Sixteen:Nine - All Digital Signage, Some Snark

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT This podcast is a bit different, as I am on the other side of the interview table - answering questions instead of asking them. That's because this is the last Sixteen:Nine podcast with me as the host. I've been doing Sixteen:Nine for almost 20 years, and the podcast version for the last nine. I'm retiring. I'm 67 and it is time to slow the hell down. I'm not leaving the industry, entirely. Just dialing back to a few side hustle gigs and other work, working more when the weather gets cold in my part of the world and I'm looking for distractions and extra money that will get Joy and I away from that cold weather for a bit. Think of this as my exit interview, done with my friends in Munich at invidis, who have been longtime content partners and will now edit and manage Sixteen:Nine. This makes me happy, as I didn't want to just stop what I think is a valued part of this business. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Balthasar Mayer: Welcome to the Sixteen:Nine podcast. This is Balthasar Mayer.  Antonia Hamberger: This is Antonia Hamberger.  Balthasar Mayer: We have a very special guest today. He is the bullshit filter of the digital signage industry. He's the head, heart, and driving force behind Sixteen:Nine, one of the rare people who manages to produce a trade publication that makes you laugh and gives you something to learn at the same time. He also keeps the digital signage industry with his beloved industry mixes at trade shows, and he's never afraid to cut through marketing fluff and speak his mind and now he's retiring, and we are very happy to have him here on the podcast. Welcome, Dave Haynes. Thank you.  Dave Haynes: Yes, I was joking. This is the exit interview. It's like leaving a company.  Antonia Hamberger: It is the exit interview, and we were thinking about just turning things around. Your blog is called Sixteen:Nine, and we're now doing the Nine:Sixteen edition. You'll get nine questions where we just let you ramble on a bit about your career, and then you'll get sixteen questions where you'll give us rapid-fire answers. Dave Haynes: Alright, I'm drinking Vice beer because I'm in Munich so this could get salty by the end of it.  Balthasar Mayer: That is our goal to make it salty, and interesting at the same time.  Antonia Hamberger: Dave, you've been doing this blog for 20 years. You've been in the industry for even longer than that. So I guess I'm wondering what made you go into digital signage? How did this happen in the first place?  Dave Haynes: I was in the newspaper industry. I was a daily newspaper reporter. I started in 1979 at the Winnipeg Free Press, and my first job out of school, working for a newspaper, was covering the rock music scene. So my first three years in the newspaper, I was interviewing rock bands like Billy Joel, Ozzy Osbourne, you name it, back in the early 80s, late 70s, just about anybody who was big at that time. I did an interview with them, which was quite interesting. At times, you would get lovely people and sometimes you'd get absolute a-holes, and everything in between.  Antonia Hamberger: Probably also a lot of drunk people, drunk rock stars?  Dave Haynes: Ozzy definitely was impaired, and Billy Joel, he stopped in Winnipeg on the first stop on his North American tour back in 1981 or something and he was just off a plane from New York, he and his band, and they had a press event at a Holiday Inn in Winnipeg, and he was very tipsy. He'd been having cocktails all the way from New York. So that was pretty interesting. I've had a number of those kinds of interviews.  So anyways, then I continued in newspapers for several years, became an editor, and got bored with being an editor in a market where not a lot of bad things happened, and as a journalist, you're not praying for bad things to happen, but they're much more interesting to write about than calm, stable situation. When the newspaper started talking about doing new media, getting into digital, I stuck my hand up and said, I'll do it. So I took the newspaper online in 1995, one of the first North American papers to go online, and did that for four years and reported directly to the publisher and nobody on the executive team, including the publisher, bought into my concerns that this was going to be a problem for newspapers. They just tended to think this was a passing fancy. It wasn't really gonna happen. So, I just got frustrated and left and weirdly went to work for a company called Elevator News Network that was putting digital screens, LCD panels in elevators, office tower elevators in 1999. Very complicated, very expensive. I started out as the GM for Western Canada, but pretty quickly became Vice President of Operations for the whole show. So I was putting screens in 70-story office towers in the elevator shops, in the shafts, and running all the cabling in the elevator shafts, and very expensive, very complicated, and very frustrating because you're dealing with unionized labor. With elevator companies, where they wanted to charge you $250 to stand there and watch you, that sort of thing. So I did that. There was a shotgun merger with another company in the US that was doing that, and I walked off the plank with the rest of the Canadian management team and found myself looking around, going, okay, now what do I do? And I ended up starting my own digital out-of-home media company, putting screens in. Public walkways in the underground walkways at downtown Toronto which was a great idea, but probably ten years too early because I would go to advertising agencies and say, I'm doing this, and they would look at me like… What? Digital out-of-home was just not a thing back then. So I was the dreaded pioneer lying in a field with arrows in my back, having done that. So I didn't make a lot of money out of that, and my wife, bless her, said it would be great if we had an income. So I started working for what is now known as ComQi. At the time, it was called Digital View, and then it became EnQi, and then it became ComQi, and I was a business development person. So I was doing sales and looking around going, how did a guy who used to interview Rock bands become a sales guy for a software company?  But I did that and went over to Broadsign because they offered me more money and then the Great Recession hit in 2008-2009, and that was that was it for salespeople. That company, Broadsign, ran into deep problems at that point. They totally rose back up like a phoenix, and they are a powerhouse now, but at the time, they were in trouble. So that was 2009, and I decided, okay, do I wanna work for somebody else or do what am I gonna do? And I just decided to go out on my own and start just doing writing and some consulting, things like that. But early on, when I was still with Digital View, I decided to just look at the industry and the level of “thought leadership” that was available at the time. It wasn't very good. A lot of it was just nonsensical or badly written, and I thought, okay, I understand this space at this point. I've been doing it for seven years. I know how to write. So I just, for the hell of it, I just started Sixteen:Nine, and never thought that this would be something that would define my career, my later-stage career for many years, and be like a full-time job, and generate real money. So it just happened.  Antonia Hamberger: But we're all glad it took that turn for you, Dave, because I don't think anybody would take you for a good salesperson. I think you're much better off as an editor and publisher. Because you would just say the truth and would probably offend a lot of people. Dave Haynes: That was one of my problems when I was doing business development. If we lost a deal, if I could understand why the target company went in a different direction, I would be fine with it, and I think to be a really good business development person or “salesperson”, you've gotta just want to be a killer. You just wanna win every deal, and it doesn't matter whether you're the right solution, you just wanna win the deal and my mind doesn't work that way. I probably wasn't best suited to it.  Balthasar Mayer: So just to understand, you founded Sixteen:Nine in 2006, and then you went full-time on it in 2009?  Dave Haynes: I wouldn't say by 2009, I was full-time, but I liked doing it every day. But it wasn't necessarily my main thing. It was just something that I'd been doing, and I kept on doing it because I felt, so I had, at that point, I had a following, and it felt something of an obligation to do it. In the first few years, I would have a Google ad on there, and every quarter, I would get like $37 or something from Google ads. But then I started getting questions saying, “Hey, can we advertise on this?” And so I would just get inbound, and that just built up and built up to become inbound. It took a while, but it was all inbound as opposed to me shaking trees. It took a while, and it was like making real money, and it was something that would be a proper income for me. At which point, I was able to back off doing much in the way of consulting or writing for hire and just mostly do Sixteen:Nine.  Antonia Hamberger: For somebody who's been in the industry only a few years, I'm wondering what the industry was like when you first came into it, and what you hoped to contribute? Dave Haynes: It was very embryonic. A few people understood it. When people would ask what I did, and I would tell them digital signage, they would just have to give me a sort of tilted head and say… Huh?   Antonia Hamberger: I still have to explain it on a weekly basis to people outside the industry. So I can't imagine what it was like 15 years ago. Dave Haynes: There are so many more reference cases now, whereas before you would have to say, you might be in a store, and you might see this. Now it's like everywhere. So I just have the digital men

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Digichief has been helping digital signage and DOOH network operators feed the so-called content beast for a bunch of years. While the Kentucky-based company started up in 2007, its roots go back another decade to a tech start-up that did similar graphics-driven content work for broadcast TV. I've known co-founder Gene Hamm forever, but this podcast was the first time we had a detailed chat about what Digichief does and offers. We get into a bunch of things, including what's widely used and what seems like perfect contextual content, but hasn't caught on. We talk in detail, as well, about more customized content, and about a new service called Mercury that Digichief spent more than a year developing and recently rolled out. If you hear thumping sounds in the background on my end, that's the roofers. It wasn't until the morning we recorded this that I remembered about the racket they'd be making. Big job. Big bill. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Gene Hamm, thank you for joining me. For those people who don't know much about Digichief, could you gimme the elevator pitch on what you guys do?  Gene Hamm: Absolutely. Thanks Dave. Long-time listener, first-time caller. Am I the first one to say that?  Probably not, among the first.  Gene Hamm: My kids always say I've got a lot of dad jokes, so I oh, no, I won't bore with that. But thanks for having me today. I'm Gene Hamm, one of the founders of Digichief.  In a nutshell we're a content solutions provider. Basically, a one-source solution for all things content. We work in a number of capacities. We have a white labeled solution for data feeds for those clients who want to control the designs themselves. Or we can provide an integrated solution with HTML5, our widgets for clients that don't want to do the heavy lifting on the design. We already have it baked into our APIs, and so we've built up a library of content over the years. All the staples, weather news, sports info, that sort of thing. We also have some short-form, video series, and some other products that we work as distribution partners, with digital art, things like that. But in a nutshell, we aggregate, we curate, and we create content for you, and we provide it in a consistent manner. We take care of the licensing, and we keep up with the inevitable changes in the source, data feeds, and put it out in a highly scalable, cloud infrastructure. So I would say in the early days or earlier days of digital signage, a lot of companies, I shouldn't say a lot because there weren't many, and there still aren't that many, but the companies that were doing the sort of work that you do, I would describe as aggregators that they were collecting and harmonizing data feeds from news gathering organizations, government organizations like National Weather Service and so on, and getting in a format that's structured, reliable and all those sorts of things so that CMS companies or end users could tap into your feeds and have something that's reliable, organized, and curated to some degree. Is that a fair way of describing things?  Gene Hamm: That is a fair assessment, and I think it's evolved over time. I think early on, it was basically, just kind of an aggregation model. We actually started the company, it's an offshoot of another company we'd started back in the 90s where we worked in the broadcast television space, where we were doing lower third tickers, turnkey systems.  So kinda like Chiron?  Gene Hamm: Yeah, we were third-party developers for Chiron. So we worked a lot with Chiron early on, but a lot of the stuff you saw on the lower thirds and newscasts around the country was our stuff.  The dreaded tickers.  Gene Hamm: The dreaded tickers that kind of blew up in the 90s, yeah. We did news headlines, we were doing integrations with AP Weather. We actually ended up doing elections, school closings, and internet chat. We were all over the board on that.  So that's how we got our feet wet on integrating and aggregating content. In the mid 2000s, we saw the digital signage kind of take off, and we said, look, we've already got these connections with these sources, so why don't we just license these and license this vertical? So that's kind of how it started, but it's evolved over time. We certainly still do that and provide those in a consistent format, but then it's also moved into kind of bespoke projects where people will say, we've got this data, we've got, we want this, maybe we have to go out and do research on specific topics for “Cold weather starting tips for Automotive Dealerships”, things like that. So there's really a research arm to it that we can go out and create stuff for custom projects.  So if you had to give a percentage of from a third party versus what you guys are developing internally, what roughly would that be?  Gene Hamm: I would say about 60 to 70% of it is aggregating. All the staples, traffic, transit, flight data, news headlines, sports scores, the stuff that people want to display most often. So yeah, I would say roughly 60 to 70% of it, and then the other stuff is, a lot of stuff on the infotainment route is data-based that we've created over time and this could be for like “This day in history” trivia, fun facts, jokes, clean jokes of the day, holidays, whimsical, eye-catching things to get eyeballs up on the screen.  The challenge I've always seen with using third-party sources for things like tickers and full-screen presentations, whether it's from the AP, Canadian Press, or Reuters, is that they typically don't write headlines for digital signage or digital at home or anything else, and they don't even really do it in a lot of cases online. So what you end up with are headlines that don't really say anything. It'll say, “This week's top news is this…” and that'll show up on screens. I see it on broadcast still, and I'm going, why are you even using this? Why don't you curate stuff that you know has fully formed thoughts and says in a headline what you need to know versus kind of a teaser?  Have you guys struggled with that, or has it gotten better?  Gene Hamm: We've absolutely run into that. You’re speaking to the choir here. We’ve knocked our head against the wall so many times, and I just think that for these news organizations, digital signage is an afterthought. Believe me, over the last 20 years, we've seen so many stories come out that we just scratch our heads, and I've had conversations with the editors to try to plead my case, and it just goes on deaf ears.  So basically what we have to do with our news, we have two formats. We have one that's filtered, and we've got lookups and intelligence written in where if something comes out misformed or certain key phrases, we just kick them out. And then we have basically a curated version where we actually go in and manually approve and post. We look at the image, we look at the images is another problem with it, but we look at the story, and we say, this doesn't make sense, or maybe we change a few words around to make it flow better and fit into a kind of concise title and description. So yeah, it's been a big problem and honestly it hasn’t gotten any better in my viewpoint. Does AI present an opportunity to clean things up? Because I will take the odd story that I write and dump it into Claude and just say, “Give me 10 suggested headlines” and it'll knock out ten headline headlines in 15 seconds, and I'll look at it and go, oh, that one's pretty good and I'll take that one and maybe massage it a little bit. But it does a pretty good job with that sort of thing.  Gene Hamm: It absolutely will be a tool that we can utilize, and we're certainly looking into it right now to try to inject on our backend tools that you can request a specific, character-limited title that makes sense. One of the nuances to AI, which I know you're aware of, is that it's all in the phrasing of how you ask the question for the format that you wanted back in.  Prompt engineering.  Gene Hamm: Yeah. It's an art in itself, and what we see is that we think that AI can help this curation service to look at the headlines that we're getting and spit them out in more of a usable, readable, concise form.  But it's not gonna be autonomous anytime soon.  Gene Hamm: We'll see.  Yeah, not reliably autonomous, it's still gonna give you some weird headlines and all that, but then again, you could hire somebody and they'll give you weird headlines.  Gene Hamm: That's true. That's absolutely true. We try to say that our Soft News, which is our curated version, and we try to bill it as G-rated content that's not going to tick somebody off, but that's next to impossible these days because whatever you think is G-rated and is not going to satisfy everyone. We try to stay away from the political end of it, but there's always gonna be somebody that's offended. Yeah. I've talked to a few people who just said, you know what, we don't even do politics on our feeds anymore, or what we show on our screens, because somebody's gonna be irritated, somebody's gonna complain, and it's just not worth it.  Gene Hamm: Oh, the stories I can tell. It's funny. We have a custom bad word filter for stuff that we don't want to come across in the AP and so we've built that over time, and I could never let that see the light of day that the things that we've seen come across the wire that we now omit. Even the images as well. There are a lot of times we'll get images that don't really explain the story, it doesn't make sense, maybe they aren't centered on the right focal point of the image, and we think maybe AI could definitely benefit, maybe being able to zone in on what the main cue is of the image that we get with the AP stories or any of the news images.  Have the demands and the uses, usage trends evolved through the years, like when I got into digital, more than 25 years ago now, there weren

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT If you go to big outdoor sports events, concerts in parks or even political rallies, there's a reasonable chance that what's happening is going to be relayed on a portable LED display that was wheeled into place by   trailer. My local footy team uses one and it is old and looks terrible. But that's not the norm, and certainly not for a Des Moines, Iowa company that is very specifically in the business of making and selling great-looking and bulletproof on-the-go LED trailers. Insane Impact has been at it for eight years and now has almost 500 units operating, mostly but not only in the United States. The flagship product is 17 feet wide by 10 feet tall, using 4mm LED and pushing as much as 7,500 nits. It's been designed to roll into place and be up and running in 10 minutes or less - even if a doofus like me was told to get it lit up. I had a really good chat with Tod Puetz, who started the company after first being a user, when he was in the golf equipment business. In this podcast, we get into a lot of things - including how he had the foresight to get ahead of the tariffs turmoil and pre-ordered enough electronics and hardware to hopefully ride out these uncertain months. We also talk about use-cases and probably the most curious application to date - drive-in funerals when COVID was raging. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Tod, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what Insane Impact does, where you're based, those kinds of nuts and bolts questions?  Tod Puetz: Yeah, appreciate it Dave. Insane Impact, primarily focused on LED as a business, but we are an audio video integration company based out of Des Moines, Iowa.  Des Moines. So you're in flyover country? Tod Puetz: Absolutely.  It's actually very handy there because you're like two hours away from the East Coast and two hours away from the West coast, right?  Tod Puetz: It really is. Just in proximity here in the central part of the US, where our corporate office and warehouse location is about 65 seconds from the airport Des Moines International, so very easy to get in. All the major interstate throwaways between I-29 North and South and I-35 North and South, and then I-80 West. We're pretty much within minutes of getting anywhere we need to go east, west, north, or south.  Nice. How long has the company been around?  Tod Puetz: We started up in 2015, flipped the switch basically late December, 2015 and have been going rock and roll. So we're coming up on our 10 year anniversary here in December.  You are a founder?  Tod Puetz: I am, yeah. Founder and CEO.  So what compelled you to do this? What did you see in the marketplace that said, okay, this is what I should do?  Tod Puetz: Yeah, really the CliffNotes version, my former life was in the golf business. I was a manufacturer sales rep for TaylorMade Golf, and I was introduced to a gentleman here locally in Des Moines that had an older video truck and basically saw an opportunity to utilize that as a sales tool to help me sell more golf clubs.  So we took this video truck out on the driving range here locally in Des Moines, hooked it up to the launch monitor and, gosh, that was almost 18 years ago. Back then it was a big deal. Not a lot of people in your run of the mill average daily golfer really ever had an op opportunity to do that. They'd seen it on tour. But we brought the bigs out to the little team here in some of these country clubs, and again, larger than life. They were able to see their stats up on the screen and really fell in love with the technology back then, and were able to utilize that for a number of years after that initial introduction. What was it back then? What was the technology back then, early LED?  Tod Puetz: It was an SMD, It was an early 8x8 millimeter SMD back then. I refer to it as antiquated, but back then, it was pretty fresh and new. But yeah, just the idea of being able to drive this thing up to the driving range, the wings folded open on this thing and, within minutes we're plug and play and just really, fell in love with that concept. ,  Yeah. So did you buy the business from him or just get something going on your own? Tod Puetz: Did not. We utilized them. It was a kind of a one man show there. It was more of a hobby for individuals, and they used it for four or five years. But they weren't interested in scaling this thing. As my career with TaylorMade progressed more and more, I ended up working with other companies, just trying to understand the LED business. So I branched out and helped a few other smaller LED niche companies to try to generate some business in the sports space. We just had a lot of relationships with the golf business and yeah, really just took the concept and I knew there was a different mouse trap here with that type of opportunity to scale it, that's where we started things in late 2015. So the idea is just at its bare essentials, and I think most people understand this anyways, but just in case, is you've got a foldable all in one LED display that's on a trailer and your customers are rolling it out to different locations, whether they're entertainment events, sports events or something else, and finding power, plugging it in, open it, and driving a signal to it, and you've got a big display where it needs to be for three days or three weeks or whatever it is, right?  Tod Puetz: Yeah, absolutely. By no means, does Insane Impact claim to be the inventor of mobile LED. Obviously, that has been one man for a very long time. Our business, Insane Impact, started up on the rental side. We designed, fabricated and engineered a handful of units, just to service what we thought was gonna be a Midwest boutique rental business and very quickly became a national presence. And what we found was that the same people were renting products two, three and four times a year, and really, our thought process was, why don't we just own one of these things, and we can use it 365 days a year, if we want? And again, there were already customers out there, there were common trucks that were selling trailers, but it wasn't popular and we really started working back in 2016 to develop a plan where if you own the product, we can certainly start to feed your business as well, you can be part of our rental network and that's really what kind of, put the fuel on the fire. Each year, more and more units in the field, more and more customers from parks and municipalities, armed forces, college, university, all of the usual suspects out there that use these things on a regular basis, really became the traction for rapid growth in this endeavor.  So your company, it's an interesting kind of mashup of different competencies, so to speak, in that if you are manufacturing rolling stock with lots of heavy-duty metals and wheels and everything else, that's one thing. And then at the polar opposite, you've got fairly sensitive electronics. So you're doing both sides of that, right?  Tod Puetz: Yeah, absolutely. We take a fully engineered and manufactured trailer. These trailers weigh anywhere from 3,500 pounds on our smallest unit up to 18,000 pounds on a triple axle gooseneck. And they've got real high end LEDs permanently. We've approached it a little bit differently. We're putting a fixed product on it. So something that's used to and withstands the elements pretty much anywhere, including the road, and then obviously everything else on the unit is fully protected from shock, from absorption of weather. Everything's IP67 through the components side of things, and IP65 on the trailer, fully powder coated system.  So we've really built, tried, and tested a product that's gonna last and withstand the elements going up and down the road at 75 miles an hour in any extreme environment.  I'm guessing that you, in your early years, had some lessons, whether they were hard ones or whatever.  Tod Puetz: Yeah, absolutely. It wouldn't be any fun if we didn't. Our first major lesson that we learned, Dave and I think this is really what sets us apart is that we did the hang and bang modular cabinets on our product for the first, probably two and a half years and we learned the lesson real quick that those just aren't designed to withstand the long-lasting road and weather, wear and tear. At the time, that's what everybody was using it and that's kind of where we were at. It took a lot of headaches, blood and sweat, for those first two years to figure out what product really made sense. For the last four and a half years, we've really been rock and rolling on a specific product, chassis, and stuff that just really outperformed, in a big way. So that was a very painful lesson because you're a year into this thing, and you've got issues, and those are hard to come by as a startup, but we were able to weather the storm and find what really worked for us and I think that really separate us from most right now is we just, we're putting some of the best products out there on the market on these trailers. And you not only have to make it bulletproof, but I suspect you have to do it down like crazy, because this can not be something that takes 45 minutes and has a checklist, like launching a rocket or something. It's gotta roll into place and find power and open the hinges, lock them down, and get a signal in, right? Tod Puetz: Yeah, you nailed it. I think one of the things as we built this thing out, Dave, is that the single most important part was customer focus and customer friendly, and I will tell you that you yourself, or even my 18-year-old daughter, can get this thing up and running in less than 10 minutes. We pride ourselves on delivering a turnkey functional unit to our flagship product, which is our Max 1710. You can pull in, and it'll take you longer to unhook it than it will to turn it on and set it up in some respects. We offer a generator-powered option or a battery-powered option.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Every so often I'll get a call or email from an industry friend asking me about a software company called Zynchro, because they were in the mix, or the incumbent, on some sort of deal that was in play. Yes, I'd say. I've heard of them. But that was about it. Well, that's changed, as I had a good chat recently with Jose Behar, one of the two brothers who founded the company some 30 years ago. Zynchro has very quietly built up a nice book of business, mostly in the United States, with SaaS software marketed on the basis of flexibility, rock-solid reliability and low annual costs. By its own admission, the Dallas-based company operates very quietly. But the installed base is north of 50,000 devices, many of them involving a couple of giant global brands. Like most whale clients, Zynchro can't quite say who those are ... but have a listen, and it becomes fairly obvious. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Jose, thank you for joining me. I have heard about Zynchro, but we've never met, at least, I don't think so, and while I've heard about the company, I don't know a lot about it, and you're one of those companies that seems to be very active, quite successful, but kinda an old World War II submarine. You're running silent and deep.  Jose Behar: Yes, we were silent for a long time. Even when my brother and I started a company 30 years ago, we started doing multimedia and CGI animation, and one of our ways to do business was to keep networking, being a little bit silent on the media, but having a lot of reputation among client to client, mouth to mouth.  So if I bumped into you in an elevator, and I'm not in this business and asked, oh, what do you do? What does your company do? What would you tell them?  Jose Behar: Zynchro is a digital signage platform SaaS, software as a service. So, our clients can use Zynchro for different kinds of applications and in a lot of vertical markets. Zynchro is not only a content manager. Maybe a lot of our clients, or the people that hear about us, look at us as content managers, but we have different modules. We now have four modules, and we are developing two more for health monitoring for all the players in the network. Also, analytics, all kinds of different analytics for interactive and non-interactive presentations. Of course, the content management, and we also have the campaign module. The campaign module is the monetizing area.  One of our biggest clients is one the biggest retailers in the market. They are using this campaign module, and you can see different media and articles saying that they are making billions of dollars using their digital signage. and now all the stores and all their home office and some distribution centers are using our software to communicate and to control their digital signage.  So the campaign manager is basically enabling a retail media network? Jose Behar: That's right. The idea is creating a TV network where our clients can sell their advertising spaces, and they can have all the inventory and all the reports that they need in order to show their clients all the information.  There are a hell of a lot of companies out there that do what you do. You've been at it for a very long time, three decades. What is it about what you do that differentiates it from the scores of other companies who have a pretty similar offer. Everybody has their unique aspects to it, but what is it about yours? Jose Behar: We don't use other hardware or software APIs. For example, one of the players that we use is BrightSign, and we know all the insights of the player. We are able to be a standalone. We don't need their software to be useful.  Another thing is that we are the owners of the intellectual property, and we develop everything completely. So our clients are able to ask us for different kinds of customizations, all kinds of customizations we have done with all of our clients, and connect directly to their systems or allow different kinds of peripherals. For example, right now, we were selected by Sony Semiconductor to integrate their AI camera Aitrios into our software as almost a plug and play. We are now the only software that can manage that and use that camera in digital signage without any additional development.  So for BrightSign and for Sony as well, when you talk about not really relying on APIs and things like that, do you have your own specific operating system instead of working with BrightSign OS, or how does all that work?  Jose Behar: In the case of BrightSign, we don't have an operating system because they have their own, but we can control the player without using almost any of their APIs, and only using their application, that is, an operating system. We are almost ready in about four to six weeks to release a new version for Android. So we have a partnership with C Labs, the players that are based here in Dallas too, and in that case, we are more into the players. So we work in that sense more like an operating system, and we can control and do more things with that kind of open architecture instead of a closed architecture like BrightSign. Is that a client, ask or demand that they want as much extraneous stuff and other hooks stripped out of it so that it's clean and therefore less of a risk security and stability wise?  Jose Behar: Talking about stability and security, we have been proven to be the most robust and secure platform. That's why this client, that is one of the biggest retailers, but other clients that we have that are almost the same size don't have any issues regarding security or stability. They have even been looking for other platforms for redundancy, because in a critical income business like that, they can have another option in case something happens to Zynchro but Zynchro has been proving that it is more capable and it can show more data and more information to the clients than any other platform. Even showing and controlling the displays, the TV with serial commands, all that kind of stuff we can do, and of course, again, because of our capability of customization, we can add or remove any of the functionalities that our clients are asking for. Until the pandemic, we had a client, the biggest one in Entertainment Parks, and they asked us to have a special administrator. So nobody can mess with the imaging, nobody can mess with the pictures or with the animations, because for them it's their brand. So they used our server for all the information in the resorts, in convention centers, and even transportation. All the bus transportation, they had connected Zynchro to their main source for all the bus routes, and if the buses were coming in time or not, connecting the buses in real time.  One of our other clients, the Central Ohio Transport Authority, has connected our system to their own system where at the bus terminals and bus stations, they can show the different routes and if the bus is coming on time or not with GPS on the buses. So that's one of the biggest benefits. The other, I think the greatest benefit here is also our pricing, which is very competitive.  At this moment, looking at the market, now we are, if not the least expensive, one of the less expensive in the market because we want to have long-term relationships, not only one-shot deals.  The challenge, of course, with competing somewhat on price is how do you make money?  If you're not charging all that much per software license, part of it's obviously about scale, but how do you address that? Jose Behar: Two main things. One, as we are the owners, and we developed this 18 years ago. In the beginning, it was for the Windows platform. We are constantly creating new upgrades and updates in order to be more efficient and for the software to be more efficient as our operation to be most efficient and the second one is that the clients like the way we do support.  In the market, one of the most costly areas is support. So what we do is to reduce the support infrastructure and the support area by creating well-tested software. And being almost perfectionist of course, we are going to have a problem some time and we are going to have some  problems. But with our software, we try to have a quality assurance and a testing phase that may be longer than any other software. But with that, we can offer almost a support free platform: a platform that is very easy to use and also so robust that the client needs almost no support.  We are one of the only ones that don't have 24/7 support. We have Monday to Friday, 9-5 support with a ticket system and that’s it and even with worldwide clients, it has worked pretty well, so reducing that cost in support is one of the main things that we have achieved.  You've understandably danced around the names and are only able to describe some of your larger clients. I get that the bigger the clients, the harder it is for them to give permission to talk about them and the last thing you wanna do is get on their bad side about doing that sort of thing.  But can you give me some sort of sense of scale of the footprint of your installed base?  Jose Behar: Right now, we are managing around 50,000 players in our network.  50,000?  Jose Behar: Yeah, and we're still growing. We are at different gas stations. One of the clients that I can mention is in Canada, Lexus-Toyota dealers. All the Lexus-Toyota dealers in Canada are using Zynchro for the different areas like the waiting room or the service parts and that kind of stuff. One of the clients that I can mention in order for you to see the different kinds of verticals is The Omnia nightclub at the Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. So they are using our software for this nightclub. But also all the big screens that you can see from the Vegas strip, talking about Omnia, are managed by Zynchro. So you're all over the place. I mean nightclubs and theme parks and big mass merch retailers, and auto dea

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Digital menu boards have long been marketed and positioned as a way to deal digitally with how what's available to order can change through a business day. I'd argue much of the critical thinking around how to do menu boards well hasn't progressed much beyond ensuring the item descriptions and prices are large enough for customers to read from the other side of an order counter. New York-based software and services firm SmarterSign has been in the digital signage industry for coming on 20 years, and has found something of a niche in working with QSR chains on optimized menu boards that are not only legible and visually pleasing, but boost sales performance for operators. Co-founder Gregg Zinn has an interest and passion for the science of advertising and marketing, and he's started writing a series called Digital Menu Board Mastery that gets into the design and psychological weeds of how to lay out and manage menu boards that influence customer ordering decisions and drive higher profits for operators. In this podcast, we get into some interesting things that most menu board sellers and users have probably never considered - stuff like psychological pricing anchors and the so-called golden zones for menu layouts. It's a really interesting chat ... Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Greg, thank you for joining me. Just to get started, can you give me a rundown on SmarterSign, what it is, how long you've been around, that sort of thing?  Gregg Zinn: Sure. Thank you very much for having me. SmarterSign was founded in 2006, so we've been doing this for just short of 20 years and it was founded by me and my primary business partner, Peter. We got together and both came from technology consulting, building applications for larger organizations, helping them understand how to use technology to make their businesses operate better.  I had actually done some digital signage. My first digital signage was done at Mall of America in the mid 90s working with Mel Simon, I have always been very intrigued by it. I had this vision of a Blade Runner future, where every surface was a communication vehicle and I was just very fascinated with the concept of digital signage, and I also saw that it was gonna be a burgeoning industry that had a lot of runway for the industry to grow and when we looked at the industry, we really found that there were two kinds of providers in the industry, and you probably remember back then, there were providers who were very technology oriented like Cisco, who were very good at moving data around networks, but didn't really have a lot of tools for content control. And there were companies like Scala who had a great software platform, a really powerful software platform, but it didn't really allow business operators to take complete control, and we saw that as the sweet spot for digital signage is moving business operators closer to their message and being able to impact their communication, whether it was in a corporate communication environment, a retail environment, or really what became our biggest market, which is food service, restaurants, digital menu boards.  I think a lot of the reason why digital menu boards became such a big and important part of our business is because of this approach of moving that communication control closer to the business operator. We've spent close to 20 years really working on perfecting as much as we can the tools to bring that vision to life.  So would you describe the company as a CMS software company or more of a solutions firm?  Gregg Zinn: Yeah, that's a great question. So really we view ourselves as two parts of the same solution. One is, one is a software provider that provides great software for controlling digital signage networks, and that's end-to-end from content creation, scheduling, distribution, and playback, and then the other piece is really the services piece of it, and I think that is equally important to the software piece of it, because these business operators are using a new tool, even business operators who have been doing it for 15 years, it's still relatively new to them. So being able to provide that layer of service and support underneath them, and when I say service and support, I'm not just saying, here's how to use our software. I'm talking about how to use this tool for your business. Here are the business opportunities for you. Here are the things that you can do with these tools. I think it's really important, and, for me, as part of the business, it's been a big focus, and I try to influence the software development to accommodate as much of that as possible and make it as intuitive as possible. But a lot of it is just working with business operators, so the service piece of it is really important.  Where's the company based?  Gregg Zinn: Our headquarters is in New York and I am based in Chicago. I moved to Chicago, just short of eight years ago. My wife's family is from Chicago. I was living in Chelsea in Manhattan, and my young sons are getting to school age and New York City is very challenging for raising children. We were living in 700 square feet in Chelsea and the truth is, it was fantastic. I love New York. I'm a New Yorker through and through. But my wife's family is from the Chicagoland area, the suburbs of Chicago, and we decided to pick up and move here, and now instead of looking at concrete and windows, I'm looking at a lake.  Yeah, it's good to have that relief valve as well, the in-laws and extended family where you can say, “hey, we need to do this, can you guys take the kids?” Plus they see more of their family.  Gregg Zinn: It's incredible. We do Sunday dinners and I love having the family around and it's great for me, it's great for my boys and now they're getting on in their teen years and doing all that stuff and it's great to see them grow up in this environment. I got in touch because I noticed on LinkedIn you posted a piece about Menu Board Mastery and I clicked through and had to look at it and I thought, oh, this is interesting because as somebody's been around digital signage as long as you, maybe not quite a few, mid 90s, I only got in late 90s, but nonetheless, we've both been around it a long time. I know that menu boards can be done badly, but I tend to think they're done badly when they're eye charts and there's way too much stuff on there, or quite simply, they're just not working. But your Menu Board Mastery pieces take a look at the science of it and of layout and the thinking and everything else. So I thought that would make a great conversation to get into, first of all why you felt it useful to put this together and then get into some of the key tenets of it.  Gregg Zinn: Really the thing is, I've had so many conversations with business operators, at all levels, and that could be from single location operators to multinational operators and all of them seem to struggle with putting a strategic foundation underneath the concept of what they're gonna display, and even this many years into it, many of them just see digital as a more efficient way to get their print menu up on the screen, and even when they were doing their print menu, I don't really believe that they were tapping into some of the core ideas of using this as an incredible marketing tool.  When I look at digital menus, I think a digital menu should be your perfect salesperson. If you could have that person talking to that customer and guiding them through consuming from your restaurant in a way that is ideal for you, and ideal for them, having it be the perfect salesperson. I think that's really important, and a lot of businesses have struggled to do that. So I took a look at this, and I thought, what if I put a series together that takes very interesting, proven, scientific complex ideas and makes them highly practical? And this has really been a core philosophy for me since I was a teenager.  When I first read BF Skinner's Beyond Friedman Dignity and David Ogilvy's Confessions of an Advertising Man, I became fascinated with how people interact with information and how behavior is impacted by communications, and those various tools and many boards are no different. So I thought about giving people some very practical ideas. I want to make this industry better, like ever since we started SmarterSign, I don't want to just have a great business in the industry. I want this industry to be important. I want this industry to really impact businesses and be indispensable as part of the complete operation for every business. Obviously that helps my business. But it also energizes me. It engages me.  Another key piece of my philosophy has always been moving people from theory to practice as quickly and easily as possible. Nobody ever said theory makes perfect. Practice makes perfect and helps people move to practice practical ideas and I use the phrase, “Is this practical?” all the time. You can have all of these great ideas and all of these visions for what can be, and you can sit there and ruminate, but really, when it comes down to it, where the rubber meets the road is where value is created, and can you put this into practice was the vision behind this series. The first article that you put out was about visual attention. When you talk about visual attention, what do you mean? Apart from the obvious.  Gregg Zinn: Yeah, and it's funny because there are some very obvious things, but there also are some well-studied scientific understandings about how people's eyes move in the interpretation of information and I think in the article, we point out two very well-known, established patterns of how people interact with information.  There is the F-pattern of how your eyes scan information, and that is typically for menus or information that is very text rich, and your eyes go across the top and then they go down to the middle and then across a

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT The next plus-sized pro AV trade show on the annual calendar is InfoComm, coming up in mid-June in, yuck, Orlando, Florida. I'm always curious about what will be new and different with the show, and that's particularly the case in 2025, because there's a new person running things. Jenn Heinold joined show owner/operator AVIXA late last year as the Senior VP Expositions, Americas, so for the last several weeks she's been in drinking-from-the-firehose mode as she learns more and more about the industry, ecosystem and how people think about and use InfoComm. Heinold is a lifer in the trade show business, and while she has run tech-centric trade shows, pro AV is new to her. We had a really good conversation that gets into her impressions and thoughts about the industry, her perspective on ISE, the AVIXA co-owned sister show, and plans for what will be her first InfoComm in June - including what will be different and new. We also get into what, if anything, will be affected by all the trade and geopolitical turmoil that's bubbled up since the US presidency had its four year shuffle. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Jenn, thank you very much for coming on. You've been on the job for how long now?  Jenn Heinold: I've been with AVIXA for just over three months. I joined in December as the Senior Vice President of Expositions for the Americas, and I'm over InfoComm in the U.S., which will be June 11th through the 13th in Orlando, Florida and then I'm also responsible for our new InfoComm America Latina launch event, which will be in October in Mexico City.  Did you know anything about the Pro AV sector before you got involved?  Jenn Heinold: No, honestly. I ran the largest satellite technology show in the U.S. for 15 years. So I've worked in technology, but Pro AV is different and I find myself now everywhere I go looking for display screens and how audio sounds. It's so fascinating how quickly you become immersed within the industry and you notice that it's everywhere and it makes our experiences better.  You'll be a display nerd in no time.  Jenn Heinold: I'm working on it. So have you always been in the trade show business?  Jenn Heinold: I have, yes, I dedicated my career to trade shows. I am super passionate about what happens in a face-to-face environment. I love the serendipity of it. I love that what I do helps businesses grow. The community aspect is amazing, right? Bringing people together with a common goal or challenge. The education that we can provide at trade shows. You can do a month's worth of meetings in three days. You can do a trip around the world in three days in some cases, right?  So I just love the format and really believe in what it can do for businesses and I'm excited to produce InfoComm. Because you had some background working with technology trade shows, has there been much of a learning curve? Setting apart the obvious that there are different companies and all that, but I guess their needs aren't all that dissimilar, are they?  Jenn Heinold: No, I think the commonality in working on technology shows is that you have the same structure where there are channel partners that are working to sell and integrate products, but then you also have all of the end users who use a specific technology. So I think it's important for us to be a forum for both Pro AV as well as our end-user audiences, and make sure that they each are fulfilled and feel welcome at the show and find value in the show.  You went to Integrated Systems Europe a few weeks ago, I saw you there. That was your first big Pro AV trade show, I assume, and I'm curious about your impressions.  Jenn Heinold: Oh, gosh, I was blown away by ISE. How could you not be? But for me, I was just so impressed by what the exhibitors did on the show floor. They really pulled out all the stops for ISE and the energy is amazing. It was so valuable for me to see the technology all together in real life, and then also to be able to meet with exhibitors here directly to know what are your strategic priorities for 2025 and beyond. Who should I be focusing on making sure that I have at the show, so it's the best for our exhibitors and our attendees alike?  I'm sure you were walking around with people like your boss Dave Labuskes both at ISE and InfoComm. Did you get some sense that ISE is its own thing? InfoComm runs differently. Yes, there are the same vendors and everything else, but apart from the obvious of Barcelona versus Orlando or Las Vegas, it does do things differently in some respects, at least. Jenn Heinold: Yeah, absolutely. I unfortunately don't yet have the comparison for InfoComm. I know what our plans are and what we're focusing on. ISE clearly has an amazing global footprint and InfoComm, while it is international, does skew a little bit more to North America just based on the location.  I think we at InfoComm have a much more training program and educational offering, which I really think is valuable. We need to not only nurture our current workforce and make sure that they have all the tools they need to succeed, but focus on the next generation as well, and I'm really proud that InfoComm does that. One of the things about ISE, as you said, there's not as much of a focus on training, there are certainly conferences and things like that, but it's more aimed at end users.  Do you find that you're getting exhibitors and other people saying, hey, it would be great if we had more end users if there was more kind of focus on that part of it, as opposed to, I sometimes refer to InfoComm is something of a gearhead show, and I don't mean that negatively, but it attracts the people who are going to go look at things like cable connectors and mounting infrastructure and so on and stuff that maybe somebody who's an experiential designer for a creative tech shop maybe doesn't care that much about. Jenn Heinold: Yeah. I will say that for 2025, we definitely are emphasizing the end-user audience. They are a key segment for us. Actually, one of the first things I did within my first week, Dave, was look at our end-user segments and compare what groups naturally grew when we were in Orlando versus Las Vegas, right? Just who organically was coming to the show and what I saw was a big increase in education when we're in Orlando, house of worship, retail, restaurants, and hospitality. None of this probably surprises you, but as we built out our marketing campaign, we've decided to really double down our investment on those segments that are organically growing in Orlando. I grew up in trade shows and marketing, so this has really been a passion project for me. Making sure that we have the right audience in InfoComm 2025 is my number one priority and I had to prioritize when I started at AVIXA so I had six months to really execute the show. So if there is one thing that I'm focused on day in and day out, it's the audience at InfoComm this year. When you say audience, are you hearing from exhibitors that they want to see more I end users or they want to see more partners because I think of an InfoComm as being a hyper-efficient way for a manufacturer to have a touch with a whole bunch of existing and potential resellers, and maybe not as worried about having like General Motors or some big retailer walking around.  Jenn Heinold: I hear both, Dave, and I think distributors and integrators are a super important part of the ecosystem, just as the end users are. We are putting more end users on Stage on the show floor this year, as well as within our conference program and I think, having the end users talk about how they are using AV technology only drives more end users to come to the show. That's what they want to hear, right? Uses cases of how they had successful installations, and how they have better employee engagement because of their conferencing and collaboration tools. We've got some retailers actually who will present how they're deploying AV technology in their stores, and what it's doing to improve their business. So we are making a real focus on that piece along with, of course, all the traditional content and certification we offer for the gearheads, as you said. I assume that's a bit of a tactic as well in, that if you invite, the Head of Digital for a big bank or big retail or whatever it may be to the show to do a speaking gig, there's a decent chance he or she is gonna bring some other people with them and then you've got people with big bank on the name tag walking around the show and you're able to talk about, look at the kinds of companies we're attracting. Jenn Heinold: That's absolutely a tactic. The other tactic is when we market to these end-user segments, and they go to our website, perhaps cold, having not really known much about InfoComm, and they see like-minded people on the website speaking, they realize it's an event for them too.  When you got involved, was there a discussion about how are things working right now? The old line about, if it ain't broke, don't fix it? Or were there things that you were told that are where we would like to grow, here's like where we would like to change things, that sort of thing?  Jenn Heinold: Yeah, I mentioned some of the deep dive I took into the show data when I first started. I also read the last five or so years' Exhibitor and Attendee Surveys. In reading those, one thing that bubbled up was just the onsite experience overall, and it is hard when you compare a U.S.-based show to an ISE at the Fira Barcelona is lovely and the food options are really healthy and great, and, unfortunately, we're a little bit behind in the United States on those things, but we are making  It's mind-blowing.  Jenn Heinold: It is a little embarrassing sometimes, but, I will tell you, I have already met with the team in Orlando. I actually was there about three weeks ago and talked about how we want to upgrade th

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT The UK-based research and advisory firm Futuresource Consulting sends a big team every year to the ISE trade show in Barcelona, and then a few weeks later releases a big report that serves as a technical recap for the pro AV community - both for people who could not attend, and for people like me who did, but didn't have anywhere near enough time to see everything. The 2025 report is out now and the good news is that it is a free download - a departure for a company that produces detailed reports that are typically paywalled and tend to cost at least four figures. In this podcast, I chat with Ted Romanowitz, a principal consultant focused mainly on LED, and Morris (or Mozz) Garrard, who heads the pro displays file and looks more at LCD and OLED. We get into a bunch of things in a too-short 30 minute interview. You'll hear about mass-transferred Chip On Board tech. Where Chip On Glass, also known as MicroLED, is at. And we also get into LCD, OLED, e-paper and projection. Have a listen. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Ted and Morris, thank you for joining me. You guys are from Futuresource Consulting.  Every big trade show, like an ISE or an Infocomm and some other ones as well, but those are the ones I'm most familiar with, Futuresource sends a whole bunch of people to these shows. I'm curious how many people at Futuresource are on the pro display file, and why do you go to trade shows like ISE?  Morris Garrard: Dave, I'm glad to jump in. Thank you again for your time today, and looking forward to tossing with you. Overall, we took nearly 20 analysts and business development people to ISE which shows Futuresource’s commitment to the trade show and our clients, specifically the Pro AV, we took four analysts, and I'm on the consulting and advisory side, so we had a really good representation across all the technologies: projection, flat panel, interactive, and LED.  I assume the reason that you go is it's a very efficient way to see a whole bunch of new stuff and touch base with a whole bunch of companies under one roof in a matter of days. Morris Garrard: Oh, absolutely. For me, it's just always, you walk in and you hit that Hall 3 where a lot of the display companies are, and it's just. Like that first impression you go, oh my gosh, here we are. How am I gonna do all this?  It's always nice. I always start at the Lang booth because they always do a nice job of having that big wow something right there at the major intersection. Yeah, they've done well with that. One thing about Futuresource is that the great majority of the material you put out is understandably paywalled. That's your business, you're producing subject matter expertise reports and selling them. So I'm always a bit curious about a complete 180 with these post-show reports. They're very detailed, there are many pages, and it's almost boy, that's more than you needed to do. Morris Garrard: Yes, I think it's, this year was something between 40 and 50 pages to cover the many, different areas of our practices, but, yeah, we think it adds value to our clients to see the latest and greatest, what's happening and not just a reporting of this product announcement or that product announcement, but it provides the context of what's really happening the undercurrents and the, big stories, the technology transitions, if you will, that are happening that are driving shifts in the industry. That kind of helps us open doors with clients to have deeper Engagements with them based on our unique insights.  Ted Romanowitz: I think just to add to that as well is we don't produce these show reports solely for the benefit of our clients. We also work with an extensive research network that benefits from these show reports, as well as other industry bodies that we work with, like trade associations, for example, and our channel partners as well.  It's a way, obviously, that you're getting driving awareness of the sort of work that you guys do and what is possible behind the paywall.  Ted Romanowitz: Exactly that. Yeah. It's a brilliant opportunity to raise our profile and also to raise the profile of the analysts working within these product sectors as well. So we're already four minutes in, and I've got about half an hour to chat with you guys. So we should dive straight into some of what you saw and came away with, and I would say that the biggest thing is probably LED in the context of pro display, anyway. So let's skip past audio and some of those other areas. You talked a lot in the report about mass transfer chips on board. Can you, first of all, describe what that is? Because we're in an industry that's overwhelmed by acronyms and why they're important, and what's the distinction? Why are you saying mass transferred when you're processing COB with mass transferred? Ted Romanowitz: Yes, and not only are there a lot of acronyms, Dave, but the problem is that terms are being misused, and I've heard you talk about that a little bit. It's a really strategic inflection point that's happening right now, literally right in front of our very eyes at ISE, where you're shifting from packaged LED technologies that have driven the industry for 20 years where the LED: red, blue, green are packaged and then picked and placed onto a PCB. That's shifting to package list technologies where the individual chiplets are red, blue, and green and are being mass transferred. So instead of one pixel at a time, they're doing thousands, and when you think about it in context, a 4k display is over 8.2 million pixels. So if you can transfer thousands at a once instead of one by one, you save a lot of time, and so this package list technology is like a chip on board where the backplane is a PCB and it's a passive driver and then chip on glass or what we call micro LED. Truly micro LED, that is, sub-100 micrometers mass transferred onto a TFT black backplane with an active driver. So at ISE, you saw this crazy tidal wave, I'm going to go with that term, this crazy tidal wave of companies that are announcing COB, and the biggest thing is that they're coming to the fruition of manufacturing processes so that they can mass transfer instead of pick and place. So the cost is going to be a lot less to make them, first of all, because you don't have to package first, then pick and place, and then secondly, because you can mass transfer.  So we expect, and this is going to, within maybe the next 12 months following, this could drive up to a 50 percent decrease in the ASPs, average sales price of 1.5 millimeters and below. It's just truly amazing. We've been hearing about this for several years, Futuresource has been writing about it, and now it's happening right before our eyes.  With COB, there are other inherent advantages as well, right? The first one would be that as they're manufactured, the finished modules have some sort of protective coating on them. That's just fundamental to how they do them, right? Versus SMD, it's the older school packaged LED displays where they're unprotected unless they've got this glue on board coating, and they're more prone to damage.  Ted Romanowitz: Yes, exactly, and those processes have been perfected over the last two to three years. So not only can you do a nice job of encapsulating it, but they can repair the LEDs as well, even after encapsulation.  So that's a major thing that's happening, and one of the things that I saw at the show was i5LED actually had a double difficult display that they did in the sense that it's a corner, an inside corner, which is difficult to do with LEDs to get, so there's not any seams or anything. But then the second thing they did is they put a touch overlay on an encapsulated COB display so you could touch. It had multi-touch on it. So again, really interesting to see the future of what's happening.  Yeah, because touch and LED were different worlds for the longest time, and it's only been recently where you start to see IR frames around displays that would make them interactive, and you wouldn't want to touch a conventional SMB display because it was going to damage it.  Ted Romanowitz: Exactly, especially when you get to 1.2 millimeters and below. The joke has always been that you needed to put a little tray underneath the LED wall that you were touching to capture all of the LED pixels that were falling off. But now, that's improved with all these new manufacturing techniques.  Are there benefits as well to COB in terms of energy consumption or brightness, things like that? Ted Romanowitz: Yeah, and the answer is yes. It's really incredible to see. Early in the LED market, if you've got 600 nits that was a lot, now you're seeing indoor displays at a 1000 or 1500 nits, which allows you to put them in a high ambient light situation, room that has Florida ceiling windows, like an office or an atrium, or even in a store window or of course outdoors in a kind of a kiosk or a standalone LED display. So this package is like technology; the chips are getting so small that you're filling in the space between the chips with an ultra black covering. That increases the contrast ratio and makes HDR content sing.  Yeah, it's like the old days of plasma displays and how their big benefit was deep blacks.  Ted Romanowitz: Exactly.  Yeah, so one of the things I came away with from ISE, and I had the impression in earlier shows as well, but really amplified this year with all the talk around micro LED and how it's coming, and that's like the ultimate super premium display.  I would look at the current product line of manufacturers who are doing COB and think, okay, that's more than good enough. I don't know that the world needs to get to micro LED video walls for us to finally have good-looking LED video walls. We're already there.  Ted Romanowitz: That's true, but really, it comes down to a cost basis, and this is where we've modeled. Working w

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT All kinds of people in this industry are very aware that while there is lot of dodgy stuff, there is also lots of well made display technology available from Chinese manufacturers who have zero brand recognition outside of that country. Buy potential buyers don't tend to have the time or resources to make the big flights over the Pacific to visit China and directly source reliable manufacturing partners. And they really - if they're smart - don't want to just order stuff, and then cross their fingers and toes hoping the stuff shows up, lines up with what was ordered, works, and then meets necessary certifications. Jacob Horwitz saw an opportunity to create a new company that functions as something as a boutique digital signage distribution company that sources, curates and markets display and related technologies that its resellers can then take to market. Horwitz will be familiar to a lot of industry people for a pair of installation companies he started and ran the U.S. - IST and later Zutek. In both cases, he sold the companies, and he could have just retired ... but he didn't want to retire. Nor did his wife, because a Jacob with too much time on his hands would make her crazy. So he started Illuminology with a longtime industry friend and business partner Stephen Gottlich, who for many years ran the digital file for Gable. I caught up with Horwitz to talk about the origins and rationale for Illuminology, which is just spinning up but has some big plans. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Jacob, it was nice speaking with you. You have started a company called Illuminology, which sounds like you started a cult, but I think that's not what it is.  Jacob Horwitz: Not yet, no, We hope it will be at some point, a good following, but first off, Dave, thanks for having me. It's been nine years since you and I first chatted on a podcast. I don't know if you realize that. It was December of 2016, and we had just finished, I think maybe the nationwide rollout of Burger King, you and I had a chat about that, and it's hard to believe nine years have gone by.  This was when you had IST?  Jacob Horwitz: Installation Service Technologies was a nationwide installation and service company, that was sold in 2018 and then a year later, I restarted a company called Zootech, and I was approached by a customer who was looking to be entrepreneurial and that company is now owned by Karen Salmon. It's a woman-owned business mow, and her father was the founder of Powerpoint of Sale. I took a couple of years off. I have a person that I have worked with for 30 years, my business partner, Stephen Gottlich. I think you've met Stephen, and he has been working with Gable Signs for the last 17 years and I think what Illuminology is now is a culmination of really two parallel journeys. Stephen took a traditional sign company 17 years ago down a path of innovation, and Gable went from a bending metal traditional sign company to a visual solutions company my background, which has been installation and service for the last 20 years, brings together two people who are a little bit older than when you and I first talked nine years ago.  It was probably 60 pounds ago when I talked to you for the first time. I'm a little gray or a little wiser and a little bit older. So the two of us come from really parallel journeys in different areas of digital signage, and we wanted to create something a little different in the United States. We'd seen some business models and other parts of the world that seem to be working. So we wanted to create a marketplace that would expand digital signage to companies interested in expanding their scope of business. So we focus a lot on traditional sign companies other technology-type companies, and installation companies. They all have some type of footprint in the verticals with technology but they're not carrying digital signage.  So we thought, how do we expand digital signage to reach a lot more people? And we've come up with this business model.  So for people who are completely unfamiliar with it, how do you describe it in your elevator pitch? Jacob Horwitz: The easiest way to describe it is to think of us as a traditional distributor of digital signage to authorized resellers. Much like a Blue Star, B&H, except that we're very boutique, and we're very focused, and we're very passionate. Stephen and I are not, we've been fortunate in business. I'm 65, Stephen is 70-ish, so we know we don't have a lot of time to build something that's going to take years and years, but we wanted to build something special.  So you would be like, an Almo or those kinds of companies, but much more focused specifically on digital signage?  Jacob Horwitz: … And being able to support them differently. So take a digital traditional sign company, next month, we'll be at the International Sign Show in Las Vegas, the USA, and a lot of those people are digital, but it's amazing how many fast signs, and banners to go, those types of places that are selling digital signage today and have no idea what digital is. They're very old and traditional.  I think of it if you sold typewriters or telephones a couple of decades ago and you didn't evolve in the IP phones and computers, you're probably not in business anymore. So we're taking a lot of those types of sign companies. We have a course called Illuminology University. We take them through an 8 to 10-week course. These are live training classes and curricula we put together to train them about what is a sign in digital singage, what's LED, what's LCD, what is GOB versus COB, just really teaching them about the industry and they have a lot of reach in the verticals that traditional people selling digital signage today don't have. The other thing that makes us unique. When you go to traditional companies like Blue Stars, you don't have everything available under one distributor. We have an experience center that's opening next week in Kansas City. It's a supermarket of visual solutions, so you'll be able to see not just LED or LCD, but you're also going to see light boxes, you're going to see different kiosks, you're going to see where AI comes into play with digital signage, you're going to have a good understanding in our experience center of the programmatic side of how things can be monetized with a digital retail network. I think that because of the 30 years that Steven and I have been involved in technology and in the last twenty in digital signage, we can be much more of a boutique to help people with a wider range of solutions, not just a traditional 55-inch monitor, but LED posters, you had on your blog a few weeks ago that digital desk, which is part of our showroom, so I think it's about innovation. I think it's about a wider range of solutions, and it's hopefully in our last chapters of life, having a lot of fun with our partners.  So I assume if I call or contact one of the larger distributors who do unified communications, do all kinds of different things, and I start asking them about it, I'm a POS company, I have a customer who's asking me about menu boards and things like that. I don't know where to start.  If you talk to a larger distribution company, they have a sheet or a system that lists all the stuff they have and they can rattle off, here's what we have, what do you want, whereas you're saying because you're much more focused on this area and you have an experience center, people could come in and you can try to find something that's tailored to their needs as opposed to what we have.  Jacob Horwitz: Yeah, I think that all those traditional distribution models are very good at taking orders and taking money. A couple of them even have some departments where they're trying to help you with that consultive part of the business but I think at the end of the day, from my installation side, conservatively, we installed well over 400,000 displays in every kind of vertical you could imagine when I owned IST.  We did the new SoFi Stadium. We did all of their point of sale. Arlington Stadium, we did all of their digital assets when Daktronics had contracted us. And Stephen has done every kind of hardware installs you could think of when he was with Gable. So I think that being able to work with a company and be there to hold their hand too, we've already gotten on a plane and gone to sales calls with our partners. You're not going to get that from a traditional distributor. We work and do the RFPs with them. We work with them on pricing and quotes. So it's a little bit different than just trying to take an order so I think that's what makes us unique and the education and our school of hard knocks, you know, god knows, we've made an awful lot of mistakes in 20 years So I think we're gotten pretty good at what we do.  So are you selling strictly third-party stuff, or are there products that fall under the Illuminology brand or a related brand?  Jacob Horwitz: We've been going back and forth for a decade now to China. Stephen and I's first project together, was Simon Properties, 250 malls, and one of the largest media networks for digital out-of-home in the country, we designed the kiosk 10 years ago that they were still using and running in their malls, and that was a factory direct where we worked directly with the factories, built a kiosk, and were able to give Simon an amazing solution, especially where technology was 10 years ago.  So through that experience and over the last decade, we've met absolutely the best factories in China. There are a lot of stereotypes of what a Chinese factory could look like, and until you go and you see the automation and the technology there, God knows you've done it. You've been all over the world. It's not what a lot of people think. So we work directly with factories. We are creating two brands. There are more later on in the year, we are white lab

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT The work on the big Future Displays report and then ISE kind of threw me off my weekly podcast routine, but we're back now - with a couple of interviews recorded, and more that are scheduled. First up is Alastair Taft, a software developer based in Hobart, Tasmania - which for the map-impaired is a big island off the southeast coast of Australia. During COVID, he and another developer came up with a plan to use the windows of shuttered retail as projected surfaces for ads and other messaging. That business didn't really go anywhere, but the exercise led to them having a solid software stack to play out and manage media - which led to the commercialization and launch of Luna Screens. The company goes to market with this key, minimalist assertion: Really Simple Digital Signage Software. It's also, at less than $4 a month per device on subscriptions, really inexpensive. I chatted with Taft about what makes his platform genuinely simple, and how being lean and mean - and making the software bulletproof - makes Luna Screen's business approach workable. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Alastair, thank you for joining me. Can you tell listeners what Luna Screens is all about, when it was launched, and the background?  Alastair Taft: Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me on. So we've been building Luna Screens for probably quite a while, probably about the last four years or so, but we only really started selling it about a year ago and what it is a really simple digital signage platform, that sums it up.  Why did you do this and why four years ago? You mentioned “we” so I assume there are other people involved. What was the thinking behind doing this?  Alastair Taft: Originally, it was a couple of us building it, a very small team. And originally it was something different, back during that great time around 2020.  We had this crazy idea where there was lots of closed down shops and shopping centers and if you walk through any of them they were dead and it didn't look too good, so we had this crazy idea where we would set up projectors in all these shops and put this photographic film on the windows project, either artwork or advertising, so we built all this software to do all that and it didn't go anywhere. It turns out we've actually built a pretty good digital signage solution here, so let's pivot a little bit. In reality, what we have now is a complete rewrite. It wasn't that much of an overlap, but that's how we ended up here.  You're a software developer by trade? Alastair Taft: Yeah, I've built quite a few things, mainly working for startups. So I've got quite a lot of experience building tech, getting lots of startups off the ground.  Yeah. I think I saw on your LinkedIn page that you're a full stack JavaScript developer, which I know what that means, but not totally. Alastair Taft: Yeah. It's just basically front end, back end, and everything involved in JavaScript. It's pretty ubiquitous.  You're in Tasmania, and it's only 7 in the morning there, so you're given a pass on being too fluid with your talking; you haven't had your coffee yet. Alastair Taft: That's true.  When you say it's really simple, I know what simple means, but how do you define that? Because there's any number of digital signage software, CMS platforms out there who insist that they're relentlessly intuitive, easy to use, all those kinds of terms. What is it about yours that validates that assertion?  Alastair Taft: I know this is probably what a lot of other platforms say too. We do think we are intuitive. When we say simple, that doesn't mean unsophisticated. But if you go on CMS and try it out, it is very simple. There are two things there. There's your screens and then there's your media library, and that's the only two things you have there. So you aren't overloaded with a million different configuration options. It's something you can get up and running quickly. There is a lot you can do, but that's the basic building blocks you get on there, you've got your screens and you've got your media library. And then there's way more powerful things you can do with your different media, with scheduling and playlists and all sorts, but that's the bare bones.  The yardstick for sort of industrial grade, enterprise grade platforms is scalability that, yes, it can be easy to use, but yes, we can also scale and we have the elasticity, we have the data behind it and everything else to be able to very efficiently, schedule it to a whole bunch of screens. Are you there with that, or are you more focused on the small to medium business market?  Alastair Taft: We are very scalable. I have a lot of experience building software that scales. For example, I've done some work for one of the largest supermarkets here in the past, and we've rolled out this personalized video that went out to half the country, so we can handle scaling with a software.  Market that tends to be small to medium size businesses, but that doesn't mean we can't handle hundreds of screens. What we can do is if you want to roll out the same content to hundreds of screens, you can create what we call a Playlist, and on the Playlist, you can either have it looping content. You could have one item if you wanted to, or you could have very complex rules that you layer. If you have some certain thing you want to show on a certain date, or you want to show some out of hours or business hours content, then what you can do is set your screens to play this Playlist, and then every time you change that Playlist, it will deploy it to all your screens automatically.  So when you were developing this, did you and your coding partner at that time put any time into looking at what other platforms did and how they were presented and the overall functionality, or did you just pretty much say, okay, this is the task, let's write something that addresses the task. Alastair Taft: Yeah, we did look at a bit of other platforms at the time. What we found is there's quite a lot of clunky tech out there. A lot of the CMSs just seem quite clunky to use. I know there are a couple that are quite good that are out now, but not when we started. How do you define clunky? What is it that you found clunky?  Alastair Taft: Oh, you just have this feeling when you use it, like you press a button and you have to wait like a year before it does anything, I think, or, you look under the hood and it's pulling in about a thousand different dependencies and yeah, it's not nice to use really. Yeah, it's one thing that I've spoken about a few times with people when they asked me about software platforms, and I said these days, if you are still releasing version 8 on the same software stack that you've been supporting for 15-20 years, I think that's troublesome, versus companies that are relentlessly modern and using whatever tool sets are available right now that can optimize what's possible. Alastair Taft: Yeah, for sure. It's a fast-moving place, front-end development. So you have to keep up to date all the time.  When you hear from customers, what's the impression you get from them in terms of what they want, and how does this meet it?  Alastair Taft: So we hear a lot of positive things from customers about how easy it is to use. We have quite a few coming over from other platforms saying, “Oh, we really like this. It's a joy to schedule content.”  Is that the big ask, just the ease of use?  Alastair Taft: For our customers, I think they find we're probably quite affordable compared to other CMSs as well, which I'm sure helps.  Yeah, you're a software as a service, right?  Alastair Taft: Yeah.  If I'm remembering correctly, your pricing was USD 3.75 a month per screen. Is that really per edge device?  Alastair Taft: That's right. Yeah. Per screen at $3.75, which I think is correct, but it makes us very competitive. I think there's only one other CMS that is that price.  The counter, not argument, but the question would be, okay, how do you make money at that?  Alastair Taft: We don't have all the bells and whistles like monitoring. Our focus is on a really simple platform to use for scheduling content and a reliable player and we're focusing on Android at the moment. So if that's what you need to do, we're a great option.  Android player, what flavor? I'm looking at the website and the minimum version is Android 7, and you're saying any Android media player or any device like I've heard through the years companies say, okay, now we have our own media player because we want to get away from trying to support all these rogues gallery of different players out there, everything from really good stuff to junk that costs $49. Alastair Taft: It's certainly a challenge supporting the different versions of Android. So it's a very hard thing to do, and we've solved a lot of things we've come across. But that is our goal. We want to support consumers' Android devices, and there's a lot of, I don't want to say tricks, but there's a lot of things you can do that we have to do to make them work reliably. You're also on the Google Play store. So, is that for Chrome OS?  Alastair Taft: No, it's for Android devices.  Oh, okay. So it's just how you would get the player.  Alastair Taft: Yeah, or you can either install via the Chrome Store or the Amazon app store, or you can download our APK off our website and install directly. You're on Fire Sticks as well? Alastair Taft: That's right.  Is that the official digital signage Fire Stick or the older ones?  Alastair Taft: I believe we're not part of the software that comes pre-installed, and you can't get the official signage Fire Sticks over in Australia yet, but I imagine we're on there if you search for us.    Again, your market, in many respects, are people who can't invest a lot of time and don't want to invest a lot of money in digital signage. So they want something affordable. It's not a big co

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Countless companies have tried sticking a screen above things in public spaces, thinking - or more appropriately hoping - that the scenario and dynamics were something that would interest brand advertisers. I won't say it never worked, but there's a lot of roadkill. A company out of Vancouver, on Canada's west coast, is going at this notion - but in a very different way. Intuitive puts 43-inch displays just to the rear of trash stations in busy public and private spaces. But instead of just running booked ad campaigns, the main purpose of the screens and supporting AI-driven tech is to change consumer behaviors. A computer vision camera uses AI-based pattern detection to look at the trash someone is about to drop into receptacles, and tells them what goes where. We've probably all had a last sip of a coffee-to-go, stopped to drop ti in the trash and recycling station, and then stood there wondering which bins to drop things in. The company, whose founders have roots in robotics, had quite a bit of success selling ready-to-go systems to organizations. on the basis that teaching consumers to correctly sort their trash would save a lot of back-end labor and time. But customers were buying one or two systems for big venues, because that's what budgets would allow. Even though 10 or 20 were needed. Based on a lot of real-world experience and enthusiasm from brands, Intuitive has now pivoted to a more traditional place-based digital media model. The business has blown up, with 10s of 1,000s of installs under contract, including a big partnership with Pepsico. I had a great chat with co-founder and CEO Hassan Murad, who calls himself the company's chief trash talker. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Hassan, thank you for coming on my podcast. I was at Digital Signage Experience a few weeks ago and wandered around the trade show floor. It wasn't all that big or crowded with stands, but I saw the stand for your company and kind of went right on by because I have this attitude based on years of seeing companies trying to put advertising screens atop damn near anything.  But I was compelled by a business friend to have another look and stop and talk with you guys. It was actually very interesting what you're up to. So can you explain what Intuitive does and how it got started? Hassan Murad: For sure. And again, Dave, thank you for having us. I'm Hassan Murad, the co-founder, CEO, and chief trash talker here at Intuitive. What Intuitive started out as - I'll take you back to myself and Vivek Vyas, who's the other co-founder of Intuitive. Both of us grew up in India and Pakistan, were born there and our families at different points immigrated to Dubai. Then we met when we were doing robotics here in Canada, in Vancouver. Our whole background was in robotics and AI. As we were starting to step foot in the real world, we had gained experiences working on drones to detect wildfires or for impact applications, submarines to do amazing things in an autonomous way, self-driving cars down at Tesla. Previously, I was proud to share working alongside Elon, but now I'm very careful. Yeah, that's not necessarily an association you want anymore. Hassan Murad: You have to be careful for sure. I describe him as the smartest person you can ever experience working for or be with, and a pioneer of this world. And at the same time, he's the dumbest person you could ever think of. But I hope this doesn't make it to him or else he will start bashing us as well. I think he has a list to go through first before he finds us. Hassan Murad: I hope so. The way that he fires off his tweets or whatever he calls it at X is just insane. Anyways, back to the point. We’re both working on robotics applications and being flat on the walls in different zero to one moments where industries were being completely revolutionized by AI and we asked ourselves the question that for the next couple of years, if we are going to jump in and work on something, what is the problem that we care about solving? One thing we were really driven to think of solutions to was the waste problem. The stat that we had read at that point that was the game changer for us was that 98% of whatever we generate ends up in landfills, oceans, rivers, open dumps, and does not get recycled or composted. That basically says one percent was composted and one percent was recycled. That made us pause and say, okay, we've got to apply our solutions or backgrounds to something that's wrecking the world.  Anybody that has watched WALL-E knows how the end happens, right? What happens to Earth? That's kind of how we got started. We were developing a solution that I'm happy to go through, if it makes sense, but it was a very robotics-based solution and then we pivoted towards education. And what that means is that instead of sorting it for people, we started developing a way to nudge and change behavior so that people could recycle better and cause less contamination because one of the big things we realized was there's no sensor for waste or materials in the whole space and people are walking up and they don't realize that the three seconds they take to throw something out actually is a very important point in their journey. If they make the right decision and if we help the facility realize that value, we have a very high chance of getting that material to the right area. So what I was mentioning is rather than having a robotics-based approach and solving it for people, like handing them the fish, we taught people how to fish using AI combined with a digital screen to make it really smart and use audio visuals so that we nudge and change an individual's behavior. So the nut of this is that, and I suspect anybody listening has had this happen to them where they've been walking along with a cup of coffee with a plastic lid on it and a cardboard cup, and they're going to put it in a trash and they'll see three slots and they'll be looking at the three of them going, okay, “which one do I put this in?” And you just take a wild stab at it and put it in one that seems to make sense or somebody else has put something similar in that one.  Your whole thing is using computer vision to guide people to, based on what you're showing me in front of the camera, it ought to go in this one. Is that an accurate way of describing it? Hassan Murad: Exactly. So we make that entire process - the individual walking up has an item or multiple items that consists of multiple materials, like that coffee cup example you gave. There's the cup that is made of paper, but it's plastic lined. Depending on municipalities, it could belong in trash or paper streams if they're accepting it or recycling. Then you've got the cardboard sleeve, and then you've got that lid and sometimes you've got liquid inside. So there's four different materials that the consumer has either no time, incentive, or reason to be putting all these pieces together to sort the item out. Most of the time what happens is people just take a guess or are not even paying attention. What we change is that behavior. We have introduced Oscar sort, which is the core technology that you could put behind any recycling bin - busy bins in malls, airports, universities, stadiums. You put it behind that bin and it starts making that bin a lot more powerful. As you're approaching that bin next time, it starts even looking at you two or three feet out and it starts nudging you by visualizing how you could sort that item out. It tries to make that decision very intuitively and it attaches an incentive to it. So it's now this digital screen that actually rewards you for sorting correctly. And if you sort it incorrectly, well, Oscar could get grouchy. This whole gamification in a simple decision that was so pivotal for the facility, but also downstream, is where we've brought fun engagement and really changed the whole landscape. So the business model on this is what? Hassan Murad: Traditionally, when you look at an airport, a mall, a university, a corporate campus, everybody pays for a garbage bin and garbage bins have a recurring cost, because you have to make sure they're being serviced and not overflowing. In different areas, you have sorting requirements downstream. So if people don't sort, they'll take it downstairs to potentially sort as well. When you look in San Francisco, many stadiums we've chatted with have 10-15 physical people at the back sorting all the bins out and that is where Oscar has been approved as the technology - you don't need people at the back end to sort anymore because Oscar can help people do that. That was our starting niche. We started by focusing on Airports that have this bottleneck problem and we've been providing different amounts of Oscar sorts to these areas to help start their journey. As you see this scale we're trying to reach, we're trying to make a dent in the universe in terms of the whole waste world. It's not going to make an impact when out of 700 bins or 200 bins in a stadium, we just provide 5 or 10 bins. That is where we have accelerated the business model towards a property becoming a partner of ours and we partner with them so that we provide Oscar Sorts to their facility and we utilize brands that are already on the Oscar screen. So people are paying to be on the screen and they're the brand that wants to say hi to Dave that is walking up. So that coffee cup you're talking about is branded rather than generic. The chips bag, the bottle, the can. You can start seeing how brands want to be the brand in front of an individual as they're walking up, since we've created this new type of experience. We've flipped the model around. We call it the Oscar Media and Materials Exchange - in short, it's OMX. That basically allows any busy property, whether it's in New York or Toronto or LA or anywhere, a busy property like a mall, univers

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT The people who build and maintain very large networks of displays, PCs, servers and other devices tend to have more to do than time to do it, and when some technical shit hits the operating fan, trying to work out what's happening and what to do about it takes experience, brainpower and what can be punishing downtime. So what if generative AI could be used by a network operations center team to comb through knowledge bases and trouble ticket archives to identify solutions in seconds, instead of minutes or hours? And what if a lot of meat and potato workflows done to deliver services and maintain uptimes could be automated, and handled by an AI bot? That's the premise of Netspeek, a start-up that formally came out of stealth mode this week - with an AI-driven SaaS solution aimed at integrators, solutions providers and enterprise-level companies that use a lot of AV gear. The Boston-based company is focused more at launch on unified communications, because of the scale and need out there. But Netspeek's toolset is also applicable to digital signage, and can bolt on to existing device management solutions. The guy driving this will be familiar in digital signage hardware circles. Erik DeGiorgi was running the specialty PC firm MediaVue, but sold that company about a year ago. Since then, he's been forehead-deep working with a small dev team on Netspeek. We caught up last week and he gave me the rundown. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Erik, nice to chat once again. You sold your company about a year ago, and I don't want to say disappeared, but kind of went off the grid in terms of digital signage, and now you are launching a new company called Netspeek. What is that?  Erik DeGiorgi: Thanks for having me back, Dave. It's crazy. Time flies. I think it's well over two years at this point since our last conversation.  We launched Netspeek at the beginning of the year. At the same time, we sold out MediaVue. Netspeek is bringing to market the first generative AI platform focused on supporting the day-to-day operations of mixed vendor estates of pro AV networks. Digital signage is certainly a component of that. We're really focused on the totality of pro AV technologies. So it includes a lot of UCC unified collaborations and communications technologies as well as signage, and really targeting office spaces. So think about meeting rooms and conference rooms. You might have a Zoom or a Teams environment in there as well as a signage system or classroom environments, and what we've developed is a generative AI solution that can be embedded into those networks, that can work alongside human operators, network administrators, technicians to help them support them in their daily workflows, and then also bring a large amount of automation. So our platform can not only kind of observe what's going on in a network, kind of a 24/7-365 way, but then take action and use its own logic and reason and independent thinking to analyze situations the same way a human operator would and then structure and generate responses. So being able to directly address equipment and solve problems independently. We're pretty excited to bring that to market. We're launching to the industry here in a week, and then we'll be demoing at ISE at the beginning of February.  You’ll have your own stand at ISE? Erik DeGiorgi: Yes, and I did pull up the booth number ahead of the call, but of course now it's on a different tab. It's in the Innovation Park, and the booth number is CS820, and it's actually centrally located there in the Innovation Park. So actually right outside the digital signage area.  Yeah, I think for people going to ISE, the Innovation Park is kind of along the main corridor in between halls.  Erik DeGiorgi: Yep, it's the central hallway.  Okay, so people should be able to find you there.  Erik DeGiorgi: Hopefully, yep.  Not a sprawling booth like a Samsung or LG or something, but…  Erik DeGiorgi: We measure in single meters. I think it's a 2x3 meter booth.  Startup life. Erik DeGiorgi: The price was right.  There are lots of device management platforms out there, either independent third-party platforms that you would subscribe to and bolt onto your system or a fair number of companies, whether they're integrators or CMS software companies in the context of digital signage have their own device management code written in, how is this different?  Erik DeGiorgi: Yeah, absolutely. Netspeek is not another monitoring platform. Monitoring is a necessary component, right? You need to know what you have on the network and know what it's doing as a foundation. But our value really lies in the intelligence that we're bringing into that. So it's taking that monitoring and observation, but then actually doing something with it in doing that either again to assist a human by bringing kind of an encyclopedic knowledge and institutional knowledge or whether it's through the automation, and so we're going to market with a total solution. We have a monitoring platform that we've developed as a necessary part of our total solution, but we actually are also partnering with existing remote monitoring and management platforms to essentially bolt on to them, and then bring that intelligence to their monitoring platform and actually at ISE, you'll be able to see that as well.  So they should happily run in parallel using APIs or…?  Erik DeGiorgi: Yep. So we hook into the existing monitoring platform and we essentially bolt on the, the reasoning and the intelligence, and then allow an existing user to leverage that front end, and that monitoring platform that they're already familiar with. Who do you think you're primarily going to be selling this into? Is it like integrators and service providers who have network operation centers or would it be end users?  Erik DeGiorgi: So it's a little bit of both, and candidly at an early stage, you tend to take a bit more of a scattershot approach, and test where the value emerges. It's a new technology, gen AI, everybody knows it's there and in a large part don't know what to do with it. But we've kind of honed in on three initial go to market opportunities. One is like a total solution directed towards the end user. One is more of a channel centric focus, whether it's a system integrator managed service provider. We're actually already engaged with a few, of each, that are interested in leveraging the platform in that capacity. And then also, like I said, with, an existing management. You could be a manufacturer. So think about even an independent manufacturer, or a platform provider, like an existing monitoring platform. So an existing tool is specific to a manufacturer or a tool for more broad-based management. Like I said, we can kind of bolt into those and go to market that way as well.  So in the scenario of a network operation center in the context of digital signage, an integrator that's doing the work to monitor a large QSR network for a restaurant chain that doesn't want to do that internally and they've got a whole bunch of screens up on a wall and they've got big curved desktop screens and the whole bit and they're watching what's going on.  Is the idea here in part that. As a problem develops and it's kind of weird and not familiar that if you had to go into a whole bunch of manuals and archived information, it would take many minutes, maybe even hours to do it versus if this is all on a learned model that the solution or at least ideas on a resolution could come up in seconds? Erik DeGiorgi: We really kind of lean into the personification of our platform. So our product is called Lena and Lena is an acronym that stands for Language Enabled Network Administrator. So we really have modeled the platform and the solution after the workflows that human operators perform every day. So imagine being in that knock and sitting there next to your colleague, Lena and Lena happens to be trained on every respective certification related to the deployment, and has been trained in every application software that's being used, has an encyclopedic knowledge of every technical document for every piece of equipment or technology that's in that deployment, has the ability to - at the speed of light - comb through any historical information like previous support tickets or anything like that that's been related.  So being confronted with a situation, whether that's a critical situation or whether it's looking at something that's preventative, or maintenance-oriented, just imagine having this kind of superhuman user that can just as a human operator analyze the situation, develop a logic flow, think critically about that situation, pull in outside information to help diagnose a potential issue, construct a resolution, and then either autonomously or along with a human companion and approval, go ahead and execute that action. One of the things that Lena can do out of the box is we've done all the integrations, and I say all we've done many, and we're continuing to do many more integrations with all the different devices and technologies that you see in these networks. So, as a generative AI, Lena can generate information for human consumption, but Lena can also generate structured information that translate down to device commands in various ways. So Lena can actually take action and do things on her own, and, we default to saying “her” because get used to personifying. Some people lean into that, some people don't. But you really kind of think about it as this if you had your next hire, your next employee that had all of this institutional knowledge and had the ability to take action in this way.  What would be the ROI on something like that? I assume that if there's a problem emerging that seems kind of weird, that can take quite a bit of time theoretically to come to a resolution, unless you have somebody on staff who is almost

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT The UK software firm Evexi has an interesting story behind its move into digital signage - in that it was more a pull from a client than a push by the company itself. They got deeper into it because of a client's needs, and then a change in technology support that really forced the hand of the customer and Evexi. A few years on from that big moment, Evexi is growing out its CMS software business based around a very modern, headless platform and tools that the company says manage to bridge a need for being dead-simple to use but also deeply sophisticated and hyper-secure. CEO Andrew Broster relates in this podcast the story behind Evexi, and how it goes to market. There's also a very interesting anecdote in there about how lift and learn tech is more than just a visual trick for retail merchandising - with Broster telling how it was driving serious sales lift for a big whiskey brand. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Andrew, thank you for coming on this podcast. Can you give me a rundown, like the elevator ride story of Evexi?  Andrew Broster: Sure. Thanks for having me, Dave. My background is very technical. I spent about ten years prior to setting up Evexi running a managed service for a private cloud-based business. In 2015, Sky came to us through a partner and asked for an advertising platform to be built into pub networks, where they had 10,000 pubs under contract to sell Sky Sports to.  We walked away and said, what was the question? But eight months later, the product was released into the pub network and it has nearly 2,700 pubs going live within just under 12 months and really from there, we were working with an existing CMS provider, Scala and we learned a lot of the pains with integrating into third-party systems, platforms, building, customer portals, because the traditional CMSs are not user friendly, and as a result, that was our first digital signage customer and our first project that we launched. So what would you call yourself when you were getting into this with Sky, were you like an independent software vendor who just did custom work for customers?  Andrew Broster: Correct. Yeah, it was literally, “Hey, Andrew, we need to build this workflow portal.” We were trying to solve problems at a software level for end users through, in those days, it was actually still the channel and that was the first exposure we ever had to the channel.  Okay. Now, though, you have your own product.  Andrew Broster: Yes, at the end of 2018, early 2019, we launched Evexi, purely on the grounds of Sky needing a different CMS vendor because Scala was the end-of-life Samsung system on chip support and yeah, Evexi came live and we flipped 2,700 pubs overnight onto our platform, and we were talking about taking a big leap, that was a big leap for and a big learning curve  And how do you do that overnight? The common perception would be if you're going to change 2,000 devices over you've got to visit 2,000 devices or you've got to Telnet into them or something or other and monkey around with each of them  Andrew Broster: No, what we ended up doing was as we created a reboot script that was rewriting the URL from the URL launcher on a Samsung screen and instead of Scala, we flipped them remotely to ourselves.  So with this business, you were asked to develop something for a specific client. Did you look at the marketplace and go, all right, we can do this for sure. We've got a client who wants it We can turn this into a larger business, but boy, there are already a lot of CMS software platforms out there, how do we differentiate ourselves? Andrew Broster: I don't think it was even that really. I think right back in the beginning my other shareholder said to me, is this a mistake? Are we going to just generate a lot of debt within the business? Is this a hard business to get into? I spent probably about three to four months, looking at the landscape, looking at companies, competitors, and companies that basically had one successful client and then struggled to grow out of the single client, and really from my point of view, it was, because I was very technical by nature, I wanted to be able to build a platform that was using the latest technologies. A lot of our competitors, less so now, but at the time in 2018-2019, were using a lot of aging software technologies, and scaling issues, so just single servers.  I'm a network architect by trade. I wanted to build a cloud-based platform that uses the same technologies as Amazon AWS and Netflix, and that really for me was the ability to have what I call a native cloud product and not make the same mistakes that everybody else does, because when you're building a product and trying to go to market, you have to really try and avoid making all your competitors' mistakes. So you ended up with what I believe you describe as a headless CMS, right?  Andrew Broster: Yeah, it's a headless CMS. By design it was headless, and then we put in a very simple UI because we had right back in those days, about 2,300 landlords wanting to publish their own content. So it really had to be very straightforward to use and we wanted to automate everything else in the backend. So things like rendering automatic web content, being able to have a platform that's open that anyone can build onto.  I'm from an open-source background originally, so I wanted to make these tools readily available to all of the partners and the ecosystem we’re working in. So when you say headless CMS, what does that mean for a typical end user?  What I think about is that you've got creatives, people who are working on online products and so on, who don't want to back out of their normal workflow, platforms and log into something separate just to do digital signage. Andrew Broster: Correct, and for the larger companies integrating into our APIs, which are publicly available, means that we become an extension of their product suite rather than copy and pasting and moving content around. We just end up at the end of the line of the production, and then content gets scheduled, instead of having to log into another system. I'm a big fan of automating and integrating everything. What would be a good kind of reference example of companies that you're working with that you're allowed to talk about?  Andrew Broster: Sky is the obvious one. We did a lot of work with David Lloyd, on some projects for their gyms. Johnny Walker and Diageo in South Africa. And they've integrated into our APIs as well, whereby, they had a lift and learn solution using Nexomsphere integrated into Evexi. They built their own web apps sitting on top of a platform for the customer user journey, and then every time you want to go and change products, they have their own merchandising platform. So it gives the whole user journey without even touching a backseat, to be honest with you, and we just turn into ultimately a distribution engine because what we're doing is providing the player to be sophisticated and be able to play whatever content has been built and developed, but the changing the scheduling and interaction of it is all done through our APIs. So you mentioned the Sky project. That's still fully going. What kind of footprint does that have at the moment?  Andrew Broster: It still has around 2,000 screens. I think they're very heavily looking at the market at the moment, and seeing who else is doing it. Stone Gates are doing a great job at the moment, running out of a media platform into a pub network and I think it's fair to say we all collectively are just watching that to be honest with  You're all watching it for?  Andrew Broster: To see how that project evolves and whether it's going to be a success. I mean Sky were the early adopters of this in pub networks and I think like anything in this world, to be able to attract the big liquor brands and the beverage brands, you need to have a reasonable footfall, and that was always the argument right back in the beginning. How do you pump advertising revenue into your advertising network, unless you've got a footfall of half a million to three quarters of a million people.  Right. You're doing a lot of work with Nexonsphere. I just did a podcast with them a couple of weeks ago.  Andrew Broster: I know them well.  I like what they do and it's interesting that “Lift and Learn” is something that's been around for 20 years, but it used to be really hard to do. Is that what's being used for Johnny Walker and could you describe it?  Andrew Broster: Yes, it is exactly that. So if you walk into a liquor store in South Africa, you can pick up a product. It'll tell you about the product. You can pick up another product. It'll compare the two products, and then you follow the user journey on a screen after you've picked up the products to be able to inquire or pick up more information about the product. So in the Johnny Walker world, it's about understanding the different flavors of Johnny Walker and what the blend and what the mixes you have with the alcohol and the key to all of that is to understand who's using the product and to be able to provide that information back to the brand.  For me, that was a great project for us because we had so little involvement. I know that sounds ridiculous, but when you have a technical partner who is very tech focused, very marketing focused and who knows how to build apps using documentation, we have very little interaction, but I think really the beauty of it is the numbers that are coming back now is that they're seeing across, I think it's about 160 to 180 sites, they're seeing between a 40 and 42 percent uplift in sales and the tills as a result of using learned because they're doing a lot of A/B testing. So we know it works, and for us, it's making the next must be integration. Now, you don't have these drop down menus, don't have a CMS that's completely and utterly configur

Just prior to DSE, I was in Palm Springs to take part in an executive retreat for the digital signage crowd, organized and run by my friends at invidis, the consultancy and publishing company based in Munich. They have done these events in Europe for a few years now: an invitation-based two-day gathering that is part networking, part knowledge-sharing and part R&R - from golf to cocktails. I was along because they needed some eye candy, and there was probably also a California mandate to include a senior citizen. But Florian and Stefan from invidis had me there, as well, to do some interviews with attendees. It was a bit like herding cats because of the size of the resort, and varying schedules, but we managed to trap eight attendees in front of the camera and mikes. There are video versions you can watch, but for those who like to listen to interviews as they walk or drive (I've even heard swimming!), here's the second of two round-ups, with four interviews in each. This one has: Jeremy Gavin of Screenfeed; Shawn O'Connell, who recently joined Uniguest; Stan Richter of SignageOS; And Trey Courtney of Mood Media.

Just prior to DSE, I was in Palm Springs to take part in an executive retreat for the digital signage crowd, organized and run by my friends at invidis, the consultancy and publishing company based in Munich. They have done these events in Europe for a few years now: an invitation-based two-day gathering that is part networking, part knowledge-sharing and part R&R - from golf to cocktails. I was along because they needed some eye candy, and there was probably also a California mandate to include a senior citizen. But Florian and Stefan from invidis had me there, as well, to do some interviews with attendees. It was a bit like herding cats because of the size of the resort, and varying schedules, but we managed to trap eight attendees in front of the camera and mikes. There are video versions you can watch, but for those who like to listen to interviews as they walk or drive (I've even heard swimming!), here's the first of two round-ups, with four interviews in each. This one has: Frank Pisano from Bluefin Bryan Meszaros of OpenEye Global George Clopp of Korbyt and the baritone, no mike needed, voice of IV Dickson of SageNet.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Sensors and triggered content have been part of digital signage for probably 20 years, but they weren't widely used for a lot of that time because putting a solution together involved a lot of planning and custom electronics. A Dutch company called Nexmosphere has changed all that, offering a wide range of different sensors that trigger content to digital signage screens by sensing the presence of people or reacting to an action, like someone lifting a product up from shelf to get a better look. Nexmosphere has developed its own set of low-cost custom sensors and controllers that make it fast and easy for digital signage solutions companies, including pure-play CMS software shops, to add triggered content capabilities. Nexmosphere focuses on the hardware and makes an API available to partners. I chatted with CEO Hubert van Doorne about the company's roots and how his customers are now using sensors to drive engagement in retail. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Thank you for joining me. Can you give listeners a rundown on what Nexmosphere is all about?  Hubert van Doorne: Oh, yes. I’d love to do that. Nexomsphere is all about sensors for digital signage and to make any digital signage system interactive and by interactive, we do not mean only by pressing a button or touching something on a screen, but it's much more of letting the digital signage installation respond to actually the person in front of it. So it can be a presence sensor. It can be something that you touch or lift the product and that way make an interactive system at Nexmosphere, build a platform of a lot of different sensors that can be hooked up easily to the system and in that way for the system integrator and really help in building this sort of system. It's something that's been done for decades by a lot of companies who made their own sensors so in that case, it’s not real rocket science, but the beauty of the product is that you can take any of these sensors, bring them together and you don't need any development time to have a proof of concept running and I think that's the real strong point of what we offer.  Yeah, I've been in this sector for a very long time, and I can remember, when I was working with one company, we had a guy who I think worked out of a motor home somewhere in Arizona or California or something like that, and he would design boards that could be used for very early iterations of sensor-based detection, presence sensor, that sort of thing, but it was a lot of work and there was nothing off the shelf that you could buy to do all that. I suspect that there's a whole bunch of companies that said, “Oh, thank God, I can just order this and it's already sorted out.”  Hubert van Doorne: Exactly. It's actually also how the company started in 2015. We were a part of a display company making POS materials for in-store and we developed our own sensor set for Sonos and for Philips to go into the European stores, but what we saw is that the number of stores was heavily declining and the complexity of every system was really growing. So we needed something modular that was not just for one group of displays. We needed something for five thousand, you could make the same part of electronics, but now we need it for 200 stores, something still affordable to build, and that's how the idea started off of making a more standard solution that you can plug and play. And, first, when we came to the market, everybody was like, “No, we will build something ourselves, that's much easier.” But then, over time you saw these numbers of installations decline. concept stores would only be maybe five stores or ten stores and then slowly evolve over time and that was getting difficult to make something really solid, and robust in small numbers. So that's where we really saw that the companies coming to us. Like indeed, what you say, thank you, you're developing this because it's only a very small part of the total installation cost and compared to a screen or a media player, we are only a fraction of the cost, but it's adding a lot of functionality. So in the end, if it's not working, it's a problem. but it's also not something where you can really save a lot of money because it's only a small part of the budget.  When you say it's a small part of the budget, are we talking tens of dollars or tens of euros or hundreds of euros on a typical installation?  Hubert van Doorne: It depends, but if you go for a presence sensor by screen, you have it over, $40-$50 a sensor. So that's only a few percent of the total installation, and of course, we go also to museum experiences where we have 20-40 sensors in one set, and then maybe you go to a few thousand euros, but in the end, it's never a very expensive set of gear, because, in the end, it's just small electronic bits that you can very well pick the right size that you need for your project. So there's very little that you do not use in the end.  What's the range of types of sensors that you do?  Hubert van Doorne: In terms of applications, we have a couple of real main areas and the first one is absolutely by far present sensing and its presence and motion. So if someone is in front of a display, if he's approaching or moving across or where he is exactly standing that sort of application, but it's very much based on seeing where a person is and depending on where he or she stands, trigger the content or just for statistics, counting how many people are there. And, the second, large area is what we call lift and learn. So if you pick up a product you can actually display information about this product over video, because we know which product’s being lifted. Typically we have about seven different technologies that can lift and learn. So we have a lot of different sensors for different products, but in the end, it is all for the same application of building a lift and learning. Another bigger area is LED lighting which you use as guidance. So a third area that we do is, guidance where you really can guide people, for example, in a museum, where to look if you light up an exhibit, but it can also be in a cosmetic store. If you have different products and you make your selection on, for example, a tablet light up the products that match this selection. So LED lighting, it's not so much a sensor, it's more an actuator, but that's what we do a lot as well, and the fourth, biggest pillar is what we call UI elements and that's anything to do with, for example, normal push buttons, but it can also be air buttons so that you just hold your hand somewhere on a position very close to the screen and it already triggers so you don't have to really touch, air gesture that you can do with your hand in the air. That's all elements where you really want the user to do an interaction with the screen that is not on a touch screen and those elements, that's another important group of sensors. And then we have a lot of small, little special sensors. They're fun, but it's not the big chunk. Did you find as you were growing the company that you started adding these things because people were asking about it or you just saw that people are struggling with understanding where to look next and so on… so let's use LEDs to light guide them?  Hubert van Doorne: Yeah, I think it’s a bit of both. Of course, we had already very early clients who helped us also. By asking the right things like, “Hey, this is something we could really use. So can you build something for us?” But also looking at ourselves, we have a very strong team, with a lot of ideas where they really look at what is needed now in the market and how we can find a technology that can really be well suited to do this and I think that's also a little bit where we differentiate ourselves from others.  You do have great industry sensors. They are very expensive. They are very good but, for larger rollouts, and larger deployments, they are far too expensive to make a big rollout or too complex. Yeah, you have the cheap stuff, but in the end, it's also not something that can really scale because you cannot really adjust them exactly how you have to use them in mainly a retail environment, but also we see them now in more and other environments where if you use too many standard sensors then you cannot customize to how it should behave in that area and you can also get a lot of misreads and I think that's the strong point of our sensors that we really build something that you just connect and it works in that retail environment.  A good example I always give is a presence sensor. We had a competition using exactly the same chipset from ST Microelectronics, but the fact that somebody walked in front of it and there was a minimum timing of a few milliseconds. A person should be there for half a second because otherwise a person cannot appear in half of a fraction of a second and be gone again but if you have a very fast sensor and you think, oh yeah, that was a person you also have to look at the application. It's not in a shopping center that somebody comes in and then a half second is gone again. So that must be a misread somewhere from the sensor, and that's how you very cleverly can filter how sensors should work, and I think that that's why we really make them for the, we call retail environment. That's our main application area, and if you want to use it in other areas there, it will work as well, but retail is just a very harsh environment where it should always work. Are these devices that you're somewhat buying off the shelf, so to speak, or are you pretty much going down to the wood and designing these from scratch and sourcing the different components and maybe designing your own PCB and so on?  Hubert van Doorne: Yeah, it's a good question. All PCB design is completely done by ourselves, but the actual sensor is often a technology that we use. It's a standard chipset a

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT There are not a lot of companies that have been involved in what we now call digital signage for 44 years, but Videotel has been selling technology that puts marketing information on screens since 1980. The company started with VCRs (younger readers may have to Google that) and then started designing, manufacturing and selling DVD players that, unlike consumer devices, would happily play out a set of repeating video files for weeks, months and years. Back in the days before fast internet connections, cloud computing and small form factor PCs, that's how a lot of what we now know as digital signage was done. About 14 years ago, the San Diego-area company added dedicated, solid state digital signage media players - and that product line has steadily grown to include networked and interactive versions. The company also now has interactive accessories for stuff like lift and learn, and directional speakers that help drive experiences in everything from retail to museums. I had a good conversation with Lisa Schneider, who runs sales and marketing, and Travis McMahand, Videotel's CTO. We get into the company's roots, the evolution to solid state media players, and how Videotel successfully competes with $400 and higher players, when at least part of the buyer market seems driven mostly by finding devices that are less than $100. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Thank you for joining me. Can you introduce yourselves and tell me what Videotel is all about?  Lisa Schneider: Yes, absolutely. Hello, Dave. Thank you for having both Travis and me today. We appreciate it. My name is Lisa Schneider and I am the executive vice president for sales and marketing for our company, Videotel Digital. We were founded in 1980. Gosh, it's been almost 44 years now, back when we were manufacturing top-loading VCRs, that went into industrial-grade DVD players, and now in the last 14 years, we are manufacturing digital signage media players. We have interactive solutions that include various sensors like motion sensors, proximity sensors, and weight sensors. We've got mechanical LED push buttons and touchless IR buttons and RFID tags, and things like that that create interactive displays. We also provide directional audio speakers. We have various form factors for all types of projects, and then we also have Travis on the line with us. I'll let Travis introduce himself.  Travis McMahand: Oh, hi, I'm Travis McMahand I am the CTO of Videotel Digital.  Where's the company based? Is it in San Diego?  Lisa Schneider: Yes, we are in, it's San Diego. It's actually Chula Vista, borderline San Diego. So in California.  San Diego area.  Lisa Schneider: Yes, San Diego area. Beautiful San Diego.  So I've been aware of your company forever and going all the way back to the days when you were doing industrial grade, commercially oriented DVD players. In the early days of digital science before things were networked, that's what people were using and if you used a regular DVD player or even a VCR or something like that, the thing was really not set up to play over and over again if you were using just like a consumer-grade device. So the whole idea was you were, you guys developed commercial-grade versions that were rated to last, for days, weeks, months, years. Is that accurate?  Lisa Schneider: Yes, that is accurate, and it was, that was our flagship product back in the day. That was because we made a truly industrial-grade player and it would auto power on, auto seamlessly loop and repeat without any manual interaction, even without a remote. So it was a looping player.  We actually still have three different types of industrial-grade DVD players that we still offer. They're actually really popular in healthcare facilities because they are specifically UL-approved for medical DVD players still, and they are still out there and, we are still producing them.  The attraction for that at the time was that just the absence of really networked media players unless you were quite sophisticated and were using big box PCs and everything else, I assume that market with the exception of what you’re saying about Hospitals is largely gone away? Lisa Schneider: It hasn't been, for example, like sometimes with waiting rooms, people are still using DVDs for movies, for entertainment purposes, not just in healthcare. Sometimes there are still people who are self-burned content for museums. It's just simple for them to just throw the disc in and then they walk away and it just continuously loops. So they're still out there.  It's not completely gone away and we are one of the only ones left though that is still really providing the industrial grade DVD players. You said about 14 years ago, you got into digital signage media players that were not based on DVDs, it was based on hard drives or solid-state storage. Lisa Schneider: Yes, we started with solid state media players that were just simply looping off of an SD card or USB, no network connection, none of the fancy stuff, and that was really kind of the migration from the DVD, because people didn't want to use DVDs anymore. They just wanted to upload their content, do the same thing, load them, and go. So we probably still have a few versions of just solid-state players. That's how we entered the market. But one of the really cool things we did was we made one of them interactive, which, that's where we come into the interactive solutions, which we can talk about too.  The primary products that you have now are network-connected, right? Lisa Schneider: We have both. We still have solid-state digital signage players, for those simple needs, and then we do have networked players as well.  I'm thinking there's an awful lot of cases like retail marketing for brands for product launches and things like that, where, yes, you could use a network digital signage player, but it's loading up a set of files at the start and that's really all it's ever going to use, right?  Lisa Schneider: Yes, that's a lot of the use cases, where they just want to upload the content and let it go but there are obviously use cases where the content is ever-changing and they can push out content on our remote players, network players, via quick push. Do you have device management? Will you know what's going on with these devices, as they're out in a big box or whatever?  Lisa Schneider: Yes, one of our new player, we actually just did a press release on it for our VP92 4K network player. It will allow customers to use our free embedded software on the player that will allow them to push out the content remotely and that they can see what is being played in the various locations, wherever the box is deployed to, and then if it's just a single unit or hundreds of units if it's up in the thousands, then we recommend our cloud-based CMS software where they can manage, do all the management within the software itself. So you have your own software, but I'm assuming you're not selling yourself as a software company?  Lisa Schneider: No, we are not selling ourselves as a software company. We have hardware and then we have various software options. But it is embedded in the players to make it extremely simple to use. And it's tuned specifically for your devices.  Lisa Schneider: Correct. Yes.  Can a third-party CMS company, a CMS software company use your boxes?  Lisa Schneider: Travis that might be a good question for you to answer.  Travis McMahand: That's a possibility. We design our players to be simple and reliable. We don't make it so difficult to set up a program, so in doing that, we've hidden or disabled, certain features within the operating system. But we can still work with companies if they have a specific application or service that they want to use. We can definitely work with companies to try to make that happen.  Okay, so I guess a scenario would be something like a retailer or even a brand that has networks in stores and is using a CMS for the big displays for retail marketing and they say, we would like to use your stuff for the interactive or whatever, can we use the same platform to manage both of them? Travis McMahand: Yeah, that's a possibility. It goes on a case-by-case basis.  It's not something you're actively marketing, but technically you could do it if it makes sense for both sides, right?  Lisa Schneider: Absolutely, Dave. That's what I'd like to interject. We're open to those conversations with anybody who is interested, especially if it is a larger project is something I would entertain.  The hardware sector has been a tough one for a lot of the companies that have media players, with maybe the notable exception of BrightSign, which has a very big footprint everywhere, but the PC guys in particular, struggled to, in recent years, get relevance, and a lot of that seems to be driven by a race to the bottom to see how low we can go in terms of cost for a media player, and we now have Amazon with a custom build or kind of a stripped-out build of its Fire Sticks that are $99.  Has it been a challenge to compete with that stuff or, do you operate differently or have a different market? Lisa Schneider: That's a great question, and yes, I did see that new Amazon $99 Fire Stick. But we're very unique in a sense where, sure you can purchase a $99 player, but is it really industrial grade? Is it going to seamlessly auto-loop? Is it reliable? Can you connect interactive devices to it? Can you grow within it?  So it is a challenge in some aspects of it. But it seems that the ones that go, the customers that choose that route, end up circling back and they want more. It wasn't enough. The price was good, but then they realized, if we invest a little bit more, we're getting all of these things that we can grow into. And your media playout boxes, they look like they're industrial grade, ruggedized. They've got what looks like heat sinks or

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT One of the particularly interesting things about Outform is how a company that's been doing digital in retail for 20-plus years is not all that well known in digital signage circles. Not that it's hurt the Miami-based company, which has offices and manufacturing facilities all over the world, and has delivered countless tech-centered shopper engagement solutions for some of the world's biggest brands. I'd been operating mostly with the impression that Outform designed nice-looking digital fixtures for retail, but there is a lot more to the company than that. They do the whole nine yards of retail from idea through execution. I had a great chat that could have gone on for a few hours with Outform founder Ariel Haroush. We started with the company's roots and how Haroush kind of fell into scalable digital solutions for retail. We get into how the company works and the state of things like retail media. Then we spend quite a bit of time talking about Haroush's ambitious new venture, called Future Stores. It takes the notion of pop-up stores, and gives it the scale and digital experience demanded by big global brands. The first location opens in central London on October 30th. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Ariel, thanks for joining me. For those who don't know, can you give a rundown of what Outform does and their background?  Ariel Haroush: Outform is a retail marketing company in essence. We've been referred to as an innovation agency because we are very much on the cutting edge of retail, experiential, and innovation in retail. The company does everything from design all the way to execution, which is quite unique because we have the ability to ideate and strategize like a typical agency that you would expect. But we are transitioning seamlessly into the execution room. So everything we ideate, we engineer, we prototype and we manufacture. So while the business has a very, I would say appeal of an agency, we are, in essence, a manufacturer at scale, and we have manufacturing facilities all over the world in three main regions in Europe, in Asia, and in the States alone, we have two manufacturing facilities, both in Chicago and in San Francisco. Did you start as a manufacturer and evolve into an agency or vice versa, or none of the above?  Ariel Haroush: My journey as the founder of Outform was quite unique. My passion for the industry actually started when I watched the movie Back to the Future. I'm sure you remember Marty flying all the way to the future with the DeLorean and then you see this billboard transform into a shark, and I was just mesmerized by it, and there's something in it that made me say, “oh my God, this is what I want to do.”  So when I started my career, I was always very much leaning to the visual aspect of things. I had an office in Times Square and I was looking at all the signage there and I went, geez, why no one is doing it on a commercial level, and that was the seed of founding Outform. So I started really with no manufacturing background, but with a lot of passion towards how spectacular signage should be, and I was able to convince one customer to give me an opportunity. Back in the days it was Siemens and I had done this huge mobile phone replicas in, one of the biggest trade shows called CeBIT and that was an experience, and one thing led to another, the second customer was Samsung, and I was moving from one customer to another, creating those experiences.  As things evolved, one of the biggest opportunities that I've got was a customer, in the United States, in Chicago that said, “Hey, are you doing all this massive, spectacular signage. Would you mind doing something smaller in scale?” I said what do you mean by that? He said, we don't need giant signage. We need something that we can fit into a retail store, and I said, okay, what do you have in mind? He said, I need 20 mobile phone replicas in a size of, not bigger than a meter or three feet. And I said, gee, that sounds like a lot of units, and back in the days I used to do those things in the Philippines, and he called me about two weeks later and he said oh, by the way, it's not 10 units, it's 500, and I was like, what? So the factory owner in the Philippines said, “Hey Ariel, we cannot do 500.” I said, so what do I need to do? He said, you need to fly to China and look for someone to do injection tools for molds.  So I took my backpack and I went into China and the guy called me again and said, it's not 500. It's actually 2000, and I'm like, what's going on? I discovered retail in essence and the scale that you have within retail. That time was actually the launch of the Razor phone. I don't know if you remember that Motorola phone. It was a massive success. I've done, in a period of about, I think it was 12 months, I did 70,000 units that went to every single store globally, because there was just a smart way of how we design it, in a way like it's cutting the ceiling or the wall or the floor. So you just apply it, and it seems like the phone is so sharp that it's cutting whatever surface you place it on. So everyone wanted to have it, and then, I realized retail is where the scale is, and the manufacturing aspect of it is what gives the business model way more substance. So with that in mind, I started to invest in factories, and one thing led to another, and I started to get into a place that, we're now buying factories, and we started to scale the business from there, and here I am today with more than a thousand people at Outform in various regions, doing what I enjoy the most, which is shaping the future of retail. Wow. Maybe there's not a when moment, but, I'm curious how you evolved into doing the agency ideation through the execution side of it as you did these things, you realized, the best people to actually manage this and deploy it and so on are my own people as opposed to trying to sub this out? Ariel Haroush: Part of the journey of working with customers, I worked with a very big tech company in Cupertino and you can guess who, and they were so secretive about everything, and we could not outsource anything in terms of the thinking side of things, and I just needed to bring people in house and I always had a tendency to creative, and I was very involved in that side and one person and then another person, and then you find yourself with a creative team and you start to conceptualize and bring in ideas, and because a lot of the stuff that we do had a highly fused tech integration, we started to create our own kind of R&D team to deal with those things. Many times I face situations where clients come to me and say, " Oh, my agency created this and they could not deliver on that, and we are super disappointed how we can ensure that it's not going to happen with you guys”, and that's always been a differentiator because everything we design we actually do. So we just start building up on those experiences, and one of the things as I built the company that I never really liked when customers or people refer to us as the vendor because the vendor is something very, in essence, commoditized type of a description, right? But I really enjoyed it when I was a partner or an agency, and I invested heavily in that because I felt this is where we create value, and every time I had a conversation with clients, which was on the C-level. It was more about how we can win in retail. It wasn't about how we're going to make it exactly, and what's the engineering and how many screws and the thickness of the material and all that good stuff, it was more about how we can influence the shopper? That's always been the passion. So investing heavily into that, and that was a differentiator for Outfrom, because, in essence, if you think about the industry in a nutshell, and you ask yourself why advertising agencies became so big as they grew, like the Ogilvy, the Y&R, the Saatchi & Saatchi, they had a really unique business model. They competed heavily on the pitch, right? And they put everything in front of it. Design, planners, strategy, and once they win the pitch, in essence, the reward was the media buying. So if you compete on a Coke pitch, you know that they're going to spend 300 million on advertising, which you buy media on and you're getting a commission on that. So that was the scalable business model.  For Outform, it's been the manufacturing side of it. That's the scalable part, but you have to put all the upfront investments to have a seat at the table, and to me, that was a model to replicate. When I look at our industry, it was very fragmented to mostly moms and pops type of operation, and they always looked at it in terms of, “I'm a manufacturer. Tell me what you need to do, and I'll make it for you.”  But that's not really the conversation customers want to have. They want to know how they can best win in retail, and they come into those experts to help them craft the proposition, and when you think about our industry, as it's getting more and more technology fused, you have to rely on people that understand the different disciplines in terms of manufacturing. So it's not just cutting wood or bending metal or using plastic. It's a combination of all of the above, including tech, including data, including how you can learn and optimize your offering as you move forward. So there's just so much built into that, and Outform was very eager to play in that area. Yeah, I've certainly through the years seen no end of companies who manufacture things. They've invented something and they're very proud of their features and specs surrounding that thing, but they go in selling that thing as opposed to, as you were describing, talking about the objective and selling a solution and providing a solution and you can see how the industry has evolved that way and how more and more, particularly large clients who are saying, I don't wa

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT The Outdoor Advertising Association of America represents and guides the interests and activities of some 850 member organizations across the US, including the biggest media companies, brands that do a lot of outdoor, agencies, ad-tech providers, and suppliers. That's billboard, of course, but also the other formats for advertising, from transit shelters to place-based media networks on TVs in venues like bars, clinics and workout studios The OAAA has been around since 1891, and these days is seeing rapid growth for the medium, especially on the digital side. If they're not already doing digital, most OAAA members are going down that path and also adopting technologies like AI. I had a really good chat, about a bunch of things, with Anna Bager - the association's President and CEO. We get into the state of the medium, which is particularly busy because of ALL the money flowing into political advertising. We also touch on issues like a need to simplify the planning, buying and distribution ecosystem, and the OAAA's perspective and activity around something that's huge in other regions like Europe - sustainability. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Anna, thank you for joining me. This is going to be a simple question to start out with, but can you tell me what the OAAA does and why it exists?  Anna Bager: Absolutely, so we are the Out of Home Advertising Association of America and we are what I would call a classic trade association. We focus on two things. We want to protect the industry and we want to grow the industry. So on the protection front, we have a pretty big government affairs unit. We do state and federal lobbying on things that really matter to the industry, such as the First Amendment, anything real estate, infrastructure, and the Highway Beautification Act, which controls the number of signs or at least roadside that you can have in the US and privacy is another area that we're increasingly interested in privacy and data regulation. Keeping an eye on what's happening, making sure that there are no laws that don't work well for the industry that is being passed or hopefully not, and, also looking for opportunities, where we can, as an industry where we can maybe benefit from some of the legislation and more things that are happening in DC or state level that can work well for the industry.  So that's one part lobbying and government affairs and a lot of legal operations, and then the other part is the growth side, and for that, we do research on behalf of the industry. We do a lot of promotion of the industry at our own events or other events. We're out there talking to advertisers and brands about why they should be. Spending more money, and investing more out-of-home, and then we create guidelines, standards, and frameworks that help the industry operate better and make it easier to buy and sell. I think that sums it up.  It’s a member organization?  Anna Bager: It's a member organization. We are the largest out-of-home association, I think, in the world, actually. We have probably close to 800 members and pretty much everyone who is in the out-of-home industry in the US and some other international members.  So this would be Lamar all the way down to an almost hyper-local kind of media owner? Anna Bager: It would definitely be but it could also be a gas station TV. It could be a cinema. It could be Airports and transit, so we cover it all. It's not just the roadside, it's all the different formats.  Is there a cutoff? I'm curious about some of what they call faster consumer TV networks like Atmosphere and Loop and so on that are in bars and it's a streaming app. Anna Bager: They are members too. Okay, so where would you cut it off?  Anna Bager: I don't cut it off. I think we welcome anyone as a member if they're in out-of-home advertising, which is, we're called out-of-home, but if I had been the one to take a pick, I probably would have called it location-based media because that's really what we are, right? Wherever there is signage or any type of ad that's there because of the location, and the context that is there it seems to be a good place to reach consumers or business people because they're there at that time and they might be receptive to a message. So anyone who's in that could be retail media networks. It could be retail organizations, could be place-based. It could be a point of care, like doctor's offices, but we typically don't have those companies as members, but they could be. Also, one thing that I think is common for most of our members is that we're one too many advertisers. We're not targeting individuals so it can be seen by many. So anyone who's doing that could be a member of the OAAA.  You mentioned retail media networks. I was going to ask about that later, let's get into it. You mentioned it. I'm curious because of the rise of that and how you're starting to see more and more activity around the in-store piece of it and not just the online and mobile parts. Are they different budgets?  Anna Bager: I think so. I think it depends. It's certainly a growth opportunity for the industry. Retail in general is taking place in a store, a lot of it online, but you have to get people there or you have to get them interested. You also may want to amplify a message before they're in the store, you want to serve them an offer and that's where we can come in.  The retail media networks themselves, buy a lot of media also on behalf of their advertisers. So it could be a Coca-Cola, right? They buy media for them. I think that out-of-home is a natural part of media that you should buy to create the most bang for the buck for a company, it's not just in the stores, it's everything around and creates an audience extension, et cetera. So there might be other budgets. It's definitely a different type of buyer, but I think we're uniquely positioned and I think we play an important role in the world of retail media, reaching consumers on the go or even at home.  I think what these networks have can be very useful, especially now that out-of-home has become more digital and you can increasingly use data and target in a very different way and also change out messages really fast. These guys have first-party data, from loyalty programs or consumers basically leaning in and allowing them to use their data and the ability to then use that data on the knowledge of where consumers might be or on the go, or, the interest they might have and use contextual and location-based advertising makes it just so much better. I think it's a great match. The ability to use the data to do that.  So what's the state of being out-of-home at this point? In your keynote, which I think was for your annual conference, you talked about double-digit growth.  Anna Bager: Yeah, I mean out-of-home has had an interesting journey since the pandemic. Before that, we were growing very steadily every year, then obviously we had a dip in the pandemic and then we had an amazing year in 2022, where I think out-of-home were faster than any other ad media. And since then, it's been steadily going up. This year is particularly interesting. There's a lot going on. We have an election that's coming up that's driving a lot of ad dollars and also not just ad dollars into out-of-home, but also into other media where other brands then look for a positioning somewhere else. So there's just a lot of movement in the market right now. It’s an economy that hopefully will start growing again. So it's been a good year. We keep growing and I think next year is going to be hopefully even better than this year.  And does digital now represent the overall kind of installed base and also a percentage of overall revenue? Anna Bager: Digital is interesting. So I think it's probably around 30 percent of all the installed base, but it's close to half of the revenue and most of the growth is coming from digital, so definitely an area that the industry is investing in and I want to keep moving forward.  Is it harder and harder to sell static? Anna Bager: No, I don't think so. I think it's just really easy to sell digital. I think you can still sell static. Static has a lot of benefits too. You have a message up for a very long time, right? It's very sturdy and you know that it works and then again, you put a billboard up, for example, it's going to be there for 30 or more days. So It's the same message that just is engraved in the sense of a little bit of a mini landmark, right? So static works really well too and for certain types of advertisers. It's absolutely key. But obviously digital has the ability to switch out content fast, use data, and do some interesting creative executions too because it's a huge growth area for us. We talked about retail media before the ability, you can do that with static too, and you can get static up fast today, but the ability to include out-of-home in more of an omnichannel media mix, it's far greater over digital because it's just there. You can just kind of plug it in. Is efficiency the big attraction? The fact that you can book something very rapidly.  Anna Bager: For digital? It all depends on the goals of the advertiser. Obviously, to be able to get a message up really fast is important. Also, to be able to switch out a message really fast, if you need to, is important. The ability to again, be able to use data. If it's raining or if it's sunshine or if there's a specific event going on that day or in that place or in that moment, you can use that knowledge to put up better ads, but it's also sometimes, the creative opportunities you have with digital can allow you to do really cool things. Anything spectacular and amorphic, brands love that, right? That's mostly digital. So there are just so many different things you can do. It all depends on what the advertiser wants to achieve.  You mentioned anamorphic, the idea of

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT When I was buzzing around the InfoComm trade show earlier this year, I stopped at one stand for a chat, looked at the next stand over, and saw some familiar faces from Poppulo - the rebranded name for a company long known in digital signage industry circles as Four Winds Interactive. I went over and got caught up on what the company was up to and why it was showing at InfoComm, as I had grown in recent years to regard Poppulo - right or wrong - as being primarily focused on omnichannel workplace communications. I was mostly wrong, though I think it is fair to say that in the wake of a private-equity backed merger of Four Winds with an Irish company that did employee communications, there was marketing more noise for at least a while on the workplace side. David Levin, the co-founder and longtime CEO of Four Winds, stepped back from that role almost a year ago now, and I had been wanting to do a podcast with new CEO Ruth Fornell, whose background was well  outside the signage and workplace comms industries. After a preliminary chat, and me saying I'd poke away at her about digital signage stuff, she suggested I'd be in better hands with Joe Giebel, who has been with the company almost 20 years and is its Senior VP of Digital Signage. Joe and I get into a bunch of things in our chat, including the journey of blending technologies and culture, and the shifting needs and profiles of customers. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Joe, nice to catch up with you. It's been a while. Can you tell me what your role is at Poppulo?  Joe Giebel: Yeah, absolutely. My current role is Senior Vice President of Digital Signage, which is a fresh title for me. I'm coming out as a vice president of sales for America's role, where I've been fortunate to lead a number of our sales teams. For those who don't know Poppulo, there, a lot of the digital signage folks will probably know you or know the company more as Four Winds Interactive, but that changed, what about five, six years ago now?  Joe Giebel: That's right. I think we did that in 2021. So not too long ago, but, yeah, let me give a little bit of a history.  Four Winds Interactive was founded in 2005 as a digital signage company and remains so, but right around 2020, we started looking at different opportunities to enhance our offering, and made a couple of acquisitions. One of those was a company called Poppulo, which was the best-in-class enterprise, internal communications tool. So we brought them into the mix and when we did that, we started to look at the names, like how do we go to market and how do we want to do business as, and so we started doing market studies and it turns out that the name Poppulo, which loosely comes from a Latin term for the term “people” resonated and we decided to change the name to Poppulo. Four Winds Interactive serves as a parent company. We do business as Poppulo and the name Four Winds Interactive was always interesting and people wanted to know what's the origin of that name and its significance, and there wasn't a big story there. So I think we were open to considering a new brand and look and feel, and that's the story, Dave.  Yeah, if we go way, way back to almost 20 years ago, Four Winds kind of got its start with those little semi-electronic touch panels that you would play back samples of music, right? Joe Giebel: That is correct, and they were dealing with specialty media. So there was a company called, Four Winds Trading. That company was dealing with specialty media and a lot of it had to do with native tribes. So the Four Winds related there a little bit more. During that business, they started to think about how do we get loyalty around the distribution of our media titles and different things that we're distributing, and of course, screens were new at the time and media in an interactive format is very engaging, and so they were looking at how we merchandise this with technology?  And out of that was born the concept of digital signage and Four Winds Interactive. You go back, I believe right to the beginning to the rented mansion house in downtown Denver, right?  Joe Giebel: I actually predated the mansion where we had a corner of the warehouse, for our sister company, in Arvada, Colorado, and, yeah, that was in 2005. I think I was certainly a single digit, I think I was the fifth employee in the company and I got to be there from the beginning and started to see what markets will digital signage be valuable in and, where should we target people and it was an incredible time.  So if we go to today, I bumped into the Poppulo stand at Infocomm, and admittedly, and I said it at the time, I was kind of surprised to see the folks there because you being a little bit absent, I would say from the trade show circuit, or at least from the circuit that a lot of the other CMS software companies show at, so it struck me as almost like the company was getting back into digital signage a little more seriously, but I was told, and I suspect you'll say the same thing that no, we never left.  It's just that, maybe we're kind of amping up marketing again.  Joe Giebel: Yeah, I would agree with that, we never left. When we went through our acquisition period, we had a lot of great new tools and we were looking at how do we adjust what we're putting to the market and what are the right arenas to play in. Distracted is not the right word, but it's probably close. We were dealing with a lot of things and not to lie about trade shows following the pandemic. We're a little bit quieter and I think potentially we were being smart with our budget and certainly had some areas to apply it.  We missed the trade show circuit, and this year, we're jumping back into it and it feels good.  My impression, and you can correct me was post-acquisition of Poppulo and kind of merging the companies. It seemed reflected in part in online marketing and so on, or what I would hit on the website that you were focusing more on workplace experience and, maybe not making as much noise around digital signage, perhaps because that was established. Joe Giebel: Yeah, we brought in these new channels. We started to look at the workplace and the way we communicate with employees in a broader sense, and I think you could look at one of our major focus areas is the workplace and employee experience, and we started to say: as the world moves to remote work, and then we've kind of swung back to hybrid, and it looks like, there have been some big splashes in a full return to office by some major organizations, digital signage was a channel that we think is extremely effective in pushing a message, but we wanted to be able to reach people in more ways, and we do that now through a multi-channel approach, which includes the ability to reach employees by email, the ability to land messaging and collaboration tools, and still maintain the scale and governance that you want from an enterprise tool. So I'd say we're multi-channel. Digital signage is near and dear to my heart, and I think we're about to see a major pushback into how we drive that employee experience through digital displays, as more and more people come back to the office, it becomes a mandate.  Was it a little worrisome because of the whole idea of, okay, everybody's just going to work, from home from now on and I saw lots of software companies doing the equivalent of desktop screensavers, ways to push messaging to people who are now working at home instead of coming into an office.  So did you guys have to kind of look at things and go, okay, this could be a problem if we're not kind of broadening our offer? Joe Giebel: I think we saw an opportunity and, one, we saw an opportunity to make the digital signage for those frontline workers and the people that didn't have that option to go home even stronger, and at the same time we always had that question. How do we better engage people who aren't in the offices where we are putting our displays, maybe their field workers, maybe they travel constantly, or maybe they work from home? I think that really brought it to the forefront. Luckily, we were in the process of figuring out how to extend or create extensibility within the platform, ahead of everybody leaving office buildings. So we felt like we had a good foot forward, and we're all in on how to provide the best possible platform to reach your audience now. I struggle to say we're entirely workplace-focused because we also have a lot of people doing customer-facing things. So it truly is understanding your audience, what are the things you want to enable or shape their behavior with and what's the best way to reach them, we really want to be that platform for our clients and it's about value, you know, what is it you hope to affect or inform and what's the best way to do it.  When you say customer-facing, how do you define that?  Joe Giebel: Yeah, I need to get information in front of people who may purchase from me or interact with my solution. So I look at my clients and you know the classic use case is a retail environment. Obviously, you've got customers coming through a retail environment. What I don't think always gets thought of is that lobby of big headquarters. Many of our clients are bringing customers and. partners through their spaces that are customer-facing as well or major delivery centers. If you've got people building very expensive items, they often have delivery centers where they bring clients in both pre-sale and post-sale, to understand here's that product you're going to invest in over the next two, three, ten years, through that partnership, and then you look at things like executive briefing centers, very similar.  How do I bring my client base and prospects into an environment where I can show off what we do? In the market, I want to be able to show that in a number of ways. Digital, obviously, is an outs

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Projection has always been something of a fringe player in digital signage because of a series of technical barriers to adoption, most notably the limited operating life of the lamps, and the product and labor costs of switch them out. Laser projection has addressed that issue, but the other one that's harder to conquer is dealing with ambient light. Unless the projector is the size of a fridge, super-bright and seriously expensive, the environment's lights need to be off or dimmed and any windows covered. A startup called Obsidian Screens, based on the fringes of greater Toronto, has developed a projection screen that can show visuals that aren't washed out even with the lights on and the blinds open - and as the brand name suggests, the screens are black instead of white or silver. It's a super-thin laminated material light enough to marry with foam - like a poster with a 1/4-inch foam backing to make it rigid and ready to hang. Co-founder Chris Cavalieri and his business partner use Ambient Light Rejecting technology - something that's been around for years - but have their own "nanofilter" technology that does a better job, he says, of preserving projector brightness and visibility. And just as is the case with LED video walls, the more black on the display surface, the better the contrast. The company has been around for seven years, but remains quite small ... as they have struggled to find the right partners to specify, sells and deploy their tech. They've run into at least a couple of challenges - with end-users who were disappointed by conventional projection set-ups, and pro AV integrators who for logical reasons want to sell systems that cost a lot more and need ongoing paid support and services. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Chris, thanks for joining me. You're based outside of the Greater Toronto Area and you've been working for a few years now on a company called, well, a product called Obsidian. Can you run through all of that for me?  Chris Cavalieri: Sure thing. Thanks for having me, Dave. I really appreciate taking the time to talk about it and boy, do I have lots to say. You have half an hour. Go! Chris Cavalieri: All right. Perfect. No pressure. So Obsidian, I should probably talk a little bit about projection. So what we've been trying to do and we've been doing for a while, is trying to find a way to take all the benefits. So if anyone's in digital signage, I assume there's a few listening to this what incredible things can be done with projection. So things like projection mapping holographic displays, very unique, creative stuff, and it's absolutely fantastic, and when we started out, we looked at things and said, like, why isn't this used more?  You know, we go to retail stores, we're going to shopping centers and there are LEDs, we've got LCD video walls now and only a few set cases, maybe a performance or display are using projection to its full potential and it begs the question is why, and that why is how we found it, our idea of Obsidian, which is to create a solution to get those benefits projection and make it a lot more accessible and practical in place of, or as an option compared to say our elite typical LED signage and LCD video walls.  So, I mean, projection, it's very renovation friendly, it's very scalable, and depending on what projector you use, it can be quite a low cost, the benefits are endless, and compared to LEDs, which are quite glaring, most of the time, I'm biased, obviously, no shame in that, but most people don't want to stare at an LED board as a backing, screen for like a speaker stage, for example, casino games. We've talked to fellows in Vegas before. It causes fatigue for people who are near them for too long. And that's, that comes down to the human eye and there's a whole science behind it, the wavelength of lights and all that. I won't go into it. It works. It's bright. It gets people's attention, but it just doesn't give the same aesthetic as a good projection setup would.  So coming back to it, why don't we use projection? And quite frankly, it's because it mostly just sucks because it fails. You need to have a dark room, dim room, or very well-controlled lighting, and by having controlled lighting and those restrictions, designers or retail commercial designers can't do solutions they want to do where this challenge is like a window nearby and sunlight there are challenges that they can't overcome and maintain a good looking display and that's where LEDs kind of help punch through that.  So the question is what if we had a solution where projection can punch through that can give you those same benefits and versatility, but you can have nearby lights? You don't have to overly control your space. I mean, of course, you can't do shopping in a grocery store with your lights off or a shopping mall. You know, it's not practical. You might be able to do a half-hour show or presentation, but it doesn't make sense, and that's at least my conclusion personally, my experience is why we don't see more of these really cool-looking projection map displays than we do now. It doesn't work in most cases. When it does, it's great, but most of the time it doesn't.  So Obsidian is basically to solve that problem. we've got our own proprietary technology and IP around it, and we've designed a system that harmonizes the projector and the screen, and we include the lighting as well for nearby lighting to essentially use the nanofiller technology to work together and what I mean in a very blunt sense from that is that these systems will work independent of the environment around it. So if people have heard of light rejecting screens, ALR screens essentially you have a gray screen or a silver screen. It'll absorb about 50%-60% percent of your light in the room and that gives you contrast, which is great because it helps you have a more adaptable, flexible display.  What our system does is the same thing, but that absorption, instead of normally it'll absorb your projector. So your white becomes gray, silver, whatever it is. In our case, your projector can shine on the screen and your lights can shine near or on the screen and have no loss, so it will reflect off of it. It keeps its colors, it keeps its white balance, and then the ambient light that is basically using this filter will absorb completely, not just the 60%. Whereas everything else gets knocked down by 50%-60%, and it creates this really neat illusion and really efficient display where fundamentally it's the same as any projection system, but you can see all your colors just popping. You maintain your contrast and your white balance and it's almost like you've doubled the lumens in your projector, and we love this because this opened up an option for again, adding an accessible and affordable solution somewhere between a TV set, and an LED video wall, where again, you can have something that's highly visible. It's got wide viewing angles. It keeps its color resilient, but you can also be adaptive. So again seasonal renovations for a retail environment stores, places where you don't really want to control lighting or it's too much work to deal with it. Plus you can install the thing in under a day. I mean, we've hung screens in under an hour compared to perhaps weeks on a video wall. So maintenance costs and benefits are endless.  So that was our goal with Obsidian again. What is holding it back from creating unique creative solutions? And how do we overcome that in this nanofilter system? And I think most people are afraid of it because it wasn't easy to develop and there are restrictions to it. Again, it's got to work as a cohesive system, that scared people and got a lot of resistance, but boy, does it work.  You're an engineer. I'm absolutely not. For simpletons like me, the simpleton explanation would be that instead of this being a white or silver screen, it's a black screen, correct? Chris Cavalieri: It is a black screen. So if you turn your projectors off and look at it, it'll look kind of a charcoal gray, maybe a little bit of a greenish tint to it, and you know, that's kind of like a decorative wall panel, and that's what it looks like. That's what it is, and that's because the light is bouncing off, it's still being absorbed. Their eyes don't have the nano filters in them. If you wear polarized sunglasses, you might, it might be interesting but that's essentially what's going on there. So it is indeed a dark-colored screen.  When you describe it as a system, you're talking about the kit of parts, but your part is the screen. The challenge with projection and the reason. It wasn't it hasn't really grown very much in digital science or anywhere else used to be with the projector and the lamp life and how you'd have to replace it all the time and it was unreliable and also that it wasn't very bright. Lasers have changed that. other technologies have improved. So that side is somewhat conquered. However, if you want a very bright projector, you're getting something the size of an Austin Mini. But, the screen thing is still by and large a white screen, right? Or film that you apply to a window glass that will make an image appear, but it's not very sharp or bright, I mean.  Chris Cavalieri: Exactly. I mean, that's the only solution people had to date is to get a bigger projector, and what's really unique about using our nano filter technology is you don't need a brighter projector to achieve the same result as you would. So there's almost a savings. I mean, I don't want to just say upfront savings, there is maintenance still involved, laser projectors have been a huge benefit to the industry on that front. They still need to be replaced eventually. But by using these filters and creating this super high-efficiency system effectively, it's not just the screen, it's the pairing of the projector and the scre