Sixteen:Nine - All Digital Signage, Some Snark

Jackie Walker, Publicis Sapient

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED - DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

There is a long history of very large companies of all descriptions finding their way into the digital signage industry, but they have tended to come in with fanfare and then exit quietly out a side door.

Often, the digital signage effort is a bit of a skunkworks that doesn't have a lot of energy behind it within giant companies that do a 1,000 other things.

That does not appear to be the case with Publicis Sapient, a giant interactive agency that has offices all over the world, 20,000 staffers, and a product and service called Premise, that does digital signage among a bunch of things.

The company has been working on it for 10 years, and has some very big, but unnamed clients using a platform that is all about data and speaks directly to the concept of omnichannel and the goal of producing content once and publishing to many devices and platforms.

Jackie Walker has been working on Premise since it was just a notion, and is what they call the capability lead. We had a great chat about the roots of Premise, how the team works with clients, and the present and future of signage, which is all about APIs, data and the end of walled software gardens.

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TRANSCRIPT

Hi, Jackie, we haven't met in person, but it's great to meet you virtually. I have certainly known about Publicis for many years at Sapient and when you were dabbling or when the company was dabbling in signage through Sapient Nitro. So I was intrigued recently when I saw a press release about Sapient and a platform called Premise, and I wanted to find out all about it, and you're the product manager (product lead) on it? 

Jackie Walker: That's right. I have been working on it for the last 11 years, so I am very close to the solution. 

This is your baby. 

Jackie Walker: This is my firstborn, yep. 

Is it temperamental? 

Jackie Walker: Yes. I have had two human babies since, but this is the one. 

Okay, let's go to the very basics of it. What is it? 

Jackie Walker: Yeah. So let me tell you who we are first, for those of your listeners who don't really know who we are. The Publicis group is, of course, one of the largest media holding companies in the world, with about 80,000 employees. A few years ago, Sapient, which was an independent company, was acquired by Publicis.

So now we are Publicis Sapient. We're about 20,000 employees, in 53 offices worldwide and in terms of our capabilities, we’re basically the digital transformation hub of Publicis group. So we think about strategy, consulting, customer experience, and then agile engineering, and so about half of our people are really technologists and engineers. And we think about how we digitally enable our clients in terms of both, the way that they work and also the way that they serve their customers. So pretty broad scope. 

I've been with the company for over 10 years. This was my first project. It wasn't called a Premise when I joined, and really what we were trying to do was, back then, that was when everybody was just learning how to spell omnichannel and put it on a PowerPoint slide, and really my first project was, we called it the Super Secret Airport Project and back then the idea was to take the airport space (because it is a slightly underserved market) and really think about how we fleshed out an omnichannel solution. So we built this end to end platform that was all about content management, real-time data, airport flight data, and built the solution that would enable our clients to drive their websites, their mobile applications, and then later digital signage from one common platform.

So that was really the frame. 

Was this driven by a client ask or was this like a hole in the market that you guys thought you could fill? 

Jackie Walker: I think it was a “hole in the market”/”wouldn't it be cool if”, right? So there was a group of people in Boston, the spouse of one of our team members who worked for SH&E, an airport consultancy, and they were talking about the ways that airports really struggled to communicate consistently with their customers across channels, right? Back then it was not uncommon that an airport would be operating 3-5 content management systems for each of their individual platforms, and so the idea was that we should consolidate this, right? We have a unique point of view, we have a skillset to do all of this, website development, app development, content management, system development from an enterprise lens. Let's see where this goes. And then we started signing up airports to actually deliver some of those capabilities.

Now, is it in the DNA of the company to build your own platforms as opposed to partnering? Because 10 years ago, it's not like somebody was wandering around the streets saying, “Please, God, somebody come up with a digital signage CMS.” There were all too many of them. 

Jackie Walker: Yeah, that's very true. So we partner a lot and typically, even from the beginning, when we started this program, we were using SDL Tridion, which was a pretty well-established, web, and mobile CMS at that time. That was really the content foundation of what we were building.

We didn't want to build a “CMS” to use that kind of terminology, because most of our clients if you think about it, are operating enterprise CMS solutions, and so part of the “what if?” was, this novel idea that a customer could change their content in one place and that content change would immediately publish on their website, their mobile app, their digital signage, which is a little bit of a different frame of the problem, I think. 

Yeah. Certainly, you know you're joking about omnichannel and learning how to spell it, the whole premise has been around for a very long time, but I've noticed in the last two or three years, it's really come to fruition and you seem to get a lot of pushback from larger companies, potential clients essentially say, “I don't want to have 4-5 different platforms to do my messaging, I want to do it off of one thing and it should go everywhere. I don't want to have this walled garden for digital signage and another walled garden for mobile, communications, and so on.”

Was that the thinking? 

Jackie Walker: A hundred percent, and again, back then, like omnichannel, was a word on a PowerPoint, right? We had these cute diagrams that contained phrases like “all your enterprise services and you're going to have this API layer”, and everybody had to learn how to spell, right? And then all of a sudden magically all these consumer channels are just consuming data consistently through these APIs and it's all gonna work. That was really, I think the North star of that vision, but it's taken a little while for clients to actually get to that level of sophistication and that's been one of the things we've been watching closely is that progression where this dream of having these fully API enabled enterprises is now getting to a point where that is the expectation, right? 

Clients have all their infrastructure in the cloud, they're using common systems. They're starting to do consolidation across content, and now they're starting to do consolidation of data. And to me, that's the other key piece of the puzzle, it’s not just thinking about the content and the customer experience and the POS or the product inventory systems or their content management system, but then also thinking about how their customers interact with all of that data, all of that experience, and making sure that data is able to be used consistently across channels. So no content silos, no data silos. 

And when you started down this path 10 years ago, shared data was not easy. You could have these conversations, but they would say, integrating with our data set and all that is a quarter-million-dollar job, or it's just not possible, or you can't see it where it's not secure or we're worried about it being secure and on, there were all these problems. Now, data's pretty easy to get out, right?

Jackie Walker: That's right, yeah. It's definitely gotten much easier and just the flexibility has improved greatly as well. I think clients are used to it as well. You know, you're going to have an interface that you're exposing and then all of your channels that you're deploying are pulling from that content.

So I think, yeah, there's been a huge transformation there, which has been a big enabler. 

Do you have to, when you're working with clients, explain that integrating data is more than just being able to pull a number from one directory or folder or whatever it may be and make it show up on a screen and make it show up on another device, that there's more to it than that? 

Jackie Walker: Yeah. So I think that's the thing that's really interesting about digital signage, and I had the benefit of building websites and building mobile apps before we started on digital signage, so I had that digital experience frame of reference, right? This is how it works, this is how you're going to build a web page that's going to be pulling content from 10 or 11 different data sources, stitching that together and you understand how that works. And then you look at digital signage and it's a little bit of a novel problem, right? Because there are some differences with digital signage. Like the analogy I use is, if you build a mobile app, you're going to build one piece of software, you're going to deploy it on a cloud infrastructure, back then it was a physical infrastructure. You deploy it on infrastructure, your problem as the enterprise, like the client-side is worrying that you're hopefully releasing defect-free software and your infrastructure, your cloud is stable, right? You don't have to worry about Tom, Dick and Harry's mobile phone. Do they have connectivity? Is their phone charged? Like all this stuff, right? That's not your problem and the customer understands that. 

With digital signage, every little digital sign you put out in the world is your baby and now you're responsible for making sure that it has power, it has the internet, it has content, no matter what happens, it has content, and so there was a little bit of reframing that we had to overcome to be able to make sure that we were solving that problem comprehensively. And those differences really ended up being what guided the product development for premise and the digital signage solution was this idea that we were thinking about bridging that gap between an API enabled customer ecosystem and deployed digital signage at scale. So we were trying to fill that hole between the two. 

Yeah, there's been any number of very large companies that have decided, we're going to write a digital signage module or we're going to branch into this. And they get a basic platform working where files are playing one after another, maybe not even with a black gap in between them or whatever, and they're rubbing their hands together and saying, “Hey, we've done it!” 

There are a lot of problems that can develop, as you've said, and I suspect you guys discovered over time that once you have all these deployed devices in all kinds of different environments, all kinds of hell can break loose. 

Jackie Walker: Yeah, absolutely and I think that's an important differentiation too. I think there are so many signage solutions that were born out of looping media, right? And so the conversation is how do I build the best playlist? And there might be interruptions, there might be things that go into that but by and large, you're thinking about full-screen video, how many video segments of the screen can I have, maybe I'll have an RSS ticker, like you're thinking about slicing and dicing the screen, but your primary content is video content.

And I think for us, we've always been approaching this thinking about modularized data-driven content. So even if you think about what we are doing in the airports, we weren't just thinking about a video playlist, we were thinking about what's the list of restaurants that's going to show up. What's the list of restaurants that are going to show up that might be different if I know that there's a flight delay next to that gate, and so all of that is query-based data. 

Back in the day, our first clients were using Flex for the interface. Obviously now everything is HTML5, but it's all modularized content and so I think it's a different way of looking at the content problem as well. Are you thinking about big  full-screen content? Which again, then you're thinking about how you manage a playlist and make sure that your large video files get moved down to the device without getting corrupted, all that kind of stuff.

Whereas if you're thinking about this HTML5 content, it's just a little bit of a different frame of reference in terms of what you have to be able to do, the different pieces that come together to enable that, and then the analytics as well, right? Like how are you getting a level of analytics that is again, akin to what customers are used to from web and mobile channels. 

So tell me what Premise is, and if I'm a cranky CMO or CEO in a meeting with your team, and I say, “why do I need this versus brand X digital signage CMS that I'm already using?”  

Jackie Walker: Yeah, I've had many experiences where I've worked with customers who have already gone through a digital signage selection process, they've already picked their partner. And they say, “Okay, we are working with X platform and now we want to deliver an experience on top of that platform, what can we do?” And the problem is typically that they didn't ask the right questions about the software capabilities when they were doing the platform selection and then when it comes to the time to actually think about the experience, now they're designing backward from the platform capabilities, as opposed to designing forward from the customer experience, which is the position you always want to be in. So I think when I think about what Premise and how it's different, it's really thinking about in-venue experience enablement. 

We say in-venue because we might mean a QSR, we might mean a retail store, we might mean a hotel. So any physical place, we're really focusing on the real-time analytics and AB testing capabilities, and we're focusing on integrations and that is really at the forefront. So if I'm working with a QSR, the starting point is going to be the point of sale, it's going to be their product database, it's going to be their product photography. We're going to want to know as much as possible about their data models and so that we are thinking about it from what can we reuse, what do we tack onto, what are the places where we can create leverage points from what they already have, and then we're filling in the gaps, to be able to support the additional needs for digital signage that are maybe slightly different than what their needs are for web or mobile. 

I might not have big video assets for the web, or certainly for mobile. I might want to use different types of product photography, I might need some different ways of thinking about that. So that's really the approach for us and I think a lot of our clients understand it because they've dabbled and what they've seen with other solutions is that they're not able to get the level of integration that they're expecting.

So they'll go through the initial conversations, the technical design and think we're going to integrate with our CMS. And I think, when you say those words, they can mean different things to the vendor and the client, right? The vendor might mean I'm going to pull a data dump every seven days and the client thinks, if it's integrated to my CMS, I'm going to make a change in my CMS and it's going to publish, and so I think a lot of clients are now starting to get to that level of sophistication and understanding where they're realizing that there is a little bit of a gap between what the current capabilities are in the market and what they want to deliver.

I had a conversation with someone in the hospitality business that manages a bunch of properties. They do a lot of merchandising of their onsite restaurants, their shows, all that. You can think like a Vegas casino type, that frame of mind, so they have all kinds of stuff that they're trying to sell customers and all of it is manual. So if they need to change the priority of a piece of content, there's a huge manual effort to go in and update their playlist on all of their screens. So we talked with them about what would it look like to build an AI engine on top of that? 

It could look at occupancy in restaurants. It could look at ticket sales, yield projected versus what they've actually sold. So it could prioritize what are the things that I merchandise to my customers that are meaningful. I don't want to merchandise a restaurant that's sold out, that doesn't help me, it doesn't help the customer. 

And what we found is that the level of metadata to be able to fuel an AI engine to be able to start to do some of that, even on a rules basis, just didn't exist in the digital signage solution they were using. Even at that level, when you start to want to deploy AI and start to get more sophisticated about the ways that you're deciding what content goes on the screens, I think the current vendor set, the current solution set in digital signage is somewhat lacking and that's really why we're in the business and we're pursuing it so aggressively is that we keep hearing more and more of our clients talk about this unmet need.

And is that a function in a lot of cases of them being in there refresh cycle where they're there four years in with a particular vendor realizing they like the notion of this, they like the outcomes of screens and so on, but they need to do more, and they're now realizing their initial platform that they went with just doesn't cut the mustard, so to speak? 

Jackie Walker: Yeah, it's a mix of both, some of our clients are in refresh cycles, some of our clients have just done pilots and they're realizing that maybe what they thought they were going to get out of it isn't really coming to fruition and then some of our clients are starting to look at this for the first time, right? They're recognizing, especially QSRs at the drive-thrus, that's a huge area of focus for us right now, because of COVID obviously you look at the market in the US, like 80% of QSR still have paper at the drive-thru. Now 90% of their business is going through the drive-thru. So there's this huge gap between the capabilities that they're able to deliver.

How are they going to meet customer expectations and the solutions that they have available? And we're really saying if you're going to do it for the first time, don't think about what you want to do tomorrow, because maybe you just want a JPEG of your menu tomorrow, but once you make that huge CapEx investment, especially outdoors, be smart about what you're going to do there because in the next five or seven years, you're going to be wanting to do a lot more, probably. You're co-investing in data initiatives, in loyalty programs, how do you connect the dots? That's always my big call to clients, is to think about what's the customer experience roadmap? And being a little bit aggressive so that you're not making a mistake on the hardware you're deploying, or even if you're buying an all-in-one solution that you're working with a partner that's not going to be able to grow with you.

This sounds much more like an engagement, a project, as opposed to “All right, I'll buy my software. I'll use Publicis Sapient’s Premise, and you know, Bob's your uncle, that's it. You may get some support.” 

It sounds like you guys want to be in the weeds with the client, from the ideation stage, all the way through to execution, right?

Jackie Walker: Yeah, you're hitting the nail on the head. So the play for us is not the digital signage licenses, so to speak. That's not the piece that we're interested in. It's not a set it and forget it solution. I think there's a well-established part of the market that does that really well, like grab it and go.

What we're really trying to do is work with customers who are looking for more involved customer experiences that are really trying to use this channel to make an impact on their business, that recognizes the value of analytics and AB testing, and that are thinking about how do they pave the path to driving differentiated customer experiences over time? And so there's a little bit of consulting, there are a few creative services, there's a ton of technology, all that kind of comes together when we're engaging with a client. 

I'm going to assume that your preferred client or the clients that you end up getting are those who have a history with agency services and work already, because they know how you guys roll and how things happen versus somebody who maybe started out with brand X digital signage CMS and has never really worked with an agency other than maybe producing some creative for them and all of a sudden there's a full-tilt engagement, which is, you still got a few zeros attached to it and there's a lot more involved.

Jackie Walker: Yeah, I think that's right, and it could be either, It could either be the marketing services side or it could be the systems integration side. So we definitely have had a lot of success in using the solution with existing clients where we already have a technology footprint with them and then it becomes about how do you leverage what you're doing in one part of the business on this additional channel? I think that's a huge part of the value proposition. 

Yeah, and certainly a macro trend within digital signage is this idea of one throat to choke or turnkey solutions, I don't want four vendors, all pointing fingers at each other when there's an issue. 

Jackie Walker: Yeah, absolutely, and I think that can be a little bit of a double-edged sword, right? Sometimes I think about what happens, and I've seen this with a number of clients where they treat digital signage as a siloed point solution.

“I'm going to buy digital signage,” and even the terminology, like a digital menu board is a great example, it sounds like you're buying a physical thing. 

“I'm Bill, I'm buying an object.” 

Honestly, that's a lot of how it's sold by a lot of companies, which I think is goofy, but nonetheless, they saw it as SKU, as a thing.

Jackie Walker: Yep, absolutely, and I think what is becoming accepted is this idea that digital signage is a digital channel. It is like your website. It is like your mobile app. It is a digital touchpoint for a customer, and I think we, as an industry, haven't done enough to push the capabilities and the thinking around the types of experiences that clients can deliver. It's been allowed to function as this kind of siloed thing on the side. So you have, even in an organization, the people who are buying digital signage are often not the same organization that's managing the rest of their digital customer channels, which is also a little bit mind-boggling sometimes.

So that's another piece that I always try to encourage customers to think about. This is not a, not just a marketing problem, it's not just an IT problem, and it's certainly not just a store-ops problem. It's actually an intersection of all three and you need to make sure that you're bringing all three of those organizations along for the ride, to make sure that you're going to end up with a solution that actually works and delivers value to the business.

Yeah, years ago I had a very large multinational brand consulting client that was putting signage solutions into their stores and the department I was working with was relationship marketing and they referred to themselves as the land of misfit toys. 

It was just like skunkworks, they caught all the stuff that nobody else wanted to do. It makes me curious because I've seen this with other very large companies where they have created digital signage business units or effort, and it's functioned largely as a skunkworks and you can tell it's a skunkworks, and sometimes the people who are running it are people who put them there to get them the hell out of important meetings or whatever.

(Laughter)

I’m not saying that in the slightest with what you're doing.

Jackie Walker: I’m glad I gave you that impression. 

Not in the slightest. You know your stuff, you've been doing this a long time, so in the larger context of Publicis Sapient, how much of an effort and how much visibility does this have in terms of the overall company? I know it's hard to give a percentage, but... 

Jackie Walker: That's a great question. I think there was a period where it was a little bit of a side business, so to speak. We were doing things like this airport managed services platform for wayfinding. We had a bunch of different clients. It ended up extending to like retail casinos, we had a sports stadium that was using our wayfinding platform, but it was a little bit of this thing that was allowed to continue to progress, and then, I think what has happened in the last couple of years, as we've shifted our focus to digital business transformation, and I actually remember really well a conversation I had with my boss, like when we started internal communications around that change and frame. 

I said, I'm really excited about what this will mean for the work that we're doing with the Premise because it's so tightly aligned to our strategy as a business, and he looked at me and I said, if you think about it, so many of our clients do so much of their business through their physical footprint when you think about retail, when you think about QSR, it's insane for us to not have an offering that directly addresses the opportunity, to drive business impact in their physical venues, right? And the reality is, if you look at the solutions that are available, it's not a place where we're going to be able to readily partner with existing companies, existing CMS, digital signage solutions, to be able to deliver those types of outcomes. So for us, we actually think about it as the market is moving in this direction.

We had a ten-year plus headstart, I think. A lot of people in the industry will say that the future of digital signage is probably going to be driven by software, and I think we're in a really great position to springboard that for ourselves and realize outcomes for our clients, in an accelerated manner because of this asset with Premise.

Yeah, there are not many good things to say about COVID, but it has forced an accelerated digital transformation plans of a whole bunch of companies, retail, QSR, and beyond, from something that we're going to do in three to five years to something they had to do in the next three to five months to survive, and I gather you've benefited from that. 

Jackie Walker: Definitely. I think it's just been this, at Publicis Sapient level, it's really validated our strategy. I am a little bit of a Kool-Aid drinker, like I really believe in the work that we do, that's why I've stuck around so long personally.

And that's also why I haven't made the choice to go to a more traditional digital signage company. I think that the unique perspective that we bring to the table because of the scope of work that we do for our customers every day, the focus on omnichannel, the focus on customer data, the focus on AI, the focus on marketing efficacy and performance marketing, we just have a completely different perspective and a completely different group of people and experts that we can bring into engagements to deliver outcomes that would be just absolutely impossible otherwise. 

Now the last time I went to the National Retail Federation Show, there must have been at least 20 booths, maybe a lot more companies, all showing retail analytics, shopper analytics, computer vision-based stuff, sensor-based stuff. 

You're talking to a lot of retailers, you're talking to a lot of large corporations. Do they see this as being as important as the vendors seem to think it is?

Jackie Walker: That's a great question. I personally get frustrated with all these point solutions because I think they do end up being just that. 

It's like queue management, so we're going to instrument the environment, we're going to understand the queues and then that's going to help us optimize customer service, or we're going to now measure everyone's temperature when they come in and that kind of theater around it is going to make people feel safer and better, and so there are all these little solutions that pop up that isn’t well integrated. It doesn't all come together particularly well, right? Beacons, one of my favorite examples, we talk so much about Beacons and it's like the mobile beacon and what are we going to do? And the push notifications, and now there's a ton of movement around geo-fencing and QSRs too, you know, to hook into kitchen operations, but they're really the same technologies that could be, if done right, enabling a ton of different types of capabilities of customer interactions, of different ways of driving value for the business on the customer, but instead, they're thought about as these little things, dot one kind of additions, that doesn't particularly connect. 

So I think that's a hard pill to swallow. They each has their own, it's a different SaaS model. You have a SaaS subscription for this, you have a SaaS subscription for that, so I think that's a big challenge. So that's something I try to think about when I'm working with customers, what are the existing initiatives they have? What are the existing capabilities they have and how do you stitch them together in meaningful ways so that you're maximizing their current investment, but also thinking about how you connect the dots moving forward. 

I think QSR has some great opportunities ahead of it, with regard to different service methods. So now they're pushing so many customers to mobile order and pay, which is fantastic, but they're going through the drive-through still, like how do you deal with these customers? Because if you're showing them the same menu board that you're showing somebody who's. trying to order, you just wasted an impression, so to speak, with that customer, right? You could have told them something new and different. You might have totally different messaging for them because you know them, or even if you don't know them, they already ordered, right? Or if it’s a delivery driver, you know that it's a delivery driver. You could know that. So how do you start to think about the intersections of these different service models and different technologies to create better customer experiences? 

You mentioned customers. Are there any customers you're actually allowed to reference and say, yeah, we work with these guys? 

Jackie Walker: Not today, Dave, you know how that goes. (Laughter)

Oh yeah, the big agencies and big clients, you don't mess with those accounts and upset them in any way, but we can think of Fortune 100, Fortune 500 kinds of companies? 

Jackie Walker: That's really the target group and the group that we work with the most. Yes, absolutely.

All right. this was terrific. We could have chatted for a lot longer. It was very nice to virtually meet you and hopefully, we meet each other in person someday. 

Jackie Walker: Absolutely, when there’s offices again, right? (Laughter) 

All right. I really appreciate you giving me some of your time. 

Jackie Walker: Absolutely. Thanks so much, Dave, take care.

AVIXA Digital Signage Power Hour - Roundtable - Commercial Real Estate

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED - DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

I have been working with both AVIXA and invidis for most of the year on a series of monthly roundtables, called Digital Signage Power Hours.

They’ve all been great, but the one we did recently on experiential media in real estate was particularly good … because of the people who kindly provided their time.

We had David Niles, who created and still works on the Comcast Experience, one of the earliest and still one of the best projects out there involving LED in real estate.  

We also had Amahl Hazelton, one of the big thinkers at the famed experiential creative agency Moment Factory. Cybelle Jones, CEO of SEGD, was on, as was Jeremy Koleib, whose Consumer Experience Group works with property companies on big LED projects. And we had Emily Webster, the Senior VP of Creative at New York’s ESI Design, which is behind some of the best experiential real estate you’ll see in real estate.

We could have chatted for hours, but we had 50 minutes. Listen, learn and hopefully enjoy.

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Stephan Odörfer, 4tiitoo

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED - DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

While we all have learned, and mostly remembered, to wash or sanitize our hands after we touch surfaces, the ongoing pandemic has undoubtedly made a lot of people antsy about touching any surfaces unless they really, really need to.

Self-service screens are one of those surfaces that makes at least some people jumpy, and things like voice-based ordering or throwing screen controls to the customer's smartphone have come up as alternatives.

Now 4tiitoo, a German company that mainly does eye tracking for workplace environments, is touting a solution that would enable doing things like ordering a burger at a restaurant chain to be contactless.

A built-in sensor on the kiosk would track and respond to what a customer sees on the screen, all the way from a welcome message and through to order confirmation.

This is not stuff out of a sci-fi movie, but a riff on existing technology that takes endless mouse work out of repetitive office jobs and allows workers with greasy or occupied hands to navigate and update a screen just by looking at it.

Stephan Odörfer, one of the founders of 4tiitoo, walked me through the thinking, and how it all works.

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TRANSCRIPT

David: All right, Stephan, can you give me a rundown on what your company is all about and what your technology does broadly? 

Stephan Odorfer: Sure. So at 4tiitoo, what we're doing is all about natural interaction, using your gaze, first of all, but in some use cases also combining speech and gestures. So basically combined, I would say natural interactions that humans can do. So what we're mainly doing nowadays is we are controlling standard workplaces, from accounting to support centers to engineering, and largely replacing the 50 year mouse, so that means, while you're having your hands on the keyboard, you start typing and when you want to select a different input field, for example, in your SAP environment, you just look at this field, which you're doing anyway, and you continue typing because our software understands what you want to do and basically predicts the intention and proactively helps you in your daily tasks.

So this is what we are usually doing for several years. Now, what we have been doing lately is hands-free or completely touchless interaction in kiosk situations, or in dedicated restaurant situations where you use your gaze, as you do today, you browse through the menu, an automatic disc will roll a list while you're reading it and our system understands that you are currently in reading mode and obviously what do you want to do at the end of a page? You want to continue scrolling it? So the system automatically scrolls for your reading speed and what it also does is obviously if you want to select a salad or a burger, you just look at these items, and then we developed a special way to basically trigger these elements, because it's not about just looking at them and boom, it happens. That's not good. So it's rather a way to basically first select something and then trigger something just with your gaze.

So this is in a nutshell what we're doing. 

David: The restaurant applications for self-service ordering and so on, was that something that was already an ask from operators prior to COVID or is it because of the pandemic that this is now something that's being put together? 

Stephan Odorfer: It was clearly connected with the pandemic, the topic of people being afraid of touching surfaces or the need in restaurants to continuously make sure that these surfaces are clean. We have seen this in manufacturing environments. We have seen this for a long time already so we have productive solutions for people on the shop floor, having gloves, et.c.controlling their shop flow terminals just with their case, so that they can continue doing their actual job with their hands. 

Now going into the restaurant business, it's quite similar because it's a clear interface, you have a bunch of options that you can touch or click on and now basically look at, and it's not a complex interface. So what people are doing there usually is pretty similar and due to the COVID-19 situation, people were looking at solutions for not having to touch things, on the one hand, and what we could offer with this technology is not only replacing this need to touch something but it's also using our gaze technology, we also see what people are interested in and based on this information, we can predict what the user wants to have, in this case, what he's looking for and then in this case, can propose recommendations for based on his current view, his gaze history, not based on the history of other people, but on his very history. And, therefore we can not only make his experience more personal, more individual, but also create a potential for upselling and cross-selling, from the store.

David: So you're using machine learning or some kind of computer vision to do that? 

Stephan Odorfer: Yes. So it’s a local based technology because privacy is an important topic for us. So it's not being transmitted in the cloud, everything that we do here in this personalization runs on the local system and what it basically does, it understands where you're looking at and what you're not looking at, which is very important.

So this is an area where we have already filed several patents because one of the most important things is obviously at work is what you look at and how you look at things, but what is also very interesting is what you're not looking at, because in your peripheral view, our autopilot works. So, the autopilot in our brain basically works if I say two plus two, in our brains, it just makes sense. But if I say 42 times 17, there are not that many brains where the solution comes up. So we need to focus on that and do the math, but the automatic part in our brain that is basically getting, selecting what should be put in or focus. So in this area, when I'm scrolling, for example, let's say scrolling through a menu in a restaurant that has different pizzas. For example, what I'm doing is, I'm basically quickly running through a page and I'm scanning things like we do if we do a Google search, for example, what is reading each word and if it makes sense, if our autopilot says, “Hey, this could be an interesting result,” only then we put our focus on it and then we read it and then we decide, and we basically understand what you already get rid of in your autopilot, because this is very important to create a better funnel and to create better results in less time. 

David: Okay. So when the original, maybe not the original, but the most familiar gesture sensors out there, the Kinect sensors that came out maybe 10 years ago, there were attempts at that time to use gestures as an interactive interface for screens and the objection I always had and observed, was that there was a big learning curve for people to figure out how to use this, and I would imagine in something like a restaurant environment, where a lot of the goal is to speed up transactions, speed up decision-making and everything else, how do you get past something where you're walking up to a screen for the first time and it's an unfamiliar interface?

Stephan Odorfer: That's a very important question. You're absolutely right. The older folks out there probably remember the Minority Report scene with Tom Cruise, where he's doing all these fancy moves and controls the computer with that. Well, think of this as if you would do this next too. The learning curve you were mentioning, it's also a topic of how long you want to do this until this is more a sports event than an operation off of a screen, right? Your eyes are constantly moving anyway. So before you touch something, before you gesture, or just pointing at something or click a mouse or whatever, your eyes are always already at this point that you want to address. And that's the magic of eye tracking. 

So the question is how do we make sure that, in our standard environment, there’s a steep learning curve that people get familiar very fast with this technology and on the other hand, in a kiosk mode, people get that it's a robust environment, it's a robust operation. It's completely a hundred percent sure operation in terms of that the user knows what's going to happen and what to expect, etc. because this is necessary that people would accept it. And what we came up with is a way to confirm things and rethink from basically his gaze information so that we can predict what he wants to do and why we have done this is because this is something that we are focusing on, so the company itself is seven years old, but, my partner and myself, the founding partners, we are focusing on this technology now for almost 10 years. And we came up with, if I remember the first days and the first month and years, it looked pretty different, in terms of how we control computers today.

So let me explain with an example. If you look at things, a button for example, what it usually does today, it has a so-called dwell time, which basically means time taken between you looking at a button and it triggering within a specific time of say two seconds or whatever. So as always, it's taken too long for a nice interaction and it's too short and therefore too many false positives, if you speed it up. So what we came up with is basically a way that you select within a split second, you select something, you can basically think of in a Windows environment, you can select on the desktop if you click an icon, if you click it once; you select it, if you click it twice to double click, then you trigger it. But you can also look at once, select it and then press return, that's basically the same. So you select it and then you trigger it. And that's the same, what we are doing. So you look at a burger and you select it, right? If you want to trigger this and put this in the cart, for example, then every time you select something, a button pops up that basically triggers the selection and to put it into the cart or whatever happens, forced by this button. So it's always a two step system and that's robust enough, but if you know how to deal with the system, you can do it super fast because our eyes are controlled by the fastest muscles in our body.

So no matter if you are looking from the lower left part to the upper right part, you can do this in a split-second while if you would need to move your hand, that would take much longer. 

David: And if you want to select something, are you blinking or doing something like that to confirm?

Stephan Odorfer: Yes, this would be a possibility to blink, but blinking is also controlled by the autopilot in our brain. So nobody is actively blinking except for these specific situations where you blink an eye to show somebody that you're winking, so that's a specific action, but if you would need to blink to every time that feels awkward, it is possible to control the interfaces with blinking and eye tracking is something that is here for many years for decades, in time. And where it came from is from psychological studies, from marketing studies. We all know these heat maps, search results, et cetera, where it also came from is that it's possible for impaired people to control a computer. So that's the great way and the only way for many people to take part in this world, that is the internet and communication, etc. And if they can only use their eye muscles, because everything else is not possible anymore. Then this is a great way,but there are other ways, better ways to trigger things which are not blinking.

Another opportunity would come up, maybe in your mind would be nodding, but anything like these blinking and nodding has too many false positives. So that's why we came up with this other solution. 

David: So walk me through this, if there's a hamburger chain and you have a self-service ordering kiosk and you're using your technology, I walk up to this thing, what is it telling me right away? 

Is there a message that says you can navigate this whole thing just using your gaze? 

Stephan Odorfer: Yes. It would not be that it's only possible, right? So you should always have a fall back option in this case, this would be touch, right? Because you don't want to force people in a direction you want to offer them a better way or different way in the first place.

And after they experienced it in a better way. So it would be introduced to folks as, “Hey, you can touch me, but you can also just look at me and I will understand what you want to do.” And, based on this very first approach, the system basically understands, “Hey, there's a new customer approaching me”, so the system understands that somebody is looking at the system and it can welcome the customer. And based on this, if it's a new customer who is not familiar with this technology at all, then it's very simple, either he can take a short tour in the situation, which is , I would say something like 5-10 seconds long, basically just to understand what it is and I see great potential in terms of viral marketing here, because, just think about somebody controlling the device just with his gaze, and  his buddy is filming this and putting this on YouTube showing how innovative this solution is basically, right? So he understands, okay, this is how I can do it. And then for example, if he goes through the list of burgers in this case, he doesn't need to learn anything. That system understands that this guy is reading and it scrolls automatically as a biometric. So there's no need to understand something. The only thing you need to understand is basically that you look at a button and you see a little shine around this burger, for example. So that must integrate into the user interface and the corporate identity of the brand, obviously and it gives a little shine so that means it's selected. And then this button pops up and since this is the first time for a user this button popped up, obviously the user will have a look at this button, so that's the way we say, “next time, you're going to look at this pattern. You're going to select this burger to put in the cart, understood? And then you just look at the button.”

And then you've got to go because you don't need to learn anything else. You just know that it's a system that scrolls automatically for me, and you understood this because you experienced this and if I'm looking at a button, okay, this other button pops up and once I'm looking at this button, I trigger it. If I'm not looking at this button, it's vanishing right away after a split second. 

David: So if I decide, I want the cheeseburger with bacon, a prompt will come up and if I look at it, it will confirm that I want that and put it into my “shopping cart”? 

Stephan Odorfer: For example, we have different buttons in such an interface, for example, the amount, so I want to have two burgers or three burgers, what is the difference if you use gaze control instead of touch control or something. Nowadays our eyes are our sensors, they sense information and put it into our brain. What we are doing, it's not only sensing, we are also making our eyes the actors, so they are acting actively.

So for example, if you think about driving in the car and you have both your hands on the steering wheel and  you want to change the radio station. If you're familiar with the car, you know, without having your eyes looking at the center cockpit, where you need to put your hands to turn up the volume or to change the station, right? Because you just know where your hands need to go, but if you need to look at this element, for example, you see +++, you would need to create the information within your peripheral view. If you look at +, you need to create the number that you're currently at, right next to the interface because you need to understand that you are at 3+ and you can now stop looking at +++ because it goes up gradually. Similarly, if you say how many burgers do you want, then you just look at one of our five buttons, one, two, three, four, five, because that way the restaurants know what amount of burgers or salads or whatever people are usually having. So, you don't need to choose 28 salads or something. 

David: So you go through that whole ordering process and then you would use more conventional payment systems like credit cards, or maybe even a phone scanner, NFC tap or something like that. Is there a point because you're already using a camera and you're looking at the retina or the iris of the viewer, could you make payments off the biometrics of that person's unique eye characteristics?

Stephan Odorfer: It’s theoretically possible, yes. And, if you look at many Asian countries, it's already the standard, right? It's not something sophisticated, that's already something that they do on a daily basis. 

David: But they don’t have GDPR there. 

Stephan Odorfer: True. Absolutely true, and that's exactly why I said it's theoretically possible. Biometrical identification, for example, this eye tracker that we are using can also be used to log into your Windows system, using the Windows Hello technology and what it basically does is it's not sending the data anywhere, it’s basically the same if you use your iPhone or your Android phone, that you use the same infrared based camera technology to identify that it's you, but it's only asking, is it you or not? You don't need to have the connection to a database. That's the main difference here.

As I said, it's theoretically possible, but this is not that's neither a focus of ours, nor it is something that is necessary in this case, because what you can actually do is you use a QR code to pay, that's one thing, use a touchless credit card or debit card to pay, so there are many ways of contactless paying in a way. What it furthermore does and I pointed this out a little bit earlier, already. So while you are browsing this, and looking through the menu, basically, what we understand is what are you interested in? Because we know that such an eye tracker collects data at about 90 Hertz, so 90 times a second. We understand where you're looking at and this information can be used to basically understand using this autopilot information, what you're interested in and what not. So in this case, for example, we can say right before the checkout, “Hey, you were thinking about taking this ice cream dessert.”

So why not offer it again at the checkout, but as we know what kind of ice cream you looked at and thought about and based on this case pattern, we understand that you really thought about this, so it's not historical information, it's personal.

And therefore you have a much better conversion rate of having upselling and making the cart size larger. 

David: If I'm a kiosk manufacturer and this intrigues me, I have QSR or other retail clients who might be interested in this, what are the hardware implications for this? Do you need to add a separate PC that just does that processing? Is there a separate, specific camera that you need? Those sorts of things? 

Stephan Odorfer: So an eye tracker consists of three different parts. One thing is the infrared lighting, so that's LEDs like you also have in your iPhone and Android phones today, you have a camera, a solution that is basically the same here. There's a special infrared camera and you have an ASIC, so it's a dedicated chip on board on the eye-tracker itself that does all the math, because through the USB port that is connected, only X, Y coordinates and X, Y set coordinates of your eyes are transmitted. So there's no camera image transmitted or saved at all. Everything is calculated in memory and just not saved at all. Also in terms of privacy, this is a standard equipment that can be easily built into the hinge of a notebook. So it's really small sothe volume you need to put into your existing kiosk solutions is really tiny.

And they're the only thing that is necessary. It needs to be put below the screen so that you can easily track the whole screen range with this. 

David: Okay, so you don't need a separate PC running an Intel or that sort of thing to make all this happen. It can just happen off of a pretty simple hardware setup? 

Stephan Odorfer: While you can do that, it depends on the use case that you want to do. For example, if you want to do the prediction, intention prediction parts that I was referring to, and this is something that is not produced on the eye-tracker itself, that is something that runs in the software on local hardware and therefore you should have an up to date device. This could be an Intel processor because the Intel processes have a dedicated deep learning algorithm embedded that we can use, and therefore much lower CPU consumption needed because it's already built in. So the commands are built into the hardware itself. 

David: So if you had a touchscreen kiosk, you could have both functions like all those stuff that the touchscreen kiosk normally doe, could run on there and your technology could run in parallel. You don't need two separate devices to do all that as long as you've got enough hardware. 

Stephan Odorfer: Yes. 

David: Okay. There was a big fuss recently up here in Canada, where I live, about a shopping mall using cameras. And even though it was anonymous video analytics, it was misinterpreted and there was all kinds of upset about it, even though there's really no reason to be. There's nothing, no privacy invasion happening there.

How do you get past that with customers who worry about it and with the general public? Because even though what you're saying is, it's only the eye coordinates, people are going to see cameras and go, “Oh my God, my invasion, or my privacy is being invaded here!” 

Stephan Odorfer: It is absolutely important. So first of all, it uses a camera, but it's a sensor. So it means that the camera images are not saved anywhere. So that's the first thing. Then in terms of our company, we are based in Munich in Germany and Germany has a very strict privacy law. So even in specific areas, there's this even going further than GDPR requests and for the company itself and for me and my partners, this is a very important topic, because we want to make our vision. 

And our mission is to make computers understand us humans and not us humans to understand how our computers operated. This has been for many years that we had to learn how things work. It's now time that computers understand and predict how they can serve us because that's their duty. So in this way, we need to have a better understanding of how we can serve and therefore we need data. If you don't have data, and say if you want to learn swimming in a pool without water, it's not possible. So you need the data. Therefore we have that.

We have certificates of Germany Privacy, that's nothing familiar outside of Germany, probably, but it's a DECRA, it's called a data audit which makes sure how we handle data, how we process data, how we delete data and how we, anonymize and pseudonymized data and aggregate data. So to really make sure that the data we use, has nothing that can be transferred to any individual. That's very important because I don't want a big company to understand what I'm interested in.

The model that we follow for data privacy is basically, something is on one side of the wall, so that's the local part and then there's a part on the other side of the wall. To make this more plausible, think that you're searching for a result and you need to access data online, because this is something that we also do. If you need to load more information, for example, they are doing an e-commerce search and you're loading more information, more t-shirts that you're looking for. So our way is that we ask for a hundred new results and locally, we only use 10 of them. So the guys can put a hundred results in the system, but they don't know which ten of these hundred are we using and needing. So that's basically how you can get around that somebody else is building a model about the person you are serving.

So that's one thing and thinking about these kiosk solutions where all the data i, on the device anyway, and as nothing is transmitted to a server, to do the local optimization or the local personalization, there's no problem in terms of privacy. Furthermore after the session is done and somebody else appears, then we start from scratch basically in terms of the data and personalization.. 

David: Last question. Is this all what we've been talking about conceptually, or are you in the field with self-service kiosks that are doing all of this? 

Stephan Odorfer: So for now, three- four years, what we are doing is we are equipping large enterprises for their standard places, right?

So that's efficiency in ergonomics and benefits. The same goes for the shop floor, so we have productive environments running in a hands-free touchless interaction, not collecting a burger, but just confirming a step in your assembly process, for example. So that's what we're doing through the pandemic.

We have seen this request from hardware, software and solution providers on the one hand, but also from the customer's side since they are looking for other ways to solve their problems. So this is something that I'm pretty sure we're gonna equip, in a few weeks, for example, a completely touchless QR system of a large company that offers their guests to understand more about the company and understand how to get around, sort of a compass, for example, completely touchless, and that's pretty much the same because you have somebody approaching a terminal, the system says, “Hello!”, when it comes to you and you use it for 1-3 minutes, and then you move on.So that's very similar And, so I'm looking forward to seeing this in kiosk environments. 

David: So the interest is absolutely there, but we're still in fairly early stages of seeing this out in the marketplace. Yes. 

Stephan Odorfer: Yes.

David: Okay. Very nice to speak with you. Thank you so much for spending some time with me.

Stephan Odorfer: Absolutely. Thank you for the invitation. 

David Niles, Niles Creative Group

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED - DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

In a technology landscape where even last year's big thing tends to get old quickly, it's pretty amazing that the lobby-filled LED installation at the Comcast tower in Philadelphia remains one of the best visual experience projects out there ... more than 12 years after it was first lit up.

If the project is unfamiliar, imagine walking into a very large corporate office tower lobby, admiring the wood walls that line it, and then seeing those walls are active, and that there are little visual stories being told.

The project went live when few people even in this industry knew all that much about direct view LED, doing a 4mm wall years ahead of when AV people started thinking and marketing in terms of pixel pitch.

I spoke with David Niles, whose little company did the original job and continues to work on it, through a recent LED upgrade.

We get into his long background, starting in architecture and early computer graphics, and evolving into pioneering work with HDTV, again years ahead of when people were using terms like 1080P.

We also talk about some of the other work done by his team.

I spoke with Niles last week as he puffed a morning cigar in his central Florida backyard. I was staring out at my Nova Scotia backyard, wondering when predicted snow flurries were going to blow in.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

 

TRANSCRIPT

David, we'll get into the Comcast experience, but that's not the only work you've done through the years. Can you tell me about your company and what you do? 

David Niles: If I would start backward, what we do today is, I make large scale multimedia experiences. Mostly for, I guess you would call it public art spaces and buildings, sometimes residences, all over the world. And that's what I do today, where I started is, it's a long list and I'll try and go through it quickly. I really started out in architecture. As a kid, I was fascinated with building and really enamored with architecture. I thought it was extremely novel. I was 10-12 years old, reading all Franklin Wrights books and studying his plans. By the time I was 12 or 13, I taught myself how to be a draftsman and I could draft, and eventually went out in my early career, designing and building outdoor cafes, stores, interiors in New York City. But I was always frustrated with this idea that as novel as I thought architecture was, it was turning into this sort of commodity for run of the mill things and I believe that the future of dynamic art is really in that thing called television. So very early on, I was fascinated with the idea of television and the medium of video and in the early part of my career I was involved with video art, very early pioneers of video art and in New York City where we would run out in porter back and we would shoot all kinds of things that we thought were for art. 

Parallel to that was involved with music and music recording and engineering, sort of altogether and theater to some extent, live theater, and that eventually melded into me getting more and more involved with the medium of video and television, summarily rejecting the idea of broadcast television. It was terrible, those television shows had terrible graphics, horrible lighting, and all this other stuff. 

One day I was sitting in a loft with some friends of mine and we're looking at this video, art that we were making and other than the three or four people in this room, looking at some protracted very boring thing that we shot and realized that we really weren't doing anything and that maybe, being popular and television needed change, needed revolution.

So I decided at that moment that it was more important to get involved with the idea of changing television and bringing art to the popular medium, rather than narrowcasting in this, three or four guys in a room, looking at video feedback on a monitor and thinking it’s wonderful. So I started to get more involved with the idea of taking what was then non-broadcast equipment and seeing if I could adapt this into making a more popular video with it and I was about 18 or 19 years old, I met up with an investor, who lived in France, who felt my ideas for creating a revolutionary mobile unit, that would permit us to go out and shoot and create on the spot more organically, without all of the baggage of what broadcast television was, at least in those days, if you wanted to go out and shoot outside, you were talking about a 50-foot trailer with 25 guys with screwdrivers, cameras that weigh 400 pounds.

He put up the money to invest in making a video mobile unit that would permit us to do that and it was a long story, but eventually, that mobile unit ended up in France and he invited me over to shoot a jousting competition in Carcassonne and this mobile unit that I built, it's a one-man show. This is one guy that had one, two-inch machine and three IVC 300 cameras. These were semi-professional, well they were professional cameras, but they were not high-end RCA, Marconi cameras. This sort of almost looked like a bread truck, it was a small van that housed all of this stuff.

And I basically went to France to shoot this jousting competition and ended up staying in France and convincing this investor to let me take it apart and rebuild it and make it better and this is years before there was any sort of private television or private videotape production in France. It only stayed on television and we pioneered the idea of creating broadcast facilities in France, to supply the French channels and eventually American and basically world channels for sporting events. 

Years later, I was able to buy out the original investor, because business was very slow for the first five or six years and set up my first company in France, where we ended up building that first original mobile unit, but ended up building nine more and became the premier facility in Europe for HBO, ABC, CBS, French television, German television, English television, in high-end video production.

That was France. Of course, pioneering, I was always pushing the envelope of never being satisfied with the state of the art of the existing equipment. It was too heavy. It was too complicated. It wasn't innovative enough. So I have an engineering side where I would go back and look at this hardware that existed at the time and modify it, adapt it, and create these sort of revolutionary for their time outside broadcast vehicles and studios, and somewhere in the early 80s, I had a reputation for being a hardware pioneer and Sony & RCA were constantly throwing new ideas at me and new products that they were developing.

Sony came along and they said, “We have something we want to show you, David” and I said, “what would that be?” 

“Something called high definition television,” and they took me into a room and they showed me the very first prototype for high-def TV and a transfer of this high-def TV that was made to the 35-millimeter film and I looked at it and it blew me away. “Holy mackerel!”

Now, this was a frustration that we'd had in Europe for something that Americans wouldn't understand is that if you produced a 65-pallet television on videotape, the French channels would not accept it. They would not accept videotape. They would only accept 35-millimeter film. So everything that we produce, whether it be a TV commercial, or anything else, or even a commercial for the cinemas, because in France, they put commercials in cinema, we would have to convert our videotape to film, and the only way to do it in the 70s was to do an elaborate kinescope process that Technicolor had developed. 

So we would have to produce absolutely perfect 65-pallet television and then take it through this kinescope process to create, well, 35-millimeter film that looked pretty good, but of course, it's limited in resolution and contrast ratio, but it looked pretty good, so we were constantly trying to get the best we could possibly get. So when I saw HDTV for the first time, looking at a video picture with a better than thousand line resolution and a contrast ratio that was amazing, I was blown away and I said, I've got to do that. So I spent several years negotiating with the NHK in Japan and Sony to allow me to buy the equipment to launch HDTV, which is what we did eventually. In France, we opened up the first studios in the world that actually produced HDTV, not necessarily for broadcast, but for transferring to 35-millimeter film, because we looked at it as either a new medium or a medium that would compete with 35 millimeter, which is the beginning of the HDTV revolution.

Our studios in France were very successful and we produced the first commercials in HDTV, the first movies in HDTV behind and a lot of our customers were calling from America, New York. And I said, “Wow, I need to expand my company,” to open up a New York office, which is what we did in 1987. We opened up 1125 Productions in New York, which was a fully equipped HDTV studio and production facility in New York City. It was an enormous financial investment but parallel, if you look at the history of HDTV, HDTV in 1987 was a very disputed medium as the American broadcasters really didn't want to know about it. The cinema community, of course, said you're not going to replace anything, you're not going to replace this beautiful film with the electronic medium. So it was a very challenging, uphill battle. 

It's a very long protracted story so I'll try and make it shorter. 1125 Productions was mostly a a very sophisticated post-production studio that we had on Fifth Avenue with mobile units. Eventually, I needed to start to produce HDTV programming on my own to start to fill the void as we needed a studio, and we eventually took over the Ed Sullivan Theater, where we built HDTV studios in New York and that's my television career. 

There's a lot involved, though I'd say it's a long story after that, but you know my roots and storytelling, show-business, theater, music,etc. everything else lends itself to, again, going back to this idea of these enormous pictures and these enormous experiential things that we could do with HDTV, that we really couldn’t do with it any other video mediums. 

So in the Sullivan theater, we built a 60-foot screen, and did perhaps through the photorealistic projection and we opened up a Broadway show called, “Dream Time” that ran for 145 performances and the big feature of the dream time, aside from being successful, was that it had fully integrated photo-realistic HDTV imagery that was projected with live actors, and you couldn't tell the difference between the live actors and the projection. It was actually a really cool show. 

What year was that? 

David Niles: That's 1992. And still, if you Google, “Dream time”, you'll see that there's even a Wikipedia page that some people put on, I had nothing to do with it, that talks about it. 

We eventually then sold The Ed Sullivan theater to CBS to do the Letterman show. I opened up studios around the corner in the studio 54 building and continued doing HDTV and other stuff and then got involved with Radio City Music Hall and Madison Square Garden, again, in the form of HDTV, but, more so with Radio City Music and their desire to expand the holiday show, which is the most important product that they're doing there, into bringing a LED screen at that time, one largest in the world that covered the whole back of the stage to be able to embellish the Radio City Music Christmas show, which we did. 

We put the screen up and we created an entire animated and coordinated sync to the background for their holiday show with great success and that brings us to where Comcast came into all of this. 

Yeah. I was going to say there's a lot of connective tissue here that I wasn't really aware of. 

David Niles: Yeah, it was interesting. Comcast, the backstory for Comcast is Comcast, at that time, in 2000, was basically a lot of administrative offices spread, pretty much in separate office buildings all over Philadelphia and Comcast became the major tenant for a spec building that was being proposed by a company called Liberty Property Trust. Liberty Property Trust are real estate developers in the Philadelphia area and my original contact was with the real estate developer that came to me and, I guess it was 2000, 1999, and they had this idea to do this spec 53-story office building in Philadelphia, and they wanted to create a sales center to pitch either anchor tenants or many tenants for their revolutionary new thousand-foot tall building and they found me and they came in and they saw what we could do, and I came up with an idea for creating a sales floor with a lot of virtual things and a lot of features that were like this experience that as soon as you walked off the elevator and it was one long interesting almost theme park ride to sell you on the idea of moving into this building, and the main feature of this thing was a room you ended up in that I designed, it was in the shape of an oval and you would sit in this room and it looked like you were in this oval-shaped room and in front of you was a 16-foot wide by 10-foot tall granite wall and this Brent wall was actually one of the materials of the spec building that Stern had designed, that Liberty Property Trust wanted to build, and the lights would dim automatically and it would go into this 10 minutes show that we produced, that would start out making you believe this is going to be a sales pitch for a building - it's going to have 25 elevators and it's made of granite and it's got 4,000 off spaces, and all of a sudden, you're now going through this 10-minute thing about falling in love with Philadelphia with shots of Philadelphia and interviews with JL and other key people and the architect, about the wonderfulness of being in Philadelphia and why you needed to be in this building. It was a very compelling, absolutely beautiful film.

And at the end of the film, it goes back to this granite wall and this granite wall slides away physically. And it reveals real windows that are actually looking out onto the site for which this building is going to be built and long story short, the lead tenant for this building became Comcast. Comcast decided at that moment, they wanted to unify all of their 5,000 workers into this new building and that this was going to be their new headquarters, and eventually, as they started to build the building, Brian Roberts, who's the CEO of Comcast had made frequent trips to Japan, he’s a very innovative guy, absolutely really smart. 

He decided that this lobby, that Stern had designed, this huge lobby and all of these wood panels. He wanted something that was going to make his 5,000 employees inspired and feel good about moving into this new building. The developer that developed the building, wanted to at the same time, create an instant destination for this new tallest building in Philadelphia and basically, I had just finished doing Radio City and they'd heard about it and they. invited me to pitch them my ideas for what to do in there. And our pitch was that we wanted to do something that was unexpected and we created a whole bunch of animatics and things, and we said if you put screens up in the lobby, you can do time and temperature and because Comcast is basically a cable TV operation, we're going to put up thousand channels. Things that would be typical, but it looked fine and then I said, wait a minute, let's talk about the unexpected, what don't we expect to see? And we incorporate something that is ever-changing and inspiring without interfering with what I consider to be private time of the public. 

Private time of the public means that, when you come through the front door of Comcast and you're walking towards the elevator, you can't do things that are too intrusive, that are screaming at you, not audio-wise, but screaming at you for your attention.

For the Comcast side, it was doing something that would be more a gift to the city. Something that was more socially redeeming without being video art, video art in a negative sense and it had some meaning. For the Liberty Property Trust side, it was their subway station name, that's underneath the Comcast building and there were another 10,000 people that come through that lobby every day, so how can we create a meaningful destination for these people coming up the staircase that allows them to enjoy something and then not feel as though they're missing something if they walk away from? 

So we created this idea of one doing the unexpected and two, using theatrical things because people relate to people, where we take ordinary people doing extraordinary things, that are like fun things to watch and from that, we created this whole plethora of things that could happen up there. And then Comcast came back and they said, “David, these ideas are great. This is wonderful. We love it. But how do you create hundreds of hours, thousands of hours of original programming, because we don't want to be constantly producing for this thing cause it's very expensive, and keep it fresh?” 

So, I went back and designed what we called a content delivery system, which is the system for which we actually get this content up onto the screen that is ever-changing, that's able to create its own content, by connecting pieces of pre-recorded content together in a logical fashion, not random so that it stays fresh. And Brian Robert said, “Okay, David, you can do this, but you've got to guarantee me that I will have two years worth of content that's going to remain valid and appear to be new all the time, without creating hundreds of thousands of hours.” 

Remember that basically scenarios in the Comcast center last about a minute, there's a minute and then it'll go back to being this wood wall, disappearing and then coming back. We rotated about 1200 pieces of content every day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. That's a quantity of content that's impossible. I mean broadcast stations don't even do this. 

This was like in the mid to late 2000s and nobody was talking about direct-view LEDs other than people with jumbotrons.

David Niles: Oh, that was the first challenge. In the mid two thousand, you were looking at LED screens that were 6 millimeters, 8 millimeter, 10 millimeter, jumbotron, so it was first because I needed this to be photorealistic, you had to believe that what you were looking at was actually real, that was part of the magic of it. So I had a longstanding relationship with Barco broadcast from my television days because they make a lot of broadcast products and Barco was doing LED, but LED in 6 millimeter and 8 millimeter. And I went back to Barco and with Barco engineers, we developed the idea of doing a 4 millimeter pixel pitch wall, which for 2006 was revolutionary.

We did tests, we set up eight screens in studios in New York, did subjective tests, objective tests. Again, there were other competing companies that wanted to build this screen, Mitsubishi wanted to build this screen, Daktronics wanted to build this screen, and we eventually ended up developing this with Barco.

Comcast eventually was convinced that Barco was the way to go, and we ended up doing the first NX4, a huge screen. It's 80 feet and it's up to almost 6 million pixels, 6,000 pixels wide. This was revolutionary for its time and then, of course, a content delivery system to be able to deliver to this. There were no servers that would do anything, no pipeline that would do anything larger than HDTV 1920x1080, and we're trying to feed something that's 2000 pixels wide by 10,000 pixels across. That's not going to happen. 

So we ended up designing and building a content delivery system that was capable of doing that. But again, Brian Roberts and Comcast came back to me and they said, “Listen, this is the front face of our building. This is our image. This has to be mission-critical.” And of course, I go back to my days in television, where there's no such thing as something going wrong, you don't do a live downhill skiing event from Switzerland, it's feeding 20 million television sets. There's no such thing as “Oops, the camera doesn't work.” That doesn't happen. I mean it does, you just don't see it. So in designing the content delivery system, we designed several levels of redundancy, such that, in the event of any failure behind the scenes, it would automatically switch over and change so that the problem would remain invisible on the screen.

And in the first eight years of operation, the screen was never turned off. It never ever went down. After eight years of operation, a couple of years ago, it was the end of life for the NX4s so we actually changed all of that, but basically, the new installation, the new content delivery system, and the new screen is based on the same original design. So what levels of redundancy we had built-in, you can't see the problem if there's a problem and eventually, it's a lot of hardware, things do go wrong, but you just can't see them. 

How does Comcast know this is working? How do they measure that this is having the desired impact? 

David Niles: That's a really great question, because Brian Roberts was constantly analyzing and he's very analytic, and even when we were proposing the ideas, we had the meetings in Comcast where he invited 50 people that worked in the building to come up and I made a miniature model of a lobby where we projected story worlds, started animatics and things and scenarios that we were developing and we actually had focus groups come in and vote on paper and tell us what they liked and didn't like, what they thought and even before we actually started shooting, we were having results in 97% off the Richter scale. 

When it finally opened, one of the first things that began to show, other than people that loved the original Comcast experience, was the holiday show. Brian wanted desperately to have, aside from what the wall does every day, during the holiday seasons to run a special holiday show, and the first year that we did the holiday show, within several days of this thing opening, it went viral and the holiday show is a 15 minute or 18 minutes show that ran every hour, 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock, 12 o'clock, eight or nine times a day in the lobby of this office building. And within several days after opening, every show was jam-packed. You could not get into the lobby of the building. The lobby would hold on a couple of thousand people. It was an enormous success and you have to imagine, this is a building lobby, there are no chairs in it, there's no place to sit down. All you can do is stand on this couch on this granite floor and people from all over would come running in on the hour to see this spectacle, and now the holiday show is in its 12th year and because they eventually put in counters and analytics to see how many people came in when they come in, we've had millions, that's plural, millions of visitors. The hardest thing in the world in show business is a free attraction. That's the hardest thing to actually promote, ‘cause I've done, Broadway shows, et cetera. Once people have bought a ticket, they're bought halfway into something, but when you do something for nothing, when it's free, when it’s open to the public, it's the most discerning audience. It's the hardest audience and the success has been phenomenal.

And even though it's part of the design of the wall, we don't do any advertising for Comcast on it. There's almost no branding whatsoever, but this idea of doing a gift to the city, the public relations response to this wall has been extraordinary. And people don't like cable companies, even if you go online and you look up Comcast, you'll see, blogs opened up a little bit of the, we hate Comcast, we don't like the bandwidth, it's screwed me out of this, but that thing that's in the lobby, it's genius. 

Now I don't want to paint you as a one-trick pony because I know you've done other work. What are some of the other projects that your team has worked on lately? 

David Niles: Another one also for Stern, who is the architect of Comcast, we, of course, did the George W. Bush library, which is an interesting 360-degree video experience. It's in the central part of the library complex called Freedom Hall, which is this very tall, huge square room where people gather, after they pass security to go into the library, they gather in this room before they're actually admitted into the library section and as they gather in this room, they're basically looking at what's a drawn level, which is doors and paneling and stuff. But, at about 12 feet high, it turns into what looks like a hand-painted mural that goes 360 degrees around them up to a skylight area. And as they're standing in there, this hand-painted mural, when enough people gather, all of a sudden it starts to come to life. Images of sand dunes and tumbleweeds and a desert landscape, Texas landscape looks hand-painted, and all of a sudden it starts to come to life. Tumbleweeds start to move around. Surround sound, original orchestra track begins to play and this goes into an eight-minute presentation about the office of the presidency, what the office of the presidency actually means. and it's about the fact that our presidents come from the people of the land, to become president and it's done in a way where we're looking at again, it's a very big challenge to shoot these time-lapse images of the American landscape, the textures of the American landscape in 360 degrees, photorealistic above your head and it's a very inspiring thing. People, all of a sudden start pointing, looking. The end of that experience is that the screen explodes into thousands of images, in what looks like, almost passport photos of all kinds of Americans, young, old Americans from a hundred years ago, colors, all races, all this and that. And it turns into this enormous mosaic of these pictures of Americans and some of these pictures are larger than others. And those pictures that are larger than others are actually what looked like passport photos of everybody that's standing in that audience and somebody will notice it and they start pointing and it's like popcorn going off in a popcorn pot. They all start and it's basically, they're incorporated basically thousands of pictures and the pictures begin to dissolve off leaving. Today it would be 40-44 pictures that are up there that are left up there that are 44 presidents, so it's a very inspiring thing. It's about the office of the presidency. It's not necessarily about a particular president. 

But that's a big one. In Washington, DC, we have the Media Arch at the City Center, which is an Archway. There are no two of my installations that are identical. There are similarities to Comcast in so much as it's got rotating entertainment, it's ever-changing, it draws quite a large crowd. 

Other installations we've done pretty much all over America and in Europe and in China, they're all different, but they're very large installations and also some very small ones. What we love to do is challenge ourselves. We constantly deal with clients that are saying, “This is what we want to accomplish. How do we accomplish it?” And what I mean by accomplish is, like in the Comcast experience, Brian Roberts wanted to have his employees feel connected to this building and inspired. At the same time, Liberty Property Trust wanted to create a destination. We love a challenge. The Bush library was another challenge. It was, not to make something specific that is, for Bush, the president, ‘cause that's where the library is here for, this was an overture to the idea of the office of the presidency. In California and in other places, it's people telling us specific goals that they have to see what we can come up with to create something that fills those particularly, sometimes commercial, sometimes not commercial and we love that idea of the challenge.

And again, we've done dozens of tiny lobbies. We have one that we're about to install in New York City, which is a ceiling in a very important office building, but it's very small. The lobby is only 18 feet wide and it's about 80 feet long and we're putting a ceiling in there. The lobby's beautifully been re-redesigned, and here we're creating a virtual ceiling that is an experience that works from the front door you walk into, down this 60-foot lobby that has a reward to it being there without interfering with the architectural design of the lobby, it's complementary. It blends in, it doesn't look like, “Oh, let's put a screen up there and we'll put a lava lamp on it or something. 

All right, David, this was terrific. We could talk for hours. I want to thank you for spending some time with me. It was really interesting. 

David Niles: Thank you so much for the questions, they are really good.

AVIXA Digital Signage Power Hour – October 2020 Roundtable On QSR & Drive-Thru

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED - DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

The QSR industry has been dramatically impacted by COVID-19, and some operators have fared much better than others for the simple reason that they had drive-thru lanes.

If the business relied on walk-in and dine-in traffic, they were in trouble. But if they had drive-thru lanes with pre-sell and menu displays, they tended to make out OK. What might have been 70% of their business went up past 90%.

Last week I moderated a roundtable panel on digital signage and the QSR business, chatting for  almost an hour with top people from companies active in the space - both vendors and end-users.

The Digital Signage Power Hour was hosted by AVIXA and sponsored by STRATACACHE. I led a discussion with Dan Williams from Stratacache, who worked with McDonald's on its massive digital deployment, Sara Grofscik of Samsung, who runs the QSR business there, Dave Petricig of PingHD, and Todd Hoffman, the digital lead for Krispy Kreme, and the subject of a recent 16:9 podcast.

The session starts with me rattling through some observations, and then we dive in.

AVIXA's Marcella Walsh can be heard at the back-end, answering some listener questions.

You can also watch the webinar online here ...

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No transcript on this one. Too many competing voices!

Joe King, Philips

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED - DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

Philips has really come on in recent years in the digital signage ecosystem, taking on more and more presence at trade shows and releasing smart display products that my industry contacts have consistently said great things about.

You probably have a consumer product like a shaver or electric toothbrush made by Philips, and assume that the commercial display products come out of that Dutch company. They do … and don’t, and I get into that in a chat with Joe King, a Senior Director with the company, who drives North American sales.

Joe and I talk about where its smart display lineup is at, and its use of Android. We also talk about its own CMS software, which he stresses is NOT intended to compete with commercial software products. It’s meant to service the very basic needs of small businesses.

We talk about market conditions, and how the professional display company has kind of skated through all of this COVID mess … because the desktop monitor side of the business has exploded with Work From Home demands.

We explore the company’s camera-driven access control offer for retail, and who’s buying direct view LED these days.

And finally, we get into what to look for from Philips in the next 12-18 months.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

Joe King, thanks for joining me. We've met in the past. I know Phillips well, and I think generally a lot of people know Phillips. One of the things that sometimes when I'm introduced to Phillips people, they kind of explained to me the background of the display side of the company. They may have Phillips toothbrushes on all kinds of things at home, but Phillips’s professional display is, as I understand it, the trading name for some other large companies. 

Joe: Yeah. Dave, thank you. Good to be with you by the way, and thank you for having me. Yeah, so we operate as Phillips. We operate under a license from Phillips. We're actually a global company called TPV. It's based out of Taiwan and we operate with a commercial license globally for digital signage, as well as a professional TV. So signage TV, hotel TV, we operate that pretty much around the world.

There are a couple of little pockets that are exceptions, but for the most part, we operate that around the world. So we have the power of TPV behind it and the manufacturing power of TPV behind it, which we're quite happy about. I think most of the industry probably doesn't know the name, but we're the world's largest manufacturer of desktop monitors. We're the world's third-largest manufacturer of televisions. And we like having THEM behind us because it gives us a lot of product development power, and also a lot of manufacturing power when we need it. So, happy you bring that up and thank you for the question. really 

There are some big companies in Taiwan. I've been there two or three times. I was there about a year ago. And, man, I was off to see AUO, but we went right by the TSMC, they're the biggest semiconductor maker in the world and this place was the size of a Ford plant. 

Joe: Yeah. It's nice having that manufacturing power behind us.

Where do you guys sit in terms of market share in North America and in Europe as well? I think in terms of Samsung and LG being top of the pile in North America, but you guys have really come on in the last two or three years. 

Joe: We have and even with COVID, Dave, we've been able to increase our share a little bit. So I think it depends on the day of the week, we are #4-#5. We tend to swap back and forth with another brand there at that level. But certainly, we don't have the market power of a Samsung or even an LG, but, as you say, we're growing certainly in North America and North America is a focus for us now.

We're the number three digital signage player in Europe. Again, behind the two large brands that you mentioned, but there's a real focus with us on North America because we feel like we're now getting our act together, so to speak. We've improved the product line. We've put world-class service in place, something that I think we can differentiate ourselves with, but yeah, we see North America as a real focal point for us. 

You joined or the company joined, what many of the display manufacturers have done in terms of adding systems-on-chip displays to their lineup? And one of the things that I've I've known about Philips is that a lot of the software companies that kind of try the different smart display platforms out there have tended to say that the Phillips’ one is really good, it's very modern Android, powerful, runs like a top and everything else. 

How much of your product line is built around a system-on-chip now? Like the commercial display product line. 

Joe: A lot. In terms of just sheer models, if we were just looking at a percentage of the models, we're probably getting close to 75%. We'll try to offer a model that doesn't have it if we're just trying to hit a price point. But for the most part, especially as you get into the higher ends of the line, almost everything has an Android operating system in it, and we see the business going that way.

I'm a firm believer and I've been in the hardware business, a long long time. I'll age myself if I say how long, but I really do think that software is going to be the driver of this business going forward, and I think that our Android platform, as you say, it performs very well. We see it in large deployments, where it's accessible. It is an open platform, which we like, and we certainly see our business heading that way. 

Something that you hear from the software companies, as well as integrators and end-users that they like that it's open. And, you know, some of the other guys have their own proprietary operating system working with it, whereas I've heard others say we really like that we can work on just Android and do what we need to do without learning or tweaking something. 

Joe: Right. Well, there's a level of consistency, I guess, would probably be the best way to say that. But yes, we get that feedback a lot and I think one of the things that we've done that might be a little different is we tend to try to stabilize On an Android version. So if we see something that we like, that's very stable, you know, we had Android 4.4.4 in the market for quite a long time. And even though there were a lot of updated versions, we kept saying to the marketplace, “This is stable, why do you want to even think about upgrading firmware and trying to mess things up?”

So we tend to draw a line in the sand, if you will, that a particular Android version and we've been very consistent in that. And I think our software partners like that approach actually. 

And where are you now? I think you're at 7. 

Joe: We actually have some displays with 8. We have two different, I think it's 7.1 in the marketplace as well as an 8 today.

Are there any objections still from end users saying, well, you know, it's a system-on-chip? What if something happens with the panel? I gotta replace the whole panel or it's not as powerful enough or anything like that. 

Joe: Certainly I think we tend to get those questions. I think we've proven with some of the demonstrations and stuff that we've done that certainly, the platform is powerful enough.

I think honestly, Dave, the way to answer that is that we've put a service organization in place that we think is second to none in the industry. So if somebody does need a fast replacement, we have the ability to do that. We offer people a 24-hour turnaround. We certainly understand that if it's a menu board in a quick-serve restaurant and it goes out, it can't be their black for a very long time at all.

So we certainly offer the marketplace, those opportunities for quick replacement and that's one of the reasons we do it. We have a very reliable product. I would put it up against anybody else in the industry, which is why we talk about that quick turnaround service, because we know we're not going to need it very much. 

Have you ever run into a smart display where the smarts have died and the panel had to be pulled down? Cause I ask this question a lot and I've never heard anybody say that's actually happened. 

Joe: No, I haven't. And it's a good question. I think again, we try to separate those two. So, the Android operating system is separate, literally a separate board, if you will, from the display itself so those aren't tied together. Now certainly, if a display goes black, it's going to go black regardless, but I haven't seen them tied together that way and it may be just because of the design of our product. 

Right, but I mean that the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that gets someone out there around system-on-chip displays is if there is a problem with the CPU, which you know, is a separate component from the display components and so on, you can't just open a trap door and snap on out and pop a new one. You got to take the whole thing down. But I've never actually heard anybody say this has happened. 

Joe: I haven't either. I haven't seen it. You could always make the argument, you know, indifference to my friends at BrightSign that you could see the same thing with a player and I think we just like this approach. We think the improved service or the improved performance of the Android operating system is worth the investment. And we don't see a risk. We really don't, and as I said, I think some of the installations we have would certainly support that.

What happens on the install side itself? I have heard some solutions providers say that field servicing drops like a boulder because we don't have all these connectors. 

Joe: Yeah. I think you're right. I think, you know, even from our standpoint, we offer our software partners the opportunity for us to preload the software, you know, we have a high touch warehouse facility where we can do that and make the installation process even easier.

So I think that's one of the things that we offer that may be unique to a system-on-chip product. I will oversimplify, it's not as easy as just hanging it and going, but it certainly can make the installation much easier to do with some of the pre-loading capability that we have.

And from what I've heard is because there aren't any HDMI cables and other cables associated with them, there's nothing to wiggle loose and, cause a truck roll. 

Joe: Yeah, well, I'll share it with you. We review service metrics every month and we know that on average, about 65% of the calls we get into our call center are exactly that, it's what I would call operator error. So, things like the cable has come loose, a power cord has come loose and typically we see, it'll be a little higher, some months, a little lower some months, but typically about 65% of the calls we get, we resolve over the phone and it is cable related. And so I think that's just another argument for having a totally contained system.

Yeah. Remove the points of failure. 

Joe: You got it. Exactly. 

So what is CMND, I assume it’s an acronym for Command? 

Joe: Exactly. So it is our “create and maintain” product, so it is a product that we let people create their own content. And I will say to everybody, we do it at a very elementary level. We don't pretend to be able to do some of the things that some of the other software companies out there can do. This is a way for, if you're an individual restaurant owner, and you own a deli and you want to put something up on a screen, this is a way to make PowerPoint and get it onto a screen fairly easily. It's a way for a school, as an example, if they need to broadcast an emergency message, this is an easy way to have that happen, and then it also gives you controls. 

So it can, again, I'll use those schools as an example if there's an emergency message that needed to be broadcast, it can be done from a central location and get to every product. We also utilize it, just like some of the other manufacturers, in very large installations. You can turn them all on with a button click, you can turn them all off with a button click. So just creating software and being able to control the systems as well. And, that's why we call it Command. 

So you're not trying to sell against your software partners or anything?

Joe: No way, as I said, we don't pretend to be that good. We're not in the software business. We're a hardware company, but as I said earlier, I think the software is the key going forward. So we want to make our product as seamless as it possibly can be for our software partners.

We're not trying to take their place. 

What I've seen with some of the display guys is a move to create a kind of foundational software that's a device management and control as you describe it that you could then port a web application onto, and maybe if you've got a special purpose thing where you really don't need all of the bells and whistles and capabilities of the CMS, you can just use command or CMND as the kind of the baseline platform.

Is that accurate? 

Joe: Yeah, I think that's a fair portrayal. As I said, it’s meant to be kind of elementary. And, look, there are people out there that do the software side really really well. And even the control functionality they do, better than we do. So, this is meant to be a very basic product.

You know, the great thing about it is, it's free. We don't charge for it. That's a little bit different than some of our competitors. But again, we're not charging for it because it is a very basic system. 

And these are end-users, buyers who are otherwise just not gonna get a CMS anyways unless they get something free or one of the freemium ones out there? 

Joe: Exactly. 

So, I think two or three years ago, I went to a lot of trade shows. That's more accurately say I used to go to a lot of trade shows and I can recall, let's say about three years ago, going to ISE and seeing a direct-view LED in the Phillips booth for the first time. 

So you guys have gotten into that. How do you differentiate your product in a very crowded field? 

Joe: Yeah, great question. The last time you and I actually spoke to each other and recorded anything was Infocom a year ago about LED and so, of course, COVID has impacted it. We have sold some units, I'm happy to say, and some of them are going on now, but I think that the big differentiator for us, as I talked a year ago, is kits. So we tend to put LED together and a pre-configured kit, you know, we've been very successful with video walls doing the same thing, so it comes together with the display, it comes together with a mouse and it comes together with all the processing equipment you need, the cables. And so we tend to believe in these kits and that's where our success has been in North America. A similar thing in Europe, we've seen, people are going to want custom screens and we'll certainly give them the opportunity to do that. But for us, the success really is those kits. I think the first three installations where you've done or in the process of doing in the US have all been kits versus custom.

I've heard that a lot and the prevailing opinion seems to be that you have specialty LED companies who understand everything about very large installations, big canvases, weird shapes, and everything else, but you've got this whole big second tier of integrators and solutions writers who don't work with LED very often and they don't necessarily understand it or get it, and don't have the cycles to just become experts on this, so a kit is something they can wrap their heads around. 

Joe: Yeah, I think so. And I think that where we're looking at selling this and where we've been successful is mostly in the corporate market. and also some of the consumer markets. We have a couple of partners that are really quite strong in the consumer market and some of these LED kits that we have worked really well are home theaters and that's where we've had some of our success. 

And on the corporate side, is it primarily conference rooms and control rooms, that kind of thing? 

Joe: Not conference rooms, more lobbies. In fact, the first installation we did was a corporate lobby, even in COVID, it's still something that proceeded and was installed. So, yeah, we are seeing more lobbies than conference rooms. 

Yeah. More broadly with digital signage in general, what are those vertical markets that seem to be working right now, even amidst all of this nuttiness? 

Joe: I think we've all been really surprised. I think we all expected that retail would get impacted and retail has been impacted, but I think we've all certainly been surprised at how well, certainly quick-serve restaurants, pizza, you know, the brick and mortar, home improvement, you know, large chain stores have done.

We're seeing a lot of activity in drug stores as an example. So it's really surprised me how well that retail itself has maintained. Certainly, we've seen a huge increase in education. I think a lot of those early dollars went to Chromebooks and laptops and everything else for students, but we're really seeing now an increase in some of the displays that are used for education, as kids do end up back in the classroom. 

Well, you know, all those places have a lot of change going on and, it's not, “This is what we're doing for the next three months, It can change in an hour.” 

Joe: Yeah, exactly, and I think we've seen some of that and certainly if you look at corporate as an example, I think in the US there's really a tendency to step back, about going back to work if you will, where I think in some other parts of the world, we've seen people go back to work a little more quickly.

Certainly, we've seen that in Europe. We've seen people go back into offices a little more quickly, you know, just a personal observation, I think we need to do that here. I think people need to get back into some kind of a normal routine and I think the office can be part of that. And I certainly hope that we're doing that as we get into 2021.

Yeah, I do wonder about this whole shift to work from home, how that will play out. I think it works very well for some people. I've been doing it forever, so I'm used to it, but I think there's a whole bunch of people who do their best work when they're in a collaborative environment and they can share.

Joe: Yeah. I'll share just a quick side note, I mean, I'm like you. I've worked from home for forever, I have a great setup. I can do it, but there are people in my group who, once we made the announcement that we would open the office back up, they couldn't wait to get back there, you know, social distancing and everything else that we planned for.

They still just felt that they were more productive in the office. And we have some that aren't and that's perfectly fine. We've given them that opportunity, but to your point, some of those people, whether they be supply chain-related or product development related, who just feel like they're a whole lot more productive in the office where they have the tools they need and I think a lot of companies are going to see that same thing. 

I certainly think that technology is going to have to help there and hopefully, digital signage can be part of that, whether it's collaborative displays, being able to Zoom effectively if you will but I think technology can help there. And I think that's part of why we're seeing corporate, maybe not as respond as quickly, is because they're still trying to figure that out. 

Going back to retail, Philips introduced something called “People Count” like two-three months ago or maybe more. Can you explain what that is? 

Joe: Sure. So it's a product that we in collaboration with a camera manufacturer, and then there's some software that we actually developed that works with our Android product. But it's basically a way to count people as they come into a retail establishment and then it's up to that retail establishment to tell the system how many people it can allow. So it counts them going in and it counts them going out so that if you can only have a hundred people in your store at one time, it will literally put the red light up, and tell people to wait and that it's not safe to enter yet. And then when somebody does exit, it'll give them a green light, and depending on how large that display is, it gives them a chance to tell people, a mask is required. You can't come in without a mask. It gives them a chance to tell them some of the things they're doing to keep their area clean.

And so it was very well received. I think it's been more well-received in Europe. I think in the US it's been almost on a state by state basis, as to how locked down those States still are. Certainly in California, it's been a very effective product. You know, in some other parts of the country, it's been really effective.

And then frankly, and honestly we've seen some areas of the country that just say, well, we're not going to worry about monitoring people coming. To be honest, it's been kind of hit and miss depending on where you are in the country. 

Yeah, I think I have heard it more broadly that in Europe, the idea of retail access controls as more demand and more take-up because there are pretty stiff fines associated with having too many people in the store. And I guess city bylaw enforcement officers in different jurisdictions who are pretty happy to write tickets on that. Cause they're incentive based on what they do, whereas as you say, it's state by state in the US. 

I live in a part of Canada where we've seen very few cases, but I've seen none of this stuff and it's still, teenagers acting as bouncers, you know, to get into a home Depot or something like that. So I think it kind of depends on where you are. 

Joe: Exactly. Where I live locally and I live in Tennessee, when it first started, there were people standing in front of the grocery store chain.

I go to counting people as they went in and counting people as they went out and they're all using walkie talkies, and now there's none of that going on, you know? And so I think they've just made a corporate decision that we don't need to spend that money, to try to monitor who's coming in and out whether they have a mask on or not.

And where again, I think there are some areas of the country where they're really still trying to do that and that's where we've seen success with that product. 

Have you had to work with some of these resellers and buyers who say, “guys, this isn't a product just for the moment. You can sweat this asset post-COVID”, presumably there is a post-COVID, have you had to do that? 

Joe: It's been one of the selling points we've had to make to everybody that's purchased it. I think that's been the capital outlay. We had one large retailer that bought it for right at a hundred locations and one of their biggest questions was what do I do with it when I no longer have to count people? And so I think that was where we came back and said to them, well, here's what you can do with it. We put them in touch with another software partner. Thankfully, this particular client is a digital signage user anyway, but I think that we've had that question from almost everybody: what do I do after, and is this investment that I'm making now going to be something I can recoup even down the line? And so, yeah, we've linked them up with software companies to try to maximize that.

I think there's a little bit of gateway drug stuff going on there where this is something that can get a retailer or another kind of a business that takes a lot of public foot traffic in, and get them understanding what you can do with digital signage and kind of migrate out from there.

You could imagine once you start using cameras and sensors and things like that, you can start to understand how the store works and where people go and how that changes by time of day, all that stuff. 

Joe: Right. Exactly. 

So there's a lot of talk in the cheap seats where I spent a lot of my time, that LCD is a product that's going to go away and we're all going to shift to direct-view LED and to micro-LED. Is that something that Phillips largely sees is happening or is there always a role for LCD because I kind of think there is when I really think about it. 

Joe: I think we've been talking about the demise of LCD for years, right? And I just don't see it. I think there are two totally different products, and I think that there's always going to be an application for LCDs. 

Do I think that eventually some of the video wall applications that we do today with LCD will end up being direct-view LED? I think, yeah, that's a possibility, but I still think even as fast as the cost is coming down, I still think there's going to be an opportunity. There are just things that we can do with LCD that you struggle to do with direct-view LED and a lot of that is just based on the economics and how much money people have to spend. 

You know, Dave, I don't see a school system putting in direct-view LEDs, at least before I end up retiring. I think that's a number of years away before that becomes a cost-effective solution for them and that's where some of the large screen stuff that we have and our competitors have, you know, really works in some of those verticals. You know, will you see it in transportation more quickly? Probably. When you're looking at what belt is my luggage on, does that turn into direct-view? Yeah, I think that probably is some of the first things that will happen to replace a traditional video wall. But yeah, I don't see it being that quick. 

Yeah. I mean, the minute you get into utilizing what's possible with a 4K display, uou just can't do that even on a micro-LED display, you know, to have fine characters and fine detail and all that. It's just not the same thing.

Joe: Well, and you also just look at the content. I think a lot of it is content dependable, you know?

So if you look at moving video, I think it lends itself to either format. But if you're looking at static content, think about a menu board in a quick-serve restaurant, I don't think that that is really going to be a direct-view LED Canada for the foreseeable future, just because I think it works just fine on LCD and it's much more affordable. 

So the last question: in this weird world that we live in, I wonder how this has had an impact on things like roadmaps and product releases and all that. What should we be expecting to see from Phillips over the next 12 to 18 months? 

Joe: Yeah. I guess we're fortunate because Dave, we are part of a large global company that is kind of diversified if you will. Our desktop monitor business has been off the charts as you can imagine. And I think in a lot of ways that's enabled it to support some of the development and some of the things we're doing in digital signage where some of the other companies may have had to look at scaling back a little bit.

So we're proceeding. We're going to produce in the fourth quarter of this year. Sometimes people look at us and say, what the heck are you doing? But we're going to introduce collaborative displays for corporate offices. We're going to introduce touch displays for education that are upgraded with some great systems behind them. We're going to introduce professional signage TV. We see that as an expanding market for us and others. It's basically a very cost-effective digital signage product that also has a TV tuner in it. So it's really made for use in a corporate environment. You know, we talked about conference rooms earlier. This is a really perfect product for that conference room, because it is a TV which also has Chromecast built into it. It gives you that seamless connectivity. And then it also gives you that CMND software, and the ability to control. If you've got multiple screens in a facility, it gives you a chance to control that as well, but it really is a cost-effective product. And we liked the fact, I think the big differentiator there is Chromecast and the ability to connect things, similarly, our education product will give you the ability to connect up 64 devices to it. So if you're a teacher and you have students with Chromebooks, Think about the ability to have, one of your students throw something up on the display instead of the teacher always having to control that and being the one doing that. So we like the flexibility that it gives us. 

That would terrify me if I taught a bunch of 17-year-old boys. (Laughter)

Joe: Yeah, it probably would, but, to get back to the premise of your question to your question. I was on a call this morning and we were talking about 2022 and we're in full planning mode. We were firm believers going in and my Marketing Manager would back me up on this, that we haven't really slowed down because we feel like if you start cutting and slashing, it's going to be a little more difficult to respond and maintain. Thank goodness, we haven't had to furlough anybody.

We haven't laid anybody off. We've maintained everybody, even in a market that we all know is down. And I think part of that will give us success, whether it's Q1 or Q2, whenever we see ourselves coming out of this. I think that puts us in a position and our company's a firm believer in this, that it puts us in a position where we can have more success coming out of this.

All right. That was terrific. I enjoyed our chat. 

Joe: Yeah, David's good to talk to you again. 

AVIXA Digital Signage Power Hour - Roundtable on LED & MicroLED

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED - DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

The trade association AVIXA has been running a series of Digital Signage Power Hours for the last few months, bringing together industry experts in a roundtable format to talk about a specific topic each time.

The most recent one was about LED, and I was once again the moderator and referee.

The panel had Chris Riegel of STRATACACHE, who among a bazillion things is spinning up a microLED manufacturing facility in Oregon. We also had on the panel Reece Kurtenbach, the CEO of Daktronics, one of the oldest and largest direct view LED firms out there. We had Johanna Ocampo from D3, Rich Ventura from Sony, which introduced the world to large format microLED. Sam Phenix, who runs her own display consulting firm and is deeply involved with AVIXA and SID. And Florian Rotberg, of Munich-based consultancy Invidis.

The session has two parts:

First, there's a brief presentation by Riegel that focuses on microLED and how disruptive it will be in this market.

Then we go into the roundtable, followed by some questions.

If you are involved in or looking at LED, this is well worth the listen.

There is another DS Power Hour coming up on Oct. 20 about QSR. Details here ...

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

Todd Hoffman, Krispy Kreme

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED - DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

The iconic doughnut chain Krispy Kreme has something of a cult status, with people flocking to their stores to get a fresh, warm, melt-in-your-mouth yeast doughnut.

There are Krispy Kreme stands and small shops, but a real Krispy Kreme store - the kind that gets people lining up - has the whole production line in view of customers, and shows the glazed doughnuts coming out of the fryer. It is experiential in its own way.

But the chain, based in North Carolina, wanted to really amplify the brand and experience for its new flagship store in New York, in Times Square. It opened recently, and it may be the most ambitious, experience-driven QSR operation on the planet.

There are giant LED visuals outside, 'cuz its Time Square. But inside, there are stacked video walls for branding and promotion, digital menu displays, interactive tables, and a scheduled projection-mapping show called Doughnut Theater.

I spoke with Todd Hoffman, the digital lead on the 4,500 square foot flagship store.

TRANSCRIPT

Todd. Thanks for joining me. Your company, Krispy Kreme recently launched something in New York City in Times Square. Can you tell me what that experience is all about and why it happened? 

Todd Hoffman: Sure. It's an opportunity for an iconic brand to make a big statement out there, Times Square is kind of a crossroads of the world, with a great place to plant a flag, I guess we're in 32 countries with about 1400 shops and and it was time to put a big stick in the ground and say something major for the brand.

We do plan a big rollout starting in 2021, and also we're coming to New York in a big way. So times square just made sense. 

New York is the home of the, not the home, but there's a lot of Dunkin donuts there and a few Tim Hortons. Krispy Kreme wasn't really present in the market? 

Todd Hoffman: We had a shop in Penn station and years ago we had more shops, but we decided strategically that this was where we wanted to expand. And, this year we rolled out four shops, even before Time Square. We've got a couple more coming at the end of the year and then entering into Dwayne Reed, the world to expand our reach even further.

This one in Times Square, it's the whole nine yards where you're doing all the production right there and people can walk in and see what's going on in the whole theater piece of it? 

Todd Hoffman: Absolutely. It’s 4,500 square feet. So it's a big shop for us. We make donuts 24/7. So that's why you have a hot light that's always on top of the roof. 

And these are not regular donuts. These are the “melt in your mouth” ones? 

Todd Hoffman: Yeah, we call them OGs (Original Glazed) but they're yeast doughnuts that take an hour to make from beginning to end, and we have a machine that can do 270 dozens an hour.

So this location is filled with technology, inside and out. You see this big LED screen as you're approaching it. Of course, it's one of the gazillion LED screens in Times Square, but it walked through everything that was done and the thinking behind it? 

Todd Hoffman: Sure. Sight lines were huge. We're at 48th & Broadway, and the goal is to be seen from 40th street all the way up to 55th. That's where we have the world's largest hotline on the roof, 15 feet, about 8,000 pounds that will be lit and truly you can see it from an even longer distance. We're using lights that are typically used on airport runways so that's one of the big pieces. We have a wraparound billboard, that's 110x35 feet. And then under that we have a ribbon of LED screens where basically you can see donuts just like they're on their conveyor, scrolling, and we could also put any kind of other messaging.

Trying to hit it hard from a distance. Everything we did, we wanted to stand out of the crowd, everybody wants to stand up the crowd, But, I think, I think we did, especially with something as simple as our big red hotline, just rotating slowly. With the pandemic that became somewhat of a beacon of hope and optimism. I mean, who doesn't like donuts? 

And even the opening of shops throughout the year, while other people might've been closing shops, and contracting, we've gone full speed ahead. 

And I believe this store was originally going to open earlier in the year, but then, New York kind of went into lockdown and that delayed it a little bit?

Todd Hoffman: It did, but, mid-July, you know, we're right in Times Square with 10% of its normal traffic, the decision was made that it was important for us internally, and we felt in New York externally to stay on track and so we opened in September. And, by the time we opened, let's say Times Square was back 30 to 40% of its average traffic, but we still hit our records anyway. Word got out. 

So when you say records, do you mean that in terms of record sales, foot traffic? 

Todd Hoffman: Both. For the opening day, we hit records and then for the opening week, also records. We opened on Tuesday always and then by Saturday, the word had gotten out to the suburbs into New Jersey and we had a big day on Tuesday, but even bigger days on Saturday and then Sunday.

And you kinda need sales records there because the cost of rent in a Times Square area is a couple of bucks? 

Todd Hoffman: Yeah. 

Not like being out in the suburbs. 

Todd Hoffman: No, and you know, profit is always an incentive, but making a big statement in Times Square that becomes our marker, that we've returned to New York.

We are in Harlem, where in the Bronx. We're down in the Financial district and we're going to open up shops in Brooklyn and the upper West side. 

If you're in Brooklyn, Williamsburg, you’ll have to be artisanal. (Laughter)

Todd Hoffman: Well, we stick to our roots. We did introduce our first, let's say $10 donut, but a big Apple donut, which is our nod to New York, comes in a beautiful box with candy Apple coating. And, it's a donut that we were taking a big risk on, but we've sold hundreds and hundreds on days. You know big risk, beautiful products but it seems to have resonated with locals. We thought tourists would buy it, but there are no tourists.

So locals seem to gravitate. 

Yeah, they take it with them. And while, I guess they're not traveling either and nobody is? 

At some point that'll all change I'm sure. So outside, the big LED displays it's as much a branding statement as it is something that's going to generate foot traffic.

Obviously people are being attracted and when they walk inside, what do they see? 

Todd Hoffman: That's where all of our, I want to say razzle dazzle is, but that's where we've really turned up the heat with digital experiences and in the pandemic where you're not so able to have a full house, or give out samples, or really have the energy that a room full of people have, digital served an even greater purpose.

When you walk in, we've got two video columns facing opposite directions. So you start to see one that's a 53-55 inch screen stacked on each other. So you can see from the door, the pathway leads right to our donut theater, where we make the donuts march down the line. So the pathway was right to the donuts and that's where we took the concept of donut theater and Bravo media, the team, to them, it was obvious that we were on Broadway, we should put out a Broadway show. Initially we were just gonna do some corporate information on the back wall and simple projection, but David really challenged us and we've got four projectors plus a camera that helps us track individual donuts as they march down the line, and that's all, spectacular visuals for people to get their appetite. But, every 12 minutes, we have a show that's about 35 seconds long from the five shows that Bravo created.

And this is on the white tile, subway tile wall beyond the Conveyor that the donuts are moving along, right? And the workers are on the other side of that? 

Todd Hoffman: Yeah, we didn't want it to take people's mind away from the donuts, which is why we only show it every 12 minutes and have these very short, spectacular shows, no words. It's really just spectacular entertainment and it has brought lots of energy to the room, to the point where there's a button in the back where you can advance these shows and when we feel a low energy in the room, boom, they kinda fire up one of the “Takeover” and it's projection on the back wall. They mapped to each individual tile, things that I didn't think somebody could do and then based on mapping to the tiles, all the different shows, you feel like, the tiles are coming off, the wall or sprinkles are coming down out of this ceiling, and then, there's another projector that projects onto our Donut glazed waterfall. And normally in our shops, it's about three inches tall here, it's three feet and, just to bring the focus on the original glaze, and then there's one that happens serendipitously where we've got sprinkles on the back wall and it looks beautiful and then one day the team members just started to poke at the sprinkles as they were exploding on the back wall and it looks like they're playing a video game with their hands, and when that takeover comes on, the donut maker stop what they're doing, they turn around and they start popping up a wall.

That has become a really spectacular show that says a lot about, I think the brand, cause we were loose enough to let it go, crazy enough to put all this stuff into our donut theater and then, let our team members, start to really interact with it. 

Is that part of the team member job description that you're required to do this when this particular show comes on or did that just organically happen? 

Todd Hoffman: It organically happened, but now we do require you do it. If you fear the first tone, then, somebody might come off the floor and one of the donut makers in uniform, and they love it and it's as if they're competing, how many sprinkles you're gonna explode in the course of 35 seconds? 

It’s a break in what they're normally doing. 

Todd Hoffman: Yeah. So that's our lead in, and when we first designed the shop, and being Times Square and being Krispy Kreme, we expected hour long lines, but the pandemic has changed that where we're only at our 25% capacity.

So we have this donut theater that people can see what their appetite, and then at the end of it, they're facing that digital column that kinda shows images of donuts, dozens of donuts, coffee, lattes, trying to help them think about what they're about to order before they hit any one of our five display cases and that's what they're there for. That's where the fun starts, figuring out how to fill the box with your favorite donuts. 

You run all the digital for Krispy Kreme, right? 

Todd Hoffman: I'm the digital lead. My day job is menu boards. That's what I signed up for. And then, what made it the best job in America was being able to do Times Square in the past nine months. Yep. 

When the ideation process was happening for this Times Square store and started floating concepts like the donut theater, I assume you had to sell that up to your managers and the executive team.

Did they go, “Hell yeah!” or did they look at your cross eyed, “You want to do what?” 

Todd Hoffman: I thought when we decided not to put messaging on the back wall, executive leadership would see it as a missed opportunity. But our COO, who really is the one who let Bravo do their stuff, which was a pretty amazing match. When he showed it to the executive team, our Head of operations, our president, they just loved it. 

Krispy Kreme as a whole, it's a very low key brand. We let our product say everything that it needs to say. We don't have an ad budget, we change up the donuts a lot, but it's really word of mouth. So we don't brag and this was a way for us to be on brand, and just entertain and make it a happy place. Where I thought it was crazy, cause I'm new to the brand, I grew up in the Northeast and really was only introduced to it when I started with Krispy Kreme. 

They were true to form, and it went over, I'd say very well across the executive team and they let go and we got to execute it.

Are digital menu boards standard to a Krispy Kreme store? 

Todd Hoffman: They are being introduced in every new store and we're testing in remodels. So eventually all the remodels will have them. The delicate balance is, we don't want people to see technology. The name of the game is, they see what they need to see, they get the information they want. We've met their appetite with some animation, but we really don't want them to feel like they're looking at TV screens, so we've stepped delicately. 

I'd say we have 15 shops that now have digital menu boards and next year we'll do a big expansion, but Times Square was a deviation. It was a project and an aspiration, all its own. 

You talked about rollout. Is this a concept that's going to go elsewhere, like the Times Square donut theatre thing? 

Todd Hoffman: It may, but there may be one other location in the US where we go all in the way we did in New York. You might guess where that is. There are other places where we have a strong presence, England, Australia, Mexico, that may merit this kind of flagship shop. 

Yeah, you could do Lester square if you ever went to Dubai, Tokyo, places like that. I would imagine, you're not saying it, but referencing Las Vegas would be the one that would make the most sense.

Todd Hoffman: Further South, maybe it's Disney territory or such. We’ll see. (Laughter)

The only one I've seen in Las Vegas was in, the one which looks like a castle and all that. 

Todd Hoffman: I think we have a presence out there, but now it's where tourists from around the world congregate, and I was there to have fun family oriented. 

So with your standard, digital menu boards, have you had any sense of what they do? Do they make a difference operationally or in terms of sales or is it just a more efficient way of doing things? 

Todd Hoffman: I'd say the pandemic screwed this up because we can't really comp stores.

We've been opening new shops so that we can comp from the year before. And then the few remodels we did, we only had a couple of months to look at, but we are definitely thinking that it's driving drinks, grabbing beverage attachment, and the goal is maybe a higher average check or more dozens.

But we believe in the concept that it is having impact, and the drive through as well. So definitely, our belief that it's worth the investment is growing, but maybe we need more months and we need more comping to confirm that.

You sent me a list of all the various components involved and there's a lot of moving parts and a lot of people involved. How did all this get pulled together? Cause I'm looking at it like a dozen vendors or something like that? 

Todd Hoffman: Yeah. You know, it started with our design team working with an architect, who are the best of the best. They set the stage and put a lot of this activity in there, not knowing how to do it. I don't think they have much experience doing it, but they could envision what could be done with the digital columns or projecting and the donut theater.

They helped us take our icons and then the icons within an iconic brand, the hotline, the donut box, the waterfall, the donut line and build on them to the point where the whole place seemed to be a theater. So they set the stage. Then we had a major creative shop come in, partnered with a technology lead, which was Electro Sonic and they took the first stab at how we fill it in, with kind of interactive tables and projection during the theater and where the menu boards might go and digital columns, but then we took it and we just dished it out to specialists in each area. 

We used Stata Cash for menu boards. I don't think any other company could have done what we did with these menu boards or any other platform. We've got three layers of imagery that's on there. We've got an animation scrolling animation in the middle board. There's three boards together. We've got your basic, DOS connected menu board items. And then every 30 seconds we have these takeovers that wash across the three screens and it took hours and days for us to, I think we pushed their platform, we pushed the media players that we were using. We pushed their creativity, but, in time we were able to kinda get what we wanted because visually it seems simple, but executionally, it was a really big challenge.

So, kudos to those guys for sticking in there and giving us the vision that we wanted with the menu boards. 

And Strata Cash at least would drive through with some of their clients, they're doing things like AI driven, suggestive selling and menu optimization. Are you guys looking at that or doing it? 

Todd Hoffman: We will be. They are our shop of record, so that's the platform we're going forward with. You know, a lot based on how they presented, we looked at nine different options for menu boards this year, Strata Cash came out on top, partly due to our aspirations with drive-thru. We think we can make more money through drive-thru or have a greater impact digitally through drive-thru.

Then we can go inside the shop. So their expertise in that area and ability to personalize. Everybody had some angle on personalized when they're pitching us, reading license plates, geo-fencing, what have you, but, I'd say Strata Cash their work from McDonald's and others, gives the comfort level that they were the ones to go with for the long haul.

So we've probably done a few shops with them, including Times Square. 

I suspect there's a few vendors who come in and say, “yeah, we can do all that”, but when you push them on it, that has to do with whether they've actually ever done it, it's a different story. 

Todd Hoffman: Yeah, there are some great outfits out there. The surprise to me, I don't know if you stay on a screen on a radio call, it's one of the few times where I thought the best of class was going to be out of our budget. And then when we looked at it, they were right there. So they were affordable and impressive, and continue to impress, but this isn't an ad for Strata Cash.

Yeah, they've done well. The idea of this store, obviously I haven't been there in six or seven months. I wonder about the sensory overload element of it. You've got audio, you've got the theater, you've got the LED displays. You've got all this stuff going on. Is there a balance you have to achieve so that it doesn't become overpowering to people when they walk in there?

Or do you just see and know, “That’s okay, I'm going into an attraction.” 

Todd Hoffman: It sounds like you were listening in on our meetings because of some of our great concerns leading up to opening. We had to get the sound levelled for background music and then, with the donut theater, the light, there's a light show and sound had to rise, but it couldn't rise so far that people couldn't talk so there's a lot of nuances, a lot of, I'd say over the next month, we're going to be doing some fine tuning, but I'm happy to say when we opened, we were pretty close to, in our mind perfect on the balance, bu, getting team member input, getting guests input is critical.

So when we're fine tuned in 30 days, we'll be able to do our best to make it work, but I don't think there's a feeling that we're over the top, yeah. 

Well, you are in Times Square, where everything else is. (Laughter)

Todd Hoffman: Yeah, there's a lot of leeway and so the only place we shouted was outside, that's where it's fair game.

And if you do shout, you know, you don't get heard. So we've tried to whisper with things like the hotline, going back in time, it looks like it's been there since the 1950s, even though we just fired it up last Tuesday, 

What's been the response of people coming in? 

Todd Hoffman: I have been there for the last 10 days and I would stop people in Times Square when I saw them sitting at a table, enjoying the donuts and they say they've been waiting for Krispy Kreme to arrive. We got a thousand pieces of media before we even opened, billions of impressions, so there was a lot of buildup, and a lot of anticipation and everybody I talked to, which are several dozens, seemed to be happy with what they saw.

Well, if they've ever had a Krispy Kreme donut, of course they're happy.

Todd Hoffman: Yeah. And it all comes down to this silly little, original glazed donut that's still warm in your hands. Once you've had one, you can't forget it. 

So before we returned to New York, you could get them in Penn station, but they weren't as fresh as they are when we're making them in a shop. 

They'd been shipped in from somewhere else. It's just different when it comes off that line. 

Todd Hoffman: Yeah, and they're always made fresh daily, but when it's in the fryer and then through the glaze only seconds ago, it's quite a treat.  

Technology is being applied in some retail environments to manage access control and capacity control.

I'm guessing you didn't have to really do that because you were already in a situation where you needed to have bouncers or some mechanism to limit how many people are in the store at a given time? 

Todd Hoffman: There are adjustments we did make for the pandemic. We have virtual queuing so you can make reservations in advance, and again, we didn't know how chaotic the lines would be going up Broadway and down 40th street. And that has helped a lot with the flow.

Mobile order pickup, that's been huge. We have a window on the street, a take-out window or and that's where you pick up your mobile order, and more than double of what we do in an average shop in terms of percentages are done through mobile order. And I'd say that's how we were able to hit our records. We can only have a certain amount of traffic inside the shop. Then when we have this walk up window, we're selling OGs and coffee, but also, picking those delivering mobile loaders, so that was a great add to what we've done. And line queuing inside, there's a lot of subtle technologies that we have used to do line management and we'll continue to optimize. 

Is there dispatch and recognition on that? Like Order #1-5 or Customer #1-5, you can come in now. 

Is that just done by text messaging or are you doing anything on screens?

Todd Hoffman: Yeah, it is. There's push messaging that'll tell you where you are in line and then tell you're third in line and then tell you how long until you need to be at the front door. 

The virtual queuing is definitely a work in progress. The company we went with hadn't done anything quite so complex or customized. I'd say the team that worked on that, which wasn't me, has done a great job of making it work to our needs. That has helped people in line who have been waiting for minutes, if not hours, there doesn't seem to be this issue of somebody walking up right to the door who had a reservation.

And we opened on a Tuesday but our reservations were booked till Saturday. That gives a hint that we were in for a pretty busy week. 

Wow. So last question. Engagement and experience are terms that get tossed around a lot and kind of lose their value in certain respects. How do you define “experience” when it comes to this place?

Todd Hoffman: So much of what our marketing team does - they almost police us - to make sure we're on brand. So we had to be on brand, color wise and with messaging, and yet we wanted to really push the envelope and make a huge statement and have people feel like they were coming to a flagship shop, especially anticipating international travelers who are our lifelong fans when they know there's a Krispy Kreme in Times Square, just like there's an M&M store or what have you, they're going to want to go and our experience, not just buying donuts, like getting to the donut cake and being in the room has to feel like you've arrived somewhere. 

And, I think we have. Our general contractor had a great line in that he doesn't think there'll be another shop like this for a few years, that has put so much into it, that has tried so hard to please its fans, its customers as we have and we've got pretty three racks worth of technology. Technologically wise, he had not handled anything that was this complex, but also, in the front of house with customers, he just felt like there was so much to see and do while you're in the shop, and he's done a lot of stores in Times Square, but he said we had hit it out of the park. So anecdotally, with just from word of mouth or reactions, we think we've done it. 

All right, Todd, thank you so much for spending some time with me. I appreciate it. 

 

ACE Roundtable: Making Connected Experiences Work Now, And Post-COVID

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED - DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

Advocates for Connected Experiences is an umbrella organization created several months ago, that pulls together the people and shared interests of a variety of organizations that deliver experiences to guests.

That can be in places like retail, in museums, commercial properties or theme parks.

The short form for the group is ACE, and it was pulled together and somewhat driven by the Digital Signage Federation - notably past and present board members like Kim Sarubbi, Beth Warren and Laura Davis-Taylor.

One of the early efforts from ACE has been a monthly series of online discussions about important topics, that pull together top people from member organizations. The most recent one was about connected experiences now and post-COVID, as we all all hope there is soon a post-COVID.

I was the moderator for the discussion, and this is the audio track, which is roughly one hour.

The panelists included folks from Shop!, SEGD, Geopath, the DSF, the Location-Based Marketing Association, Blue Telescope, The Experiential Designers and Producers Association, Retail Touchpoints and AVIXA.

There's a lot of voices and you won't always know who is saying what, but the content is worth any confusion you might experience.

TRANSCRIPT - skipping this episode ... too many voices to sort out who said what. Anything particularly brilliant was not me.

Dr. Erica Walker, Emma Mayes - ColorNet

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED - DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

If you have been around digital signage for a while, you have almost certainly heard a discussion at some point about accurate color reproduction on screens, and the problems big brands can have with that.

The example used most often is Coca-Cola Red, which is a VERY specific red.

It can be a problem at the display level, but it also has to do with the source. A small research team of academics and students at Clemson University in South Carolina are well down the path of sorting it out.

In their case, the problem was Clemson orange - a very specific shade of orange seen on 10s of 1,000s of shirts, hats and giant foam fingers during Clemson football game broadcasts. The orange shown on TV sets and replay boards is not, in some cases, the right orange.

A research project called ColorNet is using AI and neural networks to make real-time color adjustments on the fly to the broadcast signal - using an algorithm light enough that it can run on an off-the-shelf PC.

I spoke with Dr. Erica Walker and graduating student Emma Mayes about the project, and how the technology might be applied as a low-cost box in the back of digital signage screens - so that networks run by brands can really show their true colors.

The chat is a bit technical, but even I got most of it.

One other note - I THINK at some point I reference Clemson as being an SEC team. Wrong. It's in the ACC. I'm in Canada. Ask me about curling.

This is how you'd reach Walker - eblack4@clemson.edu

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TRANSCRIPT

Emma, Erica, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown on what ColorNet is all about? I know it's a university project that you guys presented at Display Week, going back about a month or so. 

Erica: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having us today. ColorNet is an artificial intelligence solution for brand colors to be displayed correctly on screens.

So not a color solution that would display all colors correctly, that solution already exists. This is specific to a brand color, and in this case, Clemson University’s orange and purple. 

That’s because you guys are working or studying out of Clemson, correct? 

Erica: That’s correct. And actually the solution could work for any color. We just happened to use the colors that we see the most on our own campus and in our athletics. 

Which is orange? 

Erica: That's correct. 

So this is a project coming out of the graphics communication department, or is it multiple departments? 

Erica: It actually includes a lot of different departments. Each of us on the project is from a different department. In fact, I'm from graphic communications. The students are from engineering and computer science, a variety of engineering degrees. And then my co-creator, or co-inventor, works in a multidisciplinary department with a focus on data science.

 Okay, so what's the problem you're trying to solve here?

Erica: Yeah, thanks for asking that. It is something that is very commonly talked about at Clemson Athletic games and probably at other universities as well. But, the orange is incredibly recognizable, our brand orange for Clemson fans. And when you watch a broadcast of the football game or basketball game or baseball game, the orange is always skewed. It's always normally skewed towards red. Now, obviously the settings can be impacted by the settings on your screen itself, but what if we could address this at the feed level, at the camera level, at the production level? 

And that would ensure that if Clemson orange is a Pantone color that is going to be color accurate, at least coming out of the feed?

Erica: Exactly. That's really that's the tipper right there is that we don't have control over other people's screens. Like the screen inside your home, we aren't trying to make any adjustments to that. That would be the homeowner or the screen enter the bar that would have to make those adjustments, but we can make adjustments to the screens inside of our facilities. So the big screen inside of the football stadium, we could adjust that cause we have control over it, but the main thing is just having a clean feed, having a feed where Pantone 165 is a recognizable color and it displays correctly.

And why is that a problem either, you know, if I'm a Clemson fan, I know my orange, but, if I'm a Syracuse fan, maybe it's a different orange who's going to know other than the Clemson fans? 

Erica: Right. So, that's a fair question. On any given Saturday, there are over 70,000 people in the stadium watching the game, and so that's a big audience, but in general, we just use Clemson orange as kind of a testbed, for this example. So it could be done for soccer teams, you know, in Europe, the big leagues. It could be done for major league baseball, it could be done for NBA finals. It could be done for really anything where brand color is recognizable to a fan of any team of any sport.

And again, you can't really control the final output, like on my TV, if the calibration is off, it's gonna show it to be orangey-red instead, or wherever. Will this help that at all? 

Erica: In my head, if the feed is better than more than likely, it will show better on your TV. Now that's not true if you've amped up your colors or if maybe, I know there are settings that are specific to gamers that they like, and so if you've changed the color settings on your TV, then that could be a problem, but one of the conversations we've been having with these screen manufacturers is what if we could address this at the screen level as well? But obviously, the goal of artificial intelligence is not to weasel our way into people's homes and make adjustments on their TV.

So that's not the goal, but we do think that we could address it in, think of like large format displays. So if you go to the Coca Cola headquarters, they want their Coca-Cola red to display correctly on the screens that are scattered throughout their entire building or their manufacturing facility, or anywhere where they have the control over their screens.

So kind of thinking of it from the brand level, as much as from the consumer level. 

Yeah, it’s not really the business application here, I mean, you mentioned that there's a patent around it and the idea around that is for really super brand sensitive, color-sensitive companies like Coca Cola, and any number of other ones, that they have more of an assurance that the broadcast advertising is going to look in the color that is really important to them?

Erica: Right now, that's what we're looking at as brand applications. So, as I said, there are solutions out there to solve, like overall, you know, a correct profile so that your TV shows colors accurately. So we aren't trying to necessarily do it across all colors, we're trying to really focus on the brand colors. 

Right. So how does it work and how did you get started on this? This doesn't strike me as one of those things that you wake up in the middle of the night and go, “I must solve this.” 

Emma: Right, so the basic approach that our team took is that we were trying to make it where when you're color-correcting, instead of correcting the entire frame, instead, we're working more with image segmentation. So the current process with athletics is that, oftentimes, they have to pick something in the frame and color-correct to that, and just hope everything falls out. So with basketball games, they look at the court and they say, “okay, the Clemson paw print in the middle of the court has to be brand color. Everything else will just be what it has to be.” 

But we're trying to just get that right. The idea is that, well, what if we can make it so they don't have to compromise? So that way, it can be segmented, So we're color correcting the correct areas and frames as opposed to everything else. The idea was also to decrease the kind of manual burden on the technician when it comes to the color correcting, so we looked at doing image segmentation through machine learning by creating a convolutional neural network. 

I know what those are. 

Emma: (Laughter) Without getting into the nitty-gritty. We usually just look at the acronym CNN, so you don't even really have to know how to spell it, but what I’m saying is, just the gist of it that we basically looked at this game footage, we pulled it and we used Adobe Premiere Pro and the Lumetri color panel and we basically picked the range of colors we wanted to correct. So that way we can adjust it to kind of perceptually that natural approximation of what we're looking at for that color brand, and then we pass in the color incorrect and correct footage into the model and it creates a mask and it's basically just showing pixel by pixel what's the difference in color.

And so the whole idea is that our model is able to generate these masks and automatically generate exactly what those corrections are gonna look like. So once we created this data, we trained it, and then that way it learned how to color-correct to these brand specifications in these image segmentation.

So that way our grass is in a weird color, our court is in a weird color. We're just adjusting the jerseys and the Clemson football fan gear and the audience, so it's fixing the colors that need to be fixed and leaving alone what needs to be left alone. 

And is that because you're segmenting it and isolating certain elements of it, that's how you can do it in real-time or near real-time as opposed to doing it in post-processing?

Erica: What makes it able to do it in real-time is partially the hardware. You need hardware that can run on that. And it really just looks like a desktop computer, like a regular box that you're used to, but we do want it to run it in real-time. And so in order to do that, we try to make everything as slender as possible.

Some neural networks have just millions of parameters that they're checking on and we kept making things smaller and smaller so that it could run more efficiently. Now there is a point where it gets too small, and it runs too quickly and it's not as effective. So that's part of the research piece of this is that the students are learning at what point do we make adjustments to make this efficient versus to make it effective? 

I have this idea in my head, and again, as anybody who listens to me knows I'm not an AI scientist or anything close, is that there is some pretty serious computing hardware, a big server room full of computers doing the work of the neural network, but it's sounding like you're saying this is just like a box? 

Erica: Yeah, it can actually run on something as small as a raspberry pie, believe it or not. It doesn't run in the same frame rate that you'd want to run for an event, but we can run about 8-10 frames per second on a Raspberry PI. You don't need an entire room full of servers in order to process this in real-time, it's very doable.

I don't pick it up and carry it around, but, but you certainly could if you needed to. 

So this is not a million-dollar addition to a TV studio or something? It sounds pretty elemental in some respects. 

Erica: Absolutely, you know, really when it comes down to it and Emma can probably speak on this better than I can, but really all an algorithm is a text file that you have to train, like the real meat of it on our end is training it and making it effective and making adjustments because it is in a new area that you can't just go and Google, “Hey, I'd like this algorithm that can do this.” We're actually doing it and modifying it as we go. 

So for a Clemson football game, if you have, I don't know, 20-25 cameras, whatever it may be. Do you need a processing unit for each of those feeds or is a master feed funnel through one box?

Erica: We only need one. Actually, the way it works is, you're right, they do have like 20 cameras and range from little tiny GoPro cameras up to, you know, high-end broadcast cameras with 4K, and so those are all processing that color so differently.

 But it all comes into live, it's coming into a production studio. So if you watch a lot of athletics, like NFL or, even NCAA, sometimes they'll show you the trucks and inside of the truck, all of those feeds are coming in, and they are making those adjustments on the fly as the feed comes in. They choose which camera feed they want to show, and then it gets projected out and all of that's happening in real-time. 

And so we actually talked about different places that ColorNet can live within the system and the place where we landed it is that if we have it right inside of that production suite, you only need one device or you can have it on the other end of that production suite, and you still only need one device, but then you're only color correcting the feed that's actually going to get put out there, versus correcting all the different feeds on all the different cameras.

Is this a problem that's common to any live event broadcaster or is it defined by the quality of the equipment you're using, like would a local community cable operator have a much bigger problem than let's say Fox Sports?

Erica: The problem is pervasive anytime you have brand colors. I'm gonna show my age on this, but I don't know if you remember when Reese's Pieces was the product that was advertised in E.T. when E.T. came out. And so, you know, even in a Hollywood film, you have a brand and that brand cares about their colors.

And so it is pervasive everywhere, but the piece of equipment actually can run anywhere, it doesn't need a fancy studio, it doesn't need ESPN type quality. It could run at any small studio just as well as it runs here, because once you've trained it's really running on its own. It's capable of doing the work without a lot of manual input. 

So in theory, is this a box, like I could order it, in theory, on Amazon, pull it out of the box, plug it in, plug the feed-in and plug the output in and give it power and off you go, or is this a whole bunch of tweaking and software and behind the scenes to make it all happen?

Erica: To answer that really the box that we ordered, the box that this runs in, it was ordered off of Amazon. It is just like a plain old normal computer box, you know, like a desktop, but the magic happens inside of the training and inside of the algorithm and inside of the adjustment to the code, so it's not really the “special sauce,” so to speak really what happens, prior to receiving the box. 

Right. But do you train it? Let's say heavens forbid that another SEC school uses this, would that box have to be trained for the Crimson tide colors or whatever?

Erica: Yeah, I think you understand a lot more about this than you're letting on, but that is a 100% the case. We would have to train it each time, as needed per color, is our current structure, but I'm actually gonna let Emma jump in on what we're thinking about moving forward.

Emma: When we trained for Clemson orange and Clemson purple, the way our data was set up, it was that you're going to look for these ranges of colors around the brand color so that way, you know what kinds of areas you're going to be shifting to be correct. Our goal is to try and kind of generalize it.

So the idea is, we can give some kind of hardware to deliver to the shader and painter with these corresponding teams. So that way they can change what color it is. So we're going to come up with the new approach to it, where instead of looking for this range of colors, to then shift, we're going to look for these areas. So we're hoping to train so it can pick out the jerseys where the fan colors are and it's very adjustable considering what those colors are. So that way you could pick up this technology and plug it in for a different team and it could work that way instead of just being limited to a specific brand's color palette.

Right. Okay, so I'm a digital signage guy. This is a digital signage podcast. I wonder, of course, what the applications potentially are for the digital signage business. 

You mentioned, early on Coca Cola and how across its a corporate campus and its many corporate campuses really, if it has a signage network with the Coca Cola brand on there, if the output PC or PCs or media players are outputting nominally incorrect colors, this could be put in the middle of it?

Erica: Absolutely. So, that's one approach that we've considered. So let's say that let's use our Coca-Cola campus example. 

They want to ensure that no matter what footage is going on what type of screens, they may have multiple brands, I don't even know, that the Coca Cola red is always correct.

And so in that case, you actually would put ColorNet at the screen level, so we would want to pull it down to a much smaller device, more like that Raspberry PI size, so that you could actually just slap it right onto the back of each screen or each set of screens and have that screen Coca-Cola ready, you know? And so you can sell it that way to a brand owner versus having it at the live video remixed phase. 

Do you sense the addressable market for this has a whole bunch of brands in particular, who are that color-conscious or is it a subset that really cares and others who, you know, “our brand color’s blue” and that's all they say.

Erica: Actually, coming from my background, I was steeped in brand from a print perspective. And so from a print perspective, the tolerance of brand colors on your box or bottle or flexible packaging, is very small. It's measured in Delta Es and they say it's a 2 Delta Es.

Most companies don't want you to be any further off the brand color specs than Delta E. And that's basically just a measurement saying, this is as close as we are willing to purchase the product. Like if it goes over 2 Delta E, we don't want your printed product. And so coming from that background, all of the big brands care, all of them want their color to be correct. 

I know there's an argument going on right now, that might've stemmed out of that recent in AB and SID type conversation, from Display Week. But this idea that screens are actually changing our tolerance for brand colors and at some point, are we not going to care so much about brand colors? Because we are willing to accept them further apart, from the brand spec, because of the screen differences that we see. 

I still think that brands are willing to put money, time, and effort behind their branding in general and that they are going to care if their product looks correct because it is as much a part of their identification as any other part of their business. 

Yeah. That would make sense. I'm sure there'd be some reticence around spending thousands upon thousands of dollars per site to do that, but if it's, as you say, a Raspberry PI device that could just plugin via the HDMI feed or whatever into the display, then yeah, maybe they'd be happiest clients to do that. 

Erica: Yeah, especially for those big brands, I bet you and I've never sat in the branding room for Coca Cola, but both Coca Cola and Pepsi use a color of red, right? I bet you that their branding teams would just go to battle over making sure that all of their products are the correct color of red so that there is no confusion on the customer level of which product you're actually looking at.

Yeah, well, I've certainly heard those stories in the past when it comes to digital signage and Coca-Cola red and a few other colors that the Coca Cola people flip out if it's not right, and they had some big problems with early-stage video walls and things like that and there was a particular product that they really liked because of the saturation levels and everything that gave them as close to the print grant as they wanted to see, I don't know if it was that 2 Ease measurement or whatever you were talking about, but it was good. 

Erica: Yeah, and you know, some companies will have different Pantone colors for their print products compared to their screens. So for instance, Clemson has two different oranges, and when it comes down to it, the Pantone that they've chosen for screen and the Pantone that they've chosen for print products, so the difference between CMYK and RGB, those two oranges look the same. 

So it comes down to this perceptual thing. So it's not always about hitting the same Pantone and it's about the perceptual brand recognition of that orange, whether it's on a car, whether it's on a screen, whether it's on a Jersey, and so on.

Okay. So this is a combination product or initiative of a couple of professors, and I think four students, is that accurate? 

Erica: Yeah, that's correct. We had four students, and then we actually just added a new student this semester. So obviously the great part about students is that they have wonderful, fresh ideas coming into a project. The sad part is that they do graduate and go away, like Emma graduates in December. 

And so, there is kind of this rotation of students who have worked on the project over time. 

So where does it go from here at some point Does this become a company or does it get licensed or was that just so far off that it's hard to really kind of rationalize? 

Erica: Certainly from our perspective, our goals align a lot more with the research end and sharing what we find, but from a university level, we are involved with the university research foundation and their job is to help connect us with potential manufacturers or companies or lines of products that would benefit from us.

And so from the university level, they have a lot of interest in that. I'm not opposed to a company or partnering with an existing company. But certainly, you know, the students getting experience out of this and our personal research goals, our primary. 

In the conversations with the companies provide a lot of opportunities to, have funding and to expand, and to come up with new ideas of how this technology could perhaps be implemented. 

Is there an application as well for things like medical imaging and seismic imaging where life and death decisions or very expensive decisions are made based on the color of some high-resolution image?

Erica: Absolutely. We've been looking at expanding this out into some different applications and you really hit the nail on the head as one of the ideas that our team had bounced around is, what if this could be used to emphasize a lifeboat or something like that is lost at sea, you know, how could we make it really fast and really easy, despite all the reflections that waves make? And we've looked at it as an agricultural thing again, where it's emphasizing, if there are healthy plants or if there are weeds, so it really could be modified and used in a lot of different contexts, just like you're saying.

So what came out of SID in that presentation that you did? Did you have companies or other really smart people coming up or contacting you?

Erica: Yeah, exactly, but not so many from virtual conferences we've found, but when we've done some presentations in person and unfortunately, SID was not one of them this year, which I was super excited about that audience.

But when we have presented in person, it has led to lots of conversations with different companies and ideas of how it could benefit them and their customers. 

Okay, so if there are people listening to this who actually understand it fully, how would they track you down and how do they sort of get involved in this in some way, or get some questions answered?

Erica: We would love to hear from people. Again, it's so exploratory still at this phase, and so hearing what real companies with real customers, what they need, what is their pain point and how could we consider ColorNet as a potential solver of that pain point, just reach out to us. My email is at eblackor@clemson.edu. 

Okay, and you guys have a football team, right? 

Erica: (Laughter) We hope we have a good one again, fingers crossed. 

Is it a challenge because people think so much about Clemson as, you know, a big sports school, football school, when this is a totally gearhead kind of science project with AI coming out of Clemson, do they go, “Oh really, you guys do that too?” 

Erica: Well, we're hoping that we actually solve a problem for our athletic department. So fingers crossed, we've proved it out that it can be done. And right now we're just kind of taking a back seat to whatever Coronavirus brings for this coming season.

But our original intent was to be up and operational for our athletic department this fall, which we're capable of doing, but again, we're just kind of taking a back seat to all the decisions that they're having to make to keep their student-athletes safe and the fans and all of that. 

Which is a moving target right now. That's broadcast may be more important than ever for the next few months. 

Erica: I agree. There's no telling where all this is going to go, but we have our first football game on Saturday, and so fingers crossed, everybody stays healthy and well, and we can get that type of normalcy back for Saturdays. 

All right, Erica and Emma, thank you so much for spending some time with me. I really appreciate 

Erica: This was a lot of fun. Thanks for inviting us.

Bobby Marhamat, Raydiant

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED - DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

A seemingly oversaturated ecosystem has not stopped more and more companies from entering the digital signage market with their own software solutions.

I get lots of email pitches from companies, and admittedly, I do a mental sort, with a bucket for no-hopers, and a different one for those I find interesting in some way. Raydiant is a VC-funded start-up in Silicon Valley that's interesting to me for a few reasons.

Their CEO came from the executive team of Revel Systems, one of the upstarts that has changed the look of point of sale systems in small retail. Think of iPads, card taps and digital signatures instead of those big,  old-school POS machines that ate counters.

I was also intrigued by the company's partnerships, which go off the normal, well-traveled path, and instead feature integrations with companies that do things like restaurant menu management, KPI data screens and video conferencing.

I also thought these guys are doing a better marketing and messaging job than a lot of software companies, who are often just re-telling versions of the same old stories. The industry and its customers don't need another "What is Digital Signage?" page.

Raydiant produces a lot of content, including podcasts that are more than just the sales guy talking to the product manager.

Bobby Marhamat, who joined Raydiant about a year ago, joined me for a good chat.

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TRANSCRIPT

So Bobby, thanks for joining me. I know very little about Raydiant and I gather it's a reasonably new company in the digital signage ecosystem. Could you give me the background on the company? 

And it would be really helpful to explain what sets you guys apart from the many other companies who are doing digital signage software.

Bobby: Absolutely. First of all, thanks for having me. Just to give you a quick glimpse into what Raydiant is and what we're up to. I've been personally a part of the company for the last year, leading the company, prior to this. The company has been around for about two and a half years and in the last year, we've really done a couple of different things. 

One is, really we did a rebrand from the name Mira to Raydiant, and a part of that also is that although we're digital signage platform and advancing the digital signage side, we noticed that the companies that we work with want something a lot bigger, and that is really creating, phenomenal experiences in brick and mortar locations. So for the last year, we've been focused kind of talking to these customers and figuring out what that means and how we can create experiences on our platform. 

And the part that's really, I'd say, relevant to the brick and mortar operator and what we've started to build is tying in these different things that happen in different locations. So whether you're a retailer or restauranteur. And maybe as a restauranteur, you want your point of sale system to talk to your digital signage, you want certain music to play at a certain hour, you want certain promos to be on the screens. We basically enable all of that and then put all of that together to really create a phenomenal experience for your customer and what that does, of course in turn is, it creates more loyalty with your customers. It increases your revenue. And you're able to use that to be able to create this experience that people will remember as they leave your location. So in a nutshell, that's what we do. 

Okay. How would you describe the breadth of the solutions and product offer?

Bobby: I'd say, we have eighteen different industries that we work in right now but we're really focused on the six or seven industries that most of our customers sit in. We're a very customer-centric company and of those six or seven industries, we really try to bring in best of breed solutions that tie into our platform and what our customers demand and what they want in their locations.

It’s primarily contact management software? 

Bobby: Primarily, but tied into other things, like music, videos, all these other elements in the store.

And a lot of companies are saying, “We can do soup to nuts for you. We can do front end consulting. We can take you all the way through to deployment, ongoing management, and so on.”

Would you describe yourself as turnkey or are you more focused on the software and the experiential side? 

Bobby: Our goal is to be a turnkey through software, right? To be as turnkey as possible. And actually, I was trying to explain this to my six year old the other day. The same way he gets iPhones now, so my whole thing was the same way that you receive your iPhone, you can download five or six or ten apps and create that personal experience on your phone. We'd like to think of ourselves as the same. You unwrap our hardware, you tie it into your TV, and you can look at the different solutions that you can tie together on our platform, to be able to create that experience that you're looking for.

So very turnkey, but using software to make it very simple. So SMB customers can configure things out, tie things in quickly. Cause, they're focused on a lot of other things in their business. So creating that enterprise experience that you can create in larger stores and making it simple enough for an SMB customer to be able to deploy. 

When the company started, was the mission and charter the same as it is now, or has it pivoted?

Bobby: No, it's expanded. From the time that we started, it was to create one very easy to use digital signage platform, simple to deploy in a few minutes so you can go on your way to put messaging on a screen and that's it transformed into.

And since we've been listening to our customers, that's transformed into how do you take that a step farther? And you take that a step farther by what we call creating an experience platform. And that's why we're focused on that.  

I would assume that your customers have also told you that, “Guys, we must have been visited by 30 companies selling software that's easy to use, friendly, all those sorts of things.” So I suspect when you came into the business, you looked at it and looked at the competition and said to yourself, we need to do a better job of differentiating ourselves. 

Bobby: Absolutely. One of the things that’s really interesting is that when the company started, a lot of people asked me when I got involved, whether I think it was good and what did I think that we have to do differently to be able to listen to our customers? 

And the part that I think we did really well is we built a very strong product and had great support. We have the highest NPS. If you look at the G2Crowd and Capterra, as far as product standpoint goes in the cloud in the cloud segment.

But the thing that was missing or the thing that we needed to transform the company into is more of listening to what our customers’ needs are as far as being able to differentiate themselves, comparable to their competition. And that's a lot of what inspired us to transform our platform to be able to create a lot of stuff for them. 

Bouncing around your website, It looks like a lot of the focus, particularly in terms of your marketing and case studies, and “thought leadership” is around retail. Has that always been the case or is that because you as the CEO come out of retail in your past life with a point of sale system?

Bobby: No, our largest base of customers are in the retail segment. Our second largest set is in the restaurant segment. And with that, we're trying to make sure we give them the tools to be able to thrive. And, I'd say third and fourth industries for us are our banking and real estate, and we're trying to also focus on those as well, but you're right to note that because our largest customers and segment of customers are really retail and restaurants, our content and what we've been able to provide in a lot of our marketing has been centered on that.

Because you came from a point of sale, from Revel Systems. Did you have, what you would consider, a better sense of how retailers operate and what they really need versus what software developers think retailers need? 

Bobby: Absolutely. You know, a lot of people ask me, you got out of the brick and mortar with, basically exiting the Revel business, so why'd you get back into it? And I really fundamentally love the brick and mortar world. I love restaurants and retail for better or worse. I know right now we're going through tough times across the board for those segments. But, if we can be helpful in creating solutions, that's what makes me happy and content. And that's a large portion of what got me back into making sure that I stay within the industry and can continue to be helpful. 

Those two industries in particular are distressed right now. I wouldn't say they all are, but you would imagine a hell of a lot of them are because of the pandemic and lockdown capacity controls and everything else.

How do you sell into them right now when they're just trying to hang on by their fingernails?

Bobby: Yeah, so the beginning of when we went into the pandemic, a large portion of what we tried to do was that we tried to help these segments figure out what to do with their digital signage, to be able to continue to attract customers, educate customers, and basically put in use cases that help them use their digital signage to continue on and carry on with their business.

I'd say, fast forward to now where these businesses have been going through the pandemic for a few months, how we really capture and talk to them is we really look at the use cases that can be relevant to them. These days, to give an example, we have an outdoor package that helps restaurateurs really put menus on the screen, put messaging on a screen, tie it into a mobile phone so that people can get the menu, and be able to order at table and stuff like that. So we're really focused on what solutions we can push out there to be helpful to our customers and this pandemic has been tough for us, tough for them in the sense of that we had to pivot in our marketing and our messaging and how we go to market to be able to help them, and that's been hard for us as well. 

I have found since COVID-19 really broke out that a number of companies have introduced very specific technologies that they have packaged up as solutions to the problem facing retail and small business in general. And, I've sat on a number of podcasts and Zoom calls and everything else and presentation. My concern about these things are that they are just things in a lot of ways. There's a thermal screener, there are hybrid screens and hand sanitizers, hand sanitizing dispenser, and so on. 

And I just wonder if the retail market is really interested in buying a “thing” or do they want to talk to somebody who can provide a solution and maybe the solution is something that already exists, just like software and a screen that's as you say, putting the menu up on a screen so that you don't have to print menus or you don't have to wipe down plastic menus and assure people that they're wiped down. 

Bobby: Yeah, we were actually just talking about this in the morning with one of our customers and they were asking us, what technologies do they buy during this time to piece together the curbside stuff and all the other stuff that they're dealing with. 

And what we start with always is we tell them to start from the beginning. Who is your customer? What are you trying to do? What's the long term strategy? Putting all that together. Then we either come out with, here are the solutions that you want to tie in, whether they're with Raydiant or other solutions that you can tie into Raydiant, or, honestly, in some cases, we're not going to be the right fit for you for the next six months or a year as you rebuild and do that. And then we can be helpful at that point. 

So we take a more consultative approach and help figure out, who's your customer, what are you actually trying to achieve? And then piece together technology. Because one of the biggest things that we always say is, just turning on technology to turn on technology and tying in different technology pieces together where you' don't have a strategy, you don't know who you're actually trying to attract what your customer is. With those fundamentals you're not doing yourself or your business any good. 

You mentioned earlier the value of having integration with other applications, again, coming out of point of sale and kind of with Revel, they turned the whole idea of point of sale on its head by going from big iron, big bulky machines to using iPads and things like that.

And, part of the answer I suspect with Revel was, we are were in a world now where we can easily integrate with different systems and inventory management systems and everything else. 

It’s the same sort of thing applied here. If you're going to be relevant in the B2B market for retail and restaurants and so on, you need to be able to easily tie in with other systems.

Bobby: Yeah. A big part of the strategy at Revel was, point of sale is the central nervous system of a location, but what happens outside of that is all these other dispersed technologies that you're trying to use and trying to manage. And so a large portion of our success there is, listening to our customers and them saying, “Hey, I'm using these five solutions in my store, none of which talk to each other, but I'm using them to try to get 1% out of each of them so I can advance my business.” 

And part of our success was tying those together and really making that a cohesive system for them, whether it was tying in like a loyalty partner, gift card partner, and all that good stuff into one platform that talks to each other. 

Part of our success at Raydiant is very similar in the sense that, right now, when you walk into a location, whether you walk into a location or whether you want to walk into a location, that experience from the beginning is important and how those things talk to each other is important. As an example, there are lots of cases wherein the restaurant world, in particular, I run out of something on my POS and a simple thing of that not transferring over to the digital signage board, where that item gets listed off the menu and it's still on the digital signage board and customers come up and ask me about that. That's a simple thing, right? 

But tying those two things together, it makes it a lot better of an experience. I can push out promos a lot easier. I can do things a lot easier when these things are talking to each other. And so that's a large part of what we've seen our customers have success with.

You're working with some things like a menu system to simplify that process. Was it a case of those companies coming to you? I'm thinking of Trabon Menu Net, did they come to you or did you see this as a need to integrate with that sort of thing?

Bobby: I can tell you it was mutual. A large portion of our larger customers were using the Trabon system and in using the Trabon system, there were also adopting Raydiant. And, we came together as two companies and said, oh, we have this many mutual customers and to give you a little bit of a glimpse of what Trabon does, Trabon is the largest print manufacturer of menus in the US for enterprise customers. And, they're in mid-market and SMB as well, but they really focus on enterprise at a high level. And the biggest part of that is now, as we may make any sort of, menu changes or we make any sort of planogram changes, or we make any sort of print, design changes, we can push that out on digital signage and it could be better for our customers, better for the environment, better for all that. So we came together and created this combined solution. 

You still have to compliment that with their solution. You still have to compliment print with digital but it's more cost-effective for their customers. It's a better experience for their end-users and ties in together really well. 

You have since then, or maybe concurrently integrated with a number of other, different kinds of systems. I've written in the past about postering my wall and done a podcast with them, so it's content templates, but you're now integrated with like Blue Jeans for video conferencing and a company called Hoopla, can you tell me about that? 

Bobby: Absolutely. So Hoopla is actually very interesting. We have a new virtual room product that we just launched about a month ago and that virtual room product ties in videoconferencing content and services on top of that. And when I say services, it's music and other services that are tied in into one platform. And one of the biggest asks from our customers was, “Hey, we have the video conferencing, we have the whiteboarding, we have the content all in one place. What's missing is if I could go and put KPIs for my sales team on the screen as well as I'm having that video conference, or if I could go put company KPIs on the bottom of the screen for all my team to know”, and especially relevant during these days of the pandemic where people are working from home, it's been very relevant.

So tying that in together. So we went out to search and realized that Hoopla is the best of breed product out in the space. And so in having a talk with their management team decided that the two companies come together and what's happened out of that also has been a lot of other use cases that have come from that. We are working on tying in other solutions for the office environment, which only happened because we went into the pandemic. Otherwise, our focus has always been kind of brick and mortar, but what we created for the brick and mortar side has been very relevant to the office side, and integration with Hoopla completely sets that productivity tool. 

So what's the primary thrust behind virtual rooms? 

Bobby: So what happened initially though, I'll start from the beginning is initially we had brick and mortar operators come to us and say, “Hey, listen, I own a hardware store, and in the middle of my lumber aisle, I want to put a virtual agent type setup where customer can walk up and hit a button and they can interact with someone sitting in my corner office that knows all about lumber, and can basically be the expert there because I can’t have a lumber expert at every store. 

So, given that, that's what initially sparked our virtual room product. Being able to go on and have on-demand video tied into the content. So if I say, “Hey, go to aisle six and get that lumber.” I can also put some specifics about that lumber on the screen as well as I'm interacting with that customer, and I can also tie in a QR code on the bottom of that if they want to, scan that and learn more about that lumber or purchase on their phone or whatever the case may be. 

So that was the initial, I want to call it “burst” of our virtual room product. Again, what's transformed into these days of, going into COVID and the pandemic has been offices saying, “Hey, my team is not remote and I want to mimic that same, in-office experience, even though we can't be in the office.” 

So our virtual room product is a perpetual video product that's always on. And with that, we've created an office product tied into Hoopla where you can be in different rooms and interact with different people as if you're in the office. You can get content pushed back and forth. You can double click on someone and go have a personal meeting and then come back into the main room as if you're in the office and all that tied in together to productivity and motivation, stats and KPIs that Hoopla provides on top of that.

So at that point, you're starting to compete with the Zoom companies of the world that have quasi digital signage products as well, right? 

Bobby: Zoom is actually a partner. We haven't put this on the site, so you're hearing this first, but we started with Blue Jeans and Zoom is now a partner as well.

So no, we're not trying to be a video conferencing player by any means. We're actually trying to embed video conferencing into our product and I know zoom also has a very light digital signage product. But the virtual room product essentially works completely different where you have content on the screen and you can basically slice up the screen in different zones. So, content on the screen together with video conferencing. I can do news flashes and push out information to my team, talk about happy hours if I wanted to. So putting that all together is basically your productive tool for the remote world. 

And your platform is built around something called a Screen Ray, which by the looks of it is a Linux-based PC stick, is that right? 

Bobby: You're correct. Yep. Absolutely. 

Those things have been around for a number of years. I've always been intrigued by them. I know a few companies that use them, but I've always worried that they're kind of cheap and dirty and will last and everything else, but I've seen enough companies using them that they seem to be happy with them. 

How much of a journey was it to come across something that you guys could put out there and say, okay, this is the mothership and this is what we're going to use?

Bobby: Yeah, our hardware is only the enabler to our software really and yet a good number of companies use the Intel sticks. We're actually in the works of creating our own proprietary sticks that still use Intel’s processing and all that good stuff, but it's more proprietary so we can control a little bit more of it. We can have that built-in and all that good stuff. We are envisioning and we are in the build mode of getting that out to the market. But, the Intel Sticks have been very reliable, and a lot of what our secret sauce happens in the cloud, in our software. So the hardware is really the enabler and it's been very consistent for our customers.

Now for companies such as yours, I would say broadly, those who are chasing retail in particular, small to medium business retail, and other similar kinds of businesses that get public foot traffic, they tend to be SaaS companies that are at a certain price to an end, it’s sometimes referred to as the race to the bottom or commodity pricing.

I looked at your pricing and it's not like that at all. If anything, it's up. I would say it's on the high side. And I'm curious about that, how that resonates with people. And my gut tells me it's probably not a problem. 

Bobby: It's not a problem for the customers that really truly believe in building experiences in their location. If you simply want to put a picture on a screen or put a flyer on the screen or whatever the case is, there's a lot of solutions out there that you can go get that are gonna be cheaper than ours. But we want to work with customers to create experiences and our platform for creating that experience is actually relatively very affordable, but our focus is really those customers that understand that experiences are paramount to having longevity in retail and restaurants and all the brick and mortar type industries. 

One of the other things that struck me in banging around the site was you have a lot of content on there. A lot of self-generated content. You have your own podcasts, a presentation. I listened briefly to one of them, so you're spending the money on content and effective marketing, is that just how it works when you're out in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, that it's part of that DNA that's what you do? 

Bobby: I think it's a part of the DNA of what I believe in, which is being very helpful to your customers and I think that'll payback and help us grow as a company, and so a large portion of what we do is exactly what you said. And even during the pandemic days, we took more of a focus on that, accelerated a lot of the content we pushed out there, accelerated a lot of the interviews that we're doing for the podcast. to be able to give relevant information back to our customers. We think that's going to pay dividends back. 

How do you get known? 

Bobby: That's tough, right? It's tough especially because we rebranded again about a year ago, but a large portion of our business, at this point at least, I would say is through referrals. So us pushing out the content, us pushing gaps, and being helpful in the space has paid dividends in the sense that we're getting customers to come to us. We're getting customers to buy from us. We're getting customers to talk to other customers about it. 

And that is one of those things that day in and day out, we're focused on continuing to do, to be able to build more of that brand because there's of course legacy providers in the space that are well-known brand names. You know, no one gets fired by bringing on a well-known legacy provider but what you don't get is you don't get the innovation. You don't get things working as fast as we do. And so we're really focused on building the brand focused on what our customers want.

I'm curious, about a year ago when you were looking at joining the company, I suspect you would have either not known very much about digital signage or maybe you did, but did you look at the marketplace and wonder, okay, this is awfully crowded. There's a lot of people saying essentially the same thing, do I want to get involved in this? 

I always wonder how much of a struggle it is for startups to cut through. 

Bobby: Yeah, that's a great question. So a year ago, to answer your question, I did not know almost anything about digital signage. I was very new to the industry. But as I looked at the industry, you're right, there are a lot of companies providing digital signage solutions, but as you think deeper, taking my experience from the Revel days and hearing what I heard with restaurants and retail specifically, and doing a good amount of research.

And I actually, before I even, took the role here, I did speak to 50 customers that are using digital signage. Not all were Raydiant customers, but all across the board. And then talking to them, I heard the same common theme: there are solutions out there, but there is no one solution that brings everything together into one experience.

And that's when the “aha!” moment went off in my head and I thought, if we can create this really phenomenal experience and do it at a very low cost and be able to help these brick and mortar operators, basically create the same shine that they can do online. You know, you can go online and create websites and social and all that good stuff, why can't we create the same thing in store? And so that's what intrigued me with joining the company. 

How much coaching do you have to do to your customers? Because there are lots of people who make investments in technology, and then, it just kinda sits there. And I've been involved in this for a long time and I don't know how many retail environments I've walked into and looked at the screen and I thought, “oh dear God, why did they bother?” And yes, you have all these templates from PosterMyWall, and access to other content, but do they use it? And how do you get them to use it?

Bobby: That's a great question as well. You know, on the backend, we can see how often these screens are being updated and it’s not like all businesses don't have to always update screens, but we can see that and our customer success team actually takes this up very seriously in the sense of reaching out and saying, “Hey, can I help you create maybe a summer special?” or whatever the case may be depending on the business.

So that's one of the areas that we do focus a lot of our time on. We do have integration with PosterMyWall, which is great. They have 150,000+ templates, a lot of templates to choose from, but the content is the hardest part of digital signage. And that's the part that either you have a full department doing it, or you have one or two people focused on it or to your point, you never get to it and you just have that one thing that you put up there when you first started the business and you're never updating. 

So we make it our problem to be able to, again, reach out and make sure that they always update content if they want to and make it very relevant to the messaging they want to push out to their customers.

You're in the land of venture capitalists, and I know that you're VC funded. You had a 7 million round last fall. Is it easier because you're out there to tap into VC funding or is it actually harder because there's a lot of competition? 

Bobby: It's a lot harder. And digital signage is not sexy to investors.

We are fortunate in that what we're creating is an experience platform. We are attracting investors that we typically wouldn't if we were just focused on a digital signage segment if that was our only kind of focus area. So it is harder in the Valley, especially because there are so many pitches going on with so many companies, like you said, in the digital signage space, particularly, but with what we're doing, we're actually in the next few months are going to go talk to new investors about our next round of funding. And I think they're going to be impressed with what's happened to the business and continue to grow. 

With COVID-19 being a bit of a wildcard in terms of how long this is going to last, and certainly creating a lot of trepidation for business operators, where do you think you're at in six months to a year?

Bobby: I could tell you, just very candidly, pre-pandemic, we were growing at 200% to our numbers. During the pandemic, we’re right on par witH 100-110% to our numbers. So we slowed down for sure, but we have not gotten to a place where we think that Anything is detrimental to our business. We continue to work with our customers, continue to provide value there, and kind of taking it day by day, to be very honest with you, as things change where we're trying to be very helpful. 

Yeah. I've certainly heard from a number of software companies, if they operate on a software as a surface basis, they've had N number of small businesses, small restaurants, and so on and saying, “Hey guys, we're not open. We need to trim back our costs. Anyway we just skip paying our subscription until we actually need it?”

How have you handled that?

Bobby: Yeah, there's been a percentage of our business that's gone through that, especially in areas where they're completely closed or continue to be closed or opened back up and then got closed again. So I'd say some percentage of our business has paused but at a high level, there are other ways to use this where signage should be very helpful. Like in your windows signage is one way, outdoor signage is another, so there are multiple ways depending on the business to be able to still provide a lot of value with digital signage and we help our customers to fire that out. If they are at a place where they need to pause, we, of course, allow them to do that.

Okay. All right. Thank you very much for spending some time with me. Just one final question. If people want to know more, where do they go online? 

Bobby: Oh, sure. they can come to raydiant.com. And I always say this and people say, why are you giving out your email? But you know, if anyone ever wants to contact me, I’m at bobby@raydiant.com, and I’m always happy to provide any information that I can.

Okay, great. Thanks again.

Stephen Borg, meldCX

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED - DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

There are times when I come across an unfamiliar company and it’s clear, really quickly, what they do and offer. But other times, not so much.

When digital signage industry veteran Raffi Vartian joined a company called meldCX a few months ago, my core response was, “OK, that’s great! Glad you’re sorted out. Ummm, who???”

Since that time, he’s walked me through what the Australian-based company, which is now growing its footprint in North America and elsewhere, was all about. If the company has an elevator pitch, it would be useful if the building that elevator’s in has a lot of floors. It gets complicated.

My simpleton explanation is that the company offers a platform as a service that makes it much easier and faster for software vendors, integrators and solutions providers to stick to what they’re good at. The customer worries about the user experience and key functions of an application, which can sit on top of a meldCX technology stack that has already got things like OS compatibility and scalability worked out.

So, when a client asks a vendor for a solution that could be very complicated, a lot of that complication has already been handled via the meldCX platform. So the job can be accelerated and the costs controlled.

I spoke with founder Stephen Borg, who splits his time between Australia and the U.S. He  walked me through the origins of the company, how it works with software vendors and integrators, and related an interesting and different take on using computer vision to keep facilities and devices sanitized in the midst of a pandemic.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

 

TRANSCRIPT

Stephen, thank you for joining me. you're in Australia, I'm in Nova Scotia. So, I think we're like 14 hours difference in time zones and all that. But, we'll make this work. 

For those who don't know much about meldCX or anything, can you give me the rundown on what the company's about?

Stephen: Yeah. So really, we started meldCX about four years ago and it started as a research project. So I got a team together, internal people, and external partners and customers, and we started it as a reason project and said, what are the common problems in delivering devices to physical space? How can we do this better? 

And what triggered that research was my background in the AOPEN group, the work with Chrome and Fujitsu, we had a common thread of problems and they were just assumptions at the time. But we looked at them and said, okay, what are the things that stop a rollout? Where are the unnecessary costs? What stops it in its second phase? Because we find a lot of customers don't know what they don't know until they get three years into their cycle and find out they hit a brick wall. So what are all those points? Then we researched and built some codebase.

We did that for about two years before we decided to commercialize it. And then we won two or three significant global customers out of that research and decided that meldCX would take its own path, become its own entity, seek its own investment. We commercialized it in the middle of 2019.

And in that short period of time, we have around 80 customers, like enterprise customers across four continents. So it's been a massive take-up, so it's been a very exciting journey.

Now was the research work for AOPEN or for Fujitsu or was it JV or…?

Stephen: Yeah. So I started it as a piece of work that I kicked off with a team looking at what are the common problems. So we looked at Fujitsu data, we looked at AOPEN data. We worked with various customers, we worked with different partners, major providers and it really started as just a bit on a paper.

Then from there, we decided, there is some significant gap here and there are areas that we can help. So, we took that and said, okay, let's do some test cases and initially, it was funded by myself and a team of interested people and we had some great support from AOPEN and the Acer group, around some goodwill, some developers, some research analysts and the like.

I'm just trying to wrap my head around what the outcome or output of this would be. A little bit of what I talked about with Raffi was about the idea of making Chrome devices like the AOPEN Chrome basis more extensible so that they could work with things beyond just plugging into the back of a computer or back of a monitor, that sort of thing that could work with printers, other external devices, that sort of thing.

Is that kind of the gist of it?

Stephen: We found two things, Chrome taught us a lot. Okay. I helped architect the first sort of commercial Chromebox with Google and what we quickly found was there are two distinct development camps and that's across signage, kiosk, and interactive devices. 

So you have a development camp that looks at quite thick architecture, is very versed in modifying drivers or going deep into windows and modifying it and bastardizing Android, so to speak. You have that sort of skill set and then you have a very dynamic backend, highly functional, web first orientation, and these developers needed to meet in the middle somewhere.

And we discovered the hard way with Chrome because we were trying to bring customers across to this new web-first environment, without the tools or the plumbing to get across. And then conversely, you had some really cool tech coming down the pipe that didn't even consider a physical environment. You know, physical security, reliability, no popups on a screen that people can't touch.

So that was phase one and we ended up enabling some big clients on Chrome, doing some things such as payments, ThinkPad integrations, biometrics integrations, accelerators like Movidius, those types of things, we enabled in Chrome initially.

And then we made a decision to say, okay, what we want to do is take these digital building blocks and if a customer uses them, they should be able to run on any operating system. So now, if a customer has built their app using meldCX tools, that can run on Android, that can run windows, soon Linux, without changing the codebase from Chrome or vice versa.

Would you call this middleware?

Stephen: Yeah. in some ways it's middleware, what we do is quite unique. The middleware covers three stages, that is the original deploy piece. Typically middleware just allows you to build and propagate. What we do is we allow you to either build using it or using our existing modules.

So we have a customer that wanted to add some AI elements to the existing app and didn't have the team to do it, and they just plugged in some of our modules. Or you can run applications side by side and make them talk to each other. So we want it to be really flexible. We didn't want to have to tell people that you must build in the Meld to use Meld. 

That's a big leap and it's something that's a bit of a barrier at the start. So we didn't create or force any customers to go into any proprietary language or tech. You can just add these tools or refer to these tools and create a high-end device, even if you've had no experience building a kiosk per se.

So we let customers take content or apps they’ve created on Adobe or web apps and turn them into devices that can operate online, offline, talk to local peripherals, etc. using our tools and our sort of process. 

I'm thinking about a creative agency that I knew in New York a few years ago that was working with a very large athletic wear company. And I was doing some consulting. These were guys who were very good at creative and very good at interactive user experience and all that sort of stuff. But they were being asked to do everything, coding hardware, sourcing, and putting together the touch screen overlays, the whole nine yards. And I'm thinking about what they were saying, “We're having to do this because our client wants us to do it, but this is not our skillset at all. Please help.”

What would happen if that kind of a company was then told, “We want you to do this interactive user experience, we also want you to do payments off of this, and we also want it to interact with smartphones or that sort of thing.” and they would be deer in the headlights. Is this the sort of thing where if they knew that meldCX exists, they could jack their way into that and it would enable them to produce something that's hardened, secure, and reliable?

Stephen: Yeah, exactly. So we just had a customer roll-out, which was really unique. Contact tracing applications for pubs and clubs and bars, and it was an agency and their integration aspects were quite complex, so we enabled the Chrome device to do Apple Pass and Google Pass so they can send digital tokens or loyalty cards to their customers, tapping as they walk into the establishment, it would contact trace, plus give them points.

Now the agency scoped out a year project. We delivered that in two months on meldCX, right? Because all they needed to do is focus on the UI and we had already done all the certifications, the Apple compliance, the Google compliance, and really, they just used our widgets, got it up and running, and the customer is rolling out now. 

So in that case, not only did we help the initial build process but ongoing, Meld manages the OS. So Meld won't let the OS go past the build. So for example, if it is Chrome, and you've built your app on, v83, it won't allow Chrome to update past v83 until you've told it to update. And if it picks up a critical security patch, it might notify you of the impact of that, and you can test it without having a physical device. You can test it in an emulator. 

In this case, they were using a development team in Melbourne, a development team in India. and they tested virtually using our emulator so they don't even need physical devices. So that's a great example.

I know “middleware” is a very simplified way of trying to describe it, but since I'm a simple person, would I describe this in certain respects as a middleware as a service?

Stephen: Yeah, so we have two essential products or product lines. One is a PaaS (Platform as a Service) product. so that is someone that wants to build their own app. It gives you all the tools. It gives you things like PCI compliance, advanced security, even tokenization of devices, a whole range of builder widgets so you can use those blocks. 

In fact, we've had quite a few, ISVs build their applications or move their applications across Meld, really just reappointed to the Meld resources rather than rebuild anything. And then they can go off and run multiple operating systems. We were dealing with a signage provider (that we’ll announce soon) and I think they had a team of 30 devs and they had seven dedicated to operating systems and after moving across the Meld, now they don't have any dedicated to the operating system, which is a sunk cost, they have them focusing on features. 

So that's one of the things we're providing and we also help them become an enterprise. So now they can use our certifications, our security compliance, our SSO, all those things that corporate entities need as a minimum requirement, they can just utilize what we've already done, right?

I completely get what you're saying. My worry would be that in a hyper-competitive marketplace, like the digital signage software marketplace, many of these companies compete on price. Layering you in adds more cost. 

Although, you've said it removes a lot of costs. Because in this case, this company doesn't need seven guys. or engineers, focused on operating systems, but how do they balance that out? Does it become net savings?

Stephen: Look, there are two aspects. Signage, you're right, it’s very competitive and I wouldn't see, for example, an entry-level signage player, that's playing a web URL, having the need for something like Meld, unless it was their first foray into Chrome and they didn't want to do the development, they just want it to point to us. 

On the signage space, we're working with partners that want to move up the food chain. And what I mean by that is they want to be an enterprise, they want to have multiple touchpoints, within the customer and they potentially want to use other aspects of Meld.

So Meld has its PaaS platform and it does have SaaS modules as well. So we have products such as advanced machine vision. And in Meld, you can schedule machine vision models or AI models. You can schedule content and apps all in the same way and pair them together.

We just worked with a global car company, and they have an app that they spent a lot of money building on, an agency built it and they wanted to add some visual elements...

An agency costing a lot of money???

Stephen: (Laughter) Yeah, and I looked at it and went oh well, but they didn't want to go back to the agency and wanted to use Meld to add some AI elements and what we ended up achieving for them is that we used the cameras within the devices and gave them content sentiment analysis, tokenization of people using it, so if they went into a pop-up that was in a shopping center and then later went into the car dealer, the car dealer wouldn't get any personal details, but they'll see, “Look, this family of four was playing with this car in a shopping center for an hour and they got to this configuration price point.” and that dealer would end up with that profile as they're walking in.

They did that and a lot of that was prebuilt with those tools in Meld. They just used those tools and ran it side by side with the application, and that was a six-week process. So they're the type of customers or partners we're using where they're taking it to that next step.

And also, even some small signage providers when they go enterprise now with all the security requirements like SSO, data restriction compliance, GDPR, all of that's really overwhelming for them. So we take care of that. 

As long as they stick to the guidelines we set in place, they can be compliant too, and they can really pump above their way.

Is one of those guidelines is that you have to use Chrome devices or is that just one of the ways you can do this?

Stephen: No. So, we use our Chrome and Windows. So one of the guidelines is, for example, the hardware. We're hardware agnostic as well so as long as the hardware has some security components like it has a TPM or we can access the firmware to create, assign digital devices, we allow it into our network. So we won't allow a customer to say add an Android device because that can't be secured. 

We are PCI level One, so the highest PCI standards. So we will ensure that the devices meet that standard if they want to be able to use any of those certificates, if that makes sense. 

Yeah. Google made a big splash about four or five years ago, about entering the digital signage market. And at that point, there were a number of Chrome devices and there was a feeling, and I was among them and I thought, okay, this could be a big deal, but then it never really went too far. There's only a handful of companies that are using Chrome, Chromeboxes and other devices, but for the most part, the world has moved on and Android came back and Android is getting a lot more serious and there are lots of special-purpose devices, set-top box kinds of devices that are being used. 

I think it's interesting that you started down the path of Chrome, but I suspect it's going to be important to communicate, at least in the context of the digital signage ecosystem that this is not just a pure Chrome play and they don't have to go down that path.

Stephen: Yeah, that's correct. And look, we love working with Chrome. I think it's come a long way. And, one of the reasons why I think adoption wasn't so rapid in this space is what I explained earlier. You have a lot of people who are used to hacking an operating system and bending it the way they want it to bend, but then you tend to compromise security, you compromise feature updates. There's a lot of compromises when you're doing that. So what we tried to do is take the Chrome methodology, make Chrome more adaptable to this market. 

We're doing offline content, talking to peripherals, running multiple apps at the same time. So I haven't come across anything of light that we can't do in Chrome that you can do in other operating systems. I think Chrome forces you to be compliant, to maintain security standards, and there are not that many players that have the skills to work within that compliance framework. 

So initially we made that easier and now we use that same compliance framework, which is the class-leading for an operating system, across the other operating systems. We've worked very closely with Microsoft to control updates, and we're about to release some dedicated Android devices that are secure, have digital certificates back and forth, and can only play up that generated from Meld. 

So even if it's your own APK, if it wasn't generated from Meld, it won't have authority. So it's super secure. You can still update the Chrome browser within Android, independently of Android, so it's very flexible but maintains that security first principle.

You mentioned machine vision and I believe the product is called Viana. You're bringing computer vision at least in the context of digital signage, into a pretty crowded marketplace in terms of a number of companies that are selling variations on video analytics for audience measurement and so on.

What's the distinction about Viana that sets you apart from the other guys?

Stephen: Sure. So Viana actually didn't start with a sort of visual analytics, in the way we see it in Signage. It started on some really deep learning projects. One, which you can look up, it's called Project Sally, where for our post postal services in Australia, we did handwriting recognition and package recognition to be able to sort parcels at a kiosk device.

You can go up to this kiosk, drop your handwritten parcel on the plateau and it will detect if it needs a customs declaration, pre-fill most of it, dimensions, calculate the cost and everything else. 

So that was quite deep learning because if anyone tried to scan my handwriting, you’d need a really decent model. 

For mine, it's not going to work.

Stephen: (Laughter) So we did that, and we got our synthetic data set generating 14 million impressions a week or variations of handwritings, and we started saying, okay, how do we do things a little bit differently around visual analytics? How do you go beyond just saying, okay, this is how many females or males of this age have walked past this screen? You know, how do we take it to the next level? 

It’s kind of I've been there, done that thing.

Stephen: Exactly, right? And we're not going to engage in something that's highly saturated unless we can add some differentiation.

So we sat down and worked through it and said, okay, what are we trying to actually get here? So we're not just trying to get the number of eyeballs, but what we're trying to get is the amount of attention time, we're trying to get the content sentiment to understand the content sentiment and how that relates to other systems, other processes or advertised media. 

So we not only built our own custom model that looks at content sentiment analysis but applies various metrics and various sorts of triggers and integrations that make it really easy to do more. And then we took it a step further and all the training models are based on synthetics.

So we haven't gone out there and pointed a camera at the public and started training. You know, you have a natural bias doing that. So what we've done is all our computers, all our training data is synthetically generated. It doesn't have the ability to even understand race, let alone be skewed to race but it does understand things like age, gender, beard, glasses, brands of clothing they might be wearing, are they wearing a hat in a hat store? It gets really detailed and we can pick up quite a comprehensive profile of that person that is entering your establishment, and you can start drilling in and say, okay, I want to understand more. I'm thinking of bringing game caps into my store, how many people were in caps of this type, and you can really start drilling down and understanding that level of detail.

And one of the modules that have come out of Viana is at the moment called Sami?

Stephen: Yup. In fact, we started this project prior to COVID. 

It's an interesting story. I was sitting in one of our offices, and being from Melbourne, I was there quite late and the cleaners came in. And they came in, checked in, sat at the conference table, cleaned that table. They were there for two hours, emptied the bin, and left. And I'm thinking, this has to be a better way to understand what's being cleaned, what's being done, how do we go away from this clipboard on the side of a wall saying this has been cleaned and we don't know if it's been done?

So we started that project and we got the provisional patent for it and then COVID hit and we said, okay, this is ideal for COVID. What it essentially does is that it can plug into any camera system, or digital camera system or you can use it with a USB camera if you choose to, and it looks at hand emotion, distances, body distances from objects. And what it starts to do is, for example, if you have a conference room, you can highlight a table or highlight those areas, it will start self-learning the digital structure or framework of that room and it'll start monitoring touchpoints.

So I might say, “After each conference, I want an SMS to go to X person to go clean it.” So what would happen is once that person goes, who gets an SMS (or Messenger or any type of message), walks into the room, accept it, and the camera where she looked for the hand motions that it's been cleaned and it will show the hotspot areas that people were engaged with prior to cleaning.

So you can really take any inanimate object and point these cameras towards it and set a threshold. You might say, after three interactions or people standing nearby, we want this cleaned and you can even set a range for hands or range for airborne, it is if someone's coughed in that area. You might want to set a meter range around that individual going in, and not only it will encourage you to clean, but it will record a complete digital manifest of that. So you'll get that pop-up, you'll engage with it, you'll clean it.

It will monitor all the hand motions. We don't keep any details of faces. We've done a lot of training on what a cleaning motion is, and it will send you an image of the hotspot areas, and if you've cleaned those hotspot areas, it'll send you a notification saying you're done and it will keep a central digital manifest of it all.

So I think that's interesting for the business environment but I would imagine where it could get really interesting would be in things like food processing environments, where they're worried about Listeria outbreaks and everything else, where you've got to have cleaning compliance versus the boardroom table.

Yes. It should be clean, but it's probably not the end of the world. If it wasn't.

Stephen: That's right. We're getting companies coming to us in all sorts of spaces around this. Food preparation areas, pharmaceuticals. We have an interesting one right now, a very, large spectacles retailer and what they're doing right now because of the COVID situation is every hour, they have two people in-store, retail associates, cleaning every single spectacle in the place. So they're using us to have focus areas. So the cleaning can be more frequent, but less broad. 

And in fact, you can have triggers so you can even use it on any kiosk, doesn't matter what operating system, what OS. We have a module that sits on the kiosk and can monitor touches and it doesn't require a camera and it will send you information saying this kiosk has hit a threshold.

We're working with an airport right now, and the first thing it would do is if that kiosk hit a threshold, it will shut down that kiosk and encourage you to go to the next chaos until someone can clean it and as you go into that cleaning mode, it will show you the impressions and all the hotspots where most of the touches were.

And if you're using a virtual eraser, it will not let you finish that process until you've rubbed all of it out and it will even ask you to say, please clean the PIN pad, please clean this and that, as a digital checklist. And that's rolling out this month as well. That's part of the Sami suite, 

So, if I'm charged with cleaning these things (and please God, I don't want that job) but, you would see a screen that has what amounts to a heat map on it that's visualizing what in particular needs to be cleaned, and as you wipe that down, the heat map colors are changing or the heat map is going away and it's going back to the normal screen. Is that a good way of describing it?

Stephen: That's correct. And the main point is the digital manifest, so the person that's cleaning it will have to be standing right in front of it. They'll click on their phone, they could have got a message of some sort, and then it will go into that mode, and you can associate that person with that compliant cleaning regime.

The first thing it would do is make you clean the whole surface and then it would make you focus on areas and have that sort of visualization so that way you can have a deeper clean and there’s some AI behind it, how many touches or how long the engagement is versus how much you have to clean up for based on the type of solution.

So if it's Clorox, it might say, this is how long you need to do it. Customers can vary that in the dashboard. So they can say, it's this many impressions or I want this clean for X minutes. I want us to not allow customers to use it, and we've just had a customer that wanted to add facemask to that, so it stops the kiosk for anyone signing into that kiosk or using that kiosk unless they have a mask. They just added two Meld modules together and created that scenario.

Yeah. I worry about a lot of these companies that are coming out with hardware products that are squarely focused on dealing with pandemic issues right now, because it's going to take longer than most people expect, but this problem will go away and I wonder if these products will be relevant at that point, versus what you're describing, which is great in the current, health safety environment, but it's going to work for a whole bunch of other reasons down the road in a whole bunch of other different scenarios.

Stephen: Exactly. So we originally started these concepts because a lot of customers use our touch screen for food or food ordering. Coli is very stubborn and it stays on surfaces for a long time, so we originally started this for things such as Listeria, Coli and general cleanliness and bacteria. 

And we're very lucky to have one of our large teams, or actually I opened at the time in Taiwan because they see a lot of work around this space and Taiwan seems to be leading the world around this space. They seem to be the best in the best state for COVID.

So we've got a lot of feedback from them on this, and having a purely hardware solution to solve this problem which may or may not be a short term, but it really needs to be multi-use and have a broader purpose than just this, and really that's what we're focused on.

It's good housekeeping. It's allowing you to create a digital manifest and to make sure it's actually done because we actually did a research piece before we started. We're working with a very large building management company, so they own buildings in the city, and then they go lease them back out and manage the buildings. And they didn't actually know, compliance. The only method of compliance they had was when the cleanup badged in and badged out, that was it. They didn't know if anything was done, which could be dangerous, in this environment. And also, just generally, you want to know if you're paying for that cleaning service that it's actually being done.

Yeah. Where's the company at, in terms of, working its way into the marketplace? You've hired Raffi Vartian. I believe you have a guy down in Dallas or Austin. Where are you at and how do companies engage with you? 

Are you working through a channel, is it a direct connection? How do people find meldCX and get the conversation going?

Stephen: Yeah. So we started off, in Australia. so we've got quite a big Australia team and some resources in the Asia Pacific region. We decided to kick off the US because, one, we have quite a few customers that are in flight, so you'll see, by the end of this year, them going live with some significant rollouts.

So we hired two people initially, that is, Edward Doan, he’s actually ex Chrome, he was part of the core Chrome team and led parts of that team. And he's come across to lead the meldCX business in the US and Raffi Vartian. And we tend to look at it in an interesting way, in that, if the project is unique and we believe that projects can come down the pipe and can be used by our partners, we will engage the customer directly for a period of time. 

So for example, in the first version of Sami, we worked closely with our customers who allowed us into their environments and create training data and do that type of thing, and then we'll make that sort of publicly available and work with partners to deliver to those clients. 

So we are a partner-centric business. We tend to use ISDs and SIs of all types. We do work with some agencies, and some consultancy firms as well but we do have some multinational, bleeding-edge type use cases that we will engage indirectly and then make those facilities or even sometimes the sample code available to our partners so they can go and modify it and do it for their customers.

Okay, so to find you guys, is it meldCX.com?

Stephen: Yup. meldCX.com.

Perfect. All right, Steven, thank you so much for taking some time with me from all the way over there in Australia.

Stephen: Yeah, thanks for your time. 

Peiman Hosseini, Bodle Technologies

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED - DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

 

Reflective display technology has been around for 20 years or more, heavily led by E-Ink.

A start-up that comes out of the R&D labs of Oxford University in England - called Bodle Technologies - is just beginning to make the shift from development to commercialization on a display product that is kinda sorta like E-Ink, but done differently.

Bodle takes the same basic approach of reflecting light from other sources - like sunlight or room lighting - to show images, instead of using back or direct lighting like LCDs or LEDs. Unlike E-Ink, Bodle's tech is not based on using electricity to move microcapsules of ink around a display. It's done differently, using layers.

I spoke with co-founder and CEO Peiman Hosseini, who in our discussion does a nice job of explaining the technology and how it works. The end result is a display surface that supports precise colors and can do full-motion video.

One of the things I found interesting in our chat is how manufacturing can be done using legacy technologies, like the equipment used to make read/write DVDs. So the speed to market and costs are not the same as having to fund and build brand new manufacturing capability.

Electronic Shelf Labels are the initial target market for Bodle, but the company also sees a future in larger public information displays, where access to power is problematic.

 

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TRANSCRIPT

 

So Peiman, pleasure to meet you virtually at least. We've not met in person and I'm almost completely unfamiliar with Bodle Technologies. So the best way to start is, can you give me a rundown of what your company does and how they got started?

Peiman: Yeah, sure. So Bodle really started as a spinoff at the University of Oxford in the UK. While I was doing my postdoctoral research there at the Materials department, we found this interesting optical effect, which in short is essentially a way to generate color using interference. You can think of it a little like the butterfly wings, where wings don't really have those gorgeous colors, it’s really the structure and really the way light interacts with the structure that generates its color. So what we found out was that we could create gorgeous colors and use a much simpler way, so much more straightforward technique to deposit the spin using vacuum techniques. And then between these sort of different layers, we would add a special material that's known as a phase change material. 

The interesting part about this material is that it can change its optical properties, and it can modulate the light that's reflected off the surface. So, essentially, we generate a technology that can be applied to a surface and then zap it with some energy, you know, an electrical pulse essentially, and the optical appearance of that surface will change. So, that was the whole idea behind this paper. And we published it in 2014. It was a very interesting and non-trivial optical effect that we discovered and once we published the paper, we immediately thought what we can do with it, you know, what would be something you could do with this technology? And that essentially led to a Bodle. 

We found that Bodle about a year after the paper was published. So, end of 2015, early 2016. And then the company slowly grew over time. We raised quite a few million pounds from the UK Oxford VC area, and we just reached a point where we essentially are starting to move away from an R&D type of project into a genuine company, looking at products and looking at customers, looking essentially at what we can do with this new technology.

And you recently took over as CEO, right, you had been one of the co-founders and Chief Technology Officer?

Peiman: Exactly. So, as I said, I was one of the founders and the founding CTO, and I have been the CTO for four and a half years essentially. And more recently, we had reorganization of the company tackling the COVID issue and so on. So essentially, I moved to a CEO position now, and I’m looking forward to making a more commercial effort towards the company.

I am definitely not an alumnus of Oxford University - they probably wouldn't even let me on the campus - but I understand the base idea of what you're describing. How would you distinguish this from what I'm more familiar with, which would be E-ink or electronic ink?

Peiman: Yeah. So, in e-ink technology, you have these particular ink balls, if you want to call it that, which probably move around into this special medium. And so essentially the technology is about applying an electric field, moving these balls in and out of the vision of the reader and generating color. It's very, very good technology for black and white. I own a Kindle, you know, it has been extremely successful in creating this sort of reflective display ecosystem. So the Kindle being the best, I would say, example out there. And really what they're doing with their technologies is moving these inks, these little balls of things around and it has some some pros and some cons. So you know, there are some good things about it and some bad things about it like every technology. 

What we are doing is very different. Our technology doesn't really move anything anywhere. So we essentially have, as I said, this sort of special material that really can change the optical appearance of a surface. So instead of having a surface that you're generating by moving around these ink, you are changing the color of the actual surface by changing its optical properties. So it's a way that we also use to generate colors. You know, if you, for example, are thinking about having a nice beautiful red, what you would do with e-ink is you are essentially working on your inks, you're creating a new type of red ink, and then you use ink to kind of generate the color and then you apply your electric fields to that ink moving up and down. So what we do is very, very different because in essence, all our pixels and all our corals are the same. The real difference between them is just the thicknesses of the layers that we put on top of each other, so if we have a slightly thicker or slightly thinner layer, we can generate, say, a blue collar or a red collar. 

So essentially making the whole thing gets a little bit simpler in a way that the structure itself is always the same. And really, the differences between these colors are the various thicknesses of the layer. And that's only possible because we are, as I said, working with interference of light. So the materials that we are using don't really have any special color. So if you take these materials, and you look at them in the bulk form, they're either gray or transparent, and don't really look like anything. But if you put them in a certain layer on top of each other with very specific thicknesses, then they become red or a very gorgeous yellow or very gorgeous blue and so on. So that's, I think, it's a very different technology but the idea in the end is the same.

Is it ink-based as well?

Peiman: No, it's not. We call it a Solid State Reflective Display, because the materials that are involved are kind of solid and sturdy materials.

And the market for this appears to be similar to what e-ink could be going after. What I saw on your website was electronic shelf labels, public information displays, the back-faces potentially on personal devices, that sort of thing but again it’s a different way of doing it, right?

Peiman: Yeah, it's a different way of doing it. So, if you think about the first e-ink Kindle, the first product came out in 2007 together with the very first iPhone and and really you know, as of today you can buy these products and they evolved over time, but still there is really a need for in the market for something that is a little bit more than just reading books. Because, you know, black and white works well for books but you want to read, say a magazine or you want to be able to surf the web, or read your emails, and do all sorts of things on a reflective type of display. So everyone who's working on reflective displays is really trying to expand that market beyond just reading books. 

You know, everybody wants to get into the next generation products. And e-ink has been around for a very long time and there's still trying and still making progress today. We are a very new technology and a very new concept, but we are able to do the same. And, as I said there are some fundamental differences between the two technologies but I think everybody agrees that if you can generate color, if you can have a display that is reflective, that can switch with video rate characteristics, then there is a huge market. 

I think it's estimated that the current market is somewhere around just shy of a billion dollar. But if you add these abilities like color and the video rate, the market jumps up to $5 billion in a few years. And I think that's kind of easy to understand because you think about when you go to a store and buy the next generation Kindle or whatever that can show you different colors, it’s video capable and still you don't have to charge it every day. I think it could be something that people want to buy and that's really what our company enables.

I don't want to make this about e-ink versus your technology at all, but it's what I'm familiar with and what listeners are probably most familiar with, but with e-ink, they went from monochrome to starting to support a base number of colors, very limited range and then I have seen demos, I believe that SID display week of e-ink doing video or a very variation on video, kind of low frame rate, low resolution motion.

You've mentioned video, what is your technology capable of doing, kind of doing something that equates to an LCD at, you know, 30 frames a second or 60 frames a second?

Peiman: Yeah, so the technology that we're developing essentially has an incredibly quick transition. So one of the strengths of the technology is that, because it's a solid material that is transitioning between different phases, you're not really moving anything around. So the speed at which you can refresh the pixel is extremely fast, so video rate is definitely something that you can do. Obviously, as for every bi-stable display technology, and for those of you guys who don't know what bi-stable means, it means that if I unplug the display, the last picture that I was showing will stay there, so our Technology is just like that, like bi-stable. Something that's bi-stable naturally will consume more power if you're trying to refresh the image, because obviously just from a physics point of view, you don't need to apply energy for the image to stay there, you will need to apply a little bit more energy when you want to change it. Obviously if you want to show videos and you want to show continuous videos, the power consumption will go up. 

But the idea is not just about showing videos, because everybody thinks you want to watch YouTube videos, and you want to watch it continuously. Sure, that’s one application but another one is simply user interface responsiveness. So if you have something that you're scrolling, for example, you want to see a nice and fluid type of scrolling movement. If you're opening your emails, you want to see something that opens up without flashing your eyes with some picture or without you really noticing that it’s refreshing. 

So that is also something that you can achieve with a video capable technology. And that's something that generates other market opportunities on handheld devices that is just beyond just a YouTube video that you want to watch. So, you know, what we think is that video is important for videos, obviously. And it's also important to enable other types of devices and applications, but otherwise, they are simply not there today. So you don't have a sort of reflective type of display when you have a nice and smooth scrolling, for example, and that's partially because of video issues with these technologies.

Yeah, certainly when I've seen electronic ink displays and when you see whatever the image or the text be refreshed, it kind of goes haywire for a split second at least, the screen goes kinda crazy, and then it locks into the next visual. And you're saying that doesn't happen?

Peiman: No, with our technology that doesn't happen. That's because we use techniques like random access capability, which means you can address one pixel without having to worry about affecting the neighboring pixels.

With that sort of capability, you don't have the flashing behavior that you have with electronic papers type of applications. But, you know, it's really about the application. If you just want to read a book, if you're sort of flipping the page and it has to flash for half a second, that’s normal. But if you want to do more things and you want to do next generation things, then that might be an issue.

 

One of the things that struck me as quite interesting were some of the visuals on your website, one in particular for, I guess, a commuter rail service or something where you had real-time train information and station information on glass. 

You know, I've written a little bit about companies that are doing mesh-LED displays that would overlay glass, or LED and film that would apply to glass or be inside of glass, but it tends to be low resolution, not the sort of thing that's readable and would be able to give you arrivals and departures times and that sort of thing. This looks like, you know, a fully readable application, that could update pretty much on the fly. Could you describe what that's all about?

Peiman: Yeah, so that's why when we were trying to develop the technology, we were also thinking about what will be a nice application for this specific pros of our technology and one thing is because our pixels are so thin in our backlinks and the electronics that go behind these pixels. It's so simple, you can apply those sorts of displays on pretty much any substance. And you know, every display is either made of glass right or you build the display on top of glass. And this sort of reflective appearance, capability to show information in public spaces in businesses anywhere really, it's one of the things that is appealing.

You can think of even having it in your bathroom mirrors, right? In the morning while you're brushing your teeth, it shows you the weather, and it shows your list of places you have to be that day. But you could technically do these things with today's technology, right? You can put some OLEDs on top, you can put some micro-LEDs but, as you said, it's just that feeling of something that's emitting light in your face, it's not what we think would be interesting from a customer experience point of view. 

What we consider interesting is, you want to have an environment within your home where you interact with surfaces that appear natural. So you will have something that is not trying to grab your attention constantly, something that almost fades away around your house and your environment. And if you want to interact with it, you can, and it would almost look like a moving magazine, kinda right out of a Harry Potter movie. Something moves and it can give you information, but it's not bright. And every time you pass next to it, it just shines out, so someone goes, “Oh, what’s this?” and you go, “Oh, it’s the Thermostat”.

So from that point of view, having a reflective technology that can be applied to any surface, that can be applied around your home on anything, it can be appliances, can be anything really. That's what we think of display-anywhere type of application, that I think, has a lot of interesting features and a lot of design concepts that go with it. That you can’t really do today, you can’t really do these sorts of things today. You need a new technology which is why we founded Bodle.

Yeah, I remember, several years ago, Corning put out a couple of videos, I believe they were called “A Day in Glass” or something like that.

Peiman: Those are the best demos I've ever seen. That's essentially what we are like.

So if you've seen those videos, this is the sort of thing that would apply to that?

Peiman: Yeah, exactly. That's the sort of application we have in mind for this technology.

Okay. In my world of digital signage technology, one of the use cases you mentioned is public information display, how do you see your technology being used?

Peiman: So, I think there are a few examples today, where you have some public information displays that essentially need to change almost daily, right? And you want to show some kind of information with it. Just because of the environment, say you are outside, and you are somewhere Sunny, like California, you cannot really use normal display technology. I mean, you could and there are people who have done it and it essentially has a liquid crystal display, a gigantic crystal display, with essentially a fridge, that’s cooling it all the time and even consuming power and all that. So that's possible, but the idea is, you can just have something smaller, you can have something that's not constantly consuming power, that you can still read very well outside, almost like you would while reading a piece of paper that can be refreshed remotely. 

I can't remember who told me this, but there are places like in Australia where if you want to change the bus, they have a bus timetable around the country, for which every bus stand there, you got to spend $25 to change because someone has to go there and open that thing, put the new one in and so on. And, you can only do that so many times, right? So if you had a sort of technology that allows you to interact with the public more efficiently, in a better way, in all sense, then I think that would be beneficial for everyone, you know, the public, the company who makes it, the company who manages it, so everybody would kind of benefit. That’s really our vision. 

As for every display technology, you want to start with a sort of relatively small display, right? Because it's easier to make. For a startup such as ours, having some handheld device, an ESL device, those things are smaller and easier to make technically. But then eventually as you're scaling up, and your equipment gets bigger, and the kind of capital you have at your disposal gets bigger, then you can address these other markets and signage, I think is a very nice example, and something that we could also do. That's, you know, down into the future.

One of the things in the use case you're describing with transit information displays is when it's being done with e-ink and the limited number of applications today in London, Australia, Slovenia and a few other places, is they are solar powered. Is your technology able to do what it needs to do, just based on a solar collector on a transit post?

Peiman: Yeah, absolutely. The technology's no power. So all you need is a source of a few volts for some time just to refresh the display, so that will be absolutely fine. And yeah, I think you're right, if there are places where getting a display to fully connect to the mains is an issue and ESL is another good example. So you know, when you have an electronic shelf edge and you might have 10,000 in a large store, so you cannot plug them all at one main line, just the whole logistics would be a nightmare. So all of those are actually battery powered. So you have to have a technology that is Bistable, so it consumes energy only when you're changing the picture. And it doesn't consume a lot of power. So you can essentially leave it on for a few years out of a couple batteries. And that's the sort of thing our technology can do.

And in order to drive information to the screen, what would be used and how is it connected? 

You know, in my world of LCDs and LEDs and so on, there's a separate computing device or an embedded computing device and it's got a signal cable that's plugging in and driving the display, how would it work here?

Peiman: It will be similar. So you know, with displays usually what they have is that some electronics are on glass, some electronics are on a chip that’s bonded to the glass, and then there is a little component outside that which manages all of those things. So ours wouldn't be much different. It would be maybe slightly better sort of versions, more adapted, sort of designed for our particular technology, but in the end it would be just like every other technology.

One of the challenges that I've seen through the years with e-ink, is they come up with something new, they add color, they add bass motion, that sort of thing. And when I start asking about the cost of these things, they tend to dance around that or they will tell me a price and they'll say, “Whoa, that's not very competitive, and why wouldn't I just use more contemporary or conventional technology for this?” 

Where are you at with that? And how do you get over it? You're at a startup level, I assume you don't have the economies of scale yet.

Peiman: No, that's true. So one of the strengths of our technology is that we essentially have reinvented an old technology. So if you have ever owned or used rewritable DVDs or Blu Ray, essentially the technology that was in these devices, these optical media is very similar to what we are using in our display. So materials, there's sort of active materials, the phase change materials were essentially invented for that application, and it used to be a big business. But nowadays, obviously, nobody uses DVDs and Blu Rays anymore, certainly not the rewritable ones. So those companies have acquired a lot of know-how and a lot of equipment to do those things and now they're sort of simply not using them. There are very few players now that can do these sorts of media. So what we think we can do is essentially take these know-how and take these lines that were used for this old technology and just use it for different applications. So instead of making rewritable discs, we will make displays with them. And essentially, that's one of the, I think, key advantages. 

We don't need to invent new processes, we don't need to invent new types of equipment that do these things, because every time you do that, obviously you have yield issues every time you have to understand how to fabricate something from scratch, but we're not doing any of them. What we are doing is just simply taking all this knowledge that was long gone with all the patterns that have expired, and really thinking about doing something completely different that makes it in a way, inexpensive to manufacture. Also that’s why in a relatively short amount of time, we made a lot of progress, because we were able to take knowledge from these people and companies that really can't wait for something new. 

So that's what we believe and we run manufacturing analysis, we run a lot of cost estimates and all that, how our technology is gonna compare to other technologies. And we believe we can be a lot cheaper than what's out there simply because it's a simple, and well known manufacturing technique, just for a new application.

Okay, so when you have a scale opportunity like electronic shelf labels (ESLs), one of the challenges that I've certainly heard is retailers love these things, but when they have to put $4,000 or $10,000 into an individual store, they look at the price of the individual tags and multiply that by 4,000 or 10,000 and have a heart attack, and so it doesn't go forward. 

Are you suggesting that your method and manufacturing would make that much more feasible and they'd be able to see the ROI quicker?

Peiman: Yeah, and I think that's the main problem. I think the problem is that people cannot see what's their return, right? If they spend that money, what exactly is the return you're going to get in terms of these investments? 

One problem is an accounting problem. So as they're spending money, they're thinking, “okay, this thing is essentially gonna replace labels, so I'm gonna save some money”. The guy who goes around and changes these labels, for sure, but then it's still a lot of money they have to spend. So what we think we can do, which is more than simply showing a price, is also adding the colors and video capabilities to these products that can essentially add more branding and merchandising type of sort of play to ESL. So it's not just about showing a price, it's not just about saving money on replacing labels, it’s now a way for you to be able to sell more Pepsi or something or sell more things because now you can play with colors, effects and have it say, “Look, today this costs less than yesterday!” So this is the sort of idea. I think you can then change a little bit of the business model that today's just thinking labels and add ways for them to get a return on investment directly from their customers. 

But there is a big but. If you only can show a limited amount of colors and you can only show a limited amount of functionality, then they cannot really do that. Which is why we think adding color, adding the customization features is so important. As I said, you can change these colors by just changing thicknesses, right? So we can make a display for a certain retailer and then make a completely different one for different retailers, and that doesn't double our investment. That's a slight rise if you want. So that kind of customization is interesting to these people in this ecosystem. Because they can do more and they can see how this becomes more than just labels.

Can you do specific Pantone colors? Everybody talks about Coca Cola Red and how Coca Cola would not accept another red, it has to be there red.

Peiman: Yeah, you can do that. You can very, very precisely hit a certain color that you like, for whatever reason, which is what we are pitching to people essentially. That's one of the things that we think is very interesting, being able to match your brand color.

You mentioned early on that you're in this transitional phase coming out of R&D into commercialization, where's that at and when would somebody be able to buy a Bodle Technologies product or is it more that they would license the technology?

Peiman: So, we essentially have started operations in Taiwan where they are taking whatever we develop in Oxford, and then just make it manufacturable, so instead of making a few samples per month, we can make hundreds and so on. And it's just the beginning of our scale-up operation. And the goal is to, you know, within 18 months to get to a proper pilot manufacturing, have our partners and get to the product, where we are going to launch our very first product, which is going to be on ESL and start getting to the market with this differentiated product. 

From there, the idea for the company is to essentially slowly move into more complex products and eventually sort of the holy grail of every reflective display player is an e-reader that can show colors, videos, and so on. That's why we found Bodle, to get into e-readers, but we saw that there is this more short term opportunity in ESL, and that's where we want to hit first.

That's very, very interesting. Thank you so much for spending some time with me.

Peiman: No problem. Thank you so much for inviting me and I hope we can talk sometime in the future, and I'll tell you all about Bodle and how we sold.

Keep me posted. And to find your company, it's bodletechnologies.com?

Peiman: Yes. So bodletechnologies.com and you'll find all about it.

Perfect. Alright, thanks again.

Peiman: Thank you so much.

DCBolt, IMERZA - Water Street Tampa

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED - DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

 

Real estate developers have long used scale models, drawings and photo-realistic visuals to help market their projects, but a massive new urban development in downtown Tampa kicks things up several notches to help lease everything from condos to office space.

 

The marketing center for the Water Street development is selling a $3.5 billion project that covers 56 acres of prime West Coast Florida property. When prospective buyers walk in, the lights come up on a presentation that blends projection mapping, visualized, real-time data and interactive digital signage.

 

The centerpiece is an elevated table that has some 450 3-D printed scale-model building, very specifically illuminated by a halo of a dozen laser projectors.

 

Instead of sales people walking clients through the space, and then heading to a meeting room to talk details, a custom iPad app controls what people see on the model - all drawn from real-time data sets.

 

I spent time recently speaking with Devin and Caitlin Wambolt, the D and C (I assume) in DCBOLT, the solutions provider that did the projection mapping. They were joined by Dorian Vee of IMERZA, which developed the custom program, sitting on top of 3D gaming technology.

 

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TRANSCRIPT

 

All right, so I have three of you on a podcast. I don't think I've done that in the past. We've got folks from DCBolt and Dorian from IMERZA. 

DCBolt’s Caitlin and Devin, can you tell me a bit about the company background and how you got to where you are now in terms of what you're doing?

Caitlin: Sure thing. So back in 2012, we started DCBolt, Devin and I were actually in Chicago. We were both going to 3D animation school, 3D animators nerds met in the classroom. From that point, we did our first project, we started DCBolt but our first project which was a nightclub in Chicago, where we designed a custom projection map stage, we did custom LED all throughout the nightclub. And from that point on, we were like, we're hooked. 

Projection mapping was our baby. And we started getting into more of the custom content aspects of immersive design. Then we slowly found ourselves in Orlando, which is currently where we're based, where we're working with the parts  doing a lot of custom animation, immersive media, things like that. And the rest is history.

Devin: Yeah, and this is Devin from DCBolt. Just to piggyback on that a little bit. My personal history and experience and background leading up to the 3D animation school was working for and with a couple of really key large AV integrators up in the Northeast region. So I essentially was getting my schooling on the world of AV and how systems worked, how to design them on a hardware level, the infrastructure requirements, how to run large projects. 

At the same time, I was using that knowledge and experience to pay for the schooling needed to do the graphic element, learn the programs, learn the 3D world. And then around 2010-2011 is when projection mapping just started on the radar of people who were kind of familiar with both worlds of how projectors work, how to use them, and also how to make some custom graphics. We were able to start connecting dots and we started seeing some really really cool and interesting, one of a kind projects cropping up on the internet and YouTube. And I had actually just moved to Chicago, freshly in, I don't know, my second apartment, maybe I had a bunch of boxes leftover. 

And I was either going to have to break the boxes down, throw them out, or I had just seen this really, really cool. It was actually a facade of a cityscape, projected onto these boxes. I forget exactly what the advertisement was, but it was an advertisement for something. And I remember being very wowed and in awe of this amazing video that I just witnessed on YouTube. And this is back before we had advertisements. This is back in the day and, and so I took the boxes that I had in my living room and I stacked them up in my apartment and I covered them in white paper. And I made my very first attempt at 3D projection mapping just using Photoshop and a projector that I happen to have leftover from a project. One thing led to another and before we knew it...

Caitlin: We were creating content for those boxes.

Devin: Yeah, we were using that project. I brought that project to the school and we started using it for all the different students to make content for. It was just a fun new thing, a new medium that people hadn't experienced yet. So one thing led to another, we ended up doing a couple nightclubs, made a bunch of videos and then eventually made our way down to Florida to help work on Harry Potter World.

Okay, yeah, that technical background is really important. I have run into motion graphic designers who have found their way into digital signage-ish projects, and they're obviously very good at the creative side of things, but they were just completely lost in the woods, when it came to some of the technical things, and particularly going back 9-10 years to the early days of projection mapping, it was really super complicated then.

If you didn't know what you're doing, you'd be total deer in the headlights.

Devin: Yeah, a lot of it was trial and error, and there weren't a lot of tutorials or people out there to reach out to for help. 

Caitlin: No Point cloud.

Devin: But that was the fun of it, really, you know, it was raw. And, you know, shortly thereafter, more and more software started becoming available to help with mesh warping and alignment tools and different things like that, which essentially evolved to the point where we were able to do something like we did in Tampa Bay with Dorian and his team. So the brief answer to your question as a background, DCBolt, we really found ourselves in the niche where we speak the language and can really speak to and understand all of the things that a content media team needs to know in order to do their jobs. But we also speak the language and understand all the variables and different aspects involved with the infrastructure that comes along with making these systems. 

A lot of people go and do a show or go and do an event and it has to be up and running for 6-12 hours and then they can break it down. When we design a system, we want it to be running 6-12 hours a day for up to 10 years. So there's a lot of different variables and redundancies and different things that we take into account as far as what brands that we choose to use and what kind of equipment we use, what's doing the video processing, the routing, the power backups, remote control, all of that comes into play. And then we can also relate all of those technical details to immediate team or to someone like Dorian’s team who has an amazing team of programmers, and they know everything they need to know about the video game world and we were able to converse with them and go back and forth and figure out the common ground of how to make get them what they need to get us what we need, so we can project on this city.

Right, and I would imagine that while you could probably get some gigs here and there in Chicago. If you want steady work with substantial budgets, you really ought to be in a place like Orlando or maybe Las Vegas, something like that, where these are the kinds of shows that as you said, may run for 10 years as opposed to one night for a brand launch or something.

Devin: Definitely and never to take away from those. There's just as much work and effort and talent for creating those productions. You know, it's just from our niche standpoint, we really specialize in installations that are meant to be permanently installed, at least or semi-permanently installed and used on a regular basis. We go for bulletproof design. So that's kind of where we set ourselves apart from most other companies that are similar to us.

Caitlin: We have the experience of the live show world, but we definitely prefer the permanent installation world.

Devin: The integration world, yeah.

So, Dorian tell me about your company.

Dorian: Hi, I'm Dorian Vee. I'm the co-founder and CTO of IMERZA, an experiential software company with primary focuses in the real estate and real estate development world. And our roots actually grew out of an architecture firm. In addition to a merger, we also have a design firm that's based in Sarasota, Florida. That's been around 30+ years and does a wide range of work from master planning through complex urban mixed use stuff. 

And what happened was, a little shy of 10 years ago, we started to look towards interactive, real time 3D tech to really change the decision making process internally. And so we started writing our own software on top of game engines to go through any level of decision you can think of whether it's entitlements and approval decisions or finished selections and things like that. And then we started pulling in all sorts of different data and being able to visualize data in these yet to be physically built environments in the game engine. And what happened was our clients started dragging their potential buyers into our office and ultimately selling million-dollar residences out of our work room, which is, as you can imagine, by no means a residential sales center. 

And it happened enough times that we realize there's obviously something there for sales and marketing. And we set out to build out this platform for both real estate developers but also real estate marketing. And actually, Devin and I met several years ago through a mutual friend in Boston. And he introduced me to Devin and we had in mind, for one of our architecture projects, this badass projection maps experience for this interior courtyard of this building. And we brought Devin down to consult on it and see how we could do it. Unfortunately, the Client ultimately wound up not doing it. But what was interesting on the Tampa project, Devin was approached by strategic property partners to consult. 

And at the same time, they had approached us for our experiential tech to help them through development decisions. And then when the RFP finally went out, we realized Devin was consulting on it and gave him a call and said, why don't we team up for this? This is just a slam dunk. If we mix what you're doing with what we're doing, it'll be something that's never been done before.

All right. So you guys have referenced the Tampa project, so can you give me information on what that was all about? It's up and running now, correct?

Dorian: That is correct. The Tampa project is a marketing center. It is the marketing center for a multibillion dollar real estate development in downtown Tampa, Florida. The development itself consists of about 56 acres of privately owned real estate downtown. And the company that's doing it is Strategic Property Partners, for which one of the major partners is Jeff Vinik, who is the owner of the Tampa Bay Lightning and their marketing team has seen some cool projection map city stuff done in other cities worldwide. 

They had this idea and they said, “Hey, we want to do something similar to that, but wouldn't it be cool if we could actually just show all of these data sets in real time, whether that be market data, real estate market data, whether that be demographic data, or even traffic data, things like that.” And  nothing like that had been done before in a projection mapping scenario. These were things that we were doing with our technology, just on the game engine side of things. And they wanted to make this the centerpiece of their marketing center. So the concept was that we would 3D print a 16-foot diameter scale model of downtown Tampa, put in all of the buildings they're currently designing, build it modularly so that as their second and third phases get designed, we could then easily replace those buildings. But then projection maps all of this information and data and color and content onto that scale model, while at the same time showing related content on the surrounding video walls to that scale model. 

Devin: Yeah, we did about a three month discovery process with SPP directly just to help define an eyesight and determine what is the map boundary going to be, what section of Tampa is going to be, even just to determine whether it was going to be a square versus a circle, you know, how large is this model going to be in the physical room. And then we worked with them and the architects to work backwards from the physical restrictions of the size and height of the ceilings in the room to essentially design a system and find all the proper lensing that we knew would be able to cover this entire model and all of its intricate little surfaces from 360 degrees. 

Because their goal was to have people to walk all the way around this model, mitigating as much shadow casting as possible. So we went through a three month process discovery for that, and essentially determined the best approach and the most efficient approach for covering the surfaces from all the different angles with the least amount of projectors needed, but enough to give us the level of detail that we needed, while also doing the best to mitigate as many shadows as possible.

Caitlin: Right and it's a fine level of detail.

Devin: A very fine balance between the number of projectors, distance of image throws, lensing selections, and then how we kind of use the mapping software to merge that entire world together from the game engine, which Dorian's team worked on. And then we actually developed some custom bits of software to make the game engine talk directly through the projector mapping software. 

Dorian: One of the other interesting things was that most projection mapped experiences, at least that I've seen, are meant to be viewed at a distance of at least 10 feet away. Whereas this is a table that you sometimes upwards a room full of 50 people are surrounding and are directly on top of and looking at and because of that it had to be a very, very fine detail of these models.

Caitlin: That dual construction of this is really fascinating to me as well because obviously this is a development where things are changing, there are phases that are already on the docket. We're talking about lots of changes. So down to the building, the individual building construction, that was a huge criterion for the client and down to the table being modular. So everything is really designed with room for growth, with room for those changes that we foresee.

Devin: Ties right back into us. We really like doing projects that have a 5-10 year shelf life and we enjoy the challenges that are brought forth by making sure we're designing with the future in mind. As the city evolves and develops physically, you look out the window, you see a new building, well, we are prepared with IMERZA to completely update everything both digitally and physically when it comes to the scale model as well.

Dorian: Yeah, and that's one of the super cool things about real time rendering, and what really gets me excited about it is if this were to be done, with traditional offline rendering and traditional media capabilities, that would have meant, if one of those buildings gets redesigned, which will inevitably happen, all of that content would have had to have been re-rendered. And then, you know, of course paid for and that would have gotten just extremely pricey. And being able to do this and push through all of this content, in real time at runtime was just such an enormous cost savings to the client then what other traditional media companies were proposing.

So when I've seen scale models of new developments, and admittedly I have not had a lot of cause to see many of them, but in my travels, I have bumped into them. They would most typically just be described as a scale model of a set of buildings that may be nested in a larger urban area. 

And you can look at it from different angles and see the ones that are colored differently. And the other ones are kind of beige or whatever so you know these are the new buildings. With the property developers who said that's not enough, we need to do more than this to actively sell, is it about sizzle?

Dorian: It's about telling a story and showing data and showing how Tampa as a city is growing and the movements of people and where Millennials are settling, how the nearby buildings are performing over time both from a rent perspective, but also like an occupancy perspective. 

One of the things that I found pretty interesting and that was a total surprise to me on the data side of things is once we started pulling in these data feeds, and we could then visualize them in a 3D form, not in you know, tabular, Excel sheets and that sort of thing, you start to see things that you wouldn't necessarily have expected, like, naturally, I would have expected that the buildings along the waterfront would have had a higher rent growth year over year. But then when we visualize it on the table, you could see that it actually it's the buildings that are in the downtown core that are actually having higher rent growth. And that's something that you absolutely couldn't do with the traditional scale model. And that was critical for them to be able to get the high priced rents they're looking for.

So when you're doing a sales presentation, in a more typical marketing center, you would take the prospective tenants into this area and show them the scale model and show them some elevations and everything else and then go to a meeting room and then run the Excel spreadsheets or PowerPoint decks that show all the different data components that you want to pitch versus this where, I guess, you could do the whole meeting just around the scale model, right?

Devin: One of the really great benefits of having the entire model and basically the entire section of the city that's being discussed in this gaming environment as well is that this is as close as we can get to an actual hologram going on and in front of them. 

We've also been able to cater very special presentations in different storytelling modes depending on who the viewer is. So if it's a sales meeting versus if there's someone who maybe is interested in buying a condo or something at this top level of the new edition building, versus someone who owns the stadium right there and they want to see... 

You know, Coca Cola comes in and they want to know, how is my branding going to look in the city? Well, you know, the immersive platform, we can upload a Coca Cola logo, and then they can visualize it on the model in front of them and all the renderings everything happens in real time. And you know, so depending on who the viewer is, we have many different modes that the presenter can go through to tell the story and they also have the ability to kind of shoot from the head. If something comes up, they can point at a building on a map and it will highlight directly on the model in front of them. They can drop the viewers almost anywhere and show them the view at certain times of a day and stuff that you just couldn't do in any other kind of working environment.

Caitlin: Right. Isolating floor levels too, and giving them that first person perspective of what it's going to be like to live in this building or what they're going to see. It’s huge and it makes for a really compelling sales tool. 

Dorian: Yeah, and we have just been talking about the super cool part, which is the scale model but as part of the overall deliverable, there are also two touchscreens kiosks that users could navigate this future version of Tampa themselves also in the room, but yeah, just like Devin and Caitlin were saying, it's an incredibly flexible tool for storytelling. 

They do have different teams. They've got a commercial team, that's all they care about, and their focus is commercial leasing. And then they have different real estate agencies that are interested in selling different residences. And then they've got a whole advertising team because obviously the stadium is right there. And we wrote a system that allows them to basically take a package of assets of billboards of digital signage, actual video mp4 files, and drop that into the content management system. And what it will do is, it will automatically ingest all of those assets and apply them to what Devin had mentioned, every specific billboard where it's supposed to go and suck in all of those video assets and do it all on the fly.

And it is controlled just off a tablet?

Dorian: It is off of a custom iPad controller that was written for the project.

So who manages the day-to-day? Obviously, you've mapped the data tables and everything, so that's okay. But as you described, you want to put in assets from Coca Cola or whatever, is that a managed service that you guys or one of your companies does or are the people at the real estate company doing that?

Dorian: We built a whole content management system that they can themselves upload new content to, they can create their own tours where they can say, I want to play this content then I want to see this on the table and I want to see these videos on the screens. So they can arrange all of that themselves. We haven't quite turned that over to them yet. We're still the gatekeepers on it for the first few months. But once everything's totally solidified, we'll turn that over to them and they will be running it on their own.

Devin: And on the systems side we've also built in a bunch of presets on the programming of the actual infrastructure so they can choose lighting presets, audio presets, there's some lighting under the table, they have control of so they can really choose and set select any specific presets they want. That ties back into the video game engine, so when they choose one thing, everything in the room is going to react to it. The lights go down, the sound comes on, the AV system itself integrates seamlessly with it.

Dorian: Yeah, for instance when they are talking about the parks and nearby parks, the soft under lighting glow of the table can turn green and you can hear birds chirping in the audio. It's very subtle, but definitely very effective things, creating that overall immersion and experience.

So how does your client measure that this is working and that the investment in time and money that they put into this is doing a better job?

Dorian: When you see 50 people enter the room and the system is off, everyone comes in, they all surround it. They're all milling about. Everyone's seen the scale model before and then the sales director hits the on button and the lights go dark and that system goes on. And 50 people at once go “whoa!” and start whipping out their phones. It was a pretty good proof of concept for them.

Yeah, sure, but there's a CFO in that company who's going to be saying, okay, that's all very nice, I'm glad people are excited, but is this selling more real estate for me?

Dorian: Yeah, I mean that is something that will get uncovered over time. Obviously, tools like this are going to be required in the near future. That's exactly why IMERZA as a company was created. The need to explain projects more in depth and the time of just being able to sell off a plan is gone. People expect to be able to experience the future and this project is on a whole nother level.

Now six months ago, pre-pandemic, people would have looked at this and said, “okay, this is the future, this is how commercial real estate is going to be sold”, but then pandemic hit and huge swathes of the population started working from home and companies started announcing we're just going to let people work from home forever now and commercial property groups started thinking, “Oh dear god, our leasing rates are going to drop to the floor.” So how does this fit into the “new normal”?

Dorian: Yeah, there's a lot of that going on and it's been pretty interesting on the real estate market to see how the pandemic has affected it. Interestingly, the housing markets actually picked up traction, at least in Florida. With the commercial leasing side really, it's not so much that anything has slowed down, they're just rethinking how you design your elevators and how you design the communal areas. 

We have not seen from our side any bit of slowdown really even on the investment side. Since COVID hit, we've landed six new projects and surprisingly, we totally expected it to slow down but if anything it's picked up. It was absolutely unfortunate for the SPP guys that the month after this amazing marketing center opened, COVID hit and they had to shut it down but they are open again and they're starting to give presentations again. Fortunately, because a lot of these tools were written in software, they could, during that couple months period where they were down, they could give remote presentations to people that couldn't be there in the marketing center. They could still see the content. They just couldn't see it in person.

Go ahead, Caitlin.

Caitlin: I was just gonna say yeah, if nothing else, this pandemic has just given so many people all the time they needed to be more creative and more expressive and creating more immersive experiences that will really sell the idea so I feel like, just like IMERZA, DCBolt really hasn't slowed down and now we're seeing even more interest because people have more time to really put more thought into solutions like these. So just piggybacking off of what Dorian said, I think, yeah, if nothing else, the time has been really helpful for a lot of companies to think up more creative solutions.

Devin: To be completely honest. Having the little break in time actually gave us the time we needed to get a breather. We were pedal to the metal to get the Tampa project done on the timeline we had and so we feel so blessed that we actually had it done and launched before the timeline.

Dorian: Which was a ridiculous timeline by the way. (Laughter)

Devin: I forget the total number of 3D printers but at one point, we had over two hundred 3D printers going at the same time for different locations across the country.

Caitlin: But it was worth it.

Devin: Yeah, it's been a nice breath of fresh air for us. We certainly have many things coming out of this and it doesn't feel like it slowed down, but I'm scared to think of how fast we'd be going right now without the COVID pumping up the brakes. 

I'm just looking for the silver lining but I feel like everything's gonna pick back up. I don't think that this is going to be a permanent new world that we're living in and people are always going to want to continue to develop real estate and come up with new marketing centers and new ways of conveying new ideas. 

Just by that short pre-COVID one month that we had, we saw so many people get excited in ways that they haven't been excited before about real estate and visualizing data even. A lot of times these are boring conversations that people have in conference rooms looking at spreadsheets, and now they're standing around them actually getting excited about a boring topic like restaurant revenues and things like that, that normally people don't care to even discuss but now they can visualize it. They can say, “Oh, that's where my friend lives down that street. There's a great restaurant. There’s a new footpath there” and it's kind of literally stepping outside of the box gaining a new perspective on, in this case, the entire city, and all the people who are city planning, making big decisions, it gives them the opportunity to look at it from a different perspective, literally walk all the way around it if they want to, and discuss it with everybody in the same room. And I don't think that the value in that is ever gonna go away.

Dorian: I think another and it's not related to COVID but more so than the Tampa project, we pushed a lot of technological limits. And there was an enormous amount of innovation that happened on this project both from just the the projection mapping point of view and pushing all of this real time content at the pixel density that we were doing that to just how do you get multiple real time computers with high end GPUs in their frame locked running at 90 frames a second and all of this sort of stuff. 

So there was a heck of a lot of innovation that happened, that, that we can carry through into new projects. And what I do find interesting and some of the conversations that we're having with companies is, you know, just these types of experiences are ones that can be enjoyed by people that are standing 5-6 feet apart and shared, immersive experiences. So I do think we'll actually see a bit more of this type of content, whether it's projected onto a table or outward onto the walls or something like that. These types of experiences, I think, we're gonna see more of them.

Alright guys, thank you very much for your time. I'm sorry to cut you off there but we try to keep it to 30-35 minutes and I'm sure we could have talked for three hours.

Rich Ventura, Sony

If you have been around the digital signage industry for even a little while, you'd know Rich Ventura - the very active board member and then chair of the Digital Signage Federation, and pretty much the front man for NEC Display.

But now, after about 20 years with NEC, he's now at Sony - running its B2B group, which includes digital signage products.

I caught up with Rich last week to talk about the job change, and where Sony sits in the signage and AV ecosystems. We get into Sony's smart displays, where Sony is at with software, and the past, present and future of its gorgeous but big-dollar micro LED displays.

He even drops a hint that maybe we'll see more LED from Sony.

Have a listen ... 

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TRANSCRIPT

So, Rich, good to chat with you. You have moved on. People know you from many, many years at NEC and now you are at Sony. What prompted the move?

Rich: You know, some people say it was kind of a midlife crisis and I kind of laugh at that. As I've told everybody in the 20 years at NEC, and I love NEC, and I always will and I tell everybody at NEC family, it was an opportunity that just made a lot of sense form my career. It had to be a really, really amazing opportunity for me to move and you know, I looked at the direction Sony wants to go, I looked at the leadership within Sony, I looked at the technology, I looked at all those different things. And it was that really great opportunity. 

And I think it was also that opportunity to give me the ability of driving change even further and adding to my skill set, but you know, going looking at the tech and the direction that Sony wants to go, it was just hard to say no. It was a hard decision to say yes. But it was also a hard decision to say no.

So what is the gig?

Rich: You know, it's basically running and leading our B2B organization. And I hate to say running and leading because it's really, to me, it's more supporting and growing and partnering within the B2B organization with all the people that we have there, to really grow our business. It's for North America. 

So you look within the B2B organization, it's working with our BRAVIA professional displays. We do also have access to some of our consumer products as well, working with our CLED product, which is really just an amazing technology. It's working with our projector group, projector products, an area I've never really worked with before, our PTZ cameras space, our boom mikes. We have Edge analytics, but it's not the type of Edge analytics people are used to hearing me talk about. It's really around distance learning and the classroom. And looking at any of those types of solutions that fit within our pro AV space.

Is broadcast on your portfolio as well?

Rich: No, it's not. That's gonna be a different group in there. But we have kind of that touch and that's what that PTZ camera base is because there's some products that we have that can play in both the AV space but also in the broadcast space.

Right. So, you know, this is a digital signage podcast, so I will tend to talk about that. I'm curious about where Sony is in the context of signage, because Sony has had a product out there in different ways for at least 15 years, and they've kind of been in and out of signage. 

You know, they've had booths at the trade shows, and then they kind of disappeared. And they seem to have software, but maybe they don't. They were the first guys, as far as I know, to do system-on-chip displays. But, you know, Samsung made a lot more noise about it than them and on and on. So, where are they at?

Rich: It's great. I mean, part of the reason or part of my decision criteria to come over here was I did look at the SOC play and what we're doing. And if you look at it, you know, our displays have an SOC chip on it, we're running Android. It's not a Sony operating system, It's an Android operating system. And there was a lot of attractiveness to that and I see this great opportunity within digital signage. I mean you look at how the industry has gone, you've got organizations that have their own operating system, and they're running this closed environment, so to speak, right? 

And then you have organizations that are not running operations. They're just running this massively open environment where you can use these different types of computers and open an operating system. And in Sony, we kind of can go both directions. We have this Android operating system, which is fairly open. But it's designed for our displays. And one of the things I want to look at is how can we capitalize on that and you'd be amazed, or you may not be amazed, but the first week of me joining Sony, so many CMS companies called me saying, “we want to work with Sony.” 

And I said great, let me understand where we're at. To me, I look at digital signage as still a very young industry. I always refer to the industry we're in today as really that fourth industrial revolution. We're focusing on IoT, in an everything's connected device world and digital signage is a massive part of it. Nobody has truly capitalized on that. And so when I came into Sony and had my conversations with leadership and everyone, they said, well, we don't focus that much on digital signage, because there's everybody's doing business in there, and I said actually, they're not. They're not doing it the right way. And I think even with what's happening with COVID, digital signage has taken on this whole different life and this whole opportunity. 

And to me, this is very opportunistic for Sony, and what we can do and I'm having a lot of late night conversations with our team in Japan. I'm talking a lot with our team here. I'm talking to a lot of different software companies and looking at what has been our strategy, so it's here and where do we want to grow? And where do we our strategy being and that's part of my first 30-45 days, laying out what is our strategy. Digital signage has got a massive opportunity for us. There's a lot of upside to it. I think we need to have, I don't want to say open our eyes a little bit differently, but I think we need to look at it a little differently than what we have historically. And I think you're gonna see a lot of really exciting stuff coming from us, both in the near future and long term future around digital signage.

It's a little bit challenging though, because Sony primarily, if you set aside the CLED product, which we'll talk about, but the on the LCD flat panel side, it seems to be increasingly a commodity play and the big Korean guys like LG and Samsung seem to be backing off of it a little bit because it can't compete with China panels.

Rich: Totally and I think you've always known my opinion about value. If you look at what I have shared with the organization in my first week, I have really three core values when looking at our business. Everything we have to do needs to drive value. So if we're delivering a 55-inch LCD, we're delivering a PTZ camera, CLED, whatever it is, there has to be value driven to our customers. 

Well, the way we drive value is really twofold. One is we drive value by being easier to engage and work with, not having complex systems. And you know, some people say, that's what you said when you were at NEC and I go well, I believe in that. I mean, I believe that as an organization, to drive value, we have to be easier to work with. We have to have systems that work very well together that go all the way down to the level of our platforms, where with Android, being able to integrate into that, being able to deploy our product, being able to purchase a product, all those things have to be easier. And that drives value. 

The second aspect of it is solutions focused. And I don't mean taking a monitor mount and a cable and throwing it in a box. Solutions focus, to me, means solving pain points for our customers. We're creating an opportunity for them to impact their business. And so when we look at those three things, our focus is not to sell at the lowest price point, our focus is not to compete at a dollar for dollar. Our focus is really competing at the value, how do we drive that value to our customers? If you look at our product category, we don't have 100 SKUs. What we have though, are very focused SKUs that can work well in the corporate space, well in the education space, work well in the transportation space, the wayfinding space.

Okay, so you don't really, I mean you would take the opportunity if it came along, but the high volume commodity-ish stuff like digital menu boards, that sort of thing where you're just selling large volumes of them isn't really the play. It's going to be more around situations where you need very high quality displays.

Rich: You know me, I'm gonna go after every deal I can, right? I'm gonna be opportunistic, but I also need to maintain and make sure that we're doing it profitably. What I don't want to do is, I don't want to give up quality, I don't want to give up support. I don't want to give all those things that we're known for just so that we can sell, you know, 10,000 displays. 

It's interesting when I've asked our employees, why do people buy Sony? And the answer has been almost identical across the line. It's been around our quality, it's been around our technology, it's been around our reliability, those things that I value very heavily. And so how do we do that? Grow the business, maintain profitability, and really deliver on the value. It's a difficult task, right? And especially as we see more and more of the commoditization happening out there, and, and that's where I'm really challenging the team. And that's where I'm even challenging our partners, from our technology partners and even our channel partners. How do we do that? And where can we become opportunistic to go after the right business and deliver the right solutions and value to our partners?

And right now, is that partners as you describe them, is that a reseller channel partner ecosystem that you primarily sell through?

Rich: Yeah, we are a channel organization. We have very strong relationships with our distribution partners. Our regional integrators are national integrators. We have really strong relationships with them. And I want to find ways to expand that relationship with them and how can we help them grow their business and really take on more of that solution. Not meaning any meaning Sony taking on that solution, but how do we help them take on that ability of growing their capabilities and growing their value add. At the same time though, I'm going to be very opportunistic and see what are the ways that we can help them with differentiation from Sony as well.

Sure. So in the ecosystem, where do you think right now or historically, these channel partners have been kind of jammed up to like, where do they need the help?

Rich: It'd be easy for me to say well, they need XYZ, but I think they're all different. Every one of these channel partners, really out of necessity and opportunity have really differentiated themselves. Some have the most amazing content creation organizations. Some of them have amazing installation capabilities and service. That's really where integrators have always cut their teeth, it's been around integration services. Some of them have just amazing levels of partnerships. So it's really looking at every level with them, where can we help them? 

And I'll use a really easy example, there's a partner that I had a call with in my first week as one of our channel partners, and they cut their teeth and broadcast an audio, that's where they've always focused their attention. And digital signage is a new realm for them. And so as we were talking through and I asked him, you know, who do you partner with, who have you talked to and stuff like that? We started talking about organizations that are out there, from a software perspective. And the knowledge base that we have is very valuable to them. And so the fact that we can help steer them and look at who are the right types of companies to work with, or as you verticalized, who are the right players in different vertical markets, that becomes very valuable. 

So now how do I use that to our advantage? And that's the million dollar question. And I think as I work with the sales organization and our marketing organization, looking at who we have worked with, and where we've seen those values and create, to me really a tear of manufacturer partners, like you know, it's our friends, it's our family, and it's our blood. Friends are those that we know each other, we work well together, right? Family is where we start getting that stickiness where we have some integrations together or we have ease, you know, I go back to the ease of use and the value. Blood is really where solutions come in and where our products are integrated with one another. 

And that's new for Sony and I think as we grow the business, it’s not going to be today, it's not gonna be tomorrow, it's going to happen over a period of time. That's where we start driving and helping that value with that integration channel.

What do you think of the whole work-from-home thing and the realization amongst a lot of companies that, “Hey, maybe we don't need this big office tower or five floors and an office tower. We can have one floor and everybody else just works from home”. What that's going to mean for things like workplace communications and this idea that this was one of the next big frontiers for signage in particular that you can sell them all this stuff, because of the need to communicate in white collar environments?

Rich: So the selfish, opportunistic salesperson in me hates it, because it reduces my opportunity to sell. I love having a million tons of the top offices out there because I can sell a lot of products. The realist in me sees this as an opportunity to differentiate and drive value, whether it's, you know, I go back to the Android player and the fact that we have simple solution for signage, and being able to get that to a company so that they can do simple, whether it's information to their employees about COVID, and information about status and information about things going on in their business. 

I think it's also going to be opportunistic and challenging for us as manufacturers to look at. What are other ways that we communicate, right? Is it putting higher brightness displays in windows so that people can be communicated to? Is there going to be this growth within the out of home community? And are they going to have a different type of need with direct view LEDs? It's all those things. One of the things I also see is, it's a challenging opportunity from a technology perspective. 

I go back to this being that industrial revolution around IoT. How do we deliver our tech that doesn't require somebody to physically touch the monitor? How do we derive solutions that allow our customers to remotely monitor, manage and deploy their technology? Where they do have offices, and maybe they don't have an employee in every single location? It's all those things, I think are going to be a play for us. I've worked from home for many years. I mean, I carried a bag for NEC, right? So you look at my first 10 years at NEC, I worked from home, then I worked at an office, and now I'm back to working at home. So, I'm used to it. It's definitely creating a new dynamic for employees. The engagement has to be different. We have to engage with our employees a lot different, we have to make sure that they feel engaged. I've seen some of these digital signage software companies like Signagelive, for example, building out platforms that allow them to engage at the employee level to their laptops. I think when we're looking at what's going on today, I think it's gonna really drive creativity and innovation. And it's gonna be really interesting, it’s gonna be fun to see how companies do innovate and drive engagement now.

So when I go to trade shows, when those things still happened, I would walk through, let's say the last one was ISC, I walked through the big Sony booth and I would see a lot of information about a product, I think, it was called TEOS, which seemed to be primarily office based, digital room signs, that sort of thing, but I got a sense that there was a digital signage component to it, but you also have some sort of a signage-CMS product that maybe comes out of India or I'm not quite sure where from really, what are those things?

Rich: I'm still learning. (Laughter)

TEOS is really an interesting platform. I'm learning a lot about it. I got to spend some time last week with our team in Europe to understand it. To me, TEOS is like this office management, automation, communication platform. And it's a platform, it's not a piece of software. And I know that it’s critical to understand that it's a platform, and it's allowing us to look at, you know, room management and schedule management and there's a digital signage element to it, but it's not like if I were to rank like the top 10 features to it and functionalities, it's not in that top five, because there's a lot of other things behind it. 

It's a module. 

Rich: It is. It's not a standalone “I'm going to deploy this for my digital signage and that's all I'm gonna do”, that's not what it's for. And so I'm really learning a lot about it. There's some really cool capabilities with it. But it's not something I would go and deploy in a retailer, for example. This is more for an office workspace environment. And you know, I'm definitely learning a lot about it. I think there's some really cool capabilities in it. And you know, knowing my background when I'm working with software teams, I of course, start asking a million questions and blow their minds a little bit, but I think there's some really cool things about it. The digital signage element you're talking about is something else that I haven't had a chance to go learn and spend my time on yet, but from what I see it, it's very simplistic. It's something that you can do within our environment. 

What I will say is, there's a necessity for it. As we all talk about, you know, that early SMB, that single screen environment that you don't make your money on. But do I think it's the silver bullet? I think you know me well enough to know that I've never considered any digital signage software package to be a silver bullet, you know, one package can’t do  everything for everyone. So, I'm gonna reserve judgment till I've gotten to really see it and play with it, right? But it's exciting to see that people are thinking about ways that we can deliver value. Everything goes back to my conversation around value.

Yeah, whenever you have your own CMS, it becomes this delicate little dance of what is it for, does it compete with your software partners and all that sort of thing. I don't think any of the software partners who started calling you would be too worried about a totally entry level onesie-twosie kind of thing. 

But I've chatted quite a bit with Samsung and Magicinfo through the years and they're now at a point where they have a full-time Product Manager and they're taking it very seriously, but you know, that starts to get really foreign in terms of the partner ecosystem that they have on the software side.

Rich: Yeah, I look at it as an opportunity. Hire as many product managers as you can, please. I look at it as an opportunity where we can partner with companies. I think you've known me long enough, and those in the industry have known me long enough, I take partnerships very seriously. And they're a path to growth. And if I can have thousands of people out there pushing and talking about the Sony brand, that's very valuable to me. 

I've had a lot of people go to me and say, “You were at NEC all those years and you guys are one of the top dogs, why go to Sony?” And I say because Sony's a top dog too, you just don't realize it yet. And I think we've been quiet. I think everybody knows me well enough to know I'm not shy. I bleed my brand. I bleed my company. I told everybody on the team on day one, I've got your back. And my job here is to help us grow and really put us in that position that we're going to be the top dog and I look at those opportunities with the products we have today, the partnerships and you know, the one product we haven't talked about yet is CLED, I mean, I'm blown away by what that product can do. It is an absolutely beautiful technology. I know you and I have talked about it. When we first saw it, you first saw it, we talked about it in interviews, and you've asked me what's my opinion of the CLED product, I said it's pretty amazing looking. I don't know anything about it yet, but it's pretty cool looking.

The one thing I would ask about CLED and if people listening don't know what it is, it's Sony's micro LED product which has been around about four or five years. Now yes, it looks amazing. I've stood really close to it and tried to figure out what was going on. And over the years I've learned more about what micro LED is. The one thing that I wondered about is that it seems to be the same product that it was three, four years ago when it first came out and in LED, everything's evolving so quickly. I wonder where is it now? Is it on Gen 3, and I just don't understand that.

Rich: Well, why fix anything if you made perfection day one? (Laughter)

I'm just kidding. I think we are evolving, right? I think where CLED is today and where we want to take it, you're going to see we will evolve it, right? One of the things I really dive deeply into and it's been an interesting experience, I think, for my business team, is really understanding all of our products whether it’s CLED, it’s BRAVIA to PTZ, you can have a list of it and having these calls with the product management team here, but also our team in Japan, and that's challenging. I’m like okay, what are we going to do? How do we grow this business? How are we positioning ourselves against the competition in the industry? 

You know, going back to my three things earlier about value, simplicity and solutions, what are we doing? And I think you're going to see a lot of really cool stuff. I can't go into depth about it at all, but I can tell you, there's a lot of cool stuff that we're working on and looking at. That being said, we've got some really, really amazing projects that are deploying the CLED product and the clarity of the product, the uniformity of the product, the technology behind it, is exactly what they need for those applications. And It's not a utilitarian product at all.

No. I mean, I've seen it in the wild Now a couple of times. And just like in the trade shows being really impressed the one thing that worried me a little bit was the glossy finish that it has on it, seems to pick up reflection.

Rich:  No, it does. And that's, like I said the applications are very explicit for how it's being used. You know, I've seen some I've seen pictures of some of the deployments that we've done. And I go, “Aha, that makes sense to me.” That makes sense on where it goes and why it goes in this application. It's really a technology you need to really dive in to understand. It's not like a traditional LED at all. And I'm still learning it. I mean, I've had nine meetings just specifically around CLED, and I still have a million questions everytime I get on the phone. So I'm excited about what it can do and how we can position it better in the market or how we currently position it, but how we continue to position it in the market.

Yeah, I think it'll be important for people to understand the price points and how the technology is evolving. Because when that thing first came out, making a micro led of that scale would have been enormously expensive, just because the manufacturing technology wasn't there. But, you know, micro LED is, I want to say it's becoming commonplace, but it's pretty widely adopted now. So, I would assume that you can do a hell of a lot more and you'll make it more relatable price wise to more potential buyers. Yeah.

Rich: Yeah and that happens, you know, we always talk about technology at that tech curve, right? So you're the early adopters all the way through to the late adopters, and technology follows that curve, right? So even if you’re the early adopters, you don't have a lot of volume, you don't have the technology to drive things. Because it's new. It's a new idea. And it takes a while to happen. But I think that's where I challenge our team. When I tell them I say our team, I am talking about everybody: our sales organization, our marketing organization, our development team, is how do we drive forward where that product, that platform is the right product, right platform for the marketplace and where it needs to go, but also fits the right applications and use cases. So like I said, I think you'll see a lot of opportunity coming out of us with the CLED product.

It's interesting that even today, you still have any number of people referring to any big outdoor LED board as a Jumbotron, which was a Sony product that came and went. But really the only Sony direct-view LED product I know of is the CLED. Are there any plans to expand? Or is that just such a crowded market and you'll stay with this premium product, and that'll be it?

Rich: All I can say is keep your eyes and ears open.

Yeah. Well that makes sense. I mean, you know, wherever it's going, it's hard not to have a range of products to suit different needs particularly in the business market. 

One other thing I'm curious about is, is it an advantage to you or does it feel more comfortable in the fact that you spent 20 years working for a Japanese company already, so you understand the business culture? Because I would imagine somebody who's spent all their time working just, with North American manufacturers or whatever going and starting to work with a Japanese business culture might be quite a shift for them.

Rich: So, it's an advantage and a disadvantage. It's an advantage because I've gotten to really learn so much, especially as I say, in the last three or four years of my career in NEC. I really spent a lot of time with our Japanese tema and I got to learn how they work and how we as an organization can work better with them and communicate better. 

I think I always have to remind everybody that English is not their first language, right? And so as we share information with our team in Japan, they may be speaking to us in English, but they're also computing this in their heads in Japanese to make sure they understand. So it's very critical that we communicate and we're very open and transparent with one another. That was the first thing. 

The second thing is that I also can understand where their needs are, and you know, they're not asking questions to be difficult, they're not doing things that way. They truly want to understand, they truly want to be there with us and support us and so I've got that, and that's been an awesome experience that I've had coming into this. 

Where it's not an advantage is I've got 20 years experience working with NEC and how they operate. Now I have a new organization. So I have a new vocabulary, I have a new chain of command, I have all those new things to learn, which is actually exciting. As I have told a lot of people, everybody's been going, “How's it going so far? Your week three!” and I go, yeah, just as excited as I was in week one. And they laugh go, well it’s only been two weeks, and I go, yeah, but you don't understand, I'm excited and I think even my people are seeing that as I talk with them and even with the Japanese, it's exciting. It's such an exciting opportunity and I hope that I can transfer that excitement within the organization. So I see a lot of value in my history of working with the Japanese and going to work with Japanese organizations because I do have a history and I do have an understanding of how we work best with one another.

Well, this has been great. It's great in a couple standpoints first, just catching up. But second, I've struggled to find the right person on the business side to talk to at Sony for many, many years. And now I have someone! 

Rich: (Laughter) Well, it's funny, Dave. I was talking with Allison in our marketing, social media Group, and I was actually talking with some of our product managers and business managers yesterday. And one of the things that I told him is that we need to be more present. We need to be more out there in the industry, whether it's just social media, whether it's speaking, training, it's education. And those who know me well know that is something I really value heavily, right? And if not me, I don't need to be the person doing it. And I really want to empower our organization to be more present in the industry. Because I look at it from a couple ways, one is it builds value. The second is it builds those bridges between our organizations, but also it shows just how much we can do and all that drives sales and all that drives relationships and everything else. 

So, I'm excited because it kind of feels they have a little bit of a blank canvas to work with. But you know, if we sit down a year from now, and we talk about all the things that we did in this first year and, you know, let's do that, let's talk in a year from now, let's talk about how much Sony's changed. And I think the statement you just made, I hope I never hear that again, because I think you guys will see us more present in the industry. You'll see us more present in the technology. You're gonna see us out there more. And I'm really excited about seeing that happen.

All right, Rich, thanks for your time.

Rich: As always, thank you for inviting me and I look forward to continuing to have these conversations with everybody.

Probably virtually. (Laughter)

Rich: I do look forward to the day that I can actually travel and see some of our customers and partners and face to face again.

Yeah, me too.

Michael Schneider, Gensler (from InfoComm Connected 2020)

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED - DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

I was kinda sorta off last week and did not record a new interview, but I have this audio track from a recent online event that's well worth sharing.

The pandemic shifted InfoComm 2020 from Las Vegas to online last month, and one of many educational sessions held at InfoComm Connected was about experiential design.

I was the host, and my guest was Michael Schneider of the giant global design firm Gensler. I've known Michael for a few years, first at ESI Design and now at the New York City offices of Gensler, where he runs the Media Architecture team.

The session was called Designing Contact-Free Building Experiences, and was a chat about how the global health care crisis is forcing a re-think of using and navigating public and commercial building spaces.

Where much of the experience in big buildings lately has been about Wow Factor, health safety and utility are now in the mix.

The session was a video call, with a chat recorded ahead of time and then live Q&A. About 20 minutes in, you will hear the tech jump in with a few questions.

I'll have a fresh podcast, with transcription, next week.

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Frank Olea, Olea Kiosks

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED - DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

I love kiosks when they serve a real purpose - making it faster, better and easier to do something.

Olea Kiosks does just that - making high-utility but also good looking kiosks that exist to make something easier - like speeding you through an airport or checking in at a hotel or health care facility.

The company started decades ago as a moonlighting woodwork shop, through Frank Olea's grandfather. It grew into a thriving business doing a ton of work on trade show exhibits. Over time, those exhibits added more and more technology, and gave Olea a lot of direct experience with electronics and software.

Now the company is squarely in the kiosk business - with standard lines and a fair amount of custom work.

Olea grew up in the family business and eventually took over as CEO. We spoke recently about what his company is doing, the challenges presented by a pandemic, and how even when touching things can seem scary, a kiosk makes more sense than one to one contact with people you don't know are healthy or contagious.

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Jeff Rushton, Media Resources

Some LED display manufacturers have made a mark in the digital signage and digital out of home industries by making a lot of noise and having splashy booths at trade shows.

Media Resources has taken a very different approach - plugging along pretty quietly and building up a solid book of business in the US and Canada that's based on its technology and end-to-end experience.

The company has an unlikely home base in leafy, very upscale Oakville, Ontario, which is in the immediate orbit of Toronto. It started many years ago as a pure sign company, and has used decades of experience in all the engineering, paperwork and politicking of putting up billboards as a distinct advantage.

LED is now 60 per cent of what Media Resources does, and that's growing.

I spoke with CEO Jeff Rushton. We get into the state of the business and why he's investing heavily in an automated manufacturing facility in Canada, doing work that's normally offshored to Taiwan or China. Lots of companies do design and final assembly over here, but get components built in Asia. Rushton's will be doing the whole nine yards in Oakville. 

We also talk about SITELINE, which is described as Light Trespass Mitigation technology. What it does is hugely reduce light pollution from roadside billboards - so nearby homes aren't flooded in light and media companies get their new billboards approved by local authorities. 

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Panel: AVIXA Digital Signage Power Hour On Access Controls In Pandemic Times

The trade association AVIXA is running a series of digital signage "Power Hours" that are designed much more as roundtable discussions than webinars.

I've been moderating them, and while they are available for playback on demand via AVIXA's YouTube channel, it's a conversation that works well as just audio.

This session was on the new demands out there for technology-driven access controls, and messaging for retailers and other venue operators who are slowly re-opening to a new normal.

I stripped out the presentation the guys from Invidis did at the front end of the hour, since they do refer to visuals. This is the conversation, which featured:

• Beth Warren from CRI
• Jay Leedy from Diversified
• Ben Reynolds from Stratacache
• Chuck Lewis from Palmer Digital Group
• Florian Rotberg and Stefan Schieker from invidis.

 

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Paul Harris, Aurora Multimedia

The COVID-19 pandemic has produced a wave of new or re-marketed products intended to address one of the many new problems businesses face in re-opening and bring people through their doors each day.

My email inbox is filled each morning with pitches from Chinese manufacturers selling screens that also have sanitizer dispensers, and smartphone-sized gadgets, with cameras, that do quick body temperature scans that are intended to flag people who may be running fevers, and therefore may be carriers of the coronavirus.

A lot of these products look, and are, the same, and it would be impossible to keep up with all the options and sellers. But I was intrigued by a New Jersey AV tech company, Aurora Multimedia, that came out recently with a solution that seems a bit more substantial. It was designed from the start to integrate and work with other building systems, as well as offer alternative uses beyond this pandemic.

Aurora has versions of a temperature check screen that are as large as 21.5-inches, and they have the company's versatile control system in behind it.

I spoke with Paul Harris, Aurora's CEO, about the thinking behind the product, and how it is turning out to be something of a saviour for some AV reseller partners who were struggling to stay relevant with their pre-pandemic products and services.

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