation support for all the partners. And what we supply is the in store experience platform and the support to the partners.. So, it would be a bit like, I know, I understand it's very different, but Broadside is they're UX, Their everything is all focused around digital out-of-home advertising. That's what they're there for, versus probably, the high 90s percentile of CMS software companies are general offers that have some specialty aspects to them, but they're pretty broadly focused. It sounds like you're saying that Dise is very much retail UX, designed for retail that's where you're going to shine. Sebastian Kryh: That's where we're going to shine. Exactly, and that decision was made quite a number of years back where it wasn't more of a general feel to it. You could do basically everything you still can, but the main focus would be retail, and how we interact with the retail needs of campaign management and structuring of all the stores and the remote management you would need for that. So, we feel that we are the ones who are focusing...

Duration:00:36:22

Dave Stewart, Design Huddle

11/14/2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Everybody who is active and experienced in the digital signage space knows the big evergreen challenge for solutions providers and end-users is content production - keeping programming on screens fresh and relevant, but also attractive. A lot of companies in the ecosystem - and not just the software guys - have some degree of template libraries and finished content that can be updated or pushed straight to screens. That's a piece of the solution. But there's also a demand for tools that make it easy and efficient to produce good-looking material for screens. In looking over the exhibitor list for the upcoming DSE trade show, I came across Design Huddle, and wondered, "Who is that and what do they do?" It's a small West Coast US startup that has B2B graphic design software that allows brands, agencies, and other platforms to create what it describes as lockable digital, video, print, and presentation templates for their users. There are some similarities to solutions like Canva, but also a lot of distinctions. The one that would particularly interest a lot of tech companies in this industry is the ability to fully integrate and white label the Design Huddle toolset inside something like a CMS. I haD a great chat with CEO and co-founder Dave Stewart, who is based (I'm jealous) in Huntington Beach, California. Yeah, there's LA traffic, but it's lovely by the water ... Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Dave, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what the Design Huddle is all about? Because it's unfamiliar to me. Dave Stewart: Yeah, absolutely. Ultimately, we are an enterprise focused on software as a service platform that focuses on templating and content creation in an easy and accessible way. We're definitely API-first, so we have a big focus on platform integrations where our customers are programmatically creating content, but then we're also really focused on end-user experience so people who are actually designing, whether that's static content or motion content in a browser, are able to really easily fill in pieces of a video template or create content really for any purpose. What kind of content would they be creating in the context of digital signage, which is obviously what I'm interested in? Dave Stewart: Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, we were actually really surprised. We're relatively new to digital signage, and within the last year, we had to get up to speed ultimately because a couple of players in this industry came to us and really expressed, “Hey, content is a big issue for us, right? We can sell these really expensive screens and they're great, but our customers are just really struggling with what are we going to put on them and how's that going to look good, right? We can have a great-looking screen without good-looking content, so there's a problem.” So, I've been educating ourselves on this very recently, and it's really a combination of things like static content where it's like, I'm just displaying basic information that might be somewhat real-time or just informational, then also, motion content for things like, imagine the signs that are up on a football stadium or in a basketball gym, where you want to show basic animated content, that's talking about whatever the context is for that sport or things like that. So it's been a little bit of everything, but imagine anything that can be shown on a sign, someone's creating that somewhere, right? Right. Is the core idea that the end user, the operator would be selecting from a template library or are they creating stuff from scratch or how does it work? Dave Stewart: Yeah, absolutely. We are actually just the software. We're not actually playing in the content game ourselves. We just make it really easy to create content on our platform, and generally, that's going to mean importing from existing design files and animation files that you've created...

Duration:00:37:49

Jon Niermann, Loop TV

10/30/2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Bars and restaurants have long been a targeted venue for digital OOH media start-ups, the attraction being scale, dwell time and lots of products and services that could be put in front of people sitting around having a drink or three. But there's been a lot of roadkill through the years, because selling in to these kinds of venues was time-consuming and hard, the cost of installs was substantial, and most of the operators didn't want to pay for anything. Much of that has changed, except for the evergreen fact that venue operators are highly attracted to free, with benefits. A couple of ambitious start-ups have emerged in recent years chasing the space, and arguably the most aggressive has been the LA firm Loop Media, which markets a service called Loop TV. The selling proposition is very straightforward and familiar - qualified venues get a free media player and free video and music content. What's different from the past is Loop's service is all built around streaming, and uses the connectivity and TVs already in a venue. So the capital cost to Loop is just an Android set-top box, and that gets put in a box or envelope and sent to the venue - which then plugs it in, connects to the Internet and uses an activation code to get things rolling. Minimal hardware costs and zero labor. The company is now north of 71,000 screens, with venues in all 50 US states. And it's now expanding beyond the U.S. I had a great chat with CEO and founder Jon Niermann, talking about the company, how ads are sold, what content resonates, and how he found his way from high-level executive jobs with Disney and Electronic Arts into connected TVs in places like bars, health clubs and small retail. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT John, thank you for joining me. Can you give me the rundown of what Loop TV is all about? Jon Niermann: Sure Dave, you bet. We provide streaming TV for businesses. It's free, ad-supported or you could do a subscription if you like, but a majority of the businesses are free ad-supported. Think about what you do at home as a consumer using Roku or perhaps Firestick and then do streaming on that. The difference is you're watching TV series and movies primarily. In public venues, like we support, it's premium short-form content, Think of music videos. We're the largest provider of music videos, for example, across the nation. So very contextualized, customizable type of content. What's the business model? Jon Niermann: So we provide it for free, it's ad-supported. Especially coming out of the pandemic, a lot of these public venues were looking for ways to cut costs. So what we've done is we've taken the cost of what you might have to provide for cable and satellite, for digital signage if you're doing menu boards for licensing if you're doing it correctly and we've taken that all away and put it into the loop player. If you don't mind showing ads, which a lot of public venues don't, because they're already doing that anyway, you could get this content for free. Our model then, is the ads that we get for the content that we work with various ad supply partners, or if it's a subscription, then we have a set price per month if you don't want ads to change the vibe of your venue. I'm guessing a hell of a lot of people are willing to have ads if they don't have to expend the operating expenses on the service. Jon Niermann: You guessed right, it’s over 90%. That's typically the way the model goes and people are more than happy to have that experience because like I said, you're out there anyway, you're partially distracted at a bar and restaurants or the doctor's office, or you're just captive. So they don't really mind it as much as they do at home ironically. What's the footprint that you have right now? Jon Niermann: We're in all 50 states. We're in Canada, we're testing in Australia, New Zealand, and soon in the UK....

Duration:00:36:02

Gil Matzliah, Novisign

10/19/2023
I bumped into Gil Matzliah at a conference this summer, and told the software executive we were long overdue to do a podcast about what's happening with his company, Novisign. We finally nailed down a date and time, and as it turned out, it was just days after the horrendous violence that broke out in Israel - where Matzliah and his company are based. We chatted about the situation and the impacts on his company. He's fine, his family and staff are fine, but everyone is understandably rattled. We then got into the roots of Novisign does, what's different about its CMS solution, and what they're seeing and hearing in the marketplace. Novisign was an early adopter of Android and it remains its primary go-to operating system. Though Israeli, more than half of its business comes from the US and another quarter from Europe. And now the company is growing business in Japan. Transcript Gil, thank you for joining me. You’re in Israel, where a few days later things went crazy there. I have to ask, how are things going? How are you? And I assume the family's fine and everything? Gil Matzliah: Yeah. Thank you for your concern. Yes, me and my family are all good, also the team members that are here in Israel are good. Last Saturday was a very hard day in Israel. It's something we never expected would happen. But now we are good. Your offices are pretty close to the West Bank, aren't they? Gil Matzliah: Yeah. So, Israel is a small and tiny country. It's not too big. So everything is close to everything. Our office is close to the West Bank, the conflict and all the issues you hear now in the news have been in the south area of Israel with the border of the Gaza Strip. I hope everything continues to be fine for you and things settle down there. Gil Matzliah: Yeah, we also hope so. At the end of the day, we like to work, we like to have peace, everybody wants to build good things together and so do our neighbors. In NoviSign, we have Arab Muslims, Christians from all around the world, Jewish people, we all work happily together and that's what we hope the world will go for. It's just this thing with the Gaza Strip that... and there's an organization called Hamas, who is making the issues and challenges for our regions, which I hope will be better moving forward. Has staffing been affected at all? Have you had members of your staff be called up to the military? Gil Matzliah: Yeah, in many countries, they call some of the stuff but you can say it's less than 10% for a team all the time one or two people in total. Yeah, it's just one of those things which you can't help but be directly affected in some way because of the size of the country and the way things operate, right? Gil Matzliah: Exactly. Yes. All right. So enough of that. I don't want to dwell on it and no doubt by the time that things will have changed and hopefully gotten better. Just for the benefits of people who maybe don't know your company, can you run down what you do, how long you've been around and how you distinguish yourself in the marketplace as NoviSign. Gil Matzliah: Perfect. So, we are NoviSign. We do digital signage software. Our company is based in Israel and provides services from all around the world. We have people in the US, Germany and Japan. With a team of more than 200 partners all around the world, we give a global software as a service for digital signage. I started a company with my colleague, Avi 12 years ago. It was 2011. We established it here in Israel, with the dream to be a great startup, changing the world and leading the digital signage software. Have you changed the world? Gil Matzliah: It's not so easy but we're sure we'll do it. We are making changes. We are progressing. Opening a startup 12 years ago, that's a long journey and like a roller coaster, you go up, you go down, but you keep going forward all the time. And after a few years, we started to see the good results coming and since then we are growing and growing...

Duration:00:31:59

DSF Cocktails and Controversy, NYC 2023 - AI In Digital Signage

10/13/2023
The opening seconds sound a little scratchy and distorted, probably because I was talking more loudly than I needed to, but the majority of the audio from Monday night's Cocktails and Controversy event sounds pretty good. I have uploaded the file to my podcast platform, so that folks who couldn't make it to the Digital Signage Federation event at Sony's NYC offices can have a listen. Consider this a bonus podcast, and I have not added an intro or exit ... so it's a bit raw, but just fine for listening. The topic was AI in digital signage, and you will hear from me, but much more usefully from Chris Grosso, CEO of Intersection, Jeffrey Weitzman of Navori and Jim Nista, who has a boutique creative agency out in LA. We covered a lot of ground and tried to zero in, very much, on what AI means to digital signage and how it is already being applied. Thanks to the folks at Sony for getting me the file!

Duration:00:43:22

George Clopp, Korbyt

9/18/2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT What if you could use AI to make digital signage screen content relentlessly relevant? That's the premise and promise of what Korbyt calls Machine Learning Broadcast, new capabilities in the Dallas-based software firm's CMS platform. Using computer vision and machine learning, the idea is that if the platform can get a sense of what's making people stop and watch in a defined environment, then content can be optimized based on that interest. The system finds and schedules content to push to screens based on engagement metrics. How it all technically works is a bit over my shiny head, but I had a good chat with Korbyt CTO George Clopp about what's going on and its implications. We also get into what the future looks like for AI in digital signage. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Geroge, thank you for joining me. We've chatted in the past. For those who don't know Korbyt, can you give me a rundown of what the company's all about? George Clopp: Hi, Dave. It's a pleasure to speak with you again. Yeah, Korbyt is at its root an employee engagement company. So we've got roots in digital signage, but our typical use case is using digital signage at corporate campuses and to communicate to employees, to increase employee engagement as well as to communicate real-time mission-critical stats as well. Is that pretty much the core vertical that you guys chase, workplace? George Clopp: It is. We are heavily into the workplace, meeting rooms as well. We do a lot with retail banks, a little bit into the retail space, but it's primarily corporate campuses. For those who don't know the company, it actually goes back a long way to Symon Communications days, right? You guys were doing workplace communications long before the digital signage industry discovered that. George Clopp: Yeah, exactly right, Dave. It precedes me. I've been here for seven years now. I can't even believe it, but that's how much I enjoy this space and the industry. I enjoy the company so much, but we had Target Vision, Symon Communications, and we've just evolved. I joined at the tail end of 2016 to develop the Korbyt platform, and obviously, we have to meet the needs of the digital signage industry, but we've had a really heavy focus on employee engagement as well. Is it interesting to see all these other companies who have more general offers, find their way into the workplace because they see that as an opportune vertical? George Clopp: Yeah, I view it as exciting. I think it's definitely a macroeconomic trend with the pandemic, post-pandemic, the modern workplace, everything is reimagining and reinventing and re-everything these days. I think it's good. It's a legitimate macro problem that everyone's looking to provide solutions to. So, I'm really excited. I love the industry myself. In some respects, you guys have been doing back-of-house, a lot longer than most companies would have. I mean, you're not just working in the offices, you're working in production areas and so on. George Clopp: That's correct. Heavy in manufacturing and heavy in the contact centers, anytime where you're doing mission-critical real-time data, you're connecting to an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), or yard management system, and you want to change or orchestrate the display and the surroundings based on data changing, we've got a deep background in that. Yeah, for contact centers, if I recall, years ago pre-arrival with the company, you were doing low-resolution LED readouts that were just telling people in the contact center about the average wait time on calls and things like that. George Clopp: Exactly, and that's matured over the years and now we're doing that on the desktop and on the mobile device as well. We still have some supply chains and some yard management systems in a warehouse, where we'll do the little blinky boards over the dock doors themselves. We...

Duration:00:31:09

Andrew Gould, Ditto (Squirrels)

9/12/2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT A lot of technology companies have bolted digital signage capabilities on to their core software platform. Often, that means the end-products don't do a whole lot beyond playing out some files on a screen. I'm a bit guilty of making that assumption about Ditto, a wireless screen sharing platform that also works as a digital signage CMS. In chatting with the company that develops and markets Ditto, and now in this podcast with co-founder Andrew Gould, I've learned Ditto is much more than an add-on. Some customers get Ditto licenses for the signage functions, and then don't even use the screen mirroring. Based in Ohio, the company spent its first dozen or so years selling screen sharing into the education and workplace verticals. But it started getting a lot of requests from end-users about adding functionality that made screens useful during downtimes. They wanted to get more bang from their hardware buck. So the parent company, Squirrels, spun up the digital signage component in 2020, and Ditto is now a tandem offer. Gould concedes there are maybe some things a pure-play, enterprise-grade digital signage CMS can offer that Ditto can't, but there's an awfully big user base out there that's never going to need or use a lot of those more exotic and elaborate functions. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Andrew, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown of the company? Is it Squirrels, the company, or is Ditto the company or is Ditto the product? Andrew Gould: Ditto is the product. Squirrels is the company. We founded the company in 2008, and we've been mainly focused on wireless collaboration in classrooms, and huddle spaces in higher education and then, in 2020, we expanded our Ditto offering to include digital signage and emergency alerts, which is something a lot of our K-12 customers were requesting. So when you started the company back in 2008, was digital signage on the roadmap way back then, or is it purely one of these situations where you had the K12 people asking you about it and eventually realized okay, we should do this? Andrew Gould: Yeah, it was a situation where we were focused on the collaboration, and then in the feedback channels we had with the customers, they started asking or suggesting, It'd be really great if we could show things when we really weren't showing things. When the teachers weren't mirroring their screens and sharing things, it'd be nice if we could say, here’s what today's homework is, or here's what's going on at the school or for higher ed, here's upcoming events, things like that. So we saw it as a natural evolution of, “We're already on that screen. It makes sense to allow users to utilize that screen when it's not being used for the primary function of collaboration.” That primary function, could you walk through how that would work in a typical scenario? Andrew Gould: Yeah, so we have an application that runs on a device connected to the screen or TV in the front of a room. Be it a projector, a flat screen, doesn't really matter. It runs on Apple TVs as well as Windows devices so there's some flexibility there of whatever device they wanna have connected to that main screen. There's just a piece of software called Ditto Receiver and that handles all of the functionality of showing what's being shared by students and teachers in the classroom. It handles displaying the digital signage and it also handles displaying critical emergency alerts, if they're fired and all of those things connect back to the cloud. The IT staff manages that from a central cloud portal, and then it periodically checks for updated settings, digital signage, configurations, et cetera, pulls those down, and caches them locally, so if you do have a little blip in the network or the internet goes down temporarily that functionality can continue to run even if it's not connected to the internet for a...

Duration:00:37:21

Jason Ault, Coffman Media

9/5/2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Jason Ault was working in the traditional sign business back in the late 2000s when a customer contract came along that required a digital sign. He had an IT background, so he stuck up his hand and took it on. He caught the bug, so to speak, and has been in digital signage ever since - putting together an initial team that launched in 2010 as Coffman Media. The Columbus, Ohio-based solutions provider has found a niche in the middle of buying market - not the little guys who can't offer much scale, and not the Fortune 500s that are going to opt for a national integrator, major software firm or even a giant consulting firm. Coffman is particularly active providing a solution, plan and services in workplaces and in regional and mid-sized QSRs, notably coffee chains. Jason and I chat on this podcast about its services, how the marketplace and needs have evolved, the gulf that still exists between conventional and digital sign companies, and the steady need for educating end-users. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Jason, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me a bit about Coffman Media and your role there? Jason Ault: Absolutely. Coffman Media is a digital signage integration firm that we started almost 14 years ago and I am the co-founder and chief operating officer. You guys are in the Columbus, Ohio area and then down in Jacksonville as well? Jason Ault: That's correct. We just opened the Jacksonville office just over a year ago. But servicing customers all across the US, Canada, and Mexico. How did you get into it? Jason Ault: Back in 2008, I was with a traditional sign company, and we were doing a big mall redevelopment project, and some of that scope called for digital signage and back then, my background was computer information, so we decided to say yes to that part of the scope as well. Took it on, partnered with CoolSign way back then before Haivision acquired it and really caught a bug for the industry, started formulating a team that we wanted to put together, and launched the shingle of Coffman Media in February of 2013. It’s interesting, that the traditional printing industry seems like this is something that they have to go towards and evolve into, and while we've seen some of it, it still seems like an industry that's not really made the jump or evolved into it. Jason Ault: I absolutely agree, and we see the same thing as well. Just knowing that industry, from my previous life and also working with a lot of traditional sign companies, it is a struggle for them to get into because it does require some computer skills and some networking skills. Obviously, they may have some content chops and metal fabrication chops, but they still need that networking and computer element. Is that something that you guys help out on? Jason Ault: Absolutely, everything from traditional sign companies to managed service providers, because they don’t know the signage side, even they don’t know the IT side, architects, really anyone trying to get into digital signage side, we can help them in pre-sales support, demos from CMS partners that we have, training up their clients, passing it off, supporting their clients, really however far they want us to go into the weeds with them, we can help them out. So you start all the way at the ideation stage with some customers and can take them all the way through managed services? Jason Ault: Absolutely. It depends on where they want to jump off and take over. We can come in under their banner; we can come in as partners with our logo. This depends on how they want to present us as a partner to the end customer. It's interesting because the digital signage market, particularly the software companies tends to present their products as being very easy to use, and very intuitive. They spend a lot of time explaining use cases and everything else but still seems to be a big leap for...

Duration:00:33:26

David Title, Bravo Media

8/29/2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT We've seen a noticeable rise in the last couple of years of visual illusions and other trickery on big digital OOH screens and other surfaces presented as real screens, when they're not. There's enough of it that observers have started giving it names, like virtual out of home, Fake DOOH or the one I like - Faux DOOH. Arguably, the most notable ones involve Dubai landmarks - a giant, empty picture frame in that city turned into an Adidas billboard celebrating Lionel Messi's World Cup win. Or a giant Barbie taking a step in a plaza, with the Burj skyscraper looming in the immediate background. They're fun and noteworthy, but if people got in their cars to go have a look in person, they'd be disappointed, because they're totally computer-based compositions overlaid on surfaces that don't have screens. And it absolutely happens. David Title of the New York creative technology shop Bravo Media goes back and forth with me a lot about this stuff, on social media. While we both have a problem with CGI creative presented as real when it isn't, we have differing opinions on its validity and value. In this podcast, we get into what's going on, how it is done, the good and the bad, and interesting things like the legal implications of running a Faux DOOH ad overlaid on a real screen that the media owner otherwise sells. It's a fun half-hour. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT David, thank you for joining me. We've chatted once before, but that was in your office in New York. Can you give me a rundown of what Bravo Media does, first of all? David Title: Sure. Bravo is a creative production studio with a very sort of direct focus on real-world, real-time experience, and for us, that sort of splits almost down the middle between working on events across trade shows, conferences, activations, launches and then working on projects within the built environment around corporate environments and retail display and hospitality and immersive attraction and combining the world of visual content animation 2D and 3D modeling video along with interactive development and design. Would you liken yourself more to an agency or like a solutions provider because, I know, a lot of the stuff you do involves some hardware as well, like you've gotta figure that part out? David Title: Yeah, we straddle a lot of those traditional titles. We work with agencies quite often to help them execute projects that they have developed with their clients. We also work directly with clients across a lot of areas, especially in the B2B space, on projects in which we're helping from ideation right through delivery. And on the hardware side, we really partner across the board with folks in the AV and hardware space. From LED providers, integrators, manufacturers, and all those folks have to come together. The thing that's so challenging and exciting about the idea of experiential marketing is that it does require a swath of people with different specialties, and any place that's saying they were doing it alone is either lying or doing it badly. I know it's always difficult to talk about projects that you've worked on because a lot of your customers don't allow you to say anything. But are there ones that you can provide references that people might be familiar with? David Title: Sure. I think a couple of things that have been fun for us that are out in the public eye; I know NFL season is starting up again shortly, and we got to work on a pretty exciting project as they were building out the new NFL Broadcast Studios, network Studios next to SoFi Stadium. And we helped create this pretty phenomenal piece of the studio called the Duke, which is half of a giant extruded glass and metal football, but each pane of glass is actually reactive. So it can go from opaque to transparent in a microsecond and then fully projection mapped. So, we're able to go from this clear...

Duration:00:36:30