Sixteen:Nine - All Digital Signage, Some Snark

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.

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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.

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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Advocates For Connected Experiences: Industry Panel - Re-opening For Business

This is a special version of the 16:9 podcast - the audio from a recent online call put on by the new Advocates For Connected Experiences, focused on the challenges of getting people back to work, and what that means for connected experiences and technology.

The chat, done on a Zoom video call, features senior folks from several organizations, talking about what's changed, what's going on now, and how technologies are being applied. I was the moderator.

On the call, you'll hear from:
- Kim Sarubbi, ACE
- Joe' Lloyd, AVIXA
- Trent Oliver, Themed Entertainment Association
- Debbie Hauss, Retail Touchpoints
- Cybelle Jones, SEGD
- Bryan Meszaros, SEGD
- Kym Frank, Geopath
- David Drain, ICX Association
- Beth Warren from CRI

I didn't have time to buff this up with the audio leveled, etc, etc, so you may have to monkey with your volume controls. But it is a good chat that's well worth a listen. 

Warning - it is 60 minutes or so, but you can always listen to half and come back to it later.

 

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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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Rick Mills, Creative Realities, Inc (CRI)

Creative Realities is a solutions provider heavily focused on retail, an industry that has been pretty much shuttered in the United States and everywhere other than Sweden because of COVID-19.

These are rough times for store operators for the people who run them, the people who work in them, and the industries that support retail, like digital signage.

While CRI's CEO Rick Mills agrees it's a dark period, he also has a lot of optimism - particularly for the retailers who have the fundamentals to be around when doors are allowed open again, and for service providers who have the tools and know-how to help address what will be new norms.

Mills and I chatted last week about what CRI is doing, as well as about new pandemic-focused tools like thermal sensing screens that his company has started marketing. We spoke, as well, about his company's outlook, including thoughts of acquiring one or several of the companies who are competitors right now, but might not come out of this situation in one piece.

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Florian Rotberg, Stefan Schieger - Invidis Consulting

Florian Rotberg and Stefan Schieker of Munich's Invidis Consulting have been active in the digital signage market since 2006, mainly focused on Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

Their work spans everything from straight-up consulting for vendors and end-users to organizing and running industry conferences in Europe and globally.

That puts them in steady touch with a lot of people, and gives them a solid perspective on what's going on and what's changing.

One of the things Invidis has been doing in presentations is a regular look at the impacts and implications on vertical markets of COVID-19, and what that means for digital signage companies.

We talk about that in this new podcast, as well as dig into some suddenly red-hot marketplace requirements like sidewalk displays and access control technologies. 

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Kim Sarubbi, Advocates For Connected Experiences (ACE)

There are a lot of special interest member organizations out there, all focused on the things they do as businesses, but also on the trends and market forces that affect them.

There is a hell of a lot of crossover when it comes to things like customer experience, but historically, there's been very little crossover between these special interest organizations.

In simple terms, an issue that's important to a digital signage network operator can be important, as well, to an advertising company and to a location-based marketer. Privacy issues is a prime example of that.

A new organization called Advocates for Connected Experiences - or ACE - has bubbled up in recent weeks with the goal of getting different organizations collaborating on these kinds of common interests. It's not a member organization you'd join, but more of a working group.

I spoke with Kim Sarubbi, who stuck up her hand and said she'd pull ACE together. She gives the back-story, and tells me what ACE is doing, and where she could use help in what is, right now, totally a volunteer effort. 

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Remi Del Mar, Epson

For a bunch of years, projection seemed like one of these digital signage technologies that had seen its day.

But that's changed in the last two or three years, and if you follow the industry and go to trade shows, you're seeing more projection product and applications.

The big reason is lasers, which last way, way longer than the lamps that were used for many years in projectors.

The big projection guys like Christie, Barco and NEC have a range of suitcase-sized products that get used for big budget events, but another company more historically known for office products has made a strong and interesting expansion into digital signage and visual experiences.

Epson has a variety of projectors that can be applied to signage jobs, but the one that has got most of the attention lately is the LightScene. It looks entirely different from boxy projectors - instead looking very much like the spotlights you see hanging from track systems in shops and galleries. It changes the whole idea of projection in key markets like retail and museums.

I spoke with Remi Del Mar, the LA-based product manager who runs Epson's LightScene team.

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Sean Wargo, AVIXA

AVIXA, the trade association for the pro AV industry, has started doing a weekly impact survey with members in North America and internationally - as a way of understanding how hard the pandemic is hitting business, and the collective point of view on what is happening, and will happen.

As you might imagine, things don't look so hot. Sales are down, and revenues with them. Jobs are being furloughed or ended. And even businesses that would, in theory, be rocking - like video conferencing - are struggling with supply chain issues.

But it's not all doom and gloom, and even in rough times, good things can happen.

Sean Wargo, AVIXA's Senior Director of Market Intelligence, runs the impact surveys. He was kind enough to take some time the other day to walk through what he is hearing, and also what AVIXA is doing with and for its members.

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Chris Riegel, STRATACACHE (2020)

These are some of the oddest, craziest, scariest moments many of us have ever experienced.

If you're sick, you'll hopefully recover quickly.

But the global economy is now very much under the weather, so to speak, and it is not at all clear when it will get better. Businesses are shuttered and many won't open again, or if they do, they'll probably come back in a different way.

The digital signage and digital out of home sectors are hit just like everything else, and this virus is going to take out companies the way it is indiscriminately taking out 100s and 1,000s of people.

I wanted to spend some of  the next few episodes talking to smart industry people about what they're hearing and seeing, as well as what they're doing.

First up is Chris Riegel, who runs what is now the STRATACACHE Group of Companies. We've spoken in the past, but I wanted to speak with Chris because he's very smart, well-travelled and connected, and always has an ear to the ground.

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Mark McDermott, ScreenCloud

ScreenCloud has been around for five years now - a pure software startup that aimed to bring web technology fully into digital signage.

Now the London-based company has roughly 100 staffers in the UK, US and Thailand, and is evolving from having an SMB focus into servicing enterprise business.

I've spoken to co-founder Mark McDermott in the past for this podcast, but I wanted to catch up for a couple of reasons.

First, I wanted to know why such a relatively young platform was completely re-architected recently.

But I also wanted to dig into some thoughts from Mark I saw online about workplace communications and digital signage more generally, in a time when a pandemic has left on-premises screens unseen, and many to most workers doing their jobs at home.

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Stefan Thorarinson, Pristine Screen

At the best of times, using an interactive screen can be a slightly dodgy experience because of the presence of dirt, grime, bacterial build-up and other stuff you really don't even want to think about.

But in this new age we're living in - hopefully temporary, but who knows - touching an interactive surface that's already been used by dozens or scores of others that day could put you in a hospital bed, or coffin.

One of the counter-measures to the risk of transmission of contagions like COVID-19 is the regular cleaning of that screen, not to mention hand-washing or sanitizing after an interactive session.

Given everything that's been going on - and having walked to the self-serve checkout at my local grocery and thought, "Hmmm, how do I do this safely ... " - it's useful to get some insight from a business that's all about clean screens.

Toronto-based Stefan Thorarinson runs North American Ops and Sales for Pristine-Screen, a UK-based company that's specifically in the business of cleaning and protecting digital signage and digital out of home screens.

We chatted about how a global pandemic has raised awareness and attention for keeping screens clean, and what operators should be doing, and not doing.

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Tina Williams, Greater Toronto Airports Authority

Airports are very different places from when I started my working life, and technology has done a lot to not only change travel experiences, but also help monetize what are, often, very busy public places.

The Greater Toronto Airports Authority runs that city's Pearson Airport. It is the busiest airport in Canada, with some 50 million passengers going through the two terminals each year.

Tina Williams runs the media and partnerships programs at Pearson, which is increasingly using technology for everything from fixed, standardized ad positions to very customized, elaborate brand activations that mix mediums. In one case, an automaker's brand messaging starts with projection mapping and video walls in the parking garage and extends all the way to a micro showroom across from the airport's busiest gate.

I've known Tina for a bunch of years, extending back to when she did similar work at Canada's busiest shopping mall. We spoke last week at an airport that, at times, has felt like a second home for me.

We grabbed a room at an Air Canada lounge, which is why it's got a bit of an echo.

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Jim Wickenhiser, SiliconCore

Trying to develop and maintain an understanding of the direct view LED industry is a challenge even for industry veterans.

There's a lot of different tech, a lot of jargon, and a lot of liberal interpretations of what something really is. One company's miniLED may be the next company's microLED.

One of the most well-established manufacturers in LED displays is Silicon Valley-based SiliconCore, which is known for very high quality, fine pixel pitch displays.

Jim Wickenhiser, the company's Senior VP of Strategic Initiatives, kindly agreed to walk me through the different types of LED out there, as well as go into some detail about what makes his company's displays different. 

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