Episodes
Wednesday Nov 02, 2022
Giles Corbett, Cloudshelf
Wednesday Nov 02, 2022
Wednesday Nov 02, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
A UK start-up called Cloudshelf has come up with an accessible, heavily-automated and simple platform that helps small, mainly local retailers offer the same kinds of interactive display tools in their stores as deeper-pocketed and more heavily resourced major retailers.
The company has written code that crawls and analyzes local retail sites on Shopify's vast e-commerce platform and produces interactive experiences that are a lot more than just the online site on a screen in the store - something we've all seen and rolled our eyes at. In this case, it is curated and stylized to look and work like an in-store interactive site produced by a digital agency - probably for a lot of money.
I spoke with founder Giles Corbett about the origins of his company, how the platform works and is sold, and why the nightmare scenario of retail lockdowns and restrictions through the pandemic actually created something of a perfect storm for Cloudshelf.
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TRANSCRIPT
Giles, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown of what Cloudshelf is all about?
Giles Corbett: Yeah, sure, Dave, with pleasure. First of all, I gotta say it's fantastic to be on the podcast. So Cloudshelf is a really simple idea. We call it in-store eCommerce. Now I bet you and the people listening to this podcast, you've all been into a store at some point, and you've gone in looking for a bike or a pair of jeans or some jewelry and you haven't found what you were looking for and you left the store disappointed. It turns out this issue of walkouts costs physical stores a trillion dollars a year. So it's a big issue, and that's just the immediate loss of sales, without even talking about all of the dissatisfaction, et cetera that it causes later on.
Now, being such a big issue, it turns out that some of the most successful retailers worldwide have built solutions to go and bring digital experiences in-store that can alleviate this issue. But what Cloudshelf does is it takes this idea and just using an AI-driven platform immediately makes it available to even smaller or independent retailers that don't have the unlimited means or the technical knowledge of some of these super retailers and these retailers can very simply set up Cloudshelf in a matter of minutes and get fantastic digital in-store experiences, either interactive experiences or display experiences that help them sell more and close more sales in the store. That's what it's about.
So how this would manifest itself in a store, a physical store, would it be some sort of a touch screen kiosk screen, whether it's on a counter or free-standing, or perhaps mounted on a wall?
Giles Corbett: Dave, all of those. It's always using some form of digital display, and Cloudshelf can operate either on interactive touch screens that you're describing, or it can even be on display-only screens. I'll talk about those maybe a bit later on. But indeed, typically retailers will have a kiosk that could, maybe imagine a fashion store with a small jewelry range and on the jewelry counter, you go and see a beautiful screen that's showing off in a stunning way all of the available jewelry, and you go and see the small range on display and you maybe you can't find exactly what you're looking for and the screen next to it will say, discover the rest of our jewelry range. You touch it, you can find what you're looking for, and even buy it directly off the screen.
Now this is different though and I wrote about this recently, how I walked around the National Retail Federation Show and saw some eCommerce companies at that time. This is going back 3- 5 years, basically pushing their websites and their online presence to an in-store screen, but not changing anything. It was just The eCom site on a computer terminal, basically in the store, and from my perspective, that wasn't enough.
I'm very old and I go back to the starting days of the internet and online news sites were filled with what was called shovelware, basically shoveling content from another medium onto a smaller screen and saying, we're done, and it looked like that. You're saying this is different, right?
Giles Corbett: Yeah, putting your website on a screen in the store is a really bad idea. You wouldn't expect to go and find your website just running as it is on a desktop, or on a mobile phone.
Similarly, as a customer, you do not want to go and see the website running on a screen when you go into a store. If I go into a store and the retailer says, oh, I'm sorry, I can't help you. It's on the website. Please take a look at it. I'm thinking, hang on, why did I even bother walking into the store in the first place? Now the whole point is to go and create digital experiences that complement the magic, the delight of being in a store. You go into a store because you think that the person who's there is actually going to advise you on the best shirt that looks the best on you, or the bike that's the best for the kind of road that you want to go on, or whatever it may be. You want that level of advice, of contact, of engagement, and therefore you want a digital experience that complements that, and that's what Cloudshelf does.
If you just put the website there, it fails miserably. Look, I will give you a really obvious example. Go into a clothes store and you have jeans, you have shirts, you have ties, you have suits, etc. If you've gone in wanting to buy jeans, you've gone up to the jeans area and you've had a look, you expect the screen next to that area to go and show you about jeans, not to go and show you that if you happen to be on the third floor of the store, you could also go and get swimwear or whatever it may be. So it's the idea of having this effectively interactive visual merchandising next to the product, and you want something that enhances that in-store experience, and that's what this is doing, and then there are a whole bunch of other reasons why it's different to the website. For instance, it knows a device it's on so that when you go and buy something, it knows which store it came from. It makes sure that you don't have to enter any personal information onto the device itself. If I was to go on the website and I wanted to buy something in the store, I need to go and type my credit card number into that tablet or that website, that would be crazy. So it does away with all of that, and it does a whole bunch of other things too.
So the premise here is that you can take an already built and managed and populated eCommerce website from a cloud platform and largely automate and push a version of it, a curated version of it, to smaller screens without having to hire an interactive agency and have a 6-12 month project on a possibly a six figure budget to put it all together, right? You can do this pretty inexpensively and easily?
Giles Corbett: That is a perfect summary. So indeed, we start with the existing eCommerce website. Why? Because for most retailers, that has now become the biggest repository they have of visual assets, product descriptions, et cetera. So that's what we use as a starting point, and just imagine if you're a retailer, you've invested a lot in your online website. It's fantastic if you can just reuse that automatically to go and create all of these in-store displays, so you're spot on.
If you happen to be, for instance, a Shopify retailer, you simply add the Cloudshelf app. It analyzes all of the products that you have, and it says, what kind of a display do you want to create? “I wanna create one for trousers or jeans, menswear, whatever…” You want to say what it is, it will then go and propose all of the products to go and put into it, and it will go and create that. You then say which screen you want it to go on, and it displays that on the screen. It updates whenever you update the website. It chooses all of the best-looking images so that you don't need to go and go through and select them all independently. It does the whole thing in under five minutes from beginning to end.
So you would have templates, I would assume that would be the wireframes to do this in different ways?
Giles Corbett: Yeah, absolutely. You could choose a number of parameters around how you want to go and lay it out, but you don't have to. You can just click ‘Create a Cloudshelf’ and it's there within seconds and then you wanna go and tune it, sure, you can tune it.
Do you find if people are doing the kind of click-and-forget thing where it's just gonna create something that they're fine with that? Or do they want to tweak it?
Giles Corbett: They definitely want to go and tweak elements that are key to their visual branding, so brand colors, logos, fonts, and things like that, and most of them will do that.
But then what is amazing is they can just about forget about it because after that, whenever they do an update to their website, it is carried through and it's there and it's intelligently displayed. They go and put on promotional sales and it is carried through to their Cloudshelf automatically. So once they've spent maybe 5-10 minutes doing those initial branding choices, then the whole thing just runs.
And that's because you're working at an API level with the eCommerce platform?
Giles Corbett: Absolutely. So a big part of what Cloudshelf does is an incredibly powerful backend sync engine that just manages the analysis, and synchronization, checking all of the retailers that are live on the platform.
And you've integrated first by the sounds of it, with Shopify, and Shopify gives you a vast audience, correct?
Giles Corbett: Shopify gives us pretty fantastic API access. It gives us a vast audience and it gives us a growing audience. So what we see in all of the countries in which we started operating is that more and more of the retailers who maybe were using another solution are moving over to Shopify, and one of the things they love about Shopify is the ecosystem of apps that enable them to go and find exactly the solution they were looking for to address their issues. So for us, Shopify has been a great place to start and learn.
It seems to me Shopify was noodling this, going back four or five years ago at NRF and some other eCommerce companies as well, why wouldn't they do their own as opposed to partnering with you?
Giles Corbett: You know what? I think you are right that Shopify is going to be looking more and more at this. In their recent declarations, they were really promoting in-store being the next growth vector for them suggesting that this is an area that they will be looking at. And you know what, when they do, I think they'll come up with something that'll no doubt be absolutely fine.
But if you want to have the very best solution, it's gonna be Cloudshelf because we are the team that's just dedicated to this area of work and development.
Yeah I've been involved in digital signage for more than 20 years now, and I've seen all kinds of very large, well-funded, deeply experienced companies get into digital signage, but, only kind of sorta, and it's a skunkworks operation. I'm thinking about past iterations of Cisco and Google and companies like that, and they're just not fully engaged and therefore the products are never all that robust. It's just like, “There, we did it!”
Giles Corbett: Yeah, I think there's a bit of that, and let's go back to what Shopify is doing. They're clearly promoting and investing in their POS and making it better and better. They are going to spend time on this but we are at a slightly different segment where this intersection of digital signage, which is about beautiful displays, and eCommerce, which is all about driving transactions and this space that we've created for in-store eCommerce is all about the union of those two worlds.
Yeah, I would imagine you had to spend a lot of time thinking about the user experience, how it looks to people walking up to it, how they're gonna navigate it, and so on because it's not the same as sitting at a desktop or monkeying around on your tablet to shop.
Giles Corbett: Absolutely. To begin with, it's a public screen, so the kind of information that you'd expect your phone to know or that you'd be willing to type into your phone, you do not want to be entering onto a public screen, so you need to have all of the handoff, the seamless handoff between what happens on the public screen and then what you complete to finalize the transaction on your private phone, and that is a completely novel experience.
When you're working with a big eCommerce platform like Shopify, were you just working basically tapping into their API and developing something, or were there sit-down meetings with Shopify folks saying, “Here's what we wanna do, here's what we need from you” and they were, in turn, asking you how we manage security and all those things?
Giles Corbett: It's a very interesting question, Dave. When we first spent some months actually prototyping all of this solution as a private app, something that was still allowed on Shopify in the early days, we were trying all of this stuff out and iterating like crazy with retailers. And then at one point we went to Shopify and said, listen, this is our idea, this is what we wanna do, this is what we want to launch, and they were scratching their head saying, “Hang on, we don't really understand. Is this POS or is it eCommerce? Where does it sit?”
We said no. This is new. This is different. This is taking somebody's website and making it so that it renders and uses beautifully in their store, and so at first, there was some confusion on their side about where does this fit? And then the more we engaged, the more enthusiastic they became, and they've been fantastically helpful at giving us feedback and advice on a bunch of things.
Do you have the back end sorted out as well? One of the things that I said to some of the companies when I was walking around NRF and they were showing this core idea was, what about device management? How do you know if the screen's active and working properly and so on, and they looked at me like I had three heads, it just had not occurred to them.
Giles Corbett: Dave, in a past life, I was running from West London, a network of 15,000 connected devices in, I think it was 350 cities in China and so yeah, we learned everything we needed to learn about monitoring devices.
You have been through the wars.
Giles Corbett: Big time. Anyway, what I'd say is that if you go and look at the Cloudshelf code base, the bit that we call the engine, the bit that displays on the screens is probably well under 20% of the code base. The backend and all of the management tools are where all of the cleverness is.
Yeah, that's an interesting comment because I've said so many times to people that getting media to play out on a screen is a technical challenge, but it's minor compared to all the work needed to keep the stuff playing on the screen reliably and manage it.
Giles Corbett: Yeah, indeed. Retailers are using Cloudshelf because they want to enhance the in-store experience. You do not enhance the in-store experience by having a blue screen.
Yeah, definitely. So where did this idea come from? I was looking at your LinkedIn background and your previous company was Ksubaka and it seemed to be about interactive in retail as well.
Giles Corbett: Yeah, so my background has always been around stuff that drives or is driven by end-user engagement. So it started off with mobile games, and then from mobile games, we thought about how we can use games to go and drive engagements in stores next to products, and would that be the beginning of a fantastic media platform.
And that's what Ksubaka was all about, and we developed that extensively in China, and then that sort of stayed in China, and we'd started developing extensions from what we are doing Ksubaka in the UK and in France, and we were supporting big retailers such as Tesco, Marks & Spencers, Next, and some others. And then the pandemic hit and Every single one of our retail clients closed down in literally a two or three week period, and that gave us an opportunity to think, reflect, go work on some of the back projects that we hadn't had time to work on, and while that was happening, there were two things that happened that I found absolutely fascinating.
First, we just became more and more aware of all of the small independent retailers around us who had closed their stores putting big signs in the window saying, “Come onto our website…” and they were all, every single one of them moving onto Shopify. So we started looking into Shopify a lot more and discovered that maybe there was something there. But you know what, the second thing that was really interesting is that all the way leading up to the pandemic, there'd been this kind of belief that all retail inexorably moving online. That basically, once a consumer had bought something online, that was it. They weren't going back into a store.
Now in the UK, we are blessed with a lot of very impressive real-time statistics by organizations such as The ONS and they track all of the online and offline sales for the last five years, they've been showing quarter after quarter increase in the share of online, and by the time we hit the pandemic, online in the UK was way above what it was in the US. It was like 24% to 25% of all consumer spending was taking place online. We hit the pandemic and that number goes through the roof, 38%. McKinsey publishes its sort of big report about how basically online has just stepped forward 10 years in two months, and that's it. It's a point of no return, and then the first lockdown ended and it was really puzzling. We saw all of the stores around us fill up, and we started looking at the statistics and the share of online fell back to what it was just before that first lockdown. Now we had lockdown two and lockdown three, and each time the same thing happened: online shot up, but by the end of lockdown, online collapsed back to the level it was at before.
All of these consumers had found out how to go and buy their jeans or their milk or whatever it was online, but yet when the stores reopened, not for all of those purchases, but for many of them, they decided to go back into the store. Now, that told us for the first time that there was absolute proof that something we'd always believed was true, and that in the future, retail was going to be something that would be completely hybrid. It was gonna be, yes, a lot of it online, but also a lot of it in-store, and the stores that would survive were gonna be those that would've invested cleverly, smartly in the digital experience to make sure that the in-store experience was outstanding and that became our customer base, and they were the people that we started targeting. So all of those things happened, and then a third thing happened. The third of my two things.
And that was the emergence of hybrid working. So initially full remote, then hybrid, and the bet that we took there was never gonna go away, that we would all spend more time working from home or elsewhere, but basically not from the city center than we had done before the pandemic, and that meant that there would need to be a shift in the fabric of retail and the structure of high streets around where people lived and that as there were many more places where people lived than their worst city centers, stores, brands, retail units would have to be smaller, and if they were gonna be smaller, then they'd need more digital to be able to offer the same range of services. And therefore our bet is that we are absolutely in line with all of those trends happening simultaneously. People are moving to Shopify, independent retailers, or retailers in general, learning how to go and digitize, and consumers wanting to go and shop more locally, and that's why we think this opportunity of in-store eCommerce is so exciting.
Yeah, there's certainly been a lot of chatter about the idea that larger stores, like big boxes and so on, would increasingly become showrooms where you could go in and have a look at something, but then you can order online or whatever, and I would imagine that it extends itself down to even small businesses who can expand their product range without expanding their footprint.
Giles Corbett: Dave, it is fascinating. I was with the owner of a small independent store yesterday called Cherry Moon, and she's got a beautiful selection of designer clothes, and she has these two tables in the middle of the store that has beautiful jewelry by two designers and she was saying that the issue is that many of these pieces are unique or in very small quantities, and the designers can't afford to put all of their stock there in that one stop, so that means that they then can't exhibit it elsewhere, and all of a sudden, what Cloudshelf was helping her do was give these designers the ability to go and sell their entire range in her store without needing to commit all of the stock. And that idea is one that we've seen time and time again.
I was in a meeting this morning with a retailer we're rolling out with this week, and they have five of their own stores. They have 12,000 SKUs and they have 200 stockers, and their issue has always been being their website is ahead of their stockers, who go and see the website as taking business away from them. And yet with Cloudshelf, it completely turns the whole story around because now they can go and have Cloudshelf presenting all 12,000 SKUs in these small stockers with the stocker knowing that if somebody goes and buys a product via the Cloudshelf, it will be allocated back to their store and they will go and get the same benefit from it as though they'd actually sold the product physically from within the store without having had to hold the stock. Now, that's a pretty amazing proposition, both for the brand and for the retailer.
So you're rolling out with a customer right now. Where are you at? In reading some of the PR, it indicated you went through a series of trials, the company is not that old, and you went through a series of trials in London and Paris and are now deploying. So you're obviously past the testing stage and getting into operational mode.
Giles Corbett: Yeah, so we are 18 months old. We started off with a small group of retailers that we called basically friends for life, pilot retailers, and the deal for them was that they'd get Cloudshelf for free forever, they just needed to go and give us feedback on a weekly basis on how they were using it, how their customers were reacting, what else they wanted to go and see in the product, and we worked with them for a year, basically iterating and improving the product, and then indeed, as you said a few weeks ago, we actually made our app live on Shopify and announced that we were now ready for business and I'm delighted to say that in the short time since then, we've actually had some fantastic successes. So we're going to live in Ireland at the end of this week with two retailers. We're going to live in Scotland also this week. So there's definite movement there.
There's been a lot of interest from many partners in France and we've just kicked off some discussions in Germany, and Dave, I really hope that in the next few months we'll be signing up our first retail networks in the US because this solution really scales and works everywhere.
And Canada where Shopify comes from.
Giles Corbett: And Canada, of course, spot on. Now you know what? To go and help us work out where we needed to target, we built a really nifty tool that we call Store Finder. Basically, I go and put in any address anywhere in the world, and it produces a glorious map of every physical store in that area, and it tells me all of the ones that use Shopify, all the ones that use Salesforce, all the ones that use Magenta, et cetera, to go and power their backend.
So a super useful tool for prospecting. But I can tell you this one thing. Shopify has done incredibly well at promoting itself in its home market because the number of stores in Canada that use Shopify to power their back head is quite phenomenal. So yes, we should definitely be there.
So if I am a digital signage company, and I'm listening to this, and a software provider, and I target retail for, I don't wanna say meat and potatoes, digital signage, but for the other stuff around a store, are you a competitor? Or is there a way to work together? Are their parallel things?
Giles Corbett: Interesting question, Dave. If you happen to be a provider of screens, we are a savior. We are working with a bunch of screen manufacturers and resellers now who basically tell us that when they are selling into retail, oftentimes retailers will come along and say, listen, we want these digital screens, some in store for our merchandising, some in the window, et cetera, and how do we create the content and the digital science company goes, ah, yeah, that's a bit of an issue.
Clearly, with Cloudshelf, we talked a lot about the interactive mode version on the kiosks a few minutes ago. We also have a second version that we called Display Mode. We haven't yet launched Display Mode. We're testing it still with retailers, but it will be launched in the next two, three weeks most likely, and what it does is it does the same kind of clever analysis of your product ranges and imagery, et cetera, as we use on the in interactive mode to go and create fantastic product-oriented visual displays. So you want to go and have something that goes and shows your various product ranges and et cetera in the store window to attract people to come in, Cloudshelf Display Mode will go and do that on the fly.
Now what we find, In the retailers we've been interviewing, is that for a number of them, that's fantastic and that's exactly what they want. But we also find a bunch of them that say you know what, actually we want to go into great videos. We want videos from the brands, et cetera. Now you wanna go and put in some, some simple banners, et cetera, Cloudshelf helps you do that automatically, but you wanna go have a very sophisticated loop with all kinds, other stuff other than relating to the products in the store. Then, you know what? You go and find a digital signage company that can go and helps create the CMS to go manage that loop and Cloudshelf can just come in and be part of that loop. So we're currently working with two CMS providers of digital signage and that's exactly what they plan to be using Cloudshelf for. So they will go and see the retailers. They'll say, listen, you can have the Cloudshelf version or you can have a Cloudshelf version and you can go and slot in, the local news, the Instagram feed, whatever else it is that you want to go and have next to it.
So if the website has something saying, “Baby clothing, 30% off, this week only” as a banner on the website, that could conceivably be curated automatically into a call to action poster for a screen doing that, but your platform's not gonna run a video wall on a big set of LEDs modules or something?
Giles Corbett: So what our platform will do is it will work out and it'll enable you to go and promote the sale. It will also select some of the best products and the products with the best images. It will go and show those. It will allow passing by, maybe you're walking past the store in the evening, and you go and see a bag that looks super nice. It will of course have a QR code on it. You can scan it and it will take you directly to that bag on your phone. If you buy it, it will be recorded as having come from that screen in that store. So all of our backend magic to help people sell more. But now working also on, on display-only signage. That's what Cloudshelf display mode is about. It's about helping retailers sell more. It's not their whole branding experience. That's something that they'll work with other people to create.
So what am I buying? Am I subscribing to this? Am I buying a software license?
Giles Corbett: You're subscribing to it. It's a SaaS model. So it's just like your subscription to Shopify. You go into Shopify, you add the Cloudshelf app, and you get one display for free for life. So you can try it out, there's no limit. You can use it as much as you want, and then as the number of stores expands, or the number of screens per store expands, you then just go and upgrade the license.
This was great and quite interesting. Can you just tell listeners where they can find out more online about your company?
Giles Corbett: Absolutely. Just head over to Cloudshelf.ai and hopefully, you'll be able to find out everything you want about the company. If you don't, call me, I love speaking with people, at any time of day or any time of day or night. I love it.
All right, Giles, thank you very much.
Giles Corbett: Dave, thank you so much for the opportunity!
Wednesday Oct 19, 2022
Erik DeGiorgi, MediaVue Systems
Wednesday Oct 19, 2022
Wednesday Oct 19, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Mediavue Systems has the somewhat unique experience of being a PC manufacturer that started in digital signage, versus any number of companies that had personal or industrial computers with the dimensions, specs and pricing that met the industry's needs and desires at the time.
One hell of a lot has changed in the intervening 15 years, and the Boston-based company has shifted with them. Erik DeGiorgi co-founded the business with his dad Dave. He's now its President and focused on what he says is a major evolution of the company and brand.
His goal is changing industry perceptions about what Mediavue does, to a point that he now talks about the company more as a software shop than a hardware manufacturer.
That's because Mediavue has been steadily developing software tools - most notably for configuration, deployment, remote device management and security. The IT people they work with think much more about uptime and efficient management than they do about the size of the box or, in particular, the price.
I had a great chat with Erik about the roots of his company and where PC hardware and software sit in an industry landscape that now also has options for low-cost smart displays and single-purpose media players.
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TRANSCRIPT
Eric, thank you for joining me. Can you give me the rundown on MediaVue systems?
Erik DeGiorgi: Yeah, sure, Dave, first and foremost, thanks for having me on, and also thanks for the invite next month. Looking forward to seeing you and everybody else at the mixer. Nice to get back to reality there, huh?
No kidding.
Erik DeGiorgi: But yeah, sure. I'll give you a snapshot. We've been around for about 16 years at this point. So MediaVue was founded in 2007. The initial product we brought to market was now what's called a media player. We started designing and building bespoke hardware for the industry back before there was really a name for it, and so we brought to market our first hardware device, I believe it was probably 2008 when we went to market, and the company's evolved quite a bit over the past 15 years. We initially went to market through our channel relationships with CMS partners.
So back in the day, we were a heavy SCALA house long before the StrataCash acquisition and everything. But we partnered with CMSs. We started to develop operating systems, include that on our devices and embed CMS and try to make it as turnkey as possible. The evolution of the companies really centred around the kind of product innovations and responses to needs in the market. So again, at the very beginning it was, let's build a device that can go and be turned on 24/7, play videos and not break as they all were. Then it was, okay, we fixed that, then how do we create it more turnkey because of all the problems we were encountering? The integration, putting the software in the hardware. Then once we resolved that it became an issue of scalability. So, if you remember back, 10-15 years ago, these large-scale networks would be deployed, but there'd be no network management.
The people would transition, and there'd be no way to know what was in the field. There'd be no way to cope with the problems when they would arise. It was just really an operational nightmare for the system integrators and certainly the end customers that were trying to scale these networks. So we responded to that and built out a robust network management platform. So that really was the kind of pivot point where we moved from being really a hardware company to a software company. So today, fast forward, what we deliver is really a turnkey operating platform. So it's a combination of hardware, it's a combination of our software management tools, support that goes along with that. It's the integration of CMS software. It's audience analytics, whatever you need to design and deploy and manage signage networks in an array of markets, we now have a fairly robust platform that supports that at scale.
That's interesting that you describe yourself as a software company. I would think most people who know MediaVue would think, they're a hardware company. They make small form-factor PCs for signage.
Erik DeGiorgi: And I may be getting ahead of myself because, as I do, but we are actually poised to go extensive, top to the bottom rebrand of the company right now and teaser come January, the look and feel of MediaVue is gonna be quite different.
So did you start the company with digital signage in mind or were you doing industrial computing and found your way into it?
Erik DeGiorgi: So David, our CEO was previously, his previous company was actually in display repair. So this was back in the 90s and the early 2000s. When people used to fix things, he was repairing CRTs and was doing that for all the major brands. He had service contracts with Dell and ViewSonic and Mitsubishi. If you bought a PC at Circuit City, you know the service contract would go to him. So he was doing large scale monitor repair, and by virtue of that, he got pulled into the digital signage industry because of early projects, this is 20 years ago, he had the service contract for the display and this was back in the day of, hanging a Dell Optiplex on the back of a screen in a large harness, and those things were failing left and right, and by virtue of having the contract for the display, they asked him if they could fix those, and so he got into that business and then looked at that and said, is there a way to build a better mousetrap here?
And that was the origin story. MediaVue was started, and we went to work on what became our first media player, but it was very much in response, having the exposure to the earliest deployments, seeing the catastrophic failure rates, and then coming up with a solution.
David DeGiorgi is your dad, right?
Erik DeGiorgi: Yeah, you will see a common last name there. He and I sat down and started MediaVue in about 2007.
Is he still involved?
Erik DeGiorgi: He is still involved. I've read some of your recent postings and things, there comes a time in life when you maybe step back from some things and focus on some other things and, Dave, will never slow down, don't let me mischaracterize him.
Yeah. He's a bit of a live wire from what I remember of meeting him.
Erik DeGiorgi: Yeah, he's 110% at all times. But yeah, we certainly work in tandem and have since the outset.
And you're in the Boston area, right?
Erik DeGiorgi: Yep. Our HQ is just south of Boston, and we've got an international presence. We've got sales teams out in MEA and spread across certainly here domestically. But one of the things that I think is unique, going back to our roots, in hardware, we still have our assembly line in Boston, so since day one and continuing today, I think the majority of what we do is really in the kind of management tool set and all of the software stack and the integration and everything that we do at that level, we still design and assemble hardware, and we do that in the back half of our headquarters and we've got our assembly floor right there along with the front of house.
And how does that resonate with resellers and end users? Is that important to them that it's domestically made?
Erik DeGiorgi: I don't know if it's there's a Made in USA badge on it, and that's important to me. I think where the value comes from having control over that process. So our assembly line is very adaptable. So we can very quickly respond to the needs of customers. So whether that's a hardware configuration, whether that's a setup and an integration with different software, we can do all of that and make very quick adjustments to our assembly line to accommodate the customer and I think that's where the value is.
Yeah, I'm sure there are people who do wanna buy products made in the USA but I, I tend to think there's probably a lot more who are buying for other reasons and like the idea that there's the support that is in 12 hours away and in Mandarin.
Erik DeGiorgi: Yeah, absolutely, and the full experience that you get with MediaVue is based domestically, So everything, the account rep you get obviously is regional, you get attached with a Sales, Engineering, and CSE at the beginning, that's a person that's domestically based. That individual works with you through pre-sale. When it converts to a sale, that person maintains the attachment to that account. You have continuity there throughout the lifetime of the deployment, and that's how we differentiate.
Our origins are certainly in hardware, we're doing a lot more now. But we're never gonna be able to compete on cost with some of our OEM competitors out in Asia. There's just absolutely no way. So we have to create a lot of value add. We have to create a lot of it's an experience working with us. It's the whole lifetime of the engagement and the deployment, it's very hands-on, and that's how we've been able to differentiate.
You describe the old days of Dell Optiplex hanging off the back of monitors and back in 2007, at that time, it was a big deal to come up with a small form factor PC. That doesn't really matter anymore, does it? Cuz everybody is like that.
Erik DeGiorgi: The playing field has levelled, certainly on the hardware side it's, but it's in form factor, it's in computing power. The value proposition back then was, how many bits and bytes can I put in the smallest form factor and, run my 720p video and, do that successfully, and the playing field is flattened there. It's not as competitive as it was. The computing's kind of caught up.
I always get a kick out of how many pixels can you actually put on a display before you have to be three inches away from it before you can tell, so it's like hardware is caught up, I think, to the industry's need if that makes sense. So now it really becomes about the value of Integration. How do you successfully roll out a deployment? How do you have that go as seamless as possible, both in the installation and in the ongoing management and maintenance of that network? Because we all know the greatest cost to doing that is getting people in the field, turning wrenches and screwdrivers. So the more you can minimize that ease, the burden for the integration partner. Certainly, that brings value to them as they're reselling things in managed services contracts. It brings value to the end customer because the cost of operating the network in total is far less. So really honing in on the stability, reliability, the scalability of these networks is, I think, more of our present challenge rather than, packing pixels on screens and having more gigabytes of processing power.
I'm gonna guess that resellers and integrators understand that a lot more than end users.
Erik DeGiorgi: There’s certainly a learning curve. The ones that have been through it and felt the pain know it very well. You have to go through it to see that. We still get opportunities to come across and people will haggle on price and this box is a hundred dollars less than that box or something and we try to educate, we try to help people see the light, if you will, and look at the total cost of ownership of these networks a little bit differently maybe than they are, and it's one of those lessons that you have to learn.
And I noticed on your product list that your small form factor, I forget the name of it, but it was a small box and it just had a Celeron running in it, and it used to be the case that people would pay a lot of attention to the generation of the processor and everything else and they might think that a Celeron not powerful enough, but they are now, right?
Erik DeGiorgi: Yes, certainly years ago, it was very much spec driven, and it was very important to, gigabytes of this and megabytes of that. Like I was saying before, the technology's kind of caught up to the needs of the industry and there's only so much you're doing. Compute power really is now doing onsite analytics and doing things like real-time decisions and stuff like that, that's pushing thresholds. It's just not as important a factor because there's just enough there.
When you started it was PCs and PCs, that's what people used for digital signage. There was the odd sort of dedicated player type, like the old digital view boxes, and there were a few others out there. But then smart displays came along, BrightSign bubbled up, and now you have two categories that you're competing with. How do you sell against those?
Erik DeGiorgi: Yeah, so that's a great question. So we're rooted still in that PC tradition, and we do so because we're looking at the life cycles of these deployments and we believe that kind of platform has the required adaptability and scalability where some of these other architectures don't, simply I look at it as, if you're rooted in kind of this PC topology and architecture, it's built to do a lot of things versus doing one thing very specifically if that makes sense. So it has the ability to adapt not just to the initial customer needs, but throughout the lifetime of the deployment, and that's getting into some of the things we're gonna be rolling out first, at the beginning of next year, really rely on that adaptability, that topology.
There are also some big security issues, and it's something that's not discussed in the industry that is very much overlooked when you get into ARM-based products, and I will try not to get too technical here, like smart displays when I say system on a chip and stuff like that, that's a hardware stack, that's a chipset that is licensed and manufactured by any no name, chip house that you've never heard of versus say an Intel, AMD and the major difference from a security perspective is that you need to maintain Operating system, you need to maintain your operating system and have that be updated because a lot of your security, a lot of your threat mitigation comes from having a stable and current operating system.
What happens is when you use these unknown chip manufacturers to develop the SOCs and things like that, they don't maintain driver support for the current operating system updates. So what happens is you are unable to continually update your operating environment because you don't have strong driver support for those chipsets. So in our opinion, that creates significant security vulnerabilities. So it's yet another reason why we maintain the kind of traditional Intel and AMD chipset topology.
Is it your opinion and perspective, or are you hearing real-world stories talking about that?
Erik DeGiorgi: I don't hear many people talking about it.
I think it's one of those things like many things in the security world that is just unknown, and it's not something that comes up. So it's a message we're certainly trying to get across.
So the devil's advocate argument would be if you're not hearing about it, maybe it's not really a thing?
Erik DeGiorgi: Maybe. I can't argue with that but it's not likely. We're a very technical company, so when we all sit around at the lunch table, these are the kinds of conversations we have about vulnerabilities. So we're on the pulse of it may be a little more than others and paying attention to it a little more than others, but yeah I do think it's there, and so it's a combination of that. It's a combination of a kind of being there are inherent limitations, capability, and limitations when it comes to those types of chipsets as well, you're not able to just load any software on it. You're not able to go and connect peripheral devices to it. It doesn't have that degree of adaptability. So it's for all those reasons, we've stayed with the kind of technology stack, the topology that we have.
My perception, and I'm definitely not a hardware expert or a software expert, is that these days, if you have a simple application like digital menu boards or FIDS displays, those sorts of things you probably don't need a PC for that. But if you're getting into anything, complicated and challenging, and as you say, it needs to evolve and have some malleability to it, you're probably gonna lean towards a PC. Is that a fair perception?
Erik DeGiorgi: I think it's a fair perception. I think it's consistent too with where we position in the market. There are so many kinds of more simple use cases, I got a menu board and that's up and running. I'm gonna say that with a caveat but I'll get back to that in a second. The majority of digital signage is putting a picture on a screen, right? And that's about as simple as it gets, and we obviously can do that. I don't think our value is in that kind of In that type of use case.
And you're probably not gonna win on price?
Erik DeGiorgi: We're certainly not gonna win on price, and we’ve got no problem with it, it's just not our market. We're really focused on how we can be a technology partner for a large-scale enterprise that wants to deploy signage and communications infrastructure as an asset for their organization, and we partner closely with them.
We work with, like I said, all of our software partners on the CMS side, and all our integration partners to put together a technology platform and an implementation program in order to deploy and manage that at scale. That's our sweet spot. Going back to the QSR example, menu boards, I guess you could say are simple, right? You're putting it up there. It doesn't really change much, It's just but then what happens when a menu board goes down? Because that's your business. If you don't have a menu, how are you gonna sell it? It’s where we bring value to say that the application is doing things where you might have content switching. You might have redundancy in those menu boards. So do things with a bit more sophistication to make sure you're managing uptime and maintaining uptime. You can look at something and see it as simple, but at the same time to do it well at scale, there's always increasing layers of complexity.
Yeah that's an interesting point because I think of digital menu boards as being really simplistic applications, but they can go down. So you need that failover and everything else.
Erik DeGiorgi: There's that, and then it's also a really dirty environment. We’ve done QSRs and gotten devices back that you have to scrape the grease out. Again, there's always more complexity than you see at first glance.
Is it fair to think that you probably tend to get more involved in projects than other companies that are just basically selling boxes?
Erik DeGiorgi: Certainly, yeah. That's our value proposition, that's our model.
Our sale is as much our management tool, our ongoing support and service, as much as the device, if you will. We're very hands-on. We're able, again, to be very flexible and adaptable to the customer's needs and that's not just to get the project going. That's the long-term maintenance and management and of course in conjunction with our integrator partners.
You have something called an Active Network Manager. What is that and why is it needed?
Erik DeGiorgi: Sure. So that is the name of the management stack of our software that I've been referencing. And so that was designed and built. We started working on that maybe not quite 10 years ago but pretty close, and that was to solve the problem with scalability. As I had mentioned previously, the devices work, and the integration with the CMSs works, but it was very difficult to deploy and manage at scale.
So what that tool enables now, so if you partner with a MediaVue and purchase our product, what you're gonna get is you're gonna get an endpoint. You're gonna get a media player, a device that's gonna have an operating system installed on it that we design specifically for the content management software or other software that's being used and that is maintained. So part of our offering is not just the deployment of that, but we actually have a quarterly update scheme for our entire operating environment. So we will aggregate all the different updates and security patches and everything for the entire software stack, and then we test and validate and then bundle everything. So you don't get that kind of experience where your iPhone updates and all of a sudden your app doesn't work, so we eliminate that as a possibility, and then obviously stay on top of security. So you get that, and then the kind of software that brings all that together is our Active Network Manager, and that enables an installer to plug in the device, push the power button, and then have the network owner, the person that is, is managing the network to see that come up, to register CMS to go and set all of the, whether it's network settings, we that can take control of the display so we can make sure the display is on when it's supposed to be.
All of that comes through an Active Network Manager and that's the toolset that enables it. It's really IT team-focused. So whoever it is, we don't do anything with content. We don't do anything with that. Never have, never will. We're strictly focused on having a robust technology stack and a toolset that enables the IT team to manage effectively. So an Active Network Manager is the heart of all of that, right? And, facilitates a lot of the kinds of a lot of customer interaction with the platform and the user experience that I've been describing.
So 10 years ago when you started developing that a lot of the CMS companies had either no or pretty thread bear device management capabilities within their software. You had companies like Diversified who had kick-ass device management way, way back then, but a lot of these guys have caught up now. So are these parallel things or can they work together?
Erik DeGiorgi: Yeah, I mean there's certainly management as we're describing it now is considered a necessity, so everybody has got on board. There are certain things baked into the CMS, some certain CMS offerings that have some device management. There are some things that we can do for various CMSs, like I mentioned, registration and plug and play and stuff like that. Yeah, and there are certainly third-party companies, good friends that just have a management platform for anything. So management has become ubiquitous. I think what differentiates what we're doing is we're really looking at it as a total platform. So it's the combination of hardware and software. It's the depth of integration that we're able to do by virtue of owning that entire ecosystem. So it just enables more. You can do more.
Sparing you all the technical details results in greater stability, greater security, and greater longevity of the network, and that's something that's different as well. We look at a successful network being 5+ years. So if we install the devices, we don't want them to be touched for five years. The current hardware is about 10 years old. It's obviously like iterations of that and it's not the same exact stuff but we have stuff that's been deployed that is the previous generation for 10+ years.
So we look at a 5+ year lifespan. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think industry standards might be like two to three would be considered successful, without any major intervention. But we look at it as for at least five years. We wanna get the stuff out, we wanna manage it, we want it to physically work. We want to have the remote capabilities to make necessary changes without having to deploy people, and I'm careful with my words cuz we're gonna be releasing some stuff that even greater enhances that remote capabilities in the coming months.
Do you have metrics around fail rates, like people talk about 99.59s and all that sort of thing?
Erik DeGiorgi: It's funny you bring that up because we exchanged an email about potentially doing an article around that, and yeah so what I proposed and what we're looking at doing is we actually just did a full audit of every intervention last year that we had on the support side, and I think those kinds of numbers and statistics, it's almost cursory. It's just fine, how many .9999 can you put in? It's just, I don't think it really tells the story, and the story that I'm interested in telling and sharing, certainly with the industry is, yeah, the physical devices work. It's the stuff that works. Software is fairly stable, but it's usually like the interaction of things.
I'm just thinking through the kind of statistics that we pulled from last year. For as many actual hardware issues as there were, there were many more issues with something happening within the operating system, a software bug coming up. It was an interaction between, third-party software that we've integrated onto the devices. It was a failure in setup, in installation. There were so many.
Or stupid shit like the janitor unplugging the thing.
Erik DeGiorgi: Oh, for sure. That happens. That's real life. It's absolutely real life.it's that it's someone going and stacking boxes on the device and having it burn up, you know what I mean? We've seen it all. I hope it doesn't come across that I'm trying to avoid answering your question.
The complexity of these things, just tells a different story rather than, one out of a thousand failing every year, or even like MBTF, it's not even a really accurate way of analyzing things. I'm hoping that if we collaborate on that, we can share some insights on what is a company that's deployed this hardware and software like this for well over a decade and has tens of thousands of devices that are currently managing, what it actually looks like in the real world? And I'm excited to be able to share that.
So in January you're gonna do a brand refresh and push a revised proposition out there. How's all that gonna roll out?
Erik DeGiorgi: Well, with your assistance of course. So I think what we want to do and it is very consistent with what you're saying. Our legacy is that when people think of our company, they think of hardware, what we're doing and what we are, the company we are today is just so different. And it's really that entire ecosystem platform that we've created and we deploy, it's the way we interact with our customers throughout the lifetime of the deployments and the support and everything that we offer.
How we're going to do it? It's gonna be digital, so the look and feel of the company online is gonna be very different. We're going to be making announcements through all the industry publications. So we've got a hard date right now of January 17th, so we'll see if we make it. But we're hoping to put out a kind of industry-wide blast and when people sit down at their computers on that day, they see something that they haven't before.
All right. If people wanna know more, where did they find you online?
Erik DeGiorgi: MediaVueSystems.com
All right. Eric, thank you so much for taking the time with me.
Erik DeGiorgi: Dave, thanks for having me on.
Wednesday Sep 14, 2022
Ori Mor, Wi Charge
Wednesday Sep 14, 2022
Wednesday Sep 14, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Anyone who has been on the ops or finance side of digital signage and digital out of home knows how complicated and expensive it can be to realize the simple task of getting power to a screen.
It's a particular challenge in settlings like retail - because store designers, until recently, didn't think much about the need to get power right in the aisles and in merchandising locations.
Battery-powered displays are one answer. Power over ethernet is another. And there's of course the often expensive and possibly unsightly option of running electrical infrastructure - wires and maybe conduit - all the way to the screens and other gear.
Wouldn't it be great if wireless power was a reality?
Turns out ... it is, and one of the companies leading development already has small displays for retail and hospitality that get their power over the air, using ceiling transmitters and receivers built into the screens.
Right now, Wi Charge's screens are just tablet-sized, but that will change.
I get the rundown on wireless power from Ori Mor, who is a co-founder and Chief Business Officer at the Israel company.
Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS
TRANSCRIPT
Ori, thank you very much for joining me. Can you give me a background on what your company does?
Ori Mor: Hi, Dave, happy to be here. We are doing over-the-air wireless power, and over-the-air charging. But when we say over-the-air, we mean a range of 10 meters (30 feet) and not proximity charging, like charging pads.
So this is very different from just those close contact charges where you put your phone down and it does it that way?
Ori Mor: Yes, very different. The phone charging is a type of docking station without wires, but a docking station. You still need to do it on your own, knowing that you are now taking care of charging and the docking station, the pad itself is being wired. We are talking about something that is more close to WiFi for power.
Is this a commercial product or something that's still in R&D?
Ori Mor: It's not in large volume yet, but it's a commercial product. It's deployed in Canada, the US, and Israel, and it's going also to a few locations in Europe and actually at the end of this month, also in Brazil.
And the company is in Israel, correct?
Ori Mor: Yes, the headquarters and R&D are in Israel. Marketing and Sales are mainly in the US, but also in Korea and Europe.
And how long has the company been around?
Ori Mor: 10 years.
Did it start trying to solve this problem or was it something else that found its way into this?
Ori Mor: We started by doing over-the-air wireless power. The main application was charging smartphones, but the technology is capable of powering other devices as well.
I was curious about the application for digital signage. I gather that you have a digital display that you could use in a retail setting, but it's a small display. You're not at a point where you could power a very large display?
Ori Mor: Yes, that is correct. We started with the five-inch display based on demand that we got from prominent retailers and CPGs from across the world who were interested in being able to power devices at the edge of the shelf. Obviously, we can't power 16 displays. So we started with a small display. We are now doing seven-inch and nine-inch as well. But the promise is, as you said, being able to power devices at the edge of the shelf without the hassle of running wires or replacing batteries.
And is that the problem that's being solved here, just simply the unavailability of power, right at a, like a shelf edge?
Ori Mor: Simply put, yes. People do display, people do CMS, and people do Digital advertising in retail space already, but usually, it's limited to very few locations and we are enabling it to be widely spread relatively easily.
And the problem is, in a lot of older retail and older can be like 10 years old, That there just isn't power on the shelves, right?
Ori Mor: Yes, That is correct. The gondolas are moving, The shelves of Heights are changing And as you said, there are in most of the retail locations, there are no wires. Maybe near the wall, but certainly not in the middle of the store.
There's power over ethernet, but I gather that has its limitations in terms of where you wanna put it and the cost of it.
Ori Mor: Power over ethernet is capable of powering displays. The problem is, again, routing it to something that changes with time, usually twice a year or even more, and you need to wire it to every different shelf, which is expensive and cumbersome.
So the setup with this is a transmitter and a receiver?
Ori Mor: A transmitter, and a receiver that is embedded within the display device.
Could you do a retrofit, like a bolt-on receiver?
Ori Mor: Actually, no. The displays are designed by us at this stage because we know how to optimize in terms of power consumption. It's a dedicated development optimized for wireless power.
In the future, I believe that we'd be able to support existing displays but we start with something we can control.
Is the power stable, or is it a bit like WiFi where it can kind of drop momentarily here and there?
Ori Mor: There is always a rechargeable battery in the device. So we charge the device and the device draws its power from the rechargeable battery. So it gets steady power from the battery even if power drops.
Are you restricted with the displays in terms of what you can show, like is it just static images or to run full 30 frames per second video?
Ori Mor: We are doing full videos.
Okay, and was that a mountain you had to climb or was that right out of the gate that would work?
Ori Mor: It was pretty simple. That wasn't the challenge.
With the transmitter, how does that manifest itself? I think it's something that you mount in the ceiling?
Ori Mor: Yes, think of it like a router in the ceiling with a range of 5-10 meters, the transmitter locates client devices and beams a directional infrared beam to the device where the device converts the infrared beam back into electricity.
Does it have to be like a line of sight?
Ori Mor: Yes. Wireless power with meaningful power is the line of site technology. You can do non line of sight using RF, magnetic and even with infrared, but the amount of power that you can deliver with sight will be very low for reasons that I can explain if you wanna dive into.
I probably wouldn't get most of it.
Ori Mor: Oh, you would get it. When you do non line of sight, it means that energy is being spread in the room and you only harvest part of it. It has two drawbacks, a) the amount of power that you draw that you receive is lower because you waste a lot, and b) you fill the environment with unwanted radiation that the regulator and the customer wouldn't want. So if you do choose to do a non line of sight, it's for very low power.
And what are the safety issues?
Ori Mor: We passed all the safety certificates worldwide. FDA in the US, IEC in UL as well. It's approved to be safe under all conditions and that's the claim to fame for the technology we can deliver meaningful power yet it is as safe as your optical mouse.
You're walking around a cafe or something where this is set up and you let's say you work there. Are there any long-term implications of being around this radiation so to speak?
Ori Mor: No. Think of it like it's even safer than your wifi router. The beam is very directional. So outside the beam, there is an absolute zero. It's not a wifi router that sends radiation to every location and only part of it is being harvested or absorbed by your cell phone. The beam that leaves the transmitter, a hundred per cent of it, reaches the receiver, a centimetre away from the beam, and there is an absolute zero, and when you cross the beam, it shuts off automatically,
Hence the need for or the value of having a battery on board?
Ori Mor: Yes.
So how long would that last if somebody put a large chair or something in the way, and it was blocking, would that mean eight hours later, it stops working?
Ori Mor: Yeah. It's a design criterion. We designed it to be able to last a full day on a battery, but you can design it differently. It's a trade-off between the size of the battery and the thickness of the display.
So if you talk about larger displays, a 30-inch display, a 55-inch display, which is quite common in digital signage, at least. How long off are we from that being a possibility?
Ori Mor: That's too big of a question for me. I'll tell you that we are not even trying to target this at this point in time, but I'll give you an example of how technology develops. You probably know that when we started using the internet, we used 2.4 kilobytes or something like that.
I go back to 256K modems, I’m old.
Ori Mor: Yeah, and we are now doing a podcast where I'm sitting on probably 200 megabytes per second. Whether the technology would take us there, we will have to figure it out by seeing.
So this is a matter of time, more than anything else.
Ori Mor: Yes. Time, the economy of scale, components becoming more capable and scaling up performance.
I would assume also that you guys don't wanna be a display manufacturer. You're doing it right now just to demonstrate what's possible, but I'm thinking you'd like to license this to the display guys, as opposed to making your own?
Ori Mor: That is absolutely correct.
Wi Charge is a company that knows how to deliver wireless power and we do that for many different applications. We chose a few to show how it works. There's a big opportunity here in terms of market demand. We chose a few applications, one in commercial, one in smart home, and one in consumer, just to see the market and then to license it to the relevant guys that can do it much better than us.
When do you see that happening?
Ori Mor: We've already had deals that are licensed-based and it's like a domino effect. It's like how penguins jump to the water. They all stand at the edge of the ocean knowing that the food is in the water, but still hesitating and then one jumps in and immediately after a hundred thousand jump in. So by showing the way, we would unlock this domino effect.
There are some Korean university researchers I wrote a piece about last week that were also doing wireless power. Are there any number of initiatives out there doing this?
Ori Mor: Yes, we have seen more and more companies or universities doing wireless power. What they're doing right now, we did 10 years ago, so it's nice that they’re catching up.
We see over-the-air charging happening already and it's happening in different ways with different technologies that allow different value propositions. So you can expect to see more and more of this.
Is your focus right now mostly on B2C (Business to Consumer)?
Ori Mor: No, we are actually doing commercial applications, like the displays. Even the consumer applications that we do, start with commercial settings. It's simply easier for us. Consumer, we are doing very cautiously and very few applications, but actually, before the end of the year, you'd hear announcements about consumer applications from us.
Right, because you've been at CES a number of times and before we turned things on here to record, you mentioned that the company would be back at CES in January.
Ori Mor: Yes. There's another reason why we are doing the display. It expedites the go-to-market. When we can actually do the turnkey product, rather than only the wireless power, we can offer solutions to end customers without hesitations.
It's easy to do it in B2B, but we already have a few consumer applications.
What's getting traction for the product right now, like a particular use case?
Ori Mor: The displays are seeing tremendous, overwhelming demand. The other products that we do are smart door locks, which you probably are not so smart, not because they can't be smart, it's because people are worried, designers, OEMs are worried that if they would add smart functionalities, batteries would run out way too fast and then the end user would be stuck locked outside over a dead battery. So we are unleashing this as well in parallel.
Yeah, it would be the same with those surveillance cameras that people have at their homes, the Nest cameras and so on.
Ori Mor: Exactly. Since they need to go to sleep to preserve their batteries. There's a phrase, I think a professional phrase, which is called the back of the thief. By the time they wake up, the thief is already on the way out.
You mentioned you were seeing tremendous take-up on displays. What's going on there? How are they being used?
Ori Mor: In various ways. Edge shelf displays in retail locations. I'll tell you what I can say and there are a few other things you can publish, we will send you when they go live.
It's the usual thing. The clients don't want you talking about them, right?
Ori Mor: So what I'm disclosing right now are things already out there that are available and in a few weeks there will be other use cases as well and I'll be happy to share them with you, both images and videos. So we are doing table-topping restaurants, this is already out there. We are doing edge shelves in grocery locations. And we are doing other devices for grocery locations, which are quite cool, but I'll wait on how they look till we launch them. We are also doing displays in shopping centres like jewellery and other stuff, it's a display it's so generic, you can put it anywhere. You can wrap it and you have advertising at the point of decision.
And this is not just in Israel?
Ori Mor: No, most of it is outside of Israel. Texas, New York, Michigan, Idaho, Toronto, and Sao Paulo.
I'm sure one of the determining factors out there is the overall cost. What this does in terms of cost versus what you would pay to run conduit, run power or ethernet cabling to a display that way and people would do a spreadsheet exercise and decide, okay, this is less expensive to do it your way.
Ori Mor: Exactly.
What is the cost of a transmitter?
Ori Mor: Oh, you'd have to ask our partners. They're selling the solutions to the end customers, not us.
Okay, but is it hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars?
Ori Mor: Hundreds, not thousands.
And it would install in the ceiling just like you would put in a ceiling light?
Ori Mor: Yes, it takes a few minutes.
For the display, understanding that these are your proprietary displays and you've tweaked them and everything else, but the hardware cost for a receiver, is that something that's also hundreds of dollars?
Ori Mor: No, much less.
It's nominal, so it'd be like another component inside a display?
Ori Mor: Yes.
Does the system also radiate WiFi?
Ori Mor: Yes, the communication with the display is over WiFi, over 3G. So with the end customers, it depends but they can run the content through a CMS on their own, independently.
So in theory would a company that makes WiFi equipment, like routers and so on, could they conceivably add your capability into their product line?
So if I'm a company that makes networking equipment, like Cisco or more B2C stuff, could they add Wi charge capability to their WiFi routers?
Ori Mor: Yes, but I'll explain how. These companies are used to creating infrastructure and delivering connectivity. They can do the same for power, power as a service, not just data as a service. The only difference is that transmitters should be located most of the time on ceilings rather than hidden in the closet, that's the difference, and now the 5G routers are on ceilings for the exact same reason. They are almost in the line of sight.
You mentioned metering. With the energy issues that Europe's facing right now because of Russia, there's a lot of concern around energy consumption, and I wonder whether we're gonna get to a stage where power would be metered for this sort of thing.
Ori Mor: Let me answer this in two ways. Since it's a service, it can be metered. It's an extension of the electricity grid and the same as you paying for watt/hour for electricity, you probably would be paying a watt/hour for wireless electricity, so it's only a natural extension. Regarding power in general and sustainability. What we also discovered is that a single transmitter that we are now shipping saves up to 5000 AA batteries and that's even on our first gen only. So it's probably your and my body weight in batteries saved by each transmitter that we deploy.
Is the transmitter always pushing out energy and therefore the meter's always going or is it more of a demand thing?
Ori Mor: No, it's a demand thing. When there's no demand, it goes to sleep.
All right, interesting. That would be a lot more efficient.
What about distance? You mentioned 10 meters right now. Will that improve, just like the other things?
Ori Mor: We did a test for a government agency for 100 meters successfully. But then we decided that as a company we need to focus. It's either we do indoor for consumers or commercial, or we do outdoor for other types of devices and we chose the short-of-range options.
So the technology can easily do a hundred meters or probably more, and there's actually a company that does that. This is their forte. We chose to focus on the inside.
Okay, but you could, in theory, have advertising displays on a sidewalk, and the same in drive-throughs, a lot of costs involved in trenching and everything else to get power out to the display?
Ori Mor: Oh, there's actually a company that we work with that is considering using our solutions for care pickup and drive tools.
And there would be enough power cuz those are extra bright displays?
Ori Mor: So for them, we are considering making animated e-ink displays. As I said the large displays with LCDs or OLEDs are out of our range at the moment.
So if people wanna know more about Wi Charge, where do they go?
Ori Mor: Website and LinkedIn.
It's www.wi-charge.com
Ori Mor: Yes.
Perfect. All right, Ori, thank you very much for spending some time with me.
Ori Mor: Thank you, Dave. I enjoyed it.
Wednesday Aug 24, 2022
Telmo Silva, ClicData
Wednesday Aug 24, 2022
Wednesday Aug 24, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Integrating data has increasingly climbed the priority list for more ambitious and involved digital signage and digital OOH projects. The big driver for that is how near or real-time data makes what's on-screen automated and triggered, which means more timely, targeted and therefore relevant messaging.
Lots of CMS software companies offer some degree of data integration and on-screen presentation, and we're starting to see some third-party companies that work mainly in digital signage - like Screenfeed - also offering data display toolsets.
We're also now seeing well-established data handling companies making themselves known in this sector, particularly to help make some of the more complicated set-ups both happen and then reliably, and securely, work. ClicData is a software firm based up in the northwest of France, but has clients globally that use its Business Intelligence platform to bring data in from more than 250 sources - into a single, harmonized data warehouse.
I spoke with co-founder and CTO Telmo Silva about Clicdata's roots, how its platform works and how it can be applied in digital signage applications.
Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS
TRANSCRIPT
David: Telmo, thank you very much for joining me. Can you tell me what ClicData is all about?
Telmo Silva: I started ClicData in 2008 as a pharmaceutical-focused data analytics company, and later branched out a little bit into making it a wider-used data analysis, data management and data intelligence tool for all sectors, and hence the name, ClicData from ClicPharma before, and yes, this tool is really the culmination of that learning in the pharmaceutical sector that we thought is applicable to really any sector.
David: Okay. So if I'm sitting here listening to the beginning of this podcast, some people might be wondering, those in digital signage and the AV sector, might be wondering, okay, why am I listening to this? How does it plug into that sector?
Telmo Silva: Absolutely, and it's funny, Dave, because an acquaintance of ours asked me, should we do this podcast? And I said, yes, absolutely, because everything generates data and digital advertising is definitely one of the factors.
You have to know where you're spending your money and what you're requiring and who's looking at things, and one of the first clients we had in the early days was actually a Canadian company out west that had this technology on elevators to take snapshots of peoples and try to recognize their age group and their demographics and as they're playing the videos on the small screen on the elevator, try to figure out what's the retention? Are their eyes moving and moving away from the screen and so forth, and how long do they stay hooked for those short 30-second clips, and things like that? And that was actually my first introduction to digital advertising and a use case for ClicData, a very successful use case, and I was hooked on that.
I was hooked into that so much that where ClicData is based out, which is France, there's a very large history of retail companies here that spent a lot of money on aisle advertising, and they start using those concepts, not only in terms of video and monitoring but also in terms of monitoring the paths of customers through their stores, optimization of aisles and things like that, where to put the digital signs and advertising and so forth, and all that generates a lot of data that you have to make sense of. And this is really well ClicData comes in, right? Those point solutions with digital advertising are part one, but without actually collecting all these from the different stores, and different locations that start making sense of it, it's just data, right? It does not turn into information until you do something with it and that's really where we come in, in trying to bring as much data from the different systems and different points of information really that a company may have, or a client may have and bring that into something that makes sense, that you can aggregate, that you can slice and dice, and then further down the line, then expose that to your customers, and say, okay, this is what you paid for.
David: So you're aggregating and harmonizing and developing insights around the data as opposed to being a collector of data, right? Like you're not doing any of the computer vision or sensor-based work yourself?
Telmo Silva: We do not, but we do have all the necessary connections just with the different systems. Unlike potentially other systems that are very well standardized, each vendor of those displays of those collectors may have their own interfaces, APIs and so forth. They may have their own storage formats and as you use the different systems, your challenge is really to understand, how can I connect to this one now, and how can I extract information that I want out of that. And our connectors are actually quite flexible in that sense where we have fixed connectors for some of those systems, but for others, we have generic connectors that you can kind of configure to tap into that data.
David: Would this be something that might be called middleware?
Telmo Silva: I would say potentially, yes. It depends on your definition of middleware. Ultimately we see business intelligence at least the portion of data analytics and reporting that we offer, as the next step before you feed it back and you go, okay, now I understand the results that I've received here, what improvements are we gonna make? And we start to cycle again, right?
So again as an example, you may start receiving data from certain videos and start saying, okay, this is the demographics and so forth, can I make some adjustments to my campaigns or to my videos or to the sequence of videos that I'm displaying? Again, I'm going back to that video on the elevator concept and optimising that, so it is part of that loop of data collection, data analysis, making decisions based on that data, and then feeding that back into the loop again.
David: When you started the company accessing data from all kinds of different data sources was very complicated and time-consuming, and you had to get all kinds of permissions and all kinds of meetings and phone calls and everything else to work it out.
One of the things that I gather has changed over the last decade or so is that most platforms now have APIs, it's easier to get stuff out of them, and so on. So has your role lessened, or has it increased because they're always changing and there are so many and if you're an independent company, like a digital signage company, a software company, you have to stay on top of that, or you would use a company like ClicData that's spending all their time doing that and making it easy?
Telmo Silva: To answer your first question, it has actually increased, right? Whereas before we would ask a vendor whether that be Facebook or Google and say, our mutual customers have data on your advertising network, right? And again this kind of can expand to any type of data vendor or data collector that we may tap into and before they would basically know it's our data, and the consumers of course start reacting against that, right? Today, If you do not have an API, if all you do is get my data into your system, but not give me anything back in return, then I don't want anything to do with you.
And we've seen backlashes at times with Facebook, Cambridge Analytics and things like that, where those types of sharing are also kinda gone another way rather, but nonetheless, today, if you do not have an API, then you're a second-class citizen on the internet and on the software technology stack. So that is great but an API is still an API. It is a programming interface and it does require some knowledge and it's not a standard. Just because we call it an API does not mean that they'll follow the same standard, it's very well organized, and it’s very well understood. So every API has its nuances, its little quirks and its own way of paging through the amounts of data that it can offer.
And so our role has actually increased due to that, because again, as I was mentioning before our connectors know how to deal with those different variations and those different formats and schemas that the data may be provided with. So in that sense, it's actually increased the need to have a tool, like ClicData, to be able to tap into those APIs and bring it into a format that is easily digestible by any analytics tool, including our own tool.
David: How much is involved, if you wanted to do this yourself and let's say you wanted to Integrate information from four different business system sources or whatever, within your company? Is that something that would take a morning, a month, or a year to do if they weren't using something like ClicData?
Telmo Silva: If they were not using something like ClicData, they obviously need somebody technical, but it would take an extensive amount of time for development, and again, large companies still do that, where they write custom interfaces to bring the data and amalgamate them into one single source of truth. This is where millions of dollars are being spent on data warehousing projects and business intelligence implementations and so forth. So not having a tool like ours definitely would require a good technical team, and again, depending on the sources, potentially database analysts, database experts, SQL developers, API developers, whether they do it in Java or Python or what have you.
And then bringing all that into a data warehouse will definitely take more than just a few days. In my previous life, prior to creating ClicData, that was my bread and butter, and these projects would go on for 3-6 months. With ClicData, if we have the connector that you need or if you can configure your API connector and you have a basic understanding of APIs, you should be able to do that within a day, to connect three or four data sources and start seeing the data flow through into ClicData.
David: So on a project launch basis and certainly on an ongoing operating basis, it sounds like if you're running a spreadsheet model on this and a business argument, it would take a huge amount of cost out of the equation and time, and these are people you don't need to hire?
Telmo Silva: It goes on to just beyond hiring and the people behind it, because, having somebody who can accompany you if you're not an expert or in the technical side, then it may be worth it. But the bottom line is the continuity of it as well. It's okay to build a prototype. It works once but the next day, you don't want to have to do the same thing, right? You don't want to have to copy and paste the data into Excel or out of Excel again and repeat and so forth.
And also, technology is what it is, business evolves as it is, and so you always need these adjustments. It is an investment that you have to make towards being data-centric, being data-focused and to say, I want to build these systems that collect the data on an ongoing basis that I can automate the reporting that can save you time as well in reporting these numbers back to your team or your clients or your management team and all this combines into the ROI that you're looking for, and yes, there is a technical side of it as well that there will be savings, whether it's in consulting or in minimizing, at least the number of times that you involve them, to gain access to your data.
David: If I'm a customer, what am I buying and how am I paying for it? Do you buy an enterprise license or is it software as a service?
Telmo Silva: It is totally software as a service. We do not offer any on-premise installations of software, and this is because we want to be rapid at giving new features, new connectors. Connectors continuously change, and there's new software in the market and we wanna be rapid in making those available. So software as a service is really our model, and what you get when you subscribe to when you get one of these subscriptions, which is monthly or yearly based, is you get basically all the connectors. You get a data warehouse, a database available to you through Microsoft Azure, that's our partner, and you can have your data stored in over eight different regions around the world: US, Ireland, Canada, Germany, France, and a few others, and once you have that data warehouse, that’s your piece of the database there, the data starts flowing through the connectors. Once that is in your data warehouse, then from there you can actually build downstream flows, you can tap into it directly with Excel if you want, or you can use our dashboard tool to start creating dashboards and graphs and charts and tables indicators.
You can share those dashboards with other people. You can publish them to your customers, et cetera, and then you can just automate these things so that it just does that every day or every morning or every hour.
David: Is that the primary output that you would see for digital signage and digital out-of-home home networks, probably more so on the digital signage side, would be data visualizations and dashboards?
Telmo Silva: I think that would potentially be one of the use cases, analyzing the data that's coming through and making decisions based on those as normal reporting and analytics data tools would. The other part of it and some customers of ClicData do this is they just use the collection capabilities of ClicData and the data warehouse to store their data, but then they feed that into other tools of their choice, tools that potentially they wanna do some more advanced machine learning on the data, maybe they want to write their own special code to analyze it, or maybe simply feed another system that requires this data to consume it and so forth.
ClicData is really a multifaceted tool that can be either used just for collection and aggregation of the data or all the way through to data visualization and analytics.
David: Okay, so you would have almost like templates or widgets of some kind that would be able to do develop dynamic charting and things like this based on what you select?
Telmo Silva: Absolutely, much like you would do on a pivot table in Excel, to drag and drop some columns, and the chart starts taking shape with columns, rows and so forth. That's exactly our design, it's very user-friendly as much as we can, we do have a lot of options for styling because not everybody likes the same styles and colors, but in essence, it's very much an Excel-like data visualization tool built into ClicData.
David: If I'm a digital signage CMS software provider and I'm working with, let's say a financial services company and they wanted data visualization, if I wanna put that visualized chart into a schedule, so it shows up on the digital signs around the workplace. Is that an HTML file or how do you get that up on a screen?
Telmo Silva: If you want to embed our dashboards into third-party applications, into screens, we have quite a few customers that have screens around the office, we have a railroad train station system that actually publishes our dashboards on every single station and stops with the schedules and things like that, and their performance, so are they late, etc.
So you can definitely embed that, and it's just simply a URL. You put that inside an iFrame, inside your web page, and the iframe immediately refreshes if the data has been refreshed, so you don't have to do anything, you just have to open it up in a browser, maximize the screen and boom, your dashboard is live and will refresh automatically.
David: Aare there any kind of limitations on how real-time it is or is it just how you wanna set it and how it works at the other end, in terms of data generation?
Telmo Silva: Our schedules have the ability to go on a minute basis to your data sources and pull the data in, however you can use our API, because we too have an API, to push data in, and in that case, the push is up to you. If you wanna send it once per second, you can. These will not be full data loads. These have to be small packets, a few rows, a few hundred rows at a time, potentially.
But you can use our API to bring in real-time data, and again, the same concept, whether we pulled it or you pushed it, everything downstream gets refreshed and gets activated for you.
David: I suspect that's a conversation that you and your sales engineers have at times with resellers and end users, “Sure we could do real-time, but for the application you're talking about, do you really need that, or is every minute or every five minutes fine?”
Telmo Silva: Absolutely, and this is why we stopped our schedule at one minute. Again, you have to be really in a high traffic, high volume situation, and to be able to make a decision in real-time, and that's ultimately the key, right? It really is up to you and there's the cost associated with you developing a push notification to other systems as well.
So it really is up to the customers, but yeah, in some sectors there are times that some folks ask for real-time when in fact, their data doesn't change on a daily basis. Case in point, Facebook, they themselves only refresh their own metrics or expose their own metrics on a much larger time scale. So for us to do real-time with certain systems and certain data sources is just refreshing and using bandwidth for nothing.
David: Do you have to make statements and assurances around privacy of the data or that's not really your issue, whoever's collecting that data or you're gathering that data is the one that's gonna have to worry about that, you're just enabling the use of that data?
Telmo Silva: Even though obviously data privacy and respecting the customer's data is our number one thing, we do have a role to play. If we're talking in Europe, GDPR is a huge thing. Every country has their own protection laws and privacy protection, like the California Data Protection Act. Every country and state and province has their own or has started some type of laws and regulations. Us being a European company, but with customers in North America, we have to be very careful. This is why we're almost the only ones that actually are able to start your data warehouse in any country that you wish in those eight regions that we've mentioned, and that's step number one, but we are a data processor for you. We don't know what your data is, but we are processing your data for you. It's our application, and we are responsible to make sure that there's no external access to it, that if there are court orders, we have to make sure we validate and check them with our customers and so forth.
Luckily that has never happened, but we don't know what your data is. So we are not able to be really responsible for it, but that's part of our terms of service. If you put data that you are not entitled to use or process if you put data that is not legal for you to own, that's the responsibility of our customers, but obviously, we would have a role to play in that in this GDPR system where we are responsible to at least point out or give it out if asked legally, obviously.
David: I assume you get a lot of questions around security as well.
Telmo Silva: Oh, absolutely, and again, this is why we partner with Microsoft Azure. Our expertise is really making the software intelligent, and easy to use, that it processes fast, that we can process thousands and thousands of files and sources and dashboards a day, an hour really, and not really on the physical and digital security of these data warehouses and systems. And this is why we rely on Microsoft Azure severely. We have a strong SLA with them to protect our property and our customer's property, their data.
David: I know almost nothing about the technical side of what your company and others like it would do, but I assume that a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of security is on the Azure side and you take advantage of that and you let them worry about that, but, make sure that you're working according to their policies, right?
Telmo Silva: Absolutely, but it also takes our knowledge to encrypt the data and to make sure that their configuration is set up correctly. I think that is the positive and negative of cloud-based systems, like Google, Amazon and Microsoft. It's so easy these days to just start a server anywhere and start putting data into it. It's much harder to make sure that nobody else has access to it and to make sure that it's protected and so forth. And even within Microsoft, there are some checks and balances there as well. We can’t say, just because it's Microsoft's or Amazon or Google that takes care of your data, we're pawning it off on them, and if something happens, let's go to court.
That's not how it should be handled. There has to be some responsibility on the people using those systems, and how we code the application, and to make sure all the settings are set up correctly. So it is a team effort between the vendors and us, and also our customers to make sure that they're comfortable with the fact that we are ISO certified, SOC certified HIPAA compliant, et cetera. This is time and an investment on our part to make sure that they should not be just for the sake of having a stamp, on your website saying, “We are ISO certified” and that's it. It does take effort from both companies and all parties involved to make sure that the data is secure and private.
David: So Microsoft is a major business partner, but they're also a competitor, through Power BI?
Telmo Silva: That is correct. Power BI, their visualization tool is a competitor to our data visualization module, not necessarily to the whole ClicData platform, and they do an excellent job at it as well.
David: But I assume your company has its share of competitors, right?
Telmo Silva: I believe there's data visualization for every type of business in the world. Power BI, Tableau, ClickView. I don't wanna name more than three, but there are at least three hundred of them, and let's not even go beyond those, let's just talk about Excel, there’s some amazing visualization in Excel and it has been around for years. So there's a lot of great experience, but again, these are tools and they are distinct separate tools, and if you have to load up Excel or Power BI or whatever every day to hit refresh, and then export it out and think about security and access, then that's the downside of these tools. They do a great job for that initial data investigation but are terrible for the ongoing maintenance of it.
So what we say is, whereas we may not be as advanced as some of those tools, potentially. If you're trying to do something very specific that only Power BI can do, maybe we cannot do it. The upside of using our tool is that you don't have to do anything else. The data is there as soon as it's refreshed, the dashboards know that the data is refreshed, it immediately sends emails out to the people that are on the list for receiving this dashboard, and they get it on their mobile app. They get an alert, whatever, right? It's all automated for you.
So if you want to spend less time wasting copying and pasting and using Excel and these tools, then, these are the types of platforms that you need to look for.
David: I assume the other thing is that you stay on top of it because APIs change and data sets change and everything else and if you just had it developed yourself internally or if you outsourced the development, a month later, the schemas and things could change and all of a sudden it doesn't work, right?
Telmo Silva: Absolutely. We see that with the big players obviously, Google, Instagram, Facebook, and others are constantly improving their APIs. Security keeps changing around the world. We're phasing out certain types of security, TLS 1, TLS 2, et cetera, and APIs need the security, they need to be compatible with it. So this is really where most of our customers get their benefits is to say, okay, ClicData is taking care of all that for you, and then make sure that the data keeps coming in, and flowing into your data warehouse.
David: So if I'm a digital signage content management systems software provider, or Perhaps an AV/IT systems integrator who has an ask from clients or wants to incorporate this into their service offers, what's involved?
What are the first questions you have to ask them? Do you support this, do you support that, or are there any really real barriers?
Telmo Silva: We start by looking at their data sources, right? If we can't bring the data, if they're using a very specific format of a very specific system that we cannot gain access to, typically very old ones then we're upfront about it. We say that you're not gonna get this data in, and you're not gonna be able to report it.
David: It's on a mainframe system or something?
Telmo Silva: Mainframe, believe it or not, we can connect to it. It is important for us and believe it or not, there are still a lot of customers, especially in the retail sector that does mainframe, IBM series of servers, those things that we thought don't exist. They exist and they exist in quite a lot of companies. So we still support those. But sometimes it's just very cryptic or the format. I cannot give you an example off the top of my head but we have this, as I mentioned before, a very robust kind of API connecting connector that takes a lot of options, and most of the time we can configure it to fit.
But yeah, if you're a provider of data that pretty much says: I'm not giving you access. I can only give you monthly reports or something like that. Yeah, you can import those reports monthly by hand. Is that something that you really wanna do, et cetera? So we discuss alternate solutions like that.
But yeah, that would be the first step. The second step is what are their objectives? Are they looking for visualization and embedding these dashboards and putting them back to their customer in a self-service mode so they can monitor the success of their campaigns, their ads network, et cetera? Or is this internal use for analytics and so forth? So we discuss those items to make sure that ClicData is the right solution for them, and if all checks out, I think then the next step is just to get a trial account for 15 days and connect a couple of data sources, see what you can build. We have an in-app chat tool that allows them to ask questions as they go along during their trials. Ask your questions, ask how you can do things and get that first initial prototype, and that's a big advantage of being a SaaS product, there's no installation, you lose nothing, right? You don't have to install or return servers. You just get started, start connecting your data and start playing around with your data and start visualizing and prototyping within your team, get success quickly, get motivated quickly as well. That's a big part of it, and from there, you just start your subscription level.
David: What level of skill do you need?
Telmo Silva: To do complex things, you definitely need some SQL sometimes, some function programming, as you do with Excel, we are all different experts in Excel. There are those of us that use Excel just to type in numbers and your basic drag and drop, and that's it. And then there's those that know to do Lookups and they know a few more functions and then there's those that do Macros in Excel, right? There are different skills, and with us, it's the same thing. It really depends on what you need to do and how much your data needs work. So we have our own kind of Excel-like language that they can use, very similar to SQL as well. They can do a lot of things with the data.
We needed to make ClicData very powerful, and very flexible to ensure that we will not be stumped by a specific need or a specific customer request. But at the surface, we also try to make it easy with a strong UI to write those hard-to-write functions behind the scenes through an interface that is a little bit easier to use.
David: So at a minimum, you want somebody who has an interest or a knack for this sort of thing, as opposed to Margaret in Sales and Marketing saying, “Here, you do this!” and she gets the deer and the headlights look?
Telmo Silva: Absolutely. Now you can, if you have, and some customers of ours do this and they split the work of connecting and making the data available versus consuming the data, right?
You have your technical person, the person that knows the data very well to create these kinds of slices and catalogues of data and make them available to the rest of the team, and the team then goes in, either with our dashboard editor or report editor, and does their own dashboards and their own kind of visualizations or with other tools as well. So there are also those splitting of functions that sometimes are important to put in place into a company.
David: ClicData is in Northwest France based in Lille, correct?
Telmo Silva: Yeah, we have three major offices. That is our head office, the engineering office in the north of France. We have one in Toronto, Canada, and we have one in Texas so we're all over the place a little bit.
David: So Europeans are gonna engage through your European offices and Canadians and Americans can find a couple of offices on this side of the pond?
Telmo Silva: That's correct.
David: Where do they find you online?
Telmo Silva: ClicData.com
David: It's important to say there's no “k” in the click. Somebody got to it before you could get the one with the “k”?
Telmo Silva: I believe so, or maybe at that point in time, we wanted to make it very even with four and four, Clic and Data, I'm not sure.
David: Oh, they'll find it. Thank you very much for spending some time with me.
Telmo Silva: Thank you for having me.
Wednesday Aug 10, 2022
Thomas Philippart de Foy, Appspace
Wednesday Aug 10, 2022
Wednesday Aug 10, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Appspace has now been active in this industry for 20 years, and through much of that time the software company was one of the larger players in a crowd of companies all chasing the general business opportunity of digital signage. But in the last few years the company has pivoted, in a big way, to the well-defined vertical of workplace. The company now describes itself as a workplace experience platform for both physical and digital workplaces. Digital signage is still a main component of what Appspace does, but just one of several in a unified platform.
I caught up with Thomas Philippart de Foy, who has been with Appspace for a decade and is now the EVP of Product Innovation. In our chat, we get into what took Appspace down the workplace path, and then how it all works within an organization.
The company has a PILE of users and says its software is in place at roughly 200 of the companies listed in the Fortune 500. But it also offers free accounts to smaller users, drafting off the well-used concept of freemium software - allowing people to try before they buy.
If you are looking at workplace - either as a vendor or as an HR, IT or ops person, listen and learn.
Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS
TRANSCRIPT
Thomas, thank you for joining me. You've been with Appspace for a very long time, right?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Just celebrating 10 years in September!
Oh, okay, and we first met a number of years ago in Dubai, but then you moved to Costa Rica, which was a bit of a pivot, but now you're in Belgium for a holiday, right?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: That's correct. I relocated to Costa Rica to get closer to the US time zone while still enjoying tropical weather.
You don't get tropical weather in Antwerp or wherever you're in Belgium?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Rarely, once a year in the summer, there's a good day, and then the rest is rainy.
And you don't like that?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Once a year, maybe.
So Appspace, that's a company that's been around for a very long time. When I first got to know Appspace, it was very much a general digital signage CMS platform, you know, “What are you doing? We can help you out!” And you were, at that time I believe, working pretty closely with Cisco, but in the last few years you could, you very much seem to have become a company that's all about workplace experience and digital signage is one of your outputs as opposed to being a pure digital signage company.
Is that a fair assessment?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Absolutely. We're celebrating our 20 years anniversary this month, so such a big milestone, and the firs 15-16 years was really building a cloud-based CMS for digital signage. We had some mission statements. We wanted to be hardware agnostic, OS agnostic. We wanted to be cloud first, and then a few years back, we started expanding our offering and went into the room scheduling worlds, where a lot of other companies were playing, and just added that as a feature.
Then just two years ago, Summer 2020, one of our biggest customers on the West Coast came over to us and said, “Hey, we're looking to return to the office after the pandemic. We need help in providing our users with an app that would allow them to reserve workspaces, comply with security policies and so forth.” And we decided to get onto that journey and build a product, and six months later we launched. So January 2021 and 30 days later, we signed one of the biggest tech companies as a customer, and from there it's been quite a ride.
Did the company go towards workplace because it looked like an opportune vertical to be in, or was it what the customers who you touching or asking for and it pulled you that way?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah, in the last 10 years, I spent a lot of time meeting with customers and trying to understand their challenges and see where Appspace could help them. In this scenario, the customer came over and they had a real challenge, which we saw many other companies would have, and there was really no one in the market that had an answer for it two years ago. So we thought that's an opportunity in which we could really put some focus, leverage our existing enterprise grade platform, cloud-first experience and credibility in our large enterprise customer base to just go and expand the use case.
Really, we also see that there is a correlation happening with workplace communication and workplace management. It's not gonna be two different things, it's actually gonna be one, and we thought we could come from our workplace communication expertise and go that direction while probably some more workplace management products would probably start moving towards workplace communication, and there would be a consolidation.
You also acquired a company called Beezy, which was all about the workplace as well, right?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah, when we entered workplace management, we also launched our employee app, and from there, we got a lot of requests from customers to focus on employee communication in the app itself, and we met with Beezy, they had a very similar company culture, they had a good size and they had a product which was very modern, very forward looking and built on Microsoft SharePoint, and we thought that would nicely align with our product platform and our vision, so that's been a very fun journey, onboarding them into the Appspace world for the last few months.
Now is Beezy still a brand, or is it that their IP and their capabilities are rolled into Appspace?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: We're rolling them into Appspace step by step. The brands are consolidating under a single brand. Now, it's the Appspace Modern Internet by Beezy, but we are clearly focusing on aligning all the different teams under a single organization, and also the brand and the product will be one.
We definitely don't wanna run two separate products. We've always had that philosophy that with Appspace, it was one platform and features and not multiple point products so we're gonna continue doing that.
There are digital science CMSs that say that the workplace is one of the verticals that they're in, and then there are companies that just do room booking software, and maybe the displays hardware as well, they blend those together. There are hot desk companies and everything else.
I'm thinking, like in a lot of other vertical markets, that the end user really doesn't wanna have to cobble together an overall solution that features all these different components and different companies doing them, they'd rather just have one company doing it all. Is that a fair statement?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yes, and the pandemic has accelerated the need for platforms versus point products.
Pre-pandemic on the workplace management, you had the IWMS to manage all your assets, you had room booking solutions for the room scaling panels, you had visitor management solutions to bring visitors into the office. There were all point products, and then on the workplace comm, you had digital signage that was a point product, you had kiosks often very close to digital signage, and then you had email publishing, you had intranet. All of those were point products as well. I think what we're seeing now is they're unifying on both sides. So you're starting to see vendors who offer room booking, hot desking, visitor management, and then on the other side, you've got companies who are starting to consolidate and acquire, and they're doing digital signage, employee app, intranet, email publishing, and what we're doing is both at the same time, which is probably our biggest unique differentiator.
We believe, if you have an employee app, it's not only about employee communication or workplace management, it's the two combined. So a single app on users' devices versus multiple apps.
And I assume that resonates well with the business communicators and the IT people within a company, because they don't wanna have to deal with all these different logins and back in and out stuff?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: I guess there's two sides to it. There's certainly the administrative side to it, but there's also the user adoption. A big part of the return to the office is implementing new tools for employees to reserve access into a building, reserve a meeting room or a desk, and comply with formalities, that's for sure. But the other side of it is how do you communicate with those employees? How do you let them know what are the new rules in place? What are the new policies? How do you communicate what are the new benefits in the office, the new technology available?
So being able to communicate in the same app that you're actually gonna reserve your workspace, invite your visitors, makes a lot of sense, and I think that's what HR and Corp comms are really liking with our story is that one app will do it all and it will of course integrate with all their backend systems and so forth.
So if I am a business communicator at a large corporation and I want to address these issues, what can you do for them and how does it work?
Are they buying an enterprise license? Is it cloud based or are they installing something on prem, and how does it all come together?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah, it's a great question and it's a big one and there's two sides to it. Once again on one side, you've got the admin, the console is fully cloud based, you don't need to install any software on your desktop, and you can start by just going on Appspace.com, create a free account and you get a full featured Appspace environment.
We don't monetize features, we monetize users and devices. So even with a free account, you’ll have all the features of Appspace, but you'll be limited in the number of users that can log into the app and the number of devices that you can register back.
So it’s the whole idea of Freemium?
I just wanted to ask because “free” is intriguing to me. You don't see that very much in digital science anymore, unless it's entry level super limited in what it does and so on, but you're doing free with the idea of onboarding people, getting them used to the system and them realizing, I like this and I'm willing to pay for it?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah, so what we think is that in order to be successful with Freemium, you need to have a platform that's really self-service, and I think that's what we focused a lot over the last 10 years is simplifying the product to the point where someone who just goes on our website, creates a free account, in 30 seconds is in the Appspace account, able to register a device, create some awesome content, publish it to the device and it's working, and we were able to do that for digital signage, but then we were able to expand that into all the digital communication channels and also for workplace management.
So we maintained Freemium when a lot of other companies started thinking, “That doesn't work for us, let's go back to a trial account with someone hand holding you.” We don't need that with Appspace, you can get started, and so we have a huge amount of customers that create free accounts every month, and then when they're ready to expend, they just need to click on the link and they get in contact with a Sales rep and they can just either swipe their credit card or work through one of our partners to buy a subscription.
Is that a huge amount of free signups every month? Are there no maintenance until they actually contact a Sales rep and say, “I'm interested in paying for this”?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: That's correct. They’re touchless most of the time.
We have very large organizations that will have a lot of different free accounts, different departments, different team members who will create free accounts and get started, and then when they're ready to move and they want to do the security assessment and they want to talk contract and large scale deployments, they reach out to us.
So I guess your sales people might look at big tech company, X and see that they have five different free accounts in different departments, and the salesperson could go to them and say, “Guys, you’re using a lot of this now, do you wanna harmonize it?”
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah. Our sales team, for sure, we also have a big marketing organization now. The product is also supported, so when you log into Appspace, you will have certain steps to follow to register a device, create content. It's the system that is holding your hand, not users.
And then along the way, you will have opportunities to get help, to talk to people. You can go to the knowledge center. Our Sales reps are already really there to help customers get to the next level, which makes it nice because when our Account Executives talk to customers, they already have a good understanding of what the customer has been doing with Appspace and they can really jump right into it.
What happens when you have potential new customers who already have some sort of a room booking system and scheduling system, and they like them.
Do you have APIs where you can just continue to work with them or do they have to abandon that and go entirely with Appspace?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: No, so we have open APIs, fully documented and online for every feature of our product. So we're happy to integrate with existing solutions that the customer may have still under contract or they're happy with it. What we're seeing though is very quickly customers consolidate because they see an opportunity for cost savings, for ease of management.
And then, you know the story of a unified platform, if you have an integration with an emergency system or your building management system and the fire alarm goes on, you can broadcast that message to a digital sign, to a visitor management kiosk, to a room scheduling panel inside the room on the video device, and that can be done really easily when you're using a platform. It's much harder to achieve when you're using point products, because you need to integrate each point product with a security system and many don't even support that concept of broadcast.
So what we're seeing is when customers onboard Appspace for one use case, they very quickly start seeing the opportunity to save money, ease operations, and then benefit from the platform features and capabilities.
Are you able to provide analytics?
I've heard about this in the past where you start to get a sense of how a workplace is being used and where people are dwelling and how often rooms actually get booked and how many people are in the rooms, and it helps to size and maybe rethink some of the meeting spaces that a company may have.
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah, so analytics and reporting is huge, and it's actually for the two sides of the product: for the workplace communication, understanding how users are interacting with content, whether it's on the app, on their phone, on their desktop, whether it's on a kiosk.
We have this concept of a corporate Netflix. We've had that for yours where users can actually browse content on demand, very much like you browse your video content on Netflix. You do that with the remote control, with a touch panel, whatever the interaction you want to use. We track all of that, and that gives a lot of analytics on how content is being consumed, the success of a campaign and so forth.
And then on the workplace management, we have the analytics of what are the most active users, what type of workspace they book? How long do they sit at a desk? How long do they use a meeting room? If the meeting room for 10 people was booked, but used by two people, we have that data, so you can size your resources accordingly based on demand.
And then you can visualize everything inside Appspace, but we also created integrations into Tableau, into Power BI. So customers can actually export the data and visualize it in their preferred data visualization tool.
And in a workplace, the Power BI and Tableau stuff is interesting. I'm curious, are workplaces now much more sophisticated to where they see digital signage and visual communications as doing a lot more than congratulating somebody on their birthday or their 20th year with the company or whatever it may be. They're getting into visualizing KPIs in real time and that sort of thing?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Oh, yes, for sure. The number of customers that display building analytics when you enter the building, when you get on the first floor, where you can see the floor plan, you can see the heat maps, you can see the air quality, you can see the average temperature of the neighborhood. That certainly is a very common use case nowadays, providing building insights to users on digital signs is becoming really exciting.
I think what we're seeing is a huge opportunity of combining workplace management and workplace communication is when you now have context to where digital signage can help, and you know that in the retail world, there's been a bunch of vendors who've monitored gender, age, ethnicity in order to manage communication campaign to those audience and measure also. In workplace management, you don't really care about age or gender. But what you do care is which user is sitting where, and when you've got a majority of salespeople sitting in a neighborhood, can you actually change the content to relate to those people? And that's been something that we've done a lot over the last year and a half is creating that context of digital signage experience, where even though I'm going back into an office where it's a hot desking hotel, the content still speaks to me, because the system is aware that I'm gonna be sitting there, and I think that's huge, because in those days you used to know exactly where people were sitting so you were planning your content for the sales team based on where people were sitting. Now, the system will automate that process based on the data they get from their workplace management feature.
And they're not using computer vision or things like that? Because when I come in to work at an office, I have to book a specific desk, and that's how you know that I'm there, right?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Either because you're booking a specific desk or you're sitting at a specific desk, and when you're actually sitting, we are able to identify who you are, and therefore dynamically say what's interesting to you is more sales data or more product marketing data, and therefore we mush multiple channels of content together to provide a perfect playlist that matches the audience.
But how do you know I'm at that desk?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: That's where workplace technology comes, whether it's smart docking stations, whether it's physically connecting into the network and passing the user identity, whether it's those new video devices that we see popping left and right on the desks. It could be when you have a desk puck, which is similar to a room scheduling panel, you arrive and you will scan the QR code with your phone and authenticate and check into a desk and say, this is now my desk. So we have a lot of different tools that allows us to identify the user and therefore to get that data that we need to personalize the workspace environment.
Through the pandemic, particularly in the first months, there was all kinds of discussion about how the workplace was gonna change, because those workplaces were being hollowed out through lockdowns and so on, and there's been all kinds of discussions and debate and everything else, particularly in the last six months or so, is where workplaces have started to repopulate as to whether it really did change all that much, and whether everybody's just working from home or everybody's into a hybrid thing.
You're on the ground, so to speak, you're dealing with companies who are implementing this stuff. What's your sense of what's actually happening?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: I think companies are worried that people are not coming back to the office as quickly as they had hoped they would, and although many companies during the pandemic said that they would not require employees to go back to the office. It's very different two years later, we realize how the workplace culture is important, and having people, if not every day, at least a few days a week, come into the office and meet their teammates and so forth. So we're now seeing a sense of urgency from many customers to find ways to convince people to go back to the office and that comes with offering a new experience, offering new services.
The new experience is making sure that regardless of where I sit in the building, I have the building talking to me, the building is aware that I'm there and being able to personalize that experience, and I think that's where digital signage is playing such a critical role. But then in the employee app, when I'm booking a room or when I'm booking a desk, I may need different types of services, maybe I need different technology, or maybe I want catering services. I should be able to do that from the app and reserve this ahead of time, and we're seeing a lot of demand around those new experiences where employees will get more benefits when they come to the office, not only benefits of a better physical workplace, but also benefits in terms of the services that are offered, and that will incentivize them to come back into the office, and then naturally, as people will come back to the office, they will meet their teammates again, and they will see why it's so important to meet in person, and that will create a dynamic, and at some point I think we'll get back to somewhat a normal situation where most people will go to the office more regularly.
Did the pandemic accelerate something that, from your perspective, was going to happen anyways and just speed it up out of necessity, or were there a lot of companies that weren't really thinking about changing how their workplaces were experienced?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: That's a great question. I actually think the pandemic gave the opportunity for large organizations to make a cultural change in the workplace that was planned, but maybe seen as a 5-10 years initiative, and they were able to do it in 2 years.
Hot-desking in hotels is an example. We've been talking about hotels and hot-desking for years, but no one was able to implement it. It was such a big cultural change. The pandemic gave the opportunity for companies to take the decision, to reduce real estate and implement hot-desking in hotels, and they had a good reason for that, and for employees, it was like a natural thing that was happening. It would have taken years to get there otherwise. That's why no one was really focusing on the technology for it.
I also think that the pandemic has accelerated the adoption of apps, like Microsoft Teams. Many companies were still using Skype for Business and other tools and they were struggling to unify under a modern app like Microsoft Teams or Slack or WebEx, and this gave them the opportunity to do that, and by doing that, all employees now have one common app on their personal device, whether it's a phone or a desktop, they're able to communicate, chat, exchange files, and we've just launched our embedded app for Teams. So now you have Appspace embedded in Teams, which means users don't need to download a new app to reserve their workspaces or receive team communication. They have all of it inside one app, and I think that's an acceleration that's a result of the pandemic.
We obviously saw how Zoom and Microsoft and WebEx grew from that. That has also helped in the adoption of new technology, like workplace management and employee comms.
Yeah, I was curious about that because if you have all these other workplace tools, the next logical thing to integrate into there would be video conferencing, but that's that's an entirely different business and pretty damn complicated. So the easier path would be to integrate with something like Teams, right?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: That's correct. I think Teams offer the framework to embed an app fully into Teams, handle the authentication for the user, and then from there, we have so much insights on what the user needs that we're really able to personalize the experience.
The Teams embedded app is a huge win for customers because if you think of a very large service organization with 200,000 desk workers, rolling out a new app for communication and for workplace management is a big challenge. Getting users to download the app or deploying the app to their personal device, enabling user authentication, tracking how users are actually logging in the app. This is no longer a challenge when you are embedded in Teams, because one morning you wake up and on your sidebar, you've got a new button, you click on it and that's where you reserve your workspace, that's where you see your workplace communication, all of it in an app that you were already logging in every morning.
So I'm a CTO at a very large tech company, and if I'm a CTO, the company's going down, but regardless of that, if I'm sitting across from you and I say, “okay, this is interesting, make me comfortable that this is secure.” What do you tell me?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: We obviously work with close to two hundred of the Fortune 500 companies, so we're used to working with very large organizations that have very strict security requirements, and our product (the cloud service) is already approved by IT, by Security and enabled whether it's for digital signage or room booking or visitor for one of the features.
Enabling suddenly to turn on the other features doesn't require any more security assessment because the product has been approved. We also have only one app, whether you are running our app on a system on a chip display, on a kiosk, on an iPad, it's the same app in a different container. And this means that once you have your app approved for one of the use cases, your app is actually approved for all the other use cases. That's again been strengths on our side is trying to keep it single simple platform that allows you to really very quickly scale this across your organization.
One thing that's come up a lot in the last couple years is digital science companies who addressed some of the ideas of remote work by having, in effect, a network screensaver, something that would push out to home based workers and pop messaging on a screen and all that. Are you doing that sort of thing, and if so, is it widely adopted?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah, it's a little bit what we started doing five years ago inside meeting rooms on video devices. When the video device is not used for video conferencing, pop up a screensaver and its Appspace, it's running natively on the client and it will display all the important communication. In the case of a meeting room, we're targeting a wider audience.
Now, when you run our UWP app on a Windows device, we obviously know who is the owner of that device, so we're able to personalize the content. Now, I see this as an interesting use case for screensavers. Although I've never seen someone sitting in front of his laptop watching a screensaver as they do a digital sign, drinking a coffee, but I do like the experience of: you're running the Appspace app on the desktop, it's in screensaver mode. When you plug in your laptop in the office or at home, it pops up the experience where as a user, you can say, “Hey, I'm working from home” or “I'm in the office”, and that then trickles into a whole series of events that makes your colleagues, your teammates aware of where you are working from today, are you in the office and so forth.
So screensaver for just pure content playlist, that's really easy to achieve, but I don't know that this is a huge benefit and a huge win, but coupling that with workplace management can be really interesting.
Yeah, I do like the idea of being able to instant message somebody in a way, other than an email, but you're right. If I was working for a large company and I was sitting at home and there was something steadily popping up on the screen telling me about Millie's birthday or Bob's retirement or whatever, I'd be looking very hard to figure out some way to disable it.
Thomas Philippart de Foy: One thing we did though, is we worked with a big law firm in Canada, and the CIO managed to convince the partners to move from a physically assigned office to a hot office, if you will. Very challenging, because lawyers and partners are very conventional. They like their workspace environment. They want their corner office. And what the CIO was able to convince is there would be new sacrifice in the personal experience and to do that, they put in every office, a digital sign, 55 inch display coupled with video or not, depending on the office profile. Outside the office, there is an office scheduling panel.
The partner from home is able to reserve on their Appspace app, “Hey, I need an office from 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM and these are the amenities I need.” They reserve that workspace, and when they come into the office, they actually check on the panel outside or on their phone and the digital sign instantly switches to their personal channel. They have potentially their practice news, maybe their preferred sports news, and also their family pictures that they want, and they've just personalized that office with content for the partners and that made them really excited because now they had a big 55 inch display showing their practice news or their family pictures instead of those little frames on the desk that would take the dust.
I think when technology really increases the user experience and doesn't sacrifice anything, I think this works really well as a home office as well. If you have an extra display and you can use that real estate, that makes sense, but let's not be mistaken, people care about themselves primarily, they want information that's relevant to them. If I'm at home, I don't know that I want this birthday of a colleague, but I wouldn't mind having pictures of a year ago from my family and kids that I celebrated, maybe that's more useful for me.
We haven't talked about back of house and all the discussions around being workplace, as it relates to an office, are you doing work in production areas and industrial areas and so on?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah. So if you remember, we acquired a company called The Marlin Company a couple of years ago, and their main focus was industrial. A very large amount of customers in that space, and we've been working a lot with those customers in transitioning from digital signage, which was a normal evolution of printed posters to digital content and focus a lot around safety and workplace wellbeing and so forth to communicate on personal devices.
Now, frontline workers typically don't have a company email address. So how do they log into the app? So we combine digital signage with the employee app. Digital signage will say, “Hey, there's a new employee app. To access the app, scan this QR code!” User scans the QR code on their phone, enters an employee ID and a phone number and a few seconds later, they get a one time password to create their credentials and they are now logged into the same app as the desk workers with different feature sets, but it's the same app, and now they also have the ability to have employee communication, team communication. They can chat, they can react socially and comment on the content the same way anyone else.
This is breaking the barrier between the desk workers and the frontline workers where really the frontline workers who didn't have a lot of the technology stack because they didn't have a company email address, where everyone has a smartphone so why wouldn't they have the same benefits? And that one time password, no email login has been huge win for us and for our customers in making sure every employee is aligned and has access to the same capabilities.
Last question, this conversation flew by. What's the installed footprint for Appspace at this point?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: It's always hard to say because we count users. We evaluate that around 10 million users benefit from Appspace around workplace management and workplace communication today. We have around 2,500 customers, two hundred of the Fortune 500, and deployments that will scale on the screen size between 50 screens and 10,000 screens for a single customer.
And on the user side, our largest deployment is 175,000 users logging into our app to receive team communication or reserve workspaces. So very large deployments. We like to focus on large customers, but with the Marlin acquisition, we were able to really get into the industrial segment where you have a lot of smaller organizations, maybe not always smaller in terms of number of workers, but maybe smaller in terms of number of physical workspaces.
Yeah. All right, this was great. I learned a lot, which is, I guess the point.
Thomas Philippart de Foy: That was great. Thank you so much for giving us the time.
Wednesday Aug 03, 2022
Hans Feil, Etulipa
Wednesday Aug 03, 2022
Wednesday Aug 03, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
E-paper displays are, by far, best known for the little e-readers people use instead of printed books. The core technology used for those readers is what's also being used for things like meeting room displays and updated bus stop schedule signs that run off batteries and, in some cases, solar chargers. But that's all been in black and white and gray. Color displays, and particularly displays that can do full motion graphics and video playback, have largely stayed in the bucket of future technology.
A small Dutch company is well along the path of changing all that - using something called electro-wetting display technology that gets its brightness from the sun, and would be used as low-energy alternatives to big LED video displays used for out of home advertising.
In this podcast, I have a detailed chat with Etulipa founder Hans Feil, whose company is rapidly evolving and maturing the technology, and has a big investment and R&D partner in Daktronics, the big South Dakota-based LED manufacturer. We get into what the technology is and how it works, its differences with other kinds of e-paper, how it sets up, and its benefits.
The company is still at the advanced R&D stage, but far enough along that it anticipates being in small quantity production next year, through a manufacturing partner in Taiwan.
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TRANSCRIPT
Hans, thank you very much for joining me. Let's just get right to it. What the heck is electro wetting display technology?
Hans Feil: That's a good question. It's what they call reflective display technology. Of course, you probably know about it already, but if people don't know, the introduction that I made is that I say you probably will have an e-reader, many people have e-readers nowadays and it's black and white and a little bit slow, but you can read it outdoors. If you take your iPad outdoor in the sun, it's difficult to read. We have something like your the display on the e-reader, but then with color and it's fast, and that's the that's the difference.
So it's a reflective display technology. It reflects light so there's no back light behind, it doesn't emit light. So if you take our display into the dark, you don't see anything unless you light it up with a back light or front light. So that's for newcomers. If you're a chemist or a physicist or a scientist, I’d probably say it a little bit different, in the sense that what we do is that we manipulates liquids colored oils, and we have a layer colored oils and with little cells with oils and we can make small droplets with it and the size of the droplets we can.
For instance, if you compare to print, many people have ink-jet printers and if they would take a magnifying glass and look at the paper, they're see little cyan, magenta and yellow droplets on the white paper, and what we do is we’re mimicking this printing with cyan, magenta and yellow. So we have a white paper or white reflector, we call it. And we have three layers of glass on top of it with cyan, magenta, and yellow oil and each individual layer, we can switch this oil droplets, making them small or big. And if all the layers are spread, it's black because you don't see anything, all the lights are absorb. And if there are all the droplets are small, white or nearly white and depending on which droplets you switch and can get all the colors of the rainbow, and that's all very low power.
From what I read on your website, unlike traditional, if you wanna call traditional ePaper, what we would know from E-ink displays primarily, this can do 25 frames per second motion, which is quite a bit different because when you see something change on an ePaper screen, it goes nuts for a fraction of a second as it reorganizes itself.
Hans Feil: Yes, and in our case, it doesn't really reorganize, droplets just become big or small and it goes very fast.
Was that a big step to get to the point where you could change them that quickly or is that kind of inherent in the technology design?
Hans Feil: It comes automatically with the technology. It has never been slow.
And with ePaper, and I'm certainly not banging on Eink, but they spent 20+ years advancing their color displays and they'll put out press releases saying we now have more color support than we used to but basically it's been a very long road to get 'em to full color.
You're saying you've got full color gamut right now?
Hans Feil: Yes, but also in our case, it was a very long long route too. The first paper of Rob Hayes and Johan Feenstra from Phillips Research was from 2003, so 19 years ago, this nature paper, where they're first showing to the world electro wetting display, or at least the concept and some examples. So that's 19 years ago and since then we are working very hard on progressing technology, making better making it possible to manufacture displays and so forth. So it's also a very long route.
So what's the tie, if there is one to Phillips?
Hans Feil: Right now, there is no tie except that we are located here in Eindhoven, what they call High Tech Campus, Eindhoven and it used to be the same campus, but smaller from Phillips Research in the old days. So the technology originally, the effect of switching oil droppers, was initially invented here a few hundreds of meters a away from the place where I'm standing now.
Am I remembering correctly that you have a background with Phillips as well?
Hans Feil: That's correct, yeah. I worked what they call the Phillips Research Labs since 1988 in various functions, but mostly quite scientific work in the old days, when it was a very scientific lab. And then I worked for a number of years in battery technology, lithium polymer batteries, and by the end of the 90s, and I got in touch of the guys who started this electro wetting displays, I think in 2004, so I'm 18 years active in electro wetting displays already.
So like you said, it has been a bit of a road then?
Hans Feil: Yes, sure.
When did Etulipa start?
Hans Feil: I’ll share a bit of history. At Phillips, when we were working on electro wetting display technology, we did a spinoff called Liquavista, you may have heard the name. It was early 2006 and a little bit prior to that, there was interest from the German automotive mirror manufacturer, a very big one, who wanted to see if this technology could be used for rear view auto dimming mirrors, and at that time it looked very promising.
In fact, after co-founding Liquavista, half a year later, together with an old colleague, I cofounded Miortech and Miortech was dedicated to use this electro wedding display technology for rearview mirrors. So by the end of 2006, we started this company, Miortech, trying to make the mirrors. Turned out to be that technology was not as fast as we hoped so there was a lot of development work to do. We really had to go back to the drawing table. In fact, we found out that there was a better way of making electro wetting displays with a different architecture that solved most of the initial problems. We patented that and then we started making prototypes of this mirrors, but basically it was a little bit too late, the market evolved and these automotive companies didn't want to really want it anymore.
But also in fact, if you're trying to make a mirror with small oil droplets or small cells, there's also always some light scattering from this droplets and so we could never get this mirrors fully free from haze. It was always a little bit of haze, so it was not good enough. So by the end of 2012, so it was almost 10 years ago, we said these mirrors are no good. It's a display technology. We have our own patented way of making electro wetting displays, maybe there are display companies who are interested in, for instance, licensing this technology, the way that we make the devices. Turns out to be not so easy, but at some point of time, we were asked, “Can't you make outdoor display with this technology?” And in fact, that's the sweet spot of electro wetting display.
If you really want to have bright, reflective colors, you need CMY, the stack of cyan, magenta, yellow. Just black and white display plus color filters is just not bright enough because you are throwing away two third of the light and so for reflective, you need CMY, and this stack has always a certain thickness because of the glass thickness, which also mean that it limits the the pixel density that you can reach. The rule of thumb is that the the thickness of the stack, CMY is roughly in the same range as the pixel size. And for outdoor displays, if you have a 10 millimeter pixels that's pretty good, that's pretty high resolution already.
So we made a few samples with CMY, very simple samples. And we went along to outdoor display companies, including Daktronics at the time, it was 2013 or 2014 or something like that and we showed it to the folks at Daktronics and they liked it. So they said this looks promising, of course, it was very early days, we just had samples. But since then, we have worked together with Daktronics. They became a shareholder, supporting us all the way, step by step from small displays to black and white displays to full color displays that we have right now. So the story started in 2013, when we stopped the mirrors and said, okay, we need to move to outdoor displays with this, and I think it was a good bet.
Did you find yourself going in the direction of outdoor displays because of market size or was it more the case of a company in Daktronics that specializes in large format, outdoor displays, was interested in it and therefore you had an automatic market partner?
Hans Feil: No, the funny thing is, when we were still at Phillips and we were looking for what kind of markets we would first do with Liquavista, with the technology. I did some research on different markets and I found out that outdoor display markets was in the sweet spot of the technology. But then, and we are talking about 2005 or something like that, the venture capitalist who invested in Liquavista really want to go in mobile displays. So it was at a time when Nokia was still big and the market was growing so reflective displays for cell phones was the automatic market and we put aside the outdoor display at that time.
So talking about my first PowerPoints I had and spreadsheet about market sizes for electro wedding displays for outdoor was already in 2005, so I had it always in my back of the minds and I had presentations ready when we made the switch. That's the reason why we visited Daktronics and a few others. So we didn't make the move to outward display just because of Daktronics, we had chosen for outdoor displays and it just fits with Daktronics.
So just like LED displays, the kind that are manufactured by Daktronics primarily, these displays have a pixel pitch, correct?
Hans Feil: Correct.
So there's a gap between each pixel basically?
Hans Feil:. Yes, they're point sources, sort of.
And right now it's 10 millimeters, which in LED terms would sometimes be referred to as P10 or something, but I'm reading that you anticipate that you can get it down to 2.5mm?
Hans Feil: Yes, that's correct. We already have made samples with TFT back planes with 2.5mm pixel pitch. So right now we have P10, so that are the first displays that we're making but the next stop would be 2.5 millimeter and also larger tiles.
At P10, that's very competitive with conventional billboards that you would see on the side of a road and up above a building, that sort of thing. 2.5 means you could have it as a sidewalk level display that somebody would be able to view quite nicely from say 10 feet away?
Hans Feil: Yes, exactly, like bus stops, sidewalks and that kinda stuff.
Yeah. Do you have to get even tighter than that, and is it possible if you wanted to do print and bus schedules and things like that?
Hans Feil: If we want to go to smaller pixel sizes, what's needed is somewhat thinner glass. So right now, the glass that we use is 0.5 millimeter and we have a stack of number of pieces of glass but if you go glass that’s 0.2 millimeter or 0.3 millimeter, we can go to pixel sizes of 1 or 1.5 millimeter.
Is that something that's possible, or it's not even developed yet by the glass manufacturers?
Hans Feil: Oh no, the glass is there. There's even thinner. Basically, we do it step by step, but the glass is there.
So this isn't a wish, it's just a when?
Hans Feil: Yeah, exactly. There are many things that are a when.
These units are, again, similar in certain respects to LED displays in terms of they have cabinets or tiles, and they stack together?
Hans Feil: Correct.
What are the sizes of these tiles, and are there limitations as to how many you can put together or is it modular and it can be as big as you want?
Hans Feil: It's modular. The the tiles that we have right now are roughly 10 inch, and we have six tiles in one panel. That's how we build the displays that we have here in our backyard. And the next step with 2.5 millimeter, we're looking for 21 inch tiles so there'll be bigger tiles and smaller pitch, but there are no limits in how big you can make the displays of it. It's just metal scaling up the electronics and it's all modular.
With the video support, I read that right now you're demonstrating animations and not full color video. Is there a reason for that or is just a matter that that's what makes sense right now?
Hans Feil: Yeah, that it's mostly electronics development. There are two parts to this, one is the uniformity of the tiles. We are constantly improving the uniformity so the gray scales and the gray scale definitions become better and better, so that's what's needed, and the electronics development is a separate thing since we have to see how fast we can make the electronics work with the number of gray levels we have. Right now, it's designed with 7 bits color so you can have 128 droplet sizes per color, which for reflective is very much, to be honest, the uniformity is not so good that we can really make this one on the 128 droplet sizes very precise. It's a little bit less but that's all about scaling up the electronics.
In the advertising world, generally speaking for digital out-of-home advertising, they're not using full motion anyways, except for spectaculars in Times Square and those big wrap arounds and so on. There's one heck of a lot of deployed stock that is just digital posters basically?
Hans Feil: Yeah, for example, along freeways, you're not allowed to do any animation and so on.
So as long as you can address full color and have the clarity that people want, they're happy?
Hans Feil: Yeah, with the first display out here, it was a test for us to see what's the color space that we can see, what's the impression that we have, and so far we are quite happy.
In fact, all the visitors that come along, many of them do not have very high expectations because they don't know what to expect with reflective colors and the the veterans, so to say, who have seen reflective displays before, they know when colors are dull. But everybody was surprised when they walk outdoor and see what we have in terms of color and brightness. People are amazed.
I believe I saw that these displays can handle 15,000 lumens, that's the maximum brightness?
Hans Feil: To be honest, we didn't measure it exactly yet. That really depends on how much sun comes on it. It scales perfectly with the with the amount of sunshine in the environment. It's like when you have newspaper, I don't have to tell you, of course, that newspaper in the bright sun is very bright but because your eyes are accommodated to the brightness of the environment, you don't do not really notice that it's so bright and that's the same with our display.
In fact, here’s a funny story, the cameraman who made his shots for the video clip that we have, he was he was used to taking shots of video or display and he suddenly realizes that he didn't have to adjust all his systems when the sun goes behind the cloud, the display didn’t become less bright because the trees and the grass, et cetera, also became less bright. It was then when he realized, okay this is different from what I've seen so far because LED displays are brighter compared to the surroundings all the time.
Yeah. It's wildly different, it's the opposite of outdoor LCDs, which are the primary things used for display totems to advertise street furniture, that kind of thing. They're always battling the sun, they've gotta be at least 2500 nits to eve overpower glare and so on, and you're saying, the brighter it is, the better it's gonna get?
Hans Feil: Oh yeah, it's fine. But also, today's very gray weather here and I've been there with visitors when it was raining in and it still looked pretty good. It's only when it's getting really dark, likewhen the sun goes down, then you really notice. But it's the same with your eReader. At some point of time, you realize, okay, now I do not see enough contrast anymore, I have to switch on my back light or front light or whatever you have.
That backlight or front light, whatever it may be, that's running off of a battery that's charged by solar collectors, right?
Hans Feil: Yeah, that's correct.
So you can be completely autonomous from electrical power grid, but is there enough power out of that battery to do cellular connectivity for updates?
Hans Feil: Yes, sure. In fact, the trailer that we have out here, that was designed to have an LED display mounted on it, so that there's a little bit big battery, but it's one solar panel, a lead acid batteries in this trailer. In fact, we have never charged this one, never. Previously we had a black and white display on it and with our color display, the power consumption of our display is so low, we don't need to charge it.
One thing I noticed in the reference photos is that the units have seams. It reminds me of 5-10 years ago when the LCD manufacturers every year would come up with some definition or description of even narrower bezel or seams in between the displays, and when LED came along, that got of a lot interest just because the seams went away, and people who were designing spaces were saying, okay, I wanna use LED instead, because there are no seams.
Are you getting any pushback about that about the seams that exist and will those with time go away?
Hans Feil: Pushback is a big word, but people do notice the seams, and although the seam here that we have here is smaller than the width of one pixel, so if you walk to the display, of course you see the seam, and we prefer to have narrow seams or no seams, but you can see the seams. If you walk away, they become less noticeable, and if you cannot discriminate between individual pixels anymore, then the seams are also becoming very thin or hardly visible.
With LED display, if you walk toward the display, at some point of time, you can see the individual LEDs, right? The image breaks down and it become little light dots. And in our case, you start noticing the seam more and more. If you're really standing in front of it, of course you’ll see many seams, but when you walk away on to say 30-50 feet for P10 pixel then it's hardly noticeable anymore. But again, of course, everybody wants to have thinner seams or no seams. So we have a program working on that to get them thinner, less noticeable. And also in future, when we go to larger tiles, seams will become thin.
We had a big outdoor advertiser here in Holland who who used our 100 square meters screens with P10 pixels, and said that this solution would be good, and not to worry about the seams very much because for 100 square meter display, you're standing 50 meters away or even more, and you won’t see the seams anymore.
Where's the product at, are you now shipping or is it still in R&D?
Hans Feil: No, we are now in the testing phase. So we have it out here in the backyard. The next display will be made and shipped to South Dakota for evaluating by Daktronics and their customers. By the end of the year, we are targeting to have a production capacity with our partner, URT in Taiwan, for 50 square meters per year, which isstill not much, but it's doable. And then early next year, we think the first display will be used by first customers here in the region because turns out there are parties that connected to us that have been waiting for low power display for many years but they couldn't go anywhere because the only thing that they had was LED, right? And now they have this option which some of them were looking for it for many years already.
We have a client who, every two years, was making calculations about power consumption of the display and every two years he was disappointed that it was never low enough, and now suddenly he got in touch with us and said, this is what I need. So he’ll probably use a number of our displays in the first half of next year.
Are the upfront costs for this going to be higher than that for the upfront cost of conventional LED displays for the same footprint and are the savings more on the backend because you're not using power?
Hans Feil: Yeah, that's correct. Right now, we are making them in small quantities So the price is not really reflecting how it can be. But indeed, there is a huge savings in situations where people have to make a connection to the grid, which can take months before they can get a connection, and it’s also very often very expensive. We had one small, black and white display in a New York City bus stop, it turns out to be that the solution with our displays in that bus stop with a solar panel and a battery was 30% cheaper than the original version with LED displays, which were connected to the grid.
This connection to the grid and all the work that, that goes along it and permits and so forth, make it very expensive. So even when there was a battery added and a solar panel added, and our display was more expensive than the LED one, it was much cheaper to have reflective displays. It was also new for us at that time.
So going forward into 2023, if I am a outdoor media company in, let's say Australia, and I want to buy this, am I going to be buying it through Daktronics, or will you be licensing this more broadly than that?
Hans Feil: Most likely through Daktronics. Probably the first smaller smaller display here in the region, we will install ourselves because that's more convenient, it's nearby, et cetera. But once this becomes bigger and more mature, it's our goal, our business plan that we will be creating the panels and Daktronics will make displays with those panels and sell them worldwide.
And as you scale up maybe the existing manufacturer in Taiwan who right now might be a contract manufacturer doing small lots, you would figure it out from there what kind of manufacturing capacity you’d need?
Hans Feil: Yeah. So for now that they have enough capacity, there should be no problem.
We are open for talks, the whole consortium of URT, Daktronics and ourselves, if there are any other major display company who says, okay, I also want to adopt electro wetting displays, because we always believe if we want to make this successful, we should not really keep it all for ourselves.
And there's lots of money to be made,-without a lot of grief-in licensing.
Hans Feil: Yeah, we're open to do anything that's reasonable. But there are many in fact, maybe all the major display companies that at some point of time tried making electro wetting displays and did R&D but they found it very difficult and stopped with it.
We have our own technology, what we call second generation technology with different approach and we solved all those problems that were there with the first generation electro wetting displays. It has taken some time, but it's worked quite well now.
I'm looking forward to seeing it at some point, somewhere. I hope I don't have to go to South Dakota in the middle of the winter, but you never know.
Hans Feil: Well, you could also come here, but I'm not sure if you are in Europe anytime soon.
Yeah, well, Eindhoven has a better football team than Brookings South Dakota, so that would be a better trip for me.
Anyway, thank you very much for spending some time with me.
Hans Feil: Yeah, I'm very glad that I got opportunity from you to talk about this. And I hope you can watch our display anytime soon, either here or in the US somewhere. Seeing is believing, in fact, and reflective is just different.
Yeah. I completely buy into the idea that it's one of those things that it's interesting to read and to hear about in a podcast, but to walk up and see it is where you're gonna close the deal.
Hans Feil: Yeah, exactly.
All right, thanks again.
Hans Feil: Thank you very much, and hope to see you soon.
Wednesday Jul 27, 2022
PJ Thelen, RoveIQ
Wednesday Jul 27, 2022
Wednesday Jul 27, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
When PJ Thelen talks about the company's software and hardware, he focuses almost entirely on the experiences they enable and deliver, as opposed to the features and specs of the technology.
It's refreshing, because a lot of the conversation and marketing around outdoor displays for directories, wayfinding and advertising has been - at least in recent years - about how they were more than just screens, but smart city devices that did a variety of things, including WiFi connectivity and IoT sensors. Thelen went so far as rebranding the company he now runs from smartLINK to RoveIQ - getting away from the heavily-used smart moniker and emphasizing how Rove speaks to enabling people to navigate a space with intelligent - the IQ bit - guidance.
The company has a CMS, sophisticated mapping, an ad server and analytics capabilities all designed to help people find their way around big places. The early adopters have been commercial properties - like mixed-use lifestyle developments. In many to most cases, those are wayfinding directories with mapping, supported by advertising.
But Thelen sees a lot of possibilities working with large-footprint healthcare, helping people find their way around sprawling medical campuses. There would be physical screens providing guidance, but in his vision, RoveIQ guides people from the time they park in a hospital garage all the way to a specific building, floor and waiting room.
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TRANSCRIPT
Peter, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what RoveIQ is all about?
Peter (PJ) Thelen: RoveIQ really emphasizes smart kiosks and wayfinding software solutions.
We just rebranded our organization from smartLINK to RoveIQ and Dave, a big reason for that was we wanted to make sure our new name is better aligned with the solutions that we bring to market and the value that we provide for both our customers and partners. Now the word Rove, it's the whole idea of wandering, discovering, et cetera but the IQ element is to do it in an intelligent fashion. So you have a very efficient and enjoyable experience.
So if somebody listening to this is trying to visualize what you do, the visual that would immediately spring to mind would be a display totem outside in a public plaza or something like that with directory or mapping, correct?
Peter Thelen: Yeah, without a doubt. So I always use the analogy, Dave, to pretend that you're going to a place for the first time. You're not quite sure where you are or what is around you so you leverage the hardware and our software to understand what is available and then ultimately leveraging either the kiosk experience or the mobile experience allows you to essentially get to where you want to go leveraging a Blue Dot scenario, which obviously is our wayfinding software.
Blue Dot scenario, what do you mean by that, or is that just the name of the software itself?
Peter Thelen: No, that's just the analogy I use Dave, where if you think about where you are and let's just say, hypothetically, you want to go to a restaurant, the dots correlate to the path that you need to take to go from where you are to where you ultimately want to go.
The old name, smartLINK, connoted the whole idea of smart cities and that there were all kinds of companies coming up with smart city kiosks in the last decade or so, and I don't necessarily see a lot of traction for those sorts of things. Is that kind of driving this as well? What if you better focus on the whole idea of guiding people, as opposed to saying this is this station that will do all these other things to help cities become smarter?
Peter Thelen: Yeah, we took a step back. RoveIQ is a software company. It just so happens that it needs a hardware platform to promote the value that we drive on a day in and day out basis.
In our minds, smart was widely used. It didn't necessarily correlate to exactly what we do today and where we're going tomorrow. From a search engine optimization perspective, it was tough just because there's so many smart this and smart that. As RoveIQ continues to grow, we're growing more and more into other verticals beyond just the smart city. So the bottom line is that we wanted a name that more appropriately aligned with who we are and what we're doing on a day in and day out basis, and it just made sense.
It was a great exercise. It was about a six month long exercise with a phenomenal local company here called Brand Fuel, and we're very happy with the results.
There seem to be two kinds of threads of these kinds of outdoor street furniture displays. There are those shopping malls and community business districts, that sort of thing put in to help people find their way around intelligently, and then there are those that are there primarily as advertising. “Oh, by the way, there's also a directory” or “there's also some sort of a lookup thing” but it exists for advertising. Do you go down one path or the other, or do you serve both?
Peter Thelen: Yeah, that's a great question, and we definitely serve both, but there is no doubt that the emphasis of our software is around creating experiences. Experiences that a visitor or a resident is wanting to have, or is not expecting, and ultimately has, which generates this great feeling.
Our software, which we consider a platform. It is a content management solution. It has the ability to be an ad server, which allows you to download and upload ads as well as schedule ads, then it has this third element around data analytics and reporting. So we feel like we have some of the best software out there. But there is no doubt at the end of the day, we're trying to promote more experiences as compared to just ads.
But a big part of the ROI from a customer perspective is that digital out-of-home ad opportunity, and post COVID that's growing significantly, which is creating great opportunities.
And ultimately, regardless of the venue and the scenario, something's gotta pay for the thing, right, so that's why advertising tends to come into play?
Peter Thelen: Yeah. We always say there's hard and soft ROI in terms of your investment in RoveIQ. The soft is the experiences that both the customer, the resident, the visitor, incurs on a per visit basis, and how do you measure that? Secondly, it is the digital out-of-home ads based on whatever DMA that property or the city resides in that correlates to how big of an opportunity that is, and then the third element, which in my mind is still fairly immature, but it's becoming more relevant and more mature each and every day is this whole idea of how do you leverage the data?
Whether it's the touch analytics, whether it's the video analytics and then the ability to potentially incorporate both WiFi and mobile, and then what do you use to do with that data to do something of value with it.
You mentioned experience, how do you define and characterize experience?
The experience can be what you see on the screen, what it looks like and everything else, or the experience can be, “that was easy. I found what I was looking for quickly, and that was a great experience” because now I can go in and experience whatever public plaza or mall or attraction that I'm at?
Peter Thelen: At the end of the day, people want to be informed, they want to be educated, they want to gain access to information in a very quick and inefficient manner, and ultimately, they want to.
We're designing our software where when you approach a kiosk and you start to interact, you can get off of it in less than 40 seconds and feel really happy about the experience and you're on your way, and you feel like you're on your way in an intelligent way. I always use the analogy, Dave, if you come to a property or a city for the first time, you're gonna be inclined to use our software. We at, RoveIQ wanna make sure every time you visit that city or that particular property, regardless if you know where you are and what is around you, because of your previous experience, you want to, once again, interact with our software, it causes you to want to come back, and if you're coming back, that means we're doing our job and adding great value to the customer, the property, etc.
So if you're doing your job, this is where repeat visitors tend to migrate to like Moss to a light. They just know, “I'll start here to help me find what I'm looking for”?
Peter Thelen: That's a hundred percent correct, and our new brand promise is this whole idea of enriching lives through intelligent software designed to move humans, then we elaborate saying both physically and emotionally, and that emotional element is probably the most important.
So where does your company start and where does it stop in terms of services and technology that you provide?
Peter Thelen: So knowing that we're a software company that ultimately needs a digital display to add value and differentiate, we're providing a fully integrated solution to a customer, which obviously includes the hardware, the related installation, the software, and then the ongoing maintenance. To do all of those things, you need to wrap it in a bow from a project management perspective, and then ultimately you're bringing this data element and this advertising element as part of the overall solution as well so the customer looks at you as a one stop shop.
So we have that ability today. Now, obviously, we leverage partners where that is their core business to add the ultimate value and aspects of the overall solution. But hopefully that's transparent to the customer.
Yeah, I'm guessing that you guys would be happy as clams if you could just be a software company and not have to worry, or really even think about hardware and just provide the specs that it needs to run on this sort of thing, but as you say, people want one stop shopping, they want turnkey.
Peter Thelen: Yep, but that does bring up a good point. Before I got here in May of 2021, we were predominantly dependent on hardware. Of course, in the last 14 months we've made phenomenal strides in promoting mobile-only solutions. So if you think about something as simple as a smart city or a mixed use real estate, yes, you're walking up to a kiosk, but as you exit that kiosk, you can scan or text to phone, to basically take that exact same experience from the kiosk with you on your mobile device, you don't have to download anything, it is considered a web app and off you go.
We're also offering mobile-only solutions which are cool. As we penetrate colleges and universities and healthcare, we're not dependent on that hardware. You can get the benefits of our software, just leveraging your mobile device which has been pretty exciting to see and we look at that as a high growth vertical.
So in theory, let's say on a university campus, you could walk up to a support column in a building and there'd be a QR code on there with a message that says. “Having trouble finding your way? Scan this!” and it'll launch your app and off you go?
Peter Thelen: That's a hundred percent correct.
How do you make money off of that then?
Peter Thelen: Well, that's all our software. If you think about it, the theme you're probably hearing from me is, we're a software company, and every time we're providing value around our software, there is a fee for that subscription base , it's monthly and it's based on the opportunity.
So in a conventional setup where you are providing display hardware, you would have a play out license for that display, but with the university campus or something like that, if you're not using physical displays, you would just have some sort of a site license for the campus?
Peter Thelen: That's a hundred percent correct.
Okay. That makes sense then. I'm curious about wayfinding. Mapping for big public displays has been around, I'd say at least a decade, maybe 15 years, and like everything it's evolved, and I saw on your website, one of the things you talk about is three-dimensional wayfinding.
Over the years, what has your company found in terms of what resonates with end users? Do they care about certain things like it being three-dimensional or do they just want something that's very intuitive and quick?
Peter Thelen: I've concluded it's all the above. I think users today are smarter than ever. They have a very high expectation in terms of the experience that they're aspiring to have. So they want everything. There's a lot of wayfinding solutions out there. So we always think to ourselves, what makes ours better than the next, and knowing that we emphasize experiences, how do we really promote a better experience as it pertains to that whole wayfinding experience?
So not everybody does 3D, most only do 2D. The whole idea of interactive is a big deal, and we obviously wanna promote that fairly aggressively, but the one thing that we're really emphasizing, Dave, is this idea of hyperlocal. Do we capture all elements of a property? So when an individual starts their journey, leveraging our software, it's a great experience. They very clearly know where they're going, they can visualize the surrounding environment and as they're going, there's no fear and uncertainty or doubt about where they're ultimately going to get to, because there's a high degree of confidence in that.
The hyperlocal is a very important element to our solution. It could be as simple as a bench, it could be a tree, it could be the look and feel of the building. Our UI/UX team does a phenomenal job of configuring the property on a per deal basis to make sure it looks and feels just like that property actually is.
So some of the areas you're in like Port Orlando in Orlando, or Miami Design District and so on, if a shopping or mixed use outdoor district like that approaches you guys and says we want to do this. What is involved? You were talking about the UX design and everything. Do they go on site or how do they put this together?
Peter Thelen: Yeah, it's a lot of different elements, which makes it fun and exciting, but ultimately it starts with a site survey, where we walk the property with the respective owners. We identify those high traffic areas. We understand the goals from the owner in terms of what they really want from this hardware and software. You have to define the advertising opportunity as part of the whole digital out-of-home. Sometimes it's a great opportunity, sometimes it's just an average opportunity and in some instances, based on the location of the property, it might not exist at all. Then the last element is this whole idea of data.
Data is becoming more valuable like I referenced earlier. Each owner wants different types of data sets that's important to them. So as part of the onboarding, we define those data elements. But as we leave that site survey, you're taking all these pieces to the puzzle and assembling them into this picture that correlates to ultimately what they want which is a combination of hardware and software that are strategically placed throughout the property. We've built out the software in terms of the configuration so the experience as you approach the digital display looks and feels just like the property.
I always use the analogy, picture your iPhone. When you open up your iPhone, you have the various apps on the first page. That's no different than what we do for a customer as part of the configuration process, and then we build out the maps. Take into consideration that hyperlocal, 3D concepts
It is the core goal and aspiration simply to ensure that people who visit a venue like Port Orlando or whatever, to just not be lost and frustrated, or is it a little more sophisticated and evolved in the case of trying to influence where they might go?
Peter Thelen: I'm chuckling a little bit because it's both. If you think about the whole idea of moving people physically and emotionally, the physical aspect is the wayfinding, and that is the emphasis of our software, but we're one of the first in industries to roll out augmented reality selfie. I was at the Avalon property outside Atlanta, Georgia last week, and I sat on the property for three hours, Dave and I watched people interact with our software, and 70% of the people were leveraging the selfie and having an absolute blast with it in terms of what filter to use, how many people to incorporate into the selfie picture. I watched them scan or text to phone and I watched them walk away giggling, because they were so happy with the experience.
Okay. So this is walking in front of a totem, there's a camera, it's capturing your image in front of the camera and then you're overlaying it like mouse ears or whatever?
Peter Thelen: That's a hundred percent correct. I would say think of Snapchat filters, that's the exact experience that we're promoting, leveraging our software.
Is that all just about the experience? Like I did this at this location and it's going to brand it and say I was at Avalon, and I did this fun thing and it's cascading out to that person's followers and therefore it's helping the Avalon brand?
Peter Thelen: That's a hundred percent correct, and then the other side of that, and I'll just use an example of coupons. Think about the whole dynamic of a property wanting to potentially push more and more of the visitors to select locations or select stores, think about the whole idea of, I'm at Avalon for the first time, where is Lululemon? I used the software to understand where Lululemon is from a wayfinding perspective, Lululemon then offers me hypothetically a 10% coupon for today's spend, I scan that QR code, I work my way to Lululemon, I obviously make my purchase, I go to the POS as part of my payment process and I get 10% off my total order.
Lululemon's ecstatic that our technology drove people to their store, but the visitors were ecstatic because they got 10% off that they weren't expecting, everybody's happy. Those are the ideal scenarios. So the next time that family comes to Avalon, they're gonna be very inclined to leverage our software to understand what other coupons are out there.
That's got traceability too, right?
Peter Thelen: That's a hundred percent correct.
Yeah, and is that happening very often, people using it?
Peter Thelen: The answer is yes, and it's happening more and more every day. RoveIQ has only been around since 2016, it was started by two individuals that also had another company. So you could make an argument, it really was a hobby.
I came here in May of last year. We had very talented people, it just needed more direction and more leaders, and we're adding new features every single day to our software to once again, heighten the whole idea of creating more and more experiences.
. Did you know much about this space when you came into it?
Peter Thelen: Yeah, I did a little, I do adapt to be dangerous, but I ran an IT solutions company for 19 years. I spent my last two years at an organization called Kroger, a rather large grocery store where I ran a division called Sunrise Technology, and that was all about leveraging technology that Kroger developed in house and realized that it worked, and the ask from me was to take that technology and sell it to the global retail world.
The emphasis of that technology was digital shelves inside a grocery store. So I took that same experience, in that case, it was a digital shelf. In our RoveIQ world, it's a digital display, but the elements of the solution were very similar: data, advertising and experiences.
I noticed in the press release announcing the name change that you also made a reference to healthcare software that was coming and I thought that's interesting, so what was that all about and is it now live?
Peter Thelen: I've had so much fun with the team and healthcare customers working on this new concept and it's going great. The premise is fairly simple. If you think about the average experience today, where you have to go to a healthcare facility tomorrow, and these healthcare facilities continue to get bigger and bigger, which from a patient perspective, creates a lot of apprehension and anxiety around, where do I park, what entrance do I go in, and how do I ultimately get to the department that I'm needing to go to?
So leveraging our legacy software, we have made tweaks where we are now integrating into their Epic and/or Cerner, where essentially a patient gets a text the day of their visit and that text takes them from their current location to the correct parking garage via car, then transfers to foot from the parking garage to the correct entrance, and then continues from the front entrance to the actual department. All leveraging a mobile device and obviously our software on that mobile device, and needless to say, it's addressing a rather large problem in healthcare that we believe with confidence we can solve and we're pretty excited about it.
Now, where does it stand? We're in pilots as we sit here today, which means we're learning every single day with a set of customers, and needless to say, our goal is to go live with many customers as we enter 2023.
That's an interesting one because an awful lot of big healthcare complexes started off as one building and ended up being eighteen buildings and they're all joined together and it's confusing as hell to find your way around, and I can certainly respect the idea of something that can say: go out this door, go down this hallway, go up three levels, then turn right and left, and eventually you're gonna find your way there because without it, you might have to leave super early because you know you're gonna get lost.
Peter Thelen: Completely agree, and if you think about the idea of hyperlocal and our legacy software with these enhancements, we can promote this unbelievable experience where you always feel like you know where you're going and where you need to go to ultimately reach your destination. And from a customer experience perspective, these healthcare entities that we're working with today, that's one of their big issues.
People need to feel good about where they need to go and how to go about getting there.
Do you address language as well?
Peter Thelen: The answer is yes. Now our current pilots, they have not asked for that, Dave, but the bottom line is, our software has that capability.
Yeah. I asked because years ago I had a meeting with a hospital in Toronto and it was in a very multicultural area of Toronto, and they had a roster of staff and volunteers who just handled all the different languages that came to the reception desk, asking where the Pediatric Clinic was or whatever, and they would have to call people and say, we need somebody who speaks Lithuanian or Tagalog or whatever it may be, and it was this monumental challenge.
I suggested at the time that you might wanna look at some sort of interactive directory that you select your language first, and then it takes you where you need to go that way, and they said that's interesting, but they wanted to just do the wow factor, I can't do stuff in their public areas instead, and they're like, oh, okay, that's not gonna solve any problems, but fill your boots.
Peter Thelen: Yeah, the bottom line is you wanna make sure you have software that can cover the population. The healthcare entities we're working with are defining that population. Needless to say, we're making sure our software can perform, and since it's our own proprietary software, the sky's the limit in terms of the capability and potential.
Yeah, I could certainly see what you're describing is working well on university campuses as well, particularly for night courses and part-time students who aren't familiar with where they're going and really the same thing in airports.
Peter Thelen: The airports for us, Dave, have been a tough market. It's so competitive, there's a fair amount of rather large players. Don't get me wrong, we focus on airports, but that's not necessarily where we have generated the most success today.
Airports are also pretty conditioned to media companies coming in and saying, we'll put this in for free.
Peter Thelen: That's a hundred percent correct. I can play that game all day, every day. I can play, it's just a matter of, can I compete?
Yeah, you're not gonna win too often when the other guy's saying, we'll put it in free for you.
Peter Thelen: You know that's the dynamic we deal with every day on a per deal basis. Based on the perceived digital out-of-home advertising opportunity, that can create a free experience or that unfortunately you have to pay for, it has to generate the corresponding value. So those are the discussions we have.
I'm guessing the majority of the opportunities that you run into and close are in some way bolstered by advertising, and there aren't that many that are purely just an informational display?
Peter Thelen: It's interesting, we've had a phenomenal 2022 and the characteristics of each deal really are so different, especially as it pertains to advertising, and there is no doubt when advertising can generate that ROI on its own, it makes it a very easy decision for a customer. But when that's not the case, then it correlates to what are the other value elements and is that important to our property? And we're seeing that increase more and more, which has been exciting, because obviously that's creating great opportunities for us.
But there's no doubt, advertising is a big play here and at the end of the day, we're trying to do everything within our means to bring the best solution forward around advertising to optimize that ROI from a customer perspective.
You mentioned programmatic in your press release. So are you working with the many programmatic companies out there? I don't even wanna rattle 'em all off, cuz there's so many and I'm so confused by it.
Peter Thelen: Yeah. So our software, because it's this platform and has this ad server capability, it integrates into programmatic partners, and we're constantly looking at the appropriate programmatic partners and then obviously incorporating those into our solution.
So yeah, that's a big opportunity. This whole idea of unused inventory, how can it be sold in an automated fashion? These programmatic partners make it very easy to fill a high volume, usually obviously lower revenue elements, but still important from a customer perspective.
The company itself, is it private or are you publicly traded?
Peter Thelen: No, it's private. It resides here in Northern Kentucky, right outside Cincinnati, Ohio. The emphasis today is within the United States, although we're always looking at growth outside of the US, but it's a fairly small company, but it's doing some really exciting and fun things.
How many folks do you have working there?
Peter Thelen: So we have 12 people today. I'm trying to grow that by an incremental three between now and year end. We have about 25-30 unique customers across five verticals: smart cities, mixed use real estate or lifestyle centers, we call it entertainment, but the emphasis really there is sports arenas, and then college universities, like we talked about earlier and healthcare. We're heavily focused on five verticals.
All right. So if people wanna know more about RoveIQ, where do they find you?
Peter Thelen: Our new website is RoveIQ.com, which in the last three weeks has gotten a lot of attention, which is pretty exciting. But they can also email me, which is pretty simple: pj@RoveIQ.com, and you have my commitment that I'll respond and give it the appropriate attention.
All right this was great. Congratulations on growing the company the way you have.
Peter Thelen:. Dave, I really appreciate your time. I appreciate your support. You do great work and thanks for giving RoveIQ an opportunity to talk about what we do on a day in day out basis.
Wednesday Jul 13, 2022
Johannes Troger, Ameria
Wednesday Jul 13, 2022
Wednesday Jul 13, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Health safety concerns that become top of mind for the whole planet back in March 2020 led to a lot of assumptions that the interactive display business was going to go touchless, with screens managed by mid-air sensors or perhaps by voice.
That only kinda sorta played out, as touchscreen companies did just fine through the pandemic. Staffing shortages and a desire to minimize staff to customer contacts led to widespread adoption of self-service screens used to order food and buy tickets.
But a German company that specializes in touchless technology suggests while consumers will use touchscreens to specifically get and do things in faster and easier ways, situations in which the screens are more about experience and discovery are going touch-free. Ameria argues that when a screen experience is opt-in, consumers are happier if they don't have to touch the screen - for health safety reasons and also because of the age-old worry about the cleanliness of the people who used the screen before them.
Based in Heidelberg but selling globally, Ameria is focused on the software that create, enables and delivers touch-free experiences using optical sensors. I had an interesting chat with Johannes Troger, who runs business development for the company.
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TRANSCRIPT
Johannes, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown on what Ameria is all about?
Johannes Troger: Yes, thank you, Dave, for having me, and sure, I can give you a little rundown. So Ameria is originally a software company coming from software project development, and a few years back, we went into the brick and mortar retail space providing interactive solutions. We are all about bringing a great experience to the customer, and started providing a lot of touch free or touchless solutions to customers.
So this is one of the things we are doing, and we are also providing a cloud platform behind that to manage all the solutions, to bring out the contents and to collect the data.
And you're based in Heidelberg, Germany?
Johannes Troger: That is correct. We're based in Heidelberg, Germany. We're founded here a few years back, actually by a couple of students from Heidelberg University who met there and found that there was a big market for software development, and yeah, that's how it got started, and then after a few changes, we arrived at where we are at now.
Are the students still involved or has it kind of evolved from there?
Johannes Troger: So one of them is. He’s our CEO, and the other one left a few years back, but one of the founders is still heading the company and is still our visionary behind everything we do.
Okay, and you're a private company, but you have outside investment?
Johannes Troger: Yes, we are a private company. It's still mainly owned by the founder and his family, but we have some outside investors. So the biggest part actually goes to a crowd investing group. It's a German platform called Companisto and we did a few rounds with them, which was a really great way for us to do it because it allowed a lot of people who also come from the industry to invest, and they didn't have to go in with large amounts but they really became our marketing and PR crowd and then we have a few larger investors also involved, but it's mainly in a family office space.
And what's your role with the company?
Johannes Troger: So I'm really heading the business development and partner development part of the business, so on the one hand, I'm a lot out there. Now again, out there at trade fairs and conventions and so on, talking to potential customers, also working with a lot of our partners and also still have some accounts which I started developing when I started at the company, and where I'm still involved in projects, which is always really good because from once in a while to see what's actually happening out there, that's really good.
We met at Infocomm in Las Vegas two-three weeks ago, and I'm curious: was this kind of a first foray into the US to start to build out that market or have you been active in it for some time?
Johannes Troger: In the past, we had some projects in North America, but they were mainly driven by customers from Europe who we supported in projects with their companies in North America. So really Infocomm was the first foray we did into North America, also talking to potential customers there, to potential partners and getting a feel of the American market.
How would you describe the state of the business? Are you out there with active installations and everything else, or are you just building things up?
Johannes Troger: So we are out there with active installations. They're usually not at a large scale yet, so we're talking about a lot of pilots and a lot of small scale installations. So it's about at this stage of the business, and I think we are on the verge of the first bigger rollouts with the Touch Free technology.
And is that the lead product now, Touchfree?
Johannes Troger: Exactly. That's what we've been focusing on in the last two to three years. We actually had some touchless solutions already before the pandemic, and we used them mainly in retail for promotional campaigns. We used them at trade fairs for companies who wanted to basically get more attention to their booth. But it was a niche product. It worked really well in what it was supposed to do but people didn't really see the need beyond that, and so with the pandemic hitting, a lot of companies realized that there are some companies out there in the market who are already doing solutions like this, and they came to us and based on their needs and requirements, and based on our experience and ideas, we started pushing those solutions, developing new options and re-augmenting our portfolio where it was needed. So that became really the focus.
It's interesting, when the pandemic first hit, the conventional wisdom was that this was the end for physical touch screens, nobody was gonna use one ever again because of the contagions on the screen and the inability to keep them clean and so on, keep them disinfected, so to speak.
What kind of played out is, touch screens actually had a pretty good couple of years through the pandemic because it was determined that separating one to one human contacts was safer using touch screens, even if you did have to wipe them down or do that sort of thing. So self-service became a big deal. So I'm curious because I thought that, okay, a lot of this is now gonna go to touchless and voice, but it didn't, but what did you experience?
Johannes Troger: So what we experienced is that, pretty much as you described that at the start, a lot of companies believed that the day of the touch screen was over and what we experienced over the course of the pandemic is that, there is a kind of big divide between solutions which are, I would say more process based. So you mentioned self order kiosks, for example, in the QSR space, and then on the other hand, there are more experience based solutions which are more geared towards marketing and inspiring customers and so on, and so with those process based use cases, we really see that touch screens are big in business and I think it’s kind of got the, “You still have got to get where you're going” thing behind it, right? So people really want their food, and as you mentioned, it feels safer to do it via the screen than to stand in front of a person at the counter.
So people use it and it's quite funny because even before that everyone could see all the studies about how dirty they were and how people were not washing their hands, and so on. We don't want to get into those kinds of unpleasant things, but it was pretty clear before that, but it didn't stop people before that, but when you see on the other hand use cases where companies try to bring an experience to their customers, inspire them, acquaint them with probably new products they have or with new services they're offering, there, we see that touch screens are not working at all. So if people don't understand what they're getting out of it, they're not gonna start interacting with a touch screen.
So they'll opt in when they're hungry or they need a transit ticket or whatever, but if it's for discovery of new products and promotions or accessorizing an outfit, they are less likely to want to touch something?
Johannes Troger: Exactly!
Okay, interesting. So one of the challenges that I've seen with touchless, and it goes back to the days when people were using Kinect sensors, gesture sensors, and so on, there was a learning curve and there was a problem with accuracy, and I'm wondering where that is at now?
Johannes Troger: Obviously, the technology has developed a lot, and I think the way it has developed this much more on the software side. So really the side from which we are coming, because we are not creating our own hardware sensors, we are really hardware agnostic in that.
So I think there are really some different things that happened. For one, the Kinect really worked based on creating a full body model, what is called the skeleton of the body and then tracked different joints and different points of the body, and that always meant there was some latency in it, and that always meant that you had to keep the interface with really large buttons and so on because it wasn't very precise.
And you're asking people to perform!
Johannes Troger: Exactly, and you usually have a certain distance from the screen and they have to make really big movements. So this was actually really the first solution we offered and we saw that it worked really well in any environment where people were in a kind of playful mood anyway, or where a lot of kids were involved and so on. So this worked really well or where you really wouldn't ask, People not to perform too much in front of the screen, but they still had a good experience, and so what we do now, for one, you're much closer to the screen so you can really work with an interface that you could also use on a touch screen. I wouldn't go as far as to say that it's advisable to just display a website, right? Because even with touch, you wouldn’t just use a normal website, you would probably make the buttons larger and so on. But it's precise enough now that after a bit of learning, you can actually even interact with a website without any trouble. So this precision problem, it's really a thing of the past.
What we also do is that we give users basically visual cues, so they get a sort of cursor where we have a dot and a circle around it, and then they know, okay, if they move closer in and the two merge, then that's when they do the click and they get a click sound. So it has become more intuitive, more precise, but at the same time, you can also help people to ease into it, and then regarding that whole latency problem, here we are really working with a combination. So it's not only about modeling the hand, but it's also about taking a lot of other parameters, like distance to the screen and so on and tracking objects in this kind of 3D space that we create and that really allows you to interact very fast.
So I assume the UX design is super important, like the workflow and that you've learned a lot through the years?
Johannes Troger: Yeah, absolutely, I think that's next to the technology and to making it really precise on the software side, that's really the key point and that's also why we realized pretty early that we had to be involved in that process, at least at the start.
So, we really pass on our experience with that to agencies of our customers, we are really involved in the whole design process, and obviously it's about a lot of things, I think some of the things also have to be considered when you talk about touch screens which you use in a public space, obviously the size of buttons and the positioning, so position them in places where it's comfortable for people to reach and things like that, and a lot of those things, once you look at it, they seem pretty obvious but they're not that obvious when you're designing it, and when you're in the middle of the process.
Do you have to tell people up front on the screen, so to speak, that you don't need to touch this, or is it intuitive enough that as you reach to touch it, it’s gonna blink and give you a signal that, yeah you've done your action already?
Johannes Troger: So we've been experimenting with a lot of different ways to make people aware, starting from not making them aware at all and just letting them find out themselves. But what we do a lot of the time is that we give them little hints, little popups and so on when they touch the screen that they don't have to, in a nice way, and that it's basically a nice service to them that they don't have to touch the screen, but what we also do is that they still activate the button, even if they touch, right? So I think that's important because we don't wanna punish anyone for probably not getting it a few times.
At Infocomm, we had an app where the hint said in German, please don't touch or you don't have to touch. But it said it in German, and I was always joking. We do it wherever we are in the world. We do it in German because German is such a nice language for ordering people around. At the beginning we experimented with things like, if you touch the whole screen turned like flashing red and you would get MC Hammer’s Don't Touch This song and stuff like this. But what worked is, and we have tried a few apps where the concept or the idea behind it is that people, not in a straightforward tutorial get made aware of it or get taught to do anything, but that they explore it for themselves and are drawn into this by realizing, oh I'm moving my hand in front of the screen and something is happening.
So for example, we have one case where it's all about recipe inspiration in grocery stores and there you get drawn in by some audio visual cues to look at the screen, and then if you start moving your hand in front of it, and if you're about 20 centimeters or 15 centimeters away from it, there's this wooden cooking spoon on the screen, which starts moving with your hand, and so almost by accident, you realize, oh, I don't have to touch, and I'm still doing something, and we also do this with start buttons, which follow around your hand when you move it in front of the screen. And so this kind of accidental realization that, this is a touch free solution that is working really well, and that's what we can see in our data, and when we talk to users, which we routinely do, they usually say that's probably the most satisfying moment that they feel when they found out for themselves that this is something new.
When you install something, is there an adoption period where you can see at first there's lots of people physically touching the screen, but maybe a month later as you get repeat users, they get it?
Johannes Troger: So it's probably not so much an adoption period over the whole group of users. What we see is that typically a larger proportion of the users get it right away. So what we do is we basically track all the movements that happen in this kind of 3D space in front of the screen, and we use this to also tweak our algorithms and to work on that, and we also track how many of those little messages pop up when people are actually touching the screen, and so at one point when we were checking the numbers, we thought, okay, there's a hell of a lot of those messages, and we realized that they were restricted to very few sessions. So it seems that few people who don't get it, they really don't get it but the majority of people get it pretty much right away.
And this is optical sensing, right? So it's like those old leap motion, little chocolate bar kinds of size things that create this physical space in front of a screen?
Johannes Troger: Yeah, exactly. So we usually work with multiple sensors so that we can attach them on the screen, so in a kind of kiosks solution, they're built into that, but we also provide little boxes, which you can click on the sides of just a normal, old, passive screen that you have, and they basically from both sides, create this field and this multiple, camera approach also allows us to scale up in the number of cameras, which also allows us to, for example, in the retail solutions add a third camera, which is looking out and basically scanning the surroundings so that we can react to people walking past with the content in some audio visual ways.
So is there a little bit of AI and machine learning happening?
Johannes Troger: There is actually quite a lot of that happening, especially in the tweaking of the algorithms in regards to precision and to making it more intuitive, so one of the things on the roadmap is to use that to also be able to react to the way someone is interacting, so that after a couple of clicks we understand is this a power user, is it a regular user or is it a first time user? And then we can react in terms of the guidance that we give, and in that, there's quite a bit of machine learning involved.
You said you're a software company first and foremost, but you do sell hardware. Are you selling, kind of display totems that have this technology embedded in it? Because it's just simpler to have a full package, as opposed to saying, “We can do this part now go find the other part”?
Johannes Troger: Yeah. This is what we do, obviously in the early stages, and it's different for different use cases, right? So, for example, if it's about retail, we have partners who built the kiosk Systems, there's obviously a number of providers out there who custom build the kiosk to do what the customer wants, sometimes there's more involved. So it could be like a printer to be added to print out the recipes or some card reader which would be included. So that's where we work with the experts, but we can basically then deliver it end to end.
I guess what we're planning when we get to larger numbers, this kind of partner ecosystem is obviously gonna grow and what we are also working on is to also have basically this kind of retrofit model we can use the screens you already have and just have an upgrade path.
So it sounds like you do hardware because you have to in the early days, but ideally you're behind the curtain, so to speak, enabling other hardware manufacturers and solution providers to make this happen?
Johannes Troger: That's really the goal, yes.
But you gotta get from here to there first, right?
Johannes Troger: That's always when you bring in something new and when we were talking about the content and about designing the the UI and so on, I think if you bring out something new, you are always required to do much more than what you probably consider the core of your business, and of your innovative capabilities. I mean, if you do passive digital signage or you shoot a TV commercial or something, they're out there. There are thousands of agencies who understand the channel, who understand how it works and who can tell any customer perfectly how it works. But when you come to some new channel, which it really is, then there is no agency out there who has a whole desk full of best practices, and that's what we are seeing a lot of the time.
For example, with one customer, we were working on a solution, which is placed in petrol stations, and before that they had passive screens there and they obviously have what they do online, which is the only stuff they know how to do interactively, and so somewhere in between that, we had to find a way where the brand’s people said, yeah, that's fine, that's along our guidelines because they didn't have guidelines for that channel. So it's really about developing concepts for a whole new channel, and that's the same really with the hardware. So we talk to the hardware producers, to the kiosk producers and manufacturers, and we discuss with them how to best mount the sensors and how to bring it together.
So yeah, that's the fate of anyone who brings in an innovation, but I have to say, it's also the fun of it, right? Because it allows you to not only see this very narrow field in the value chain, but to also learn and understand about many other areas and become a more rounded business person for that.
Is it just the software that creates this field and does motion capture and all that? I believe you've got composer software that allows the end user to fully design the experience that their customers or their users are gonna see?
Johannes Troger: Exactly. We have a cloud software suite also behind that, so part of that is a composer software, which allows you to build the content. So you basically just upload the assets and activate them, and the other part is the, it's called the CX manager, the connected experience manager, and that really takes care of all the content distribution scheduling but also taking in the data that is created because other than a touch screen, we also have a lot of data that tracks what happens before someone starts interacting with that outward looking camera, ao we know how many people walk past, stop to look at the screen and so on, and it's really for monitoring the hardware, and it's really a system we started building a few years back and it's really geared towards being a central hub for all sorts of different interactive customer experience solutions that you have out there. So it also runs augmented reality car configurators which we did for a customer. It also runs beacon systems and mobile apps for customers.
So the idea is really everything that you bring out there for your customer experience or for creating customer experience can be run via that centrally.
Interesting. I noticed on your website that you referenced beacons and I thought there's a technology that had its moment and didn't seem to get much in terms of broad ranged adoption, but you're using them. How are you using them?
Johannes Troger: So, with beacons, it's use case where is really in the automobile industry, and It works in a way that the beacons are placed in the cars, and then if you have the manufacturer app you can step next to the car, and it displays all the facts about the configuration and about the car you're standing in front of
On a smartphone or…?
Johannes Troger: Yeah, on a smartphone.
So the idea behind that is really to provide information and then to allow people to take this information, and for example, then include it into their own configuration that they probably have done online and that they have stored in the app, and so that there really is a kind of exchange between the physical experience of the showroom and the digital experience they probably started at home.
If somebody stops you and says, who's your big client? What's that reference case that you like to talk about? What is that?
Johannes Troger: So, in automotive, the most work we have done is with Porsche, so for a long time they were our largest client and they were the most innovative ones really when it came to how to deliver more experience or more digital experience to their customers. In retail and consumer goods, the longstanding client and the most innovative one, and the one we were able to try and learn the most with this is definitely LEGO, and I think one part of that was really that they obviously understood the kind of playfulness of it right from the start, and what we are seeing is that really the retailers themselves that's something that really only has happened for the last two or three years.
I think, five years ago, a lot of the retailers still felt okay, the whole digital stuff in brick and mortar, that's mostly gadgets and let's just hang up a couple of screens and that's fine, if they even did that, but now for the last two or three years even in grocery, retail and so on, I'm hearing a lot of managers saying, okay, we know that we have to move and we know that we have to do a lot to be ready for the future, and I think the exciting thing at the moment is that other than, if you wanna build an online shop, there are a lot of people out there who can tell you that's how you build an online shop, but when you come to digital in the brick and mortar space, there's no one who can tell you those are the two or three recipes, that's how you build it, and that's it, right?
So probably passive digital signage is about the only thing that people by now know how it works, and you can find someone who does it for you and executes it nicely, and that's fine. But anything beyond that, it's still a lot of trial and error of finding out what is it really, what the customers want? What do they need? How can we attract them to use something?
All right, this was great. If people wanna know more about the company, how do they find that out? Where do they go online?
Johannes Troger: Obviously, the first point is our website, so it's www.ameria.com
Okay, perfect. All right, thanks again for spending the time with me.
Johannes Troger: Thank you, Dave. Thank you for a really interesting half-hour with you.
Wednesday Jul 06, 2022
Alex Epshteyn, Zignage
Wednesday Jul 06, 2022
Wednesday Jul 06, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
If a company wants to hang its business hat on the proposition that it is very good at visualizing real-time data to screens, it helps to have a big, very familiar client that heavily uses that sort of thing.
A small New York City start-up called Zignage has that in the New York Stock Exchange - providing and maintaining a platform that shows the numbers and trends charting on screens around the hyper-kinetic trading floor in Wall Street.
The company grew out of an NYU media lab and spent its first few years working mostly behind the curtains, developing signage and data-handling capabilities to software firms and end-user clients. But a few years ago, the company made the decision to develop a brand and start selling its data-centric capabilities directly to end-users.
I had a great chat with Alex Epshteyn, the CEO and Founder of the company, about how it got started, where its headed, who it all serves, and how there can be a huge gulf between software shops that can take a number from a shared data table somewhere, and running mission-critical, hyper-secure visualizations on a stock exchange floor.
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TRANSCRIPT
Alex, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown on what Zignage is all about, how they started and how long you've been around?
Alex Epshteyn: Absolutely. Thank you for having me, Dave. Zignage started in 2009 formally, and we started at the NYU Incubator while I was doing my graduate work at the Media Lab in NYU and suffice to say the company was more interesting than the graduate works. So I started doing that, even though I'm from the east coast and this doesn't typically happen, it kinda happened here. So initially, conceptually, we were gonna get into the digital out home space and we were gonna build an auction backend that people can bid for spots on digital signs. So kinda a slightly novel idea, especially in digital signage and we couldn't do a big enough raise, and then we found a number of these sort of remnant advertising platforms coming into the market and we decided, since I have a pretty good little black book of enterprise clients, and we built the platform to about 50% at that point, in mid to end of 2009, let's try our hand at some enterprise folks, and what ended up happening is a trajectory that basically pushed us for about eight years, which is we built a middleware and a toolkit, essentially our own toolkit, that enabled us to build very quickly CMSs and builds and anything related to that, data bindings for third party systems like CRM systems and CRP systems, a variety of backends essentially, and we essentially entered OEM space.
So we built products for other companies. Some of them were large, some of them were small. We had a tremendous amount of NDAs and non-competes, as you can imagine. These companies would not like you to advertise your own stuff while you were building it for them and typically we would have maybe one or two of these customers at the same time. So from 2009 to about 2017, maybe a little bit later even, we basically did work for third parties and we built a lot of different solutions, and around 2018, we decided that we were gonna attempt to productize. That means, essentially build our own, front facing, become a brand, and move away from a pure sort of project solution, even though we had a product in there. But it was a product for us, not so much for the end customer and to get into the market and so we did, and in the meanwhile we had two direct customers during almost all the time.
NYU was one. We had a number of schools at NYU that we were able to pitch, and successfully had running, so NYU Law School, NYU Engineering School, where I was a student and then NYSE where we initially partnered Thomson Reuters. So Thomson Reuters did the data and, most of the application stack actually, and what we provided is a device management framework and advanced players to run the WebGL and all the other things that they needed to run for the New York Stock Exchange. This was under the NYSE-Euronext regime, which has since been bought by the Intercontinental Exchange. This was in 2017, which was a formative year for us. As I mentioned, NYSE under the new ownership came to us and said, “Look, Thomson Reuters is relatively expensive and essentially they're reselling us their data, how about you guys take on their responsibility?” You get nine months to replicate and you get this support contract that basically takes over for them, at a discount for them but it was a nice option for us.
We took on the challenge. Because we were able in these intermittent years we built up so much experience and know how to deal with realtime sources, realtime data sources, and WebGL specifically to make things pretty bulletproof whereas perhaps some other HTML5 technology that is fairly popular in digital signage would is maybe not robust or maybe not as performant. So we took that toolkit and applied it to over essentially at the New York Stock Exchange and took the contract over and successfully we did that. So at the New York Stock Exchange today, they're actually running two separate solutions from us. They have our more standard on print solution for their marketing group and then they have a much more customized, almost like an OEM version for their trading real time data, which are now classed as a number of financial data widgets.
So if I'm at the NYSE and I'm looking down on the floor, or I'm walking around the floor with all the guys with the funny jackets and everything, those various dashboard screens that I see with all the pricing indicators and everything else, that's all being driven by you?
Alex Epshteyn: That is correct. So everything essentially above the workstation level, everywhere above the trader level, if you just look up above the 5’8” level from the ground, you’ll basically be looking at our solutions. It actually is a full gambit of our capabilities. We have synchronized video, real time widgets for financial data consumption, charting types of things and a lot of different ticker technologies that we've custom built and some of our generic ones, and streaming as well.
The only other company that works with us at the site is Haivision, so they provide the backend system and supplementary streaming solutions. So we consume their feeds and also feed them.
They’re a video distribution company?
Alex Epshteyn: That's right. So we're actually partnered with them. So they're one of our partners in space. We like working with them, they are a nice Canadian company to say the least and I know some of the original folks that sort of constituted the company and they have grown as a company tremendously through the years. So we really like working with them.
Yeah, this must have been a really big holy shit moment for you guys when you got that deal because it's not like winning a hundred locations QSR chain or something, this is the New York Stock Exchange. It's on the TV every day with endless photos and everything else, and it's mission critical. Like you can't say, oh, we're just doing a software update and we'll be back in 10 minutes?
Alex Epshteyn: Indeed, and the escalations we get are pretty hardcore. We have just a few minutes to get things going, and philosophically, we try to blend some aspects of redundancy with a lot of resiliency because redundancy itself, some folks who deal with these sorts of mission critical situations, could itself present its own set of problems, right? So you want the system, the platform itself to be as resilient or high availability as possible to use a term out of the server space.
So yeah, it was a huge thing for us and ultimately, we specialized in a lot of financial services and non-retail banking is a more generic category or an area we do very well in and we work with some integrators in the space that are known for it as well in terms of channel. Currently our CTO is actually the chief architect of the Thompson Reuter solution. He came on board with us a year ago, a year and a half ago as a full time hire. He was a consultant for many years after Thomson Reuters got customization space, and he worked with us for a long time and then finally our CTO to do other stuff, and Steve came on board. So we're very well positioned for this work.
So for your company, if you had to do an elevator pitch saying what all you do, what do you rattle off for them?
Alex Epshteyn: I think what we would do is, as you mentioned, mission critical type of usages, whichever vertical, right? We've done things with SCADA. We've done things in transportation that I wish I was at liberty to say, maybe soon, and it doesn't have to just be financial data. It could be sports feeds. It could be building services, things of that sort that are critical for the use. That's one of our specialty points.
The other is, I would say, while we're very happy to have relationships with a number of hardware companies, we still have really some high end hardware that we field. So what we do is, for very demanding applications, not necessarily mission critical ones, but those overlap obviously, we provide a full-stack solution, and these players, we're getting into the realm of show control type of players, really beefy and professional level graphics capabilities. So we do sell those. Those are fully our stack, and this way we can guarantee basically the solution as opposed to having us do a certain portion system integrated to another and so forth.
The last thing I would say is while we still support some level of OEM work, we currently have two customers that we work with. Our business model changed a bit in the last three years of supporting them. We have our standard SaaS business and in some cases we modified it for on-prem. So it's already flexible, but we also have a platform as a service offering to really support those OEM customers. So it's a lot less expensive in volume, very scalable, and I would say those are the things that really make us stand out. It's real time data, data visualization, full-stack solution with hardware to do very difficult things often, and finally, configuration where people assume real, ad-hocs customization. There's an assumption there, right? If you're doing something very bespoke, the assumption there is that it's gonna be insanely expensive and take a long time to build and that's true if you haven't built two dozen variants of it and you don’t have a toolkit to basically assemble it from parts like a LEGO set, which we do.
I would assume that your calling card when you go in to talk to opportunities, when you can say, yeah, we do the New York Stock Exchange, we do all the data handling on that, and you could imagine it's more than a little bit secure and mission critically oriented. I suspect that makes the target customers feel pretty comfy?
Alex Epshteyn: It does, and even before them, it makes consultants who put us on the bid lists and generally are interested in finding parties that can actually fulfill the scope, call us. So we don't really advertise much, and that's gonna change, I think, maybe next year. We're gonna do maybe a marketing splash at some point next year.
Right now, it's all word of mouth, and we do get a lot of calls. There's a lot of projects we actually pass on because they're not in our sweet spot and they're distractions, but the projects that we do take on are often difficult. We even do work in retail, as I mentioned to you, and the types of deals we take in are always really heavy data integration, visualization, where they are very automated workflows, there's almost no humans involved where the humans are basically special events, and then the system essentially corrects for automation again.
Yeah, I've been writing about data visualization for 6-7 years now, and when I started writing about it, it was pretty rare and beyond FIDS displays and things like that but it's now pretty standard. I'm curious because you guys are obviously super deep and experienced in that area, when you see all the other software companies saying, yeah, we do real time data, we can do realtime data handling, we can integrate, we have APIs and this and that.
When you get into a conversation with a prospect, how do you distinguish what you do versus other companies who say, yeah we do all that too, cuz I suspect it's different?
Alex Epshteyn: It is. One of the first things we've put on a table is that we can mostly guarantee our resolution time SLA, nobody else can pretty much. Most people will be aggressive, pick up the phone and work the problem, but the way that our stuff is built, we can fix the problem. We can guarantee fixing the problem within a certain period of time. Now it's not inexpensive, sometimes it's actually affordable for a lot of types of businesses where a fully custom solution would not be.
The other one is that most data visualization takes a lot of shortcuts, it really leverages, not to get too deep in technicalities unless you want me to, basically JavaScript and CSS, the mainstay of HTML5. But all of our data visualizations are built in WebGL. It's like the difference between driving a car on the road and driving a bullet train on tracks, right? There's no interruptions to the bullet train. It'll just go and it'll be on schedule. There's no interruptions. There's no jitter. There's no movement. That sort of paradigm. So we like to guarantee behavior of our data visualization, especially dynamic like charting or graphing libraries that we use and implement. It's actually extremely difficult to build something that you would think is easy like a ticker or crawler.
Whatever data that's feeding it, I’m sure we both have probably seen a lot of instances where it stutters, it has problems, it doesn't refresh on time and doesn't deal well with different fonts and whatnot. That's just not true of our solution. Our solution is, I would say, cutting edge on dynamic data visualization.
So for an end user or for an integrator, they have to educate themselves that just because a company says they can do real time data doesn't mean they can really do it. That means they might be able to reflect a number that's in a data table and show it on a screen, and that's quite a bit different from what you're talking about.
Alex Epshteyn: It is and maybe the third aspect is most of the companies we work with already have accounts with the big data warehouse places like Refinitive, IBS, and a number of others, so we already are super familiar with these back ends. In fact, we have things that monitor the APIs. We routinely do a lot of monitoring of real time or just dynamic sources. So this is a huge value add in the industry, and I wish more providers would do that because ultimately, if you are a data fed platform, it's up to you to tell the customer something's failing on the back end because they won't know, they'll assume all sorts of things, but you need to critically have the tools inside to tell what's going on, and if you build it out in a smart way, you can also alert the right people at the right time that something's happening and to look into it. So you can be proactive about it. That's the third item, I’d say.
They also change like the schemas and everything without telling people, right?
Alex Epshteyn: That's true. But it's a super exciting space. Once you have the core technology built out. You could really do a lot, in terms of, consuming this kind of data and I think generally, signage, we're in a slightly privileged position regarding this, but I think there's a move into industry towards generative and procedural content away from more Codec-heavy content. Although, there's obviously gonna be overlap for many years for both.
We certainly support Codec playback in a variety of ways, synchronized, on different players and so forth, and there's nice innovations like AV1 coming onto the market nowadays. But you could do so much more with generative dynamic content, it's a big difference. For instance, we had a client that wanted us to expose much more of the controllability of a layout, standard design tool inside of our platform. Now, typically we would not wanna do that because there's some nice tools on the market like Premiere, like After Effects, real tools that they generally use. But the problem that certain customers power users I would say are having is they don't wanna have to export an After Effects file and have it encoded in something, that's time, that's sometimes money because they do it externally because they don’t have a kit on-prem, or in the cloud.
So what we've done is basically have a simpler version of something like Adobe Premiere or After Effects that lets them make quick changes in some key framing or some transitory effects and they don't have to put the whole thing into a codec. So that seemed to really resonate with certain power users that we have and directionally, it's the area that we'd like to innovate in.
Is it important to make a distinction between generative data for business applications and generative data for artwork? Because I see a lot of video walls out there that are set and forget. They're driven by generative data and it's just these abstract visuals that are swirl and kind of bloom and everything else, but that's very different from, I think what you're talking about, which is what on the screen in terms of charting or what appears is based on what the data is influencing, it's it's shaping what appears?
Alex Epshteyn: That’s correct. A lot of general data is canned, right? It's almost like a video basically, and some experts, some design shops typically would change it for you, and it becomes evergreen content, day two, three, and day four. What we try to do is something a little bit different and we work with some really nice design companies as well. So just to be completely clear, we don't do the design ourselves. We typically either partner with a company that's really good at it. Sometimes the company brings us into the opportunity, right?
The consultant can also spec us to partner with somebody or the end client may have relationships with companies that do this very well. But, I would say the formulation, the recipe for this kind of thing, to make it dynamic is a few things, and that's where this sort of generative content becomes more like a Zignage type of problem, as opposed to something that you could hire a design house to basically build for you, right?
One is that you could update content even if the filters or the generative piece is running. Separately you might be able to in CMS have the tools to change the filters of the generative option, just as I explained prior, and finally have trigger conditions. We do mostly casting, right? There are some great companies in space. I think they're very good at that kinda stuff. They do a lot of smart interactive signage. We do a little bit of that, but we mostly do narrowcasting. So in our world trigger conditions come from some sort of backend system. It could be a calendaring system, it could be something smarter, right? Where it's not just a boolean condition. It could be a multivariable that basically has to click off a list of things that can happen. And that's really where we can add a lot of value and it overlaps with the kinda work we do with the New York Stock Exchange. We generally term it as business logic So we really do some smart business logic and I think it's actually, there's a lot of growth in that area once we apply modern sort of machine learning to it to make it extensible to go further.
But with that kind of approach you have an ability to modify a piece of content continuously, right? It's a living piece of generative content, even if it's not dynamically fed with financial data sources, or sports data sources.
I haven't seen your user experience, but I'm guessing people listening to this are thinking, this is really interesting, but I'd be terrified to try to use this software. What’s it actually like?
Alex Epshteyn: You’re not gonna be terrified because we are one of the proponents of nearly or fully automated systems. So often what we do for non-power users is to give a build out to the software that our customers use, and then everything is essentially this business logic that I'm describing to you.
It’s kinda like a headless CMS?
Alex Epshteyn: It's like a headless CMS for the non-power users. For the power users that really like their tools like Adobe, or you could just use a Dropbox or some sort of hotfolder mechanism. We're also partnered with a number of DAM solutions. There's a lot of workflow that happens in digital asset management solutions, including tag based workflows.
We do a lot of tag based workflows nowadays, where we consume the tags that are done in a DAM, and essentially they find their way onto the right players at the right time, and on the flip side, we do have a standard suite. It's actually going through a major overhaul at the end of the year, what we call Z Cast 6. It does have a number of these power tools. But our CMS generally follows a certain idea. It was popular for a while and it's hard to execute unless you have our kinds of customers, which is what we call an additive UX. So it's the opposite of something like Microsoft Office, right where you have a billion features and there's a long learning curve if you wanna learn everything.
What we do is really try to identify the user story behind what needs to be done. We create the access controls that really expose certain parts of the CMS, and even within the same context, add or remove tools as needed. That creates a situation where there's almost really minimal training. I think one of the biggest problems we're trying to solve for our direct customers, or channel customers is the attrition that happens in major enterprises for users of digital signage, right? Like one of the biggest problems we face even in huge banks is the fact that digital signage is consigned to a webmaster subcategory. Like they manage the CMS that's published on their portal, and then somebody in that team or a few people in that team handles digital signage as well. So that's historically been a problem for our whole industry, and what we're trying to tackle is kinda remove both the friction of adoption and also try to give them the tools that they need, and if they use tools, bridge those tools, that's our philosophy on that end.
So what's the structure of your company? Are you a private company?
Alex Epshteyn: We are a private company. We're an LLC in New York, and we're about 20 people. Most of our development used to take place until very recently in Ukraine because one of my partners and I from there originally. So as this topic is in the news, unfortunately, forget about our team. The fact is cities in the eastern part of Ukraine are partially destroyed but luckily a lot of the folks that we would use are in the Western part of Ukraine now, and we continue to use them but not all of them unfortunately.
So you're having to manage your way through that along with other things, right?
Alex Epshteyn: We did, and they're very talented folks. We have worked on so many projects.
Yeah, it's interesting. I was trading LinkedIn messages with another company and he was talking about operating out of Odessa and they're still like opening QSRs and things like that and putting in menu boards.
Alex Epshteyn: Good for them. That's exactly what they should do.
Yeah, and I was thinking, boy, all the other challenges you have out there, like supply chain and everything else, layer in a hot war on top of that. Good lord.
Alex Epshteyn: Our problems are very small compared to the real problems in Ukraine and the world. But it's a small world. You sort of face these things as they come.
Well, hopefully someway or other, it gets resolved. I'm not quite sure how, but this was great. Can you let people know where they can find your company online?
Alex Epshteyn: Sure. It's Zignage.com
So signage with a Z on the front?
Alex Epshteyn: Correct. The last word is Zignage. You find me on LinkedIn, Alex Epshteyn. That's where mostly we do our sort of minimum branding that we do.
All right, but we'll be looking for more later in the year, right?
Alex Epshteyn: Absolutely. We're excited to make some announcements in the transportation space, some more in the financial industry and some more in retail.
All right. Great to hear it's going well for you. Thanks so much for spending the time with me.
Alex Epshteyn: Thank you, Dave. My pleasure.
Wednesday Jun 22, 2022
Naveen Viswanatha, Google
Wednesday Jun 22, 2022
Wednesday Jun 22, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
The prevailing impression of Google and digital signage is that the tech giant came briefly into the sector a few years ago, made some noise, and then quietly left. But the reality is that the tech giant has continued to be active in digital signage, and there are numerous screen networks out there running on Chrome OS devices through different CMS software vendors.
Then there's Android, the Google-developed operating system used on a pile of smart displays and separate play-out boxes.
But now Google is again getting visibly active in the digital signage and related kiosk ecosystem, extending an existing program called Chrome Enterprise Recommended to software vendors who use Chrome OS. It's also introduced a Chrome OS device management license, for narrow-purpose uses like screens and kiosks, that works out to just a touch more than a couple of bucks a month. And there's Flex, an application that can extend the life of a Windows box by running Chrome, and enable screen networks using a blend of playback hardware.
I think a lot of the early interest in Google, back in 2015, was with the relatively low prices of the software and hardware. These days, it likely has more to do with scale, manageability and security.
I spoke with Naveen Viswanatha, Google's product lead on Chrome OS.
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TRANSCRIPT
Naveen, thank you for joining me. What's your role at Google?
Naveen Viswanatha: Hey, thanks for having me. I am the Chrome OS Product Lead for our solution areas and our solution areas include virtualization, contact center, and very recently we've beefed up our kiosk and digital signage solution area.
Are you at the main campus out in Silicon Valley?
Naveen Viswanatha: I am, indeed. Yeah, right here in the heart of the main campus in Mountain View.
How long have you been with Google?
Naveen Viswanatha: I have been with Google for 16 years but I haven't been spending the whole time in Chrome OS. I've been using Chrome OS for about 7 years, I believe.
So you're almost a lifer in Google terms?
Naveen Viswanatha: I guess so, it seems like that.
I'm gonna talk about Chrome OS. Can you give me a sense of the installed base globally for Chrome OS? I don't need like today's number, but just like … it's many millions, right?
Naveen Viswanatha: Yeah. We don't break out specific details, but yeah it's in the millions and that kind of spans, I would say across three broad areas. Education is one area. So students and student Chromebooks and boxes. Consumer, and then Enterprise and, within Enterprise, that's where my focus is in the solution space. So yeah, that's how we look at the overall market, but yeah it's seen a tremendous amount of growth, especially in the last several years.
Yeah, the pandemic really put a push on Chrome for Education, right?
Naveen Viswanatha: It did. I would actually say that it increased an already healthy appetite for Chrome devices within the education space. I actually used to be part of the education team, and we went from devices that were primarily purchased by schools and districts to devices that were now starting to see adoption in the home and that was the kind of recent trend that we saw over the course of the pandemic is really devices being used in the home, remote for delivery of curriculum.
Would that be driven in part by just the simple fact that the kids are learning at home now, and the parents are seeing the Chromebooks and thinking, okay these are perfectly workable laptops?
Naveen Viswanatha: That's entirely right, and in addition to that, some of the unique capabilities allow students to use their education profiles. So the same profile that they use on their Chromebooks at school, they can log into a personal Chromebook at home and all of their data, all of their bookmarks, their applications, everything is synced to them pretty uniquely.
And so, that ability of having this kind of floating cloud profile was another reason that it became really easy to simply adopt Chrome devices at home.
Okay, so on the enterprise side, you know, this is a digital signage podcast so we talk about digital signage. I assume that relative to education and to consumer, the percentage of the installed basis for digital signs of kiosk would be still pretty small, right?
Naveen Viswanatha: It's smaller. It's growing though, and in fact, I would actually say that we saw a lot of acceleration, arguably more acceleration broadly in the Enterprise space, over the pandemic in terms of growth, relative to the other verticals I was talking about, and a lot of that had to do with unique capabilities of Chrome that aligned really well with some of the challenges that businesses had during the pandemic to really maintain business continuity, whether that was remote work or whether that was increased concerns around security, data protection due to being remote.
These are all things that Chrome OS was really designed for, and so over the course of the pandemic, we saw a huge acceleration in these trends, and as a result Chrome OS was really the platform and endpoint of choice for many organizations.
When I wrote last week about the announcement that, of the the recommended track for kiosk in digital signage. I said that Google made a big splash in the digital signage space in 2015. They took a big booty in the middle of the primary trade show for the industry and had all kinds of people looking at that booth and going, “oh, interesting, these guys are involved. I wonder what that means and will they take over and so on…” and it didn't really happen, there would be suggestions that Google got into the space and then got out of the space but what I wrote was basically, maybe they stepped back a little bit visibly, but they've continued to be in the digital signage and kiosk space and have a pretty decent footprint that isn't known.
Is that a fair statement?
Naveen Viswanatha: I think that is a fair characterization and I'm glad you brought that up because, as we've seen the trend over the course of the last couple of years, some of the trends that I was talking about with regards to the pandemic, those trends around moving to cloud and web are significant. Those trends in moving to remote and hybrid work are significant, increased data protection and controls are significant, and that primarily those three things really accrue primarily to end user computing so Chrome books and Chrome boxes used by employees.
But in addition to that, I think this kind of ties back to your point, we did see a lot of interesting trends as people started moving back into physical spaces. So increased expectations from customers for self-service options, increased expectations from employees for more engaging physical environments when they do return to the office, and these kinds of latter two trends are unique to kiosk and digital signage. So that's where we started really leaning more into this business that we have had for some time, as you mentioned, but really on the backs of what our customers and our partners were doing and what we're seeing as broader trends, we really wanted to lean into this area and really help drive more growth and drive more value into the overall ecosystem znd so recently we have really beefed up our efforts around kiosks and digital signage.
You know, when you work in a very niche industry like digital signage, you have this distorted idea that it's actually a pretty big industry, but in the the overall scheme of things, it's tiny, and I wondered if Google, going back a few years, looked at digital signage and continued to look at it and thought this is interesting stuff.
Signage and kiosks, it's got some possibilities, but it's so small compared to education. How much focus have you put on it?
Naveen Viswanatha: I think that's a fair question. The reality, I think is that we have always maintained that we want to be an enterprise computing platform, or commercial, basically anything that requires a business or an organization or an NGO or a government to purchase devices and be the primary buyer. So it's a very broad space, and over the last several years, we have endeavored to really beef up our capabilities around end user computing. That was somewhat timed coincidentally with the pandemic. So that was an area of focus for us starting in 2018-19, really to emphasize these focuses on these solution areas, as I was mentioning, to really go after distinct sections of the enterprise market, and then very recently, starting to invest in kiosk and digital signage because we're starting to see additional trends driving that and those trends being lined up with ChromeOS capabilities.
So I wouldn't say it was due to the size of the market in particular. I think it's just in terms of when we think about our overall strategy and where we saw our customers really taking the platform, we wanted to really lean into those areas, and so that's really been the main driver is trying to meet our customers where they are, and identify areas that have a strong product market fit in the enterprise space and you see that as a reflection of the key solution areas that we're investing in, including kiosks and signage now.
So when Google as a company takes an interest in something like this, how does that manifest itself in real terms? Is there like a dedicated team or is this one market that a broader Chrome OS team pays attention to and puts some work into?
Naveen Viswanatha: That's a really good question. So I keep referring to these solution areas and maybe it'll help a little bit because I think that'll help frame the answer to your question a bit more to talk about what these solution areas are.
A few years ago we started looking at where we were seeing product market fit and where we were seeing our customers adopt Chrome OS beyond education, and really noticed that to deliver a robust solution built on top of this platform, you really needed to have an end to end solution that customers and organizations knew was just gonna work and work really well, and so what that meant was there's really four components to these solution areas. So there's underlying features and capabilities of the operating system itself, so security, APIs, core functionality that the operating system provides, even for enterprises, things that are unique to the solution areas and I can list off a few new features and capabilities that we have as an example that are unique to the kiosk and signage solution area but that's another part of that.
The second component is around management. So how can these solutions areas and their administrators and the folks that manage these solutions, manage the platform easily? And then there's an ecosystem component to this too, and this is really what I think rounds out our notion of a solution area. An ecosystem includes devices so endpoints and OEMs, as well as peripherals and then ISV partners. So solution providers that actually build their products on top of Chrome OS and we ensure that they're optimized and integrated into the operating system. So that's what constitutes a solution area, and as we saw increased focus and investment in those solution areas, we started really orienting our teams to deliver against that.
On the product and engineering side and the UX side within Google, that means that we still rely on broad platform capabilities that you think of more as foundational layers, but increasingly we have teams that are focused on delivering features capabilities, management capabilities, specific to solution areas. And we'll talk a little bit about that or what we did for the kiosk, and then in addition to that, we really started focusing our partner teams on the partners, both the devices, peripherals, as well as ISV partners that we wanted to work with to really bring these solutions to life, and so there's increasing focus around these areas and we're really organizing ourselves across the stack to really deliver towards these solutions.
So you have this Chrome enterprise recommended track for “kiosk and digital signage”. When I saw that, I wasn't familiar with it and I thought, okay, they've created this, but in doing a little bit of digging, it looks like you have Chrome enterprise recommended tracks in other areas already. So this is something you already do and you've added digital signs and kiosks?
Naveen Viswanatha: Yeah, that's exactly right. The solution tracks that you saw prior to the recent announcement for the kiosk track were really built around the end user computing growth that we were seeing in the last several years that I was alluding to earlier, and very recently, last week we announced the kiosk and signage Chrome enterprise recommended solution track, and so nine partners that we worked with, their solutions are validated, they're optimized, they're integrated into Chrome OS. That means that our partner engineering teams have worked with these organizations to ensure that everything that they build on our platform works. They are regression tests every release that comes out. So we're really tightly working with these organizations, and we only expect, especially in the kiosk and signage space, this category to grow over the coming quarters and years.
And this whole validation process, is that to keep your engineers sane or is it in certain respects, a marketing tool to say this is kind of Google approved and Google validated?
Naveen Viswanatha: It's a bit of both actually. We actually go through and test these solutions within our own test labs, and then these providers also will be testing their solutions with every Chrome OS release, and as a result of that, we badge these providers, these ISV partners of ours, and that badge effectively denotes that level of confidence for any organization that's going to adopt an end to end solution.
Some of the companies that are involved in this are pretty small in relative terms. Are they getting involved, to use a term a colleague of mine used to use, “to bask in reflected glory that we're working with Google” or have they made a business decision based on the technology that this is where things are going and we wanna get ahead of it?
Naveen Viswanatha: I've spoken to many of these partners and really a lot of it boils down to their alignment either from a business or technology standpoint that they want to really align their solutions with a platform that they feel is going to help them scale their business. These are organizations that are typically developing web-based applications that are lightweight, robust and work well on Chrome as a web-based operating system.
Security is a big concern for them, and I think it's a growing concern in the signage space. We've spoken to many customers having concerns about their screens taken over. If you have more and more screens in your physical spaces, your brand and your operations are potentially at risk, and so a lot of these partners kind of align to that element of Chrome, and I think the simplicity in being able to remotely manage devices, that's another area that these partners have really embraced and benefited from.
So I think it's really around looking at what technology and platform they want to align with and that's where we've started our conversations with them and as you mentioned they represent a specific segment of the market, and I think over the coming quarters and years, we're really looking to add more partners to our kiosk and signage Chrome enterprise recommended track.
I got a sense back in 2015 that when the first iteration of this came out and you had a whole bunch of partners really quickly that a lot of the energy and interest around Chrome devices was, here's low cost management software and relatively low cost playback hardware versus the PCs that were out in the market then and it was just at a point when you were starting to see set top boxes and things like that being used.
I sense that's changed, that the partner marketplace is a lot more sophisticated, and as you've alluded to, they're looking more at things like security and ease of management?
Naveen Viswanatha: A hundred percent, that is absolutely right. The kiosk and signage landscape has shifted dramatically, I think, in the last, 18 to 24 months really, kind of emerging out of the pandemic as well, and I think it was shifting before and then I think what happened was that a lot of physical spaces started really being underutilized during the early part of the pandemic, but then that really set customer expectations and business expectations a lot around how they can be use technology to really digitally transform their businesses, and so as people started moving back into physical spaces, customers started moving back into physical spaces, it came with a fervor that I think has really accelerated some interesting opportunities in the signage space.
Opportunities and threats too, as you mentioned, security and data protection and these things are becoming more and more of a concern. Updating, if you have more screens and more kiosks in your physical space, the kind of traditional operating systems that were being used, don't lend themselves well to that, right? They don't lend themselves well to being updated, being patched, being managed remotely. I think we've all seen blue screens in airports and different types of signs before. That's becoming more and more challenging, just the reliability and remote management.
So as these trends are starting to really put pressure on a lot of businesses, that's where Chrome OS is starting to really be considered more and more as a robust platform that can really help accelerate the next phase of digital transformation in these physical spaces.
I get the argument for Windows and the bloatware and the crap on there and the updates you can't control and all those sorts of things. It's less of an issue with Linux but there's still an issue?
Naveen Viswanatha: Linux is an interesting platform. We don't see it too much ourselves but I think one of the challenges with Linux has to do with that it can do anything you really want it to, but in order to get it, to do what you want, it takes a lot of tuning, a lot of configuration, a lot of setup, and so I think you'll be spending the cost as an organization on either building up the technical capacity and knowing how to do that and really piecemealing a solution together, and at some point you're probably gonna ask yourself, is it worth it for our business to really become a Linux expert for our digital signage and kiosk strategy? Is that really core to driving the customer experience or should we rely on a platform like Chrome OS to give us a lot of that as part of its core capability?
And if you're using something like Chrome OS as a software firm, is there less demand to have in-house expertise around an operating system, if you're using something like Chrome versus Linux?
Naveen Viswanatha: Yeah, I would say that's one of the common benefits that we've seen. Recently I spoke to a retailer abroad in Asia, and they were saying that they saw an 80% reduction in staff having to focus on updates and management of the platform, and I asked the question because I wasn't sure if they said 80% or 18% because 80% sounded really startling and in fact they said no 80%, and now these individuals, they're effectively being focused on higher order capabilities with higher order needs within the organization rather than just going out and servicing screens and devices that needed to be updated, they're focusing more on higher value business objectives.
And so absolutely, I think this is one of the areas where businesses need to ask themselves is this core, or is it context? It means core to obviously incorporate digital signage and service options within your business, but is it core for your organization to understand exactly how an operating system is gonna work?
One of the arguments that a very successful company in the digital signage space called BrightSign makes … they are spin out of Roku and the CEO is saying that one of the reasons there's a lot of attraction to our hardware is we don't really have an operating system. It's our own proprietary operating system. So there's nothing to really hack. There's nothing you can do with it.
I understand the risk with Windows and to a lesser degree with Linux are, and I know you do harden Chrome, but what are there ways in? And if there are, please explain them to me. (Laughter)
Naveen Viswanatha: That's actually one of the areas that I think we have a very strong track record around, and I will add that systems will get compromised over time, and unless you have a security team, a large robust security team, actively monitoring and ensuring that exploits and vulnerabilities are gonna be patched consistently, that turnaround time needs to be very quick, and that's exactly what we do on the Chrome OS side, and I think you can look at our track record. We have zero ransomware attacks ever reported on Chrome OS.
It's also another component that if you double click into the security piece of Chrome OS, it’s really baked into the operating system. Many other operating systems out there will think about security as a bolt on afterthought. It's core to exactly how Chrome OS works. I'll give you a couple of examples.
Executables are blocked from running on the operating system, they're just blocked. And so that's a huge vector of vulnerability that is just removed entirely. Timely security updates, like I was talking about before. We have the ability to roll out updates on a four week cycle. Even if you're part of our long term stable channel so organizations that don't choose to get four week updates on the operating system, they wanna actually get six month updates instead, even if you're on that six month long term stable support channel, we will still roll out critical security updates to you. So you get the best of both worlds, right? And again, we have a whole team of people that are watching and monitoring what kind of vulnerabilities are out there on a consistent basis, and I'll mention one more thing really quickly and that is that the operating system files are kept in a complete, separate partition, so they can't be modified at all. So let’s say with kiosk, your app is hacked in some way, or there's a vulnerability in the application that you're building, the operating system itself is hardened and entirely isolated from the application session itself.
It's just a handful of things to think about. I think any chief information security officer or CIO or organization that's really looking at security needs to evaluate it broadly, and we have a lot of great material that can tell you beyond what I've said here. Why Chrome OS is a very hardened and safe operation.
I suspect you've also learned a lot through the years too. I know that some of the companies who were early on with Google using Chrome OS, they were frustrated by new versions that would break their software, and I think you got to a point pretty quickly where you started to pin the OS versions and a company could stay on that until they're ready to move to the next one instead of being auto-updated.
Naveen Viswanatha: Yeah, and we have learned a lot over the last several years, and you bring up a good point. One of the design principles that we really try to anchor on, when you think about what a business wants, they want predictability and control. They wanna know when things are gonna change, they wanna have the control to be able to initiate those changes.
Even if we have this release train rolling out great new updates, security updates, new features. As a business, you want to be able to throttle that, and yeah, we have a number of different controls that have allowed organizations to do that. A long term stable and support channel, which I mentioned expands the actual stable channel that the operating system is on for six months. So that was a big one that we announced earlier this year. But in addition to that, the ability to, like you said, pin different application versions and be able to know exactly when you wanna roll those out, there's a number of other controls that allow you to better understand how you're gonna update your fleet.
So tell me about Flex.
Naveen Viswanatha: Ah, we're super excited about Flex. So that was one of the three big announcements we had around CER. The first one was the Chrome enterprise recommended solution track that you alluded to earlier. The second one was a brand new SKU that's focused specifically on kiosks and digital signage, and we can get to that in a moment too, and the third one was the incorporation of Flex.
So Flex is something that we announced earlier this year and what it allows organizations to do is install Chrome OS on any device they already have. So if you have an existing investment, say in Windows devices, they're aging, you're not sure when you're gonna refresh them, maybe you wanna refresh part of them but you wanna get the benefits of Chrome OS, the security, the built in updates, everything we've been talking about thus far, remote management, you can now install Chrome OS Flex on those devices and get all of the benefits from Chrome OS.
So we've seen that as a really interesting opportunity in the kiosk space as many customers are starting to use that as an. Chrome OS. So they'll maybe extend the life of their existing infrastructure for a couple of years, and then we'll see them roll onto Chrome devices in the future, but we've also seen organizations look at Chrome OS Flex as a way to really tailor what they want in terms of device capabilities for their signage solutions based on the breadth of different hardware and endpoints that exist out there today.
So for example, if you wanted an existing device that is not a Chrome OS device, either based on the aesthetics of it, based on the form factor or performance, is it ruggedized, fanless, et cetera. You can look at that and say I wanna use that device. It's not a Chrome OS device, but with Flex now, I can transform that into a Chrome OS device and incorporate it into my overall device strategy.
So why can you extend your life? Is that because it's a leaner application and strips out a lot of stuff?
Naveen Viswanatha: It's because we're able to really look at the hardware and separate the hardware from the software, and so rather than relying on Microsoft's operating system support and when that's gonna be EOLd (end of lifed) or when the device itself be becomes EOLd, Chrome OS Flex allows us to effectively say, look, that's an end point and we're gonna separate the software and the operating system from the actual device components. As an organization there creates an abstraction layer for you to utilize Flex as a way to extend the life of that infrastructure.
I assume you could also run a blended network as well, so that you could have Chrome OS devices and re refurbed windows or reclaimed windows devices as Flex devices and run concurrently. You don't have to have a network, that's just all pure Chrome OS devices.
Naveen Viswanatha: Yeah, you hit the nail on the head and that's what we're starting to see with many of our customers who will start with Chrome OS flex, but then they’ll say … a lot of organizations, especially larger organizations, they don't necessarily have one device on one operating system or one endpoint or one operating system, they have a plethora of them and these devices might be on different refresh and end of life cycle.
So when there might be one coming up, say, at the end of next year, Chrome OS Flex is a great way to evaluate Chrome OS capabilities. Most of the time customers overwhelmingly are happy with Chrome OS and start using that as an onboarding mechanism for other Chrome devices or then rolling out Flex to other parts of their fleet that might be the end of lifting and subsequent years. And so during that time, they will have, like you said, a hybrid model of Chrome OS devices, as well as Flex devices, and you can absolutely manage those through the single pane of glass, like via the partner pane of glass, one of the nine partners that we just announced, or even our own admin console.
You mentioned a new SKU. What is that?
Naveen Viswanatha: Yeah we're very excited about that. The new SKU is called the kiosk and signage upgrade, and what it does is it unlocks all of the signage capabilities that an organization wants, but none of anything else that you need. And what I mean by that is that Chrome OS is an operating system that serves end user computing, as well as signage. On the end user computing side, you need capabilities to manage users, user profiles, logins, different types of login modalities. But on the signage side, you don't really need that, right? Even if there's end user interaction, there's a lot of user modes and user capabilities that are not part of that overall management…
Because it's a dumb end point in a hell of a lot of cases?
Naveen Viswanatha: I wouldn't use the word dumb, but because it's a highly focused endpoint, and as a result of that, we tailored a SKU which is $25 per device per year. So that's half off, two bucks a month basically, enterprise SKU, and for that, you get this 50% off SKU and very focused functionality, still gives you all the security, all the device controls, cloud management, reporting and insights. You just don't get the user controls that you get with the Chrome enterprise upgrade SKU, and that's the full SKU.
But if you did want those user controls, for whatever reason it may be, could you use those? And could you run a blended network with both kinds of licenses?
Naveen Viswanatha: Absolutely and we have a lot of customers that that, that are doing exactly
One thing that came up a few years ago and there was some buzz around it, but I don't know where it went. There was chatter that Android, which is pretty widely used in digital signage as well, was going to converge with Chrome OS and it was going to be the same thing that didn't really happen or did I miss it?
Naveen Viswanatha: No, it didn't happen. I've been on the team for seven years, so I'm not sure if what you're referring to is before my time, but we do have Android and Chrome OS as a company, two operating systems that serve different parts of the overall market.
Now you're right that there is going to be some overlap. We see Android in the signage space. We see Android focusing a little bit more on mobile kiosk type of use cases. So a customer associate in a store walking around with a tablet style device, so things along those lines, whereas Chrome OS feels like it's a bit more focused on fixed facility types of infrastructure, and that's how we see the segmentation today. And we obviously worked very closely with the Android team.
Over time I think, as things evolve somewhat organically, if there are opportunities to bring these two capabilities or two operating systems together, that's something that we will consider but today we see a pretty natural segmentation.
One thing I will add is that you were talking about managing a blended environment. With the Chrome OS capabilities and Android management capabilities, many organizations are managing both Chrome OS and Android endpoints through their universal endpoint management solutions. So that is a way that these two solutions can coexist even today.
This has been great. I could have talked for at least an hour or more, but we committed to a certain time window, so I should honor it. The last question I wanted to ask is just very simply if software companies and solution providers wanna get involved, or at least look into this how do they start?
Naveen Viswanatha: Yeah, so you can go to our website. We have a lot of great information on our website. For customers, we have a wayfinding guide. We have information about the different solutions that we have for kiosk in terms of both devices that they can use at as endpoints, as well as peripherals that they can also utilize.
On the partner side, on the solution provider side gets in contact with our business development team. I know we are actively looking at working with more and more partners. I mentioned earlier that we listed nine and that's just a starting point, and what we've seen is that on the solution provider and ISV side, as you scale out globally, there are a lot of kinds of localized partners that do a lot of work in different regions, and so we expect this area to really build out significantly over the coming years. So get in touch with our BD team and our business development team, and be happy to work with you, figure out ways to incorporate you into our Chrome enterprise recommended program.
As you dug into this, were you surprised by how many CMS software companies are out there?
Naveen Viswanatha: Yeah, I absolutely was. Especially considering where we were just five years ago or so. It seems like this has been one of the areas where we've seen a lot of hyper specialization and hyper localization. So unlike other solution categories like contact center, as an example, you tend to have a number of global players and then a few localized players within each market.
In this particular arena, in kiosks and digital signage, it feels very different because you look at APAC. I can't even talk about APAC as a market because each country, and sometimes even within countries, different specializations with retail versus employee spaces and workspaces has created a huge ecosystem around kiosks and signage. So yes, long answer in terms of in terms of your original question, but absolutely.
That's good for me because a crowded market means there's more to write about and talk about. (Laughter)
Well, thank you very much for spending some time with me!
Naveen Viswanatha: Thank you, and appreciate the time and opportunity, and I look forward to talking to you again at some point.
Wednesday May 18, 2022
Jeremy Jacobs, Enlighten
Wednesday May 18, 2022
Wednesday May 18, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
The cannabis retailing industry is interesting in a whole bunch of ways. It is a unique vertical market with an absolutely screaming need for digital signage and interactive technologies.
While longtime recreational users may know their stuff, as US states and Canadian provinces have legalized, there's a whole bunch of new users coming in with needs that have more to do with sleep problems or arthritic joints. They walk into dispensaries and are confronted with products and options that are somewhat or entirely unfamiliar, so screens that promote and explain are very helpful and relevant.
The dispensary business is also interesting because the industry has its own overcrowded ecosystem of payments and management systems that need to somehow be tied together.
The largest player in cannabis digital signage is the Bowling Green, Kentucky firm Enlighten, which is in some 1,200 dispensaries in the United States,
I had a fun conversation with Enlighten founder Jeremy Jacobs, who found his way into digital signage when the clean energy business he was running went south in the late 2000s recession. He pivoted into screens in businesses, and menu displays for restaurants led to an opportunity to branch into cannabis retail. He's a super-smart, interesting guy more signage people should know about.
Enjoy.
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TRANSCRIPT
Jeremy, thank you for joining me. Can you give me the rundown on what your company does?
Jeremy Jacobs: Yeah, absolutely, Dave. Enlighten is the only real omni-channel company within the cannabis vertical particularly, and by omni-channel, we affect the customer journey throughout that entire customer journey. We have a product real quickly called AdSuite that targets people in a digital environment, whether it be mobile, Roku or even desktop computers based upon audience segmentation data we have, to know those are known cannabis consumers. And then we have our SmartHub product, which is an in-store product which is why we're here today, digital signage, kiosk related, and that product helps to upscale the customers that were brought in from the marketing from AdSuite.
And this could be on menu boards, this can be on information displays, this can be on tablets, any number of things, right?
Jeremy Jacobs: Yeah, so SmartHub is really unique. Even if you zoom out of the cannabis vertical and just look broadly at the digital signage industry, SmartHub is an extremely unique product that we created. It manages kiosks, it manages digital signage, all sorts of menus, feature boards, order queue systems, break room TVs, where the audience has shifted from a consumer to the actual employee. It uses extremely advanced logic and filtering with the point of sale data that it's consuming to make these things and even has an e-commerce component to it.
So really the way to think about it is that SmartHub is an extremely robust merchandising platform that manages all of your consumer facing surfaces, whether that surface is a passive screen, an interactive screen, like a kiosk or even the webpage where someone would come to purchase and make an order on your website.
And the cannabis industry is its own unique ecosystem, right? There's POS companies that only do cannabis business, and so on?
Jeremy Jacobs: Yeah, I would say there's no true word than cannabis is its own individual ecosystem. So as a veteran, not been in the industry quite as long as you but since 2008, I've seen a lot of things and cannabis extremely unique. So it does have all of its own tech stack companies for the most part. There are a few companies, Microsoft Dynamics makes a sort of a POS system that's been modified for cannabis. But outside, I'll see a Square every now and then, but for the most part 99.99% of all point of sales systems at a digital signage company would integrate with are extremely cannabis specific and they all compete for what is roughly 8,500 retail clients across just short of 40 states, and so to talk about the uniqueness, even in more depth, not only are the stacks different in cannabis than they would be outside of that, but all the individual laws and rules that apply very literally from state to state. So you even have state variances.
Why would so many companies decide, “I want to be in a space that's changing constantly and not all that big and in the grand scheme of what retail is”?
Jeremy Jacobs: That's a great question. I think what your question was alluding to, there's the TAM, the total addressable market. You look at restaurants and there's literally hundreds of thousands of them, and I would argue there's barely as many POS companies in restaurants as there is inside of cannabis. And I think it's a couple of things. From an emotional standpoint, this is “the green rush” right? Any cannabis advocate that for the last hundred years that it's been illegal has felt violated by the error, has seensocial injustice from that. I believe there's an emotional component why a lot of these companies are there, a lot of these leaders are there. Second, there's a power vacuum that gets field when no one wants to go somewhere. So when you take a look at the cannabis industry, none of these major POS companies that we're referring to, none of them had any interest at all whatsoever in getting involved in cannabis. So the result of that is someone has to, and then the third prong, I think of this little fork here is that there is a green rush. The Anheuser Bushes of the world are about to be made of cannabis. There's very unique transactions, very unique audiences, and there's a lot of money to be made there. There's a lot of value and you can see companies that are in the space that make tech.
If you look on the internet, Weed Maps is probably the largest one, listed on the NASDAQ billion plus dollar company, recently Dutchie has made some announcements for billion plus dollar companies as well. So fortunes are being made even though the total addressable market is small.
Yeah, I've always thought that the cannabis dispensary business was a particularly interesting one for digital signage, because unlike most retail where you walk into an apparel retailer, you know what you're looking for, clothes, I need a shirt or whatever. It's pretty obvious.
But if I walk into a cannabis dispensary, I'm pretty much lost. I don't know what I'm even looking at and all these different strains of flowers and buds and this and that. It is like Mars to me. But, and I suspect a lot of people walk in like that who maybe aren't recreational users, but want it to help them sleep or calm them down or whatever purpose they have for it?
Jeremy Jacobs: Yeah, and so to drill into that observation you've made is really there's two kinds of consumers that very quickly develop in cannabis. There's the customer that you just described, which is a new customer, and there's a lot of those, because again, cannabis was technically illegal for about a hundred years. And so there's a huge amount of new customers that don't know anything, and so there's a massive educational vacuum there, and that's actually, Enlighten really started as we recognize that, and so we created an in-store digital out of home, a television network that runs ads for brands and things of that nature, endemic or non-endemic. We've got clients like Door Dash or Vans shoes or FX networks and their cannabis shows, but the content that's on that network is educationally driven specifically to satisfy that lack of education that you just talked about, and then on the other end of that spectrum, there are these clients that very much know what they want and precisely what they're looking for and those particular clients aren't looking for that same experience. They're looking for, digital menus that can be sorted based upon terpenes are based upon cannabinoid profiles so the highest THC value, they're looking for is express checkout kiosks, so they don't have to have an interaction.
So uniqueness of the cannabis dispensary from a digital signage perspective is you have to create digital environments that satisfy both of those polar opposites.
I gather when you were talking about omni-channel that it's really important or helpful to a company playing in this space to be able to serve multiple needs and to integrate with the other technologies that are part of the ecosystem. If you just did digital signage, it's a walled garden thing where you're going to get much better reception for many users, whereas you can provide multiple components, right?
Jeremy Jacobs: Oh, absolutely. I've been in a lot of industries. The restaurant space was the first one. I was really into digital signage. Sysco Foods started slinging my digital menus for me, and like things 2009 and their 30 different offices and so I got to see a lot of things there. But in the first week in cannabis, eight years ago, the word integrate came up like 40 different times within an hour, and so I've never seen an industry that's so demanding of integrations. Like for example, you walk into a restaurant and any number of restaurants and you look over by the hostess stand and there's the DoorDash tablet, and there's a GrubHub tablet, and there's a Postmates tablet and there's all these tablets. And so the hostess is watching these orders come in and then they're putting them in their POS system.
That would never fly in the cannabis industry, like it's a demanded integration by these people, and so if you're going to create an integration engine, you're going to want to make it have more points of influence than just a TV menu, you're going to need to provide that e-commerce plug and you're going to need to provide those kiosks. You're going to want to link up with their customer data for targeting those customers, on their mobile devices. You're exactly right, if you're going to be relevant in cannabis, your stack better be serious because they're trying to reduce that vendor set to if they could just one, nobody does all of it, but they want to reduce that number to the smallest possible.
Is that in part, because it's a younger buyer audience who understands technology more and didn't grow up in kind of old style restaurants or whatever, where there were all these different systems?
Jeremy Jacobs: Interesting thing you said there,t because it's a younger buyer, so that was very true eight years ago. But at this point, that is not the truth at this juncture. So just a few years ago, I think it was two and a half years ago, the fastest growing segment of users shifted from 20 year olds to middle-aged mothers and it was the fastest growing audience, and then over the last few years, what has really been the fastest growing audience has actually been elderly people. It seems like they're starting to come to grips with, “Hey, I have pains and aches and cannabis is actually the solution”, and so it's a big growing segment.
But I think the answer to the question that you did ask is why is there this desire for a consolidation of a tech stack more than anything.
Yeah, I was thinking more of the operators that tend to be younger. Maybe that's not the case?
Jeremy Jacobs: Same thing at this point, it's not the case now, it's weird. So it was the case before, a hundred percent because who was willing to take that risk to get in the weed business, and so a hundred percent, but now I'm sitting in meetings with digital officers and marketing officers from Abercrombie and Apple, and they came from big organizations and so it's a very changing landscape.
But at the end of the day, I think that some of them are young, so yes, to your answer, very good observation. Second is the ones that aren't young are professionals, and they're used to dealing with that. But thirdly, I think for both of them, the demand of tech stack is necessary because the regulations and the data that they have to send back to the state agencies and authorities and all of those sorts of things and the compliance they have to undergo is worse than any other industry ever. Like they're under so much scrutiny and you could lose your license at the drop of a hat, and so they want less to deal with so they can focus more on staying in business.
Does that touch on your platform and what you do? Do you have to have a Nevada version of it and a Colorado version and I forget where else it's legal, California, obviously. But do you have to pass them out state by state or is it pretty uniform?
Jeremy Jacobs: Great question. So the technology itself is the same across all the states. AdSuite is AdSuite and SmartHub is SmartHub, but there are definitely nuances. So let me give you a couple of interesting examples in the state of Pennsylvania, you're not allowed to put anything up on a screen from a digital signage perspective, unless absolutely it has been medically proven. And so it needs to come from a doctor or some position, a medical authority, and in Alaska, for example, they don't believe anything has ever been proven by a doctor or medical authority and so you can't put anything up that even closely resembles a recommendation. So there's two polar opposites. So from a content perspective, I gotta watch those things.
From an advertising perspective. Some states, even though it's cannabis, won't let you show pictures of weed in the advertisements. Go figure that out. How do you advertise weed without showing weed? You can't show people consuming the product in a lot of states with advertisements. So there's another nuance, and then a third nuance is like in Pennsylvania, what I'm able to put on a digital menu is very specific and I cannot put any imagery into one thing, and I have to, I'm required to put certain testing results, similar to the way in the restaurant industry. Now everybody went digital whenever they were required to put the calorie count for these items, and that's when you saw this massive uprising in digital cause they got to replace all this stuff anyway, might as well go to the screen, and in Pennsylvania, I got to put things like that, testing results.
What's the content that seems to be required across all the different dispensaries, kind of the money messages that need to be there, and the operators want to have up there?
Jeremy Jacobs: Yeah, so from a TV menu perspective. We'll start with our that's the most largely adopted digital signage product ever and so the TV menu, what's necessary is the name of the products, the type of the product, the weight of the product, the price, the product, but really importantly, people want to know about cannabinoid profiles, is this high or low in THC? The psychoactive ingredient that gives you the feeling of a high, is it higher, lower in CBD, which is the non-psychoactive ingredient that really focuses a lot on pain, arthritis and inflammation and things of that nature, muscle pain. So consumers sort of demand that, operators want to provide that.
And from an educational perspective, if you're talking about a different digital signage product and just more like digital signage, we're producing educational videos, the demand really is around education of what are these different terpenes, what are these different cannabinoids, these little things inside of the cannabis that creates different effect for each strain, like this one makes me sleepy, this one makes me energetic, this one's great for back pain, and so that's the demand from a regulatory standpoint of pretty much the only uniform thing that I can't really do is show anything that's cartoonish that might want to lure children into the store.
There was a big problem with packaging for edibles for a while there, right?
Jeremy Jacobs: It was, they've got sour patch kids on the box, and the first versions of edibles were very kid friendly because they took kids candies and made them, and now that's pretty much been regulated out. So the same thing, that same sort of concern with the packaging that you pointed out with edibles is also a concern in digital signage and even digital advertising. So if I'm targeting a mobile phone, even though I'm targeting a known cannabis consumer, just stay away from anything that might be alluring to children.
So if I'm a customer of Enlighten, is it a SaaS platform that I am using?.
Jeremy Jacobs: Yeah, so the two products are different. The SmartHub is the in-store signage, kiosk, kind of technology that manages all of that and talks to your POS system. That is definitely a SaaS product. As far as pricing models, there's been a lot of those in digital signage, our kiosk system is one price for your entire store and use as many as you want. Our signage model is the same as anyone else's, per node. SaaS model on our AdSuite product, though that is a SaaS product, if you will, it's a piece of software that gains you access to those audiences on our DOH network and in stores, as well as, digital Roku devices, mobile devices, desktop computers but that's driven just like any other digital advertising model would be external on a cost per impression basis.
What's the footprint for your company at this point?
Jeremy Jacobs: So we've reached a really interesting crossroads, very few companies in cannabis have ever got over that thousand mark. Right now, I would estimate we're in probably roughly 1200 dispensaries, somewhere thereabouts and then have several hundred other clients that are brands and so forth so our footprint reaches to about 1500 or so clients, big number and a TAM of 8,500, if you look at it that way.
And this is an industry that like more and more states seem to be coming on stream, or at least there's a push to bring them on stream. So it's not like it's a finite market right now?
Jeremy Jacobs: Yeah. So that's part of the growth. When we're assessing growth, there's a couple ways to look at it. One is how we can get more money out of the existing customers and that's to offer premium versions of our products, additional services that might be out there that we could focus on. But also there's just the overall growth of the entire market itself, and there's a couple of phases of that. The first phase is for the state to go medical. So now, they can be a client of ours. But typically, we find the greatest traction in the states once they go recreational because what happens is their revenue growth is astronomical.
People don't appear to want to go to get a medical license nearly as easily as just walking in a dispensary. So whenever they go recreational, they buy a lot of other products from us and really focus on that retail environment and creating a magical experience for those recreational customers. So really there's two phases, medical, and then recreational. But right now you're looking at cannabis in almost 40 states at a medical level roughly 10 or so at a recreational level. I’m averaging there, the number changes. I haven't kept track of it in a minute, but to give you an idea of growth, there's about 10-12 to go to medical and then there's the vast majority or 80 plus percent that are not yet recreational. So a lot of growth in them.
Are you up in Canada as well?
Jeremy Jacobs: We are. So it's a lot of challenges working inside cannabis, anybody's ever nailed internationally. You have to have your own bank accounts, your incorporations, your teams up there. It's hard to import hardware products, and as a company, we do also provide the hardware. So that has its own challenges, but we do operate in Canada. We've got some systems in Puerto Rico, which is a US territory. Jamaica, we send some things too. We have some plans we're brewing up. Spain has a pretty good sized cannabis market and so we're looking internationally there because the challenge is the same. People don't understand cannabis, they need education. That's the same worldwide. It's been illegal globally, for a hundred years.
How did you get into it? You mentioned that your first foray into digital signage was restaurants for Sysco, how did you end up in this?
Jeremy Jacobs: So in 2008, I started a company called IconicTV, and it's had many offshoots with verticals. I've been one of those guys when I see a vertical, I'd make a very precise product. We helped build a C-store DOH network called C-store TV. We had a school product called, school menu guru. We had a lobby product called lobby Fox, it does visitor management and so one of those products we noticed early on was digital TV menus, and so in 2009, I formed a deal with Sysco foods and they have 30 offices across the country that would distribute my digital signage, digital TV menu products to their restaurant tours. And so I hired these vice presidents in each of those areas to partner with those offices as Sysco calls an opco, and so Sysco would have reps and my reps would go do ride alongs, and so they would ride along with these representatives and go in and meet these restaurant tours at work and stuff. One of them, the guy in Denver, Colorado, Ted Tilton's name? So Ted called me one day and this is right before cannabis goes legal in Colorado, which was the first state to legalize recreational cannabis, Washington and Colorado voted on it basically at the same time. But Colorado was the first actually who implemented, and he calls me, he says, Hey man, I got this idea and I said, what is it? He goes, these TV menus we’re selling through Sysco. I said, yeah, he goes, what do you think about making some for marijuana? I said, what are you talking about? And he says I've got these buddies opening this dispensary called DANK, and it'll be the closest dispensary to Denver International airport and I got this feeling as soon as weed was legal in Colorado, a lot of people are going to be coming into DIA and this place is going to be really busy since it's the closest one, and he says, and I was like, what would be the difference? And he said, essentially we put up marijuana buds instead of chicken sandwiches. And I said, I'm in.
I've been a big advocate of cannabis for a long time. At one point, I was even the executive director of Kentucky NORMAL, the division of the national organization for marijuana legalization. It's the Kentucky chapter. I've been a big advocate of it. I've been a self prescribed patient for many years. It was an interesting opportunity to take a couple of things I was very passionate about both cannabis and digital signage and went to do some real work on two things I care about. So we dove in.
Has the profile of the operator changed?
I remember talking to another person who's involved in this space and actually being out in Denver and he was saying that there’s two types of operators. There's a business people who see this as a growth opportunity, and they've already had some experience in retail or in investing or whatever, and then there's growers and growers who are turning into retailers and he said the challenge with the growers as they're growers, they're not business people and they don't really understand retail, and I'm curious if in the early days you saw a lot of them stories of dispensaries that would start up and then drop off because they didn't really know what they were doing?
Jeremy Jacobs: Yeah, and I'll take that example. Your friend gave you a pretty good insight there, but to expand on that, I don't even think it's just growers though. It's I think just very weed passionate people, like they're very passionate about it. Whether it's consuming it or making concentrates or growing it or whatever. So I would just call them plant passionate people versus business people, and it very much exists, and it doesn't today to the degree that it used to. In the beginning, someone that's a senior executive vice president of Abercrombie is not going to go start a dispensary, like during the first couple of years, we were all wondering if everybody opened these things, were all gonna go to jail. I'm sure everybody in America is going everybody in Denver is going to do it, just wait, and if all my friends at open dispensaries were sitting around, I would have conversations with the night and they're like, I'm just wondering if tonight, the DEA raids my house, and so nobody wanted to be under that scrutiny except plant passionate people.
But as time got on and the federal government sorta started to take a position, even if the position was, “we don't have a position”, that's still a position, and so they're not taking an aggressive stance on it then you began to see real business people start to come into the environment and at this point, you have organizations like Cresco who just bought Columbia Care, and these operators have over a hundred stores and they're doing hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in retail cannabis sales. These are not the type of marijuana dispensary that I think most people have in their mind. These people have entire floors of IT teams. They have entire floors and marketing teams. They do in-depth customer insight studies, and that influences every tiny nuance of their packaging and their store layouts. These are real operations, but I can still take you to Oregon right now and walk into the shop or Nancy and Megan who are best friends and they have tie-died things up on the wall and they're very whimsical people that are just very passionate and who also have a successful sotry. Now they're not going to sell hundreds of millions of dollars to cannabis, but they're also successfully operating.
Think of it like liquor, for example, Liquor Barn exists and that's a big corporation. But, in the town I live in, everybody wants to go to Chuck's Liquors when Chuck was alive, because Chuck was just the coolest guy ever. So you went to Chuck, so they both have a place.
Yeah, I've certainly seen the same thing. I remember being an Amsterdam for ISE and, you'd stick your head into one of these coffee shops, and it was just a hole in the wall and weird but out by the hotel where I was staying, there was a dispensary that looked like an Apple store, like it was very slick.
Jeremy Jacobs: Interesting you say that. So there's this place called Euflora and Jamie Perino was one of the owners at the time and it's at the 16th street walking district in downtown Denver. This is the big street with the old piano outside and everybody wandering around a very touristy area and so we did the first project for them that I remember getting a call from them and they're like, “Hey, we open in 11 days and we've got this crazy idea where there'll be a touchscreen kiosk and it's sitting next to a jar of marijuana, and this kiosk has all this interactive stuff on it with everything about that strain of marijuana. We needed in our stores in 11 days. Can you guys do it?” And they said, oh yeah, and our budget is X, and I just laughed, and I said X is missing a couple of zeros, especially for 11 days, what are you talking about? And they're like, can you do it or not? And I said I can, but I shouldn't but I'm going to, and so we did, because we wanted to be part of the exposing of this whole thing.
And so we took it on, and so when you would first walk on your floor, you can dig up some old video files from the news channels from eight years ago, it very much looked like an Apple store cause we had Apple iPads on every table next to a jar of marijuana and you can scroll up and down and see what the euphoric effects would be and does it make you sleepy, happy, hungry, horny, what's it going to do? And, in what genetics, where did it come from? And just all this interesting stuff, and people would come into that store fascinated, and so it was very Apple-esque.
How did you end up in digital signage? Cause I was looking at your bio and you've got patents in Magneto, hydrodynamics for energy exploration, drilling and everything. How did you get here?
Jeremy Jacobs: What the hell happened? Early in life I realized I didn't really like formal education. So I think I'm like nine hours from a college degree, but I dropped out and became entrepreneurial. So I became an investment broker and I worked on several different fundraising deals, most of them were driven around biodiesel. That was very active at the time when I dropped out of college, nearly two thousand, biodiesel was a thing, a lot of different technologies. And very quickly I got interested in alternative energy technologies and energy efficiency technologies, and just anything that was energy related, and technology related, and so I had an operation with about 20,000 acres of natural gas wells in Eastern Kentucky that were clean natural gas wells using advanced technologies like hydraulic fracturing.
I started inventing Magneto hydrodynamic technologies that's used by Chevron and Exxon and people that. It goes down in oil wells. It's used to eliminate paraffin and that technology has now been adopted by the DoD to make airlines, to make fighter jets fly farther because the fluid systems flow better and a lot of different things, and then 2008 came, so I own a quarry, that's mine and silica for Silicon to make marker processors, and I got a bunch of natural gas, wells and magnetic technologies, and 2008 comes, 2007 comes, the housing crisis collapses, everything and natural gas went from about $14 in MCF, which was a vast majority of the revenue that we were driving to like a dollar and a half in MCF, which is the unit that you produce and sell for, it stands for thousand cubic feet, and I needed $3 to make that make sense, right? And now it's at a dollar and a half. So I went from really cash flow positive to a hundred percent cash flow negative and just a matter of months.
And on top of that, when you own a bunch of quarries, nobody's buying any materials, and so I look up and literally everything I'm involved in just all of a sudden is collapsing and I don't have the payroll to make payroll for this massive bunch of employees. We had several offices in different parts across the country. And surely it was excruciatingly painful fast. Everything had to close, and so here's, here's the reality. I'm at home depressed out of my mind. I've just had to lay everyone off. I've had to shut in all these gas wells. I've had to lock the gates on all these quarries and nobody wants to talk about anything, everybody's going broke and my wife comes to me and she says, you've got to do something. We have kids we have to feed, we have bills we have to pay. You cannot sit here and be depressed, and I had seen somewhere I think it was in a mall. A friend of mine had built a TV screen, turned sideways, and it had Adobe Flash player on it, and it was playing some animated motion graphics that he controlled on a desktop PC inside this big kiosk and I thought I could do something similar to that, and so I literally grabbed a 32 inch Vizio TV out of my living room. My wife goes, where are you going with my TV? I said, I'll bring it back to you. I'll see you in a week, and she goes, you are leaving with the TV for a week? I said, yeah, and you’ll get a bigger one, I promise, and I grabbed the Toshiba laptop that my field hands that would go around, they had to log what parts they use and how long they were on job sites and stuff, and I grabbed one of these old stinky laptops that smells like crude oil and hung it in a friend of mine's restaurant in Clarkson, Kentucky. It was called K's cafe and it was political season, and so I'm going to tell a story about myself here, Dave, and so I go around and build these very animated PowerPoints and I'm changing the files out via LogMeIn at the time. I didn't even have any software, digital signage software. I didn't even know about the digital signage thing.
And so I'm like, I gotta sell ads on this thing, so I go to this guy that's running for sheriff, and I told a little white lie. I was like, Hey man, the other guy that's running for sheriff, he's buying in on my screens. It's in the most high traffic restaurant, and apparently legally, I've got to offer you the same opportunity at the same price. He goes, why what's he paying? And I told him, he goes, I'll take it, and so then I went to the guy that I just told a white lie and said, this other guy is buying. It was, which was actually true the second time. That's how I got started, I had to feed my kids. I had a 32-inch Vizio TV and a busted up laptop and I sold some people aspiring to be politicians, some ads and some real estate agents, and it just grew from there. I look up and I’m in hundreds of restaurants and fitness centers with the DOH network and six months later, a friend of mine says, Hey, can you use one of those silly ad TVs and make a menu on it because the price of salmon keeps fluctuating so much. I got to put these mailbox letters, and so we made, which was one of the early digital menus. I think we'd both agree, 2009-2009 was not the dawning moment of digital menus. It wasn't the precipice of it. That was very early.
And so we started using those and saw opportunities to replace those little black felt directories with the letters you run out of the M, and so you flip the W upside down, it's all bow legged looking, on the little felt boards. We started making digital directories integrated with Google sheets, so you could change it easily and the rest was history, man. I dove in and needless to say, the kids are fed now. The wife is happy. She got a bigger TV. I think it's 70 inch now. So everyone's cool.
That's a hell of a pivot.
Jeremy Jacobs: Yeah, buddy. Necessity is the mother of invention.
All right. This was terrific. I really enjoyed our conversation.
Jeremy Jacobs: Yeah, man. I was going to start off this morning saying longtime listener, first time caller. I've been watching your website, your blog, your podcast for as long as I can remember. So it's been an honor to finally get to be a part of it, and I really appreciate it.
Thank you for taking the time with me.
Jeremy Jacobs: I thank you, Dave.
Tuesday May 10, 2022
Geoff Bessin, Intuiface
Tuesday May 10, 2022
Tuesday May 10, 2022
NOTE - Podcasts normally come out on Wednesdays, but as a favor to Intuiface - which is at this week's ISE trade show in Spain - I moved it up a day to coincide with the show's opening day ...
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
One of the big trends in the software world is the whole idea of no code development - the premise that both programmers and mere mortals can create applications without getting their typing fingers dirty and brains fried doing traditional computer programming.
The proposition is that no code development platforms can cut out a lot of time and cost associated with pulling applications together, and also deal with the reality that good programmers are in high demand and therefore scarce.
The French software firm Intuiface is in the interesting position of having offered a no code platform long before no code was a discussion point, so the folks there are a great resource for discussing the implications for the digital signage and interactive display market.
I spoke with Geoff Bessin, the CMO and main voice for Intuiface, about the distinctions between no code and low code development platforms, and how they differ from the simple drag and drop, what you see is what you get user interfaces that are common in digital signage content management systems. We also dig into the benefits, the limitations, and more than anything, why you should know and care about no code.
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TRANSCRIPT
Geoff, thank you for joining me. Can you give me the rundown first on what Intuiface is all about?
Geoff Bessin: Will do, Dave, thank you for having me. So Intuiface is a no-code platform dedicated to the creation of interactive digital content. That includes digital signage, but really it can anything in the venue. It could be a museum exhibition, could be a sales pitch for a movie sales team, could be anything at a trade show, something in a real estate office, et cetera. So you create it, you deploy it, you can do analytics with it. It’s all good.
And the company is based in France, correct?
Geoff Bessin: We are headquartered in a town called Labège, which is right outside Toulouse in France. Although I'm not, but it's funny, my name is Geoffrey Besson, so both my first and last name look French. So people always assume it's French, but that’s not the case. I'm in Boston.
Can you speak a lick of French?
Geoff Bessin: Oui. Yes.
Good for you! I wanted to talk about no-code software, cause you guys have been no-code before people were even using that term and no-code is one of these trends, just like headless CMS, that seems to be bubbling up and maybe people don't understand a lot about it yet.
Geoff Bessin: Yeah, you could go back to the 80s and find things like HyperCard where you were enabling non-developers to create an application of some sorts. So it goes back a long way, but in terms of a movement, generating notice, gaining investment and having companies spend money on it, it's only been the past few years.
I can tell you that statistics are now saying that the market size, the amount of money being spent on no-code software used to create apps is almost $14 billion. It's a lot of money being pumped into these apps. And in fact, more than 65% of apps are now created using no-code tools. So more than 50%, more than half of apps are being built with no-code software. It is the predominant means of delivering applications these days.
What's the distinction between no-code and low-code, because I've heard both terms.
Geoff Bessin: There's no formal distinction. You can't point at it and go, “Oh, this one’s no-code” like you just went over the line. But the idea is that with low-code, there are back doors. There are means to enhance, to extend, to facilitate integration that might involve a little bit of coding. Even that coding could be simplified based on maybe either a scripting language that is native to the tool or a public scripting language like Ruby.
Whereas no-code is just 100%, you're not going to see code anywhere, and so you are in a way limited to the sandbox provided by the no-code platform, what it is you're able to deliver is limited by what you can piece together with the Lego blocks of that platform. no-code gives you those little back doors to branch yourself out.
So what does it mean for development? Does it distance or mediate the need for application developers completely, and just any old end-user can produce an application without having to engage developers or is it more something that accelerates the development process and just gets some cost and time out of the way?
Geoff Bessin: I think that question brings us to who's doing it, and why are they doing it? As I mentioned, no-code has exploded recently, and it is due to a set of developments that have driven application development to what is now called the “citizen developer.”
Trends such as a shortage of developers, it's not that we're trying to get rid of them. It's that there’s not enough. I saw one statistic that back in 2020, there were 1.2 million unfilled developer jobs in the United States, just the US but 1.2 million developer jobs unfilled in the US and colleges and universities were only cranking out about 400,000 developers. There's a shortage. So it's not that we don't want them, we don't have them. What do you do about that? There was also COVID, which has greatly accelerated investment in these no-code platforms, because everything moved online, and when everything moved online, everything needed to be digitized and companies realized we have to move now but we don't have enough resources, so how the heck are we going to digitize these things?
And then there's also tangential, but influential, the fact that even in our own home, we're not coders, but we are programmers. If I'm working with my Nest thermostat, that's programming. I just got a puppy and they have these apps that you can then program to see how many steps they've taken and how much water they drink, that's programming, and the digital native is used to controlling their environment digitally. There are tools out there that enable them to realize their ideas as an application, and somebody has to build it because there's not enough developers to go around. That's what really kicked the no-code market in the butt.
What we're seeing subsequently is that the developer shortage is being filled by these citizen developers producing applications, maybe for personal use, maybe for internal employee use, maybe for customer us, it depends. Those developers are now being transitioned to work on larger projects, more intricate projects. They have more time arguably to focus on the big tickets stuff that still needs the hardcore development, offloading their responsibility from the simpler things that can now be handled by that citizen developer.
Are there trade offs that you have to accept, to use no-code instead of just doing your own thing?
Geoff Bessin: Certainly. There are obvious advantages, there's speed and there's costs benefits. There's a big productivity boost, but of course there's trade offs. I like this notion of Legos. You have these prebuilt blocks and this is a finite number of block options that you can combine in an infinite number of ways. At the end of the day, you're still limited to those blocks, right? And so if I'm using a no-code platform and I need a block that doesn't exist, I'm stuck.
Now, I suppose if it's a low-code platform, depending on what I need to achieve,okay, maybe I can put something together if I have the skill, maybe I don't, but if I don't have the skill or if the opportunity with the platform doesn't exist, I am limited, and I think that might be the fundamental challenge is what can I do? What can I realize? Cause recognize that a lot of these platforms are built to be generic, to address sort of breadth, not always depth, and so that can be a challenge. You are also, of course, relying on them to be responsible for performance and reliability. You are handing over that duty, that responsibility to the provider, the no-code platform. I hope they're doing a good job. Because it's out of my hands, I can't control that, and so those are the big risks: can I achieve exactly what I want or am I making compromises? Am I achieving the level of performance? My ability to deploy? My ability to collect data analytics? My ability to manage that deployment?
There's 150-200 platforms across the spectrum offering no-code and low-code options. You might be making some compromises on the way, certainly are, but as I shared with you, 65% of apps are now built with no-code platforms. So companies have decided it's worth the risk.
What's the distinction between no-code and what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) user interfaces?
Geoff Bessin: No-code, I think it's more of a connotation, not a denotation. I think you could argue that a lot of no-code platforms are WYSIWYG. Intuiface is a no-code platform, it's a drag and drop tool. It's a WYSIWYG. The connotation of WYSIWYG, it could be for a developer. It could be for anybody of any skill set. So it's more of a generic catchall for applications enabled to create other applications by dragging components and you can see what they look like at design time and development time.
No-code connotes the non-developer, the citizen developer that you don't have coding skills and you're not expected to have those skills. So I think that's it.
You sent me a white paper that kind of goes into this and you're making the argument that while no-code is out there, it's exploding and growing and everything else, there's really no application, I think you called it a ‘no-code blind spot’ in terms of in-venue applications. What do you mean by that?
Geoff Bessin: So let's define in-venue because that is exactly our contention. In-venue is an encapsulation of any digital deployment out of the home. It could be digital signage, could be all those things I mentioned with Intuiface as well, the museum exhibition, the sales presentation, real estate office, et cetera. It is out of the home. It is not my phone though. It is not my PC. I'm not browsing the web at home. I'm out of my home, I'm in a venue and there is some digital content trying to communicate to educate, to promote, to sell to me.
That domain has been, I think with the exception of Intuiface, untouched by the no-code movement. For sure, if you look at the landscape of companies delivering solutions to address the needs of the citizen developer, there is nothing out there addressing these in-venue deployments. It's all about web and mobile apps and some websites, that's it. So if you want to create digital signage, if you want to create that museum exhibition, the sales pitch, there is no option out there now, and which brings us David, I know you're going to want to ask this, which is, will, aren't all digital signage platforms, no-code? Which is great question, Dave, by the way...
You are a psychic!
Geoff Bessin: That's a yes, but, it is absolutely true that you don't write code, but there are certain expectations of a no-code platform that the traditional digital signage CMS cannot fulfill, and it's interesting if I take a step back, really by definition, it has always been the non-developer on the digital signage side, hasn’t it? You buy a platform, there's a CMS, the user of the content management system is the content person. They're not coding anything. They're working with the CMS, they're assigning content to zones and they're day partying. By definition from day one, digital signage was always a non-developer domain, whereas web and mobile apps and these sorts of things were always the developer domain.
The no-code movement was, “Hey, this complicated stuff, we gotta make it simpler. We need the citizen developer involved.” So they brought no-code to the domain that started with developers, which I think is one of the explanations for why it didn't really come over to the in-venue side yet, because it was always non-coder users, but there are certain expectations of the no-code platform, that is not really in scope of the platform delivering in-venue content. A simple example, just to give you one would be the notion of context. To react to the user, react to the environment, in real time in that context, and do something as a result that is inherently this notion of logic. If this, then that. That's coding, right? It's got the whiff of coding and how do you do that? And there's a list of things we can discuss about what makes in-venue unique. But it requires the accommodation of additional concerns that are beyond the scope of what a traditional CMS does and that no other no-code platform does across the no-code spectrum.
I guess what you're saying in certain respects is you can develop a playlist, do all the basic functionality of a digital sign, you can target content and everything else, but the moment you get into a request to do something different, that's interactive, that as you say, maybe responds to triggers and so on, that gets a lot more complicated, and at that point you're putting in, if you're an end user, you're putting in a request to your reseller or to the software company directly saying, can you do this? And they'll say, yes, we can, but it's going to take this amount of time, this amount of money and, we can't get this to you for six months cause it's off of our roadmap or whatever… Is that one of the arguments you'd make?
Geoff Bessin: I would say that for sure. You see, a lot of companies have libraries. Here's our template library, here’s our plugin library, here's our integration library. Oh, you want something we don't have? We can build that for you. Here's the cost. Here's how long it's going to take. That's one example.
I can tell you that from a Intuiface perspective, we don't have any libraries. We haven't really prebuilt anything. Our paradigm is to enable integration with any web service, to create any UI, to integrate with any content management system, to have that ubiquity, which means that we don't have to build anything for our clients. The customer can do that. But it also means that, well, you better have a good idea and you better need to know what you. Because you're starting with a tabula rasa, but yes, that is certainly one good example of how you fulfill these sort of unique needs you might have thought about. I'll give you another example, which is retail point of sale. How would you build that thing? To me, that qualifies as an in-venue application. That's in the venue, right? I can order through a website, but do I want to put a website on a kiosk? It's a different domain. It's a different paradigm. It has different design requirements, different expectations, different issues about security, about being able to run potentially offline. But having to work with peripherals, having hyper-local context dependence, there are all of these concerns that will impact that user experience in the venue that may not be relevant or at all to a web experience. If I want to build that thing, how much flexibility am I going to have? Now there are companies like Grubber, which are pretty much pre-built everything, right? All you do is you push your menu into their back office system, and you're good to go. You just have to hope it does exactly what it is you want because you're constrained within the confines of what they offer for design, with the offer for business process, what they offer in terms of context, awareness, and reaction and if you need to make any kind of changes, you're dependent on them to make those changes, and that has a cost and a time penalty to it.
What kind of skillsets do you realistically need to use a no-code particularly in the context of Intuiface? I'm assuming the proposition is anybody can sit down, but you still have to plan out, you have to have some methodical thinking about what you want to do with what the decision tree is on all that stuff, right?
Geoff Bessin: You do, and that gives me an opportunity to give you just a brief history of Intuiface because we were never a no-code company, that wasn't how we were oriented. The company was actually founded back in 2002. It was founded by a couple of PhDs with expertise in touch technology. And from day one, it was about bringing user experiences to a lot of it was, believe it or not, the defense industry, but also retail, touch-driven user experiences for something, to accomplish something. The company was always about the user experience.
At the end of the day, as great as your touch technology might be, nobody cares if it's not usable. If it doesn't make it easy to achieve some goal, and so Intuiface, when it was born it was all about the user experience, and in fact, most of its early hires were focused on that, on how to make something intuitive and that where the company name comes from, an intuitive interface. To make intuitive user experiences that we're driven by interaction like touch. What happened was we were servicing all of these organizations, again, a lot of defense, Intuiface is headquartered just outside the Toulouse, as i mentioned. So you have the big aerospace and defense industry located in Toulouse like Airbus. So a lot of those clients, but also retail, commerce. Focused on user experience, and it was hard to scale the business because you had this deep technical dependency underneath because it's driven by touch and we’re going back 15 years, so expensive hardware, challenging technology, and at the same time, trying to come up with these really intuitive user interfaces, it was a challenge, and we decided internally, I say we, but I wasn't here yet. Intuiface decided internally that we need to come up with something that can accelerate our ability to deliver good user experiences on top of this touch technology.
The company builds something called Intuikit, it was used internally by user experience experts, designers, and people good at aesthetics, people good at thinking about the customer. They were not developers. Ultimately, we decided this thing called Intuikit is pretty awesome, maybe that's our business, and so we're. It's a short story about how the software platform Intuiface was born. We were always about the user experience. It is our expectation that our users are experts in the users, creating intuitive interfaces, not In having any necessary knowledge about development. So that is our expectation, and that's what we think is appropriate. You need to be creative. You need to understand the user. You need to understand the domain. You don't have to worry about the platform you're building it on. That should not be your problem. You should be all about solving the customer's problem.
I realize you work with a bunch of industries, but a lot of your activity is in digital signage. If I am an end-user and I'm using ACME digital signage software, can I use the Intuiface with it? Does it plug into it or are there restrictions? Do you have to go through door number one or door number two, you can't use both doors?
Geoff Bessin: Probably, you can't do. Typically the content management system used by the DS platform is proprietary. It's a closed system. It doesn't have a published API. So we couldn't read from it. Intuiface conversely has its own runtime as well. We can run side by side. In fact, on Windows, we have the ability to run side by side with other applications, we have had customers who are not ready to transition off their existing DS investment. So they were sort of a cohabitating interactive Intuiface based content at one part of the screen and traditional DS content and others were cohabitating that screen. But normally no, that wouldn't be how one would do it.
Certainly Intuiface is positioned around interactivity. We believe that by definition, once you introduce interactivity and the need to be responsive and context, and to accommodate not just touch, but sensors and voice and computer vision, when you need to account for all of these things, you need to be very good at that if-when, right? And that notion of conditional responses to events which are completely typically outside the realm of the traditional DS platform. That's where we start, and then clients can decide, do I want these Intuiface to co-exist with this DS platform? Or do we need to make some sort of transition.
If I'm an end-user and I start with Intuiface and have a series of interactive screens that are doing some sort of functionality, whatever it may be and then I decide, I want to also have an expanding network of “dumb screens” that are just running traditional digital signage content in some sort of a sequence. Can you do that too?
Geoff Bessin: Sure, the content doesn't know it’s in a dumb playlist, right? The content is fine. Certainly you can do that. The Intuiface was born, solving the interactive problem. And it's interesting, Dave, because in the early days of selling our platform, digital signage was something else. You didn’t touch signage. So our communication to the marketplace was not interactive signage. There wasn't such a thing. There was interactive content for kiosks. That was the world when we first walked in, you were touching something such as a table or a kiosk. There were touch screens, very expensive touch screens. You could be bound on a wall, never a perceptive pixel from a million years ago. Like those CNN screens and that sort of thing. You spend $2,500, you can have a touchscreen, but bylarge, it was kiosks and that sort of thing.
What happened was that they had this largely commoditized, digital signage space, hundreds of companies offering traditional digital signage and customers had iPhones in their pocket and they had iPads at home, and they started thinking about interactivity. They see the voting coverage on CNN and people tapping screens. So can you do that? That's why we started getting questions about traditional digital signage. Can you fulfill that as well? We were like yeah, we can, and over the years we developed additional capability to accommodate it.
The paradigm is still different. We don't have a traditional notion of a playlist for example, but you can create a playlist within Intuiface. We're using our Lego blocks, not just to build interactive content, but non-interactive content as well. You can do both.
So it was something you could do, but it's not your focus?
Geoff Bessin: I would say, we’res interactive first, but the traditional broadcast signage, and I don't mean this in a judgy way, it's not typically that complicated. So if it is a playlist of stuff, images, videos, documents, it's very easily done, but people very rarely come to us, Dave, with traditional first. They're coming to us because they need to solve an interactive need, and oh, by the way, long-term you can transition to traditional content as well.
I agree that, the conventional side of digital signage, the meat potatoes, run this stuff at this time and these locations and all that is commoditized and pretty simple, and I always say that the complicated stuff is behind the scenes, the device management, the API integrations and all that sort of stuff. Are you at a level now where you can provide the building blocks, the Lego blocks to do the interactive piece, but also enable the end user to monitor and remotely manage all that?
Geoff Bessin: We do offer that, and in fact we offer both of what you mentioned, cause you also mentioned the API integration, we can accommodate that as well.
On the device management side, certainly we have an awareness of the devices in the field and you can set up notifications if things are going wrong, that sort of thing, you can see what's running on those devices. On certain platforms, you can remotely update on runtime, that sort of thing. We're not averse to working with a device and platform management options, to collaborate with them in a deployment, but we do offer some of that. And with API integration, we've actually offered for six years. It's been a long time and it's one of those things, Dave, where, as I said, we weren’t born with no-code. We were born worried about user experience and we realized we looked in the mirror and wen, oh, we're actually no-code.
We've been offering a software called API Explorer. You can automatically create an integration, an integration with a web API without writing code And it is a real time integration reading from writing to that web API. It could be a back office system, ERP application, CRM application could be a database wrapped in an API, could be a device on the internet of things, all of these options can be integrated with a running Intuiface experienced by a non-developer, using API Explorer. So we've offered that for some time.
We now have our own CMS but you don't have to use it. Our original value prop is to use whatever you want. We have API Explorer, you can plug into whatever you want. We have now introduced our own because depending on the scenario and the requirements of the project, it just makes better sense to use ours. But we still have customers that would rather use that other thing, or Dave, they’re integrated with the ERP application. They're building a retail point of sale application with Intuiface, and they have integrated with the ERP system, they need to work with the API and you can do that.
Who would you describe as your kind of core end-users, core customers?
Geoff Bessin: I would say 50 to 60% of our customers are agencies and integrators. So we can discuss with the actual user might be, but I would say more than half of our installed base are agencies and integrators with their own clients. And there is a spectrum of reasons why they're using Intuiface. Some of them, they don't have the development skill, but they want to offer interactivity. Others have men and women on the bench with the skill, but they don't have the scale. That's the problem with people is that they can work on one thing at a time.
And what we find is that a lot of the integrators in particular will be taking Intuiface so they can scale. They can take on a larger volume of maybe small and mid-sized projects that they can do with Intuiface, and then put the men and women on the bench onto the bigger high value projects. We find that customers are saving 80% of time and 60% of costs versus customer that don’t use Intuiface. So it's very easy for them, and it's an easy pitch. Conceptually, if you can build an interactive application, doing exactly what you want with a no-code platform is probably cheaper and faster than if I wrote code, so it's an easy idea to wallow and it is what our customers experience. So that's what you'll find. I would say the majority 60%-55% agencies and integrators, the rest are the small and midsize museums, schools, retailers, sales offices, marketing, and sales teams, they want to do it themselves.
And do they want to do it themselves because of cost or control?
Geoff Bessin: Often it's because of cost. They have ambition or they've been bitten, Dave, where they have outsourced it. You don't see this going in, but you meet an agency. You tell them what you want, they agree and deliver something in two months that doesn’t resemble what you wanted, so you ask for revisions, and this cycle continues while you pay for the time. It's not an agile process, and again, I'm not casting aspersions at the agency, they are our customers. But their sales pitch is we use Intuiface so we can deliver what you want faster than the other guys that do exactly what you want, and by the way, if you don't like the work we did, you can take it with you.
If I pay an agency to write custom code and I'll be dissatisfied, I'm starting from zero with another agency. So you have that kind of portability benefit as well. So yes, a lot of the small and midsize, it's budget driven or based on their experience, they have limited budgets. They outsourced it, and they were just satisfied. We do have the occasional large enterprise. They want to have maybe an interactive sales pitch. So the marketing and sales team is driving the creation of the collateral, hiring a developer to make. I could use PowerPoint. Why am I hiring? It's hard to justify this pay developers to code a sales pitch, I can just use PowerPoint. Hold on a second, here's this thing called Intuiface. I can build an interactive sales pitch for my Salesforce. I'm still using the tool. I'm the creative team on the marketing sales team. But I'm creating something that is far more novel and engaging than a PowerPoint.
When the pandemic hit, I speculated and I'm sure many people speculated that this was going to be a difficult time for people who were in the touch and interactive business. What happened instead is that touch actually went up in demand and self service applications became very much a big development initiative. Have you seen that happening in the last couple of years?
Geoff Bessin: We have, and then ultimately it turns out people are more afraid of other people than touch screens. And our business has rebounded quite well. What we were hoping for, and it seems to be the case is that demand didn't drop. It got stuck behind a wall. There was a dam and the demand was building behind the dam, and you couldn't open the dam cause nobody was out of the house and the waters were rising, people are finally out of the house, and you opened up the floodgates. So we're seeing a really nice rebound that is complimented, not just by the building interest anyway, but the kind of renewed interest in facilitating a non-human interaction, which sounds horrible culturally, in their place of business or what have you.
And again, it's not just touch. Yes, I think probably most people would rather take a little Purell. They're fine with that, but still some people are not, and maybe they can use their mobile phone or scan a QR code.
But it's also a labor issue. It's harder to hire people and if you can use self service, then you don't have to worry so much about staffing.
Geoff Bessin: There's that whole other thing too which is the cost of staffing and training and enabling and equipping and there's that as well. So for sure, there is certainly a perceived increase in interest, and interactivity of any kind and Intuiface has always been focused on any kind of interactivity, not just touch, and certainly this ability to use my mobile phone to interact with content is an increasingly interesting example, using gestures to interact, using voice to interact. So I'm not touching but I'm still working with technology directly rather than mediating through somebody else. So all of that is going on.
Last question: you guys have certainly in the last few years had a presence at ISE and at other trade shows, what are you doing in the next few weeks and months? Is Intuiface going to be something that people can walk up and get demos for?
Geoff Bessin: We will be at ISE, so that'll be our first trade show in however many years we'll be there. So you and I are speaking on April 26th and that's why I say in just a couple of weeks, we will be there with a booth, and we certainly hope we'll see others there.
We used to actually have our user conference in parallel with ISE, in-person and the pandemic put the kibosh on that. We've done virtual user conferences every year since then, and we like that because you don't have to travel, and so our user conference will be forever more be virtual. We actually have our user conference in three weeks that people are welcome to join. It's free, it'll be online, but we plan to be at ISE. We plan to be a DSE in the US and I think it's now November, and we'll be participating when your colleagues at Avitas are running DSE in parallel and ISE will be participating in that as well. So we're starting. We're treating this as back to normal. It's interesting, Dave working on my travel plans, flying into Spain. But you can’t just get on a plane, you need to jump through certain things because of COVID. But it looks as of today, they're not even requiring masks onsite. That doesn't seem to be a requirement. Just the honor system that you are vaccinated or recovered and we'll see how that goes, but we're excited to be there. We'll have a big booth and about eight of us, we'll have a lot of people there.
And where can people find Intuiface online?
Geoff Bessin: Dave, thank you for asking, Intuiface.com. They can also just contact us. You are listening to Jeff Besson. You can just email me bessin@intuiface.com.
The product can be tried for free, Dave. No credit card required. People can poke at it and see if what we're saying is true.
All right, thank you.
Geoff Bessin: Dave. It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Wednesday May 04, 2022
Justin Lachovsky, Telecine
Wednesday May 04, 2022
Wednesday May 04, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
When I first heard the longtime digital signage solutions company Telecine was getting into subscription content for screens, my first reaction was "Hmmm ... pretty crowded and established market to shoehorn into ..."
Then I got the details, and the logic and applicability were a lot more apparent.
The Montreal company has set up three very customizable sets of pre-packaged feeds that would run in parallel with the products already out there, as opposed to being alternatives.
There's a weather feed that's all about context, like one letting runners know if this a good day to put in some mileage.
There's a banking industry feed that solves a big pain point of developing messaging that is fully compliant with finance regulations.
And there's an interesting air quality feed that marries on-screen content with a small, included device that does real-time air monitoring in buildings.
I spoke with Justin Lachovsky, Telecine's Director of Sales & Marketing, about the new services. We also talk at the start about how the company has adjusted to the sudden loss last year of its much-loved and respected founder, James Fine.
Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS
TRANSCRIPT
Justin, thank you for joining me. Let's get something out of the way right away, because you guys, and the digital signage world in general, had a big shock last year when your founder, James Fein unexpectedly passed away. How have you guys adjusted to that? What have you done and how are things?
Justin Lachovsky: Yeah. Definitely a huge shock and something that we're still battling through, of course, something that shocking doesn't go away easily. But we've luckily had the opportunity to really just continue focusing on what we do best and that's helping our clients with producing excellent digital signage content for their networks, and frankly, that's I think something that James really would've wanted us to do.
So we're all really holding onto his memory in that regard of just doing everything that we can to continue pushing forward his vision, obviously, it was a shock. It's a tough loss, but he's really laid the groundwork for our management team to step up now and help just continue pushing forward all the great stuff that we do here at Telecine.
Yeah. One of the new things I learned is that he set you guys up with a succession plan so the shift wasn't that difficult.
Justin Lachovsky: No, and you know that's something that some folks might not know, but for the last, I'd say six plus years just before I joined Telecine, James had been doing about six months sailing sabbaticals across the world and some management oversight in that regard, but most of the day-to-day operations and client management stuff was handled by our management team so while it's a deep loss and obviously we're still deeply upset by the loss of James, he put this company in a perfect position for us to continue going forward, and I'm very grateful for that.
Yeah. It was fun to hear how he would be in the south Pacific with Chantal sailing and he would get on a sat phone and call in.
Justin Lachovsky: Yes. I can't tell you how many conference calls I've had with James, where he's like, “I'm in the middle of the water. There's no land in sight, but somehow I'm able to jump on a phone and talk to you all the way back in Montreal.” It's very cool to see how far technology has come.
So we've done a podcast in the past, it was with James, miss him a lot, but for those people who don't know what Telecine is about, could you just give a kind of a quick rundown of what you guys do? What's your focus on?
Justin Lachovsky: Yeah, for sure. So yeah, Telecine is a 35 year old media and software company. We've been doing digital signage, I think since before digital signage was even really an industry and really our main focus is to help our clients solve their communications challenges and using digital signages, that medium, to help deliver effective communications to their audience, and we do this by leveraging all sorts of cool content pieces, dynamic data sources, and then just internal databases of information that these corporations have that they don't leverage enough to create that all encompassing communications platform. It's not just email, it's not just social. It uses your screens to effectively communicate that message, and we do that with them by helping produce really nice digital signage content.
You being services based through the years, you don't sell specific pieces of software, you don't manufacture displays or anything else. So services are in your DNA, but I found it interesting that you guys have added on subscription content capabilities.
I think of a handful of companies like ScreenFeed who sponsors this podcast that do that sort of thing, but you've got into it, but it's not the same sort of thing, right?
Justin Lachovsky: No, and that's right. We work with the ScreenFeed guys all the time and all of the other providers within the digital signage space. We couldn't do what we do without their support and the things that they provide to the industry. But we did notice an opportunity for us to help end users with providing our services from the high end production of digital signage content and finding a way to offer them ready-to-go content without the high production costs that sometimes involve these larger projects. So it's something that actually James coined as “prêt à partir” content, which in English just means ready-to-go content.
So what have you done? What are you offering?
Justin Lachovsky: We've launched three new product lines in the last quarter. The three products are Fin Facts, AQ (Air Quality) and Lifestyle. All three of these products are HTML5 based so totally software agnostic, they'll work with any digital signage system, which is really what our main focus was in developing these, and the other thing that's interesting too, is they all have specific use cases, but it's a friendly piece of content. You don't have to worry about anything negative popping up there. They're friendly, that's the term I'll use for them.
Yeah I found it interesting for the financial one that you guys are providing, that could be quite complicated and labor intensive to figure out what are those messages that are relevant to banks and what are those messages that can be used and your work around was just using the content from the FDIC so that it's already vetted and approved and not going to get anyone into trouble by using it.
Justin Lachovsky: Yeah, that's exactly it. As you're aware, we do offer our services quite a bit in the financial space, retail banks, insurance brokerage firms, stuff like that. So I actually had this idea while talking to a client about three years ago. Every time we had to produce a piece of content for them, it had to get run through their compliance department, and had to have some FDIC disclosure on it, and I said, why can't we just take information that the FDIC already puts out there. We know that it's a trusted source and find a way to create a compelling database of banking facts. S
o that's exactly what we did. We went right to FDIC, started sourcing facts right off their website, and we came up with Fin Facts, which is this fun, engaging and informative database of digital signage content which, like I said, works great for banking environments, behind the teller desk, all that area is FDIC approved and not only does it, I think, works just for the banking space, but any sort of corporate office as well.
By providing these factoids to their staff, the message that they're conveying is, we don't just care about, offering you corporate information and telling you about what the company is doing, but we care about your financial wellbeing. So we've taken this information from the FDIC and said, look, this is topical. It applies to everybody, everybody's got to do banking. So for me, it was just a cool way of saying to, end users in the audience that we don't just care about delivering messages for messaging sake, we care about your financial wellbeing as well.
I'm going to assume the FDIC was quite happy that they have a new distribution channel for this information.
Justin Lachovsky: Yeah, absolutely, and that's the really cool thing about the program is, there's three steps to the way that the content is shown. There is the fact page, so we'll tell you the topic of what we're talking about. So for example, like mortgage planning tips. One page with a nice little factoid. The second page gives you a use case, and then the final page actually gives you a QR code where it'll link you back directly to the FDIC website where this information was sourced from, and actually what we're doing with one of our banking clients is we're using that QR code to actually measure audience attention. So it gives us that additional layer aside from just providing information.
We're giving the banks and other clients the opportunity to capture information and say, okay, you know how many people are actually looking at this stuff.
The capability is there so if somebody snaps the QR code with their phone, it hits a specific target URL, and you get the analytics off that to say that in the past month, X number of people hit this target URL?
Justin Lachovsky: That is exactly correct.
So if I'm a financial institution in the United States and I want to use this and I'm using Brand X CMS, it's just a matter of scheduling a URL into a playlist and off you go?
Justin Lachovsky: That's exactly it.
And you subscribe to it, right?
Justin Lachovsky: Exactly. So we're in the process of figuring out the best way to deliver that to clients but right now, if you subscribe to the product, you'll be able to select from a list of topics ranging from youth savings to mortgage tips and general savings, credit cards. You'll be able to select those topics. We'll provide you with a URL that will deliver all that content directly into your CMS.
Is it tailorable, customizable? So in other words, you've got regional savings and loans in Oklahoma, and they want to use Oklahoma state orange because that's their corporate colors. Can you change the background of that?
Justin Lachovsky: Yeah, of course, that was really what our intentions were with building it. The way that we've done it is, well, we love to do custom content. So even with our product offering, it was important for us to offer that customizability and flexibility for clients, as opposed to just saying, this is what you get. You have the full capability to changing the colors, fonts as well as any integrations or logos or other branding elements that are needed.
You and I are both in Canada. So, if you had a Canadian bank that you're working with FDIC stuff stuff, there's probably lots of elements of that crosses borders quite nicely, but you can't brand it as FDIC. So what happens if I'm the Royal Bank and I come to you and say, we want to use this too, but we need Canadian stuff?
Justin Lachovsky: I'm glad you asked that question because we're actually in the process right now of doing a Canadian version. In Canada, we have the CDIC, which is a governing body similar to the FDIC. So we’re in the process of doing a similar approach with CDIC information to offer that to Canadian clients as well, and as part of that roll out, we're also looking to provide some interesting quizzes using both the FDIC and CDIC information, so you'll have a database of FDIC facts, a database of CDIC facts, and then coming soon, we'll also have a database of quizzes from both databases.
So that's now available? Have you onboarded some customers already or you're just starting to spread the word?
Justin Lachovsky: Yeah. So it was launched a week ago, but we've already had a client who was beta testing this for us for about six months now and we've just gotten the go ahead to roll this out to all of their branches.
I'm going to assume that the people who work at banks of varying sizes in the United States, who are charged with feeding the content beast all week and all month long are probably pretty happy that this sort of stuff will become available to them.
Justin Lachovsky: Yeah, they are. They're actually quite thrilled. One of the things that we encounter often, especially with financial clients, is they're hyper concerned about safe content, and that was really our approach to this is that FDIC is a safe, trusted resource and it delivers that way for digital signage content. So it's exactly what you said. These bankers are quite happy that they now have a safe resource that they can display in their bank branches without any hesitation.
Yeah, because if you're running news feeds and those are pretty carefully curated anyways, but I suspect if I asked the ScreenFeed folks or some of the other companies, they would say, you wouldn't believe what upsets people, and I could imagine, like the Oscars thing, where Will Smith alpped Chris Rock, that's a story that got a lot of attention, but there's probably some bank and some customers that say, “I don't like that there. I'm offended by that. Take it off!”
Justin Lachovsky: Absolutely. I've lived through that experience a couple of times. So I'm happy now that we can offer something where I can deliver it to a client with peace of mind, that that kind of scenario won’t occur.
How does it work in terms of scale? Do you just subscribe to the service or do you subscribe per media player?
Justin Lachovsky: Yeah. So the way that it runs, it's a similar model to the way the other folks have run it. It's a per player subscription, obviously, depending on the size of the network and the amount of facts that people are looking for, there is some flexibility there, but it is a typical per player pricing model at the moment.
And because it's HTML, this stuff you're harvesting from FDIC, so I guess in most respects you would say it's canned, it's already done, but because it's HTML, can you update on the fly if things do change?
Justin Lachovsky: Yeah, we do have a process in place to continually monitor the FDIC website so that if things change, we're able to make those changes to our content, but also, they add more and more articles over time so we're looking to continue growing the database, but also make those amendments if they are needed.
Okay, so that's the financial one. You said there's a lifestyle one and an air quality one as well, am I right?
Justin Lachovsky: That's right. So obviously folks have become hyper aware about health and wellness over the last couple of years. I know that I have that for sure. So one of the cool things that we did was develop this set of lifestyle content that really speaks to activities. At this point, seeing the weather forecast in digital signage is fairly common to put it mildly, and everybody's got weather in their pocket these days.
So what I wanted to do, and the rest of the team wanted to do is find a way that we can contextualize that a little bit more. Like you said, it's so easy to get a three-day forecast, but let's say you're going into a bank one day, or you're going into the office one day, and you know you've got something going on this afternoon. You're supposed to go golfing with a couple of teams. What we've done is using the backend for weather information, we've developed a set of indexes that will tell you about activity-based information, whether it's appropriate to do that or not on a given day. As an example, I was talking about golf. So we have a golf index that'll tell you, based on relative humidity, the weather outside. It'll provide you with an index saying, is it a good day to go golfing? Yes/No, and then there's a forecast that's associated with that, but that also comes with a handful of other data points, things about driving difficulty, pollen in the air. You have dry skin today. This one was my favorite, hair frizz. Fairly straight hair, but you never know what humidity can do that kind of thing. So really what our goal there was just to add that additional context to the weather by saying, “It is probably a good day for you to stay inside. Don't go outside” or “Don't go golfing today. Maybe pick tomorrow”
So it was really important to just help boost people's awareness for those activities as we're going in and out of places more. For the longest time, these outdoor activities were our saving grace and he was the thing we were only able to do for close to two years. So I thought it was a great way to just have a set and forget the piece of content in your signage system that goes with the weather, but also works in just a variety of places. From banking to retail, to corporate, everybody's out and about doing activities to that these days. That was our goal.
I'm assuming apart from the financial facts one, which was pretty straight forward, that this would be much more of a challenge to visualize and for people to look at and immediately get it because you can't just write out, “This isn't the best day to go golf”?
Justin Lachovsky: That's exactly correct.
So what we did is we used the same approach that most people do for weather. Most people can quickly look at a digital signage screen and get a quick understanding of, okay, this is the location I'm at, this is the high and low for the day, and this is what the forecast looks like for the rest of the week. So we use that same visual approach for this, where you'll have, again, I'll use the golf index. It'll tell you the golf index for Los Angeles, California. It'll tell you what the current weather is, but also on a scale from 1-10 what the quality of golfing would be that day.
So if you look at the screen, you get the current weather forecast, you'll get a three to five day forecast that'll tell you from 1-10 what the next few days of golfing quality looks like.
So your suggestion would be that this can run in tandem with the more “conventional” weather stuff that might be on a digital signage network?
Justin Lachovsky: Exactly. One thing I've noticed is a lot of these digital signage screens where the use cases effective for this piece of content is, retail banks, stores, those are places where people are either in the process of doing an activity or going between activities. So for me, it felt like the best possible place to put this information because people are, like I said, either going to do something or on their way back from doing something. So that seems to be the best place to deliver this information to them.
So could you also handle customer requests? I was just talking to a guy a couple of days ago, who lives in Syracuse, New York, and that's on the wrong side of lake Ontario, so lake effect country, and he was saying they had a pretty good winter for snow. They had four feet less than normal. So I'm wondering in terms of a lake effect or tune up your snowblower warning or something.
Justin Lachovsky: Yeah. I think we have 10 indices right now, if I'm correct, but it is something that's continuing to grow as customer requests come up and they're like, I'd to know if it's a good day to mow my lawn. These sorts of things come up all the time, so we'll continue growing that library for sure.
And then the other one that I believe you're working on or have released, has to do with air quality and is very much sensors-driven?
Justin Lachovsky: Yeah, air quality is another interesting one. Again, folks have become hyper aware of their health and wellness and that obviously speaks to air quality. So what we've done is we've got an air quality sensor, which is a very small, low profile, little sensor. It looks like one of those air diffusers that you would just buy and have your oils diffusing on your desk, and what it does is it measures a handful of different parameters, things like the indoor temperature, humidity, air pressure, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, particulate matter, ozone, and what it does is it sucks in all this information, and we deliver a dashboard of varying levels of what these parameters are at, and then we've come up with our own measure of taking it all in and delivering an air quality index.
So it'll tell you, based on the information that I just mentioned, what the level of air quality is in a given space.
So there's hardware associated with it?
Justin Lachovsky: Yeah, that’s correct, but it's all done through subscription. So you subscribe to the product, you get the air sensor with it and we deliver the dashboard at the same time. So there's no need to purchase any large hardware, it's just the sensor that comes with the subscription of the content.
And is it a smart setup? Let's say the sensor reads that carbon monoxide levels are higher than what is safe, would it trigger something on the screen?
Justin Lachovsky: Yeah. So that's a custom piece that we work on with clients, obviously on a case to cases basis, but yes, we've done things like when you've got certain levels of high carbon monoxide, we can have a different kind of graphic trigger on screen, just letting people know this. It really came down to wanting to show more transparency on the health of our clients' spaces. We work with a lot of folks in the corporate environment. We've got clients that are corporate real estate landlords. So it spawned out of a request that we got early on in the pandemic. Somebody said, I'd love to know what our air quality is like so our staff feels comfortable working in space during the pandemic, but also in the future.
When the return to office stuff comes into play, we'd love to continue reporting that, and in fact, we did a project with a client out in California, they're a large real estate client. They were actively going after a well building certification and what that is, it's similar to a lead building certification, but it's focused more around the health of the building itself. One of the very pertinent aspects of that certification was providing information on air quality. So we were able to integrate these air sensors into, I think they've got six floors in their space, and we reported that on the digital signage screens, which allowed them to go and get a platinum well building certification, which is quite unique because there are only one of three buildings in all of California that have this certification right now.
So it becomes almost a leaseholder retention sort of thing, saying, “Hey, here's in visual terms how “well” a building we are”?
Justin Lachovsky: That’s exactly it.
With those displays, is it the sort of thing that runs in a content schedule or do they tend to allocate one or multiple displays or screens that are just showing that?
Justin Lachovsky: Yeah, we've seen both use cases. We've got some customers that just want it mixed in with their regularly scheduled content. But we've got other clients that actually just have a straight reporting dashboard. You walk into their lobby and right on the lobby desk where you would typically go to sign in if you were a guest visitor, it would just tell you right off the bat, this is what the air quality is like, and I think that it gives, like I mentioned, the staff a peace of mind, but also visitors coming to this space because that's certainly coming back. It gives those visitors peace of mind that they're in a healthy space.
So for larger buildings and particularly newer ones, I suspect that they're using Honeywell, or some big giant company that has HVAC systems and monitoring and everything else, and probably has APIs that you could tap into to also get that kind of information. Do you do that or is it just simpler to use this little device?
Justin Lachovsky: Yeah, and that's actually something we've been doing long before the pandemic happened and these air sensors came into play. That's our bread and butter. Telecine, loves to get their hands on APIs and data and figure out a cool creative way to display that. So yes, we definitely integrate with those types of sources for customers.
Okay. So the device that you guys make available is the little hurdle for those companies to say we don't actually have those APIs, or that would be a son of a gun to pull all that together, so just use this?
Justin Lachovsky: Exactly. It depends on the customer space, obviously new buildings, it's a lot easier to get that stuff available to us than it is abuilding that's been around for 15+ years. Sometimes to avoid the hurdle of waiting six months for a customer to figure out who their HPAC provider is, who owns the contract, where can I get the data from? We wanted to offer this cost-effective sensor and display package that is very easy to just get in front of a customer in a variety of spaces.
So you've done these three services, is that it? Or is there other stuff on the horizon that you don't have to give me the details, but are you done?
Justin Lachovsky: We're never done. There's always something on the horizon. We've got a couple of really interesting projects coming up. I can't share those with you yet but as we continue to firm up those details, I look forward to jumping back on a podcast with you and sharing them.
So we're all hopefully coming out of a crazy two and a quarter year, how have things gone now, setting aside the shock of losing James?
Justin Lachovsky: Yeah. Things have gone really well. One thing that Telecine does really great is client retention. A lot of our clients are getting close to a decade of working with us. It's really important for us to just focus on the customer experience and that's what I think we've done really well in the last couple of years, as we've all experienced challenges with the pandemics our clients have as well. So our focus really has just been helping them in any way possible, and focusing on that communications message through digital.
All right. So if people who are listening to this want to find out more, how do they find you and how do they find this particular set of products?
Justin Lachovsky: We've got a product website for all of them. You can find them under our main website, telecine.com. If you have any questions I'm always available, you can just reach me at justin@telecine.com and we've got those product websites just listed on our main website. You'll be able to find all the information.
All right, Justin. Great to catch up with you.
Justin Lachovsky: You as well, Dave, thanks so much.
Wednesday Apr 20, 2022
Ryan Taylor, Delta Airlines
Wednesday Apr 20, 2022
Wednesday Apr 20, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Airports and airlines were early adopters of digital signage technology and the whole idea of data-driven messaging - using screens to tell travellers about arrival and departure times, and the status of flights and boarding at gates.
But digital signage is becoming central to communications not only for passengers, but also for staff.
A huge upgrade of Delta Airlines facilities and passenger experience officially opens today at LAX, with the focal point a 250-foot-long horizontal LED ribbon behind the check-in and bag-loading areas at Delta's relocated and renovated terminal. Similar work is being done by Delta for another busy airport in bad need of sprucing up, LaGuardia in New York.
I had a chance to speak with Ryan Taylor, who is managing the digital signage side of these projects for Delta. We get into the thinking behind them, and how they'll be used, but we also have a broader chat about other ways digital signage is being used in airports by Delta. You have maybe heard of FIDS and GIDS displays, but did you know about RIDS and even SQUIDs?
Listen and learn!
Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS
TRANSCRIPT
Ryan, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what your role is at Delta Airlines and how that's evolved?
Ryan Taylor: Yeah. Thank you for having me, Dave. So my role now is exclusively digital signage. So I run a lot of the digital signage that you may or may not see. Some of our stuff is in the airports and increasingly so now, but a lot of our stuff that I do is the back of the house employee communications. We do a lot of dashboarding and other things. So yeah, I am full time digital signage for Delta Airlines right now.
Wow, is there like a department or are you the guy, the one person?
Ryan Taylor: Our team is growing, so it's me and a couple of other people and a whole lot of people that support us tangentially, of course.
But right now there are several other teams that do digital signage. Most of what you see in the gate areas is another team, and then like I said, my responsibilities are some of the airport areas and then mostly back of house. So right now I manage a network of about little less than 1800 screens somewhere in that range.
Oh, wow, and does that include back of house and workplace and so on?
Ryan Taylor: Yeah, so a lot of the employee communication stuff. So we're in break rooms where employees congregate, lobby areas and then of course there's a lot of dashboarding that we do for various groups to help them navigate the operations and specific things to their work groups. We're very data intensive, so it's not all the nice, pretty pictures. Some of it's just pulling data from various systems and giving people and work groups the information they need to do their jobs effectively.
Where are you hived out of, the IT group?
Ryan Taylor: That's correct. Yeah. So I'm IT and so we manage the infrastructure, the software and build the experiences for customers, whether they're internal or our actual customers.
It's interesting because when you talk about data, you could make the argument that airports were probably the first venues that really adopted the idea of data integration, and they've been doing FIDS displays and GIDS displays for 20+ years.
Ryan Taylor: Yeah, and you can imagine that an airline generates a lot of data, right? And data has a how's the shelf life, especially in real-time 24/7 operation, getting that data to people that need it is critical and making sure your flight is not delayed and it's on time and it's going where it needs to go, and everybody that needs to be on it is on it, and so yeah, we do pride ourselves on playing a really active role in putting that data in the hands of people that need it.
I like to think of the dashboards that we do, they're really heads up displays. The ramp people that load the bags and service the plane and everything, we have our RIDS displays out there for them that give them a whole lot of data on that flight, you know, they don't have access to computers. So having a display on the ramp that shows where that flight's going, how many bags left to be loaded on, how many passengers. All that data that helps the operation run is really front and center for them and has a really positive impact on how the airline operates. So something that we're really proud of.
Yeah, that's interesting. Being a consumer passenger, I'm sitting on the plane or I'm sitting in the gate and all that, the only screens I ever see in those areas are big, almost analog LED displays that just say, which gate, or maybe it says, 867 BOS, cause the flight's going to Boston or something. But, as you're describing, there's more displays that we would never see that are mission critical to the folks trying to get the plane out on time.
Ryan Taylor: Yeah, so you can actually see these RIDS displays if you're in one of our larger hubs. Sometimes they're a little hard to see from the window seat, but they are there and we're pushing a whole lot of information to them. A lot of the data probably doesn't mean much to a passenger, you know, just looking at it but it means a whole lot to the ramp guys and even the pilots rely on it even though they have different systems, it's so visible that they become Kind of integral to the operation, which is great. It's a great place to be when the stuff that you're doing is that valuable.
Is that a new application or have those always been there and I just didn't know about them?
Ryan Taylor: They've been there for a couple of years now. They're about maybe two years old, so pretty new, and I can send you some pictures if you're interested in seeing them, but they're really a cool success story. They do serve a very vital role in the operation.
Yeah, it was going to be my next question: you've had two years of these in action, have you been able to measure the impact and assess the impact of them?
Ryan Taylor: That's a very good question, and it's one that I wish I had more data on.
I believe we know that they are having a positive impact. It's a source of frustration for me, because I would love to get more data on the before and after, on everything we do really. I don't know if everybody's plates are already so full that going through and coming through the data and gathering it is just another task that people don't feel is necessary at this point, but everything from the employee communication side of things, I've always wanted to do before and after survey to see how better informed they are after we put these screens in their break rooms even, do they know more about what the company's direction is and things like that.
We do signage in the Sky Clubs, these are actually iPads that are on the bars that show the drinks that are on offer the premium drinks. We know that they do have an upsell effect in that the bars that have them do sell more premium drinks, we just don't have the hard data to back it up because we can't get anybody to provide it for us. So it's things like that. But yeah, I would love to be able to point to some positive ROI stories because it's always hard digital signage, right? Because sometimes it's not readily apparent. Unfortunately, we don't get that much information.
But anecdotally, and just inherently, you would know that down on the ramps and all that, just simply enabling the workers to know where they're at, what the status is, how much time they have, how many more bags to go or whatever, must be huge for them?
Ryan Taylor: It is. Yeah, we know from talking to them and from the leadership, and just from the investment they've made in it. These went from a, like everything, it starts out as a small POC, and once they see the value, they either hit the gas or they hit the brakes and they hit the gas on those RIDS very quickly. We went from pretty much 0 to 200 of those deployments and in about six months.
So they're maybe not standardizing on them, but they're becoming a fairly normal sort of piece of the landscape?
Ryan Taylor: Yeah, in the airline world, we have leeway to put these in some of our larger hubs where we have more of a presence and in some cases, we're not allowed to put them in a common use environment, but we have in pretty much all our largest hubs, which is great to see.
Yeah, I guess in airport terms, there are airports where you have gate licenses to be there, but there are other airports, like obviously Hartsfield in Atlanta and Salt lake City where you have your own terminal and everything else, right?
Ryan Taylor: Yeah. If we're the terminal operator, we basically have pretty much free reign to do what we want in terms of the technology and everything else that we put on, and like in a smaller station where we only have a couple of flights or a handful of flights, or we're sharing gates with other airlines, that's obviously not as easy to do.
Digital signage and airports have been around for a long time. Obviously there have been two main activities, there have been the flight information displays and the gate information displays that are traveler focused and are just saying, “This flight's going here at this time at this gate and so on”, and then a fair amount of new digital signage has gone in from media companies, but it seems in the last 2-4 years that airports are really, and airlines are making an investment in kitting out the pre-security areas, doing things at check-in and elsewhere, using digital signage that gives them a lot more flexibility and the ability to do messaging and everything else and I was intrigued, and the reason we connected was the work that's going on at LAX. Could you explain that?
Ryan Taylor: Yeah. So this is probably the most exciting thing that I've ever been involved with in my work life, so we do the LIDS and everything airport digital signage needs, your flight information displays, so FIDS or LIDS, as you mentioned. So really LIDS have traditionally been just a single screen behind the counter where you show, checking in the main cabin or this is for sky priority, segmentations. When they started redoing the LA airport, we kinda got involved with our corporate real estate partners, ACS, which is the airport customer service team that runs the gate counters and everything and we wanted to do something that was different that allowed for more than just your normal screen behind the counter.
And that's where we started talking with NanoLumens about putting it in a digital back wall that was continuous using direct LED technology, and it grew from there. So as far as we know, this is the largest single back wall in any airport in the United States. I know Orlando has a much longer one, but it's individual LCDs.
Yeah, it's a whole bunch of tile narrow bezel LCDs.
Ryan Taylor: Right, so this is the longest, continuous one that we're aware of. So we're going to claim it. We're going to say, we have it, but yeah, it’s 250 feet long. So beyond just the normal, for main cabinet or oversize baggage, this allows us to put a whole lot more information, and branding. The whole idea was to create this wall that had a calming effect in the airport. An airport can be a very chaotic and sometimes intimidating place, like LAX can be daunting. So this gives us a whole new avenue to promote the brand, but really inform and maybe change the mood a little bit in that check-in process.
So what you'll see is an addition to the LIDS information, we'll have flight information, so there's actually FIDS embedded in there. There's an innovative new meter for the sky club to tell you how busy the club is before you even set foot behind security. So you can play on, “Hey, the club is busy. There are two clubs, so you can choose between them.” So that's a really cool data point on there, but just the imagery and the videos that we'll be playing behind it will kind of have a sense of calm. It all works together on this really huge, beautiful back wall that stretches the entire length of the ticket counter, which is pretty impressive. I'm really happy with the way it turned out, and we're really excited.
The really cool thing about it is there will be a sister to this wall coming online very soon in LaGuardia, and it will be the next one to get it when they open up in early June.
These are two terminals that could badly use any sprucing up they can get, right?
Ryan Taylor: Absolutely, yeah. If you've ever flown out of either one of them, you’d know how much they needed investment and it is a big investment and we're happy to be a part of it.
So with the 250 foot wide LED ribbon, are you running a single piece of content at times across the whole swath of it or is it segmented?
Ryan Taylor: It'll be segmented and most of that, I guess from the user end, it'll look like it's one piece of content. It's actually two PCs running the wall. So there are two PCs that split the wall in half. So one side is driven by one PC, it's actually a 4k resolution. So everything's being reassembled onto the wall and in that linear fashion, but it will look like one piece of content.
The only reason why we don't have one continuous landscape shot would be just because it doesn't exist. We couldn't find anything longer than 4k width to put up there.
So you'd have to come up with custom creative and maybe somewhere down the road, you do that, but to get going this'll do just fine?
Ryan Taylor: Yep, absolutely.
And the LAX job, it was previewed recently, but it's not actually live yet, right?
Ryan Taylor: Yeah. So LAX is going to open April 20th, that’s when passengers will start being directed to use that space over the old terminal to check in and that one will be renovated for another airline that I believe. But yeah, that will be our new home, terminal three in LA come April 20th.
This is why you're going back and forth a lot between Atlanta and LA?
Ryan Taylor: That is, yeah. We had a media event a while ago. As you can imagine, there's still a lot of last minute details to take care of. So we're just making sure that all the I’s are dotted, T's crossed and ready to go for April 20th.
In terms of the LED wall itself, did you have to do some testing and everything else around what pixel pitch was going to work for viewability? These are not just ads and not just visuals, you've got to have text on there. I would assume you have to be pretty careful to make sure the legibility is there so that people aren't wondering, does that say 130 or 730?
Ryan Taylor: Yeah, this was definitely a learning curve for us. This was our first foray into using the LED technology and you mentioned the pixel pitch, which is spot on. I think we're using 2.5 millimeters on this wall, so there is some trade-off right? The resolution is pretty good, especially when you're standing at a distance.
Customers will be about 10 to 12 feet away from this when they're actually at the check-in counter talking to an agent. So you have some distance, but it is still relatively close. We did a lot of testing on the legibility. When we're actually putting data out there, it's really good. Some of the images, depending on how fine they got, tended to not be as clear. So where we could, we defaulted to actually printing and texts from the software instead of putting up an image.
I'm curious if what you're doing will extend into the automated baggage loading areas. I don’t know the technical term for that is, but one of your rival airlines that rhymes with United, in Denver, had a new area open up recently where those conveyors or whatever, where you do your own bag tagging, and then you drop them on a conveyor and they go into something, they were using LED walls there to segment the different stations and say, this one's open, this one's closed or whatever, or this is for a business class, all that sort of thing. Are you doing that or looking at it?
Ryan Taylor: Yeah, so, there's an express baggage lobby in Atlanta, and I believe there's one coming or already in Detroit. We did a pilot because of the layout of the one in not Atlanta. There's four kiosks for the self tag bag drop. So we did use some sensors to feed a digital display that was in the queuing area that would show you which one is occupied and which one is available.
Unfortunately it didn't really pan out. It was either too sensitive or not sensitive enough because it was basically looking at an area in front of the kiosk to tell somebody was standing in front of it and if they moved out of that fence off the virtual area, if we set it too sensitive, as they're moving around with their bag, it was flickering, between open, closed, occupied, and then if it wasn't, if we dial down the sensitivity, then it was somebody would leave and for too long it would look like somebody was still there. So we abandoned that aspect of it, but our screens are still there explaining the process and wayfinding and directionally, where you go after you drop the bag off.
Yeah, I assume in airports, just like in retail, particularly given what's happening in the last couple of years that I've been saying a lot that digital signage is even more important than prior to the pandemic, because there's more of an emphasis than ever on self-service, more technologies being introduced and whether it's frictionless shopping or whatever in retail, you need screens that explain, “This is what you do. This is how you do it. This is where you go”, all those things.
So I'm assuming that the journey that starts at check-in, you guys are thinking about the full journey, all the way to the boarding ramp for passengers and using digital signage to guide them.
Ryan Taylor: Yeah. I think you nailed it. You really do have to look at the whole experience from a passenger perspective, from curbside to a baggage claim and on, so there is a lot of emphasis and there's a whole team that does look at that experience, not just from a digital signage perspective, but from every aspect of that traveler's journey and so we're partnered with them to make sure that we're aligned with how we want that passenger to experience Delta and digital signage is a key part of that.
I guess it's one thing when Delta owns the terminal or has blanket rights to it or whatever, versus ones where you're a tenant in it, how difficult is it to coordinate with all the different systems and displays and data sources and everything else that may be in like a secondary, I'm pulling one out of the air here, let's say Kansas city, Missouri, or something like that, where maybe you're not a hub but there are all these systems that you need to work with?
Ryan Taylor: That's a good question. I don't know that I have an answer for that because I haven't really had to deal with that piece. Generally, we are brought in after they've already sorted those kinds of details out.
Yeah. I was supposed that regardless of whether new digital signage is in there, they've always had flight information displays and that sort of thing?
Ryan Taylor: Yeah, and I don't really do the FIDS, but I know that some airports, they like to use their own FIDS and their own data feeds and then, areas like Atlanta those are FIDS, they're managed by us so and obviously we're just showing our flights there because you're on our concourse.
So it definitely depends on what the airport wants or allows us to do, versus you know I think in our view, we would want to have all our stuff, be owned and operated by Delta.
In the sky clubs, the frequent fire lounges, are you doing anything beyond FIDS display?
Ryan Taylor: Yeah. So in the sky clubs, we specifically manage our team on the outside, the ladder boards, affectionately called the SKIDS for sky club information displays.
I've learned about RIDS and SKIDS today.
Ryan Taylor: Oh I'll tell you all about it, we've got more “ids” coming. LaGuardia is getting SQUIDS.
Okay. I have to ask what that is.
Ryan Taylor: SQUIDS is security and queue information displays.In LaGuardia, there'll be these freestanding totems that will let the passengers know that this line is for general boarding. This one is for precheck, so that segmentation. So those will be actually very cool. They are about 12 feet tall, and they're kind of, I call them monoliths, because they're triangular shaped and they'll have LED screens on two sides of them. They're very striking. They're going to be a really cool different looking digital signage, right? Not your normal 16:9, and not to bring up your brand, I do feel like there's going to be a lot more digital science that comes out, especially with the LED technology that breaks that mold of the ratio, which I think is great because it's become so ubiquitous.
I’m definitely going off on a tangent here, but I think the challenge, especially in an airport environment is there is a proliferation of screens. If you're looking in the gate area, there's so many screens hanging down for your attention and if we could rethink that and figure out a way to make it less cluttered and clean up the gate area, I think that would help with some of the chaos of visual stimulation that you can become bombarded with.
Yeah. I think that the chaos and reducing that has gotta be the biggest goal of any of this sort of stuff in something like an airport, and I really appreciated it when I think it was Orlando airport, they started using flat panel displays at the TSA screening areas, that would say, this line is for business class and so on, and if things changed and a new aligned open up or whatever, the screens would automatically reflect that, and just anything like that operationally that makes the journey a little easier and a little less irritating, I think is amazing.
Ryan Taylor: Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree. I think there's a lot that can be done to inform but also, make it just a little more palatable. I think one of the dangers with digital signage is it's easier than ever to put up a screen. The cost has come down and especially with these large format LED screens, even in your city cityscape, you're running the risk of saturation to the point, I mean, I don't think it's there yet, but in certain places that can be where you're creating that future mystic Blade Runner scenario, where there's a screen on every building and you're just overwhelmed with stuff.
So we definitely have to be thoughtful on how we deploy and what we're putting on there and is it useful, right? Is it serving its purpose? Or are we just adding to the clutter and teaching people not to look at these things? Cause that's what you don't want to do.
Yeah. I think that's the great example of why airport digital signage is so good because of all those “ids” and they all have a point except maybe the advertising, which I know you guys don't do, but all those other ones serve some express purpose.
Ryan Taylor: Yes.
All right, Ryan, this was terrific. I learned a lot today, including about SQUIDS.
Ryan Taylor: Yeah. If you ever get to New York, I'd love to show you around and if you're ever in Atlanta, we can host you here if you're interested. There's a lot of stuff we're proud of and we can show you the RIDS, we can show you SQUIDS.
There’s nothing more exciting than going to LaGuardia.
Ryan Taylor: I know, right? By the way, our back walls are affectionately called BFLIDS, which stands for Big Friendly LIDS. You can choose another word for friendly features, but that's how we refer to them.
I'll have to start coming out with my own “ids”.
Ryan Taylor: You can get creative with them.
All right, Ryan. Thanks again.
Ryan Taylor: Thanks, Dave. It was good talking to you.
Wednesday Mar 23, 2022
Fred D’Alessandro & Eric Hutto, Diversified
Wednesday Mar 23, 2022
Wednesday Mar 23, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
New Jersey-based Diversified has grown into one of the world's largest AV integration companies, and certainly among the most active in digital signage.
The company was started almost 30 years ago by Fred D'Alessandro, who just recently announced he was shifting his role in Diversified to make way for a new CEO. He's still going to be very much involved, but says former Unisys executive Eric Hutto is now very much in charge of the company.
The two of them kindly set aside some time recently to talk about that big news, and what's ahead for Diversified. Among many things, we get into the steady convergence of AV and IT.
Fred also relates a story I'd not heard before, about how and why Diversified got started, which funnily traces to a job he didn't want at the Home Shopping Network.
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TRANSCRIPT
Fred and Eric, thank you for joining me. Fred, congratulations on your decision to slow down and Eric, welcome to pro AV!
Eric Hutto: Thank you.
Fred D'Alessandro: Thank you. I don't know about slowing down, but thank you.
Is this a transition that's about to happen or it's been underway for a while and you're now just talking about it?
Fred D'Alessandro: No, it's been under way and it has happened. So yeah, Eric is the new Diversified CEO and I couldn't be happier to have him on the team. Absolutely great move by us, and I'll say it by myself as well.
You finally did something right!
Fred D'Alessandro: Exactly, only took 29 years.
So why now?
Fred D'Alessandro: A lot of good reasons. I've been blessed to start Diversified in 1993, really as a startup, it's a garage story and to have the opportunity to lead it for 29 years, create a $1 billion organization, I think the first ever in our industry, which is, absolutely exciting and just a real honor, we have an army of industry expertise in the organization. But what the organization doesn't have is somebody with Eric's leadership at this level, when you're trying to build an organization that has a clear path to being a multi-billion dollar organization. So from,the strategy, from the vision, from the operations, how to, I would say, continue to exceed our client's expectations and our employees development, it's the right time and it’s the right team and the right place. So yeah, thrilled.
Coming out of COVID, we're financially sound. So now's the time.
So this is not just you deciding, you know what, I want to go down to Boca Raton and lawn bowling?
Fred D'Alessandro: No, I'm a young 63 year old, so I have a lot of energy. But you know what I feel why my value at this point in time for the organization can be used in other areas. I think strategic accounts and clients that I've known for years, employee mentorship, development, things that, again, I know that I'm really good at and I know Eric's really good at taking a financially sound organization, and I've said this in the past it's not so much about how big we are, it's just really continuing to be the best as we get bigger, and that's really important.
To me, as a founder, again it's about being unselfish and doing what's right for our customers, doing what's right for our employees, and Eric is the right guy to do that for us. So I'm excited.
So sometimes when a company is founded by a particular person who's still there and when they maybe not step aside, but step back into another role, it could be a bit of a balancing act to say, “No, you need to go talk to Eric about that.” How are you going to work that out?
Fred D'Alessandro: Yeah look, there's no ego in this organization.
I've met people there.
Fred D'Alessandro: There's no ego at the leadership level, let’s say that and I will be the first to say that, I am here in a different role, I've made that very clear over the past week to all the employees and that Eric is going to make the decisions on the strategy, the operating model, so the vision is going forward. I'm going to help him as a chairman of our Diversified board of directors. So from that perspective, I'll listen to Eric, I'll challenge him. But at the end of the day, he's going to make those decisions. And if somebody comes to me, I'm pointing them to Eric.
I said this again and again last week, I am very content with the role and making the decision to do this, and really to bring Eric on. We're fortunate to just think sometimes you need luck, and hard work brings that, but yeah, Eric's are going to be great for this role and I really feel he's going to take us to the next level and take our clients to the next level.
Was there somebody you knew or was this kind of a headhunter thing?
Fred D'Alessandro: So we did a search. Fortunately, the timing worked out so it happened rather quickly. I've spent the last month with Eric, spending a couple of days here and there just to get to know the person and to see how Eric would fit in the organization, and like I said, in many ways, I felt like his skills and tone were similar to mine, but his expertise and where he's been through his career, it's hard to beat. Like I said, it was a pretty easy decision on my part at the end of the day, after spending, like I said, the last month with Eric.
It's interesting. The pro AV community, particularly people like Gary Kayye, have been going on and on for some time now about how pro AV and IT are converging and pro AV people need to be thinking about this. So to bring somebody on as CEO who comes from pure IT services seems a really sharp move and something that had to be done in a lot of ways.
Fred D'Alessandro: I would agree with you. I think it is converging. It's been converging, it is more an IT managed services play in a lot of ways. And again, Eric’s expertise is spot on, and we have, like I said, we have an army of AV knowledge and expertise. There's no shortage of that at Diversified. Now it's just bringing that all together with everything else that's happening and training.
Eric, you come from Unisys IT services and consulting and so on. I'm curious from your background, were you hearing the same thing, but on the flip side that IT people need to be more aware of video delivery and AV in general, in terms of their overall practice?
Eric Hutto: Yeah, I think, the pandemic simply heightened it. We all got sent home. So if you think about the audio video, quality of calls and the ability to keep things running right, it is a bit different now and I think that forced people to get more educated, appreciate more of the components that go into it versus just servers and storage in clouds and I think it has merged the IT industry over 30 years and has just been completely collapsing all the stacks of technology, and now its technology product gets out and it gets software updated and it lasts for lot longer than it used to because it can be updated.
And I think that's where we're headed with this, I think of it as experiential experiences that we're going to be having in these environments. We're going to have to come together. The morning show can't be broadcast in the afternoon because you went down because of your cloud or your server or you were hacked. So I do think it is the natural progression to take all the sophistication that Fred and team have built around how to create a great experience in a stadium. But now we move just beyond that, to what's coming into the stadium, and how do we keep that under control? Because bandwidth and those things affect the quality of the experience.
I think of Diversified in deployment integration, traditional pro AV roles, but I know you also do services. Do you see Diversified getting more and more into the services and consulting side of the business?
Eric Hutto: Absolutely. Where we're headed with this digital world, It's all about design thinking. Now I do think that one thing that is core to Diversified that I've seen already is the ability to sit down and really design and layout to an outcome. Where we do that is in big, large, complex things. Not to say that we don't do that in Google Rooms and so forth. Now that's going to have to get a bit more sophisticated, right? As we bring cloud, bring security, bring software-defined networks into the conversation.
I think I was reading the other day just to get up to speed on what's happening in the business. They say that by 2030, there'll be another $10 billion invested in stadiums. So they're not standing still. It's not a place of slowness. It's speeding up, but it's going to speed up in a software platform as a service model, and people are going to be able to really track and see what's happening almost at the seat level, if you can imagine that at, in a stadium, when they're having a concert of what and how they move sound around. I think it's going to be all software and it is going to be really important.
I come at this from the angle of digital signage. So that's always what I'm thinking about and less so about some of the more traditional sides of IT and AV collaboration and that sort of thing. I've always thought of Diversified in the sense of the last decade or so as among the big integrators, the one that by far was paying the most attention to and most active in digital signage.
Fred, do you still see it that way or the other guy is coming on and realizing, “Hey, we need to do more in this area”?
Fred D'Alessandro: No, I would agree. I think, look, it's still a key business unit for us that drives a lot of value to our customers, and I think continuing to innovate. That is most important, especially in these kinds of markets.
So large network deployments, content creation is an experiential piece to what that digital signage is going to do for the eyeballs that are looking at it. So it continues to really be a focus for us and it is growing. Coming out of the pandemic, we have large opportunities to grow even bigger in that area.
One of your main competitors now has an experience design group for, big, wow factor, corporate office, campuses and things like that. You guys have always worked with the Gensler's and the ESI Design, that sort of thing, and stayed in your lane. Is it important to do what you're good at, but let the experienced people do what they're good at as opposed to compete with them?
Fred D'Alessandro: Look, that's always been my philosophy. Best in class, usually at the end of the day wins the day. When you're trying to create that total solution and you don't quite have the best people on your staff, it's usually not a good outcome for the client and that's what it's really about.
What is what's best for the client? I think our approach is the best.
The IT services business, and I guess to some degree, the AV services business has grown because you have enterprise level customers of all different stripes and sizes. I gather, saying, “We want to do what we're good at. So can you guys take this other stuff on for us?”
Are you seeing that and seeing growth in that area of being turnkey for a lot of these kinds of projects?
Fred D'Alessandro: It usually goes in cycles, but I do think that clients are realizing, especially on a global scale to have a single partner that could provide various solution sets that we have, and I think Diversified is the only company in the world, honestly, that has the portfolio of offerings, and then it's managing for the clients, all these different technology platforms and services and we've seen a tremendous uptick in that requirement and the ask of clients, the technology, even though a user base often feels easier to use, the behind the scenes, the back end and all that stuff, it's complicated, and so many customers don't have the staff that can actually operate or maintain the technology. So that's a big growth area for us, for sure.
Eric Hutto: One of the things that I've learned over 16 years in IT services is that it is a relationship, and that relationship is trusted and you don't get to be a trusted partner advisor if you’re making decisions that are oriented towards yourself, and I think Fred's right, it's always been outcome-based, and I do think that it gets hard to be the best at every single component of the solution, because it's so complicated these days. There's so many things that you have to consider.
I absolutely would and I have always leveraged specialty partnerships where they bring it. Even Apple doesn't necessarily do all their own gooey work for their applications and what we interface with because they're very good at what they do, and I do think that's exactly how we'll look at this going forward. Will we need to have some knowledge, onsite with us that understand cloud or security? Absolutely, you always want that, but we'll use strong partnerships in areas where people are really specialized to get the best outcome for the client.
Yeah. It would be difficult for you guys to hire on the level of creative to compete with the guys who you instead partner with?
Eric Hutto: Right, and that talent wants a place to grow, and we're not a creative company by core, even though it's something that we can do.
Yeah, you go into the kitchen to have your lunch and you end up talking to somebody who's a sales engineer and you can talk about football or baseball or whatever, but not so much about the core discipline.
Fred D'Alessandro: Yeah, and we're a company of scale. So again, you can't have one person that understands it and believe that you have an end to end solution, which is quite the story in many cases.
Eric Hutto: Yeah, and just the IT industry skills are going to evolve in our company. If you go back 15 years, you had storage people and server people and network people. You don't really have that as much anymore. They're still out there, but it's all converged and so integrated that we all have different types of enterprise, and I would imagine it will evolve as this stuff converges, as things merge, as we get more platform oriented software that helps us extend our services and capabilities of the people who will need, will grow into a different skill set.
Security has been obviously a huge component of IT services. Fred, have you started to see that becoming a demand on the AV side as well?
Fred D'Alessandro: It absolutely is a demand. As all the AV equipment, digital signage players have touched the network, it is absolutely a vulnerable point for IT. So yes, the bottom line is it's been going on and it's just every day gets more and more.y scrutinized and restricted. So you have to have that skill.
French. You mentioned that 29 years ago, this was a garage story. I don't think I've ever heard that, how the company got started?
Fred D'Alessandro: I'm a broadcast engineer by trade. I was working in the New York, New Jersey area for the station I worked for, I was blessed to be able to work in many different departments. So I got a well-rounded education for my first seven years of employment there and the home shopping network purchased our TV station when they started up, and it was a decision between going to work for the home shopping network and I'd taken a shot at going out there in the world and doing it on your own, and that's literally what happened.
I was like, “Let's go. Let's try to make something happen,” and yeah, and so again, we went everywhere up to 300 television towers, replacing antennas to studios. So yeah, absolutely whatever dirty work we could get, we did.
Wow, I had not heard of the home shopping network thing. I was like, do I want to spend the next 10 years sticking an ice pick in my eyes or move on?
Fred D'Alessandro: So that's why I say, things happen for a reason. I'm a true believer in that.
So today what's the scale of the company? You're much more than just a US company now and there's a lot of bodies, much more so even than 10 years ago.
Fred D'Alessandro: Now, our revenue is around a billion dollars. We have around 2,700+ employees worldwide. We have 52 offices, 35 of those are in the US, the rest are overseas. All our offices are sales, integration, and service. So they're not just sales offices. We build and service out of those locations, and about 80% of our revenue is out of the US and about 20% is currently overseas and growing and our latest international operation opened up in Bangalore, India and it is really exciting.
That's a big road trip!
Fred D'Alessandro: Yes, it is. But when I look at all the players in the industry, what I'll say is by far Diversified has invested the most internally to be a global organization. We use partners but our goal is really to be our own entity and work through the rest of the world, and provide our customers with a consistent and standard experience.
Have you been going to other countries because you see North America as somewhat capped out or crowded in terms of competition versus other markets, or is it just that there's a lot of growth potential in India?
Fred D'Alessandro: The view of this and the strategy has always been to be where our customers are. So it really had nothing to do with North America being saturated and there's no more business. There's a lot of business here going forward, but those customers that we work with and touch our global customers.
So if you want to service them the right way and the best you need to be where they are and so that's been our strategy today.
Is that a demand, when you're working, as you say, with a global customer, like a Fortune 100 kind of company where they want to roll in multiple countries and in the old days, you'd have to say we can do it here, and we'll see who we can find to do this in France and see if we can find to do this in Japan and so on?
Fred D'Alessandro: Yeah we want to make it easy for them to do business Diversified. So that's a saying that we've had in a company a long time: make it easy for our customers to do business with us, and so being able to work and have established entities in these various countries, you're able to buy in the country, you're able to transact in the country for them, and you just avoid a lot of the inefficiencies that you get when you're trying to do things from just the US.
Eric Hutto: Just like a lot of companies in IT, you get taken to places by clients, right? So you have to be able to operate where their clients took you. Over time, I think as Fred alluded to, we're going to have our competencies and our direct associates, if you will, but there'll be markets that we're choosing to be in because we see the growth in versus we got taken there by client, but we will always have the ability through partnerships and other relationships to service a client wherever they need to be.
I think that's the balance of, direct labor, indirect labor, having more of a variable bottle. It allows you to stay extremely nimble and flexible, but at the same time where you have decided to be in a market, that is where your associates are.
Has most of the growth that you've seen both domestically and internationally being through acquisition, or are you going into some markets and just opening up as Diversified and starting to hire and do sales?
Fred D'Alessandro: I would say all our expansion has been strategic. We've absolutely never just gone in and said, we hope there's business there and that we're going to sell. So I think Eric's point is very true, you look at what opportunities are in the country, and who our global clients are and where they are. So when you put those two together, you have a really large opportunity.
Eric Hutto: In my initial, what solid 14 days, Fred, what I have seen in talking with, and I've talked to surprisingly, quite a few people. That's just how I work and learn, I start at the frontline and work backwards. We are growing a lot and mainly from relationships we have because we're tried and true, and we've always done great quality work.
So I see a lot of organic growth really in this year, Fred, I would say because we've learned how to, really get in with a client and understand the problems and solve them and they continue to consume more from us, and as our portfolio expands and we're able to do other things besides just to your point earlier about integration and putting things in, we just continue to create a stickiness with our clients and create the value.
Where do you guys see the opportunity over the next couple of years as we get out of this mess with COVID?
Fred D'Alessandro: What I'll say is, I see a tremendous amount of opportunity with, like you said, returning to work is one, which obviously is the collaboration and that piece of it. I think when you look at how digital signage, how media, how IT are all stitching together these disparate technologies into one experience, for, I think our customers, their employees, their customers, is what is really exciting and the opportunity that I think with the pandemic brought a lot of new thinking into our organization about how we can help our customers, not just during a pandemic, but long after and make what we design, what we create, what we install and maintain more valuable than it was in the past. So there's a big opportunity in all these stitching together.
Did you learn things out of the pandemic as well?
I saw a lot of investments, a lot of marketing of products that were pandemic-specific like thermal sensors, temperature scanners, alternatives to touch screens and so on, and while there was a lot of noise around it, I didn't see a lot of commercial take-up of them.
Fred D'Alessandro: Yeah, I would agree. I think that at the end of the day, some of those were needed at the time, but, I don't think there's a future for a lot of these products. As I said, when you think to the core of what companies need to do, their employees need to collaborate. Those types of tools I think, we'll continue to add value.
When you think about streaming and media and virtual events, those will, I think, continue. So there are a number of things that I think the new workplace and a workforce will embrace, and I think it will add efficiency and it will be a better outcome for all.
Eric Hutto: It also gives us a chance to help companies rethink their work environment. Because even when I was at Unisys, we didn't have everybody coming back to the office yet, but as they start to come back, what kind of office is it, right? And really what people need is collaborative spaces where they can come, engage, connect, get things done, and then move on.
But I think that's a huge opportunity for us to, again, help them think through the design of what it is they want to achieve with their associate base when they do come back.
A lot of what I've seen around the workplace has been so focused on the front of house, so to speak, the white collar areas, the offices, and not that much about the production floors, the warehouses and all those sorts of things. Have you seen more understanding of that as an opportunity and a need?
Fred D'Alessandro: We see a lot of digital signage, IP TV opportunities in the warehouse workplaces, because corporate communications is key. I mean we have Rachel on the phone here with us, but I think that's one of the things that you learned, especially during a pandemic of how important communication is. So I think companies going forward will need to step up their game, to make sure that everybody is connected because everybody is now always in the office or in the warehouse these days.
So it's important, but that's where I see digital signage, corporate communications, IP TV really being the leader and that's what we do really well. That's an area we've been doing extremely well in.
So just the last question, what's been the reception around the industry to the news that you're taking on a different role and Eric stepping in?
Fred D'Alessandro: Well, from my perspective I'll say, look, everybody's congratulated me.
Are they saying, “Oh, thank God”?
Fred D'Alessandro: Exactly, to some degree. People are happy that I'm not going anywhere that I'm still around. But again, as I've made clear, Eric has the football now and I'm here to support him and I'm here to support the organization and our clients. So yeah, it's been really positive, very rewarding. I'm humbled by a lot of the emails and phone calls.
Well, congratulations to both of you and a pleasure chatting with you.
Eric Hutto: Thanks, I appreciate it.
Fred D'Alessandro: Thank you.
Wednesday Mar 16, 2022
Randy Guy, Bluefin
Wednesday Mar 16, 2022
Wednesday Mar 16, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Much of the attention in digital signage goes to big-dollar projects that feature huge screens and flashy content, but there's a good business and a lot of trade happening with much smaller displays that just help explain and sell stuff.
Bluefin International kind of fell into digital signage in the mid-2000s, and it has turned into a full-time business. The companies that were buying corporate-branded digital picture frames from Bluefin started asking for more functionality, to make the screens interactive in settings like retail. Now the Atlanta company has a wide range of sizes and types of flat panel displays that brands are using to influence consumers right at merchandising positions.
I had a great chat with Randy Guy, Bluefin's owner, about how he found his way into digital signage, and how his company operates - straddling a main office in Georgia with a manufacturing plant he owns and runs in Shenzhen, China.
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TRANSCRIPT
Randy, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me about Bluefin’s roots and the core focus of the company?
Randy Guy: Sure. Dave, that's a kind of a tricky question, but we started 21 years ago selling USB flash drives out of China. Everything we tried was a challenge, and eventually in 2004, people wanted us to customize the flash drives and put people's logos on them. That got us in the promotional products business. We invested in some facility over there to do customization.
In 2007, 2008, we started selling a lot of digital picture frames. The pharma companies, the big guys were giving away to doctors and everybody digital picture frames, and people started wanting us to customize those picture frames by adding touch, push button, motion sensors, things like that. So we developed our own ad player in 2008 based on our own proprietary platform, and we engineered and designed it and held all the mechanicals ourselves, and that kind of got us in the LCD market. So we started making custom LCDs in 2011 for some large global brands and then when Brightsign introduced their all-in-one chip back in 2016, they came to us and we were able to put that in an all-in-one fixture, and that kinda got us into the digital signage market.
So it was a tricky way to get into the digital signage market, but that's the truth, and that's how we got here. It's 21 years later. We have owned a facility in China since 2012, where we do all our engineering design and manufacturing. We still have our promotional product business. It's thriving and focuses on consumer electronics, think anything from earbuds to USB chargers, anything that you would buy in an electronic store, we still put people's logos on.
So our background is customization. Our background is giving the people exactly what they want, and we've just transitioned that to digital signage and LCD manufacturing, that's probably one of our core strengths and they all see the businesses you get exactly what you want from Bluefin. You have a challenge or you have a specific need for an LCD, we can customize the fixture or the LCD to meet exactly what you're looking for.
That's interesting. I suspect with a lot of companies in this space, if you said, “Yeah, I really liked that, but I need it in blue”, there's just going to get pushback saying no, can't do that.
Randy Guy: Absolutely. In fact, one of our largest roll-outs was in white. We went to a large furniture manufacturer, a global retail brand, and they insisted on white touchscreens, white housings. So color is not a problem on our end. We've offered them in blue, red, and white has been since our largest rollout where they insisted on that color.
Yeah. If you're a conventional manufacturer, this just wouldn't be in your wheelhouse at all but you've got that experience.
Randy Guy: Absolutely. To be honest with you, we don't really compete with the traditional guys. We're niche, and we're so focused on customization and larger projects where people really need something customized and they want to hold those mechanicals for 5 to 10 years, that's why they come to us. It's because they know we deliver a product today, five years from now, they can get the exact same product from us, the same customization, same everything. We keep that SKU constant for those guys throughout the life of their project.
This may be a difficult question because “typical” is probably all over the place, but what would be a typical kind of environment that you would be in with your screens?
Randy Guy: Our background has been the point of purchase market, working with retailers and the retail fixture manufacturers, coming up with solutions. There's not a retailer out there that doesn't have our screens working. So really when they come to us with a challenge and they say, I've got this much space, or I need this particular mounting pattern, or I need this particular setup from a touchscreen perspective, and we want to specific void of space, I think that's probably our biggest value add and then making it all come together, giving them exactly what they want.
We offer around 30 screen sizes between the standard 16:9, and then also the stretch-bar LCD category, and then we custom cut sizes as well, so there's really not a size we can't handle and we can't provide. We do focus on the smaller sizes because once you get into the bigger glass, we really lose our cost advantages from the big guys cutting so much 43 and 55 inch glass. But we still do that. Our customers are very specific about needing a specific mechanical design or something customized. Those guys, the big guys, don't want to mess with a thousand custom 43 inch monitors, but that’s right up our alley.
Yeah, they want to do a hundred thousand.
Randy Guy: Exactly.
So a lot of this would be like end cap displays, merchandising displays, like in something like a Best Buy where there's an audio product or a home automation product, and there'll be a screen there that's an explainer screen. Is that pretty typical?
Randy Guy: Absolutely. That's the perfect application. We have a lot of units in these different retailers. The touch screens become really important when it's a higher end category and the product might be complicated or it needs more explanation, or the customer might have more questions or wants to dig in deeper on other items like accessories and how the product works. That's where touchscreen interactivity really comes into play in the retail market because you can drive home your message, and the customer can explore the product on the screen versus we still sell a lot of just looping videos, your Best Buy basic 10” screen that just loops a video, it gives you a basic idea of what the product does, and it shows them some pictures and videos of the product and real life applications. But the touch screens are really where it gets deeper and you can really enhance the customer experience with information.
And a lot of times they're smaller just simply because the retailer doesn't want to surrender stocking space and merchandising space so they want to integrate it there, but it can't be a big ass display because then they can't put products there, right?
Randy Guy: Exactly. The small form factors are ideal for the point of purchase because you are competing for the physical space on the shelf itself or on the display. They want to stack it full of products, it can be speakers or earbuds or Bluetooth headsets so they want to have plenty of room on there for the product. So smaller is better in that sense.
But now the digital signage world is finding a lot of applications for small form factors. They're thinking, this might be a great opportunity to engage in a customer here or different spots throughout different buildings, whether it be corporate or hospitality. VisualSign just started to come around, I think, with the small form factors, we're seeing a lot of opportunity, especially with the customization we can do. They can have something really unique to grab people's attention.
Yeah. I've been in digital signage for a long time and have been paying attention to it for at least 21 years. I would say the first wave of digital signage in retail, if you set aside those companies that put screens in and want to sell ads on them, and they’ll put them in for free. If it's the retailers paying for it, the first wave seemed to be large screens hanging from the ceiling on the walls and everything else.
That didn't really work, and the next wave seems to be maybe big LED feature walls, but just one of them and then small screens, right at the point of purchase.
Randy Guy: Absolutely. We're seeing a transition from path to purchase where a lot of consumer packaged goods brands advertise on billboards and commercials. They want to be where you're buying the product. They want to be where the product is, and then a lot of times you're not going to hang a 55 inch by a candy aisle or by a potato chip aisle. You're going to need a smaller form factor to grab the customer's attention and drive them to your product.
But the brands are starting to see a lot more value in being at the point of purchase versus the path to purchase. So we were excited about that kind of transition and how to forge that customer experience because the brands have the money to spend, and if they want to be front and center where the product is purchased, that's a great opportunity for our industry.
When I was dealing with packaged goods companies like 12-15 years ago, and their brand marketers were asking about doing digital display in the store, right at the fixture, they liked it, but they said the unit cost was too much, didn't want to spend it and they only needed it for six months or maybe even three months. Could they rent it?
How has that changed or are those CPG brands now willing to spend the money?
Randy Guy: They are willing to spend the money, and I think that not only on the brands, but the retailers and the store owners themselves are seeing opportunities to share that screen space and get value added as well.
A perfect example would be the CPG might get 75% of the screen for 75% of the time, and the store owner would get, or the store chain would get, or the retail chain would get the other 25% of the time and they can share that screen, but the screens have come down in cost. We have a solution called Daisy chain where you can put multiple screens on one player. So that helps drive this cost down and you only have one endpoint to maintain. So we feel like that's a really good solution that we're pitching to a lot of people. We're starting to roll out in volume to different retailers with that solution, but basically you can run, say a 24” stretch, you can run 12 of those displays off of a 4k box. So that helps drop the costs down and it helps them repurpose the product and they have a lot more screens for a lot less.
I suspect your a technical guys, particularly those who've been with you for a while, have been on a bit of a journey because I was interested in digital picture frames just as you were going in the late two thousands and thinking, maybe these things are digital signgage, they're low cost or integrated and everything else, but the technology, the underlying hardware in a lot of cases I suspect was more than a little flaky, but how hard was it to find reliable goods or is that why you just set up your own manufacturing?
Randy Guy: It was a challenge going from some of the higher end industrial grade monitors, a seven inch monitor might have been $400 and a digital picture frame was $40. While the fixture gas and the retail markets are great, we love this $40 solution, but it doesn't have the functionality or the industrial grade qualities of this $400 a unit. So that was our challenge.
How do we beef up our digital picture frame to make it into an ad player, and that's when we researched the chip sets and designed a platform around that, and we took control of the mechanicals and put it in metal housings and those types of things. So we industrialized digital picture frames is really what we did and how we got started in a very crude sense of product development. We took a really low cost plastic housing, a digital picture frame, and we put it in a metal housing, beefed up the chip sets, gave it more functionality, we added touch and push-button capabilities and motion sensors and those types of things. That's how we got started in 2008 with our first ad player.
So you're kind of remanufacturing them?
Randy Guy: Actually redesigning them, and believe it or not, we're still selling picture frames. We're still selling that plastic low end picture frame with people's logos on it. It's kinda made a comeback in the last couple of years.
Yeah, I was walking around a Best Buy recently and saw a company song that I thought, oh, this was like a flashback for me. I felt like I was back in 2008, like you say, the demand is there.
Randy Guy: Absolutely, especially on the 10” size. Once the screen get down to lower costs, people can get more bang for their buck and there's been some really good companies that have come out with solutions that integrate with your phone and have apps. I can be out fishing with my kids or in a football game and I can take a picture and I can download it directly to my mother's 13 or 15 inch I bought her that’s sitting on the mantle, and so she gets real time pictures of us at the beach or wherever we are.
So they've come a long way from the original where you had to put everything onto an SD card and plug it in and then take it out and update the pictures and everything. So some of the applications now with picture frames are really cool.
When you started to redesign these picture frames, is it at that point that you started working with BrightSign or was that kind of further down the road?
Randy Guy: That was further down the road. We were out selling our ad player and we had a global brand that wanted us to make custom monitors for them, and then we got introduced to BrightSign that way, so we optimized our monitors for BrightSign’s box and then when they came to market with their own all in one chip, we were the first ones to integrate it and bring it to market, and that their platform took it to a whole nother level from functionality and connectivity.
And they've brought all the programming you can do to all the touch screens and interactivity, so that just elevated it to another level from where we had developed.
I'd assume that kind of removes some of the R&D headaches and challenges that you're facing because they have that figured out and you just got to snap that board in?
Randy Guy: Absolutely, especially on the content creation side and the interactivity. We used to do layer touchscreens where it was quite the challenge to program and everything else, and they've got all that canned in the package and it's very simple. Everybody's familiar with it. That makes it a lot easier technically for sure.
Does it add a layer of comfort as well when you're working with resellers and integrators that you can say it's BrightSign under the hood and they feel better?
Randy Guy: Oh, absolutely. They are an award-winning platform and software and their support and the reliability and the products themselves. People love them, so absolutely, it provides a layer of comfort.
They've done a nice job. It's at a level now when I talk to people, they're saying we're thinking about PCs, or maybe we're going to use smart displays or maybe we'll use BrightSign boxes. So it's at a level now where it seems to be its own category.
Randy Guy: Absolutely. They've done a great job and their products are exceptional. Between the support they provide and the product quality and reliability, it's definitely a bonus to integrate their products into our stuff and the digital signage world and their retail and point of purchase world really resonates with our solutions.
I guess there’s not really an installed base, but from the numbers of products out there, what would be the percentage of them that are connected versus just working off of a memory card?
Randy Guy: I would say probably 75% are working off a memory card. There might be more than that that's connected, but how often people update content is never as often as they want to or they think they're going to when they roll out an application.
So if it's just working off a memory card, it's not connected. If there's a problem, something locks up or whatever, does anybody know, or you're completely at the mercy of the local store manager?
Randy Guy: If you're not connected to the internet, then you're not going to have visibility for that time. The beauty of our products is that if there's any kind of power issue or for any reason, the unit reboots, it fully auto starts, it doesn't require any interaction.
They're designed not to go down, to be honest with you. That’s the beauty of our platform is to know the OS and things like that you're going to have challenges with. As far as locking up and having to reboot or something like that, we just don't have those challenges in our platforms.
So the bigger challenge in a lot of respects is just all the stuff that you can buy off Alibaba that says it's a looping ad display or whatever and those are, I'm sure out in retail as well, and those who go down, maybe they don't have the routines to come back. So somebody would look at that and go, this sort of stuff doesn't work, I don't want to buy this.
Randy Guy: Absolutely. If there's any opportunity for the unit so you don't have to choose a menu or do something to start the device, that's a challenge. Retailers lose power all the time. A lot of stores shut down power at night. So no one has the stomach anymore to have those touchscreens, and if you rely on the store manager or the local staff to keep your signage running, you're in trouble.
So it has to be plug and play and it has to be autostart, and it has to correct itself if there are any power issues or anything like that, it has to take care of those challenges on its own. You can't rely on any human help at the store.
Are there any limitations as to what you can do, like it'll only run standard definition video or anything like that?
Randy Guy: No limitations. Any kind of crazy resolutions that the screen manufacturers come up with, we find a way to integrate them in our displays and make that available to the content guys. I'd say the stretch bar LCD is a challenge. Well, content is always a challenge because there's content creation and getting it updated and getting it approved by all the different parts of whether it be brands or manufacturers that have to approve the content. But when you start changing the resolutions from standard 16:9 or standard 1080p, then that's when they start having real delays and challenges and that can mess up a project. It's more on the content creation side than it is us being able to deliver the content on the screen.
Are you seeing demand? I did a podcast recently with another company, Instorescreen, and they do inline shelf edge displays that are like ribbon displays and that sort of thing. Are you getting the ask for that sort of thing?
Randy Guy: We absolutely participate in that market. I think it's going to be a challenge long-term though. I think you can overwhelm the customer at some point. You can have too much video. You can have too much color. In fact, we've had displays where people are trying to take the color out and they're making it more monochrome looking almost on a regular display.
So I think that there's a place for those solutions. I think it's going to be more higher end, higher dollar valued products. I can't imagine that we're going to see shampoo or toothpaste full of LCD screens, telling you what the price is on every one of those shelves that are trying to sell those, but I can see where a higher end item, for example, home audio, $200-$300 items. I can see where you can use stretch displays for something like that to not only educate the customer, but there's more to it, like specs and technical information to give on something like that, and then the dollar value supports the spend on the digital signage. I just can't imagine a shampoo or a toothpaste driving in a value to warrant having a digital signage solution. So that's my take on it.
I think it's going to be very targeted for certain categories, maybe new products or something like that, but I don't see a future where every shelf in the grocery stores has a screen on it. That's just me personally. I just don't see it.
I always liken it to a kaleidoscope effect, and years ago, working with a company that was going to put screens in like flat panel displays with ads on them on casino floors, and they engaged me to walk around the casino with them and ask where they should put them on. I said not in here, period, because there's too damn much going on there. They're just going to get lost in all the other razzle-dazzles that's there, put them in the entryways, put them in the common areas, it's the same thing. If every shelf edge has motion media going, that is just, like you say, it's overwhelming.
Randy Guy: Absolutely. Humans can be overstimulated, they'll just tune it all out. I think that you'll lose the effectiveness of it.While I think there's a more targeted market for shelf edge, I don't think it's going to be a hundred percent off the shelves or an opportunity in my mind.
Is it easier now to go into stores because 20 years ago there was no power in the floor, very little power at the merchandising areas, in the shelf gondolas or any of that stuff so you had to do drops of power cords and this and that, all kinds of hacks to get power to the screens. Is it better now?
Randy Guy: Absolutely. In the places where digital signage and point of purchase kiosks are located, the retail owners are finding a way to get power to those locations. They see that it's a necessity. We used to end caps in some of the largest home improvement stores and things like that and they didn't have power, but now they're seeing the benefit that they need to get power there.
Another benefit of a lot of our products is that you can use power over ethernet, which makes it low voltage. So you don't have to do a power drop with a certified electrician and worry about code and pulling permits, and things like that, and you can move the product around a whole lot easier with a network cable than you can trying to find a power outlet. So power over ethernet solved a lot of those issues for people that were hesitant to run a power drop but it's pretty easy to run a network cable.
Do you see much business outside of retail?
Randy Guy: Oh, we do. Like I said, the digital signage world in general is starting to warm up, especially the interactive touchscreens. The start of the pandemic was a scare for us because of all the noise around touch screens and surfaces and transmitting COVID, but that went away. Thank goodness. That was going to be a real challenge for the market if that hadn't changed, so that put a scare in us big time.
One of the biggest applications we're seeing uses for our small form factor of touchscreens is people are able to control larger screens, almost using our screens as a remote control. So you get the bang for the buck, you can have interactivity, you have a robust solution. You can go through a lot of different content, but it's being thrown up on a bigger screen where you get a bigger experience and then you can engage people that aren't actually touching the interactive part, so you can engage people all around the store or the lobby or wherever since they can see what's going on. So we think that's a pretty cool solution and almost a cheaper way to put interactivity on a large screen TV is by having a control box. That's a lot lower cost.
You don't want to have a 65 inch touchscreen. You can, but it's going to be really super expensive, and people are, other than wayfinding, a lot of people aren't comfortable walking up huge screens and start banging on it and touching on it, there's a hesitation in that sense and when you're so close to a big screen, you can't really take in all the content anyway. So we love solutions where we use our small screens to drive larger screens, we think that has a lot of legs.
Yeah, and with LED video walls, with some exceptions, for the most part, you really don't want people walking up to that LED wall and touching it in any way.
Randy Guy: Exactly. Touchscreens have always had a little hesitancy from the public, but they're getting used to them with the tablets and iPads and those types of devices, they're getting used to coming up and touching smaller screens, but you're right. You don't want them touching the bigger screens and people were a little bit leery of doing that anyway.
You recently added an open operating system for an all-in-one display that has ARM processors and can run on like Linux and Android. So it shifts or provides an alternative to BrightSign. Why did that come about?
Randy Guy: Just supply chain issues. We can’t have enough options in the world right now. We have some specific clients who are using those platforms. At the end of the day, we're a contract manufacturer. That's our customization angle is that we want to make whatever product you need. So it was twofold. One, the product supply issues, and anything could happen in this world from a supply chain standpoint, it was what we've all figured out. And number two, customers really want that solution. A lot of people are already using that solution. We felt that we were missing some market share and some opportunities there. We wanted to be able to offer any platform they want to use and pretty much be a one-stop shop.
So if you had a screen network that was using a lot of Android driven boxes or Android smart displays, they didn't want to add this into the network, running something that’s different. They would prefer that this be Android too?
Randy Guy: Absolutely. So if they've already spent the time and money to develop an Android app and they're supporting it then they want as many devices as they can get on that platform. So they don't have to support multiple platforms. So we were getting shut out of a lot of opportunities,where they insisted on something running Android. They loved our product, but they had to have Android. So that was a challenge.
And as we talked about before, their only other option probably would be to go on Alibaba and then cross their fingers, right?
Randy Guy: Absolutely. Being a US-based company is a huge advantage over Alibaba and those types of companies of the world. Just from the standpoint, we support all our products in the U S. You've got credit terms. You've got RMA support and it's just a lot easier to handle projects and a lot more comfortable on the thrust side of things. So we see that as a huge benefit owning our own facility in China, we're cost competitive with anybody in the world. So we take that factor out.
So the ability to have inventory and samples and can support projects, US-based you know, that gives us a big advantage.
Yeah. You could have a contract manufacturer in Shenzhen, but if they're busy on something else, well, too bad.
Randy Guy: Absolutely, and then, those guys, they don't like to run a 100 units or 50 units or 75 units and then run 75 this week and you come back three weeks later and want 30 more, that doesn't go over. You don't stay in their graces very long, but customization and projects, that's been our business for 21 years.
Someone might order 500 pieces today and if they come back three weeks later, oh, shoot. I should've ordered some spares, I need it. That's what we do. That's not a challenge on our end. A lot of people resonate with that and they appreciate that. They get a flat pricing on stuff like that, and we're here to serve them and make sure that they get what they need. And if they need an extra 50 units for gosh sakes, we're not gonna penalize them or be mad that they need 50 more units because the quantity is low. We've got to see the bigger picture, the whole thing.
In 2022, what more are we going to see out of Bluefin?
Randy Guy: We've got a couple of surprises up our sleeve that we're designing on. There's a few segments of the market that that we think are underserved, that we're really eyeballing. One thing about being a small company is that we are small enough that we care about the customers and we listen to customers, but we're also big enough that we can take care of the customers and we're getting a lot of feedback from a couple of different channels in the market that they're having a heartburn with and they're struggling with, and being a small company, we can pivot and try to meet some of those needs of the customers where they're having issues. So we're excited about a couple of initiatives that we've got, hopefully gonna roll out here in the first half of this year.
Hopefully prior to InfoComm, and so we've got a few things coming out. We'd love to get back on here and talk to you about as we move along.
All right. So if people want to know more work and how can they find you online?
Randy Guy: We are TheBluefin.com.
The only other thing I have on here I wanna make sure we cover, our supply chain issues are resolving quickly, so we're offering more products to hedge against future supply chain issues. Logistics is still a challenge, but our lead times are back down in our normal four to five week range now. Getting the product to the United States is different. Air freight is reliable, but it's really expensive right now, ship freight is not reliable and it's still expensive. So it's a double edged sword there, but from a production capability, we're getting back into business, we are ready to roll. From that standpoint, we are seeing the pandemic kind of fade away on the supply chain side from component issues.
All right, Randy, thank you so much for spending some time with me.
Randy Guy: Oh, absolutely. I appreciate you having me on, I look forward to coming back soon with some more exciting news.
Wednesday Feb 23, 2022
John Marshall, Userful
Wednesday Feb 23, 2022
Wednesday Feb 23, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
There has been lots of talk – particularly on the pro AV side of digital signage – about how traditional corporate AV and IT roles and needs are converging.
And there’s been a lot of discussion, as well, about the pros and cons of shifting from more conventional ways of moving content around screen networks – with dedicated hardware and cabling – to using the networking infrastructure of an end-user customer.
I had an interesting chat with John Marshall, the CEO of Calgary-based Userful, going back two or three years ago at ISE, when he was relatively new to the company. He talked at length, and in detail that was at times way the hell over my head, about the shift he expected to see with digital signage going to AV over IP solutions.
That’s now happening in a big way, he says, accelerated in part by technology advances, but also because of all the upheaval of the past couple of years – when video streamed meetings went from something done here and there to constant.
We spoke last week about where using networks to move informational content around is at, how it works and why you should care, and about a new partnership his company has developed with display giant LG.
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TRANSCRIPT
John, thank you for joining me. You're in Calgary today, right? But you kind of cycle between the Calgary and San Francisco area?
John Marshall: Back and forth every two weeks. But yes, I'm in Calgary today.
How has that worked out in the last couple of years with travel restrictions and everything?
John Marshall: It's been an interesting challenge because I've had an opportunity to see different cities, different cultures, different reactions to the pandemic. And I've seen a lot of differences, but I'd say the overall trends, whether it be relating to work from home, return to work, accessibility for certain businesses and the likes, it's fairly similar.
We're talking because your company recently announced, and I'm going to read this because that's easier, “an end-to-end software-defined AV over IP solution that combines Userful’s visual networking platform and LG’s Web OS signage platform to optimize display network for control rooms, digital signage networks, corporate signage and video walls.”
That's a mouthful. I was saying before I hit the start button that I'm not that strong on AV over IP and I had to read the press release about four times before I started to get a grasp of it. What does all this mean in practical terms and why should people in the digital signage industry who would be listening to this, why should they care?
John Marshall: I got my career started in Silicon valley at 3Com Corporation, then launched another company that was foundational in building broadband and the mindset of the IT industry, the mindset of the networking world is being able to access multiple nodes, being able to access a range of devices across the network.
So this concept of network-based solutions is very powerful. It means I can get to almost anything anywhere, anytime. And when you shift over into the AV world, the traditional mindset is around quality of video. If we really look at making sure we're going to deliver the very best quality video for advertising or for monitoring the safety of a situation through cameras and the likes. You're always optimizing for quality and you don't want to bring into play the interference that comes with a network: latency, security risks, and the like, but more and more as we move towards wanting to see more and more information, combinations of video and data from multiple sources around a company, around the globe, as we're trying to do more with it, making sure it's networked is valuable. You get access to more information. You can do more with more information. So you're willing to make some trade-offs on quality to get more information from different sources and I think that's where the AV industry is headed today. We're looking at multi-source delivery of content to multiple displays and that just demands a network model.
Are some of the issues that were kind of barriers to adoption like concerns around latency and the buffering icon on the screen, or blocky/pixelated videos, has that largely been solved?
John Marshall: I'd say that's being solved, and part of the issue is we're moving from an AV world that's quality focused to a networked world that's AV over IP, you have to address those things.
Just like you described, how latency affects the availability of the video. That's the swirling circle, right? Saying it's buffering, or I'm trying to deliver a single vide to many displays distributed around the globe. How do I do that without taking on massive costs of wide area network charges, right? Like the broadband delivery or the MPLS delivery of content by employees, or how do I chop it up so I can present it on a single video wall that's composed of many TVs or many displays or multiple DV LED screens that are backed by multiple controllers and how do I lace all that together?
And transformatting that is challenging. It's very challenging, especially when a network is involved. So I think we're on our way and I think this really is the year where we start to see that migration.
Is that because technology has improved to a degree that it's possible, like networking technology, or is it as much to do with an understanding of what's possible?
John Marshall: I think it's a combination, right? I think that we've started seeing the interest, the demand for seeing multiple sources of data on screens. A good example, if I'm in a control room environment, I want to see a combination of security video feeds, I want to see production video feeds, but I also want to see that side-by-side with data, IOT fed data. I want to see AI, showing me the correlation between video productivity, factory floor production, and information about supply chains. I want to see it all on a single screen. And that's my control room environment.
If I move over to look at advertising or marketing, I want to see social media feeds in parallel with advertisement or video footage promoting a product. All of it goes hand in hand. And I think that's what the consumers are becoming more accustomed to through consumer channels.
I can gather a lot more information today through my computer, through my mobile phone than I can through my business-fed video stream or my business channels. So I really think we just have to keep moving at the pace of consumer desire for video, audio, data-fed content.
You're describing stuff that can be done right now, but I assume what you're saying is the way it's done right now may involve a whole bunch of different software components, a bunch of APIs, and a whole bunch potentially of hardware components to pull it all together, and you're saying with a AV over IP, a lot of that can be stripped out of it and made more efficient, is that accurate?
John Marshall: I think what I'm saying is that we've found ways in the past when we had a segregated AV department of a company to do it, according to the standards defined by the national association of broadcasters, that drive the highest quality video. But that really was more of a point to point driven solution. I've got one source device for one screen.
Also that video content was so voluminous. How do I move it across a data network that's only operating at 10 megabits per second? It's hard, real hard. We're now at a place where the encoding technologies have progressed. Data networks are now operating at greater than 10 gigabits per second. We've got communication networks that are flourishing both on the local area network and the wide area networks so distribution between facilities is more viable. We've got much more storage capacity, so we can load more video, digital video onto our networks and the compute, the availability of computers for CPU or GPU has progressed. Moore's laws have taken us further.
So if we look at the combination of all of those things, we're now at an inflection point where all of them align and are matching up with that demand for more data, more video, more audio, all in parallel, and the stars are aligning.
So in a typical corporate environment, how would this play out, if they were using the Userful solution, let's say with the LG Web OS for digital signage?
John Marshall: The first thing is that LG and Userful sat down and looked at which environment we need to standardize around and the first decision that was made was if we're moving video onto IP or data networks, we really need to be focused on the standards, the protocols of the IT world.
And so prioritizing those codecs, prioritizing those streaming protocols. For example, our RTSP, real-time streaming protocol ensures that we provide for quality while making sure that we're latency sensitive on those data networks and using those standards of the IT world makes the IT world comfortable bringing AV onto their network more so than ever before and I think that's the core of what we've done, is we’ve focused on its standards.
So what would that mean then? If I was, let's say, a financial services company and I came to Userful and LG and say, I want to do this:
I want to have KPI dashboards in all of my sales and customer contact areas. I want to be able to pull in a bunch of data from different business systems within the organization. What can you do versus what my AV solutions people are suggesting, which is as you said earlier, a point to point solution?
John Marshall: They're going to initially say, if I start from the point to point solution that I have to segregate that and isolate that solution on my network, and the IT department automatically doesn't want to do that because more and more we're consolidating in the data center or we're consolidating in the cloud, so they don't want to have all these islands all over the corporation where they have to send IT staff out to manage that island.
So if I can now centralize that infrastructure, if I can centralize in the data center, it makes for a much easier solution. But the concern or the risk that they have is, I've now got all that AV traffic flowing back and forth across my corporate network, what's that going to do to the rest of my data network? How does that adversely affect that?
So what we see today is that they'll typically still start icing, they'll create that island, but then they'll see how they can start to pull portions of it back into the data center or how they can manage it from the data center remotely, even though it's still an island. And that's what our AV over IP architecture provides. It's a platform, a software defined solution that allows for remote manageability from ITs central on that island that's remote, using all of those network management protocols, having security and policy, enterprise policy in place like role-based access control, security provisions that they're familiar with that keeps it secure across the network, and then as they grow more and more familiar and comfortable with that island, they can pull it fully back to the data and/or then start deploying more and more from the data center.
That's the trajectory we're seeing already today at least at Userful. We've seen that from the last 10 customers that we've deployed at.
In doing that sort of thing, are you stripping out hardware components and therefore lower in capital costs? Or are you having to also upgrade the networking components to handle that, with all the 4k video files that are now streaming?
John Marshall: I'd say yes to both of those. So the three anchors there are: first, we come from a world where you're putting a PC behind a display that can decode the encoded video that was sent from the given source, whether that's a full fledged PC, or whether that's a thin client. We also have options like zero clients out there today. All of these different technologies are basically available for decode. But what you don't have is you don't have the manageability. You don't have the security profile that you would ideally like. So what we've done is we've come in and created a software based solution that allows for you to load basically a soft client that can be loaded onto the display that allows for it to replace that hardware that traditionally sat behind that display.
So you remove hardware there, you lower carbon footprint, you lower energy consumption. It's much more beneficial, but the other side of it is that you increase manageability, Because now you're actually directly managing the endpoint. You're managing the display and you're not having to manage both a device that's behind the display and then try over just that HDMI connection over that CEC link. You're not trying to manage the display with the older HTMI technologies and CEC technologies that we had from the AV world. You have more of the network management tools that the IT world's familiar with.
So you're putting the software client on the smart display, the LG Web OS system on chip device that's embedded in the display, right?
John Marshall: Correct and we've done this very successfully with all of the digital signage displays from LG. We've done this with all of the video wall displays from LG. We've done those with all of the DV LED solutions from LG and it runs beautifully, but to get there, we had to actually work with LG, to do some redesign and some upgrades to their media engine within that system, within the Web OS displays and ensure that then on top of that, that media engine, it could support our RTSP and then support our application in kind. So it did take some rewiring for a networked latency oriented AV world that's running over IP and that's a challenge.
So if I'm an end-user and say, “Hey, I'm interested in this. We have a network already in place, but we're using Samsung smart displays that are running Tyzen or we're using Sony or Phillips or Sharp or whatever that's running Android, can we do it?”
What do you tell them?
John Marshall: We say absolutely yes. So Userful already developed our soft client for Web OS and deployed that with LG successfully. We've already developed it for Tyzen, for Android, for Linux. We have a client for each.
So what's the distinction then between what you're doing with LG versus some of the other guys, because the press that came out, you said that some of the other guys were a bit behind. They failed at some of the things that needed to be done.
John Marshall: I'd say it's one thing for Userful to go develop a soft client that can be loaded onto a display. We can deliver content to that display regardless of manufacturer, regardless of the OS, however, if you want to make sure that you're providing for a real-time streaming protocol, that protocol has to go right into the heart of that smart display and manage it's media engine, it's pipeline.
And not everyone has been able to successfully integrate RTSP and so therefore they're not going to be as latency sensitive as say, an LG Web OS display that can provide for gaming quality latency, less than 50 milliseconds of latency. That's impressive across a corporate network. So if you want to get to that level, you really need to collaborate and look at those IT protocols in a new way.
So it's a distinction between, “we can do it” and “we can do it better”?
John Marshall: Correct. And I would say that also applies to security.
If you want to put certain security standards in place that will make the IT industry comfortable, you have to do that not just in the app. You just can't load an app onto the display. You have to actually look for AV, how that flows through the rest of the system.
You mentioned earlier that AV is its own department in some larger corporations or historically has been and IT is obviously its own department. There's been lots of talk for the last five, really 10 years about AV and IT converging.
Is that actually happening now and are AV departments IN larger companies going away and becoming just part of IT?
John Marshall: We, at Userful, see that happening faster and faster. I think the pandemic has helped facilitate that, right? There's a whole sector called unified communications and we all are zooming or Microsoft Teaming, or whatever it is. We're using AV for core business meetings and communications. We can't get away from it anymore.
And so when you're using unified communications, that is AV, you just happen to be using Web RTC as a protocol, right? But did Web RTC come out of the AV world, the national association of broadcasters? No.
When we look towards other AV technologies, sharing content from our PC onto a screen in a huddle room, as we return to work. Huddle rooms, war rooms, collaboration areas that's becoming more and more AV driven, and that's something that the IT world's getting more familiar with and it's becoming core. So that's exactly where we see it headed as well. Making sure that we're adopting the right protocols to match those emerging standards for the post-pandemic business operations.
Userful came into the digital signage ecosystem marketing a product that was all about video walls and a different approach to doing video walls, as opposed to very hardware focused. This was much more software defined but you've shifted, maybe into AV over IP as being your core focus. Is that accurate and why did that happen?
John Marshall: It's absolutely accurate. I joined the company in 2018 and I arrived with that perspective. I'm a networking guy but not just a networking guy. The last several companies I was involved in were IOT companies and I saw, square on, more and more businesses, doing more and more with video but they weren't doing it just to see the videos, they were doing it with a business purpose in mind, for example, worker safety or analyzing employee performance, look at truckers in transportation industry, wanting to monitor even the eyelids of the transportation workers to make sure they were staying awake on long haul deliveries and making sure that they could correlate that video with data for safety. And as I saw more and more data accumulating and more and more use of video, I said, we're headed on a trajectory where video's gonna come right to the heart of business operations and I think that's what we're seeing.
More and more startups I'm seeing out of Silicon valley are using video to analyze and create better performing business operations. And so what I started realizing was how are we going to take that data from companies like Palentier, create a dataset, create a rule set, create AI and guide us towards managed visual operations. Who's doing that? Who's working on that underlying platform that brings all the data, the video together? And I didn't see anyone.
So it was a former board member of mine who said that they believed that just like the iPhone or Android phones would get larger and larger tools to be the size of an entire wall. And we'd be using walls like you see in the movies, right? Data dashboards, the assertion was that there would be an underlying business glue that operated off of video and there was an opportunity for some company to come forward and create that kind of platform.
They actually recommended that I take a look at this company, Userful based in Calgary, Canada because they had done a lot of the work to bring those AV protocols together with the IT protocols. So that was the story back in 2018.
So you joined the company and had to look at things and said, this is a much more opportune market than staying purely focused just on video walls?
John Marshall: That's absolutely right. What is the hardest problem to solve? Where do we start this AV over IP problem? And our initial thesis was that we start in control rooms because control rooms are where you're pulling in video feeds, you're pulling in data. You're trying to manage the network. You're trying to manage security. You start there and it's an aggregation point for multi-source and multi-display. So if you can solve the control room problem, the emerging modernized control room problem, then you'll be able to address any of the AV over IP challenges that a corporation might be able to face. Naturally, they're very concerned about the timeliness of what they're seeing, since it's real-time monitoring so choosing the right protocols mattered.
So that's where we began and we focused on control rooms and then have evolved towards corporate signage, call centers, logistics centers for data metrics, dashboards, and are continuing to expand into meeting rooms and the like.
Yeah, I think it's been really interesting in the last two, three years that you've started to see pretty broad understanding that the control room environment, as you say, aggregates all this information, there's so many other environments all the way out to manufacturing floors and customer contact centers and so on, they all have a need for a dashboard of some kind, because it's the most opportune real-time way to communicate to the people working there.
John Marshall: I couldn't agree with you more. And I think the interesting thing for us, now if I shift back to the AV or the digital signage space, digital signage is more accustomed to single sourced, single output. But as we move more and more towards that operations mindset, we're looking at multi-source, so how do you do that without looking across a network?
It gets a lot harder. So it's a whole mindset shift, right? Multi sources is a whole new paradigm.
Is this a situation that obviously in some respects is disintermediating some of the hardware components that are on a traditional point to point digital signage network. What does it mean for those companies and those end-users who are using CMS software solutions, traditional digital signage monitoring, and management solutions.
Are they also not necessarily needed in this model or they're something that plugs in?
John Marshall: I looked at some fairly credible research recently, and I think that there's always going to be a need for traditional digital signage. That market's strong and growing and there'll still be demand for single source to single display application, but as we evolve more and more, I think that we see by, I think the data suggested by 2026-2027, a third, maybe more than a third of the market's really shifting towards a software defined approach and I think that's a pretty fast migration, especially when you're doing more and more multi-source, just a standard matrix switchers not going to get you there. You really need to look at network based solutions. So when you look at companies like Netgear, right? Let's talk about Netgear very quickly.
I think Netgear is quickly evolving, taking traditional IT networking, they're taking 10 gigabit switches and they're introducing an AV mindset into those switches by creating profiles, AV profiles that you can match up the right source device with the right display, without having to know all about AV standards. They're integrating the two in a solutions mindset that I don't see other networking or traditional networking companies doing. They're taking a very unique AV approach to network topologies.
But I think as we move in that direction, Netgear is a really good example of a hardware based company that's adapting and bringing that software defined mindset into their hardware products. So I think that will happen. I also think there will be hardware companies that have traditionally just taken source material and coded it and put it out through a given interface, they're going to have a lot more to learn. And partnering with companies like Userful or Netgear would be advantageous for them. I just think now is the time to get on that train.
Did Cisco kinda miss the mark on this?
They were in digital signage 10-12 years ago selling hardware devices and doing all that, you would think they would have been perfect for this sort of thing.
John Marshall: I think Cisco's really far out in front of many. They have a firm grasp around the right protocols for video, they're strong with other technologies like multicast, they've got the full portfolio there, but I don't know if Cisco's quite yet seeing this migration of the AV segment of the market migrating on to corporate networks. And I don't know if they are watching or studying the evolution of the industry and the implications for corporate networks in the same way. But I think that they'll see that probably in the next year or two years.
You mentioned the next year or two years. What might people more broadly see out of Userful going through 2022 and beyond?
John Marshall: I think that one of the key growth opportunities for Userful is recognizing that moving to the data center for a private cloud or enabling AV from either private cloud or public cloud is an important move for the IT department and as AV moves from being an AV department nto IT, we have to be mindful that it is a much larger organization with different responsibilities. So there's an applications group within most IT departments that are responsible for application selection, then once an application is selected, there's an infrastructure operations group, and that's typically where we're seeing AV move because it's an infrastructure or operations play.
We're seeing that that's an area that needs consideration. The security department, the security team within an IT department has a say. So all of these different areas have high relevance, but what we're seeing is that as more and more sharing of resources become relevant and as AV becomes a shared resource, a multi-source, multi-display resource that will happen through I&O, infrastructure and operations.
And so we're recognizing the need to move from islands to data centers and we have several offerings for private cloud and public cloud that will be announced later in 2022, and that will help facilitate that move.
All right, John, thank you so much for spending some time with me. I even understood some of it.
John Marshall: Thank you for making the time to hear what we had to say.
Wednesday Feb 16, 2022
David Crumley, HUSH Studios
Wednesday Feb 16, 2022
Wednesday Feb 16, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Experience is one of those soft, squishy terms that gets used a lot in the context of digital signage - using displays and content to attract, engage and leave a desired impression with the people who go through a designed space.
There are many projects that get described as visual experiences that aren't a lot more than screens on walls that are running stuff, but a Brooklyn company called HUSH Studios is absolutely in the business of designing and delivering visual experiences that can communicate the mission, values and products of big corporate clients.
HUSH has done interesting work in the corporate spaces of some of the biggest and most familiar brands in the United States and beyond. The company came on my radar after it pushed out a case study last year showing what was done at Uber's newly opened corporate campus in San Francisco. It's a digitally-driven space, but much more inventive than just a big fine pitch LED on a feature wall.
I had an interesting chat with David Crumley, the Austin, Texas-based Technology Director for HUSH. We get into the thinking and technology challenges of these kinds of projects, what works and why, and his life being the guy who has to make the big ideas into something that exists or can be made, that makes sense, fits a budget, and works reliably.
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TRANSCRIPT
David, thank you for joining me. What does HUSH do, and what's your role?
David Crumley: Hush is an experiential design firm based in Brooklyn. Our mission is to design experiences for the most dynamic organizations in the world. Our work is around the globe. Our goal is to seamlessly integrate architecture and digital technology to create custom experiences for the workplace, employees, guests and transform the built environment with technology.
My role is the technical director and I focus on the kind of AV hardware and systems side of it and we have other technical directors that focus more on the software side.
So you would go onsite, do site surveys and all that, at least in normal times, and basically work with the big thinkers who say, “we want to do this” and you say, okay, or sure we can do that?
David Crumley: Yeah, that's actually a great way of describing it, and how I often will talk with my team. We have an amazing creative team of art directors, architects that come up with amazing concepts, sketches or quick renders and then my job is to then look at that and figure out, okay, how do we make that? What technologies can we use? Hopefully it's something that exists already, so it's not building something from scratch, sometimes it is.
And then working with a huge ecosystem of partners on the client side and the build side to bring it all to life.
So at least part of your time is spent understanding the emerging technologies and building relationships with different vendors to understand whether these guys will deliver or they're going to be a problem?
David Crumley: Exactly, right. We spent a lot of time working with LED manufacturers, lighting manufacturers, AV integrators, fabricators, physical computing partners all over the place to figure out, to know, and have a jumpstart on what products or options are out there. What will make the most sense to be permanently installed? Because our project has a lifespan of 10 plus years. So it's crucial to have those relationships in that knowledge of all the hardware and technologies out there.
The company's key statement is: we mix content, space and technology to communicate an organization's mission, vision, and products.
I'm curious how you get to that, because there's a lot of corporate mission statements out there that somehow managed to be lofty and, in their words, but also empty. Like I'll look at their mission statement, I go, okay, what does that mean?
David Crumley: Yeah, that's a good question and to be totally transparent, that is not my area of expertise. Thankfully, we have a huge team of strategists and creatives that spend a lot of time upfront working with the clients to distill that down, to figure out the essence of what we should be creating and what should be built and what the messaging should be to actually translate the company's brand and mission and identity in to these experiences that can easily turn into something where it becomes more complex or convoluted.
I think Hush does a really great job of distilling that down and finding the essence of what needs to be communicated and doing it in an artful and thoughtful way, which is one of the main reasons I've worked with them so long and enjoy the work we do there.
Do projects lead with digital or is it more a case of, it's just a common outcome because the technology makes sense?
David Crumley: It's a bit of both. We do start with digital, that is our bread and butter. We are excellent at taking data and content and using that to create amazing visualizations and content and lighting animations, and what not with these projects, but we also do a lot of strictly analog work as well. So super graphics, like fabricated elements that go within the building itself.
We have a few that have no digital components at all. It's just strictly analog type work. It really depends on the space, the client, the brief, bost of our projects do have digital aspects.
Do the clients or potential clients come with a brief in mind? Do they have an idea that we want to do a huge video wall in our lobby or whatever or are they saying we want to communicate our mission, our brand, what should we do?
David Crumley: It's a bit of both, honestly.
We prefer whenever it's the latter, because we have more of a blank page to work with and we can do those extensive strategy design concepts in phases and really figure out what makes sense for the client, their brand and for the space. But on the other side, we do get a lot of projects where the building is built, they have SPECT hardware, they have a big system, but they have nothing to go on it and so we come in to figure out what kind of content or what makes sense on it. So we do a bit of both of them as well.
I would imagine the latter is maybe not problematic because it's work and it could still be interesting and all that, but to you you're confined to what you can do, right?
David Crumley: Oh yeah, exactly.
Your company's worked with a lot of very big global brands. Why do they come your way?
David Crumley: That's a good question. I think they are drawn to the work we do that I kinda mentioned earlier where we will work closely with them to distill down what the message and what the concept is.
I think we do a great job of integrating media and content into the architecture, to where it's not just screens on walls or big video wall, like you said, and for the clients that want to have that tight integration between architecture, technology, content, storytelling, I think that's where we stand out and our body of work and luckily that gravitates with a lot of clients, and when they come to us, that's what they want and that's what we do well. And so we're typically set up for success in that regard.
You mentioned storytelling. I found a lot of corporate lobby video walls and experiences or whatever, it's not so much storytelling, at least with the early ones, it has been more about just the wow factor!
David Crumley: Yeah, that's very true, like big, bold, fast content, just trying to do that initial kind of wow moment, like you said. And another approach we do is like a slow burn where there is a wow moment in the scale and the architectural elements, but we're not showing all our cards or all the things that technology can do. It's a bit restrained, both in the content and the tech and it allows the content to be a longer enjoyable thing, especially for employees that come into a lobby every day where they don't see everything it can do the first time and it just becomes repetitive.
Yeah, it's interesting when you say slow burn, because I often talk about how the wow factor jobs tend to have a best before date or an expiry date where it just becomes this very expensive, big piece of wallpaper. So, yeah, strategy is super important for that.
Let's talk about a project that got Hush on my radar, the global headquarters for Uber in San Francisco. Can you describe what was done there?
David Crumley: Yeah, so we were brought on very early. So it was one of those ideal situations that I mentioned, being a blank slate where the client knew they wanted to do something in their lobby for a new headquarters building built in San Francisco. It's a multi-building complex and there's one building called, MD2, that is the main entry point and it's an amazingly designed building that has this beautiful open lobby space and they knew they wanted to have some sort of interactive installation there. And we were brought in to do strategy and figure out what made sense.
We did a bunch of concepts, but then they would narrow down to two that we luckily had the time, budget to actually build out and flesh out both of those concepts with full renders, motion tests, some initial drawings to really flesh them out and all the different content modes, presented our way up through the organization and got buy off on one of those concepts, which is called, The Stream and that was ultimately what was built and the concept behind that on a super high level was just translating Uber's activities into beams of light and motion that would be constantly flowing through the lobby and resolving in a kind of high resolution canvas at one end of the lobby that could be used as a means of providing storytelling, not traditional content, but it would at least be a have the resolution and surface area to provide, video content and a mix of motion graphics and whatnot.
So we worked on that project for, I think the design was about three years, design, construction fabrication, so it was a long-term project and we installed it last year and it officially launched this year, and components of it are being scaled to other Uber lobbies throughout the world that we are in the process of doing now.
I believe at one end, there's a fine pitch LED video wall, if you want to call it a conventional video wall that you might find in a lobby, but a lot of what was done was custom fabricated LED almost like light tubes and things,right?
David Crumley: Yeah. So you're exactly right on the LED wall. It's a fairly standard LED wall but it's about eight feet wide, about nine feet tall. And, above it, and throughout the lobby are these custom tubes. We worked with a fabricator called Machine Histories down in Los Angeles. And again, going back to the privilege and opportunity to have a long design process. And the time to prototype, we worked with them to create two prototypes of these LED tubes and they are utilizing the Martin DC strip, which Hush has used on quite a few projects. And I'm a huge fan of it because it has long cable runs for the power supplies and 16 bit color depth, 60 frames per second,. So I knew I wanted to use that to begin with, but we had a challenge in that we needed to have the tubes as thin as possible, like everything in our architecture team wants to do as thin and sleek as possible, but we also needed to have the content viewable as close to 360 degrees around the tube so we spent a lot of time figuring out the right diffusion, the right placement of the LED, figuring out cable management actually almost productizing the tubes where we worked with the fabricator to make a custom PCB connector from tube to tube, so all the tubes can be easily removed and replaced for maintenance.
But in the end, we ended up having over 2200 of the Martin 15 millimeter strips used in these tubes and there's an overhead component that's suspended from the ceiling that makes this a tube array above your head, as you walk in through the lobby. And that's I think just under 90 feet long and at its highest point, it goes up to 25 feet.
The lobby has a single height area and then it opens up into a double or triple height space and the tube array actually bins up and goes up to the upper area over some suspended bridges. And then we also built a large wall behind the reception area using the same tubes that forms about a 22 foot high screen by 28 feet wide low-res with the same tubes, but it makes this huge statement that has a bit of transparency to see the stairs behind it in between the tubes and you can actually get behind the tubes and see the same content from both sides.
I don't know the budget or anything else, but I assume that if Uber really wanted to have high-res tubes or just make the whole thing high-res, they would have the dollars to do that, but they've gone this way. Why was it done that way? They just liked the idea of keeping it low-res or is it more visually interesting that way?
David Crumley: There are a few criteria. One, the visual aspect since the architecture of the lobby has lots of slats and repeating linear elements that the tube array compliments really well.
To your point, the LEDs are premium LEDs from Martin, the tubes are custom fabricated, there's a lot of work. So certainly that money could have been put toward more traditional LED displays or high-res, but having that kind of art more integrated into the architectural design as well as something that just looks different and unique to the space, and we also had another criteria to keep in mind is that this lobby is an unconditioned space and we could not add any additional cooling. So we were trying to keep heat energy consumption to a minimum within the space, which the LED strips are great for.
= So it's an interesting overall discipline that Hush has in that there are creative shops who produce the material for big LED video walls and corporate lobbies and so on and there are vendors who could come into that space to say, yeah, we can put a 1.2 pixel pitch wall right along the whole breadth of the lobby here and there, nut in order to really pull this together, you've got to be creative, you've got to have technology sourcing, and you've got to have a whole bunch of engineers in the middle to pull all this together right?
David Crumley: Yeah, and that's one of the great things about Hush is that we have architects on staff. We have more traditional art directors and designers, motion graphics designers, myself as the hardware background, creative technologists that do custom software dev. So running this actual experience as a custom piece of software that our team built in open frameworks and actually multiple applications written but that does a mix of rendered motion graphics as well as real time content that uses a whole interactive system that I haven't even touched on.
So yeah, I feel like to do what we do, you have to have all these different kinds of departments and disciplines under one roof.
Yeah, if you don't have that, can you really even be competitive in these kinds of jobs?
David Crumley: Yeah, it's difficult, because if we didn't have this mix, we e could potentially do the initial concept and then that would then have to be bid out to another firm to build and then potentially another firm to do the software. It becomes costly, I would imagine the cost would then be probably double what it was.
Yeah, and finger pointing!
David Crumley: Oh yeah, exactly. One throat to choke is a good and bad thing, but depending on whose throat it is.
You referenced content, I'm curious, when you talk about being able to visualize Uber's activities, what's going on there, are you tapping into an API that has analytics that are showing how many drivers are on the road right now or whatever?
David Crumley: We sourced data but there's no live data feeding it, which we do a mix of content for our projects. Sometimes it's the live API, sometimes it's an existing data set. And with this, we use existing info to build our content around. We do have some things, future content modes we're working on, that'll pull more live data.
But the real time component of this, the interactive mode that I mentioned, is using an array of nine depth cameras that are in that overhead array, and as guests walk under that array, you are disrupting the stream of information flowing above you in the tubes. So you can see ripples within the content, and then as you approach the high-res screen at the end of the lobby, once you reach a certain threshold, it reveals a curtain animation that reveals a more traditional video content on the high-res wall. So you can actually trigger that content.
I recognize that you're on the technical side of this, but I have to ask this anyways, experience is a really soft squishy kind of term. How does it get defined with these kinds of projects and how do you measure and know when you know something is working, that it is delivering an experience?
David Crumley: Oh, that is a great question. I'll take a beat to think about that. Because I'm very much on the technical side and not on the more feelings side of it, for lack of a better term. But I think I personally look into social media posts or seeing what people's reactions to the work we do and how photos are being shared and how they're connecting to it and we, as a company, do analytics in terms of number of guests, their engagement time,what videos they trigger, dwell time, all those things, which we turn into actual intellectual reports for our clients to determine that.
But I think it's more the kind of personal anecdotes that I find appealing, just how they talk about it's this amazing experience they haven't seen before, or even this particular experience is viewable through the storefront windows and this building is across the street from the arena where the Golden State Warriors play, so it gets a lot of pedestrian traffic. So you see a lot of photos of other people talking about it as well.
With the pandemic, we've had this shift of head offices being the Mecca, so to speak, and that's where you go. Too many companies have people working from home. I'm curious if that has changed the business, changed the way you have to approach corporate spaces and are companies scaling back, or are they seeing this stuff as even more important?
David Crumley: I think it's the latter. We were worried at first, a couple of years ago when everything happened. But then as we talked with clients and saw briefs coming out and seeing articles and blog posts from industry thought leaders, we came to realize and also we agree with the stance that things like what we do and Uber’s lobby and other headquarters, I think helped make the office a more appealing place to visit, because it's to actually get employees there especially with content that is refreshed or ever-changing, or that's data-driven because it's something special to see and interact with.
And so luckily, since the pandemic started, the work we've been doing hasn't slowed down and we're still seeing briefs and clients wanting to do these types of engaging experiences in their offices, public space.
You mentioned content being refreshed, is that something that you have to really push on clients to understand that guys lighting this up is a great first step, but it's a first step you need to budget and think about what's on this display and what's in this experience for, as you said earlier, 5-10 years?
David Crumley: Yeah, it's extremely important. I think anything we do, we prepare a content matrix and we'll propose evergreen content that can live throughout the life of experience and then also content that needs to be refreshed or changed or in the case of it being data-driven or built off on a data set, the frequency of that. So there's kind of incentive to keep it fresh, like you said, and for a lot of our projects, after we deploy, we'll build in a certain amount of time for content updates over the next year, two years. That's part of the scope so we can help make sure that happens because it is easy a lot of times for it to be up, everyone's happy and then forget about it.
Even though we build our own content management system and adjust it to each project, and even though it's user-friendly to use and built to update, it's not always used by every client, obviously. So it's extremely important to do that and continue to update the content like you said.
What do you do in cases where you have a corporate client or potential client who already has a corporate digital signage network with standard flat panel screens in the sales area, maybe other areas as well and they're using already have a CMS of some kind that they use and they have a certain way of doing things and you're trying to plug into that, does it become problematic?
David Crumley: It's tricky, I'm not going to lie. And we always get the requests like why can't you just use the CMS we have? And it's possible, it's not easy and by the time you factor in all the customization that's required, it’s typically more expensive than just using the custom CMS that we built and then editing it or adding features or modules to do everything that's needed.
So we almost always will use our core CMS and in the scenario that you said that's come up recently and we're actually building a feature for our CSM so as you use it to create content that's real time and targeting our custom displays, it will actually render out that content in a video format. And so the company can use their existing digital signage system to use that video as well so the content can be shared across.
So you would have a reverse API, so you could push stuff out to other systems?
David Crumley: Yeah, exactly.
Is there technology, let's say super fine micro LEDs or the LEDs you're starting to see embedded in architectural glass that you're waiting on it to mature and then use?
David Crumley: Yeah, I feel like over the last two-three years, so many projects or clients or partners have recommended doing LED glass or the LED film that can be applied on glass and it's getting close. We haven't used it yet because it just hasn't been the right resolution or the right brightness or for a myriad of reasons. I am certainly excited by it, but I'm not quite there yet to be able to spec it.
And even the OLED displays, we haven't really spec’d those yet for the same reason, for content burn-in and just how they work, but I think this year, I'm starting to feel more comfortable with those and we're starting to include those in some of our designs and proposals.
And yeah, the micro LED, I'm extremely interested in. We had a project last year where I tried to use it, which didn't go super well because the product just didn't live up to expectations. But I think again in another year, I think we'll be close if they can get the kind of coating process down to be consistent across it. But I have not seen that yet.
You're using a lot of LEDs. Do you have to worry about proximity to people? Are you encouraged by the increasing number of manufacturers who are doing these kinds of coated modules?
David Crumley: Yeah, I'm interested in the coating. That's what I was referring to, not being consistent across the panels yet to where we had a project where it had the coating, but then it almost looked like you painted a brick wall with different shades of paint.
Since we tie it so tightly into the architecture, we try to incorporate ways to naturally keep people away. So like for Uber, for example, we have a nice trim piece around and then the interactive spot for you to deal with it is 10 feet away and, it's a natural stopping point and so it's just using the human nature of not getting too close to a big, bright wall to help protect it.
Do all the business systems now seem to be a lot more secure, but open through APIs. Are you able to get out a lot more data?
David Crumley: Yes and no. It's still a little tricky in most regards to get truly live data from a lot of companies for exactly what you said for security, privacy reasons. And then just making sure that data format of the API doesn't change drastically, that's been a big challenge for us. So typically, we'll use live data, but it'll be in a way that can be formatted or have an intermediary step to then make sure it continues to work with our software app.
Through these last two years I would imagine the standard practice when you're working on a project like the Uber one that started well before the pandemic, you would go onsite, you'd be in San Francisco for two weeks or whatever, figuring all this out.
Have various Hush people had to mostly do this remotely?
David Crumley: It was a mix. We started the design process before and then we did a few site visits before everything shut down. And then we luckily did the prototype review the year before, I guess it was 2019 that we did a lot of the prototype reviews, both in LA and our studio in New York with the client and then during construction, we were not on site until it was essentially installed or close to being installed. And we had a small team that went during the tube and hardware installation. So myself included, I was on site for a couple of weeks at, but it was still a very small team and limited, and we had to do multiple trips spread out over a long period of time, but it was close to normal, but it was still very hard and tricky and you never knew who was actually gonna be able to be on site because of COVID protocol and which team you're going to be working with.
Last question, if you can even answer this, what is Hush working on that you're allowed to talk about?
David Crumley: That's a good question. I mentioned we're scaling the streamed experience that we did for Uber's headquarters to multiple locations and that's wrapping up now for the main locations and it doesn't have the tubes, it has various just direct view LED walls, but what's nice about that is they're each a little different because they're all tied into the architecture of the space. One is a fairly traditional, single flat wall, but another one has a mitered 90 degree corner and is a very long canvas, I think the resolution's a little less than 7,000 by 900 pixels, so ultra wide format. And then another one has a radius corner around the wall because that's how the architecture was. And it was nice on our end that we developed the software to smartly scale the content across all these different aspect ratios, sso that's deploying now.
We have a few projects for some financial institutions that are launching now that one of those uses LED strips, this time from S&A, along with a direct view LED wall that is incorporated into these kinds of fins that does this kind of reflected light back on the wall behind it, which is really nice. Hopefully I will be able to talk about it more in another month or two. And then, we have some other things early in the concept phase, but probably not allowed to talk about any of that.
Yeah, I would imagine when you talk about account wins and all that, in certain respects, it’s a much bigger win when you also have the contract about being allowed to talk about it until it’s done.
David Crumley: Exactly. And that's, going back to the Uber project, it's nice that it's ground level, public accessible. So many of our projects are on the top floor that you have to get through security or be invited to see. So, we love the ones that are a little more public facing.
Yeah, me too. There's been a few times when, like the LAX airport with the international terminal with all the work Moment Factory did there, I wanted to see it, but I had to go through post security on a flight to Japan or something if I wanted to see it. So never have.
David Crumley: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I've been to LAX so many times. I've not been in the Bradley terminal to see it. And then one time I tried to get to it and had a long layover and tried to connect my terminal to it and it was an exercise in futility and I could never get there.
All right, David, thank you so much for spending some time with me.
David Crumley: It was my pleasure.
Wednesday Feb 02, 2022
Dave Ianonne, First Arriving
Wednesday Feb 02, 2022
Wednesday Feb 02, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
I'm a big fan of digital signage companies that identify a niche and go after it with a lot of focus - in product development, sales and service delivery. A lot of companies are generalists who broadly do digital signage, which I think can be deadly ... because you're then competing mainly on price and UX.
That's why I really like a company called First Arriving, that is very specifically in the business of providing digital signage solutions to first responder departments and other local government agencies that have a lot of moving parts in their operations.
The Richmond, Virginia company started out doing marketing services, and kind of fell into adding on digital signage about five years ago. Now it's the main focus, and First Arriving's products and services are widely used by the people who run towards emergencies in the U.S. and Canada.
This is not just HR stuff on screens in the break and meeting rooms of fire halls and other venues. The company has scores of integrations with the other technology and information platforms that feed into first responder operations, creating visual dashboards that give crews steadily updated, on-point situational awareness to 911 emergencies.
I also like that these guys are not just selling into that vertical market. Many of the staffers at the company are former first responders, or still active as volunteers. I spoke with Dave Ianonne, who founded the company and was himself, for many years, a volunteer firefighter.
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TRANSCRIPT
Dave, thank you for joining me. Can you summarize what First Arriving does and offers?
Dave Ianonne: First Arriving is a company that started as a marketing company, targeting public safety primarily, and a few other secondary markets, and then we moved into digital signage by chance back in 2018 with an acquisition and that is by far our fastest growing part of our company, and then we're building products off of that digital signage concept in the future.
But essentially we're a marketing and technology company, now more of a technology company more focused on public safety, and rapidly expanding into local government as well.
Okay. So based on what I've seen on your website, the marketing stuff you were doing, websites and all that stuff was for first responders?
Dave Ianonne: We do a variety of things, websites, we manage a few different associations. We do recruitment videos for volunteer fire departments across the country, typically through federal funded grant programs, so a wide variety of typical things which an association management or marketing agency would do, and the websites tie the technology piece well as a SaaS based business.
How did you get into this?
Dave Ianonne: I was a firefighter and a journalist and I combined those two things when the internet started, to launch a website called firehouse.com, which was pre-Facebook back in the day, was the largest website for firefighters in America, and then we built some websites for law enforcement, EMS and security and other industries.
So that's how I got started, and we built a very large social network for firefighters in the mid 2000s, and that kind of spun into starting to do services directly for agencies as opposed to being a media company. So we saw the writing on the wall with the media space specifically, especially large magazines and large websites when Facebook came along. So we started doing direct delivery of services to manufacturers, associations, and so forth.
Interesting. So you've evolved as technology has evolved?
Dave Ianonne: Exactly. Yep, I couldn't tell you what digital signage was five years ago other than seeing it at McDonald's.
I'm a big fan of what you do because I consult companies and write about them and I get a lot of material from software companies saying, here's our stuff and here’s what we do. I look at it and say, I'm sure their technology is fine, but it's a very general offer and they’re basically saying, they do digital signage and I always encourage companies to find a niche, and mine the hell out of it and be the guys in that niche.
You guys are the poster child for that more than anybody else. If I was a first responder department of some kind, I would automatically go to you because this is what you do. This is what you know, it's not like one of the things you do.
Dave Ianonne: We definitely feel like we've got public safety and local government as a real niche, and we're starting to get into other areas. We’re in a gold mine in Nevada, for example, we're in a Disneyworld's local government, so we have a variety of different tactics and markets to serve, but we're not trying to be a consumer focused WYSIWYG based digital signage platform.
Our platform is the opposite of that, it's all custom. We give a lot of tools to our customers to update their content from very simple ways like Google Slides and Google Sheets to more advanced, direct messaging, broadcast alerts down to the individual dashboard itself, the individual digital signage itself all the way globally. So we're constantly unleashing tools to give people access, to manage their content, and we have a lot of content with over a hundred integrations that feeds in automatically. So a typical fire department might be using five or six or more different technology platforms and we're able to give them a quick dashboard view of the key metrics from all of those platforms in one dashboard.
So you're pretty much staying in your lane, so to speak, and if a regional QSR came along and said, “Hey, could you do digital signage for us?” You'd probably be saying, “Yeah, maybe we could, but it's not our thing”?
Dave Ianonne: It depends on what their need is. But yeah we're trying to stay in our lane and really be focused on the B2B, local government, public safety space, and anything that kind of an offshoot of that. So there's security and construction safety, and a lot of different options that'll keep us busy for a long time.
What's your installed footprint?
Dave Ianonne: In terms of number of customers, I think we have almost 700 customers, about 3000 digital signage across the country and a couple in Canada as well. So the average customer has four or five dashboards in their station, offices, the chief's office and some in the field on tablets and desktops. So we do serve tablets and desktops as well.
During the peak of early COVID, we gave our customers a free desktop license across the board to put in their emergency operations center so they could see what the fire departments were doing on the streets, pulling other dashboards from the local government that could all be viewed in one single place. So we probably rolled another 500-600 during the peak of COVID back in 2020 but as a courtesy, we didn't charge customers for that at all.
I'm guessing at that number, there's still a lot of opportunity out there to sell this into, god knows how many volunteer fire departments and formalized fire departments are out there in North America alone?
Dave Ianonne: Yeah, there are 3000 fire departments. There are just as many police departments. There are some 80,000 local governments. So we're currently pacing for that number to double this year, and let it double again next year.
We really didn't have a full-time marketing staff and sales staff until early last year, it was a bootstrap kind of operation. We acquired this on a shoestring budget from a furniture digital signage company that had built this as a pet project of one guy who now works for us. They built it and had some clients, they've had it for a couple of years actually. They weren't familiar with the public safety market, even though they had quite a few customers and we started reselling it and then, somehow three months later, I owned it. It was very rapid. I actually found this platform because I was looking for a digital signage company for my own fire department to just simply put photos of new members on a TV screen. That's how I found this platform, and then just business wise, we happened to acquire it a few months later.
So you've got an immense amount of potential growth you could see?
Dave Ianonne: Oh yeah, for sure. We expect to be at 10,000 screens by the end of next year, and as you scale up into local government, we have quite a few local governments and the fire department might have 10, the police department might have 10, the entire local government might have 50 or 60 in parks, departments, courts, and a wide variety of different organizations and at the core of it, they’re all using this because all other platforms get ignored. Emails get ignored, texts get ignored.
You come in for duty, you go to the TV screen and you know exactly what's going on, who's working, what events are today, what vehicles are in and out of service, what the weather is and it constantly gets updated. Chiefs can push out video messages or text messages to all the screens or to a single work site. So we try to give people access to as much information as it makes sense to digest without overwhelming them.
So if I'm in a typical firehouse or EMS station or whatever those are called, what's the mix of things that you're going to see on a screen or sets of screens?
Dave Ianonne: The core of it is scheduling, so who's on duty or who's coming in for duty, weather, live radar, we offer folks what events are coming up, what their response times are, so they do metrics against each other in terms of how quickly they get out the door and what their typical turnout times are. Quite a few departments have a live feed of their unit status so they can see other stations, are they on a call? Does that mean I'm more likely to get a call for instance, and then certainly when a call comes out, it pops up on the screen. It shows a map via a platform called Esri, which is a big maps and data player in local government.
So it displays the running round and also hydrants nearby. So they get a quick glance of where they're going. It shows Google street view. So it gives them kind of a situational awareness of where they're going into or what the details are. So it's a wide variety.
We have people use it for everything from, where they need to be event wise, to who owes what to the house fund, which is the daily meals that people do in a firehouse. So they track pretty much everything. They get very creative in how they use it for sure.
You talked about a hundred plus data integrations. Having those integrations would be absolutely essential because nobody's got time to just sit down and blink away at a browser or an update for this stuff, it's like when things are happening, they're happening, right?
Dave Ianonne: Exactly. It's real time. Some of our integrations are every couple seconds, especially when you get to the volume of calls and things like that. We take data just about any way you can possibly imagine from real-time API to nightly update it, CSV files. So if it's data, our general mantra is we can take it and do something with it.
There's a lot of investment and time to figure it all out, right?
Dave Ianonne: Oh yeah. We have a fairly significant development team in-house as well as some South American developers that we have. So it's a constant, not just maintaining the integrations, but building new ones. We're constantly adding new integrations as we onboard new customers. They actually help with those relationships.
We have a lot of customers who go to our integration partners and demand more of them to put up on our screen. So that's very helpful.
Now, there would be other software companies that were feeding different functionality into these kinds of operations, are they ever contemplating while we could do digital signage too? Or do they do what you do and stay in your lane?
Dave Ianonne: I'm sure that some of them could.
We have some dispatch platforms that we work with where their dashboard doesn't offer the same number of features we do, and when the call comes out, their dashboard takes over our dashboard while the call is dispatched. So we have some unique relationships with that. But certainly if there's ever going to be a competitor, it's going to be there's all kinds of scheduling platforms and things like that but our view is we're Switzerland. We want to take in everybody.
So we have probably 25 different scheduling platforms, and if one of those scheduling platforms decided, “Hey, I want to do a dashboard”, they probably would not let the other 24 in. It gives us kind of an advantage at that point. So if the fire department is using that platform now, but moves to a different one in two years, they don't need to lose their dashboard.
You mentioned you're a firefighter, I believe you're a volunteer firefighter?
Dave Ianonne: I was, yeah, I'm still involved administratively, but for the most part, I was active for about 25 years as a firefighter.
Don't want to climb up ladders anymore?
Dave Ianonne: No, in my youth, that was better.
I find that interesting in that in most cases, I would say in digital signage, the companies are run and the technology sold by people who maybe know an industry, but are not from that industry, like they sell into retail, they sell into QSR or whatever, but they've never been an operator, and maybe they made fries when they were teenagers or something like that, but you expressly understand the space and I get a sense from your staffing profiles that you have any number of people who are either still active in first responder communities in some way, or definitely know it.
Dave Ianonne: A lot of staff are, I am. My business partner is. On the marketing side, we have quite a few people who do that. Even on the technology side, we have a sales rep who's married to a firefighter. We have multiple SMEs who are firefighters. So being able to walk the talk is a big piece of that, and as we grow passing that education onto our new sales teams and marketing folks who don't come from that industry, because it is a very specific niche, so when the chief is talking to somebody, they want to know that person understands the fire service, and isn't just trying to sell them some random technology. They want to hear the use cases and understand how it's going to benefit them from a communications standpoint.
And I'm going to assume the sales cycle is fairly long for some of these just simply because they're government?
Dave Ianonne: It's the government, but it's also individual fire departments. It's volunteer fire departments.
I like to say we have the only SaaS based product that people can see, that's the big benefit of digital signage. We have customers who come and say, “Hey, I saw this other fire department. I don't need a demo. I need five of them”, and the sale is done, and certainly we have very large customers in Fort Worth, San Bernardino, California, where it might be a two year sales cycle because it's a significant capital expense, not just all the license fees and the hardware, but also they're going to buy the TVs, they have to get them set up, they have to get the infrastructure involved. So it's really all over the place.
And there's RFPs and everything else in the larger ones too, right?
Dave Ianonne: Some. We're able to sole source for a lot of reasons because in a lot of ways we have so many integrations and no one really has that number of integrations. So we're fortunate, at least for now, not to have a big competitor who can come in the door and say, “I can do A, B and F and X”, and that's what that department needs. So we sole source quite a bit.
We are starting to see more and more RFPs, especially on the local government side, certainly that were involved, but I'd say RFPs are maybe 10-15%.
And what's the breadth of the services that you offer in the context of digital signage and kind of related to it?
Dave Ianonne: Digital signage is the big thing. So certainly the typical big screen TV, we deploy the equivalent of what shows up with a big screen TV to desktops and tablets. So we have a Chrome based platform that can deploy those devices, whether it's a PC, Mac, either way.
We're starting to build some apps and some internet style products that feed the same information, but there is a different use case where you can navigate it more easily and get it pushed to phones and upload documents and do some things that are beyond just pushing information, but letting them access information directly. Because again, it's all the same challenges.
“I want a single source of truth for all my information”, but the average firefighter does not need the 10,000 foot view. They just need to see what's in their face at that moment, so things like, “I need a document. I need to see what the weather is. I need to see who's showing up tomorrow.”
So do you have a professional services kind of thing where you look at the systems that a department works with and match that up with the APIs that you already have and build a show so to speak for them? Or do you say, “Here are the tools, you go at it”?
Dave Ianonne: We build everything. So when it comes to the APIs and things like that's all on us. We don't really charge our customers for APIs, unless it's something that only they would only use. So if someone has an existing platform and they want to add new functionality that no other department is using, if we feel there's a use case for other departments, we just roll with it.
So they might want to display scheduling or their turnout time data a different way or squeeze the integration partner for some new data points that we couldn't otherwise get, and we share that around and do a good job of getting that out there to all of our other customers.
What about creating content, you do that?
Dave Ianonne: We don't really create content, certainly on the marketing side we do, but on the technology side, it's more about using their information. We certainly have tools and our expanding tools where we can push information at the zip code or state or national level, so national emergencies and written regional emergencies. That's something that we're rolling out soon in terms of us pushing content to them.
What do you tell customers about what difference this will make for them, what this is going to do for them if they’re skeptical?
Dave Ianonne: Streamlining will save them a whole rack load of time communicating. So people ignore emails, people ignore texts, or there's just too much information put at them through too many platforms when really they just need to know this little nugget and this little nugget from those two platforms. So really it's about just the mission critical information that they need to know right now to do their jobs without having to read a five page document, they missed an email. They were off for a week, so they missed a memo or they missed a meeting and they have no idea what's happening with the different equipment or what's the new standard operating procedure, especially during COVID, where things are changing almost all the time in terms of SOPs and procedures and all those types of things.
So that's our mantra and that's the challenge, whether it is local government or police or fire, the people who find us, everyone's challenges are exactly the same, people just aren't seeing that the critical information I need them to know, and in a lot of cases, people will put the top five things from a standard operating procedure in a simple Google Slide and put a QR code right on the screen that says, take this photo to download the rest of this document, but here's the things you must know, and it's right there in their face with a photo, with whatever graphic, et cetera.
Is there any monetization of these screens in terms of just in the same way all these integration partners are selling stuff into firehouses, I assume there are specialty companies that make equipment and all the way up to vehicles, co they advertise on these networks?
Dave Ianonne: No, and we don't really push that. Certainly we've had people inquire about that and manufacturing facilities have asked us about that, but I think we generally try to stay away from that because the departments are paying us to push their information to their folks, and it's not like someone's gonna stand there and watch a commercial, especially because the screens are in a bunk area or they're in the kitchen or they're in the day room where someone's already watching TV, so the noise would just be noise for lack of a better explanation.
Yeah. I wonder though, and I don't know much of anything about fire departments and so on, but I assume a fire truck costs a couple of bucks and the manufacturers of those things could sponsor screens going into firewalls and everything if they wanted to?
Dave Ianonne: Yep. We've explored that, especially with our integration partners for packaging it in there, essentially sponsoring it for them or just making it part of their existing relationship with them. But it's not something we've significantly focused on just yet.
Where do you think you're at in terms of the breadth of services that you provide? Are you still scratching the surface or are you pretty much covering things off at this point?
Dave Ianonne: No, I think we're still scratching the surface, especially as we talk about expanding the digital signage concept and information into other platforms like desktop and an app beyond what we're doing right now.
Local government could be a market that's 10 times the scale for us and a whole new slate of integrations, and more importantly, how those inter agencies talk to each other. So pushing data from the fire department to the city council, so the city council office can show how many calls the fire department ran yesterday, how much overtime they used, those sorts of things.
So it's about pushing information and I think long term intaking the information and then splitting it up, and parsing it out as a data aggregation platform.
Yeah. I'm just going to look outside my window and we've got a nor'easter that's coming through and there are trucks out there salting the roads and sanding, and then there'll be plowing and the whole nine yards and that's a whole other kind of first responders, but it's same kind of thing, right?
Dave Ianonne: Exactly. Where to plow, what roads need to be plowed. The dispatcher can get real time information via the AVL in the trucks, in terms of where their trucks are located. Some AVL platforms have that, some don't. So real-time status of what vehicles are broken down, what equipment is, etc.
Do you have software companies as competitors or do you pretty much have the market on your own?
Dave Ianonne: If you Google fire department digital signage or police digital signage, there are certainly regular digital signage companies that are more consumer based who have a page in their website targeting those markets. So they're certainly picking up business by chance and we find we've picked up probably a dozen customers in the last year who were using one of those standard digital signage platforms and just couldn't get the flexibility they wanted, whether it was integrations or data aggregation and so forth.
So they switched to us and left those companies because those companies aren't going to build the APIs or they'll have the API tools that a third party like the fire department could do, but most of these fire departments don't have the bandwidth to go build a custom API. Some certainly do, and they very well may, but not the vast majority.
Yeah. You could do a basic communications channel and, with HR messaging and staffing messaging and that sort of thing, but what you're describing, what you guys do is like several many notches above that.
Dave Ianonne: Yeah. You'll get an IT guy at a guy or gal at a fire department who's really gung ho and says, “Hey, I can just build this myself.” But again, that's a very rare instance, and they get something super custom but not nearly at the same speed, where they want to add another platform. If that person leaves there, they're stuck.
Yep. That's the age old story of digital signage. Somebody says, “I could do this, we don't have to spend money on it” and that'll get them started, but it's not sustainable.
Dave Ianonne: Yep, and we don't pitch ourselves as some high dollar platform. So they're not paying thousands of dollars per screen per year, despite that's the value they're getting.
Our pricing is probably similar to most digital signage platforms and our customers are very likely to last a very long time and not switch between platforms and not leave us once they realize the value. The only handful of times that someone's left us, were customers from over five years, even before we acquired it, probably six or seven years where a chief changed and he just didn't like it for some reason, or they got it and they're not maximizing the use of it so they don't get the value, no matter how much we tell them all the different ways to use it and throw case studies at them and have all these departments singing our praises.
If they don't engage with the content and update it frequently, no matter if it's us or anybody else, they're not going to find it useful,
When it comes to the volunteer departments, is it a challenge for them to find a budget?
Dave Ianonne: No, we are at a pretty good price point. So the volunteer fire departments that have one or two stations, that's not really our main focus. We certainly have quite a few of them, but we're really going after the departments that want to have 5-7, they might have two or more stations so that's our real wheelhouse, and then we're starting to get into much larger agencies, like I said earlier, Fort Worth, Palm Beach County, San Bernardino county, we're in dozens of fire stations, hundreds of boards, just for that one county.
All right. This is great. I'm a big fan of what you guys do. I love anybody who's got a really pure focus as opposed to, “We do digital signage. What do you need?”
Dave Ianonne: I appreciate that. Like I said, five years ago, the only digital signage I knew was at McDonald's so if you hadn't told me five years ago, I probably would just would've laughed and been like, what?
But then once we started getting into it and realized that the challenges we were solving for people and saving so much time in communication, I think we got really excited and this is our big area of focus and we've got a whole lot of investors who are interested in helping us accelerate the needle.
Yeah, for sure. All right. Dave, thank you very much.
Wednesday Dec 15, 2021
Henrik Andersson, Instorescreen
Wednesday Dec 15, 2021
Wednesday Dec 15, 2021
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Retail experts have long spoke about the so-called zero moment of truth - that time in bricks and mortar stores when shoppers are in the aisles and making the decision about which product they're going to pull off the shelf and put in their basket.
Getting digital signage into stores, with screens doing messaging when people are in a shopping mindset, has always been a big business driver. But putting screens right in the aisles has been a challenge for a few reasons - the main one being how conventional screens would eat up shelf space.
Display manufacturing has advanced to a level now that it's possible to put strips of high resolution LCDs right on the shelf edge without getting in the way - introducing color, motion and the possibility for things like dynamic pricing.
But the solution is not just the display. There has to be a whole system behind it, and that's where Instorescreen comes in. The Hong Kong-based company has a solution that actually meets the scaled needs of retailers and brands, so that you can do things like drive as many as 96 ribbon displays - with different content to each - off a single Lenovo PC.
I had a good chat with Henrik Andersson, the CEO of Instorescreen.
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TRANSCRIPT
Henrik, Thank you for joining me. We've spoken a few times in the past, but for those who are not familiar with Instorescreen, can you run through what your company does? What are you all about?
Henrik Andersson: Yeah, So Instorescreen is a manufacturer of hardware, mostly monitors and technology for digital signage. We are 20 years old and today, an exclusive partner of Lenovo.
It's a curious set up in that you're based in Florida, but you're Danish, I believe, and a lot of the company is over in Hong Kong, is that right?
Henrik Andersson: Yeah. So our headquarters is in Hong Kong, and I'm very close to Danish. I'm Swedish...
Ah okay, you're Nordic.
Henrik Andersson: Yeah. So our headquarters is in Hong Kong. We have three manufacturing sites in China and yeah, that's what we are doing today.
And is it privately held or are you publicly traded?
Henrik Andersson: We are privately owned.
One of the things that has struck me about what you do versu and what's historically happened in retail digital signage is, I would say the different waves of signage and retail have involved putting conventional flat panel displays all over stores, which was then followed by doing video walls instead hiving them all together, and the third wave seems to be now that the technology is there to try to put displays right in the aisles, right where consumers are making decisions, as opposed to just being part of the overall look and feel of a store.
Is that kind of why you went on it the way you did?
Henrik Andersson: Yeah. So the story is that Instorescreen is created to be a supplier that works outside in, instead of inside out. If I explain that very quickly, we come from true OEM manufacturing and we have been listening to the customer to see how we can make the right product for the customer in the right location? That has been the key.
Inside out is more like if the customer calls in and you show them what you have, and we didn't want to work that way. So what we have done is that we have created different solutions that are OEM based, but we have based them on a whole, like retail. So for retail, we have been looking to see how we can replace or how we can add screens and technology into the retail environment. Based on that, we created shelf edge displays. We worked through the biggest manufacturer of LCD screens, and we have been working very closely with them to create the right size, length and height.
When that's finished, we have a solution that could be on the shelf edge. It can be on the header and so on. The second step here is how are we going to drive them? What is the most intelligent way to drive them? And that's where it comes in with our solution, where we call it inDAISY, it's a data chain technology where we can utilize one 4K computer running up to 96 screens. Second generation that's coming next year, we'll also be able to push power through to the DAISY chain. So we will be able to push both power and data through one single cable.
This is the partnership with Lenovo, and with the DAISY chaining, is it one signal to as many as 96 displays, or could it be addressable, like it could be 96 different signals?
Henrik Andersson: It’s 96 different signals. So each screen will get an ID, and based on that ID, you can have different content, so each screen would have different content.
This wouldn't be 96 pieces of video, though, right? It would be images?
Henrik Andersson: No, 96 pieces of video.
Wow. That would take a pretty serious graphics card.
Henrik Andersson: No, not really. Our data chain works as the way that you think about a canvas that's 4K and each ID is taking a spot from that canvas. So for example, if you have the header display that’s 1920x360, the first header takes location 0 to 1920 down to 360, that's ID #1, ID #2 starts besides that and takes from 1920 to 3840 and down to 360, and then the shelf chassis starts below and they are taking left-right, left-right, and then by utilizing the Lenovo computer, we could have four 4K outputs so we can get four times that resolution.
So with retail in the many years that I've been involved in this space, one of the challenges has been trying to get displays right into where the merchandise is.
But the problem has always been that if you put a conventional flat panel display into that space, it's going to eat up merchandising space. It's gonna eat up the shelf space that you want for talking about the product. One of the big drivers here I assume is that this takes up space. That it's a way to not take away from that merchandising space and stockings space?
Henrik Andersson: Yeah, we have been working very closely with the manufacturer of the gondolas to figure out how much space we can take without taking up on any merchandise. So we are taking up about one and a half inch to 1.7 inch in height, and then we are following the two foot three foot and four foot lengths.
And this is using LCDs?
Henrik Andersson: That's LCD, yes.
And I gather that the reason you're able to do this now is you can now natively manufacture LCDs at these sizes?
Henrik Andersson: Yeah, we don't use any resize. When we started this project like eight years ago, we used a resize to test and see how we can get it to look and how it should work.
Today, we are natively producing them. There are benefits of natively producing them. One of the biggest is that you get the same every time. So if you put like 10, 15 of these side by side, you want all of them to have the same backlight. You want all of them to have the same color, of those kinds of features.
And the biggest one is probably to get down in price. By utilizing a cut down like a 55 inch down to be making one shelf edge. That's a lot of waste doing that by using native screens. If the volume reaches X, we will be able to be very competitive. We are calculating, we should be able to go way below.
A hundred bucks a foot.
Yeah, because I remember when these thin ribbon LCDs first came out and I would see them at places like NRF, about six, seven years ago, the salespeople work in the boosts wouldn't even tell me a number in terms of price, because I gather it was ghastly, but that's changed.
Henrik Andersson: That's changed a lot. For example, we could have a two foot display today for around 200 bucks.
And who is putting that in? Is it the brands or is it the retail owners?
Henrik Andersson: It's both. It's both. It has been the latest 4-5 years. It's a lot of brands. It's getting more retailers, and today, it's mostly retailers on end caps.
And do they see this as part of their business model, their merchandising model that they'll sell end caps and now it's digital.
Henrik Andersson: Yes, and that's information they see that they have, by just using packages, they cannot inform the customer of what the product is doing by utilizing video screens. Now they can inform me what's the benefit with this product and that product they can also do in different flavors.
They can tease you by looking at how good this is with their eyes and so on, and one of the key things everybody's talking about right now is dynamic pricing. You will be able to change the pricing very quickly. You're able to change products on the shelves. You will be able to Collect external data.
For example, if we say which employee has allergy medicine and so on, we can publish the pollen count onto the shelf fetch in real time.
Are these replacements potentially for electronic shelf labels or are they kind of complimentary to them?
Henrik Andersson: Today, it's a compliment. I can say that mostly due to the price, but as the price is still getting lower, I think they are direct competition to the ESLs, I think they are, because you have more dynamics on an LCD screen than you have on an ESL.
With an ESL, you can do the price and maybe a barcode or something that's maybe two or three colors. That's about it, right?
Henrik Andersson: Yeah, here you can have a full color spectrum. You can have movies, you can have touch screen functionality. There are so many things you can do. We can integrate the sensors so you can scan your membership and get your special price.
There's so many things that we are investigating right now. What's going to be next?
And doing that is contingent at all on the kind of back office systems that our retailer has as to whether they have the data and everything to make that?
Henrik Andersson: Here is where we work very closely with a lot of partners that build softwares.
So we worked with, for example, Microsoft, Oracle, all of them where they have the backend for the retailers, and then we were working with the digital signage companies, that’s how we can get data between those two systems.
Is that a challenge at all in terms of working with the different digital signage, CMS options out there that they need to have a platform that can work with this high-end Lenovo box?
Henrik Andersson: No, it's not a super high end Lenovo box. It's a computer called P 340. That has an Nvidia board inside before 4K output. So a signage software will work with our solution and most of the times when we talked to a signage company, they found this complicated and it took them 15 minutes and said, oh, this is so easy.
So yes the Daisy chain and all of that kind of feature sounds very advanced, but we made all the technology on our board. So the digital signage company doesn't have to think. That technology, they just have to follow publish on our full 4K cameras.
I guess they would have to, depending on how their CMS works, maybe introduce some new resolutions that they didn't previously have, like 1920x360 or whatever you were describing?
Henrik Andersson: No, they publish 3840x2160 full 4K resolution, and then our data chain board based on the IDs are taking spots from those full 4K canvas.
What about LEDs? I have seen some manufacturers at trade shows again, who were showing shelf edge strips that were based on fine pitch LED. Is that a consideration or not the right way to go on this?
Henrik Andersson: The problem we have with the LEDs is the heat. We have been investigating working with LEDs because there are benefits where you can easily make new sizes. We have to make a tool and new tooling costs about $1.5 to $2 million to make a new size.
So if someone says, we don't want 3 feet, we want 3.2 feet. That's a very expensive thing. But in LEDs, it's doable. But we have power usage, it's almost 10 times more, and then we have the heat. So if we take a whole retail store and we put these LEDs out, it could be that you have to start getting more air conditioning units, basically.
I never thought of it that way. Certainly think of all those LEDs, even though we all think of LEDs as being incredibly energy efficient, if you're using thousands of them in a whole store, maybe millions of them, and that's just a lot of little lights to feed.
Henrik Andersson: They're made for outside. You could use them if you could spot the installations. I think they're fine. LCD is more energy efficient.
The problem that I've seen with the LED versions is simply that to get the resolution, the granularity of the information down to a level that is legible like an ESL or an LCD is you're talking very fine pitch and it adds to the cost.
Henrik Andersson: You cannot do it. So if we look at our header display, for example, it's 1920x360 in resolution. That means we have 360 pixels in height. If you go to an LED, you're down to maybe 30- 40 pixels.
And the net result of that is the visuals just don't look very good, vright?
Henrik Andersson: Yeah, I guess they will have a resolution of 150x30 or 150x40. Right now, our is 1920x360.
So it looks like a 1994 desktop monitor?
Henrik Andersson:It depends. From a distance, and if you do the content right, it will look quite okay. But if you go down to price tags and QR codes, coupons, things like that, they will never work. And we can do that as well. We can publish coupons and everything to the shelf edge.
So maybe down the road 3-5 years after micro LEDs mass manufacturing gets sorted and the yields are up and everything else, maybe that's an option, but certainly not right now?
Henrik Andersson: That's something we look into. We have really started looking at that, but it's way too early.
What kind of research has been done to measure the impact of a planogram that's just conventional shelf labels and things like that, versus a portion of a planogram that has your digital shelf edge elements to it?
Henrik Andersson: Yeah. So what we have seen now is that it's a wow factor. That's one of the things. If you walk in the store and you’re making about 80% of your decisions in the store, and if you get a wow factor, you get something that triggers your brain, you will buy that product. On top of that, you have tools and gadgets, things that need to be explained.
It would be like powered rails. So we say vitamins, anything that needs to be explained, an energy drink, those kinds of fine benefits. I like telling you that by using this product we give you these benefits. We are seeing between 20% to about 300% based on product.
Sustained or just like when it first goes up?
Henrik Andersson: It continues. We have some data from pharmaceuticals when they're explaining a product where we have 300-400% uplift, and we have also inside retail on produce and stuff like that. We have a huge growth.
Are those brands the ones that have used other types of digital signage, like more conventional, flat panels around a store and maybe I assume it wouldn't have had anywhere near the impact, just because it wouldn't be as close to the product?
Henrik Andersson: That has been a thing. They have advertised on digital signage screens in retail, but most of the time they are too far away from the product. So due to the impulse of buying.
The further away you are from the physical product, the less sales are you going to make.
One of the things that you were telling is your solution in tandem with Lenovo, your partner, you're doing in-store analytics as well?
Henrik Andersson: Yeah, we have a solution that we are introducing at the NRF which we call smart vision. It's a full analytics platform utilizing Lenovo servers and multiple cameras to collect data from the retail environment.
This is also applicable not only to retail we're doing even in transportation, education, fast food. It's about collecting data on how many people are happy walking in, or sad walking out, where they're walking. We can see the paths of walking. We can see where most people are spending most time, and how long they are standing in front of that product. We can also trigger things. We can see for example, that there has been a spell of a drink in aisle six, and we need to call the janitor to get that clean up. We are also working on things to see if they are putting things in their pocket, or they're putting things in the cart. We can see if someone is acting violent or has a tendency, if something could happen. This is what we work on. We'd like machine learning together with Intel to figure out what kind of information we want.
So you're using Intel's OpenVINO?
Henrik Andersson: Yes, we are using OpenVINO as the base.
Retail analytics using computer vision has been around for 15 years, maybe even longer. So that part is not new. What's distinct about what you do versus some of the more familiar ones that are already known in digital signage?
Henrik Andersson: It’s probably our dashboard, an easy way to get an overview and also the flexibility to pick the things you want. We are trying to do the same here as we do with the screen work outside in, instead of inside out, we don't tell the customers that this is the data that we think you should have. We are asking them what data do you want to make your business better.
Most of that is basically to combine multiple cameras, to get the whole view. Instead of having one camera inside of, by one header display by using this, we can see the moving paths in the store. We can see, for example, during X hours a day, we have this many visitors, but we only have this many cashiers open. Then they can move things around in the store to create something more streamlined.
You want green lines across the whole store. You don't want to, like some aisles are more visited and otherized. You want all of them to move like a typical Ikea. Where you want to go, you have to go with the whole store, even if you want to get the thing at the end of the story.
Yes, you do and it's not my favorite way to shop, but...
Henrik Andersson: That's the way to create impulses on the way to the thing that you're intended to buy. Look at the carts at Ikea. You buy so many things on the way to the exit that you'd never planned to buy.
The reference case that I'm familiar with for your company, is a seat to table store down in south Florida? Is that still your biggest deployment for this, or, where have you put your screens in?
Henrik Andersson: That’s the biggest single-store deployment. We are deploying in multiple stores, but often as a single end cap or category, and there will be a lot of announcements next year of full grocery stores that are getting this installed.
More than just an end cap, but if it takes you to tape, for an example, we have about 200 screens in that store, including shell fetches, header, square screens. So that is an Intel Lenovo and initial screen show, and everybody's welcome to come down and look at it.
So that's your living lab, or you can walk people through and go here's what's possible.
Henrik Andersson: Yeah. So that's where we test everything from the analytics to the screens to do dynamic pricings, everything is tested there and that's better than having it in our own office.
Lenovo is one of those very large computing companies that has been on the edge of digital signage and some of these companies like HP and so on, they're in they're out. You don't really know what they do, but it sounds like Lenovo has made a concerted investment of capital and people into the space.
Henrik Andersson: Yes, Lenovo has grown a lot in the OEM division. I think when I started working with Lenovo OEM, there were about five guys. Now they're up to 50-60.
And just working specifically with you or are they active in other areas as well?
Henrik Andersson: Basically, it's the whole thing. If you're working outside in instead of inside out, trying to figure out solutions for each individual company. It could involve computers only or it could involve computers and monitors.
One of the things we did in 2020-21 was a full line of monitors with anti-microbial coding on them. So they are like killing viruses and bacterias. But one of the key things as well is that the whole chassis is aluminum. So it's 95% sustainable.
And is that an ask that you get from retail now?
Henrik Andersson: Mostly Europe, because they don’t want anything that has plastic in them anymore.
That'll be a big change if it starts to happen here.
Henrik Andersson: So if you go to a grocery store in Sweden, for example, you have to pay 50 cents for a plastic bag. That's what it cost. If you want to bring the groceries home, you have to pay 50 cents for the plastic bag.
Yeah. That's starting to happen here in Canada as well. And I'm constantly buying more bags cause I forgot to bring the ones I have in the car.
Henrik Andersson: Every Swedish guy has a car full of such bags.
What do you see happening in the next couple of years with the kind of work that you do? Do you imagine there are going to be other companies developing copycat solutions? For instance, I was in Taiwan when we still could travel about two and a half years ago, and I know that AUO, which is a huge LCD manufacturer, has a whole feature wall of odd shaped ribbon displays and things like that, so it seems like this would be accessible to more accompanies now.
Henrik Andersson: Yeah. So AUO is one of our partners. So if we look at a couple of their sites that they have, we have been part of their engineering process. We are being part of developing the size, the functionality, the backlight, all those kinds of things.
So AUO is one we have HKC, we have BUE, we work with all of them. Will be the products similar to our products on the market. Yes, there will be. We are trying to be innovative. We are trying to make it easy. Most of our competitors are basically working as if each screen is an individual screen. They're using an Android board put in there and by using an Android board inside, you will be able to push one content to that screen. The problem you're going to face is if we put multiple screens up, for example, you have a limitation of how many units can be connected to a WiFi network.
You would have a limitation of power plugs. You need so many power plugs to have power to each display. Think about the digital signage licenses. Now, this is nothing but fun for the signage company, if you have 3000 screens in a store and each screen has a built in a hundred players, that 3000 licenses. And also about servicing them, it should be easier to take one away, put one back, you know what a computer is, you have something that needs to be updated in one location, not 3000 locations.
So in other words, you could source something like what Instorescreen has off of Alibaba or wherever you want to go. But the simple question that you would ask or somebody smart would ask or somebody else who's smart would ask is will it scale? And it just doesn't, as you just described.
Henrik Andersson: No it doesn't, and to get it with the, know what we are able to today to have very smart servicing options. We have longtime warranties. We have technical people on 24x7 call. It's a disaster if a retail store shelf edge goes black. For example, we need to fix that very quickly and not call an Alibaba contact and you get a new screen in three weeks.
Yeah. That doesn't work so well. All right. This was great. If people want to learn more about your company, where do they go online?
Henrik Andersson: They can contact Lenovo OEM or go to lenovo.com or they can go to instorescreen.com.
All right. Perfect. Thanks for your time.
Henrik Andersson: Thank you very much.