Episodes
Wednesday Dec 14, 2022
Gerhard Pichler & Zuzana Yalcin, Easescreen
Wednesday Dec 14, 2022
Wednesday Dec 14, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
The roots of Austria's Easescreen are as a AV systems integrator, but when the company looked around in the late 1990s for software to use for jobs that weren't yet being called digital signage, there weren't many options.
So Easescreen wrote its own software, and the company is now, by far, a software company first ... though it still offers hands-on solutions work in its home country Austria.
Now Easescreen is looking beyond central Europe and actively developing partnerships and business in North America.
I had a good chat with CEO Gerhard Pichler, and marketing manager Zuzana Yalcin, about the roots of Easescreen, how it differentiates itself from the many software options out there, and why they now have their sights set on this side of the Atlantic.
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TRANSCRIPT
Gerhard and Zuzana, thank you for joining me. Gerhard, can you give me a background on what Easescreen is all about and how long you've been?
Gerhard Pichler: Sure, Dave. Easescreen started in the late 90s, so actually, my first company, which still exists, is an AV integrator, so we come from quite a strong technical background, and in some of the projects, the customer requested solutions, which we now call digital signage. So we started, more or less, as the second role on the market as a manufacturer of software, as I told you, more than 20 years ago and now this year, we have rolled out more than 10,000 projects in nearly 100 countries. So it developed quite well, I would say.
Would you describe what you now do as being software-first? Or do you still operate as an integrator as well?
Gerhard Pichler: Software-first, but in our home country (Austria), we have two offices there, one in Graz, which is in the south of Austria, and the other in Vienna, the capital. So in this home market, we also do AV integration so we still keep our knowledge regarding network, transmissions, protocols, screens, and so on quite high. My team does this kind of job but definitely, the most important thing within the company is the digital signage of the Easescreen.
I assume having that capability and current knowledge of the hardware market and the installation challenges and all those things is probably quite helpful in giving you insights as to what the end users and the resellers need versus just guessing and talking to people about it?
Gerhard Pichler: That's for sure. Especially one thing is the contact with the other manufacturers. So for our businesses, we have very close contact with two manufacturers: LG, and Samsung, and on the other hand, we know how the integrators, which actually are our customers with who we do indirect business, how their mindset is, what their pains are because we experience the same. So that's quite helpful.
I'm guessing that you got into the software side of this business, back in ‘99 because there weren't a whole bunch of software options out there at that point, right?
Gerhard Pichler: Yeah, you're right. There were some dinosaurs, like Scala or Omnivex in Europe but the options for the customers weren’t many compared to now. I would say in the 2000s and on, there were quite a lot of solutions coming up and disappearing again so it maybe was not very helpful for the signage industry because many of these solutions were not really professional, so the customer had a bad experience. They didn't touch signage for long, but I would say 10-15 years ago, it started again when customers trusted in professional solutions, and now the markets as you know as well, it's merging and there are a lot of solutions out there and there's some kind of consolidation going on.
Of all those different deployments that you have, do you have some large ones?
I think I saw that recently you did some sort of a deal where you have, I think, roughly 8,000 displays for a tobacco company in stores in Germany. Is that correct?
Zuzana Yalcin: Yes. That was Japan Tobacco International. They carry brands like Camel, Winston, et cetera. I believe they're the third largest tobacco company in the world.
Yeah, and what are you doing with them? Are there screens at the point of sale?
Gerhard Pichler: Yeah, point of sale. So each point of sale has, I think, between one and three screens and behind each screen, there's an Easescreen license. So this is one of the larger projects.
I told you we have 10,000 out there and the project means networks the small network consists of 1-3 screens, and the larger ones like JTI for example, with at least 6,000 or 7,000 screens. The larger networks have more than thousands of screens in one network.
So do you have a reference case or two that when you meet a potential business partner or customer, they say, “give some ideas on the kinds of projects that you've done.”
Do you have one or two go-to's that you tend to mention?
Gerhard Pichler: We go through the channel, which means our strategy is just all the know-how we have about our solution and all the things around digital signage software, we transfer to our resellers. The resellers are 20% AV companies, 60% IT companies, and 20% agencies, I would say from the creative side.
Every one of these companies has to go through a training and certification process. For many projects, we don't really know where our license goes because they can stand on their own feet. That's one of our strategies is to be able to multiply without having hundreds of employees. Usually, the customer asks for signage. In the meantime, digital signage is some kind of expression that the customer already knows, and if the project has some specialties, like integration of databases, or something like that, which is not which cannot be configured out of the box with our solution, then we work together very closely with our resellers and with the end customers, and we help them to integrate all solutions in their not only network but the environment, but most of the projects, we are not involved in it as a manufacturer.
So you stay behind the scenes and you're not even really marketing that you did this, and let your partners shine?
Gerhard Pichler: We call our solution the Austrian Army knife. It’s like the Swiss, but the Austrian Army knife. It's a toolbox for our integrators that is very full of features, and functions that now after 23 years can be used out of the box for various vertical markets.
The most important for us is definitely the corporate market. So most projects are in this field. Companies use our software to inform the employees and the customers, on production lines, for example, real-time data showing to the teams there, digital door sign canteens. So these are the kind of projects we do. The project with the many licenses, I mentioned before, 1000-10,000 are more in retail because these are the projects with a lot of licenses, but besides corporate and retail, we identified ten verticals where our solution is widely known and used, for example, higher education, transportation, healthcare, for example, is very interesting because we are certified in Europe with some kind of protocol so we can show patient names. So they can use our software for calling the next patient on one side, but also for showing their offers that the hospital has or some advice they give, or for wayfinding, things like that. It's quiet interesting..
I often say to companies that are marketing CMS software that I encourage them to find a vertical market or a specialty of some kind that has a lot of opportunity associated with it versus being a general offer because if you're a general offer, you are mainly competing on price because the functionality is maybe different across different companies, but in general terms the same.
But it sounds like you're doing fine with being a general offer because you've got 20-plus years in the business and established resellers.
Zuzana Yalcin: Yeah, so that's where our sales channel comes in because our integrators have specialties, so they are the experts on different vertical markets. They know how to customize our software to the end customers' needs. So it's also an example of where you empower the integrator, you empower the reseller, and then they're able to do amazing things.
Is the software white labeled?
Gerhard Pichler: There are some examples, yes.
So if a business partner, a reseller wants to say this is Brand X’s software, you guys are behind the scenes entirely, but driving it?
Gerhard Pichler: Yes, we are prepared for this so we can easily white-label it for partners. Usually, this discussion comes up with large integrators. They say, okay, I want to hide the name and I want to add my own branding to the solution. But when we talk to them, it often turns to the opposite. They say, okay, it's better that we have a very close relationship with you, and we can start with all the references we bring to the table.
Still, there are some examples where Easescreen is hidden behind the different names.
We met on the floor at a Digital Signage Experience in November and you agreed to do a podcast, and one of the things that intrigued me was that you're an Austrian company, but you are in the United States looking to expand into North America and build up partnerships here. I gather that's been something that's been an ongoing effort for the last couple of years.
Gerhard Pichler: Yes, that's true. So from time to time, we do get some projects in the US. For me, the US is definitely the Mecca of digital signage. There are a lot of really professional companies there, which could be great partners for us. There are so many opportunities. The market is that huge. So for me, it's a challenge to start a business there, and I wished to do this many years before, and we decided I think two years ago to install some guy there to do market research, to find ways how we can sell it, through which channels, and so on. He is a very experienced guy out of the AV business and after we see that there are enough opportunities, there are chances for us with our solution.
The market in the US does not really have a lot of software that is comparable to ours. So then we decided, okay, we go to the next step. The next step was founding a company called Easescreen America LLC in Miami, which we did this year, I think it was in June. Because we have had success in the US for a long time, it's definitely important and necessary to have a company there, and I think 2023 should be our year. The pipeline is quite full now with projects.
So some of our guys were doing the DSE in Vegas, they were on the East coast visiting future partners or partners, which already signed contracts with us, and they brought I think five or six projects to Austria. So I think the start is quite successful up to now.
If you're an AV integrator or an IT systems integrator, whatever it may be, there are a lot of options in North America. There are a lot of companies selling software solutions and it wouldn't be that you'd get a meeting where they’d go, “oh finally, somebody's got software that can do this.” Why are they choosing to partner with you when there are other options out there? What's ticking their boxes?
Gerhard Pichler: One thing that we experienced is that we tell them and they seem to trust us. We only go through integrators. So many examples in the past, the integrators told us that manufacturer, they promised us they promised not to make shortcuts directly to the end customer, but they didn't do it. The integrators, they're waiting for, I think manufacturers who they can trust.
Other thingsinclude things like we have so many options in the setup, we can be installed on-premises, for example, which many other solutions are not able to be because they're only cloud-based. We have a cloud infra as well if the customer wants to use it, they can use a private cloud, and so there are many options for the integrators and multipliers, it seems for them very interesting, and besides that, we have technical feature wise I think so many things on board out of the box which nearly no other solution can bring to the table, and these are some of the reasons why they change because many of them when you talk to them, they would tell us about the bad experiences with other solutions. With us, it's always good if some company is experienced and tells us the pain and we can show him how our solution would do it, then you can win them very fast.
So it's interesting and very good for us if companies give us the chance to talk to them, they have already had experiences with solutions, then these companies are the best us and for them, we can be quite fast.
In terms of partners, do you have a kind of partner, like a profile that you would prefer to work with?
Gerhard Pichler: It seems the larger projects are done by IT companies. So in the US, they're large IT companies, they do the job for digital signage for companies, and so on. So the profile seems more to be IT-focused companies than AV. But we have experienced in the last months, the really interesting projects, they come up more from bigger IT companies.
So one way to the market was through reps, so they introduced us to the integrators there. So we cover now I think nearly 45 states, reps like Simco or BP Marketing, and these guys, who have a large network of AV and IT integrators behind them. For Easescreen, this is the way we can reach the integration network quite fast.
Is it a challenge on the educational side?
One of the things I've heard over the years is if you're going to have a reseller channel, you have to invest a lot of time in ensuring that the people who are talking about your product and solutions, fully understand what it is, and if they're an IT systems integrator, they're thinking about all kinds of things, including network security and bandwidth and so on.
Gerhard Pichler: Yes, of course, it's a challenge, but since we have been so long on the market, there are so many slides and training programs exactly prepared for these kinds of topics. We can talk about the language they talk. So you have to talk to IT companies differently of course than to agencies, and in the end, in the US market, we have to learn our marketing lessons because the first step to the customer more than here is by a colorful brochure and things like this, which is quite old fashioned, but it's definitely necessary.
And here, I would say, comes in Zuzana again. So what has been your experience on the marketing side, comparing the North American market to Europe, and what homework we had to do?
Zuzana Yalcin: So definitely from a marketing perspective, it’s way more abot storytelling. Of course, at some point it's about the USP, it's about the features, it's about all the amazing things you can do. But the first story is always: who are you? Where do you come from, and how do you actually serve the people all around the world?
So for me, this has been a big lesson in trying to focus on the human side of software because in the end, our partners are human, the end customer is human. The user is human, so how can I translate that story in a way that makes sense to everybody from a professional integrator all the way to an amateur user? And I say that without any negative connotation, but just so they know what digital signage is, what the screen is, and what it can do for them.
This is something I'm noticing actually in Austria as well, most people see digital signage every single day, multiple times, if not countless times, but they have no idea what it is. They cannot label it, and if you talk to them about digital signage, they think it's maybe digital signatures or something like that, so just raising awareness in general is a pretty exciting thing for me.
Yeah, I was gonna ask about the evolution of all this. Given that you've been involved in it for as long as I have that, what have you seen changing through the years? Obviously, something's never changed. There's still a limited understanding of what it is, but I suspec I find in my own life that I don't have to go on and on at length to explain what it is I do and what I'm involved in. They get it pretty quickly versus it was, a five-minute conversation back in 2005.
Zuzana Yalcin: I think software is definitely becoming more accessible to the end customer in general, and it also changes customer expectations because they expect to be empowered more. They expect to be involved more. But I think, 10-20 years ago, you could be a genius technician with amazing software and rely on people coming in. Now you definitely have to tell the story if you definitely have to go out there and share the message.
Gerhard Pichler: Yeah, but you are right, Dave.
Of course, the awareness now is different than 20 years before. In shows like ISC or Infocomm and so on, we've been part of ISE, I think 15-17 times. In the first years, you had to explain even to the people in the industry, what is digital signage and so on, and that changed completely. Now, people quickly understand what it is. I would say that changed.
The trust in signage is there. That means customers who want info screens and systems for showing content, know that if they make the right choice they can buy systems that are stable and reliable. That is different than it was 5-10 years ago. I think what didn't change is that the end customers are not aware of which kinda tasks they have when there is a digital signage solution. When we are involved in projects, we try always tell the customer, I hope it's clear to you that there will be a technical, very perfect system for you, but in the end, you have to think about who do you want to reach? What are the contents? How is the way that content coming to the screen? Who is responsible? So in many projects, this didn't change. The customer is not aware that he has to give resources, that the digital signage system is successful and lives and is active, I would say. So that slightly changes, but it's the same story as many years before I would. But we help them in creating concepts, for example.
How is the company set up? Are you privately held or do you have a private equity backer?
Gerhard Pichler: Oh, private, a hundred percent. A hundred percent of the code is made in-house and we are privately held.
What's your headcount?
Gerhard Pichler: 25.
Has that grown much through the years? Obviously, it started with one, but...
Gerhard Pichler: Yes. I would say by one or two per year, so we are growing but not that fast
There's a lot of companies that are your size like you have larger companies, particularly private equity backed ones, actively looking at as potential acquisitions, I suspect you're getting those emails and phone calls pretty regularly?
Gerhard Pichler: Yes, that's right. But we didn't decide on one until now.
You're staying on your own path.
Gerhard Pichler: Yes, up to now. Our mission is not completed yet.
So if people wanna know more about your company, where can they find you? Obviously, you're going to be at ISE in a couple of months, but online they would find you find you at…
Zuzana Yalcin: www.easescreen.us, and of course we are on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook. Simply type in an Easescreen and you will find us.
Simply put, I like it. Thank you very much for spending some time with me.
Gerhard Pichler: Thank you very much, Dave.
Zuzana Yalcin: Thank you. The pleasure is all ours.
Wednesday Dec 07, 2022
Brian Nutt, Adificial
Wednesday Dec 07, 2022
Wednesday Dec 07, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
There have been a few companies that have come along in recent years offering a platform that used templates, image library and stored data to largely automate the production of videos - but few if any of them had their heads wrapped around how that might work with and for digital signage networks.
A Louisville, KY start-up is taking a run at the concept, and the big difference with Adificial is that its CEO and co-founder started and ran a digital signage software company for many years ... so he has his head around the desire for content automation when it comes to videos that find their way to screens.
Some listeners will know Brian Nutt as the founder of Codigo, which had built up a strong and interesting business focused mainly on regional banking. That business was acquired in 2018 by Spectrio, which now also owns and publishes Sixteen:Nine, and Brian spent a few years away from the business, before thinking about and pulling together Adificial. It's a platform that uses web services and the scalability of cloud computing to enable HTML5-driven motion media files to be generated quickly and easily, by the hundreds or thousands. At scale, a motion file unique to a person or place can cost only pennies.
Nutt is a digital signage guy, but he's launching Adificial with a focus on media embedded in staff and customer emails. That makes sense, as the idea is that this platform can generate many thousands of custom videos for emails, versus the dozens or maybe hundreds that might be needed by a digital signage network that wants different messaging for, let's say, each store in a chain.
But the capabilities are there to make this relevant for digital signage. Have a listen.
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TRANSCRIPT
David: Hey, Brian. Thank you for joining me. For people who don't know you or maybe recall you from your past, can you give me your background and what you were doing with Codigo?
Brian Nutt: Sure and great to talk to you again, Dave. Codigo was a digital signage company that I founded back in around 2004, so set up kinda early on in the trajectory of digital signage. That morphed into us introducing a number of different retail media products, interactive kiosks, overhead music, on-hold messaging, all that type of, and we had a focus on financial institutions, really, like regional, local banks and credit unions. Although towards the end there, when I sold Codigo in 2018, we had installations around the world and all sorts of different industries from restaurants, universities, office complexes, and all the places that you would see a digital sign installed today, or retail media, as I said.
Did that and sold that in 2018, took a few years off and launched this new project which is pretty exciting.
David: So what is Adificial?
Brian Nutt: Yeah, so Adificial really began I guess in terms of me thinking about this back before I sold Codigo, so Codigo and I think like a lot of digital signage products, at least today, maybe not back then, but we had the pretty robust online content engine for creating content that could be either sent down to a kiosk or digital signage or any of the devices, whether it was on-hold messaging or any of those things, you could create the content on the web, and so I had this idea that might be an exciting product as a standalone product.
We never launched it, and it's probably a good idea because folks like Canva came along, and Promo and these other products came along, and they did a pretty good job so I’m glad I didn’t do it, but after little time off, I was still thinking about the product and just how video is forcing businesses to do things differently, and this requirement today to personalize content for folks that are your customers or are interested in the product.
So the idea of an Adificial is to solve the problem that's traditionally been around video, which is, it's expensive, it's time-consuming and yet the requirement of it by consumers continues to race forward daily, and then the age today where data, people are willing to share their data with brands freely and why is video passive still? Why is it that it's audience-based where I press play and I watch it and Dave gets the same video as I do, even though we have totally different lives and we live in different spots and have different ages and all those things.
It's this idea that you can make videos personalized with data. What I know about you, I should be able to map brand assets, audio, video, and language even, and insert interactive elements, calendar invites, pdf, downloads, buttons, and anything like that into the video. So it's fully interactive and engaging in ways that just really haven't been largely available and at reasonable rates.
David: So this is a content automation platform?
Brian Nutt: Yes. I would wrap it up by saying we're not in the marketing automation space. We're not trying to compete with Mailchimp or anything like that, what we're trying to do is automate the production of the video with data and available assets and return that piece of content back to the market automation platform that would then send it out, primarily via email, although I can see this transition to social and SMS in any other way that you communicate to consumers.
David: So if I'm running a digital signage network, and I have a hundred different stores and I want a video for each of those stores, but I want it localized to each of those stores, instead of getting an agency or in-house designer to generate a hundred different videos, you would run it through this and it would use data to generate those hundred videos?
Brian Nutt: That's a decent comparison, but this product's really not built for digital signage. So imagine a little bit bigger than that. You know the value of data on your consumer today is tremendously high. So if you have a CRM that has 10,000 people that are either current customers or leads or somewhere along the customer journey.
What we do is we could produce videos for all of them and you insert video into your marketing stack, into the customer journey and send it out via email.
David: Oh, okay. Are the files not big enough to run on a large format screen?
Brian Nutt: They could, and in fact, when I initially started this, the idea was to send content to any device, but we've narrowed that down and focused on market automation platforms. But there's no reason it couldn't morph into a digital signage play. It’s just not today.
David: Right, because there's more scale in those and it's just a bigger business.
Brian Nutt: Yes.
David: So it's one of those things like Poppulo, App Space, and some of these other companies that are starting to blend platforms, where it's one stock that can send to a digital screen, that can also send to a smartphone, to a tablet, to a website, whatever. It would kind of plug into that kind of thing.
Brian Nutt: Yes, and here's the other reason that I've gotten into this, and I'm a huge believer in power digital signage, obviously. But at Codigo, our growth was really built around this incredible drive to build more stores, more locations, more branches in the banking space, and so we leveraged that and grew off that and really benefited from it. But today what's happening is, in fact, I was looking just recently, they're suggesting that in the next five years, 50,000 retail stores will close.
Since 2009, when we were going into the great recession, banks and credit unions numbered about 15,000 total, that's not branches. Today, there are about 7,000. So it's this consolidation and push not including the number of locations that close during the pandemic, what 20,000 retail stores, something like that.
So what's happening, in my opinion, is the store or branch does a couple of things. One, it's meant to educate a person in person on the product, build trust, and sell products. But if stores are closing, people aren't going to the store, how do you communicate to them personally and to me, the conversation today is done in data. If I'm willing to give a brand my data, trust them with that, even if it's unreasonable. I'm not going to the store. I never wanna meet a person that's going to tell me about a shoe or a bank loan or whatever, but that doesn't mean I don't expect you to communicate back to me with things that are specific to me, to help me learn about products, build trust, and ultimately sell me something. So that's taking it from the digital science in-store installation, that's the next progression of what we're trying to solve.
David: It's another output.
Brian Nutt: Yeah, exactly.
David: So how does this work?
Brian Nutt: I guess, where do you want me to start? It did take quite a while to figure it out honestly. You start with this gigantic idea and then try to distill it down into something actionable. So that's where we are now.
But at the finest level, it's really not that dissimilar from digital signage. It's just one level deeper in how you're delivering the content, so you know the right time, right place, right person, all those things. And a large well of content that's either procured the third party ShutterStock, et cetera, or first party to the brand and then using technology to map these pieces of content to data, and data could be something like just knowing your name and having it be, “Hello Dave”, and so if the first name equals Dave, then show the text Dave on the first screen and if language equals Spanish, say, “Hola Dave”, and that's really what it is.
It's mapping data smartly to assets, no matter whether it's something as simple as text or a background image or a video, things like that, and then you stitch those together based on where you are in the process towards, or whatever it's you're involved in. It could be something like onboarding an employee. It could be obviously selling someone, onboarding them on a product, or following up with a customer service issue, and you do it at scale. Because you can automate it.
David: So if you have the data tables, you have the image assets, and you have maybe some core templates, you could conceivably generate 10,000 videos that are all tailored to each individual?
Brian Nutt: That's exactly right.
David: Are you dependent on templates?
Brian Nutt: Again, it’s very similar to digital science in many ways. So what we're doing, just like we did at Codigo, is leveraging a high degree of design skill and allowing folks to manipulate that as they choose. Now we've done a couple of things a little smarter this way, which is we're building in functions where we call it a branded function, which I guess is kinda out there in the market in software where you just click a button and it'll map your brand assets the best it can to template that we're building, but the same thing with Codigo is that we have a pretty high-end content editor that allows you to build whatever you want.
David: Do you need to have graphic design skills?
Brian Nutt: Not a high degree of them. As I said, it’s very similar to what we did at Codigo from a user experience perspective.
David: So you wanna have somebody using this who has some core design chops and knows not to use Comic Sans for a font, or use pink and everything?
Brian Nutt: Exactly. I can barely sign my name much less, create a piece of content that's gonna be sent out to thousands of consumers and I'll never do that. But the thing about this is not the design skills. It's meant to be, the whole set it and forget it attitude, which is once we have content mapped and I have the data that's associated with different pieces of content, and I have the story, we call it a story setup, and maybe I'll give you an example:
If they use a CRM and I have David Haynes who showed interest in Red Wine and you wanna join the wine club, the Friday Wine Club at the local wine establishment. So you show interest in that, and in their CRM you meet a condition that says, “Hey, Dave just joined the wine club” and what traditionally happens is when you meet that condition, you're sending an email and the email says, “Hey Dave, thanks so much for your interest in the wine club”, and it's got a picture or something of it, there, and maybe it shows people what the wine club. Well frankly, that's boring.
So what we wanna do is take that same approach and it's all that is: a form, it's all merge fields. “Hello, first name” - it just that it happens to be Dave. “Thank you for your interest in Product ID” - wine club, or whatever that it might be. Brian might be a white wine drinker, but it all comes from the same engine, so it's effectively a similar approach. We're taking data from those systems, current systems, we're not trying to be a CRM and mapping that to assets that we have, whether they're the first party to this, in this case, the wine club or something that we've provided you from a third party library, and then turning that into video, right? Stitching each of these assets together with dynamic fields that represent, “Hey, Dave, thanks for your interest in the wine club. All the red wine drinkers are meeting down the road on Friday afternoon. Come by. Would you like to attend?” You could click yes.
David: Gotcha. So this is rules-based, it's not AI?
Brian Nutt: Today, no.
David: So there's a plan?
Brian Nutt: There's a grand plan.
David: So what are the outputs like? What's the output file?
Brian Nutt: The output file as well as a URL, and so what we're generating is a PURL, a personalized URL.
David: So it's not an mp4, it's not a video file of any kind, it's an HTML5 file?
Brian Nutt: Yes.
David: Do you work in parallel with a CRM system or how do the two platforms play together?
Brian Nutt: Yeah, now we're going to beta in February. Today, there are a number of different ways to do it. You can either upload it yourself or you can, there are a number of systems that can automate the transfer of data, like Zapier, et cetera.
And you map these just like anything else. If you have a list of people that meet conditions, like the Red Wine Club, you take that data and get it to our system. As long as we understand what the fields are, then we can choose the correct content to weave together and return it back to you as a PURL, which can then be sent out as an email.
David: How seamless will it be?
Brian Nutt: It should be very seamless. Take any system, let's take Mailchimp for example. There are custom fields and automation that allow you to insert links into an email template or a landing page. So we're routing on top of those existing systems and the features that they have and so once you have that, you can have a custom record for each person, like Dave O'Brien or whomever that updates itself, and when those conditions are met, it knows to send the email.
David: So would you use APIs or would you use middleware like you were mentioning like Zapier?
Brian Nutt: That's the first way to do it. Oddly in the financial space, it's more of a security requirement. Rather than doing that, oftentimes I'll just use SMTP, which seems old school, but there are reasons to do so, like man-in-the-middle attacks, and things like that. But there are ways to do this. Now, do we wanna integrate with as many systems as we possibly can? We'll let the market dictate that.
David: Because it's HTML5, is it responsive?
Brian Nutt: Responsive to the size of the device? Is that what you mean, like web responsive?
David: The screen resolution, and if it's going out on Facebook, it's a 4:3 square and if it's going out on a larger screen, it's a 16:9 rectangle?
Brian Nutt: Yeah, again, it's very similar to the product we had with Codigo, which is, you can do custom resolutions, you can do whatever you want, but then again, it's gotta be responsive to the area of the device, or in this case, the browser, whether that's mobile or your laptop or tablet or whatever.
David: So when you look at this from financial aspects, what's the benefits argument of doing this versus producing individual videos? It's pretty obvious, but tell me nonetheless.
Brian Nutt: As I said, producing videos is incredibly expensive, and I've termed it the content gap, which is what I call, it's the distance between what consumers require in video - and they want everything in the video - and what businesses can reasonably produce. So it's not just the cost, a lot of times people outsource this stuff, and then it's got a shelf life.
But with what we're doing we think we can reasonably produce hundreds of thousands of videos, for pennies on the dollar, and I say video because that's what people understand, but it’s actually HTML that you render, that's the other component that is good. It's favorable.
Now, will that be something that every brand wants? Do they want rendered videos? Sure, there might be folks that require rendered video, and maybe we'll do that at one point we actually did, at Codigo, we ended up using a very similar approach. Then we built a rendering engine that rendered as HTML5 to true video. But today it's HTML5 and it's just from hosting to production to the delivery of it, it drives the cost down to prices that were impossible.
David: So when you go to market in a couple of months, two or three months, what am I paying? Am I subscribing to something? Am I buying an enterprise license?
Brian Nutt: It's a SaaS model, and it's usage-based too. So it's a tiered-based model similar to the digital signage space, there definitely be some content creation elements to it where we assist clients if they need the content made, and you probably remember at Codigo we did that as well. It’s the same approach here, and it really depends. It's hard to give you a specific pricing point. But I think most customers will probably land somewhere between $500 and $1500 a month. That's where I think it would be. It could be far higher, depending on usage.
I was at a trade show recently and there's a customer of mine, who said that they sent out emails last month. Well, If you make 140,000 videos, it might be a little higher, but that's what we're trying to do, we're trying to do the same thing as the last business, which may get a very attractive price that they can leverage.
David: So that's the scale argument why it makes more sense for a cable company or a phone company or power company, something like that, that has tens of thousands of subscribers and customers versus something like a digital signage network, which as I said, might have a hundred iterations of a similar ad, and you don't get the same economies of scale from.
Brian Nutt: That's right, and in a lot of ways I feel like this is very similar to when I started Codigo. I remember telling people, I'm going to replace printed posters on the wall with flat screens, and they're like, what? And I'd say it's called digital signage. They'll say, oh, you mean like those LED, those red blinky lights that go across like that? I'm like no. That's not what I mean, and I would go around with a 42-inch screen, and those things were heavy, and so it's almost the same thing where I have to show this to everyone so they can understand this, and go oh I can use this. There are all these different permutations of a relationship with a client or an onboarding of one or whatever it is and then they kinda get it so that's where we are.
David: Yeah, that's very familiar to me. Years ago, back in the mid-2010s, I had a little spin-out product that I did with a Korean partner called Spotamate, and it was automating videos based on templates and by far my biggest challenge was education. Because people just couldn't wrap their heads around it. So how are you gonna deal with that?
Brian Nutt: I think that today, the state of the consumer today around video is totally different, and the other thing is that I think Spotimate was sort of Adobe-reliant, right?
David: Yeah, it was an Adobe plugin.
Brian Nutt: Yeah, so we're skipping all that. So from a user perspective, it makes it a little easier to get started, since it’s a lot fewer steps to take, but from an education standpoint, I think people are starting to expect this. It's like if you log in to Netflix and you see all these interesting shows that you know, that makes you think, oh, wow, boy, that's something I would watch, you understand that there's a data-driven decision behind that, and whether it's content while you're scrolling through on Instagram or across the web, all these technologies exist and I feel like most folks understand that when they see something like this, they get it, where before it might have and it still can be creepy. I'm not saying it can't be, but depending on the use, before it was perceived entirely like that.
With the pandemic and, if you go back before the pandemic, or let's go five years back, a lot of people didn't wanna take videos. They didn't wanna do a zoom call or whatever. They wanted to do it on the phone or they shut off their camera. But today, if I have a Zoom call with you and you don't turn your camera on, I think something's wrong. What's going on? So it's this drive to video and the requirement of a personalized experience that when people get this, I think they'll be like, oh yeah they'll understand.
David: So I realized, as you've said that your core market is email marketing, maybe social media, some of those things. If you have digital signage, software platforms, or solution providers who are interested because maybe they do this whole omnichannel thing and they see this as an opportunity, how would they work with you? Would it run in parallel?
Brian Nutt: That's a sort of broad question to ask. I'm not sure I don't have that nailed down yet. But I'd take all inquiries, so to speak. Because again the idea is to insert this into the marketing stack. So whether it's digital signage or traditional email marketing, or any omnichannel approach, as you said, contacting a customer, why aren't you using video? And so it does seem as I said from my perspective, the growth of digital signage, which isn't anywhere, relies on footprint and as it declines or appears to decline at least from different ways. This is one of those ways to pick that up.
David: Yeah, and I think you're gonna start seeing a lot more screens, but in places other than what people thought about, which was, in stores and so on, but there are all kinds of operational messaging that could stand to be personalized based on location, not personalized to individuals, but to the dynamics of that, area of a building or whatever.
Brian Nutt: Sure, and the same thing holds true. The level of personalization is all really based on the quality of the data that you have and if you try to make it too deep and too complicated, folks I think will shy away because, yeah, it might not be possible, remember, it's the same thing with digital signage. You can make things super, super complex, and try to do all these really neat things, but the reality is a lot of people don't have that capability.
So you can only deal with what is reasonably available to you from a data perspective, but there's no reason you have to be specific to a person. Obviously, digital signage doesn't do that but automates it specific to an area, of the work floor, or whatever that's doable.
David: You've been out of digital signage for roughly four years now. I'm curious now having kinda left the industry, what's your perspective on it now?
Brian Nutt: I think there has been a tremendous amount of consolidation, including me, right? So a lot of the players that existed before have been rolled up in some ways. So it's like the wild west that existed when I really was looking back in the wild west, but it's gotten a little more sterile, at least that's my opinion. I think that the interesting pieces of it are in the hive stack arena with retargeting and programmatic ad buying, which I was never a really big proponent of the ad model. I think we talked about it before, but there are interesting ways to serve content and that's really more, kinda what, where you're going with what your comments were before, how do you serve that content to folks in a unique and timely way, and I think there will be, and there already has been this approach to multi-device from a screen, just one big screen, but honestly, since I got out, I haven't paid a tremendous amount of attention to it.
David: What you're doing is very current in terms of the shift more and more to using data integration and automated content so that it's always relevant, so you're doing what the industry's doing.
Brian Nutt: All right, there you go.
David: So if people wanna find out more, where are they gonna find you online?
Brian Nutt: Yeah, it's www.adificial.io - we're signing up beta users, although it'll be a closed group and already have a pretty good number that we've signed up from some past relationships.
But anybody who's interested, just go on there and there's a beta sign-up little form there, and you can learn about it.
David: And you're bootstrapped?
Brian Nutt: Yeah, bootstrapped in entirety. I've got one co-founder who was actually with me at Codigo as well, and we've got a team of six developers working on this thing full-time and are pretty excited about it.
David: All right. It was great to catch up with you.
Brian Nutt: Yeah, you too, Dave.
Wednesday Nov 23, 2022
Daniel Smalley, Hologram Expert From BYU
Wednesday Nov 23, 2022
Wednesday Nov 23, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
I'm not sure why seeing all the product references lately to holograms makes me a little crazy, apart from the simple fact that none of them really meet the definition. It's not like that's the one term marketers abuse. We've seen bezel-less displays that had bezels. MicroLED displays that aren't actually microLED. And on and on.
I don't entirely know what really does meet the definition, so I thought I'd ask an expert. Daniel Smalley is an associate professor of electrical engineering at Brigham Young University in Utah, and a genuine expert in the field. He's working, his CV says, to make the 3D displays of science fiction a reality, using "waveguide-based modulators and optical tractor beam technologies."
The short summary is that we're not there yet, and in this conversation, we get into why that is - with the biggest reason being bandwidth and the immense computing power needed to genuinely make the holograms of Star Wars and Star Trek actually happen, and work.
We also get into a discussion of the various products already on the market that have co-opted the hologram term, and also talk about the real world, practical applications for holograms.
Daniel went to MIT and has his masters and a Ph.D, so he's approximately a billion times smarter than me. This talk gets technical in spots, but I tried valiantly to keep up!
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TRANSCRIPT
Daniel, thank you for joining me. Can you explain your role at BYU and your interest in holograms?
Daniel Smalley: Certainly, I'm an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering here at Brigham University. My research primarily has to do with advanced 3D displays, including holographic displays and volumetric displays.
Okay, and when you say you're doing research, what does that mean?
Daniel Smalley: So it is our group's manifest destiny, as we see it, to recreate the displays of science fiction, specifically the Princess Leia projector from Star Wars and the Holodeck from Star Trek, and so research in my mind is the steps we take to get from where we are to those places
And where are we in those steps?
Daniel Smalley: On the holography end, as we'll talk about, I'm sure, the primary challenge now is that we can make little teeny tiny holographic video displays, but the bandwidth issues, the sheer computational power required to make big displays remain an obstacle. Some estimates have suggested that we will colonize Mars before we have the capacity to easily feed a big holographic display with all the pixels it's hungry for and on the other side, on the Princess Leia projector side, we're in a similar space, but with more hope. That is to say that we can make little teeny tiny Princess Leia projections, but I think we're not far away from getting moderate and maybe even large-size volumetric images in the near future.
So let's do a level set here. How do you define holograms and holographic visuals?
Daniel Smalley: Yeah, that's an excellent question. So there have been meetings of the minds where we've discussed and debated what these things mean, and I think the best way to think about the different display families is that there are three of them. So a trifecta of holographic display.
The first is a “ray” family of displays, the second is a “wave” family of displays, and the third is a “point” family of displays. Now the ray displays are the displays we're already familiar with. These are lenticular displays, stuff that you might see at Best Buy or in a magazine. These crisscross rays of light and space form an image point that we perceive, what we would call a real image point. A holographic display is a step up from that. Instead of taking rays and intersecting them in the air, what it will do is it'll take its whole surface, so you'll be gazing at a screen and this whole surface is focusing light, it's curving away in front of a light, in order to focus at a point, and your eye perceives that focal. As a display point. Now the magic of holography is you can take that surface that's shaping light and you can superimpose many such surfaces, one on top of the other, and focus on multiple points and in this way, build up an image in the air, and these images can be optically indistinguishable from real objects.
So if you've seen a really good hologram in a museum, you may be tempted to pick it up and look behind the glass to see if there is a real object behind it. Even a seasoned holographer will occasionally mistake a hologram for a real object. Now it comes with the price of the fact that there is a glass, that you have to be looking through a screen of some type. But the reason for this is that wave shaping is being performed by a pattern of lines, a diffraction pattern, where there are three ways of bending: light, reflection, refraction, and diffraction.
And in a hologram, diffraction is the active ingredient in creating this wave shape. So you have to be staring into those lines. You gotta be staring into that pattern if you hope to see something, Now that said, imagery can be very deep. Looking into that hologram, that window, you can see imagery that comes out and tickles your nose or goes way back to infinity, back to the horizon. But you've always gotta be watching it like you watch a television set, even if what you'd prefer to do is watch it like a water fountain, right? Where the aperture is flat and then there's content shooting up out. Then you can walk all around it and see it from every direction. Now, that type of display exists, but it's not a hologram. It's called a point display or a volumetric display, and unlike ray displays and wave displays that require screens, a point display can be screenless.
In fact, maybe the best way to think about it is you take its screen and you grind it up into little pieces and you scatter them into the air, and then each time you're looking at one of those little pieces, you're looking at an image point as well. And that's the technical definition of a point display is that every time you're looking at an image point, you're also looking at a group of atoms, a physical scatterer, which is to say, unlike the ray case, where you're looking at an intersection of photons or the hologram case where you're looking at the focusing of the wavefront, here we're looking at physical atoms scattering light. So in some ways, a volumetric display is a lot like a 3D printer that just destroys the object it's creating every 30th of a second and this endows it with some remarkable properties. So you can make images that you can see from every angle. It can be relatively low bandwidth images if they're sparse and they have what's called perfect accommodation, which means you can focus on them. Your eye believes even if you close one eye, you can focus really tightly on them and have really strong 3D cues. Now, the downside is that with these types of displays, it's hard to achieve the same level of realism that you get with a holographic display, and the reason for this, is you can imagine if you had a jar of fireflies and you're trying to make images out of these fireflies, no matter what, you'd always have this problem where you can the fireflies in the back of your image at the same time, you can see the fireflies at the front of your image and in the result is that everything looks like a ghost or a hole, right? So this problem of self-occlusion is a big one, and it's one it's part of the research we do is try to come overcome these issues so that it can be a complete display of the solution.
In terms of array display, you were describing lenticular. So in the context of this stuff that people listening to this might relate to. Going back a number of years, there were what were called glasses-free 3D displays that were basically LCD displays with a lenticular layer over top of it and if you looked at it from different angles, you would see something was popping up from the screen. Is that basically what a ray display would be?
Daniel Smalley: Absolutely, that's exactly right.
The wave display when you were describing that, I was immediately thinking of that little company in Brooklyn called Looking Glass and the little loose-eyed blocks that they have.
Daniel Smalley: So Looking Glass and I don't want to misrepresent them or anything but Looking Glass, I think I will admit they are a ray display technology.
If you look at a Looking Glass display and you move left and right, you will see the image change perspective. But if you move up and down, you won't. And that's an indication to the viewer that you're looking through a cylindrical lens as opposed to an array of circular or spherical lenses. Now the difference between them is that if it's a lens-lit array as opposed to a lenticular array, then you can move up and down and you'll also see 3D in that direction. But you can dramatically reduce the information you need by just making it horizontal, parallax only. They're just providing information for the horizontal and your eyes for the most part don't care. They're horizontally separated. You don't do a lot of bobbing up and down, so you get the most bang for your buck with just horizontal parallax.
Yeah I've seen the Looking Glass stuff, I think I might have seen it at a trade show but I was underwhelmed. It's like, I'll shift to my right and I'll shift to my left, and it does seem like the image is subtly different, but it's one of these things where I'm going that's nice, but so what?
Daniel Smalley: Yeah, that's true. There is also some fatalism about three 3D displays that when you get really good, you've just now duplicating reality, which is something we're very used to, and it just becomes suddenly banal. It just suddenly looks like everything.
So what would be an example of a wave? Are there real-world examples of a wave family display?
Daniel Smalley: A wave display that you could go out and buy today, I don't know, but there are certainly many good static displays. There are certainly commercial companies making an effort to create wave displays. Two approaches that are gaining traction commercially, I think, are holographic displays, which are a pattern of lines that refract light to form a wavefront or a nanophotonic phased array. There is a caveat, there's a merging between the ray and the wave family at the moment when the rays come from emitters that are very small, smaller than a wavelength of light. If those emitters are super small, number one and number two, if all the emitters can see each other, that is to say, they have some fixed phase relationship with each other. The technical term for this is coherence. They act as a team. If all those things are true, then you can start shaping wavefronts with what would've been rays. So essentially if you have a big emitter, the ray comes out like a laser. But as your emitter gets smaller and smaller, the ray doesn't come out like a laser. It comes out more like a, I don't even know how to describe it, a spray, right? It defracts out more and more until now you've got a spherical emitter and all those spherical emitters see each other and they interfere with each other in ways that allow them to create arbitrary wavefronts. Any wavefront you want, you can create from a collection of spherical emitters, assuming they're small enough and assuming they're coherent with each other.
So that's another approach that some people are taking. But the problem is, in each one of these cases you've got just an intractable information problem. For example, any display could be made into a holographic display if its resolution was sufficiently high if it could achieve holographic resolution, which is roughly a thousand pixels per millimeter linear. So imagine taking all the pixels in your computer screen right now and squishing them into a 1:1 millimeter area and then refilling your computer screen at that density.
So that's a million times more pixels than what you're currently using to create a display the same size as what you're currently using, and so you're talking about if you wanted a meter-size holographic display updated, at a reasonable refresh rate you're looking at in the neighborhood of hundreds of billions of pixels per second, maybe trillions of pixels per second to create that display.
So you've got challenges with computing power, with graphic processing, with bandwidth, and everything else?
Daniel Smalley: Yeah, but primarily bandwidth. The feeling I think, broadly, is that optical electronics is a solvable problem. We might even be able to get pixel densities where we want them, maybe. But that compute power, that remains a big deal.
Now there are shortcuts and workarounds. One particularly good workaround was by SeaReal back in the day, what they would do is they would look at the viewer's eyeballs and they would only shoot light into the eyes, light that was diffracting in other directions they would ignore entirely. It wouldn't compute any of that, so they could dramatically reduce the amount of the information they had to process and they could increase the pixel size because they only needed just a little bit of diffraction, just enough to cover your pupil, and then they were done. It’s unfortunate that we haven't seen more from them.
They started out with a kind of mechanical version of the display that worked really well, and I think there was a struggle to make something that was solid state. But it was a pretty clever trick to reduce this bandwidth while still preserving the benefits of a wavefront-shaping holographic display and the realism that comes with it.
So where do light field displays fall into all this? Are those waves or points?
Daniel Smalley: So this is the most controversial of all of this syntactic infighting that we have right now, because there are displays out there right now trying to commercialize light field displays, and they don't want anyone thinking that they're any less, that consumers are getting anything less than what they might consider being a holographic display.
And how they use the term and how we use the term are often very different. So those of us who've gotten together and agreed on this, say a light field display is a ray display. That is to say, it's a pixelated display that's shooting rays in different directions, and it's those intersections that create image points that our brain perceives. Though I know there are displays out there, or at least they're attempting to create coherent Wavefronts, that is to say, these nanophotonic phased arrays. They're trying to create phased array wavefronts potentially, and I can't be sure this is the case, but they do have wavefront shaping capabilities and that’s when you've crossed the bridge from ray display to a wave display.
Are hologram and holographic Interchangeable terms or are they different things?
Daniel Smalley: So hologram as we see it, the way we decided to specify this term, we define a hologram as the surface with the lines on it that's actually diffracting the light. So if you go to a museum and you see a hologram, the glass plate that you look into, the screen itself, that is the hologram, and the image that's the holographic image. And then the process of creating that is holography. So we use holography to create holograms, and when we illuminate those holograms, they create holographic images.
Is a spinning LED light stick that are these individual sorts of fan blade things and arrays of them that are being called holograms? Are they holograms?
Daniel Smalley: No. There's nothing diffracting. So if there's no diffraction, then it can't be a hologram. Now it could be a volumetric image. What's happening with most of these is there is a fan that spins in a single plane, however, if you just move that fan in and out, you just oscillate it in and out, or if you add a bunch of fan blades stacked on top of each other and spin them, now you've created a volumetric display. Now, every time I look at one of those image points, I'm looking at a physical object in a volume and I'm getting a volumetric image and it will have all of the benefits and all the deficiencies of that family of displays, of that point family, but not a hologram.
So when you say it's volumetric, it means if you went off to the side a little bit, it's not just this single flat image, there's a dimension to it or depth to it?
Daniel Smalley: So when I say volumetric, I mean that If you look at an image point, you're looking at a physical object, in this case, an LED. Of course, it's just a flat screen, it's just spinning in a plane. If it wants to be qualified as a 3D display, then it needs to have pixels or voxels that exist off a plane. So you just need to stack these or move one of them in and out, and then you could achieve this effect of having a volumetric image.
It's yet more moving parts in these things, which would worry me even more.
Daniel Smalley: That's right. If they weren't dangerous enough.
Is a transparent LCD a hologram?
Daniel Smalley: That is a good question. So that depends entirely on what are you displaying. So first of all, it could be a hologram if you're displaying a pattern of lines on your transparent hologram meant to diffract light so that far away it's converging to a point for somebody to observe. That kind of display would not be very useful unless the pixels of this transparent LCD were very tiny. Now, in the case of some microdisplays, for example, there are transparent LCD microdisplays for projectors, that could be a legitimate holographic display that would actually create an image that we would appreciate as a holographic image.
Now, those microdisplays are micro, they're small maybe an inch, maybe one or two inches on a side. So they're not particularly well suited to humans. But they would make great pets or insect displays. The challenge now is to keep that same pixel, those teeny tiny pixels, those teeny tiny transparent LCD pixels, and then scale that size up while keeping the pixel small to something that a human would appreciate, something in the 20-inch diagonal range.
So these shower stall dimension displays that are transparent LCDs that are just nicely lit, white screen captured visuals of people who were standing in one place and it's reflected on the transparent LCD inside the shower stall thing, that's being described as a hologram, and when I've written about it I describe it as hologram-ish. But it wouldn't qualify as a hologram, would it?
Daniel Smalley: It would not. But I will say this, I think that the tradeoffs made there are actually pretty compelling. So when it comes to representing full-size humans, we have to recognize that humans are flat, especially if you're looking at somebody standing on a stage, the six inches of depth from the front of their nose to the back of their head is not much in the grand scheme of things, especially if you're looking at them from 50 feet away or a 100 feet away, which is why the two 2Pac “hologram” was so compelling, because the further away you get from an object, the fewer 3D cues your eye is able to use to determine.
So when you go to a play, they can paint the background, the mountains, and the sun, because those things are so far away. The only 3D cues we get are occlusion. The fact that one is in front of the other, but it could be totally flat and those pictorial cues are all we need. As objects get closer, we start adding things like motion parallax. When you're driving down the road, now you see these telephone poles moving with respect to each other, and then as things get a little closer, now you get left eye, right eye disparity, and it's only when they get really close within a few meters does your eye start being able to focus on the near and far parts of that image and you get these accommodation effects, and then when they get within arms reach, you can touch them, and now you have keen aesthetic cues. So it's really when things are up close, within arms reach that you get this rich set of 3D cues, but if you push imagery back far enough, you can really get away with a lot. Things get much cheaper, and much easier, and if the intention for these shower displays as you call them, which I think is a pretty accurate description, if it's just to give the sense of the presence of another human being in a room, and if they're a few feet away, that might be a reasonable trade-off, especially if they're pushing all those resources into creating really high dynamic range, which they do, good color saturation, and high responsibility.
Those things are gonna be much more compelling to a human viewer than those six inches of depth. We're boring as far as 3D is concerned as humans.
Yeah, I've seen light field displays at the SID trade show and I have seen the shower stall devices at different trade shows, and if I think of the two, the light field display is arguably closer to what people are thinking about as a science fiction hologram, but they're also six inches tall, and I suspect that most people having to choose between the two would say, I like the life-size thing a lot more, even if it maybe isn't quite as sophisticated in certain respects.
Daniel Smalley: Absolutely!
When I talked to the guy at Portal, David Nussbaum, who founded that company, it used to be called Portal, and that's the shower stall displays. He says, I know it's not a true hologram, but we have to call it something and it's something that consumers have their heads wrapped around so that's why we use that. Is that a fair approach?
Daniel Smalley: Yeah, I think so. As I say, we're all very defeated at this point on this. So I think that if you're trying to communicate with humans and it's already entered the vernacular in that way, unless we give them an alternative, then what else is a guy supposed to do?
I'm curious longer term as this technology matures, what are the real-world applications for this? Because, if you're replicating Princess Leia and Star Wars that's a theme park attraction or a museum attraction or something like that. But are there practical business uses for holographic visuals?
I did see a demo from a company up in Newfoundland, called Avalon Holographics and that was for energy exploration and shipping and so on, to show the depth of the ocean and all that, and I thought, that's pretty interesting. So is that kind of the more, the real-world use of this going forward?
Daniel Smalley: That's a very good question. I think we have yet to find the killer app for holography, to be honest. So in any of the scenarios I've been approached with, it seems relatively straightforward to come up with something that's almost as good for much, much cheaper. In the case of oil exploration, they're trying to understand these complicated 3D shapes in the form of oil fields and where to dig and this kind of spatial stuff. But unless time is an important factor and it's not in this case, you can use a really big, nice 2D screen, move your mouse around and rotate around enough to get a real good sense of the 3D shape. People are really good at abstracting from 2D to 3D, and I'm thinking of radiologists in particular who just make this second nature.
However, if you were a surgeon and you were trying to thread a catheter through the vasculature of the body, which can get very complicated in 3D, especially as you approach the heart and the brain it might be useful to have a really high fidelity 3D image that you can see as you're pushing this catheter to avoid getting abrasions on the artery surface causing embolism, that sort of thing, and the reason for that is because time is important. You're moving that catheter in time, you're being able to capture the spatial information at the same time you're moving is sensitive. Time is a sensitive part of this process and so maybe in that case.
Maybe if you're doing aerospace surveillance, we've got all these extra satellites, thanks to Elon Musk and SpaceX to keep track of and the possibility of conjunction, which is the smashing together of satellites, I think it's greater and greater all the time, and that's more complicated than airplanes smashing into each other because you got these curved orbits and I'm sure there are all sorts of AI and computer analysis, but there’s still a human loop, I think in most cases, and they have to make a judgment call about whether these two complicated orbital paths are gonna result in the smashing together of two objects, and if you have that rendered in 3D, you've got this moving spatial situation. I think you could understand what's happening much more viscerally than trying and abstract that from a 2D screen so I see those as two, clear and present applications for a really good holographic system.
Is there a lot of business investment in this or is much of the work involving holography happening in environments such as yours, more on the academic side?
Daniel Smalley: Definitely more on the academic side. If you're talking about the display, the real money in holography has never been in the display. It's always been in things like security or photolithography or some of these other fields.
So holography for currency counterfeiting?
Daniel Smalley: Yeah, that's exactly right.
So I don't imagine that's going to change. My feeling is the display field is just fraught. It's just a terrible market to be in, it is. If you think about the last century, we really only had two dominant display technologies. For the majority of this century, you had CRT displays, and then for the rest you had LCDs, and during this time, big companies were cannibalizing their own technologies. New things were coming on like miniature cathode ray tubes and all sorts of interesting OLEDs, just think how long it took OLEDs to take off even though they were superior in so many ways. It was just, you've got these multi-billion dollar foundries, and fabs, and you're gonna squeeze every last drop out of those displays, and then the margins are so small and yeah, it's just a rough business to be in.
So thelast century in the early part of this one has just been littered with good technologies, good 3D technologies that just couldn't get a foothold. In the 90s we had two excellent 3D displays. We had the Actuality display, which is the spinning paddle which was a very nice display, and then, it had a hundred million pixels, I think, per second, and then we had Sullivan's Crystal display where he had these stacked liquid crystals that he would project on to form a volumetric image, are also excellent and solid state for goodness sake, and that both of those, about the 90s, both of those couldn't quite find a foothold in the market.
Is it the sort of thing that could be revived?
Daniel Smalley: Oh, it has been revived. So there is a version of this type of display, which I called an enclosed volumetric display where you have a diffuser moving up and down inside, what I presume is an evacuated volume, and then you're projecting on that and it looks beautiful, it looks great and they're making a good try. They're making a good effort to get out there and solve some problems.
My feeling with most people who are doing 3D displays is that the targets they're looking at are in entertainment, people who are trying to do VR or something like this, but need some collaborative platform to develop on that, where everybody can gather around and that becomes this volumetric display or in this case, Looking Glass is also good at this, and then I think Sony has another beautiful 3D display auto stereo for the same sort of thing, targeting that same sort of market.
Yeah, I've seen that. Where do you think things will be in 10 years from now? Will there be commercial products out there, or is this still gonna be in the labs?
Daniel Smalley: I guess we have to dig down a little bit on that question. What are we gonna have? Well, we're gonna continue to have better and better displays for sure, and I think we're gonna start making inroads on niche markets. I think we are seeing companies take this tack of hitting premium markets first. So oil exploration will be in there, entertainment will be in there, and hopefully, we'll have a Tesla-like experience where they'll get a nice premium product with lots of really inspiring features. They'll identify a killer app and then the trickle-down will provide the rest of us plebians with a 3D display in the next little bit.
Things are accelerating, lots of technologies are converging. I think it's much more likely that you'll see an everyday volumetric display before you see an everyday holographic display just because the information problem, and the bandwidth problem's not going away. And I say volumetric displays. I should also say that displays like Looking Glass, these light field displays or more correctly, maybe these ray displays are also gonna get better and better, and we'll have to make some decisions about whether we are willing to pay the premium to go from that excellent ray display to a much more expensive holographic display.
This was very helpful, very technical, I even understood some of it. I appreciate you taking the time with me.
Daniel Smalley: Yeah, my pleasure. It’s my favorite thing to talk about.
Wednesday Nov 02, 2022
Giles Corbett, Cloudshelf
Wednesday Nov 02, 2022
Wednesday Nov 02, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
A UK start-up called Cloudshelf has come up with an accessible, heavily-automated and simple platform that helps small, mainly local retailers offer the same kinds of interactive display tools in their stores as deeper-pocketed and more heavily resourced major retailers.
The company has written code that crawls and analyzes local retail sites on Shopify's vast e-commerce platform and produces interactive experiences that are a lot more than just the online site on a screen in the store - something we've all seen and rolled our eyes at. In this case, it is curated and stylized to look and work like an in-store interactive site produced by a digital agency - probably for a lot of money.
I spoke with founder Giles Corbett about the origins of his company, how the platform works and is sold, and why the nightmare scenario of retail lockdowns and restrictions through the pandemic actually created something of a perfect storm for Cloudshelf.
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TRANSCRIPT
Giles, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown of what Cloudshelf is all about?
Giles Corbett: Yeah, sure, Dave, with pleasure. First of all, I gotta say it's fantastic to be on the podcast. So Cloudshelf is a really simple idea. We call it in-store eCommerce. Now I bet you and the people listening to this podcast, you've all been into a store at some point, and you've gone in looking for a bike or a pair of jeans or some jewelry and you haven't found what you were looking for and you left the store disappointed. It turns out this issue of walkouts costs physical stores a trillion dollars a year. So it's a big issue, and that's just the immediate loss of sales, without even talking about all of the dissatisfaction, et cetera that it causes later on.
Now, being such a big issue, it turns out that some of the most successful retailers worldwide have built solutions to go and bring digital experiences in-store that can alleviate this issue. But what Cloudshelf does is it takes this idea and just using an AI-driven platform immediately makes it available to even smaller or independent retailers that don't have the unlimited means or the technical knowledge of some of these super retailers and these retailers can very simply set up Cloudshelf in a matter of minutes and get fantastic digital in-store experiences, either interactive experiences or display experiences that help them sell more and close more sales in the store. That's what it's about.
So how this would manifest itself in a store, a physical store, would it be some sort of a touch screen kiosk screen, whether it's on a counter or free-standing, or perhaps mounted on a wall?
Giles Corbett: Dave, all of those. It's always using some form of digital display, and Cloudshelf can operate either on interactive touch screens that you're describing, or it can even be on display-only screens. I'll talk about those maybe a bit later on. But indeed, typically retailers will have a kiosk that could, maybe imagine a fashion store with a small jewelry range and on the jewelry counter, you go and see a beautiful screen that's showing off in a stunning way all of the available jewelry, and you go and see the small range on display and you maybe you can't find exactly what you're looking for and the screen next to it will say, discover the rest of our jewelry range. You touch it, you can find what you're looking for, and even buy it directly off the screen.
Now this is different though and I wrote about this recently, how I walked around the National Retail Federation Show and saw some eCommerce companies at that time. This is going back 3- 5 years, basically pushing their websites and their online presence to an in-store screen, but not changing anything. It was just The eCom site on a computer terminal, basically in the store, and from my perspective, that wasn't enough.
I'm very old and I go back to the starting days of the internet and online news sites were filled with what was called shovelware, basically shoveling content from another medium onto a smaller screen and saying, we're done, and it looked like that. You're saying this is different, right?
Giles Corbett: Yeah, putting your website on a screen in the store is a really bad idea. You wouldn't expect to go and find your website just running as it is on a desktop, or on a mobile phone.
Similarly, as a customer, you do not want to go and see the website running on a screen when you go into a store. If I go into a store and the retailer says, oh, I'm sorry, I can't help you. It's on the website. Please take a look at it. I'm thinking, hang on, why did I even bother walking into the store in the first place? Now the whole point is to go and create digital experiences that complement the magic, the delight of being in a store. You go into a store because you think that the person who's there is actually going to advise you on the best shirt that looks the best on you, or the bike that's the best for the kind of road that you want to go on, or whatever it may be. You want that level of advice, of contact, of engagement, and therefore you want a digital experience that complements that, and that's what Cloudshelf does.
If you just put the website there, it fails miserably. Look, I will give you a really obvious example. Go into a clothes store and you have jeans, you have shirts, you have ties, you have suits, etc. If you've gone in wanting to buy jeans, you've gone up to the jeans area and you've had a look, you expect the screen next to that area to go and show you about jeans, not to go and show you that if you happen to be on the third floor of the store, you could also go and get swimwear or whatever it may be. So it's the idea of having this effectively interactive visual merchandising next to the product, and you want something that enhances that in-store experience, and that's what this is doing, and then there are a whole bunch of other reasons why it's different to the website. For instance, it knows a device it's on so that when you go and buy something, it knows which store it came from. It makes sure that you don't have to enter any personal information onto the device itself. If I was to go on the website and I wanted to buy something in the store, I need to go and type my credit card number into that tablet or that website, that would be crazy. So it does away with all of that, and it does a whole bunch of other things too.
So the premise here is that you can take an already built and managed and populated eCommerce website from a cloud platform and largely automate and push a version of it, a curated version of it, to smaller screens without having to hire an interactive agency and have a 6-12 month project on a possibly a six figure budget to put it all together, right? You can do this pretty inexpensively and easily?
Giles Corbett: That is a perfect summary. So indeed, we start with the existing eCommerce website. Why? Because for most retailers, that has now become the biggest repository they have of visual assets, product descriptions, et cetera. So that's what we use as a starting point, and just imagine if you're a retailer, you've invested a lot in your online website. It's fantastic if you can just reuse that automatically to go and create all of these in-store displays, so you're spot on.
If you happen to be, for instance, a Shopify retailer, you simply add the Cloudshelf app. It analyzes all of the products that you have, and it says, what kind of a display do you want to create? “I wanna create one for trousers or jeans, menswear, whatever…” You want to say what it is, it will then go and propose all of the products to go and put into it, and it will go and create that. You then say which screen you want it to go on, and it displays that on the screen. It updates whenever you update the website. It chooses all of the best-looking images so that you don't need to go and go through and select them all independently. It does the whole thing in under five minutes from beginning to end.
So you would have templates, I would assume that would be the wireframes to do this in different ways?
Giles Corbett: Yeah, absolutely. You could choose a number of parameters around how you want to go and lay it out, but you don't have to. You can just click ‘Create a Cloudshelf’ and it's there within seconds and then you wanna go and tune it, sure, you can tune it.
Do you find if people are doing the kind of click-and-forget thing where it's just gonna create something that they're fine with that? Or do they want to tweak it?
Giles Corbett: They definitely want to go and tweak elements that are key to their visual branding, so brand colors, logos, fonts, and things like that, and most of them will do that.
But then what is amazing is they can just about forget about it because after that, whenever they do an update to their website, it is carried through and it's there and it's intelligently displayed. They go and put on promotional sales and it is carried through to their Cloudshelf automatically. So once they've spent maybe 5-10 minutes doing those initial branding choices, then the whole thing just runs.
And that's because you're working at an API level with the eCommerce platform?
Giles Corbett: Absolutely. So a big part of what Cloudshelf does is an incredibly powerful backend sync engine that just manages the analysis, and synchronization, checking all of the retailers that are live on the platform.
And you've integrated first by the sounds of it, with Shopify, and Shopify gives you a vast audience, correct?
Giles Corbett: Shopify gives us pretty fantastic API access. It gives us a vast audience and it gives us a growing audience. So what we see in all of the countries in which we started operating is that more and more of the retailers who maybe were using another solution are moving over to Shopify, and one of the things they love about Shopify is the ecosystem of apps that enable them to go and find exactly the solution they were looking for to address their issues. So for us, Shopify has been a great place to start and learn.
It seems to me Shopify was noodling this, going back four or five years ago at NRF and some other eCommerce companies as well, why wouldn't they do their own as opposed to partnering with you?
Giles Corbett: You know what? I think you are right that Shopify is going to be looking more and more at this. In their recent declarations, they were really promoting in-store being the next growth vector for them suggesting that this is an area that they will be looking at. And you know what, when they do, I think they'll come up with something that'll no doubt be absolutely fine.
But if you want to have the very best solution, it's gonna be Cloudshelf because we are the team that's just dedicated to this area of work and development.
Yeah I've been involved in digital signage for more than 20 years now, and I've seen all kinds of very large, well-funded, deeply experienced companies get into digital signage, but, only kind of sorta, and it's a skunkworks operation. I'm thinking about past iterations of Cisco and Google and companies like that, and they're just not fully engaged and therefore the products are never all that robust. It's just like, “There, we did it!”
Giles Corbett: Yeah, I think there's a bit of that, and let's go back to what Shopify is doing. They're clearly promoting and investing in their POS and making it better and better. They are going to spend time on this but we are at a slightly different segment where this intersection of digital signage, which is about beautiful displays, and eCommerce, which is all about driving transactions and this space that we've created for in-store eCommerce is all about the union of those two worlds.
Yeah, I would imagine you had to spend a lot of time thinking about the user experience, how it looks to people walking up to it, how they're gonna navigate it, and so on because it's not the same as sitting at a desktop or monkeying around on your tablet to shop.
Giles Corbett: Absolutely. To begin with, it's a public screen, so the kind of information that you'd expect your phone to know or that you'd be willing to type into your phone, you do not want to be entering onto a public screen, so you need to have all of the handoff, the seamless handoff between what happens on the public screen and then what you complete to finalize the transaction on your private phone, and that is a completely novel experience.
When you're working with a big eCommerce platform like Shopify, were you just working basically tapping into their API and developing something, or were there sit-down meetings with Shopify folks saying, “Here's what we wanna do, here's what we need from you” and they were, in turn, asking you how we manage security and all those things?
Giles Corbett: It's a very interesting question, Dave. When we first spent some months actually prototyping all of this solution as a private app, something that was still allowed on Shopify in the early days, we were trying all of this stuff out and iterating like crazy with retailers. And then at one point we went to Shopify and said, listen, this is our idea, this is what we wanna do, this is what we want to launch, and they were scratching their head saying, “Hang on, we don't really understand. Is this POS or is it eCommerce? Where does it sit?”
We said no. This is new. This is different. This is taking somebody's website and making it so that it renders and uses beautifully in their store, and so at first, there was some confusion on their side about where does this fit? And then the more we engaged, the more enthusiastic they became, and they've been fantastically helpful at giving us feedback and advice on a bunch of things.
Do you have the back end sorted out as well? One of the things that I said to some of the companies when I was walking around NRF and they were showing this core idea was, what about device management? How do you know if the screen's active and working properly and so on, and they looked at me like I had three heads, it just had not occurred to them.
Giles Corbett: Dave, in a past life, I was running from West London, a network of 15,000 connected devices in, I think it was 350 cities in China and so yeah, we learned everything we needed to learn about monitoring devices.
You have been through the wars.
Giles Corbett: Big time. Anyway, what I'd say is that if you go and look at the Cloudshelf code base, the bit that we call the engine, the bit that displays on the screens is probably well under 20% of the code base. The backend and all of the management tools are where all of the cleverness is.
Yeah, that's an interesting comment because I've said so many times to people that getting media to play out on a screen is a technical challenge, but it's minor compared to all the work needed to keep the stuff playing on the screen reliably and manage it.
Giles Corbett: Yeah, indeed. Retailers are using Cloudshelf because they want to enhance the in-store experience. You do not enhance the in-store experience by having a blue screen.
Yeah, definitely. So where did this idea come from? I was looking at your LinkedIn background and your previous company was Ksubaka and it seemed to be about interactive in retail as well.
Giles Corbett: Yeah, so my background has always been around stuff that drives or is driven by end-user engagement. So it started off with mobile games, and then from mobile games, we thought about how we can use games to go and drive engagements in stores next to products, and would that be the beginning of a fantastic media platform.
And that's what Ksubaka was all about, and we developed that extensively in China, and then that sort of stayed in China, and we'd started developing extensions from what we are doing Ksubaka in the UK and in France, and we were supporting big retailers such as Tesco, Marks & Spencers, Next, and some others. And then the pandemic hit and Every single one of our retail clients closed down in literally a two or three week period, and that gave us an opportunity to think, reflect, go work on some of the back projects that we hadn't had time to work on, and while that was happening, there were two things that happened that I found absolutely fascinating.
First, we just became more and more aware of all of the small independent retailers around us who had closed their stores putting big signs in the window saying, “Come onto our website…” and they were all, every single one of them moving onto Shopify. So we started looking into Shopify a lot more and discovered that maybe there was something there. But you know what, the second thing that was really interesting is that all the way leading up to the pandemic, there'd been this kind of belief that all retail inexorably moving online. That basically, once a consumer had bought something online, that was it. They weren't going back into a store.
Now in the UK, we are blessed with a lot of very impressive real-time statistics by organizations such as The ONS and they track all of the online and offline sales for the last five years, they've been showing quarter after quarter increase in the share of online, and by the time we hit the pandemic, online in the UK was way above what it was in the US. It was like 24% to 25% of all consumer spending was taking place online. We hit the pandemic and that number goes through the roof, 38%. McKinsey publishes its sort of big report about how basically online has just stepped forward 10 years in two months, and that's it. It's a point of no return, and then the first lockdown ended and it was really puzzling. We saw all of the stores around us fill up, and we started looking at the statistics and the share of online fell back to what it was just before that first lockdown. Now we had lockdown two and lockdown three, and each time the same thing happened: online shot up, but by the end of lockdown, online collapsed back to the level it was at before.
All of these consumers had found out how to go and buy their jeans or their milk or whatever it was online, but yet when the stores reopened, not for all of those purchases, but for many of them, they decided to go back into the store. Now, that told us for the first time that there was absolute proof that something we'd always believed was true, and that in the future, retail was going to be something that would be completely hybrid. It was gonna be, yes, a lot of it online, but also a lot of it in-store, and the stores that would survive were gonna be those that would've invested cleverly, smartly in the digital experience to make sure that the in-store experience was outstanding and that became our customer base, and they were the people that we started targeting. So all of those things happened, and then a third thing happened. The third of my two things.
And that was the emergence of hybrid working. So initially full remote, then hybrid, and the bet that we took there was never gonna go away, that we would all spend more time working from home or elsewhere, but basically not from the city center than we had done before the pandemic, and that meant that there would need to be a shift in the fabric of retail and the structure of high streets around where people lived and that as there were many more places where people lived than their worst city centers, stores, brands, retail units would have to be smaller, and if they were gonna be smaller, then they'd need more digital to be able to offer the same range of services. And therefore our bet is that we are absolutely in line with all of those trends happening simultaneously. People are moving to Shopify, independent retailers, or retailers in general, learning how to go and digitize, and consumers wanting to go and shop more locally, and that's why we think this opportunity of in-store eCommerce is so exciting.
Yeah, there's certainly been a lot of chatter about the idea that larger stores, like big boxes and so on, would increasingly become showrooms where you could go in and have a look at something, but then you can order online or whatever, and I would imagine that it extends itself down to even small businesses who can expand their product range without expanding their footprint.
Giles Corbett: Dave, it is fascinating. I was with the owner of a small independent store yesterday called Cherry Moon, and she's got a beautiful selection of designer clothes, and she has these two tables in the middle of the store that has beautiful jewelry by two designers and she was saying that the issue is that many of these pieces are unique or in very small quantities, and the designers can't afford to put all of their stock there in that one stop, so that means that they then can't exhibit it elsewhere, and all of a sudden, what Cloudshelf was helping her do was give these designers the ability to go and sell their entire range in her store without needing to commit all of the stock. And that idea is one that we've seen time and time again.
I was in a meeting this morning with a retailer we're rolling out with this week, and they have five of their own stores. They have 12,000 SKUs and they have 200 stockers, and their issue has always been being their website is ahead of their stockers, who go and see the website as taking business away from them. And yet with Cloudshelf, it completely turns the whole story around because now they can go and have Cloudshelf presenting all 12,000 SKUs in these small stockers with the stocker knowing that if somebody goes and buys a product via the Cloudshelf, it will be allocated back to their store and they will go and get the same benefit from it as though they'd actually sold the product physically from within the store without having had to hold the stock. Now, that's a pretty amazing proposition, both for the brand and for the retailer.
So you're rolling out with a customer right now. Where are you at? In reading some of the PR, it indicated you went through a series of trials, the company is not that old, and you went through a series of trials in London and Paris and are now deploying. So you're obviously past the testing stage and getting into operational mode.
Giles Corbett: Yeah, so we are 18 months old. We started off with a small group of retailers that we called basically friends for life, pilot retailers, and the deal for them was that they'd get Cloudshelf for free forever, they just needed to go and give us feedback on a weekly basis on how they were using it, how their customers were reacting, what else they wanted to go and see in the product, and we worked with them for a year, basically iterating and improving the product, and then indeed, as you said a few weeks ago, we actually made our app live on Shopify and announced that we were now ready for business and I'm delighted to say that in the short time since then, we've actually had some fantastic successes. So we're going to live in Ireland at the end of this week with two retailers. We're going to live in Scotland also this week. So there's definite movement there.
There's been a lot of interest from many partners in France and we've just kicked off some discussions in Germany, and Dave, I really hope that in the next few months we'll be signing up our first retail networks in the US because this solution really scales and works everywhere.
And Canada where Shopify comes from.
Giles Corbett: And Canada, of course, spot on. Now you know what? To go and help us work out where we needed to target, we built a really nifty tool that we call Store Finder. Basically, I go and put in any address anywhere in the world, and it produces a glorious map of every physical store in that area, and it tells me all of the ones that use Shopify, all the ones that use Salesforce, all the ones that use Magenta, et cetera, to go and power their backend.
So a super useful tool for prospecting. But I can tell you this one thing. Shopify has done incredibly well at promoting itself in its home market because the number of stores in Canada that use Shopify to power their back head is quite phenomenal. So yes, we should definitely be there.
So if I am a digital signage company, and I'm listening to this, and a software provider, and I target retail for, I don't wanna say meat and potatoes, digital signage, but for the other stuff around a store, are you a competitor? Or is there a way to work together? Are their parallel things?
Giles Corbett: Interesting question, Dave. If you happen to be a provider of screens, we are a savior. We are working with a bunch of screen manufacturers and resellers now who basically tell us that when they are selling into retail, oftentimes retailers will come along and say, listen, we want these digital screens, some in store for our merchandising, some in the window, et cetera, and how do we create the content and the digital science company goes, ah, yeah, that's a bit of an issue.
Clearly, with Cloudshelf, we talked a lot about the interactive mode version on the kiosks a few minutes ago. We also have a second version that we called Display Mode. We haven't yet launched Display Mode. We're testing it still with retailers, but it will be launched in the next two, three weeks most likely, and what it does is it does the same kind of clever analysis of your product ranges and imagery, et cetera, as we use on the in interactive mode to go and create fantastic product-oriented visual displays. So you want to go and have something that goes and shows your various product ranges and et cetera in the store window to attract people to come in, Cloudshelf Display Mode will go and do that on the fly.
Now what we find, In the retailers we've been interviewing, is that for a number of them, that's fantastic and that's exactly what they want. But we also find a bunch of them that say you know what, actually we want to go into great videos. We want videos from the brands, et cetera. Now you wanna go and put in some, some simple banners, et cetera, Cloudshelf helps you do that automatically, but you wanna go have a very sophisticated loop with all kinds, other stuff other than relating to the products in the store. Then, you know what? You go and find a digital signage company that can go and helps create the CMS to go manage that loop and Cloudshelf can just come in and be part of that loop. So we're currently working with two CMS providers of digital signage and that's exactly what they plan to be using Cloudshelf for. So they will go and see the retailers. They'll say, listen, you can have the Cloudshelf version or you can have a Cloudshelf version and you can go and slot in, the local news, the Instagram feed, whatever else it is that you want to go and have next to it.
So if the website has something saying, “Baby clothing, 30% off, this week only” as a banner on the website, that could conceivably be curated automatically into a call to action poster for a screen doing that, but your platform's not gonna run a video wall on a big set of LEDs modules or something?
Giles Corbett: So what our platform will do is it will work out and it'll enable you to go and promote the sale. It will also select some of the best products and the products with the best images. It will go and show those. It will allow passing by, maybe you're walking past the store in the evening, and you go and see a bag that looks super nice. It will of course have a QR code on it. You can scan it and it will take you directly to that bag on your phone. If you buy it, it will be recorded as having come from that screen in that store. So all of our backend magic to help people sell more. But now working also on, on display-only signage. That's what Cloudshelf display mode is about. It's about helping retailers sell more. It's not their whole branding experience. That's something that they'll work with other people to create.
So what am I buying? Am I subscribing to this? Am I buying a software license?
Giles Corbett: You're subscribing to it. It's a SaaS model. So it's just like your subscription to Shopify. You go into Shopify, you add the Cloudshelf app, and you get one display for free for life. So you can try it out, there's no limit. You can use it as much as you want, and then as the number of stores expands, or the number of screens per store expands, you then just go and upgrade the license.
This was great and quite interesting. Can you just tell listeners where they can find out more online about your company?
Giles Corbett: Absolutely. Just head over to Cloudshelf.ai and hopefully, you'll be able to find out everything you want about the company. If you don't, call me, I love speaking with people, at any time of day or any time of day or night. I love it.
All right, Giles, thank you very much.
Giles Corbett: Dave, thank you so much for the opportunity!
Wednesday Aug 31, 2022
Chad Hutson, Dimensional Innovations
Wednesday Aug 31, 2022
Wednesday Aug 31, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Experience is one of those terms that's being heavily used and sometimes abused these days, as companies in the digital signage ecosystem talk about what they can do for end-user customers.
Everything, it seems, is somehow experiential or immersive. But what does that really mean and how does it manifest itself in projects that use display technology?
I had a really good chat with Chad Hutson, who very much qualifies as an experience design expert and has the project portfolio behind him to back that up.
He ran a well-respected agency in Chicago called Leviathan, stuck around for a few years after it was acquired, but this past year hooked up with a company that would have been a competitor in the past - Dimensional Innovations.
He's now DI's Chief Strategy Officer, and spends his time working with the DI team and with customers - working a process to understand needs and then develop solutions that deliver on those needs, and realize an experience that can be everything from simple to elaborate.
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TRANSCRIPT
Chad, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown on what Dimensional Innovations is all about and what your role is there?
Chad Hutson: Yeah, you bet. We’ll call it DI for short, to make it easier for both of us. DI is an experience design and build firm, based in the US, down in Kansas city, and they are really robust at not only designing and building the physical experiences but all the fixtures that can be built out with the wood shop, metal shop, paint and a giant two-story, high 3d printer, which is pretty amazing, we also use, but also on the digital side, we have deep roots in technology, both in being able to figure out what's the right technology for the experience and then creating the content and the interaction that goes within those experiences as well.
So I'm the new Chief Strategy Officer, it's a new role at DI, I started about eight months ago with the organization and that role just organically evolved. They were kind enough to say you're making a positive impact and we'd like for you to do a bit more. It's good stuff so far.
So it sounds like the company bridges a few things like there's some traditional AV integrations side to the business. There are some elements of a creative technology agency, but there's also a fix-your-fabrication kind of company as well. So you're into a whole bunch of things.
Chad Hutson: Yeah, that's a pretty good encapsulation and it’s a team of about 300 people, so they're not messing around.
And you're up in Chicago, right?
Chad Hutson: That's correct. I'm in Chicago when I sleep at home. I travel around quite a bit, both down in Kansas City and wherever the clients are as well.
And Kansas City is what, like an eight-hour drive or something like that?
Chad Hutson: From Chicago, that's not too bad. I think like maybe six and a half, but I’m always flying though, always in the air.
You don't wanna drive in the middle of the winter?
Chad Hutson: No, flying in the middle of winter is already a challenge enough.
So people are gonna wonder, people who know you that you came from a company that you founded called Leviathan in Chicago, much more of, I would say, a creative technology shop, at least that's the term I use.
I'm curious, as somebody who founded that company, what compelled you to leave?
Chad Hutson: Yeah, that was an existential issue, I guess you could say, just trying to debate with myself, what can I do in the future? Yeah, Leviathan is still a great shop, although it's going by a different name. My partners and I sold it to another digital agency called Envoy back in, I think, 2017 and I was happy to stick around for a while. I think it's been close to five years since I decided to stay put and continue to run the organization.
But I'd say where Levithan was just all about that hybrid of digital and physical experience, Envoy as a larger group, they are versed in everything from e-commerce to branding, and I don’t know, just felt like what I love was maybe not as front and centre as was what Leviathan did, so there is certainly no bad blood whatsoever, it was good to stick around and see it through a lot of great accomplishments there. But DI was always in my side view and they were always staying in touch and said, we'd love to talk about what the future could be. At some point, the stars aligned and that's why I went over to DI.
That's a decent run anyways. When a founder sticks around, they might stick around for a year or something, so three to five years is pretty good.
Chad Hutson: I agree, and the cool thing about the DI is, for me personally, it filled that missing gap BECAUSE whenever we were contacted about a digital experience, it could be like a lobby or experience for a theme park, it was always just limited to that digital scope, and it was later in the conversation.
So with DI, because they are involved in the entire experience from even very early days what is the purpose of this space and what can it serve? Who's gonna be there? What kind of experience do we want them to have, digital and analogue? That's really the reason why I went over there, and I really love it over there.
Yeah, I wanted to get into that. What is the whole process involved when you engage with a new customer?
When I have done consulting in the past, the first thing I say to a new client, or even just in the early stages when we're having our first conversation is okay, why do you wanna even be talking and looking at digital? And I suspect these days when people start talking about wanting something experientially designed into our new space, experiential is such a huge catchall and somewhat abused term that you really have to enforce some kind of discipline to figure out what's gonna work here.
Chad Hutson: Yeah, you're absolutely right. The process is really, I don't wanna say it's not much different than any other firms, but we're very curious people, and so we want to ask our clients, what do you envision for the space, who is going to be there? What kind of assets do you already have from a content perspective? What's your technology infrastructure for the rest of the space? We don't want to build something just in a bubble from tech and IT standpoint. So really getting the lay of the land and asking a ton of questions, not just logistic or technology-wise, but more just thematic and just really trying to figure out what they know, and more importantly, what they don't know, so we can help discover what that is. So thinking about that space, we want to have the right purpose and the right functionality.
So then we get into high-level ideas of what it could be more like rough sketches along with even rough buckets of what budget could look like for those experiences, and they may say that's perfect or, that's a bit rich for us. And then from there, we start to refine those ideas and also refine the pricing and what the technology solutions might be and what the narratives might be from a visual and oral content standpoint, and then we start building it and we never leave our clients high and dry. After we build, we always like to be involved when we can in content refreshes, in support of that experience and yeah, hopefully, continue those relationships for years to come.
There's a business reason why you wanna stick with the customer and do the content refreshes and so on, but I suspect some of that is just simply that you wanna stick with it because it's your team's baby, so to speak, and you’re enrolled in it.
Chad Hutson: That's right, and since 16:9 has a touch of snark to it, I'll say that we would definitely want to keep the good children but for those who are grown up and ready to leave the nest, we welcome them leaving the nest. So we do try to nurture the right relationships in the right ways.
When you're engaging with new customers, I'm curious, about how often they really know what they want to do.
Chad Hutson: That is a great question because when we speak with clients, we know that they know their brand better than anyone else. We can't come into that conversation with the assumption that we know them inside and out, that's absolutely not true, but from a guest or user experience standpoint, I feel like we can balance out what they know about themselves. For example, sometimes the conversation leads with technology. “Oh, we absolutely want to use VR here”, or “we want an immersive experience” and as much as we get excited about all those conversations, we also have to say, why do you think you need that? And we want to make sure that is the right solution from a narrative or technology standpoint. So yeah, that's what I have to say about that.
I was curious how often you have customers who are saying, “Yeah, we want a big LED video wall in the lobby”, or we want this particular type of technology and they're just thinking in terms of the wow factor as opposed to what this will actually do.
Chad Hutson: Oh, every time, and I'll also pick on architects a little bit. I think some of the larger architecture firms are definitely getting better, they have their own experience design teams.
The Gensler and so on, they've got people who know that stuff now.
Chad Hutson: Exactly, but otherwise, depending on who's making the decisions, it is truly based on grandeur, so having the largest screen, “I went to our competitor's lobby and they had a giant screen, and I want ours to be bigger.”
So sometimes it can be down to that, but I think what is thought of just so little is content strategy, meaning, some folks think about content, what can we put on the screen, but okay, that's great, now what's going to be there tomorrow and the next day, and that can become prohibitively expensive if it's not thought of the right way and how to get the right content there. Some of it can be big and beautiful. I know that what used to be Obscure Digital and now they're I think they've been folded into another organization, but people talk about the Salesforce lobby and still talk about it even now, and it is a beautiful experience, but it is that exact same experience over and over again. So how can that be more dynamic? We'll have those ooh-ah moments, but we need something else to fill the space and not just be a pretty screensaver.
Yeah, I've seen some projects and the narrative is describing the projects after they've been lit up where they're talking about how this changes the whole experience of travel or whatever it may be in a rail station or an airport, and a vast screen or a set of screens with all this very expensive content and so on and I'm thinking if I'm a traveller, what would be a great experience for me is something that says, “Track 14 is this way” because that is what really matters to me, not being uplifted by this amazing content and all that, just show me where the hell the train is.
Chad Hutson: Yeah, it has to be practical as well as transformative. I feel like if people are travelling, yes, let's get them excited about their destinations, let's give them a moment of surprise and delight but let's be practical about it too, and use elements of wayfinding. Not everything has to be wow, and flutter and fluff on these large screens.
And I suspect it's difficult at times to convey to the client that there's a technology investment here and so on, but you have to keep this refreshed and, you can't just have your quarter-million dollar data visualization piece from some artist and just run that thing forever?
Chad Hutson: You're exactly right. I think I might know the data visualization artist you might be speaking of, whose work I do love, don't get me wrong, but you're absolutely right.
If a client's investing upwards of half a million or more on a display and they automatically assume, I need $25k to $50k for a video or I'll just use stock footage, that is just a bad investment. There's so much more you can do. The reason why you have a screen in the first place is to show content, it's not just to have a static piece of wall art hung up.
Is it now a case when you and your team, as you’re Chief Strategy Officer, I'm sure if there's a whale client, they pull you into it? You mentioned you're travelling a lot, so that's probably why. You immediately start thinking about how digital fits in here or do you try to kind of park that and listen to the client and then think digital would be good here, but maybe not?
Chad Hutson: Oh, great question. Certainly from my previous roots, thinking through a digital lens has been instinctual somewhat, but since going to DI, it is definitely starting with more of the basics and leaving digital and analogue out of it.
It's more about fact-finding and learning more about who they are and what they want to accomplish, and then the solutions fall from that. So that's been actually a welcome shift that not everything has to be tech-savvy, but I'm a techie at heart, I can still remember coding on a radio shack color computer using BASIC way back in the 80s. So yeah, I'm a geek and I like technology. It's front and centre of my mind a lot of times.
When you think in terms of experience design, how do you define experience? And I realize that's a big question.
Chad Hutson: Yeah, that is. So not intended to be a shameless plug, but the thing about DI is that they work across not only pro and collegiate sports organizations, but also larger brands, museums, retail, and entertainment, so theme parks and such, so the experience is different across all those, but I think consistently people want the experience to be intuitive.
I guess some brands don't have a clean brand, but in our opinion, we want the environment to be clean and welcoming and not intimidating. Perhaps if you're going through a frightening exhibit at a Disney park, maybe we do want that to be more thematic and scary, but a good experience just makes you feel something, and I know that some people might roll their eyes and go, oh my gosh, if we're walking through a company's headquarters, do they really want their guests to feel something?
And I would argue, yes, whether it wants someone to buy something, or want them to have moments of surprise and delight, even in a museum, you want them to learn and take that piece of information with you. So the experience, I think initially, no matter what you do or how pretty it is, if you don't feel something that you're not gonna remember that experience and I think that's ultimately what these destinations are about. Do you want folks to remember it, remember you as an organization or tell your friends about the amazing experience you had? So I would say that it is really front and centre, the emotional component.
But the emotion isn't necessarily “wow” or being bowled over by the scale of a screen or the 3d anamorphic illusion on a screen or whatever, it can be as simple as, “I'm feeling calmer about being in here” because now I know where I'm going” or “I feel better about the meeting I'm about to have with this company” because I'm seeing the company's history on this video wall, it’s explaining everything that they do and I'm thinking, holy shit, these guys are amazing.
Chad Hutson: Oh, a hundred percent, Dave. I'd say there's a sliding scale of what you want people to feel and we don't always crank that to 11. I think y might need certain degrees of it, like a moment of surprise and delight, in a customer's customer sales centre or in a museum like, oh, wow, I wasn't expecting that, and that's nice, but not everything has to be “whoa” and gigantic and expensive.
It's adjustable depending on what we need people to take away from that experience.
Yeah. I just wrote about a project the other day that was in a residential lobby of a building in Boston and it was a pretty small kind of corner wrapped LED that was only 10 feet square or something and I was thinking, okay, that makes sense in that kind of setting, that it's not enough where the residents are thinking well, now I understand why my condo fees are so high, but it's just something that helps give the lobby a bit of a lift, but also has information on there that's useful.
Chad Hutson: Yeah, isn't that the beauty of display technology? It is dynamic. So it can be so many different things. Sometimes it could be too many things, and so we want to pick the right bitsto have in that space, but it's dynamic and it can be evergreen .
What about budgets? I imagine, as you were saying in your kind of project scoping and everything, that you're trying to get a sense of what their budget restrictions are, whether they're bottomless or tight, and is it possible to deliver an experience on a pretty modest budget?
Chad Hutson: Yes, I would say so. There are some simple tips and tricks that can be used. I would say that much like with an artist of any sort or any kind of designer, sometimes working with constraints yields some of the best results, whether you’re out of time, you're out of money and you just really have to become inventive on how to make that work out.
If any clients are listening, I would never want to encourage purposely limiting the budget just to see what kind of brilliance can come from that. But yeah, I've certainly seen some very impactful experiences. It Doesn't necessarily cost a ton, but you can be inventive in how you use those lower cost solutions and make it effective. I think about the analogy of the giant lobby screen, instead of having one giant screen, can we break that up into different sections and pieces so it has an interesting footprint and ne minute, we have content on individual screens and the next we have this larger canvas that is, even though it's broken in pieces, everything works in concert with each other. So value engineering is the mother of invention sometimes.
I'm thinking of the project in Denver at a Wells Fargo office tower where there was obviously some nod to budget limitations where they did these five or six vertical slats that made it kinda look like you're seeing out through fence slots, and that was a way to have big LED strips that wouldn't cost the same kind of money, and they didn't have to be particularly high rez because you were seeing them at a distance, but that was a way to create visual impact, but not have something like the scoreboard at the Dallas Cowboys stadium.
Chad Hutson: Yes, and I think I know exactly the one you're talking about. They're really tall and narrow as well. But yeah, they are certainly impactful, I would agree.
Do you also have products now at DI? I was looking on the website and it said like you had some package products as opposed to everything just being custom to the client.
Chad Hutson: Yeah. Good eye there, Dave. So there are some products that we have developed and clients say, oh, we really like what you did for this client, could you do something similar? So after doing that a number of times, we just realized we can take some of the best parts of some of these projects and not necessarily repurpose them. But clients oftentimes are saying our budget is limited. What can we do? Can you repurpose this?
So that is in essence what we have done with a few different things. There's something we call it, coloring wall, which essentially we use gesture sensing technology to let people, oftentimes kids, let's have a low touch, very simple and intuitive experience where they can stand in front of what looks like a giant coloring book page, it's just a white page with black outlines and waving our arms or running past it, and it fills in the color in a very painterly fashion. Once we figured out that we don't have to reinvent the wheel every time, let's take some of these ideas and repurpose them. We can do them, we can replicate them and we always improve upon them, I think every time we do that.
And you can also reduce some of the cost too because you've already written and everything, right?
Chad Hutson: I guess we could say we're trying to be benevolent and generous to clients, but we're also trying to make money off of what we have, IP we have created in the past.
The gestures that you're describing, kids are naturals to interact with those sorts of things and have fun and all that, but I've seen a number of cases where that same sort of gesture technology is designed for brand advertising or experiential. activation, so to speak, and I've wondered, do these really work with adults?
Chad Hutson: I remember when the Kinect first came out, I think that was around 2011 or so. My team at the previous firm were actually hacking it before there was even an SDK or software developer kit available and I think we were all just amazed by it and assumed this was going to transform how everyone interacts.
But what we figured out along the way, I know the DI team has this figured out also is that there's no international language, if you will, for gestures. You can wave and say, hello, you can flip a bird, if you're really upset, you can use a right turn or left turn, but I think that with these sorts of gestures, particularly with adults, they're not gonna wave their arms around like a crazy person.
I can't imagine many CEOs doing that willingly. So we've figured out that we have to keep those gestures very simple. It's more about standing in a place and it triggering content, or as I mentioned with kids that can run and be silly and that can fill that coloring book page very easily, but for the rest, it has to be super intuitive. If you are having someone raise their right hand or raise their left hand to advance an icon or a cursor, then those instructions have to be given in, I don't know, 15 seconds or less and have it figured out instantly.
It's been my experience that with experience design, that the ones that really work are those where the architect or person who designs the space, the physical look of a space is involved early, so that the screen technology doesn't look like it was added on, it's built in, like it's part of the original design. Is that a fair assessment?
Chad Hutson: Oh, so fair. Otherwise it's just just another giant rectangle, sitting in a lobby. It stands out, but more like a sore thumb than it does something that's integrated into the architecture. So I'm a big fan of all the involved parties talking as early as possible.
An architect's thinking we can integrate a screen here, but speak to the technology partner and think about what's the right pixel pitch, viewing angles could be an issue or ambient light. So I feel like the more that all the right people can talk early on, it can be beautifully integrated and it can be the right technology and the right content.
That's one of the ways you can reduce the cost, right? Because if you really think about it, then you can use like LED ribbon strips instead of a giant rectangle that you were describing to have the same kind of impact
Chad Hutson: Yeah, absolutely, and getting creative with almost a sculptural version of a display. I think I know a lot of people in our industry who talked about the beautiful work for the AT&T Discovery District, and there were many groups that touched that, but there is a sculpture that was fashioned after AT&T logo that's in that space, and it's it's also has embedded LED ribbons similar to what you described and yeah, it makes for an interesting experience and that brand touch is subtle. So kudos to that team on creating a pretty cool experience.
Yeah, it's like a halo sort of tunnel thing.
Chad Hutson: That's the one!
Yeah, that is nice.
With LED rapidly emerging and evolving, is that kind of the main go to thing now for DI when you're thinking about digital or are you still looking at OLED and LCD and other technologies?
Chad Hutson: Yeah. Direct view LED is in almost every conversation I feel like just because it is a great technology. This is not a slam on the AV industry, because I know technology can only advance as fast as it's able to. The supply chain is an issue, the pandemic was an issue. So I feel like not that tech has stalled. It's not the case at all, but I feel like advancement has slowed a little bit.
Definitely LED ribbons, direct view LED, some things that we've been playing with more recently, there's it's more of a smaller format now, but I'm sure that the size is growing. Actually I'm certain, I've seen some larger versions of it, but displays like the looking glass factories, the display looks semi holographic. You can use other gesture sensors for that. So that is a more of a one-to-one experience versus a giant shared experience. But I'm excited about that. Even outside of display technology, seeing what is being done with AI and creating visuals, platforms like Dall-E and Mid Journey, where you can simply type in a prompt and boom multiple versions of what the computer thinks is the right image for you, and I think that's also starting to step into video creation as well. It’s mostly static, but I've seen some early images of video.
I think that talk about being able to have dynamic content. Data visualization is one thing, but constantly having even photo realistic or having what looks to be an artist creation being done on the fly is pretty amazing.
Yeah, my son is heavily into all that stuff and DALL-E and he was just asking me to give him a prompt and I gave him some crazy prompt, like squirrels playing croquet or something, and 30 seconds later, there it was!
Chad Hutson: It's nuts. I'm gonna try that, squirrels playing croquet, wearing pink tutus in a desert and yeah, I bet it'll give me exactly what we want.
Yeah, and god knows why, but there you go.
Is the kind of flexibility that we're seeing now with LED important in that you actually have physically flexible modules, but you also have ribbons and you have LED on film, LED embedded in building glass and so on. Do those open up new opportunities?
Chad Hutson: Absolutely, they do, Dave. If anything, the first question is: can we do it? And we get excited and then it's a matter of pricing and availability and that's sometimes because it is so new or brightness could be a factor, or the glass has already been specked out and it's a matter of could we retrofit it, and it's just not as feasible, but now that we know those technologies are available at least for future endeavors, we are absolutely thinking about that as often as we can. Maybe it's a little bit of a gear list, but also it could be the right solution for a space.
Clients sometimes say at least, from a large scale perspective, we don't want anything that's going to obstruct views or have something where you can see wires or pieces or parts of the technology, and sometimes that's unavoidable, but I think if we can have the slimmer format of some of these ribbons or the embedded LED into glass, that solves some of that. So we're really excited about the future of those.
Is there a particular lesson that you've learned through the years that you apply to a lot of work now?
Chad Hutson: Honestly, if we're talking about an experience that does have a digital component, it is really pretty much what you and I have been harping on a lot in this conversation, which is just bringing the topic of content upfront, before decisions are being made about technology.
I'm a huge supporter of the AV industry and that beautiful content can't be as inspiring sometimes if it's not on the right kind of display or the right scale either. But I'm thankful for the integrators and other technology folks that I know that always ask the first question of: Yes, you wanna display but why, and what would go on a display and why do you want that, and yes, we're an AV integrator, but you need to have conversations with the architect or your creative agency, whoever it may be, so that's not falling flat because honestly, for, if there's a lesson learned, it's folks in the AV industry. They can be blamed if I spend a million dollars on this giant lobby screen and it doesn't do shit, and that's absolutely not true. If the right content solution is there and the experience that is intended is considered more heavily up front, then everyone looks good in the end.
Absolutely. All right, Chad, thank you very much for spending some time with me. That was super interesting.
Chad Hutson: Oh, thanks. It's good to be back on 16:9 and hope to talk again soon.
Wednesday Aug 10, 2022
Thomas Philippart de Foy, Appspace
Wednesday Aug 10, 2022
Wednesday Aug 10, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Appspace has now been active in this industry for 20 years, and through much of that time the software company was one of the larger players in a crowd of companies all chasing the general business opportunity of digital signage. But in the last few years the company has pivoted, in a big way, to the well-defined vertical of workplace. The company now describes itself as a workplace experience platform for both physical and digital workplaces. Digital signage is still a main component of what Appspace does, but just one of several in a unified platform.
I caught up with Thomas Philippart de Foy, who has been with Appspace for a decade and is now the EVP of Product Innovation. In our chat, we get into what took Appspace down the workplace path, and then how it all works within an organization.
The company has a PILE of users and says its software is in place at roughly 200 of the companies listed in the Fortune 500. But it also offers free accounts to smaller users, drafting off the well-used concept of freemium software - allowing people to try before they buy.
If you are looking at workplace - either as a vendor or as an HR, IT or ops person, listen and learn.
Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS
TRANSCRIPT
Thomas, thank you for joining me. You've been with Appspace for a very long time, right?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Just celebrating 10 years in September!
Oh, okay, and we first met a number of years ago in Dubai, but then you moved to Costa Rica, which was a bit of a pivot, but now you're in Belgium for a holiday, right?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: That's correct. I relocated to Costa Rica to get closer to the US time zone while still enjoying tropical weather.
You don't get tropical weather in Antwerp or wherever you're in Belgium?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Rarely, once a year in the summer, there's a good day, and then the rest is rainy.
And you don't like that?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Once a year, maybe.
So Appspace, that's a company that's been around for a very long time. When I first got to know Appspace, it was very much a general digital signage CMS platform, you know, “What are you doing? We can help you out!” And you were, at that time I believe, working pretty closely with Cisco, but in the last few years you could, you very much seem to have become a company that's all about workplace experience and digital signage is one of your outputs as opposed to being a pure digital signage company.
Is that a fair assessment?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Absolutely. We're celebrating our 20 years anniversary this month, so such a big milestone, and the firs 15-16 years was really building a cloud-based CMS for digital signage. We had some mission statements. We wanted to be hardware agnostic, OS agnostic. We wanted to be cloud first, and then a few years back, we started expanding our offering and went into the room scheduling worlds, where a lot of other companies were playing, and just added that as a feature.
Then just two years ago, Summer 2020, one of our biggest customers on the West Coast came over to us and said, “Hey, we're looking to return to the office after the pandemic. We need help in providing our users with an app that would allow them to reserve workspaces, comply with security policies and so forth.” And we decided to get onto that journey and build a product, and six months later we launched. So January 2021 and 30 days later, we signed one of the biggest tech companies as a customer, and from there it's been quite a ride.
Did the company go towards workplace because it looked like an opportune vertical to be in, or was it what the customers who you touching or asking for and it pulled you that way?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah, in the last 10 years, I spent a lot of time meeting with customers and trying to understand their challenges and see where Appspace could help them. In this scenario, the customer came over and they had a real challenge, which we saw many other companies would have, and there was really no one in the market that had an answer for it two years ago. So we thought that's an opportunity in which we could really put some focus, leverage our existing enterprise grade platform, cloud-first experience and credibility in our large enterprise customer base to just go and expand the use case.
Really, we also see that there is a correlation happening with workplace communication and workplace management. It's not gonna be two different things, it's actually gonna be one, and we thought we could come from our workplace communication expertise and go that direction while probably some more workplace management products would probably start moving towards workplace communication, and there would be a consolidation.
You also acquired a company called Beezy, which was all about the workplace as well, right?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah, when we entered workplace management, we also launched our employee app, and from there, we got a lot of requests from customers to focus on employee communication in the app itself, and we met with Beezy, they had a very similar company culture, they had a good size and they had a product which was very modern, very forward looking and built on Microsoft SharePoint, and we thought that would nicely align with our product platform and our vision, so that's been a very fun journey, onboarding them into the Appspace world for the last few months.
Now is Beezy still a brand, or is it that their IP and their capabilities are rolled into Appspace?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: We're rolling them into Appspace step by step. The brands are consolidating under a single brand. Now, it's the Appspace Modern Internet by Beezy, but we are clearly focusing on aligning all the different teams under a single organization, and also the brand and the product will be one.
We definitely don't wanna run two separate products. We've always had that philosophy that with Appspace, it was one platform and features and not multiple point products so we're gonna continue doing that.
There are digital science CMSs that say that the workplace is one of the verticals that they're in, and then there are companies that just do room booking software, and maybe the displays hardware as well, they blend those together. There are hot desk companies and everything else.
I'm thinking, like in a lot of other vertical markets, that the end user really doesn't wanna have to cobble together an overall solution that features all these different components and different companies doing them, they'd rather just have one company doing it all. Is that a fair statement?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yes, and the pandemic has accelerated the need for platforms versus point products.
Pre-pandemic on the workplace management, you had the IWMS to manage all your assets, you had room booking solutions for the room scaling panels, you had visitor management solutions to bring visitors into the office. There were all point products, and then on the workplace comm, you had digital signage that was a point product, you had kiosks often very close to digital signage, and then you had email publishing, you had intranet. All of those were point products as well. I think what we're seeing now is they're unifying on both sides. So you're starting to see vendors who offer room booking, hot desking, visitor management, and then on the other side, you've got companies who are starting to consolidate and acquire, and they're doing digital signage, employee app, intranet, email publishing, and what we're doing is both at the same time, which is probably our biggest unique differentiator.
We believe, if you have an employee app, it's not only about employee communication or workplace management, it's the two combined. So a single app on users' devices versus multiple apps.
And I assume that resonates well with the business communicators and the IT people within a company, because they don't wanna have to deal with all these different logins and back in and out stuff?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: I guess there's two sides to it. There's certainly the administrative side to it, but there's also the user adoption. A big part of the return to the office is implementing new tools for employees to reserve access into a building, reserve a meeting room or a desk, and comply with formalities, that's for sure. But the other side of it is how do you communicate with those employees? How do you let them know what are the new rules in place? What are the new policies? How do you communicate what are the new benefits in the office, the new technology available?
So being able to communicate in the same app that you're actually gonna reserve your workspace, invite your visitors, makes a lot of sense, and I think that's what HR and Corp comms are really liking with our story is that one app will do it all and it will of course integrate with all their backend systems and so forth.
So if I am a business communicator at a large corporation and I want to address these issues, what can you do for them and how does it work?
Are they buying an enterprise license? Is it cloud based or are they installing something on prem, and how does it all come together?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah, it's a great question and it's a big one and there's two sides to it. Once again on one side, you've got the admin, the console is fully cloud based, you don't need to install any software on your desktop, and you can start by just going on Appspace.com, create a free account and you get a full featured Appspace environment.
We don't monetize features, we monetize users and devices. So even with a free account, you’ll have all the features of Appspace, but you'll be limited in the number of users that can log into the app and the number of devices that you can register back.
So it’s the whole idea of Freemium?
I just wanted to ask because “free” is intriguing to me. You don't see that very much in digital science anymore, unless it's entry level super limited in what it does and so on, but you're doing free with the idea of onboarding people, getting them used to the system and them realizing, I like this and I'm willing to pay for it?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah, so what we think is that in order to be successful with Freemium, you need to have a platform that's really self-service, and I think that's what we focused a lot over the last 10 years is simplifying the product to the point where someone who just goes on our website, creates a free account, in 30 seconds is in the Appspace account, able to register a device, create some awesome content, publish it to the device and it's working, and we were able to do that for digital signage, but then we were able to expand that into all the digital communication channels and also for workplace management.
So we maintained Freemium when a lot of other companies started thinking, “That doesn't work for us, let's go back to a trial account with someone hand holding you.” We don't need that with Appspace, you can get started, and so we have a huge amount of customers that create free accounts every month, and then when they're ready to expend, they just need to click on the link and they get in contact with a Sales rep and they can just either swipe their credit card or work through one of our partners to buy a subscription.
Is that a huge amount of free signups every month? Are there no maintenance until they actually contact a Sales rep and say, “I'm interested in paying for this”?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: That's correct. They’re touchless most of the time.
We have very large organizations that will have a lot of different free accounts, different departments, different team members who will create free accounts and get started, and then when they're ready to move and they want to do the security assessment and they want to talk contract and large scale deployments, they reach out to us.
So I guess your sales people might look at big tech company, X and see that they have five different free accounts in different departments, and the salesperson could go to them and say, “Guys, you’re using a lot of this now, do you wanna harmonize it?”
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah. Our sales team, for sure, we also have a big marketing organization now. The product is also supported, so when you log into Appspace, you will have certain steps to follow to register a device, create content. It's the system that is holding your hand, not users.
And then along the way, you will have opportunities to get help, to talk to people. You can go to the knowledge center. Our Sales reps are already really there to help customers get to the next level, which makes it nice because when our Account Executives talk to customers, they already have a good understanding of what the customer has been doing with Appspace and they can really jump right into it.
What happens when you have potential new customers who already have some sort of a room booking system and scheduling system, and they like them.
Do you have APIs where you can just continue to work with them or do they have to abandon that and go entirely with Appspace?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: No, so we have open APIs, fully documented and online for every feature of our product. So we're happy to integrate with existing solutions that the customer may have still under contract or they're happy with it. What we're seeing though is very quickly customers consolidate because they see an opportunity for cost savings, for ease of management.
And then, you know the story of a unified platform, if you have an integration with an emergency system or your building management system and the fire alarm goes on, you can broadcast that message to a digital sign, to a visitor management kiosk, to a room scheduling panel inside the room on the video device, and that can be done really easily when you're using a platform. It's much harder to achieve when you're using point products, because you need to integrate each point product with a security system and many don't even support that concept of broadcast.
So what we're seeing is when customers onboard Appspace for one use case, they very quickly start seeing the opportunity to save money, ease operations, and then benefit from the platform features and capabilities.
Are you able to provide analytics?
I've heard about this in the past where you start to get a sense of how a workplace is being used and where people are dwelling and how often rooms actually get booked and how many people are in the rooms, and it helps to size and maybe rethink some of the meeting spaces that a company may have.
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah, so analytics and reporting is huge, and it's actually for the two sides of the product: for the workplace communication, understanding how users are interacting with content, whether it's on the app, on their phone, on their desktop, whether it's on a kiosk.
We have this concept of a corporate Netflix. We've had that for yours where users can actually browse content on demand, very much like you browse your video content on Netflix. You do that with the remote control, with a touch panel, whatever the interaction you want to use. We track all of that, and that gives a lot of analytics on how content is being consumed, the success of a campaign and so forth.
And then on the workplace management, we have the analytics of what are the most active users, what type of workspace they book? How long do they sit at a desk? How long do they use a meeting room? If the meeting room for 10 people was booked, but used by two people, we have that data, so you can size your resources accordingly based on demand.
And then you can visualize everything inside Appspace, but we also created integrations into Tableau, into Power BI. So customers can actually export the data and visualize it in their preferred data visualization tool.
And in a workplace, the Power BI and Tableau stuff is interesting. I'm curious, are workplaces now much more sophisticated to where they see digital signage and visual communications as doing a lot more than congratulating somebody on their birthday or their 20th year with the company or whatever it may be. They're getting into visualizing KPIs in real time and that sort of thing?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Oh, yes, for sure. The number of customers that display building analytics when you enter the building, when you get on the first floor, where you can see the floor plan, you can see the heat maps, you can see the air quality, you can see the average temperature of the neighborhood. That certainly is a very common use case nowadays, providing building insights to users on digital signs is becoming really exciting.
I think what we're seeing is a huge opportunity of combining workplace management and workplace communication is when you now have context to where digital signage can help, and you know that in the retail world, there's been a bunch of vendors who've monitored gender, age, ethnicity in order to manage communication campaign to those audience and measure also. In workplace management, you don't really care about age or gender. But what you do care is which user is sitting where, and when you've got a majority of salespeople sitting in a neighborhood, can you actually change the content to relate to those people? And that's been something that we've done a lot over the last year and a half is creating that context of digital signage experience, where even though I'm going back into an office where it's a hot desking hotel, the content still speaks to me, because the system is aware that I'm gonna be sitting there, and I think that's huge, because in those days you used to know exactly where people were sitting so you were planning your content for the sales team based on where people were sitting. Now, the system will automate that process based on the data they get from their workplace management feature.
And they're not using computer vision or things like that? Because when I come in to work at an office, I have to book a specific desk, and that's how you know that I'm there, right?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Either because you're booking a specific desk or you're sitting at a specific desk, and when you're actually sitting, we are able to identify who you are, and therefore dynamically say what's interesting to you is more sales data or more product marketing data, and therefore we mush multiple channels of content together to provide a perfect playlist that matches the audience.
But how do you know I'm at that desk?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: That's where workplace technology comes, whether it's smart docking stations, whether it's physically connecting into the network and passing the user identity, whether it's those new video devices that we see popping left and right on the desks. It could be when you have a desk puck, which is similar to a room scheduling panel, you arrive and you will scan the QR code with your phone and authenticate and check into a desk and say, this is now my desk. So we have a lot of different tools that allows us to identify the user and therefore to get that data that we need to personalize the workspace environment.
Through the pandemic, particularly in the first months, there was all kinds of discussion about how the workplace was gonna change, because those workplaces were being hollowed out through lockdowns and so on, and there's been all kinds of discussions and debate and everything else, particularly in the last six months or so, is where workplaces have started to repopulate as to whether it really did change all that much, and whether everybody's just working from home or everybody's into a hybrid thing.
You're on the ground, so to speak, you're dealing with companies who are implementing this stuff. What's your sense of what's actually happening?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: I think companies are worried that people are not coming back to the office as quickly as they had hoped they would, and although many companies during the pandemic said that they would not require employees to go back to the office. It's very different two years later, we realize how the workplace culture is important, and having people, if not every day, at least a few days a week, come into the office and meet their teammates and so forth. So we're now seeing a sense of urgency from many customers to find ways to convince people to go back to the office and that comes with offering a new experience, offering new services.
The new experience is making sure that regardless of where I sit in the building, I have the building talking to me, the building is aware that I'm there and being able to personalize that experience, and I think that's where digital signage is playing such a critical role. But then in the employee app, when I'm booking a room or when I'm booking a desk, I may need different types of services, maybe I need different technology, or maybe I want catering services. I should be able to do that from the app and reserve this ahead of time, and we're seeing a lot of demand around those new experiences where employees will get more benefits when they come to the office, not only benefits of a better physical workplace, but also benefits in terms of the services that are offered, and that will incentivize them to come back into the office, and then naturally, as people will come back to the office, they will meet their teammates again, and they will see why it's so important to meet in person, and that will create a dynamic, and at some point I think we'll get back to somewhat a normal situation where most people will go to the office more regularly.
Did the pandemic accelerate something that, from your perspective, was going to happen anyways and just speed it up out of necessity, or were there a lot of companies that weren't really thinking about changing how their workplaces were experienced?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: That's a great question. I actually think the pandemic gave the opportunity for large organizations to make a cultural change in the workplace that was planned, but maybe seen as a 5-10 years initiative, and they were able to do it in 2 years.
Hot-desking in hotels is an example. We've been talking about hotels and hot-desking for years, but no one was able to implement it. It was such a big cultural change. The pandemic gave the opportunity for companies to take the decision, to reduce real estate and implement hot-desking in hotels, and they had a good reason for that, and for employees, it was like a natural thing that was happening. It would have taken years to get there otherwise. That's why no one was really focusing on the technology for it.
I also think that the pandemic has accelerated the adoption of apps, like Microsoft Teams. Many companies were still using Skype for Business and other tools and they were struggling to unify under a modern app like Microsoft Teams or Slack or WebEx, and this gave them the opportunity to do that, and by doing that, all employees now have one common app on their personal device, whether it's a phone or a desktop, they're able to communicate, chat, exchange files, and we've just launched our embedded app for Teams. So now you have Appspace embedded in Teams, which means users don't need to download a new app to reserve their workspaces or receive team communication. They have all of it inside one app, and I think that's an acceleration that's a result of the pandemic.
We obviously saw how Zoom and Microsoft and WebEx grew from that. That has also helped in the adoption of new technology, like workplace management and employee comms.
Yeah, I was curious about that because if you have all these other workplace tools, the next logical thing to integrate into there would be video conferencing, but that's that's an entirely different business and pretty damn complicated. So the easier path would be to integrate with something like Teams, right?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: That's correct. I think Teams offer the framework to embed an app fully into Teams, handle the authentication for the user, and then from there, we have so much insights on what the user needs that we're really able to personalize the experience.
The Teams embedded app is a huge win for customers because if you think of a very large service organization with 200,000 desk workers, rolling out a new app for communication and for workplace management is a big challenge. Getting users to download the app or deploying the app to their personal device, enabling user authentication, tracking how users are actually logging in the app. This is no longer a challenge when you are embedded in Teams, because one morning you wake up and on your sidebar, you've got a new button, you click on it and that's where you reserve your workspace, that's where you see your workplace communication, all of it in an app that you were already logging in every morning.
So I'm a CTO at a very large tech company, and if I'm a CTO, the company's going down, but regardless of that, if I'm sitting across from you and I say, “okay, this is interesting, make me comfortable that this is secure.” What do you tell me?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: We obviously work with close to two hundred of the Fortune 500 companies, so we're used to working with very large organizations that have very strict security requirements, and our product (the cloud service) is already approved by IT, by Security and enabled whether it's for digital signage or room booking or visitor for one of the features.
Enabling suddenly to turn on the other features doesn't require any more security assessment because the product has been approved. We also have only one app, whether you are running our app on a system on a chip display, on a kiosk, on an iPad, it's the same app in a different container. And this means that once you have your app approved for one of the use cases, your app is actually approved for all the other use cases. That's again been strengths on our side is trying to keep it single simple platform that allows you to really very quickly scale this across your organization.
One thing that's come up a lot in the last couple years is digital science companies who addressed some of the ideas of remote work by having, in effect, a network screensaver, something that would push out to home based workers and pop messaging on a screen and all that. Are you doing that sort of thing, and if so, is it widely adopted?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah, it's a little bit what we started doing five years ago inside meeting rooms on video devices. When the video device is not used for video conferencing, pop up a screensaver and its Appspace, it's running natively on the client and it will display all the important communication. In the case of a meeting room, we're targeting a wider audience.
Now, when you run our UWP app on a Windows device, we obviously know who is the owner of that device, so we're able to personalize the content. Now, I see this as an interesting use case for screensavers. Although I've never seen someone sitting in front of his laptop watching a screensaver as they do a digital sign, drinking a coffee, but I do like the experience of: you're running the Appspace app on the desktop, it's in screensaver mode. When you plug in your laptop in the office or at home, it pops up the experience where as a user, you can say, “Hey, I'm working from home” or “I'm in the office”, and that then trickles into a whole series of events that makes your colleagues, your teammates aware of where you are working from today, are you in the office and so forth.
So screensaver for just pure content playlist, that's really easy to achieve, but I don't know that this is a huge benefit and a huge win, but coupling that with workplace management can be really interesting.
Yeah, I do like the idea of being able to instant message somebody in a way, other than an email, but you're right. If I was working for a large company and I was sitting at home and there was something steadily popping up on the screen telling me about Millie's birthday or Bob's retirement or whatever, I'd be looking very hard to figure out some way to disable it.
Thomas Philippart de Foy: One thing we did though, is we worked with a big law firm in Canada, and the CIO managed to convince the partners to move from a physically assigned office to a hot office, if you will. Very challenging, because lawyers and partners are very conventional. They like their workspace environment. They want their corner office. And what the CIO was able to convince is there would be new sacrifice in the personal experience and to do that, they put in every office, a digital sign, 55 inch display coupled with video or not, depending on the office profile. Outside the office, there is an office scheduling panel.
The partner from home is able to reserve on their Appspace app, “Hey, I need an office from 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM and these are the amenities I need.” They reserve that workspace, and when they come into the office, they actually check on the panel outside or on their phone and the digital sign instantly switches to their personal channel. They have potentially their practice news, maybe their preferred sports news, and also their family pictures that they want, and they've just personalized that office with content for the partners and that made them really excited because now they had a big 55 inch display showing their practice news or their family pictures instead of those little frames on the desk that would take the dust.
I think when technology really increases the user experience and doesn't sacrifice anything, I think this works really well as a home office as well. If you have an extra display and you can use that real estate, that makes sense, but let's not be mistaken, people care about themselves primarily, they want information that's relevant to them. If I'm at home, I don't know that I want this birthday of a colleague, but I wouldn't mind having pictures of a year ago from my family and kids that I celebrated, maybe that's more useful for me.
We haven't talked about back of house and all the discussions around being workplace, as it relates to an office, are you doing work in production areas and industrial areas and so on?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah. So if you remember, we acquired a company called The Marlin Company a couple of years ago, and their main focus was industrial. A very large amount of customers in that space, and we've been working a lot with those customers in transitioning from digital signage, which was a normal evolution of printed posters to digital content and focus a lot around safety and workplace wellbeing and so forth to communicate on personal devices.
Now, frontline workers typically don't have a company email address. So how do they log into the app? So we combine digital signage with the employee app. Digital signage will say, “Hey, there's a new employee app. To access the app, scan this QR code!” User scans the QR code on their phone, enters an employee ID and a phone number and a few seconds later, they get a one time password to create their credentials and they are now logged into the same app as the desk workers with different feature sets, but it's the same app, and now they also have the ability to have employee communication, team communication. They can chat, they can react socially and comment on the content the same way anyone else.
This is breaking the barrier between the desk workers and the frontline workers where really the frontline workers who didn't have a lot of the technology stack because they didn't have a company email address, where everyone has a smartphone so why wouldn't they have the same benefits? And that one time password, no email login has been huge win for us and for our customers in making sure every employee is aligned and has access to the same capabilities.
Last question, this conversation flew by. What's the installed footprint for Appspace at this point?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: It's always hard to say because we count users. We evaluate that around 10 million users benefit from Appspace around workplace management and workplace communication today. We have around 2,500 customers, two hundred of the Fortune 500, and deployments that will scale on the screen size between 50 screens and 10,000 screens for a single customer.
And on the user side, our largest deployment is 175,000 users logging into our app to receive team communication or reserve workspaces. So very large deployments. We like to focus on large customers, but with the Marlin acquisition, we were able to really get into the industrial segment where you have a lot of smaller organizations, maybe not always smaller in terms of number of workers, but maybe smaller in terms of number of physical workspaces.
Yeah. All right, this was great. I learned a lot, which is, I guess the point.
Thomas Philippart de Foy: That was great. Thank you so much for giving us the time.
Wednesday Jul 27, 2022
PJ Thelen, RoveIQ
Wednesday Jul 27, 2022
Wednesday Jul 27, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
When PJ Thelen talks about the company's software and hardware, he focuses almost entirely on the experiences they enable and deliver, as opposed to the features and specs of the technology.
It's refreshing, because a lot of the conversation and marketing around outdoor displays for directories, wayfinding and advertising has been - at least in recent years - about how they were more than just screens, but smart city devices that did a variety of things, including WiFi connectivity and IoT sensors. Thelen went so far as rebranding the company he now runs from smartLINK to RoveIQ - getting away from the heavily-used smart moniker and emphasizing how Rove speaks to enabling people to navigate a space with intelligent - the IQ bit - guidance.
The company has a CMS, sophisticated mapping, an ad server and analytics capabilities all designed to help people find their way around big places. The early adopters have been commercial properties - like mixed-use lifestyle developments. In many to most cases, those are wayfinding directories with mapping, supported by advertising.
But Thelen sees a lot of possibilities working with large-footprint healthcare, helping people find their way around sprawling medical campuses. There would be physical screens providing guidance, but in his vision, RoveIQ guides people from the time they park in a hospital garage all the way to a specific building, floor and waiting room.
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TRANSCRIPT
Peter, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what RoveIQ is all about?
Peter (PJ) Thelen: RoveIQ really emphasizes smart kiosks and wayfinding software solutions.
We just rebranded our organization from smartLINK to RoveIQ and Dave, a big reason for that was we wanted to make sure our new name is better aligned with the solutions that we bring to market and the value that we provide for both our customers and partners. Now the word Rove, it's the whole idea of wandering, discovering, et cetera but the IQ element is to do it in an intelligent fashion. So you have a very efficient and enjoyable experience.
So if somebody listening to this is trying to visualize what you do, the visual that would immediately spring to mind would be a display totem outside in a public plaza or something like that with directory or mapping, correct?
Peter Thelen: Yeah, without a doubt. So I always use the analogy, Dave, to pretend that you're going to a place for the first time. You're not quite sure where you are or what is around you so you leverage the hardware and our software to understand what is available and then ultimately leveraging either the kiosk experience or the mobile experience allows you to essentially get to where you want to go leveraging a Blue Dot scenario, which obviously is our wayfinding software.
Blue Dot scenario, what do you mean by that, or is that just the name of the software itself?
Peter Thelen: No, that's just the analogy I use Dave, where if you think about where you are and let's just say, hypothetically, you want to go to a restaurant, the dots correlate to the path that you need to take to go from where you are to where you ultimately want to go.
The old name, smartLINK, connoted the whole idea of smart cities and that there were all kinds of companies coming up with smart city kiosks in the last decade or so, and I don't necessarily see a lot of traction for those sorts of things. Is that kind of driving this as well? What if you better focus on the whole idea of guiding people, as opposed to saying this is this station that will do all these other things to help cities become smarter?
Peter Thelen: Yeah, we took a step back. RoveIQ is a software company. It just so happens that it needs a hardware platform to promote the value that we drive on a day in and day out basis.
In our minds, smart was widely used. It didn't necessarily correlate to exactly what we do today and where we're going tomorrow. From a search engine optimization perspective, it was tough just because there's so many smart this and smart that. As RoveIQ continues to grow, we're growing more and more into other verticals beyond just the smart city. So the bottom line is that we wanted a name that more appropriately aligned with who we are and what we're doing on a day in and day out basis, and it just made sense.
It was a great exercise. It was about a six month long exercise with a phenomenal local company here called Brand Fuel, and we're very happy with the results.
There seem to be two kinds of threads of these kinds of outdoor street furniture displays. There are those shopping malls and community business districts, that sort of thing put in to help people find their way around intelligently, and then there are those that are there primarily as advertising. “Oh, by the way, there's also a directory” or “there's also some sort of a lookup thing” but it exists for advertising. Do you go down one path or the other, or do you serve both?
Peter Thelen: Yeah, that's a great question, and we definitely serve both, but there is no doubt that the emphasis of our software is around creating experiences. Experiences that a visitor or a resident is wanting to have, or is not expecting, and ultimately has, which generates this great feeling.
Our software, which we consider a platform. It is a content management solution. It has the ability to be an ad server, which allows you to download and upload ads as well as schedule ads, then it has this third element around data analytics and reporting. So we feel like we have some of the best software out there. But there is no doubt at the end of the day, we're trying to promote more experiences as compared to just ads.
But a big part of the ROI from a customer perspective is that digital out-of-home ad opportunity, and post COVID that's growing significantly, which is creating great opportunities.
And ultimately, regardless of the venue and the scenario, something's gotta pay for the thing, right, so that's why advertising tends to come into play?
Peter Thelen: Yeah. We always say there's hard and soft ROI in terms of your investment in RoveIQ. The soft is the experiences that both the customer, the resident, the visitor, incurs on a per visit basis, and how do you measure that? Secondly, it is the digital out-of-home ads based on whatever DMA that property or the city resides in that correlates to how big of an opportunity that is, and then the third element, which in my mind is still fairly immature, but it's becoming more relevant and more mature each and every day is this whole idea of how do you leverage the data?
Whether it's the touch analytics, whether it's the video analytics and then the ability to potentially incorporate both WiFi and mobile, and then what do you use to do with that data to do something of value with it.
You mentioned experience, how do you define and characterize experience?
The experience can be what you see on the screen, what it looks like and everything else, or the experience can be, “that was easy. I found what I was looking for quickly, and that was a great experience” because now I can go in and experience whatever public plaza or mall or attraction that I'm at?
Peter Thelen: At the end of the day, people want to be informed, they want to be educated, they want to gain access to information in a very quick and inefficient manner, and ultimately, they want to.
We're designing our software where when you approach a kiosk and you start to interact, you can get off of it in less than 40 seconds and feel really happy about the experience and you're on your way, and you feel like you're on your way in an intelligent way. I always use the analogy, Dave, if you come to a property or a city for the first time, you're gonna be inclined to use our software. We at, RoveIQ wanna make sure every time you visit that city or that particular property, regardless if you know where you are and what is around you, because of your previous experience, you want to, once again, interact with our software, it causes you to want to come back, and if you're coming back, that means we're doing our job and adding great value to the customer, the property, etc.
So if you're doing your job, this is where repeat visitors tend to migrate to like Moss to a light. They just know, “I'll start here to help me find what I'm looking for”?
Peter Thelen: That's a hundred percent correct, and our new brand promise is this whole idea of enriching lives through intelligent software designed to move humans, then we elaborate saying both physically and emotionally, and that emotional element is probably the most important.
So where does your company start and where does it stop in terms of services and technology that you provide?
Peter Thelen: So knowing that we're a software company that ultimately needs a digital display to add value and differentiate, we're providing a fully integrated solution to a customer, which obviously includes the hardware, the related installation, the software, and then the ongoing maintenance. To do all of those things, you need to wrap it in a bow from a project management perspective, and then ultimately you're bringing this data element and this advertising element as part of the overall solution as well so the customer looks at you as a one stop shop.
So we have that ability today. Now, obviously, we leverage partners where that is their core business to add the ultimate value and aspects of the overall solution. But hopefully that's transparent to the customer.
Yeah, I'm guessing that you guys would be happy as clams if you could just be a software company and not have to worry, or really even think about hardware and just provide the specs that it needs to run on this sort of thing, but as you say, people want one stop shopping, they want turnkey.
Peter Thelen: Yep, but that does bring up a good point. Before I got here in May of 2021, we were predominantly dependent on hardware. Of course, in the last 14 months we've made phenomenal strides in promoting mobile-only solutions. So if you think about something as simple as a smart city or a mixed use real estate, yes, you're walking up to a kiosk, but as you exit that kiosk, you can scan or text to phone, to basically take that exact same experience from the kiosk with you on your mobile device, you don't have to download anything, it is considered a web app and off you go.
We're also offering mobile-only solutions which are cool. As we penetrate colleges and universities and healthcare, we're not dependent on that hardware. You can get the benefits of our software, just leveraging your mobile device which has been pretty exciting to see and we look at that as a high growth vertical.
So in theory, let's say on a university campus, you could walk up to a support column in a building and there'd be a QR code on there with a message that says. “Having trouble finding your way? Scan this!” and it'll launch your app and off you go?
Peter Thelen: That's a hundred percent correct.
How do you make money off of that then?
Peter Thelen: Well, that's all our software. If you think about it, the theme you're probably hearing from me is, we're a software company, and every time we're providing value around our software, there is a fee for that subscription base , it's monthly and it's based on the opportunity.
So in a conventional setup where you are providing display hardware, you would have a play out license for that display, but with the university campus or something like that, if you're not using physical displays, you would just have some sort of a site license for the campus?
Peter Thelen: That's a hundred percent correct.
Okay. That makes sense then. I'm curious about wayfinding. Mapping for big public displays has been around, I'd say at least a decade, maybe 15 years, and like everything it's evolved, and I saw on your website, one of the things you talk about is three-dimensional wayfinding.
Over the years, what has your company found in terms of what resonates with end users? Do they care about certain things like it being three-dimensional or do they just want something that's very intuitive and quick?
Peter Thelen: I've concluded it's all the above. I think users today are smarter than ever. They have a very high expectation in terms of the experience that they're aspiring to have. So they want everything. There's a lot of wayfinding solutions out there. So we always think to ourselves, what makes ours better than the next, and knowing that we emphasize experiences, how do we really promote a better experience as it pertains to that whole wayfinding experience?
So not everybody does 3D, most only do 2D. The whole idea of interactive is a big deal, and we obviously wanna promote that fairly aggressively, but the one thing that we're really emphasizing, Dave, is this idea of hyperlocal. Do we capture all elements of a property? So when an individual starts their journey, leveraging our software, it's a great experience. They very clearly know where they're going, they can visualize the surrounding environment and as they're going, there's no fear and uncertainty or doubt about where they're ultimately going to get to, because there's a high degree of confidence in that.
The hyperlocal is a very important element to our solution. It could be as simple as a bench, it could be a tree, it could be the look and feel of the building. Our UI/UX team does a phenomenal job of configuring the property on a per deal basis to make sure it looks and feels just like that property actually is.
So some of the areas you're in like Port Orlando in Orlando, or Miami Design District and so on, if a shopping or mixed use outdoor district like that approaches you guys and says we want to do this. What is involved? You were talking about the UX design and everything. Do they go on site or how do they put this together?
Peter Thelen: Yeah, it's a lot of different elements, which makes it fun and exciting, but ultimately it starts with a site survey, where we walk the property with the respective owners. We identify those high traffic areas. We understand the goals from the owner in terms of what they really want from this hardware and software. You have to define the advertising opportunity as part of the whole digital out-of-home. Sometimes it's a great opportunity, sometimes it's just an average opportunity and in some instances, based on the location of the property, it might not exist at all. Then the last element is this whole idea of data.
Data is becoming more valuable like I referenced earlier. Each owner wants different types of data sets that's important to them. So as part of the onboarding, we define those data elements. But as we leave that site survey, you're taking all these pieces to the puzzle and assembling them into this picture that correlates to ultimately what they want which is a combination of hardware and software that are strategically placed throughout the property. We've built out the software in terms of the configuration so the experience as you approach the digital display looks and feels just like the property.
I always use the analogy, picture your iPhone. When you open up your iPhone, you have the various apps on the first page. That's no different than what we do for a customer as part of the configuration process, and then we build out the maps. Take into consideration that hyperlocal, 3D concepts
It is the core goal and aspiration simply to ensure that people who visit a venue like Port Orlando or whatever, to just not be lost and frustrated, or is it a little more sophisticated and evolved in the case of trying to influence where they might go?
Peter Thelen: I'm chuckling a little bit because it's both. If you think about the whole idea of moving people physically and emotionally, the physical aspect is the wayfinding, and that is the emphasis of our software, but we're one of the first in industries to roll out augmented reality selfie. I was at the Avalon property outside Atlanta, Georgia last week, and I sat on the property for three hours, Dave and I watched people interact with our software, and 70% of the people were leveraging the selfie and having an absolute blast with it in terms of what filter to use, how many people to incorporate into the selfie picture. I watched them scan or text to phone and I watched them walk away giggling, because they were so happy with the experience.
Okay. So this is walking in front of a totem, there's a camera, it's capturing your image in front of the camera and then you're overlaying it like mouse ears or whatever?
Peter Thelen: That's a hundred percent correct. I would say think of Snapchat filters, that's the exact experience that we're promoting, leveraging our software.
Is that all just about the experience? Like I did this at this location and it's going to brand it and say I was at Avalon, and I did this fun thing and it's cascading out to that person's followers and therefore it's helping the Avalon brand?
Peter Thelen: That's a hundred percent correct, and then the other side of that, and I'll just use an example of coupons. Think about the whole dynamic of a property wanting to potentially push more and more of the visitors to select locations or select stores, think about the whole idea of, I'm at Avalon for the first time, where is Lululemon? I used the software to understand where Lululemon is from a wayfinding perspective, Lululemon then offers me hypothetically a 10% coupon for today's spend, I scan that QR code, I work my way to Lululemon, I obviously make my purchase, I go to the POS as part of my payment process and I get 10% off my total order.
Lululemon's ecstatic that our technology drove people to their store, but the visitors were ecstatic because they got 10% off that they weren't expecting, everybody's happy. Those are the ideal scenarios. So the next time that family comes to Avalon, they're gonna be very inclined to leverage our software to understand what other coupons are out there.
That's got traceability too, right?
Peter Thelen: That's a hundred percent correct.
Yeah, and is that happening very often, people using it?
Peter Thelen: The answer is yes, and it's happening more and more every day. RoveIQ has only been around since 2016, it was started by two individuals that also had another company. So you could make an argument, it really was a hobby.
I came here in May of last year. We had very talented people, it just needed more direction and more leaders, and we're adding new features every single day to our software to once again, heighten the whole idea of creating more and more experiences.
. Did you know much about this space when you came into it?
Peter Thelen: Yeah, I did a little, I do adapt to be dangerous, but I ran an IT solutions company for 19 years. I spent my last two years at an organization called Kroger, a rather large grocery store where I ran a division called Sunrise Technology, and that was all about leveraging technology that Kroger developed in house and realized that it worked, and the ask from me was to take that technology and sell it to the global retail world.
The emphasis of that technology was digital shelves inside a grocery store. So I took that same experience, in that case, it was a digital shelf. In our RoveIQ world, it's a digital display, but the elements of the solution were very similar: data, advertising and experiences.
I noticed in the press release announcing the name change that you also made a reference to healthcare software that was coming and I thought that's interesting, so what was that all about and is it now live?
Peter Thelen: I've had so much fun with the team and healthcare customers working on this new concept and it's going great. The premise is fairly simple. If you think about the average experience today, where you have to go to a healthcare facility tomorrow, and these healthcare facilities continue to get bigger and bigger, which from a patient perspective, creates a lot of apprehension and anxiety around, where do I park, what entrance do I go in, and how do I ultimately get to the department that I'm needing to go to?
So leveraging our legacy software, we have made tweaks where we are now integrating into their Epic and/or Cerner, where essentially a patient gets a text the day of their visit and that text takes them from their current location to the correct parking garage via car, then transfers to foot from the parking garage to the correct entrance, and then continues from the front entrance to the actual department. All leveraging a mobile device and obviously our software on that mobile device, and needless to say, it's addressing a rather large problem in healthcare that we believe with confidence we can solve and we're pretty excited about it.
Now, where does it stand? We're in pilots as we sit here today, which means we're learning every single day with a set of customers, and needless to say, our goal is to go live with many customers as we enter 2023.
That's an interesting one because an awful lot of big healthcare complexes started off as one building and ended up being eighteen buildings and they're all joined together and it's confusing as hell to find your way around, and I can certainly respect the idea of something that can say: go out this door, go down this hallway, go up three levels, then turn right and left, and eventually you're gonna find your way there because without it, you might have to leave super early because you know you're gonna get lost.
Peter Thelen: Completely agree, and if you think about the idea of hyperlocal and our legacy software with these enhancements, we can promote this unbelievable experience where you always feel like you know where you're going and where you need to go to ultimately reach your destination. And from a customer experience perspective, these healthcare entities that we're working with today, that's one of their big issues.
People need to feel good about where they need to go and how to go about getting there.
Do you address language as well?
Peter Thelen: The answer is yes. Now our current pilots, they have not asked for that, Dave, but the bottom line is, our software has that capability.
Yeah. I asked because years ago I had a meeting with a hospital in Toronto and it was in a very multicultural area of Toronto, and they had a roster of staff and volunteers who just handled all the different languages that came to the reception desk, asking where the Pediatric Clinic was or whatever, and they would have to call people and say, we need somebody who speaks Lithuanian or Tagalog or whatever it may be, and it was this monumental challenge.
I suggested at the time that you might wanna look at some sort of interactive directory that you select your language first, and then it takes you where you need to go that way, and they said that's interesting, but they wanted to just do the wow factor, I can't do stuff in their public areas instead, and they're like, oh, okay, that's not gonna solve any problems, but fill your boots.
Peter Thelen: Yeah, the bottom line is you wanna make sure you have software that can cover the population. The healthcare entities we're working with are defining that population. Needless to say, we're making sure our software can perform, and since it's our own proprietary software, the sky's the limit in terms of the capability and potential.
Yeah, I could certainly see what you're describing is working well on university campuses as well, particularly for night courses and part-time students who aren't familiar with where they're going and really the same thing in airports.
Peter Thelen: The airports for us, Dave, have been a tough market. It's so competitive, there's a fair amount of rather large players. Don't get me wrong, we focus on airports, but that's not necessarily where we have generated the most success today.
Airports are also pretty conditioned to media companies coming in and saying, we'll put this in for free.
Peter Thelen: That's a hundred percent correct. I can play that game all day, every day. I can play, it's just a matter of, can I compete?
Yeah, you're not gonna win too often when the other guy's saying, we'll put it in free for you.
Peter Thelen: You know that's the dynamic we deal with every day on a per deal basis. Based on the perceived digital out-of-home advertising opportunity, that can create a free experience or that unfortunately you have to pay for, it has to generate the corresponding value. So those are the discussions we have.
I'm guessing the majority of the opportunities that you run into and close are in some way bolstered by advertising, and there aren't that many that are purely just an informational display?
Peter Thelen: It's interesting, we've had a phenomenal 2022 and the characteristics of each deal really are so different, especially as it pertains to advertising, and there is no doubt when advertising can generate that ROI on its own, it makes it a very easy decision for a customer. But when that's not the case, then it correlates to what are the other value elements and is that important to our property? And we're seeing that increase more and more, which has been exciting, because obviously that's creating great opportunities for us.
But there's no doubt, advertising is a big play here and at the end of the day, we're trying to do everything within our means to bring the best solution forward around advertising to optimize that ROI from a customer perspective.
You mentioned programmatic in your press release. So are you working with the many programmatic companies out there? I don't even wanna rattle 'em all off, cuz there's so many and I'm so confused by it.
Peter Thelen: Yeah. So our software, because it's this platform and has this ad server capability, it integrates into programmatic partners, and we're constantly looking at the appropriate programmatic partners and then obviously incorporating those into our solution.
So yeah, that's a big opportunity. This whole idea of unused inventory, how can it be sold in an automated fashion? These programmatic partners make it very easy to fill a high volume, usually obviously lower revenue elements, but still important from a customer perspective.
The company itself, is it private or are you publicly traded?
Peter Thelen: No, it's private. It resides here in Northern Kentucky, right outside Cincinnati, Ohio. The emphasis today is within the United States, although we're always looking at growth outside of the US, but it's a fairly small company, but it's doing some really exciting and fun things.
How many folks do you have working there?
Peter Thelen: So we have 12 people today. I'm trying to grow that by an incremental three between now and year end. We have about 25-30 unique customers across five verticals: smart cities, mixed use real estate or lifestyle centers, we call it entertainment, but the emphasis really there is sports arenas, and then college universities, like we talked about earlier and healthcare. We're heavily focused on five verticals.
All right. So if people wanna know more about RoveIQ, where do they find you?
Peter Thelen: Our new website is RoveIQ.com, which in the last three weeks has gotten a lot of attention, which is pretty exciting. But they can also email me, which is pretty simple: pj@RoveIQ.com, and you have my commitment that I'll respond and give it the appropriate attention.
All right this was great. Congratulations on growing the company the way you have.
Peter Thelen:. Dave, I really appreciate your time. I appreciate your support. You do great work and thanks for giving RoveIQ an opportunity to talk about what we do on a day in day out basis.
Wednesday Jul 13, 2022
Johannes Troger, Ameria
Wednesday Jul 13, 2022
Wednesday Jul 13, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Health safety concerns that become top of mind for the whole planet back in March 2020 led to a lot of assumptions that the interactive display business was going to go touchless, with screens managed by mid-air sensors or perhaps by voice.
That only kinda sorta played out, as touchscreen companies did just fine through the pandemic. Staffing shortages and a desire to minimize staff to customer contacts led to widespread adoption of self-service screens used to order food and buy tickets.
But a German company that specializes in touchless technology suggests while consumers will use touchscreens to specifically get and do things in faster and easier ways, situations in which the screens are more about experience and discovery are going touch-free. Ameria argues that when a screen experience is opt-in, consumers are happier if they don't have to touch the screen - for health safety reasons and also because of the age-old worry about the cleanliness of the people who used the screen before them.
Based in Heidelberg but selling globally, Ameria is focused on the software that create, enables and delivers touch-free experiences using optical sensors. I had an interesting chat with Johannes Troger, who runs business development for the company.
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TRANSCRIPT
Johannes, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown on what Ameria is all about?
Johannes Troger: Yes, thank you, Dave, for having me, and sure, I can give you a little rundown. So Ameria is originally a software company coming from software project development, and a few years back, we went into the brick and mortar retail space providing interactive solutions. We are all about bringing a great experience to the customer, and started providing a lot of touch free or touchless solutions to customers.
So this is one of the things we are doing, and we are also providing a cloud platform behind that to manage all the solutions, to bring out the contents and to collect the data.
And you're based in Heidelberg, Germany?
Johannes Troger: That is correct. We're based in Heidelberg, Germany. We're founded here a few years back, actually by a couple of students from Heidelberg University who met there and found that there was a big market for software development, and yeah, that's how it got started, and then after a few changes, we arrived at where we are at now.
Are the students still involved or has it kind of evolved from there?
Johannes Troger: So one of them is. He’s our CEO, and the other one left a few years back, but one of the founders is still heading the company and is still our visionary behind everything we do.
Okay, and you're a private company, but you have outside investment?
Johannes Troger: Yes, we are a private company. It's still mainly owned by the founder and his family, but we have some outside investors. So the biggest part actually goes to a crowd investing group. It's a German platform called Companisto and we did a few rounds with them, which was a really great way for us to do it because it allowed a lot of people who also come from the industry to invest, and they didn't have to go in with large amounts but they really became our marketing and PR crowd and then we have a few larger investors also involved, but it's mainly in a family office space.
And what's your role with the company?
Johannes Troger: So I'm really heading the business development and partner development part of the business, so on the one hand, I'm a lot out there. Now again, out there at trade fairs and conventions and so on, talking to potential customers, also working with a lot of our partners and also still have some accounts which I started developing when I started at the company, and where I'm still involved in projects, which is always really good because from once in a while to see what's actually happening out there, that's really good.
We met at Infocomm in Las Vegas two-three weeks ago, and I'm curious: was this kind of a first foray into the US to start to build out that market or have you been active in it for some time?
Johannes Troger: In the past, we had some projects in North America, but they were mainly driven by customers from Europe who we supported in projects with their companies in North America. So really Infocomm was the first foray we did into North America, also talking to potential customers there, to potential partners and getting a feel of the American market.
How would you describe the state of the business? Are you out there with active installations and everything else, or are you just building things up?
Johannes Troger: So we are out there with active installations. They're usually not at a large scale yet, so we're talking about a lot of pilots and a lot of small scale installations. So it's about at this stage of the business, and I think we are on the verge of the first bigger rollouts with the Touch Free technology.
And is that the lead product now, Touchfree?
Johannes Troger: Exactly. That's what we've been focusing on in the last two to three years. We actually had some touchless solutions already before the pandemic, and we used them mainly in retail for promotional campaigns. We used them at trade fairs for companies who wanted to basically get more attention to their booth. But it was a niche product. It worked really well in what it was supposed to do but people didn't really see the need beyond that, and so with the pandemic hitting, a lot of companies realized that there are some companies out there in the market who are already doing solutions like this, and they came to us and based on their needs and requirements, and based on our experience and ideas, we started pushing those solutions, developing new options and re-augmenting our portfolio where it was needed. So that became really the focus.
It's interesting, when the pandemic first hit, the conventional wisdom was that this was the end for physical touch screens, nobody was gonna use one ever again because of the contagions on the screen and the inability to keep them clean and so on, keep them disinfected, so to speak.
What kind of played out is, touch screens actually had a pretty good couple of years through the pandemic because it was determined that separating one to one human contacts was safer using touch screens, even if you did have to wipe them down or do that sort of thing. So self-service became a big deal. So I'm curious because I thought that, okay, a lot of this is now gonna go to touchless and voice, but it didn't, but what did you experience?
Johannes Troger: So what we experienced is that, pretty much as you described that at the start, a lot of companies believed that the day of the touch screen was over and what we experienced over the course of the pandemic is that, there is a kind of big divide between solutions which are, I would say more process based. So you mentioned self order kiosks, for example, in the QSR space, and then on the other hand, there are more experience based solutions which are more geared towards marketing and inspiring customers and so on, and so with those process based use cases, we really see that touch screens are big in business and I think it’s kind of got the, “You still have got to get where you're going” thing behind it, right? So people really want their food, and as you mentioned, it feels safer to do it via the screen than to stand in front of a person at the counter.
So people use it and it's quite funny because even before that everyone could see all the studies about how dirty they were and how people were not washing their hands, and so on. We don't want to get into those kinds of unpleasant things, but it was pretty clear before that, but it didn't stop people before that, but when you see on the other hand use cases where companies try to bring an experience to their customers, inspire them, acquaint them with probably new products they have or with new services they're offering, there, we see that touch screens are not working at all. So if people don't understand what they're getting out of it, they're not gonna start interacting with a touch screen.
So they'll opt in when they're hungry or they need a transit ticket or whatever, but if it's for discovery of new products and promotions or accessorizing an outfit, they are less likely to want to touch something?
Johannes Troger: Exactly!
Okay, interesting. So one of the challenges that I've seen with touchless, and it goes back to the days when people were using Kinect sensors, gesture sensors, and so on, there was a learning curve and there was a problem with accuracy, and I'm wondering where that is at now?
Johannes Troger: Obviously, the technology has developed a lot, and I think the way it has developed this much more on the software side. So really the side from which we are coming, because we are not creating our own hardware sensors, we are really hardware agnostic in that.
So I think there are really some different things that happened. For one, the Kinect really worked based on creating a full body model, what is called the skeleton of the body and then tracked different joints and different points of the body, and that always meant there was some latency in it, and that always meant that you had to keep the interface with really large buttons and so on because it wasn't very precise.
And you're asking people to perform!
Johannes Troger: Exactly, and you usually have a certain distance from the screen and they have to make really big movements. So this was actually really the first solution we offered and we saw that it worked really well in any environment where people were in a kind of playful mood anyway, or where a lot of kids were involved and so on. So this worked really well or where you really wouldn't ask, People not to perform too much in front of the screen, but they still had a good experience, and so what we do now, for one, you're much closer to the screen so you can really work with an interface that you could also use on a touch screen. I wouldn't go as far as to say that it's advisable to just display a website, right? Because even with touch, you wouldn’t just use a normal website, you would probably make the buttons larger and so on. But it's precise enough now that after a bit of learning, you can actually even interact with a website without any trouble. So this precision problem, it's really a thing of the past.
What we also do is that we give users basically visual cues, so they get a sort of cursor where we have a dot and a circle around it, and then they know, okay, if they move closer in and the two merge, then that's when they do the click and they get a click sound. So it has become more intuitive, more precise, but at the same time, you can also help people to ease into it, and then regarding that whole latency problem, here we are really working with a combination. So it's not only about modeling the hand, but it's also about taking a lot of other parameters, like distance to the screen and so on and tracking objects in this kind of 3D space that we create and that really allows you to interact very fast.
So I assume the UX design is super important, like the workflow and that you've learned a lot through the years?
Johannes Troger: Yeah, absolutely, I think that's next to the technology and to making it really precise on the software side, that's really the key point and that's also why we realized pretty early that we had to be involved in that process, at least at the start.
So, we really pass on our experience with that to agencies of our customers, we are really involved in the whole design process, and obviously it's about a lot of things, I think some of the things also have to be considered when you talk about touch screens which you use in a public space, obviously the size of buttons and the positioning, so position them in places where it's comfortable for people to reach and things like that, and a lot of those things, once you look at it, they seem pretty obvious but they're not that obvious when you're designing it, and when you're in the middle of the process.
Do you have to tell people up front on the screen, so to speak, that you don't need to touch this, or is it intuitive enough that as you reach to touch it, it’s gonna blink and give you a signal that, yeah you've done your action already?
Johannes Troger: So we've been experimenting with a lot of different ways to make people aware, starting from not making them aware at all and just letting them find out themselves. But what we do a lot of the time is that we give them little hints, little popups and so on when they touch the screen that they don't have to, in a nice way, and that it's basically a nice service to them that they don't have to touch the screen, but what we also do is that they still activate the button, even if they touch, right? So I think that's important because we don't wanna punish anyone for probably not getting it a few times.
At Infocomm, we had an app where the hint said in German, please don't touch or you don't have to touch. But it said it in German, and I was always joking. We do it wherever we are in the world. We do it in German because German is such a nice language for ordering people around. At the beginning we experimented with things like, if you touch the whole screen turned like flashing red and you would get MC Hammer’s Don't Touch This song and stuff like this. But what worked is, and we have tried a few apps where the concept or the idea behind it is that people, not in a straightforward tutorial get made aware of it or get taught to do anything, but that they explore it for themselves and are drawn into this by realizing, oh I'm moving my hand in front of the screen and something is happening.
So for example, we have one case where it's all about recipe inspiration in grocery stores and there you get drawn in by some audio visual cues to look at the screen, and then if you start moving your hand in front of it, and if you're about 20 centimeters or 15 centimeters away from it, there's this wooden cooking spoon on the screen, which starts moving with your hand, and so almost by accident, you realize, oh, I don't have to touch, and I'm still doing something, and we also do this with start buttons, which follow around your hand when you move it in front of the screen. And so this kind of accidental realization that, this is a touch free solution that is working really well, and that's what we can see in our data, and when we talk to users, which we routinely do, they usually say that's probably the most satisfying moment that they feel when they found out for themselves that this is something new.
When you install something, is there an adoption period where you can see at first there's lots of people physically touching the screen, but maybe a month later as you get repeat users, they get it?
Johannes Troger: So it's probably not so much an adoption period over the whole group of users. What we see is that typically a larger proportion of the users get it right away. So what we do is we basically track all the movements that happen in this kind of 3D space in front of the screen, and we use this to also tweak our algorithms and to work on that, and we also track how many of those little messages pop up when people are actually touching the screen, and so at one point when we were checking the numbers, we thought, okay, there's a hell of a lot of those messages, and we realized that they were restricted to very few sessions. So it seems that few people who don't get it, they really don't get it but the majority of people get it pretty much right away.
And this is optical sensing, right? So it's like those old leap motion, little chocolate bar kinds of size things that create this physical space in front of a screen?
Johannes Troger: Yeah, exactly. So we usually work with multiple sensors so that we can attach them on the screen, so in a kind of kiosks solution, they're built into that, but we also provide little boxes, which you can click on the sides of just a normal, old, passive screen that you have, and they basically from both sides, create this field and this multiple, camera approach also allows us to scale up in the number of cameras, which also allows us to, for example, in the retail solutions add a third camera, which is looking out and basically scanning the surroundings so that we can react to people walking past with the content in some audio visual ways.
So is there a little bit of AI and machine learning happening?
Johannes Troger: There is actually quite a lot of that happening, especially in the tweaking of the algorithms in regards to precision and to making it more intuitive, so one of the things on the roadmap is to use that to also be able to react to the way someone is interacting, so that after a couple of clicks we understand is this a power user, is it a regular user or is it a first time user? And then we can react in terms of the guidance that we give, and in that, there's quite a bit of machine learning involved.
You said you're a software company first and foremost, but you do sell hardware. Are you selling, kind of display totems that have this technology embedded in it? Because it's just simpler to have a full package, as opposed to saying, “We can do this part now go find the other part”?
Johannes Troger: Yeah. This is what we do, obviously in the early stages, and it's different for different use cases, right? So, for example, if it's about retail, we have partners who built the kiosk Systems, there's obviously a number of providers out there who custom build the kiosk to do what the customer wants, sometimes there's more involved. So it could be like a printer to be added to print out the recipes or some card reader which would be included. So that's where we work with the experts, but we can basically then deliver it end to end.
I guess what we're planning when we get to larger numbers, this kind of partner ecosystem is obviously gonna grow and what we are also working on is to also have basically this kind of retrofit model we can use the screens you already have and just have an upgrade path.
So it sounds like you do hardware because you have to in the early days, but ideally you're behind the curtain, so to speak, enabling other hardware manufacturers and solution providers to make this happen?
Johannes Troger: That's really the goal, yes.
But you gotta get from here to there first, right?
Johannes Troger: That's always when you bring in something new and when we were talking about the content and about designing the the UI and so on, I think if you bring out something new, you are always required to do much more than what you probably consider the core of your business, and of your innovative capabilities. I mean, if you do passive digital signage or you shoot a TV commercial or something, they're out there. There are thousands of agencies who understand the channel, who understand how it works and who can tell any customer perfectly how it works. But when you come to some new channel, which it really is, then there is no agency out there who has a whole desk full of best practices, and that's what we are seeing a lot of the time.
For example, with one customer, we were working on a solution, which is placed in petrol stations, and before that they had passive screens there and they obviously have what they do online, which is the only stuff they know how to do interactively, and so somewhere in between that, we had to find a way where the brand’s people said, yeah, that's fine, that's along our guidelines because they didn't have guidelines for that channel. So it's really about developing concepts for a whole new channel, and that's the same really with the hardware. So we talk to the hardware producers, to the kiosk producers and manufacturers, and we discuss with them how to best mount the sensors and how to bring it together.
So yeah, that's the fate of anyone who brings in an innovation, but I have to say, it's also the fun of it, right? Because it allows you to not only see this very narrow field in the value chain, but to also learn and understand about many other areas and become a more rounded business person for that.
Is it just the software that creates this field and does motion capture and all that? I believe you've got composer software that allows the end user to fully design the experience that their customers or their users are gonna see?
Johannes Troger: Exactly. We have a cloud software suite also behind that, so part of that is a composer software, which allows you to build the content. So you basically just upload the assets and activate them, and the other part is the, it's called the CX manager, the connected experience manager, and that really takes care of all the content distribution scheduling but also taking in the data that is created because other than a touch screen, we also have a lot of data that tracks what happens before someone starts interacting with that outward looking camera, ao we know how many people walk past, stop to look at the screen and so on, and it's really for monitoring the hardware, and it's really a system we started building a few years back and it's really geared towards being a central hub for all sorts of different interactive customer experience solutions that you have out there. So it also runs augmented reality car configurators which we did for a customer. It also runs beacon systems and mobile apps for customers.
So the idea is really everything that you bring out there for your customer experience or for creating customer experience can be run via that centrally.
Interesting. I noticed on your website that you referenced beacons and I thought there's a technology that had its moment and didn't seem to get much in terms of broad ranged adoption, but you're using them. How are you using them?
Johannes Troger: So, with beacons, it's use case where is really in the automobile industry, and It works in a way that the beacons are placed in the cars, and then if you have the manufacturer app you can step next to the car, and it displays all the facts about the configuration and about the car you're standing in front of
On a smartphone or…?
Johannes Troger: Yeah, on a smartphone.
So the idea behind that is really to provide information and then to allow people to take this information, and for example, then include it into their own configuration that they probably have done online and that they have stored in the app, and so that there really is a kind of exchange between the physical experience of the showroom and the digital experience they probably started at home.
If somebody stops you and says, who's your big client? What's that reference case that you like to talk about? What is that?
Johannes Troger: So, in automotive, the most work we have done is with Porsche, so for a long time they were our largest client and they were the most innovative ones really when it came to how to deliver more experience or more digital experience to their customers. In retail and consumer goods, the longstanding client and the most innovative one, and the one we were able to try and learn the most with this is definitely LEGO, and I think one part of that was really that they obviously understood the kind of playfulness of it right from the start, and what we are seeing is that really the retailers themselves that's something that really only has happened for the last two or three years.
I think, five years ago, a lot of the retailers still felt okay, the whole digital stuff in brick and mortar, that's mostly gadgets and let's just hang up a couple of screens and that's fine, if they even did that, but now for the last two or three years even in grocery, retail and so on, I'm hearing a lot of managers saying, okay, we know that we have to move and we know that we have to do a lot to be ready for the future, and I think the exciting thing at the moment is that other than, if you wanna build an online shop, there are a lot of people out there who can tell you that's how you build an online shop, but when you come to digital in the brick and mortar space, there's no one who can tell you those are the two or three recipes, that's how you build it, and that's it, right?
So probably passive digital signage is about the only thing that people by now know how it works, and you can find someone who does it for you and executes it nicely, and that's fine. But anything beyond that, it's still a lot of trial and error of finding out what is it really, what the customers want? What do they need? How can we attract them to use something?
All right, this was great. If people wanna know more about the company, how do they find that out? Where do they go online?
Johannes Troger: Obviously, the first point is our website, so it's www.ameria.com
Okay, perfect. All right, thanks again for spending the time with me.
Johannes Troger: Thank you, Dave. Thank you for a really interesting half-hour with you.
Wednesday May 25, 2022
Denys Lavigne, Oasis Immersion
Wednesday May 25, 2022
Wednesday May 25, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
One of the best things about projection mapping technology is its ability to completely fill a big space with immersive visuals. The resulting experiences can be good enough to become paid attractions.
There are now dedicated, ticketed venues devoted to immersive, projection-mapped experiences around the world, and one of the best is Oasis Immersion, a venue in downtown Montreal that was dreamed up by a guy who'll be very familiar to the digital signage community - Denys Lavigne.
He started and ran Arsenal Media for many years - building up a creative shop that most years would all but sweep the digital signage awards programs it entered. Arsenal was ultimately acquired by the display technology firm Christie, and Lavigne continued working for them for about four years, before deciding to step away and chase a new dream.
That's been a real journey. I had lunch with him years ago, in New York, when he laid out the rough concept for me. I did a walk-through of the venue back in 2019, when it was just a set of darkened rooms, months off from opening. Then COVID hit, and the launch plans were derailed by lockdowns. The concept and business clawed its way through the pandemic, and Oasis is open and thriving with experiences designed to both amaze and inspire.
I had a terrific catch-up chat recently with Denys.
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TRANSCRIPT
Denys, can you tell me what Oasis is all about?
Denys Lavigne: Oasis Immersion is an immersive destination that was launched on February 25th, 2021 in Montreal. It's within the Montreal convention center, and it's really part of this new trend of immersion as a destination, similar to places like the Cathédrale in Paris, the Team Lab project in Tokyo have actually quite a few. So it's really based on projection and audio, it's a 25,000 square foot space structured in three galleries. There's a cafe bar, there's a boutique and there are two additional experiential areas. So I'm really proud of this project.
And this is right in the heart of Montreal, right?
Denys Lavigne: Right in the heart of Montreal, the Montreal convention center is located between the old Montreal area and the cultural district and the business district. So it's within an area called the international district which bridges to many strategic areas within the city.
And this is, if I'm remembering correctly, because I've walked through this space with you, it was an old loading dock or something for the convention center?
Denys Lavigne: It was actually before a bus station, and it was transformed into a potential future exhibit area but the project never really came through so it was actually used as just a storage facility, and because of its location within the convention center, it wasn't necessarily easy to use as a rental space, because most of the other areas' rental rooms and conference space are on the upper floors. So it became a no man's land, and when I was made aware that this area was just sitting there, I thought this could be a great place for this project. I had the immersive destination project in mind for a while, and this was the perfect timing and the perfect location to do it.
Yeah, you're right across from some pretty good hotels and not far away from some other ones and obviously it's a convention center, so there's a ton of people flowing through there. It's on a subway line on and on. So it seems kind of perfect.
Denys Lavigne: Absolutely. For us, the location in terms of the site itself was really important, and the other interesting aspect about the location, it helps us to diversify the business model around the project. So we do have, of course a more B2C angle with the immersive exhibits that we present to the audience, but we also have a B2B angle where the space can be privatized for different type of events and used as a another option in terms of the rental for spaces so it works out really well from so many angles.
This is one of these “experiences” where you're going to walk in and with projection mapping, you're just going to be totally immersed in whatever the theme is for that particular exhibition?
Denys Lavigne: Yes, so there's a lot of different definitions about what is an immersive experience these days. I think VR industry will very often refer to these types of experiences as immersive experiences, and it is in a certain way. The way I define a real immersive experience is about stepping into this other world that is dynamic and putting the visitor in the middle of the story of the experience itself and the experience evolves and there's a total immersion from an audio and video perspective.
So yes, it's the type of experience where you walk around, it's similar to a museum and that really helped us in terms of finally being able to open because initially the project was scheduled to open early June of 2020 and of course, we all know what happened, and we were able to reopen a bit sooner than some other cultural destinations because of the fact that people walked around the space like a museum. There's no time limit. There is no official start to the show. You do have to buy a ticket to arrive at a certain time so that we can manage the traffic flow and limit waiting time at the entrance, but it's really like a very free experience in terms of the way that you want to experience, the duration, and yes, you walk into every room and there's 360 projections on the floors, and of course spatialized audio in every room, which is a really important thing that is often underestimated in terms of its importance within an immersive experience.
This has been quite a journey for you. As you mentioned, you plan to be open in Q2 2020, but then COVID hit but this is actually something that's been in the works for what, two or three years prior to that?
Denys Lavigne: I was actually made aware of the site in the summer of 2018 and then the development process started from there. So yes, there was a process to it, and of course the pandemic added another layer of complexity to putting this project together. The past two years have been quite difficult, but we're turning the corner and fortunately, it's a good time to offer the audience this type of experience. I think there's a lot of interest and these experiences can be so powerful, and I think if we continue to do a good job from a quality of experience perspective, then we have the feeling that the audience is listening, the audience is interested and it's looking good for the future.
We had to go through this process to put the project together and roll through the difficulties of the pandemic. But now, things are stabilizing and we're looking forward to build for the future.
When we talked about this well before you launched, you put a big premium on wanting to have very much thematically curated expositions that were built around an idea, as opposed to just having generative data artists put something up on these big canvases and make it flow and ooze and do whatever it was going to do. You want it to talk about particular topics like space, and so on.
Denys Lavigne: Yeah, specific topics, but also specific topics at the right time, and I think that speaks to the kind of the heritage that I have coming into the immersive world through the world of digital signage and having been exposed to the different types of projects where the essence of it is to show the right message, at the right place, at the right time and that mindset carried through this project, and for us, one of the interesting aspects was to look at building a curated programming that was relevant to present at a certain moment in time so the here and now angle for us is quite important, and how it connects through not necessarily the news of the day, but the bigger picture trends of the moment.
So this is how we approach our programming, allowing us to go in different directions. But staying relevant in terms of the timing of it, and also staying aligned with our DNA about using this media to share an optimistic perspective of life and use this media in a way that will inspire people, that will give them something that will stay within them after the exhibit hopefully, and just provide an uplifting perspective. This is really at the heart of this Oasis project, because the immersive media can be such a powerful experience that for us, the notion that it had to be relevant at that moment in time and provide a positive influence to our visitors was really important because both me and my co-founder and a dear friend, we're big fans of rays and multimedia performances, and I think one thing that we noticed over time is that there was very often a lack of connection with the times, this lack of sometimes emotion, that it was visual exploration just to explore, and sometimes it was really interesting, but we thought that a curated approach that was both relevant and inspirational, and that touched people was where we wanted to be and how we wanted to use the media.
Have you developed a sense that the aspiration to strike an emotion with the people who are visiting, that's working? Are you getting feedback that this was more than just visually interesting to them?
Denys Lavigne: Absolutely, and it's been so rewarding to get that feedback from the audience. We often see people in rooms that are very touched, that actually show emotions. We have feedback on our social media. Artists get direct email and visitors share directly with the artists what they went through and the emotions, and now we're absolutely where we want to be, and we want to continue to build on that.
We actually, as part of the process of getting better as a creative group and understanding the media, which is still quite a young media. We launched an initiative called the Direct French Translation, and we worked with a startup company that uses biometric tools to measure the impact of experiences from an emotional and cognitive perspective, and we did a preliminary phase last fall as part of our Unwind exhibits and the preliminary results are actually quite positive. So we have the declarative piece, feedback from the audience, feedback on social media and on surveys and direct messages to the artists are quite positive, but now we also have a data driven piece that starts to show, starts to establish that the people are reacting in a good way and we now have preliminary patterns, biometric patternss to support it.
If I went to Oasis immersion right now, what would be the shows that I'd see?
Denys Lavigne: So we recently launched our Spring/Summer programming, and there were a few elements that we launched. The first one is that we activated the notion of having multiple shows playing at the same time. So we currently have two choices of exhibits that visitors can choose from. Officially, we launched a large interactive floor in our main room, which is to my knowledge, one of the largest permanent interactive floors in North America. We pre-launched it in February, but officially launched it as part of the spring/summer programming. We currently have two exhibits, the Recharger/Unwind, which is a sensory experience in the world of generative arts, but structured as a wellness experience. We're extending that show because it's been a big success for us. The show was originally launched last fall, but since there was still interest we're continuing with that. But our new main show is called Van Gogh distortion, and this is the first time that we are doing an exhibit featuring a painter and it's really about acknowledging the world phenomena that has come out of this union of the medium of immersion, and the world of painters and Van Gigh was a key figure in that movement, and we did it.
We produced a show that is aligned with the spirits of Oasis that goes along in terms of the positive, inspirational angle, but also best practices in terms of how we feel a show like that needs to be produced because we all have seen some of these shows around the world, and some of them, I feel lack depth in terms of the experience itself. The way that we work with the painter, artwork and create a powerful, immersive experience where we actually put the people in the middle of the experience and that we use sound in a good way. For us, the painters shows we would have liked to see more around the world, and again it's an acknowledgement of that global phenomenon that has emerged from this union between immersion and painting.
So in essence there's a big public demand. The feet are going through these places where they have these touring exhibitions for Van Gogh or whoever it is, and you could ignore it, or you could surrender to it to some degree, and build something that you think really does the job well, as opposed to just very large projections of still paintings?
Denys Lavigne: Yeah, you're right. We just acknowledged that there was a phenomenon. We acknowledged that there was interest, and I think one of the great aspects about this is that it has helped expose this new type of entertainment to a very large audience, and as the industry evolves, I think the expectations in terms of the quality, in terms of the element of surprise, people have more and more expectations.
So we felt it was the right time to push the boundaries with these types of shows, and we felt Van Gogh was the main painter that activated this movement, and in terms of the timing, we also thought it was really interesting because one of Van Gigh's strengths is about showing, sharing the emotion and in the smaller things of life, of our immediate world of nature. He brought emotions to things that we take for granted and we felt there was also an interesting link with what we went through over the past two years, being isolated and the pandemic, and just how we've reconnected to our immediate world nature, other people, the way that we view these elements and the role that they have in our lives, we thought that the timing of this from this angle was also really interesting to show and made it more relevant to focus on Van Gogh for this project.
And I guess it's something of a gateway drug as well that you could get people come to your venue to see this who, if you just had the other show on, might be a little too out there for their unfamiliar minds, but if they even get them in to see this they'll go, “Oh, that was really interesting. I'll come back!”
Denys Lavigne: Yep, there was definitely an aspect of, we're still a new destination within Montreal, and I think it's part of the process to ensure that we get known to a larger audience, and there was a bit of that for sure, in our decision. But the main thing was about the here and now angle, the phenomena, and we've already done a good job building an audience that is really grand public, and even for Recharge/Unwind exhibit that features generative art, it's actually quite surprising and quite satisfying to see that we have people from all ages attended it and it's much more balanced than what we expected, and I think this speaks to the interest of people and this new type of entertainment, and we want to continue to build on that for sure.
What are the creative demands involved in this? Can you say for the Recharge/Unwind material, can you say to a generative data artist, “here's the resolution, here's what you're working with, go!” Or do you have to train them?
Denys Lavigne: We do train some people, because again it's still an emerging media. It's not like there are thousands and thousands of destinations similar to ours in the world right now. So the pool of expertise is limited, but it exists, and yes, part of the briefing is similar to more of a traditional digital signage content, or experiential media experience. There are technical specifications and are parts of the brief and there are also creative specifications that are shared with the artists.
So Oasis immersion is not only just an operator of a site because of my background and my interests, we've also put together an internal creative team that works on developing the curating approach and the creative alignment for our projects. Each artist is informed about, what is the intent? What is the big picture of the exhibit? What is the expectation, in terms of his content and the role his content will play within the sequence, the journey that we want to create for our audience? So we are quite specific about that. And in terms of the artists, we usually select artists that we feel are the best fit for the type of content that we want to achieve. Most of the time these artists are experienced, but we've also worked with emerging artists. You know in our first exhibit we developed an experience with a young YouTuber who had, when I told him that we were going to develop an immersive experience together, you said what's an immersive experience and his expertise was really about just producing video. He was 21 years old, a kid that had really good talent as a director, as a storytelling artist but we felt that he could produce something that would be a bit more powerful, a bit more complex. We supported him and so we see our role also as supporting artists and that's why we have an experience team internally to play that role, and sometimes, the type of relationship we have with different artists varies with their expertise. But we certainly see that part of our role within the industry is to ensure that we have more and more people that understand the realities of creating powerful experiences for this type of media so that the industry can grow in the long term.
Do you see business applications for this? We've seen in the digital signage world, all kinds of corporate lobbies, all the way to airports adding immersive elements to it so that there's an entire lobby that's surrounded by LED or other ones that are using projection, if it's dark enough and so on.
Do you see the time when the sort of work and thinking that you're doing for a destination could be applied to something that's a venue like a building lobby?
Denys Lavigne: There's probably an extension that could happen. The fact that I'm here doing this project is a cycle of the work that I've done in the past for immersive lobbies and different types of experiential installation, and this has led me to do this project. I think it could work the other way around. As soon as you have digital assets, you can basically do whatever you want. I think then it becomes about, what's the type of experience and for what audience, but for example, we do have B2B applications within Oasis immersion, and I could see a client who has privatized the space and created a custom experience for the people that will attend the event. I could certainly see a client using these assets, repurposing them to create a spin-off and adapted version for another space for sure.
I think we will eventually get to that because the logic of return on investment or return on experience willlikely lead to that but there will definitely be adjustments in terms of the storytelling, the nature of the experience because of the way that people will consume the experience.So when you are totally immersed within a space, from a storytelling perspective, you can go at it from a certain angle. If it's just a lobby experience and there are other things happening and you have different objectives, then there's going to have to be a certain storytelling adaptation.
You've alluded two or three times to your background. For those people who are listening and don't know who you are, could you tell the story of Arsenal Media?
Denys Lavigne: Sure. So I founded Arsenal Media in 1999, I believe, and I created the agency initially as a content marketing agency, and when we started, we were actually doing custom publishing, so doing branded magazines for clients, at that moment, it was a big trend. And then we evolved into creating content for the web, because the initial internet revolution was really driven by programming companies, but there were not a lot of design and content companies, and so we extended our expertise to content marketing on the web, and eventually we were exposed to digital signage and we completely transited our operation and focused on digital signage because we felt that was the ideal platform where we could merge creativity and technology and building a relationship and providing value for the audience.
The reason why I started the company as a content marketing agency is because I always thought. you could build a more meaningful and long-term relationship with the consumer if you actually provided value versus just a commercial advertising. Traditional commercial advertising will deliver a certain type of result and certainly has its role within the bigger picture of marketing strategies, but always felt that the content marketing actually provided something useful, either from an information perspective or quality of experience perspective, there was something that the consumer had in return. So that was the foundation of it and when we were exposed to digital signage, it was similar to the internet in the sense that they were not a lot of creative companies at the beginning, and we saw this as a great opportunity and started to focus on digital signage right until 2014, when the agency was acquired by Christie digital and we joined the Christie company. I was there for four years. I led the experiential project division and we did projects all over the world.
For me, personally and professionally, this was such an inspirational time. I have so many good souvenirs, so many great learnings and great projects, and it allowed me to continue to push further on the experiential side and eventually led me to focusing on immersion, to really focus on the experiential side of it. But it's the sum of these experiences and learnings, and I'm really proud of my digital signage roots to a certain extent because it helped me understand context and sharing the right message at the right time, what that meant, and adding an experiential feel and understanding the impact of architecture within the space and the configuration and how people moved within the space. So all of these were great learnings that allowed me to do this project.
The part that you humbly left out is that you guys werewere sweeping the awards, Arsenal Media won a whole pile of awards for creative through the years.
Denys Lavigne: Yeah, we were so fortunate to get the support of the industry, and I think that speaks to the commitment of our team who try to contribute positively to this media, and that's how we approached it, bringing value to the consumer and trying to raise the bar in terms of best practices from a quality of design and relevancy, and I believe in the media and I think it deserved from us as creatives and strategists that we put our best foot forward every time, and we always were in this evolving mode of, how can we do better and how can we push the boundaries, and how can we make this media more efficient for our clients? I think the support that we've got and the accolades from the industry speak to my team's commitment to achieve that and we are quite proud of the results, and again, the accolades that we've received from the industry.
Ten or fifteen years ago you were doing conferences in Montreal and very politely yelling at people, “it's the content, stupid” that in the industry at that time was still and for a long time after it still focused on technology, as opposed to what's actually on the displays. Is it heartening now that you're somewhat detached directly from the direct digital signage industry to see the amount of really kick ass content that you're now finding on screens?
Denys Lavigne: Absolutely. There's great content. I think the aspect that I'm most proud to see the industry do now is just being more smart in the way that we plan for these projects, the way that we set up displays, the way that we think about the media from a business perspective, architectural perspective, the integration of this media with the rest of the marketing ecosystem, the rest of the brand ecosystem. So I'm really proud to see where the industry is at, in terms of the level of refinement of the work in general because yes, the quality of the content is really important but through my time in digital signage, I think quickly we realized that it was also about the strategy itself and the right selection of equipment for the right context, and how the media wasn't just this extra terrestrial piece within the marketing or branding ecosystem of the clients. But it actually played a role and was connected and made sense and how it was used.
So the integrated marketing or branding approach that I see now, the quality of the executions from architectural perspective and content perspective is really impressive to see, and I'm proud to see where the industry is at today.
All right. That's a great place to leave it. Congratulations on Oasis Immersion and great to catch up with you.
Denys Lavigne: Thank you, Dave. Always a pleasure.
Wednesday May 18, 2022
Jeremy Jacobs, Enlighten
Wednesday May 18, 2022
Wednesday May 18, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
The cannabis retailing industry is interesting in a whole bunch of ways. It is a unique vertical market with an absolutely screaming need for digital signage and interactive technologies.
While longtime recreational users may know their stuff, as US states and Canadian provinces have legalized, there's a whole bunch of new users coming in with needs that have more to do with sleep problems or arthritic joints. They walk into dispensaries and are confronted with products and options that are somewhat or entirely unfamiliar, so screens that promote and explain are very helpful and relevant.
The dispensary business is also interesting because the industry has its own overcrowded ecosystem of payments and management systems that need to somehow be tied together.
The largest player in cannabis digital signage is the Bowling Green, Kentucky firm Enlighten, which is in some 1,200 dispensaries in the United States,
I had a fun conversation with Enlighten founder Jeremy Jacobs, who found his way into digital signage when the clean energy business he was running went south in the late 2000s recession. He pivoted into screens in businesses, and menu displays for restaurants led to an opportunity to branch into cannabis retail. He's a super-smart, interesting guy more signage people should know about.
Enjoy.
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TRANSCRIPT
Jeremy, thank you for joining me. Can you give me the rundown on what your company does?
Jeremy Jacobs: Yeah, absolutely, Dave. Enlighten is the only real omni-channel company within the cannabis vertical particularly, and by omni-channel, we affect the customer journey throughout that entire customer journey. We have a product real quickly called AdSuite that targets people in a digital environment, whether it be mobile, Roku or even desktop computers based upon audience segmentation data we have, to know those are known cannabis consumers. And then we have our SmartHub product, which is an in-store product which is why we're here today, digital signage, kiosk related, and that product helps to upscale the customers that were brought in from the marketing from AdSuite.
And this could be on menu boards, this can be on information displays, this can be on tablets, any number of things, right?
Jeremy Jacobs: Yeah, so SmartHub is really unique. Even if you zoom out of the cannabis vertical and just look broadly at the digital signage industry, SmartHub is an extremely unique product that we created. It manages kiosks, it manages digital signage, all sorts of menus, feature boards, order queue systems, break room TVs, where the audience has shifted from a consumer to the actual employee. It uses extremely advanced logic and filtering with the point of sale data that it's consuming to make these things and even has an e-commerce component to it.
So really the way to think about it is that SmartHub is an extremely robust merchandising platform that manages all of your consumer facing surfaces, whether that surface is a passive screen, an interactive screen, like a kiosk or even the webpage where someone would come to purchase and make an order on your website.
And the cannabis industry is its own unique ecosystem, right? There's POS companies that only do cannabis business, and so on?
Jeremy Jacobs: Yeah, I would say there's no true word than cannabis is its own individual ecosystem. So as a veteran, not been in the industry quite as long as you but since 2008, I've seen a lot of things and cannabis extremely unique. So it does have all of its own tech stack companies for the most part. There are a few companies, Microsoft Dynamics makes a sort of a POS system that's been modified for cannabis. But outside, I'll see a Square every now and then, but for the most part 99.99% of all point of sales systems at a digital signage company would integrate with are extremely cannabis specific and they all compete for what is roughly 8,500 retail clients across just short of 40 states, and so to talk about the uniqueness, even in more depth, not only are the stacks different in cannabis than they would be outside of that, but all the individual laws and rules that apply very literally from state to state. So you even have state variances.
Why would so many companies decide, “I want to be in a space that's changing constantly and not all that big and in the grand scheme of what retail is”?
Jeremy Jacobs: That's a great question. I think what your question was alluding to, there's the TAM, the total addressable market. You look at restaurants and there's literally hundreds of thousands of them, and I would argue there's barely as many POS companies in restaurants as there is inside of cannabis. And I think it's a couple of things. From an emotional standpoint, this is “the green rush” right? Any cannabis advocate that for the last hundred years that it's been illegal has felt violated by the error, has seensocial injustice from that. I believe there's an emotional component why a lot of these companies are there, a lot of these leaders are there. Second, there's a power vacuum that gets field when no one wants to go somewhere. So when you take a look at the cannabis industry, none of these major POS companies that we're referring to, none of them had any interest at all whatsoever in getting involved in cannabis. So the result of that is someone has to, and then the third prong, I think of this little fork here is that there is a green rush. The Anheuser Bushes of the world are about to be made of cannabis. There's very unique transactions, very unique audiences, and there's a lot of money to be made there. There's a lot of value and you can see companies that are in the space that make tech.
If you look on the internet, Weed Maps is probably the largest one, listed on the NASDAQ billion plus dollar company, recently Dutchie has made some announcements for billion plus dollar companies as well. So fortunes are being made even though the total addressable market is small.
Yeah, I've always thought that the cannabis dispensary business was a particularly interesting one for digital signage, because unlike most retail where you walk into an apparel retailer, you know what you're looking for, clothes, I need a shirt or whatever. It's pretty obvious.
But if I walk into a cannabis dispensary, I'm pretty much lost. I don't know what I'm even looking at and all these different strains of flowers and buds and this and that. It is like Mars to me. But, and I suspect a lot of people walk in like that who maybe aren't recreational users, but want it to help them sleep or calm them down or whatever purpose they have for it?
Jeremy Jacobs: Yeah, and so to drill into that observation you've made is really there's two kinds of consumers that very quickly develop in cannabis. There's the customer that you just described, which is a new customer, and there's a lot of those, because again, cannabis was technically illegal for about a hundred years. And so there's a huge amount of new customers that don't know anything, and so there's a massive educational vacuum there, and that's actually, Enlighten really started as we recognize that, and so we created an in-store digital out of home, a television network that runs ads for brands and things of that nature, endemic or non-endemic. We've got clients like Door Dash or Vans shoes or FX networks and their cannabis shows, but the content that's on that network is educationally driven specifically to satisfy that lack of education that you just talked about, and then on the other end of that spectrum, there are these clients that very much know what they want and precisely what they're looking for and those particular clients aren't looking for that same experience. They're looking for, digital menus that can be sorted based upon terpenes are based upon cannabinoid profiles so the highest THC value, they're looking for is express checkout kiosks, so they don't have to have an interaction.
So uniqueness of the cannabis dispensary from a digital signage perspective is you have to create digital environments that satisfy both of those polar opposites.
I gather when you were talking about omni-channel that it's really important or helpful to a company playing in this space to be able to serve multiple needs and to integrate with the other technologies that are part of the ecosystem. If you just did digital signage, it's a walled garden thing where you're going to get much better reception for many users, whereas you can provide multiple components, right?
Jeremy Jacobs: Oh, absolutely. I've been in a lot of industries. The restaurant space was the first one. I was really into digital signage. Sysco Foods started slinging my digital menus for me, and like things 2009 and their 30 different offices and so I got to see a lot of things there. But in the first week in cannabis, eight years ago, the word integrate came up like 40 different times within an hour, and so I've never seen an industry that's so demanding of integrations. Like for example, you walk into a restaurant and any number of restaurants and you look over by the hostess stand and there's the DoorDash tablet, and there's a GrubHub tablet, and there's a Postmates tablet and there's all these tablets. And so the hostess is watching these orders come in and then they're putting them in their POS system.
That would never fly in the cannabis industry, like it's a demanded integration by these people, and so if you're going to create an integration engine, you're going to want to make it have more points of influence than just a TV menu, you're going to need to provide that e-commerce plug and you're going to need to provide those kiosks. You're going to want to link up with their customer data for targeting those customers, on their mobile devices. You're exactly right, if you're going to be relevant in cannabis, your stack better be serious because they're trying to reduce that vendor set to if they could just one, nobody does all of it, but they want to reduce that number to the smallest possible.
Is that in part, because it's a younger buyer audience who understands technology more and didn't grow up in kind of old style restaurants or whatever, where there were all these different systems?
Jeremy Jacobs: Interesting thing you said there,t because it's a younger buyer, so that was very true eight years ago. But at this point, that is not the truth at this juncture. So just a few years ago, I think it was two and a half years ago, the fastest growing segment of users shifted from 20 year olds to middle-aged mothers and it was the fastest growing audience, and then over the last few years, what has really been the fastest growing audience has actually been elderly people. It seems like they're starting to come to grips with, “Hey, I have pains and aches and cannabis is actually the solution”, and so it's a big growing segment.
But I think the answer to the question that you did ask is why is there this desire for a consolidation of a tech stack more than anything.
Yeah, I was thinking more of the operators that tend to be younger. Maybe that's not the case?
Jeremy Jacobs: Same thing at this point, it's not the case now, it's weird. So it was the case before, a hundred percent because who was willing to take that risk to get in the weed business, and so a hundred percent, but now I'm sitting in meetings with digital officers and marketing officers from Abercrombie and Apple, and they came from big organizations and so it's a very changing landscape.
But at the end of the day, I think that some of them are young, so yes, to your answer, very good observation. Second is the ones that aren't young are professionals, and they're used to dealing with that. But thirdly, I think for both of them, the demand of tech stack is necessary because the regulations and the data that they have to send back to the state agencies and authorities and all of those sorts of things and the compliance they have to undergo is worse than any other industry ever. Like they're under so much scrutiny and you could lose your license at the drop of a hat, and so they want less to deal with so they can focus more on staying in business.
Does that touch on your platform and what you do? Do you have to have a Nevada version of it and a Colorado version and I forget where else it's legal, California, obviously. But do you have to pass them out state by state or is it pretty uniform?
Jeremy Jacobs: Great question. So the technology itself is the same across all the states. AdSuite is AdSuite and SmartHub is SmartHub, but there are definitely nuances. So let me give you a couple of interesting examples in the state of Pennsylvania, you're not allowed to put anything up on a screen from a digital signage perspective, unless absolutely it has been medically proven. And so it needs to come from a doctor or some position, a medical authority, and in Alaska, for example, they don't believe anything has ever been proven by a doctor or medical authority and so you can't put anything up that even closely resembles a recommendation. So there's two polar opposites. So from a content perspective, I gotta watch those things.
From an advertising perspective. Some states, even though it's cannabis, won't let you show pictures of weed in the advertisements. Go figure that out. How do you advertise weed without showing weed? You can't show people consuming the product in a lot of states with advertisements. So there's another nuance, and then a third nuance is like in Pennsylvania, what I'm able to put on a digital menu is very specific and I cannot put any imagery into one thing, and I have to, I'm required to put certain testing results, similar to the way in the restaurant industry. Now everybody went digital whenever they were required to put the calorie count for these items, and that's when you saw this massive uprising in digital cause they got to replace all this stuff anyway, might as well go to the screen, and in Pennsylvania, I got to put things like that, testing results.
What's the content that seems to be required across all the different dispensaries, kind of the money messages that need to be there, and the operators want to have up there?
Jeremy Jacobs: Yeah, so from a TV menu perspective. We'll start with our that's the most largely adopted digital signage product ever and so the TV menu, what's necessary is the name of the products, the type of the product, the weight of the product, the price, the product, but really importantly, people want to know about cannabinoid profiles, is this high or low in THC? The psychoactive ingredient that gives you the feeling of a high, is it higher, lower in CBD, which is the non-psychoactive ingredient that really focuses a lot on pain, arthritis and inflammation and things of that nature, muscle pain. So consumers sort of demand that, operators want to provide that.
And from an educational perspective, if you're talking about a different digital signage product and just more like digital signage, we're producing educational videos, the demand really is around education of what are these different terpenes, what are these different cannabinoids, these little things inside of the cannabis that creates different effect for each strain, like this one makes me sleepy, this one makes me energetic, this one's great for back pain, and so that's the demand from a regulatory standpoint of pretty much the only uniform thing that I can't really do is show anything that's cartoonish that might want to lure children into the store.
There was a big problem with packaging for edibles for a while there, right?
Jeremy Jacobs: It was, they've got sour patch kids on the box, and the first versions of edibles were very kid friendly because they took kids candies and made them, and now that's pretty much been regulated out. So the same thing, that same sort of concern with the packaging that you pointed out with edibles is also a concern in digital signage and even digital advertising. So if I'm targeting a mobile phone, even though I'm targeting a known cannabis consumer, just stay away from anything that might be alluring to children.
So if I'm a customer of Enlighten, is it a SaaS platform that I am using?.
Jeremy Jacobs: Yeah, so the two products are different. The SmartHub is the in-store signage, kiosk, kind of technology that manages all of that and talks to your POS system. That is definitely a SaaS product. As far as pricing models, there's been a lot of those in digital signage, our kiosk system is one price for your entire store and use as many as you want. Our signage model is the same as anyone else's, per node. SaaS model on our AdSuite product, though that is a SaaS product, if you will, it's a piece of software that gains you access to those audiences on our DOH network and in stores, as well as, digital Roku devices, mobile devices, desktop computers but that's driven just like any other digital advertising model would be external on a cost per impression basis.
What's the footprint for your company at this point?
Jeremy Jacobs: So we've reached a really interesting crossroads, very few companies in cannabis have ever got over that thousand mark. Right now, I would estimate we're in probably roughly 1200 dispensaries, somewhere thereabouts and then have several hundred other clients that are brands and so forth so our footprint reaches to about 1500 or so clients, big number and a TAM of 8,500, if you look at it that way.
And this is an industry that like more and more states seem to be coming on stream, or at least there's a push to bring them on stream. So it's not like it's a finite market right now?
Jeremy Jacobs: Yeah. So that's part of the growth. When we're assessing growth, there's a couple ways to look at it. One is how we can get more money out of the existing customers and that's to offer premium versions of our products, additional services that might be out there that we could focus on. But also there's just the overall growth of the entire market itself, and there's a couple of phases of that. The first phase is for the state to go medical. So now, they can be a client of ours. But typically, we find the greatest traction in the states once they go recreational because what happens is their revenue growth is astronomical.
People don't appear to want to go to get a medical license nearly as easily as just walking in a dispensary. So whenever they go recreational, they buy a lot of other products from us and really focus on that retail environment and creating a magical experience for those recreational customers. So really there's two phases, medical, and then recreational. But right now you're looking at cannabis in almost 40 states at a medical level roughly 10 or so at a recreational level. I’m averaging there, the number changes. I haven't kept track of it in a minute, but to give you an idea of growth, there's about 10-12 to go to medical and then there's the vast majority or 80 plus percent that are not yet recreational. So a lot of growth in them.
Are you up in Canada as well?
Jeremy Jacobs: We are. So it's a lot of challenges working inside cannabis, anybody's ever nailed internationally. You have to have your own bank accounts, your incorporations, your teams up there. It's hard to import hardware products, and as a company, we do also provide the hardware. So that has its own challenges, but we do operate in Canada. We've got some systems in Puerto Rico, which is a US territory. Jamaica, we send some things too. We have some plans we're brewing up. Spain has a pretty good sized cannabis market and so we're looking internationally there because the challenge is the same. People don't understand cannabis, they need education. That's the same worldwide. It's been illegal globally, for a hundred years.
How did you get into it? You mentioned that your first foray into digital signage was restaurants for Sysco, how did you end up in this?
Jeremy Jacobs: So in 2008, I started a company called IconicTV, and it's had many offshoots with verticals. I've been one of those guys when I see a vertical, I'd make a very precise product. We helped build a C-store DOH network called C-store TV. We had a school product called, school menu guru. We had a lobby product called lobby Fox, it does visitor management and so one of those products we noticed early on was digital TV menus, and so in 2009, I formed a deal with Sysco foods and they have 30 offices across the country that would distribute my digital signage, digital TV menu products to their restaurant tours. And so I hired these vice presidents in each of those areas to partner with those offices as Sysco calls an opco, and so Sysco would have reps and my reps would go do ride alongs, and so they would ride along with these representatives and go in and meet these restaurant tours at work and stuff. One of them, the guy in Denver, Colorado, Ted Tilton's name? So Ted called me one day and this is right before cannabis goes legal in Colorado, which was the first state to legalize recreational cannabis, Washington and Colorado voted on it basically at the same time. But Colorado was the first actually who implemented, and he calls me, he says, Hey man, I got this idea and I said, what is it? He goes, these TV menus we’re selling through Sysco. I said, yeah, he goes, what do you think about making some for marijuana? I said, what are you talking about? And he says I've got these buddies opening this dispensary called DANK, and it'll be the closest dispensary to Denver International airport and I got this feeling as soon as weed was legal in Colorado, a lot of people are going to be coming into DIA and this place is going to be really busy since it's the closest one, and he says, and I was like, what would be the difference? And he said, essentially we put up marijuana buds instead of chicken sandwiches. And I said, I'm in.
I've been a big advocate of cannabis for a long time. At one point, I was even the executive director of Kentucky NORMAL, the division of the national organization for marijuana legalization. It's the Kentucky chapter. I've been a big advocate of it. I've been a self prescribed patient for many years. It was an interesting opportunity to take a couple of things I was very passionate about both cannabis and digital signage and went to do some real work on two things I care about. So we dove in.
Has the profile of the operator changed?
I remember talking to another person who's involved in this space and actually being out in Denver and he was saying that there’s two types of operators. There's a business people who see this as a growth opportunity, and they've already had some experience in retail or in investing or whatever, and then there's growers and growers who are turning into retailers and he said the challenge with the growers as they're growers, they're not business people and they don't really understand retail, and I'm curious if in the early days you saw a lot of them stories of dispensaries that would start up and then drop off because they didn't really know what they were doing?
Jeremy Jacobs: Yeah, and I'll take that example. Your friend gave you a pretty good insight there, but to expand on that, I don't even think it's just growers though. It's I think just very weed passionate people, like they're very passionate about it. Whether it's consuming it or making concentrates or growing it or whatever. So I would just call them plant passionate people versus business people, and it very much exists, and it doesn't today to the degree that it used to. In the beginning, someone that's a senior executive vice president of Abercrombie is not going to go start a dispensary, like during the first couple of years, we were all wondering if everybody opened these things, were all gonna go to jail. I'm sure everybody in America is going everybody in Denver is going to do it, just wait, and if all my friends at open dispensaries were sitting around, I would have conversations with the night and they're like, I'm just wondering if tonight, the DEA raids my house, and so nobody wanted to be under that scrutiny except plant passionate people.
But as time got on and the federal government sorta started to take a position, even if the position was, “we don't have a position”, that's still a position, and so they're not taking an aggressive stance on it then you began to see real business people start to come into the environment and at this point, you have organizations like Cresco who just bought Columbia Care, and these operators have over a hundred stores and they're doing hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in retail cannabis sales. These are not the type of marijuana dispensary that I think most people have in their mind. These people have entire floors of IT teams. They have entire floors and marketing teams. They do in-depth customer insight studies, and that influences every tiny nuance of their packaging and their store layouts. These are real operations, but I can still take you to Oregon right now and walk into the shop or Nancy and Megan who are best friends and they have tie-died things up on the wall and they're very whimsical people that are just very passionate and who also have a successful sotry. Now they're not going to sell hundreds of millions of dollars to cannabis, but they're also successfully operating.
Think of it like liquor, for example, Liquor Barn exists and that's a big corporation. But, in the town I live in, everybody wants to go to Chuck's Liquors when Chuck was alive, because Chuck was just the coolest guy ever. So you went to Chuck, so they both have a place.
Yeah, I've certainly seen the same thing. I remember being an Amsterdam for ISE and, you'd stick your head into one of these coffee shops, and it was just a hole in the wall and weird but out by the hotel where I was staying, there was a dispensary that looked like an Apple store, like it was very slick.
Jeremy Jacobs: Interesting you say that. So there's this place called Euflora and Jamie Perino was one of the owners at the time and it's at the 16th street walking district in downtown Denver. This is the big street with the old piano outside and everybody wandering around a very touristy area and so we did the first project for them that I remember getting a call from them and they're like, “Hey, we open in 11 days and we've got this crazy idea where there'll be a touchscreen kiosk and it's sitting next to a jar of marijuana, and this kiosk has all this interactive stuff on it with everything about that strain of marijuana. We needed in our stores in 11 days. Can you guys do it?” And they said, oh yeah, and our budget is X, and I just laughed, and I said X is missing a couple of zeros, especially for 11 days, what are you talking about? And they're like, can you do it or not? And I said I can, but I shouldn't but I'm going to, and so we did, because we wanted to be part of the exposing of this whole thing.
And so we took it on, and so when you would first walk on your floor, you can dig up some old video files from the news channels from eight years ago, it very much looked like an Apple store cause we had Apple iPads on every table next to a jar of marijuana and you can scroll up and down and see what the euphoric effects would be and does it make you sleepy, happy, hungry, horny, what's it going to do? And, in what genetics, where did it come from? And just all this interesting stuff, and people would come into that store fascinated, and so it was very Apple-esque.
How did you end up in digital signage? Cause I was looking at your bio and you've got patents in Magneto, hydrodynamics for energy exploration, drilling and everything. How did you get here?
Jeremy Jacobs: What the hell happened? Early in life I realized I didn't really like formal education. So I think I'm like nine hours from a college degree, but I dropped out and became entrepreneurial. So I became an investment broker and I worked on several different fundraising deals, most of them were driven around biodiesel. That was very active at the time when I dropped out of college, nearly two thousand, biodiesel was a thing, a lot of different technologies. And very quickly I got interested in alternative energy technologies and energy efficiency technologies, and just anything that was energy related, and technology related, and so I had an operation with about 20,000 acres of natural gas wells in Eastern Kentucky that were clean natural gas wells using advanced technologies like hydraulic fracturing.
I started inventing Magneto hydrodynamic technologies that's used by Chevron and Exxon and people that. It goes down in oil wells. It's used to eliminate paraffin and that technology has now been adopted by the DoD to make airlines, to make fighter jets fly farther because the fluid systems flow better and a lot of different things, and then 2008 came, so I own a quarry, that's mine and silica for Silicon to make marker processors, and I got a bunch of natural gas, wells and magnetic technologies, and 2008 comes, 2007 comes, the housing crisis collapses, everything and natural gas went from about $14 in MCF, which was a vast majority of the revenue that we were driving to like a dollar and a half in MCF, which is the unit that you produce and sell for, it stands for thousand cubic feet, and I needed $3 to make that make sense, right? And now it's at a dollar and a half. So I went from really cash flow positive to a hundred percent cash flow negative and just a matter of months.
And on top of that, when you own a bunch of quarries, nobody's buying any materials, and so I look up and literally everything I'm involved in just all of a sudden is collapsing and I don't have the payroll to make payroll for this massive bunch of employees. We had several offices in different parts across the country. And surely it was excruciatingly painful fast. Everything had to close, and so here's, here's the reality. I'm at home depressed out of my mind. I've just had to lay everyone off. I've had to shut in all these gas wells. I've had to lock the gates on all these quarries and nobody wants to talk about anything, everybody's going broke and my wife comes to me and she says, you've got to do something. We have kids we have to feed, we have bills we have to pay. You cannot sit here and be depressed, and I had seen somewhere I think it was in a mall. A friend of mine had built a TV screen, turned sideways, and it had Adobe Flash player on it, and it was playing some animated motion graphics that he controlled on a desktop PC inside this big kiosk and I thought I could do something similar to that, and so I literally grabbed a 32 inch Vizio TV out of my living room. My wife goes, where are you going with my TV? I said, I'll bring it back to you. I'll see you in a week, and she goes, you are leaving with the TV for a week? I said, yeah, and you’ll get a bigger one, I promise, and I grabbed the Toshiba laptop that my field hands that would go around, they had to log what parts they use and how long they were on job sites and stuff, and I grabbed one of these old stinky laptops that smells like crude oil and hung it in a friend of mine's restaurant in Clarkson, Kentucky. It was called K's cafe and it was political season, and so I'm going to tell a story about myself here, Dave, and so I go around and build these very animated PowerPoints and I'm changing the files out via LogMeIn at the time. I didn't even have any software, digital signage software. I didn't even know about the digital signage thing.
And so I'm like, I gotta sell ads on this thing, so I go to this guy that's running for sheriff, and I told a little white lie. I was like, Hey man, the other guy that's running for sheriff, he's buying in on my screens. It's in the most high traffic restaurant, and apparently legally, I've got to offer you the same opportunity at the same price. He goes, why what's he paying? And I told him, he goes, I'll take it, and so then I went to the guy that I just told a white lie and said, this other guy is buying. It was, which was actually true the second time. That's how I got started, I had to feed my kids. I had a 32-inch Vizio TV and a busted up laptop and I sold some people aspiring to be politicians, some ads and some real estate agents, and it just grew from there. I look up and I’m in hundreds of restaurants and fitness centers with the DOH network and six months later, a friend of mine says, Hey, can you use one of those silly ad TVs and make a menu on it because the price of salmon keeps fluctuating so much. I got to put these mailbox letters, and so we made, which was one of the early digital menus. I think we'd both agree, 2009-2009 was not the dawning moment of digital menus. It wasn't the precipice of it. That was very early.
And so we started using those and saw opportunities to replace those little black felt directories with the letters you run out of the M, and so you flip the W upside down, it's all bow legged looking, on the little felt boards. We started making digital directories integrated with Google sheets, so you could change it easily and the rest was history, man. I dove in and needless to say, the kids are fed now. The wife is happy. She got a bigger TV. I think it's 70 inch now. So everyone's cool.
That's a hell of a pivot.
Jeremy Jacobs: Yeah, buddy. Necessity is the mother of invention.
All right. This was terrific. I really enjoyed our conversation.
Jeremy Jacobs: Yeah, man. I was going to start off this morning saying longtime listener, first time caller. I've been watching your website, your blog, your podcast for as long as I can remember. So it's been an honor to finally get to be a part of it, and I really appreciate it.
Thank you for taking the time with me.
Jeremy Jacobs: I thank you, Dave.
Tuesday May 10, 2022
Geoff Bessin, Intuiface
Tuesday May 10, 2022
Tuesday May 10, 2022
NOTE - Podcasts normally come out on Wednesdays, but as a favor to Intuiface - which is at this week's ISE trade show in Spain - I moved it up a day to coincide with the show's opening day ...
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
One of the big trends in the software world is the whole idea of no code development - the premise that both programmers and mere mortals can create applications without getting their typing fingers dirty and brains fried doing traditional computer programming.
The proposition is that no code development platforms can cut out a lot of time and cost associated with pulling applications together, and also deal with the reality that good programmers are in high demand and therefore scarce.
The French software firm Intuiface is in the interesting position of having offered a no code platform long before no code was a discussion point, so the folks there are a great resource for discussing the implications for the digital signage and interactive display market.
I spoke with Geoff Bessin, the CMO and main voice for Intuiface, about the distinctions between no code and low code development platforms, and how they differ from the simple drag and drop, what you see is what you get user interfaces that are common in digital signage content management systems. We also dig into the benefits, the limitations, and more than anything, why you should know and care about no code.
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TRANSCRIPT
Geoff, thank you for joining me. Can you give me the rundown first on what Intuiface is all about?
Geoff Bessin: Will do, Dave, thank you for having me. So Intuiface is a no-code platform dedicated to the creation of interactive digital content. That includes digital signage, but really it can anything in the venue. It could be a museum exhibition, could be a sales pitch for a movie sales team, could be anything at a trade show, something in a real estate office, et cetera. So you create it, you deploy it, you can do analytics with it. It’s all good.
And the company is based in France, correct?
Geoff Bessin: We are headquartered in a town called Labège, which is right outside Toulouse in France. Although I'm not, but it's funny, my name is Geoffrey Besson, so both my first and last name look French. So people always assume it's French, but that’s not the case. I'm in Boston.
Can you speak a lick of French?
Geoff Bessin: Oui. Yes.
Good for you! I wanted to talk about no-code software, cause you guys have been no-code before people were even using that term and no-code is one of these trends, just like headless CMS, that seems to be bubbling up and maybe people don't understand a lot about it yet.
Geoff Bessin: Yeah, you could go back to the 80s and find things like HyperCard where you were enabling non-developers to create an application of some sorts. So it goes back a long way, but in terms of a movement, generating notice, gaining investment and having companies spend money on it, it's only been the past few years.
I can tell you that statistics are now saying that the market size, the amount of money being spent on no-code software used to create apps is almost $14 billion. It's a lot of money being pumped into these apps. And in fact, more than 65% of apps are now created using no-code tools. So more than 50%, more than half of apps are being built with no-code software. It is the predominant means of delivering applications these days.
What's the distinction between no-code and low-code, because I've heard both terms.
Geoff Bessin: There's no formal distinction. You can't point at it and go, “Oh, this one’s no-code” like you just went over the line. But the idea is that with low-code, there are back doors. There are means to enhance, to extend, to facilitate integration that might involve a little bit of coding. Even that coding could be simplified based on maybe either a scripting language that is native to the tool or a public scripting language like Ruby.
Whereas no-code is just 100%, you're not going to see code anywhere, and so you are in a way limited to the sandbox provided by the no-code platform, what it is you're able to deliver is limited by what you can piece together with the Lego blocks of that platform. no-code gives you those little back doors to branch yourself out.
So what does it mean for development? Does it distance or mediate the need for application developers completely, and just any old end-user can produce an application without having to engage developers or is it more something that accelerates the development process and just gets some cost and time out of the way?
Geoff Bessin: I think that question brings us to who's doing it, and why are they doing it? As I mentioned, no-code has exploded recently, and it is due to a set of developments that have driven application development to what is now called the “citizen developer.”
Trends such as a shortage of developers, it's not that we're trying to get rid of them. It's that there’s not enough. I saw one statistic that back in 2020, there were 1.2 million unfilled developer jobs in the United States, just the US but 1.2 million developer jobs unfilled in the US and colleges and universities were only cranking out about 400,000 developers. There's a shortage. So it's not that we don't want them, we don't have them. What do you do about that? There was also COVID, which has greatly accelerated investment in these no-code platforms, because everything moved online, and when everything moved online, everything needed to be digitized and companies realized we have to move now but we don't have enough resources, so how the heck are we going to digitize these things?
And then there's also tangential, but influential, the fact that even in our own home, we're not coders, but we are programmers. If I'm working with my Nest thermostat, that's programming. I just got a puppy and they have these apps that you can then program to see how many steps they've taken and how much water they drink, that's programming, and the digital native is used to controlling their environment digitally. There are tools out there that enable them to realize their ideas as an application, and somebody has to build it because there's not enough developers to go around. That's what really kicked the no-code market in the butt.
What we're seeing subsequently is that the developer shortage is being filled by these citizen developers producing applications, maybe for personal use, maybe for internal employee use, maybe for customer us, it depends. Those developers are now being transitioned to work on larger projects, more intricate projects. They have more time arguably to focus on the big tickets stuff that still needs the hardcore development, offloading their responsibility from the simpler things that can now be handled by that citizen developer.
Are there trade offs that you have to accept, to use no-code instead of just doing your own thing?
Geoff Bessin: Certainly. There are obvious advantages, there's speed and there's costs benefits. There's a big productivity boost, but of course there's trade offs. I like this notion of Legos. You have these prebuilt blocks and this is a finite number of block options that you can combine in an infinite number of ways. At the end of the day, you're still limited to those blocks, right? And so if I'm using a no-code platform and I need a block that doesn't exist, I'm stuck.
Now, I suppose if it's a low-code platform, depending on what I need to achieve,okay, maybe I can put something together if I have the skill, maybe I don't, but if I don't have the skill or if the opportunity with the platform doesn't exist, I am limited, and I think that might be the fundamental challenge is what can I do? What can I realize? Cause recognize that a lot of these platforms are built to be generic, to address sort of breadth, not always depth, and so that can be a challenge. You are also, of course, relying on them to be responsible for performance and reliability. You are handing over that duty, that responsibility to the provider, the no-code platform. I hope they're doing a good job. Because it's out of my hands, I can't control that, and so those are the big risks: can I achieve exactly what I want or am I making compromises? Am I achieving the level of performance? My ability to deploy? My ability to collect data analytics? My ability to manage that deployment?
There's 150-200 platforms across the spectrum offering no-code and low-code options. You might be making some compromises on the way, certainly are, but as I shared with you, 65% of apps are now built with no-code platforms. So companies have decided it's worth the risk.
What's the distinction between no-code and what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) user interfaces?
Geoff Bessin: No-code, I think it's more of a connotation, not a denotation. I think you could argue that a lot of no-code platforms are WYSIWYG. Intuiface is a no-code platform, it's a drag and drop tool. It's a WYSIWYG. The connotation of WYSIWYG, it could be for a developer. It could be for anybody of any skill set. So it's more of a generic catchall for applications enabled to create other applications by dragging components and you can see what they look like at design time and development time.
No-code connotes the non-developer, the citizen developer that you don't have coding skills and you're not expected to have those skills. So I think that's it.
You sent me a white paper that kind of goes into this and you're making the argument that while no-code is out there, it's exploding and growing and everything else, there's really no application, I think you called it a ‘no-code blind spot’ in terms of in-venue applications. What do you mean by that?
Geoff Bessin: So let's define in-venue because that is exactly our contention. In-venue is an encapsulation of any digital deployment out of the home. It could be digital signage, could be all those things I mentioned with Intuiface as well, the museum exhibition, the sales presentation, real estate office, et cetera. It is out of the home. It is not my phone though. It is not my PC. I'm not browsing the web at home. I'm out of my home, I'm in a venue and there is some digital content trying to communicate to educate, to promote, to sell to me.
That domain has been, I think with the exception of Intuiface, untouched by the no-code movement. For sure, if you look at the landscape of companies delivering solutions to address the needs of the citizen developer, there is nothing out there addressing these in-venue deployments. It's all about web and mobile apps and some websites, that's it. So if you want to create digital signage, if you want to create that museum exhibition, the sales pitch, there is no option out there now, and which brings us David, I know you're going to want to ask this, which is, will, aren't all digital signage platforms, no-code? Which is great question, Dave, by the way...
You are a psychic!
Geoff Bessin: That's a yes, but, it is absolutely true that you don't write code, but there are certain expectations of a no-code platform that the traditional digital signage CMS cannot fulfill, and it's interesting if I take a step back, really by definition, it has always been the non-developer on the digital signage side, hasn’t it? You buy a platform, there's a CMS, the user of the content management system is the content person. They're not coding anything. They're working with the CMS, they're assigning content to zones and they're day partying. By definition from day one, digital signage was always a non-developer domain, whereas web and mobile apps and these sorts of things were always the developer domain.
The no-code movement was, “Hey, this complicated stuff, we gotta make it simpler. We need the citizen developer involved.” So they brought no-code to the domain that started with developers, which I think is one of the explanations for why it didn't really come over to the in-venue side yet, because it was always non-coder users, but there are certain expectations of the no-code platform, that is not really in scope of the platform delivering in-venue content. A simple example, just to give you one would be the notion of context. To react to the user, react to the environment, in real time in that context, and do something as a result that is inherently this notion of logic. If this, then that. That's coding, right? It's got the whiff of coding and how do you do that? And there's a list of things we can discuss about what makes in-venue unique. But it requires the accommodation of additional concerns that are beyond the scope of what a traditional CMS does and that no other no-code platform does across the no-code spectrum.
I guess what you're saying in certain respects is you can develop a playlist, do all the basic functionality of a digital sign, you can target content and everything else, but the moment you get into a request to do something different, that's interactive, that as you say, maybe responds to triggers and so on, that gets a lot more complicated, and at that point you're putting in, if you're an end user, you're putting in a request to your reseller or to the software company directly saying, can you do this? And they'll say, yes, we can, but it's going to take this amount of time, this amount of money and, we can't get this to you for six months cause it's off of our roadmap or whatever… Is that one of the arguments you'd make?
Geoff Bessin: I would say that for sure. You see, a lot of companies have libraries. Here's our template library, here’s our plugin library, here's our integration library. Oh, you want something we don't have? We can build that for you. Here's the cost. Here's how long it's going to take. That's one example.
I can tell you that from a Intuiface perspective, we don't have any libraries. We haven't really prebuilt anything. Our paradigm is to enable integration with any web service, to create any UI, to integrate with any content management system, to have that ubiquity, which means that we don't have to build anything for our clients. The customer can do that. But it also means that, well, you better have a good idea and you better need to know what you. Because you're starting with a tabula rasa, but yes, that is certainly one good example of how you fulfill these sort of unique needs you might have thought about. I'll give you another example, which is retail point of sale. How would you build that thing? To me, that qualifies as an in-venue application. That's in the venue, right? I can order through a website, but do I want to put a website on a kiosk? It's a different domain. It's a different paradigm. It has different design requirements, different expectations, different issues about security, about being able to run potentially offline. But having to work with peripherals, having hyper-local context dependence, there are all of these concerns that will impact that user experience in the venue that may not be relevant or at all to a web experience. If I want to build that thing, how much flexibility am I going to have? Now there are companies like Grubber, which are pretty much pre-built everything, right? All you do is you push your menu into their back office system, and you're good to go. You just have to hope it does exactly what it is you want because you're constrained within the confines of what they offer for design, with the offer for business process, what they offer in terms of context, awareness, and reaction and if you need to make any kind of changes, you're dependent on them to make those changes, and that has a cost and a time penalty to it.
What kind of skillsets do you realistically need to use a no-code particularly in the context of Intuiface? I'm assuming the proposition is anybody can sit down, but you still have to plan out, you have to have some methodical thinking about what you want to do with what the decision tree is on all that stuff, right?
Geoff Bessin: You do, and that gives me an opportunity to give you just a brief history of Intuiface because we were never a no-code company, that wasn't how we were oriented. The company was actually founded back in 2002. It was founded by a couple of PhDs with expertise in touch technology. And from day one, it was about bringing user experiences to a lot of it was, believe it or not, the defense industry, but also retail, touch-driven user experiences for something, to accomplish something. The company was always about the user experience.
At the end of the day, as great as your touch technology might be, nobody cares if it's not usable. If it doesn't make it easy to achieve some goal, and so Intuiface, when it was born it was all about the user experience, and in fact, most of its early hires were focused on that, on how to make something intuitive and that where the company name comes from, an intuitive interface. To make intuitive user experiences that we're driven by interaction like touch. What happened was we were servicing all of these organizations, again, a lot of defense, Intuiface is headquartered just outside the Toulouse, as i mentioned. So you have the big aerospace and defense industry located in Toulouse like Airbus. So a lot of those clients, but also retail, commerce. Focused on user experience, and it was hard to scale the business because you had this deep technical dependency underneath because it's driven by touch and we’re going back 15 years, so expensive hardware, challenging technology, and at the same time, trying to come up with these really intuitive user interfaces, it was a challenge, and we decided internally, I say we, but I wasn't here yet. Intuiface decided internally that we need to come up with something that can accelerate our ability to deliver good user experiences on top of this touch technology.
The company builds something called Intuikit, it was used internally by user experience experts, designers, and people good at aesthetics, people good at thinking about the customer. They were not developers. Ultimately, we decided this thing called Intuikit is pretty awesome, maybe that's our business, and so we're. It's a short story about how the software platform Intuiface was born. We were always about the user experience. It is our expectation that our users are experts in the users, creating intuitive interfaces, not In having any necessary knowledge about development. So that is our expectation, and that's what we think is appropriate. You need to be creative. You need to understand the user. You need to understand the domain. You don't have to worry about the platform you're building it on. That should not be your problem. You should be all about solving the customer's problem.
I realize you work with a bunch of industries, but a lot of your activity is in digital signage. If I am an end-user and I'm using ACME digital signage software, can I use the Intuiface with it? Does it plug into it or are there restrictions? Do you have to go through door number one or door number two, you can't use both doors?
Geoff Bessin: Probably, you can't do. Typically the content management system used by the DS platform is proprietary. It's a closed system. It doesn't have a published API. So we couldn't read from it. Intuiface conversely has its own runtime as well. We can run side by side. In fact, on Windows, we have the ability to run side by side with other applications, we have had customers who are not ready to transition off their existing DS investment. So they were sort of a cohabitating interactive Intuiface based content at one part of the screen and traditional DS content and others were cohabitating that screen. But normally no, that wouldn't be how one would do it.
Certainly Intuiface is positioned around interactivity. We believe that by definition, once you introduce interactivity and the need to be responsive and context, and to accommodate not just touch, but sensors and voice and computer vision, when you need to account for all of these things, you need to be very good at that if-when, right? And that notion of conditional responses to events which are completely typically outside the realm of the traditional DS platform. That's where we start, and then clients can decide, do I want these Intuiface to co-exist with this DS platform? Or do we need to make some sort of transition.
If I'm an end-user and I start with Intuiface and have a series of interactive screens that are doing some sort of functionality, whatever it may be and then I decide, I want to also have an expanding network of “dumb screens” that are just running traditional digital signage content in some sort of a sequence. Can you do that too?
Geoff Bessin: Sure, the content doesn't know it’s in a dumb playlist, right? The content is fine. Certainly you can do that. The Intuiface was born, solving the interactive problem. And it's interesting, Dave, because in the early days of selling our platform, digital signage was something else. You didn’t touch signage. So our communication to the marketplace was not interactive signage. There wasn't such a thing. There was interactive content for kiosks. That was the world when we first walked in, you were touching something such as a table or a kiosk. There were touch screens, very expensive touch screens. You could be bound on a wall, never a perceptive pixel from a million years ago. Like those CNN screens and that sort of thing. You spend $2,500, you can have a touchscreen, but bylarge, it was kiosks and that sort of thing.
What happened was that they had this largely commoditized, digital signage space, hundreds of companies offering traditional digital signage and customers had iPhones in their pocket and they had iPads at home, and they started thinking about interactivity. They see the voting coverage on CNN and people tapping screens. So can you do that? That's why we started getting questions about traditional digital signage. Can you fulfill that as well? We were like yeah, we can, and over the years we developed additional capability to accommodate it.
The paradigm is still different. We don't have a traditional notion of a playlist for example, but you can create a playlist within Intuiface. We're using our Lego blocks, not just to build interactive content, but non-interactive content as well. You can do both.
So it was something you could do, but it's not your focus?
Geoff Bessin: I would say, we’res interactive first, but the traditional broadcast signage, and I don't mean this in a judgy way, it's not typically that complicated. So if it is a playlist of stuff, images, videos, documents, it's very easily done, but people very rarely come to us, Dave, with traditional first. They're coming to us because they need to solve an interactive need, and oh, by the way, long-term you can transition to traditional content as well.
I agree that, the conventional side of digital signage, the meat potatoes, run this stuff at this time and these locations and all that is commoditized and pretty simple, and I always say that the complicated stuff is behind the scenes, the device management, the API integrations and all that sort of stuff. Are you at a level now where you can provide the building blocks, the Lego blocks to do the interactive piece, but also enable the end user to monitor and remotely manage all that?
Geoff Bessin: We do offer that, and in fact we offer both of what you mentioned, cause you also mentioned the API integration, we can accommodate that as well.
On the device management side, certainly we have an awareness of the devices in the field and you can set up notifications if things are going wrong, that sort of thing, you can see what's running on those devices. On certain platforms, you can remotely update on runtime, that sort of thing. We're not averse to working with a device and platform management options, to collaborate with them in a deployment, but we do offer some of that. And with API integration, we've actually offered for six years. It's been a long time and it's one of those things, Dave, where, as I said, we weren’t born with no-code. We were born worried about user experience and we realized we looked in the mirror and wen, oh, we're actually no-code.
We've been offering a software called API Explorer. You can automatically create an integration, an integration with a web API without writing code And it is a real time integration reading from writing to that web API. It could be a back office system, ERP application, CRM application could be a database wrapped in an API, could be a device on the internet of things, all of these options can be integrated with a running Intuiface experienced by a non-developer, using API Explorer. So we've offered that for some time.
We now have our own CMS but you don't have to use it. Our original value prop is to use whatever you want. We have API Explorer, you can plug into whatever you want. We have now introduced our own because depending on the scenario and the requirements of the project, it just makes better sense to use ours. But we still have customers that would rather use that other thing, or Dave, they’re integrated with the ERP application. They're building a retail point of sale application with Intuiface, and they have integrated with the ERP system, they need to work with the API and you can do that.
Who would you describe as your kind of core end-users, core customers?
Geoff Bessin: I would say 50 to 60% of our customers are agencies and integrators. So we can discuss with the actual user might be, but I would say more than half of our installed base are agencies and integrators with their own clients. And there is a spectrum of reasons why they're using Intuiface. Some of them, they don't have the development skill, but they want to offer interactivity. Others have men and women on the bench with the skill, but they don't have the scale. That's the problem with people is that they can work on one thing at a time.
And what we find is that a lot of the integrators in particular will be taking Intuiface so they can scale. They can take on a larger volume of maybe small and mid-sized projects that they can do with Intuiface, and then put the men and women on the bench onto the bigger high value projects. We find that customers are saving 80% of time and 60% of costs versus customer that don’t use Intuiface. So it's very easy for them, and it's an easy pitch. Conceptually, if you can build an interactive application, doing exactly what you want with a no-code platform is probably cheaper and faster than if I wrote code, so it's an easy idea to wallow and it is what our customers experience. So that's what you'll find. I would say the majority 60%-55% agencies and integrators, the rest are the small and midsize museums, schools, retailers, sales offices, marketing, and sales teams, they want to do it themselves.
And do they want to do it themselves because of cost or control?
Geoff Bessin: Often it's because of cost. They have ambition or they've been bitten, Dave, where they have outsourced it. You don't see this going in, but you meet an agency. You tell them what you want, they agree and deliver something in two months that doesn’t resemble what you wanted, so you ask for revisions, and this cycle continues while you pay for the time. It's not an agile process, and again, I'm not casting aspersions at the agency, they are our customers. But their sales pitch is we use Intuiface so we can deliver what you want faster than the other guys that do exactly what you want, and by the way, if you don't like the work we did, you can take it with you.
If I pay an agency to write custom code and I'll be dissatisfied, I'm starting from zero with another agency. So you have that kind of portability benefit as well. So yes, a lot of the small and midsize, it's budget driven or based on their experience, they have limited budgets. They outsourced it, and they were just satisfied. We do have the occasional large enterprise. They want to have maybe an interactive sales pitch. So the marketing and sales team is driving the creation of the collateral, hiring a developer to make. I could use PowerPoint. Why am I hiring? It's hard to justify this pay developers to code a sales pitch, I can just use PowerPoint. Hold on a second, here's this thing called Intuiface. I can build an interactive sales pitch for my Salesforce. I'm still using the tool. I'm the creative team on the marketing sales team. But I'm creating something that is far more novel and engaging than a PowerPoint.
When the pandemic hit, I speculated and I'm sure many people speculated that this was going to be a difficult time for people who were in the touch and interactive business. What happened instead is that touch actually went up in demand and self service applications became very much a big development initiative. Have you seen that happening in the last couple of years?
Geoff Bessin: We have, and then ultimately it turns out people are more afraid of other people than touch screens. And our business has rebounded quite well. What we were hoping for, and it seems to be the case is that demand didn't drop. It got stuck behind a wall. There was a dam and the demand was building behind the dam, and you couldn't open the dam cause nobody was out of the house and the waters were rising, people are finally out of the house, and you opened up the floodgates. So we're seeing a really nice rebound that is complimented, not just by the building interest anyway, but the kind of renewed interest in facilitating a non-human interaction, which sounds horrible culturally, in their place of business or what have you.
And again, it's not just touch. Yes, I think probably most people would rather take a little Purell. They're fine with that, but still some people are not, and maybe they can use their mobile phone or scan a QR code.
But it's also a labor issue. It's harder to hire people and if you can use self service, then you don't have to worry so much about staffing.
Geoff Bessin: There's that whole other thing too which is the cost of staffing and training and enabling and equipping and there's that as well. So for sure, there is certainly a perceived increase in interest, and interactivity of any kind and Intuiface has always been focused on any kind of interactivity, not just touch, and certainly this ability to use my mobile phone to interact with content is an increasingly interesting example, using gestures to interact, using voice to interact. So I'm not touching but I'm still working with technology directly rather than mediating through somebody else. So all of that is going on.
Last question: you guys have certainly in the last few years had a presence at ISE and at other trade shows, what are you doing in the next few weeks and months? Is Intuiface going to be something that people can walk up and get demos for?
Geoff Bessin: We will be at ISE, so that'll be our first trade show in however many years we'll be there. So you and I are speaking on April 26th and that's why I say in just a couple of weeks, we will be there with a booth, and we certainly hope we'll see others there.
We used to actually have our user conference in parallel with ISE, in-person and the pandemic put the kibosh on that. We've done virtual user conferences every year since then, and we like that because you don't have to travel, and so our user conference will be forever more be virtual. We actually have our user conference in three weeks that people are welcome to join. It's free, it'll be online, but we plan to be at ISE. We plan to be a DSE in the US and I think it's now November, and we'll be participating when your colleagues at Avitas are running DSE in parallel and ISE will be participating in that as well. So we're starting. We're treating this as back to normal. It's interesting, Dave working on my travel plans, flying into Spain. But you can’t just get on a plane, you need to jump through certain things because of COVID. But it looks as of today, they're not even requiring masks onsite. That doesn't seem to be a requirement. Just the honor system that you are vaccinated or recovered and we'll see how that goes, but we're excited to be there. We'll have a big booth and about eight of us, we'll have a lot of people there.
And where can people find Intuiface online?
Geoff Bessin: Dave, thank you for asking, Intuiface.com. They can also just contact us. You are listening to Jeff Besson. You can just email me bessin@intuiface.com.
The product can be tried for free, Dave. No credit card required. People can poke at it and see if what we're saying is true.
All right, thank you.
Geoff Bessin: Dave. It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Wednesday Apr 20, 2022
Ryan Taylor, Delta Airlines
Wednesday Apr 20, 2022
Wednesday Apr 20, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Airports and airlines were early adopters of digital signage technology and the whole idea of data-driven messaging - using screens to tell travellers about arrival and departure times, and the status of flights and boarding at gates.
But digital signage is becoming central to communications not only for passengers, but also for staff.
A huge upgrade of Delta Airlines facilities and passenger experience officially opens today at LAX, with the focal point a 250-foot-long horizontal LED ribbon behind the check-in and bag-loading areas at Delta's relocated and renovated terminal. Similar work is being done by Delta for another busy airport in bad need of sprucing up, LaGuardia in New York.
I had a chance to speak with Ryan Taylor, who is managing the digital signage side of these projects for Delta. We get into the thinking behind them, and how they'll be used, but we also have a broader chat about other ways digital signage is being used in airports by Delta. You have maybe heard of FIDS and GIDS displays, but did you know about RIDS and even SQUIDs?
Listen and learn!
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TRANSCRIPT
Ryan, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what your role is at Delta Airlines and how that's evolved?
Ryan Taylor: Yeah. Thank you for having me, Dave. So my role now is exclusively digital signage. So I run a lot of the digital signage that you may or may not see. Some of our stuff is in the airports and increasingly so now, but a lot of our stuff that I do is the back of the house employee communications. We do a lot of dashboarding and other things. So yeah, I am full time digital signage for Delta Airlines right now.
Wow, is there like a department or are you the guy, the one person?
Ryan Taylor: Our team is growing, so it's me and a couple of other people and a whole lot of people that support us tangentially, of course.
But right now there are several other teams that do digital signage. Most of what you see in the gate areas is another team, and then like I said, my responsibilities are some of the airport areas and then mostly back of house. So right now I manage a network of about little less than 1800 screens somewhere in that range.
Oh, wow, and does that include back of house and workplace and so on?
Ryan Taylor: Yeah, so a lot of the employee communication stuff. So we're in break rooms where employees congregate, lobby areas and then of course there's a lot of dashboarding that we do for various groups to help them navigate the operations and specific things to their work groups. We're very data intensive, so it's not all the nice, pretty pictures. Some of it's just pulling data from various systems and giving people and work groups the information they need to do their jobs effectively.
Where are you hived out of, the IT group?
Ryan Taylor: That's correct. Yeah. So I'm IT and so we manage the infrastructure, the software and build the experiences for customers, whether they're internal or our actual customers.
It's interesting because when you talk about data, you could make the argument that airports were probably the first venues that really adopted the idea of data integration, and they've been doing FIDS displays and GIDS displays for 20+ years.
Ryan Taylor: Yeah, and you can imagine that an airline generates a lot of data, right? And data has a how's the shelf life, especially in real-time 24/7 operation, getting that data to people that need it is critical and making sure your flight is not delayed and it's on time and it's going where it needs to go, and everybody that needs to be on it is on it, and so yeah, we do pride ourselves on playing a really active role in putting that data in the hands of people that need it.
I like to think of the dashboards that we do, they're really heads up displays. The ramp people that load the bags and service the plane and everything, we have our RIDS displays out there for them that give them a whole lot of data on that flight, you know, they don't have access to computers. So having a display on the ramp that shows where that flight's going, how many bags left to be loaded on, how many passengers. All that data that helps the operation run is really front and center for them and has a really positive impact on how the airline operates. So something that we're really proud of.
Yeah, that's interesting. Being a consumer passenger, I'm sitting on the plane or I'm sitting in the gate and all that, the only screens I ever see in those areas are big, almost analog LED displays that just say, which gate, or maybe it says, 867 BOS, cause the flight's going to Boston or something. But, as you're describing, there's more displays that we would never see that are mission critical to the folks trying to get the plane out on time.
Ryan Taylor: Yeah, so you can actually see these RIDS displays if you're in one of our larger hubs. Sometimes they're a little hard to see from the window seat, but they are there and we're pushing a whole lot of information to them. A lot of the data probably doesn't mean much to a passenger, you know, just looking at it but it means a whole lot to the ramp guys and even the pilots rely on it even though they have different systems, it's so visible that they become Kind of integral to the operation, which is great. It's a great place to be when the stuff that you're doing is that valuable.
Is that a new application or have those always been there and I just didn't know about them?
Ryan Taylor: They've been there for a couple of years now. They're about maybe two years old, so pretty new, and I can send you some pictures if you're interested in seeing them, but they're really a cool success story. They do serve a very vital role in the operation.
Yeah, it was going to be my next question: you've had two years of these in action, have you been able to measure the impact and assess the impact of them?
Ryan Taylor: That's a very good question, and it's one that I wish I had more data on.
I believe we know that they are having a positive impact. It's a source of frustration for me, because I would love to get more data on the before and after, on everything we do really. I don't know if everybody's plates are already so full that going through and coming through the data and gathering it is just another task that people don't feel is necessary at this point, but everything from the employee communication side of things, I've always wanted to do before and after survey to see how better informed they are after we put these screens in their break rooms even, do they know more about what the company's direction is and things like that.
We do signage in the Sky Clubs, these are actually iPads that are on the bars that show the drinks that are on offer the premium drinks. We know that they do have an upsell effect in that the bars that have them do sell more premium drinks, we just don't have the hard data to back it up because we can't get anybody to provide it for us. So it's things like that. But yeah, I would love to be able to point to some positive ROI stories because it's always hard digital signage, right? Because sometimes it's not readily apparent. Unfortunately, we don't get that much information.
But anecdotally, and just inherently, you would know that down on the ramps and all that, just simply enabling the workers to know where they're at, what the status is, how much time they have, how many more bags to go or whatever, must be huge for them?
Ryan Taylor: It is. Yeah, we know from talking to them and from the leadership, and just from the investment they've made in it. These went from a, like everything, it starts out as a small POC, and once they see the value, they either hit the gas or they hit the brakes and they hit the gas on those RIDS very quickly. We went from pretty much 0 to 200 of those deployments and in about six months.
So they're maybe not standardizing on them, but they're becoming a fairly normal sort of piece of the landscape?
Ryan Taylor: Yeah, in the airline world, we have leeway to put these in some of our larger hubs where we have more of a presence and in some cases, we're not allowed to put them in a common use environment, but we have in pretty much all our largest hubs, which is great to see.
Yeah, I guess in airport terms, there are airports where you have gate licenses to be there, but there are other airports, like obviously Hartsfield in Atlanta and Salt lake City where you have your own terminal and everything else, right?
Ryan Taylor: Yeah. If we're the terminal operator, we basically have pretty much free reign to do what we want in terms of the technology and everything else that we put on, and like in a smaller station where we only have a couple of flights or a handful of flights, or we're sharing gates with other airlines, that's obviously not as easy to do.
Digital signage and airports have been around for a long time. Obviously there have been two main activities, there have been the flight information displays and the gate information displays that are traveler focused and are just saying, “This flight's going here at this time at this gate and so on”, and then a fair amount of new digital signage has gone in from media companies, but it seems in the last 2-4 years that airports are really, and airlines are making an investment in kitting out the pre-security areas, doing things at check-in and elsewhere, using digital signage that gives them a lot more flexibility and the ability to do messaging and everything else and I was intrigued, and the reason we connected was the work that's going on at LAX. Could you explain that?
Ryan Taylor: Yeah. So this is probably the most exciting thing that I've ever been involved with in my work life, so we do the LIDS and everything airport digital signage needs, your flight information displays, so FIDS or LIDS, as you mentioned. So really LIDS have traditionally been just a single screen behind the counter where you show, checking in the main cabin or this is for sky priority, segmentations. When they started redoing the LA airport, we kinda got involved with our corporate real estate partners, ACS, which is the airport customer service team that runs the gate counters and everything and we wanted to do something that was different that allowed for more than just your normal screen behind the counter.
And that's where we started talking with NanoLumens about putting it in a digital back wall that was continuous using direct LED technology, and it grew from there. So as far as we know, this is the largest single back wall in any airport in the United States. I know Orlando has a much longer one, but it's individual LCDs.
Yeah, it's a whole bunch of tile narrow bezel LCDs.
Ryan Taylor: Right, so this is the longest, continuous one that we're aware of. So we're going to claim it. We're going to say, we have it, but yeah, it’s 250 feet long. So beyond just the normal, for main cabinet or oversize baggage, this allows us to put a whole lot more information, and branding. The whole idea was to create this wall that had a calming effect in the airport. An airport can be a very chaotic and sometimes intimidating place, like LAX can be daunting. So this gives us a whole new avenue to promote the brand, but really inform and maybe change the mood a little bit in that check-in process.
So what you'll see is an addition to the LIDS information, we'll have flight information, so there's actually FIDS embedded in there. There's an innovative new meter for the sky club to tell you how busy the club is before you even set foot behind security. So you can play on, “Hey, the club is busy. There are two clubs, so you can choose between them.” So that's a really cool data point on there, but just the imagery and the videos that we'll be playing behind it will kind of have a sense of calm. It all works together on this really huge, beautiful back wall that stretches the entire length of the ticket counter, which is pretty impressive. I'm really happy with the way it turned out, and we're really excited.
The really cool thing about it is there will be a sister to this wall coming online very soon in LaGuardia, and it will be the next one to get it when they open up in early June.
These are two terminals that could badly use any sprucing up they can get, right?
Ryan Taylor: Absolutely, yeah. If you've ever flown out of either one of them, you’d know how much they needed investment and it is a big investment and we're happy to be a part of it.
So with the 250 foot wide LED ribbon, are you running a single piece of content at times across the whole swath of it or is it segmented?
Ryan Taylor: It'll be segmented and most of that, I guess from the user end, it'll look like it's one piece of content. It's actually two PCs running the wall. So there are two PCs that split the wall in half. So one side is driven by one PC, it's actually a 4k resolution. So everything's being reassembled onto the wall and in that linear fashion, but it will look like one piece of content.
The only reason why we don't have one continuous landscape shot would be just because it doesn't exist. We couldn't find anything longer than 4k width to put up there.
So you'd have to come up with custom creative and maybe somewhere down the road, you do that, but to get going this'll do just fine?
Ryan Taylor: Yep, absolutely.
And the LAX job, it was previewed recently, but it's not actually live yet, right?
Ryan Taylor: Yeah. So LAX is going to open April 20th, that’s when passengers will start being directed to use that space over the old terminal to check in and that one will be renovated for another airline that I believe. But yeah, that will be our new home, terminal three in LA come April 20th.
This is why you're going back and forth a lot between Atlanta and LA?
Ryan Taylor: That is, yeah. We had a media event a while ago. As you can imagine, there's still a lot of last minute details to take care of. So we're just making sure that all the I’s are dotted, T's crossed and ready to go for April 20th.
In terms of the LED wall itself, did you have to do some testing and everything else around what pixel pitch was going to work for viewability? These are not just ads and not just visuals, you've got to have text on there. I would assume you have to be pretty careful to make sure the legibility is there so that people aren't wondering, does that say 130 or 730?
Ryan Taylor: Yeah, this was definitely a learning curve for us. This was our first foray into using the LED technology and you mentioned the pixel pitch, which is spot on. I think we're using 2.5 millimeters on this wall, so there is some trade-off right? The resolution is pretty good, especially when you're standing at a distance.
Customers will be about 10 to 12 feet away from this when they're actually at the check-in counter talking to an agent. So you have some distance, but it is still relatively close. We did a lot of testing on the legibility. When we're actually putting data out there, it's really good. Some of the images, depending on how fine they got, tended to not be as clear. So where we could, we defaulted to actually printing and texts from the software instead of putting up an image.
I'm curious if what you're doing will extend into the automated baggage loading areas. I don’t know the technical term for that is, but one of your rival airlines that rhymes with United, in Denver, had a new area open up recently where those conveyors or whatever, where you do your own bag tagging, and then you drop them on a conveyor and they go into something, they were using LED walls there to segment the different stations and say, this one's open, this one's closed or whatever, or this is for a business class, all that sort of thing. Are you doing that or looking at it?
Ryan Taylor: Yeah, so, there's an express baggage lobby in Atlanta, and I believe there's one coming or already in Detroit. We did a pilot because of the layout of the one in not Atlanta. There's four kiosks for the self tag bag drop. So we did use some sensors to feed a digital display that was in the queuing area that would show you which one is occupied and which one is available.
Unfortunately it didn't really pan out. It was either too sensitive or not sensitive enough because it was basically looking at an area in front of the kiosk to tell somebody was standing in front of it and if they moved out of that fence off the virtual area, if we set it too sensitive, as they're moving around with their bag, it was flickering, between open, closed, occupied, and then if it wasn't, if we dial down the sensitivity, then it was somebody would leave and for too long it would look like somebody was still there. So we abandoned that aspect of it, but our screens are still there explaining the process and wayfinding and directionally, where you go after you drop the bag off.
Yeah, I assume in airports, just like in retail, particularly given what's happening in the last couple of years that I've been saying a lot that digital signage is even more important than prior to the pandemic, because there's more of an emphasis than ever on self-service, more technologies being introduced and whether it's frictionless shopping or whatever in retail, you need screens that explain, “This is what you do. This is how you do it. This is where you go”, all those things.
So I'm assuming that the journey that starts at check-in, you guys are thinking about the full journey, all the way to the boarding ramp for passengers and using digital signage to guide them.
Ryan Taylor: Yeah. I think you nailed it. You really do have to look at the whole experience from a passenger perspective, from curbside to a baggage claim and on, so there is a lot of emphasis and there's a whole team that does look at that experience, not just from a digital signage perspective, but from every aspect of that traveler's journey and so we're partnered with them to make sure that we're aligned with how we want that passenger to experience Delta and digital signage is a key part of that.
I guess it's one thing when Delta owns the terminal or has blanket rights to it or whatever, versus ones where you're a tenant in it, how difficult is it to coordinate with all the different systems and displays and data sources and everything else that may be in like a secondary, I'm pulling one out of the air here, let's say Kansas city, Missouri, or something like that, where maybe you're not a hub but there are all these systems that you need to work with?
Ryan Taylor: That's a good question. I don't know that I have an answer for that because I haven't really had to deal with that piece. Generally, we are brought in after they've already sorted those kinds of details out.
Yeah. I was supposed that regardless of whether new digital signage is in there, they've always had flight information displays and that sort of thing?
Ryan Taylor: Yeah, and I don't really do the FIDS, but I know that some airports, they like to use their own FIDS and their own data feeds and then, areas like Atlanta those are FIDS, they're managed by us so and obviously we're just showing our flights there because you're on our concourse.
So it definitely depends on what the airport wants or allows us to do, versus you know I think in our view, we would want to have all our stuff, be owned and operated by Delta.
In the sky clubs, the frequent fire lounges, are you doing anything beyond FIDS display?
Ryan Taylor: Yeah. So in the sky clubs, we specifically manage our team on the outside, the ladder boards, affectionately called the SKIDS for sky club information displays.
I've learned about RIDS and SKIDS today.
Ryan Taylor: Oh I'll tell you all about it, we've got more “ids” coming. LaGuardia is getting SQUIDS.
Okay. I have to ask what that is.
Ryan Taylor: SQUIDS is security and queue information displays.In LaGuardia, there'll be these freestanding totems that will let the passengers know that this line is for general boarding. This one is for precheck, so that segmentation. So those will be actually very cool. They are about 12 feet tall, and they're kind of, I call them monoliths, because they're triangular shaped and they'll have LED screens on two sides of them. They're very striking. They're going to be a really cool different looking digital signage, right? Not your normal 16:9, and not to bring up your brand, I do feel like there's going to be a lot more digital science that comes out, especially with the LED technology that breaks that mold of the ratio, which I think is great because it's become so ubiquitous.
I’m definitely going off on a tangent here, but I think the challenge, especially in an airport environment is there is a proliferation of screens. If you're looking in the gate area, there's so many screens hanging down for your attention and if we could rethink that and figure out a way to make it less cluttered and clean up the gate area, I think that would help with some of the chaos of visual stimulation that you can become bombarded with.
Yeah. I think that the chaos and reducing that has gotta be the biggest goal of any of this sort of stuff in something like an airport, and I really appreciated it when I think it was Orlando airport, they started using flat panel displays at the TSA screening areas, that would say, this line is for business class and so on, and if things changed and a new aligned open up or whatever, the screens would automatically reflect that, and just anything like that operationally that makes the journey a little easier and a little less irritating, I think is amazing.
Ryan Taylor: Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree. I think there's a lot that can be done to inform but also, make it just a little more palatable. I think one of the dangers with digital signage is it's easier than ever to put up a screen. The cost has come down and especially with these large format LED screens, even in your city cityscape, you're running the risk of saturation to the point, I mean, I don't think it's there yet, but in certain places that can be where you're creating that future mystic Blade Runner scenario, where there's a screen on every building and you're just overwhelmed with stuff.
So we definitely have to be thoughtful on how we deploy and what we're putting on there and is it useful, right? Is it serving its purpose? Or are we just adding to the clutter and teaching people not to look at these things? Cause that's what you don't want to do.
Yeah. I think that's the great example of why airport digital signage is so good because of all those “ids” and they all have a point except maybe the advertising, which I know you guys don't do, but all those other ones serve some express purpose.
Ryan Taylor: Yes.
All right, Ryan, this was terrific. I learned a lot today, including about SQUIDS.
Ryan Taylor: Yeah. If you ever get to New York, I'd love to show you around and if you're ever in Atlanta, we can host you here if you're interested. There's a lot of stuff we're proud of and we can show you the RIDS, we can show you SQUIDS.
There’s nothing more exciting than going to LaGuardia.
Ryan Taylor: I know, right? By the way, our back walls are affectionately called BFLIDS, which stands for Big Friendly LIDS. You can choose another word for friendly features, but that's how we refer to them.
I'll have to start coming out with my own “ids”.
Ryan Taylor: You can get creative with them.
All right, Ryan. Thanks again.
Ryan Taylor: Thanks, Dave. It was good talking to you.
Wednesday Mar 16, 2022
Randy Guy, Bluefin
Wednesday Mar 16, 2022
Wednesday Mar 16, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Much of the attention in digital signage goes to big-dollar projects that feature huge screens and flashy content, but there's a good business and a lot of trade happening with much smaller displays that just help explain and sell stuff.
Bluefin International kind of fell into digital signage in the mid-2000s, and it has turned into a full-time business. The companies that were buying corporate-branded digital picture frames from Bluefin started asking for more functionality, to make the screens interactive in settings like retail. Now the Atlanta company has a wide range of sizes and types of flat panel displays that brands are using to influence consumers right at merchandising positions.
I had a great chat with Randy Guy, Bluefin's owner, about how he found his way into digital signage, and how his company operates - straddling a main office in Georgia with a manufacturing plant he owns and runs in Shenzhen, China.
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TRANSCRIPT
Randy, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me about Bluefin’s roots and the core focus of the company?
Randy Guy: Sure. Dave, that's a kind of a tricky question, but we started 21 years ago selling USB flash drives out of China. Everything we tried was a challenge, and eventually in 2004, people wanted us to customize the flash drives and put people's logos on them. That got us in the promotional products business. We invested in some facility over there to do customization.
In 2007, 2008, we started selling a lot of digital picture frames. The pharma companies, the big guys were giving away to doctors and everybody digital picture frames, and people started wanting us to customize those picture frames by adding touch, push button, motion sensors, things like that. So we developed our own ad player in 2008 based on our own proprietary platform, and we engineered and designed it and held all the mechanicals ourselves, and that kind of got us in the LCD market. So we started making custom LCDs in 2011 for some large global brands and then when Brightsign introduced their all-in-one chip back in 2016, they came to us and we were able to put that in an all-in-one fixture, and that kinda got us into the digital signage market.
So it was a tricky way to get into the digital signage market, but that's the truth, and that's how we got here. It's 21 years later. We have owned a facility in China since 2012, where we do all our engineering design and manufacturing. We still have our promotional product business. It's thriving and focuses on consumer electronics, think anything from earbuds to USB chargers, anything that you would buy in an electronic store, we still put people's logos on.
So our background is customization. Our background is giving the people exactly what they want, and we've just transitioned that to digital signage and LCD manufacturing, that's probably one of our core strengths and they all see the businesses you get exactly what you want from Bluefin. You have a challenge or you have a specific need for an LCD, we can customize the fixture or the LCD to meet exactly what you're looking for.
That's interesting. I suspect with a lot of companies in this space, if you said, “Yeah, I really liked that, but I need it in blue”, there's just going to get pushback saying no, can't do that.
Randy Guy: Absolutely. In fact, one of our largest roll-outs was in white. We went to a large furniture manufacturer, a global retail brand, and they insisted on white touchscreens, white housings. So color is not a problem on our end. We've offered them in blue, red, and white has been since our largest rollout where they insisted on that color.
Yeah. If you're a conventional manufacturer, this just wouldn't be in your wheelhouse at all but you've got that experience.
Randy Guy: Absolutely. To be honest with you, we don't really compete with the traditional guys. We're niche, and we're so focused on customization and larger projects where people really need something customized and they want to hold those mechanicals for 5 to 10 years, that's why they come to us. It's because they know we deliver a product today, five years from now, they can get the exact same product from us, the same customization, same everything. We keep that SKU constant for those guys throughout the life of their project.
This may be a difficult question because “typical” is probably all over the place, but what would be a typical kind of environment that you would be in with your screens?
Randy Guy: Our background has been the point of purchase market, working with retailers and the retail fixture manufacturers, coming up with solutions. There's not a retailer out there that doesn't have our screens working. So really when they come to us with a challenge and they say, I've got this much space, or I need this particular mounting pattern, or I need this particular setup from a touchscreen perspective, and we want to specific void of space, I think that's probably our biggest value add and then making it all come together, giving them exactly what they want.
We offer around 30 screen sizes between the standard 16:9, and then also the stretch-bar LCD category, and then we custom cut sizes as well, so there's really not a size we can't handle and we can't provide. We do focus on the smaller sizes because once you get into the bigger glass, we really lose our cost advantages from the big guys cutting so much 43 and 55 inch glass. But we still do that. Our customers are very specific about needing a specific mechanical design or something customized. Those guys, the big guys, don't want to mess with a thousand custom 43 inch monitors, but that’s right up our alley.
Yeah, they want to do a hundred thousand.
Randy Guy: Exactly.
So a lot of this would be like end cap displays, merchandising displays, like in something like a Best Buy where there's an audio product or a home automation product, and there'll be a screen there that's an explainer screen. Is that pretty typical?
Randy Guy: Absolutely. That's the perfect application. We have a lot of units in these different retailers. The touch screens become really important when it's a higher end category and the product might be complicated or it needs more explanation, or the customer might have more questions or wants to dig in deeper on other items like accessories and how the product works. That's where touchscreen interactivity really comes into play in the retail market because you can drive home your message, and the customer can explore the product on the screen versus we still sell a lot of just looping videos, your Best Buy basic 10” screen that just loops a video, it gives you a basic idea of what the product does, and it shows them some pictures and videos of the product and real life applications. But the touch screens are really where it gets deeper and you can really enhance the customer experience with information.
And a lot of times they're smaller just simply because the retailer doesn't want to surrender stocking space and merchandising space so they want to integrate it there, but it can't be a big ass display because then they can't put products there, right?
Randy Guy: Exactly. The small form factors are ideal for the point of purchase because you are competing for the physical space on the shelf itself or on the display. They want to stack it full of products, it can be speakers or earbuds or Bluetooth headsets so they want to have plenty of room on there for the product. So smaller is better in that sense.
But now the digital signage world is finding a lot of applications for small form factors. They're thinking, this might be a great opportunity to engage in a customer here or different spots throughout different buildings, whether it be corporate or hospitality. VisualSign just started to come around, I think, with the small form factors, we're seeing a lot of opportunity, especially with the customization we can do. They can have something really unique to grab people's attention.
Yeah. I've been in digital signage for a long time and have been paying attention to it for at least 21 years. I would say the first wave of digital signage in retail, if you set aside those companies that put screens in and want to sell ads on them, and they’ll put them in for free. If it's the retailers paying for it, the first wave seemed to be large screens hanging from the ceiling on the walls and everything else.
That didn't really work, and the next wave seems to be maybe big LED feature walls, but just one of them and then small screens, right at the point of purchase.
Randy Guy: Absolutely. We're seeing a transition from path to purchase where a lot of consumer packaged goods brands advertise on billboards and commercials. They want to be where you're buying the product. They want to be where the product is, and then a lot of times you're not going to hang a 55 inch by a candy aisle or by a potato chip aisle. You're going to need a smaller form factor to grab the customer's attention and drive them to your product.
But the brands are starting to see a lot more value in being at the point of purchase versus the path to purchase. So we were excited about that kind of transition and how to forge that customer experience because the brands have the money to spend, and if they want to be front and center where the product is purchased, that's a great opportunity for our industry.
When I was dealing with packaged goods companies like 12-15 years ago, and their brand marketers were asking about doing digital display in the store, right at the fixture, they liked it, but they said the unit cost was too much, didn't want to spend it and they only needed it for six months or maybe even three months. Could they rent it?
How has that changed or are those CPG brands now willing to spend the money?
Randy Guy: They are willing to spend the money, and I think that not only on the brands, but the retailers and the store owners themselves are seeing opportunities to share that screen space and get value added as well.
A perfect example would be the CPG might get 75% of the screen for 75% of the time, and the store owner would get, or the store chain would get, or the retail chain would get the other 25% of the time and they can share that screen, but the screens have come down in cost. We have a solution called Daisy chain where you can put multiple screens on one player. So that helps drive this cost down and you only have one endpoint to maintain. So we feel like that's a really good solution that we're pitching to a lot of people. We're starting to roll out in volume to different retailers with that solution, but basically you can run, say a 24” stretch, you can run 12 of those displays off of a 4k box. So that helps drop the costs down and it helps them repurpose the product and they have a lot more screens for a lot less.
I suspect your a technical guys, particularly those who've been with you for a while, have been on a bit of a journey because I was interested in digital picture frames just as you were going in the late two thousands and thinking, maybe these things are digital signgage, they're low cost or integrated and everything else, but the technology, the underlying hardware in a lot of cases I suspect was more than a little flaky, but how hard was it to find reliable goods or is that why you just set up your own manufacturing?
Randy Guy: It was a challenge going from some of the higher end industrial grade monitors, a seven inch monitor might have been $400 and a digital picture frame was $40. While the fixture gas and the retail markets are great, we love this $40 solution, but it doesn't have the functionality or the industrial grade qualities of this $400 a unit. So that was our challenge.
How do we beef up our digital picture frame to make it into an ad player, and that's when we researched the chip sets and designed a platform around that, and we took control of the mechanicals and put it in metal housings and those types of things. So we industrialized digital picture frames is really what we did and how we got started in a very crude sense of product development. We took a really low cost plastic housing, a digital picture frame, and we put it in a metal housing, beefed up the chip sets, gave it more functionality, we added touch and push-button capabilities and motion sensors and those types of things. That's how we got started in 2008 with our first ad player.
So you're kind of remanufacturing them?
Randy Guy: Actually redesigning them, and believe it or not, we're still selling picture frames. We're still selling that plastic low end picture frame with people's logos on it. It's kinda made a comeback in the last couple of years.
Yeah, I was walking around a Best Buy recently and saw a company song that I thought, oh, this was like a flashback for me. I felt like I was back in 2008, like you say, the demand is there.
Randy Guy: Absolutely, especially on the 10” size. Once the screen get down to lower costs, people can get more bang for their buck and there's been some really good companies that have come out with solutions that integrate with your phone and have apps. I can be out fishing with my kids or in a football game and I can take a picture and I can download it directly to my mother's 13 or 15 inch I bought her that’s sitting on the mantle, and so she gets real time pictures of us at the beach or wherever we are.
So they've come a long way from the original where you had to put everything onto an SD card and plug it in and then take it out and update the pictures and everything. So some of the applications now with picture frames are really cool.
When you started to redesign these picture frames, is it at that point that you started working with BrightSign or was that kind of further down the road?
Randy Guy: That was further down the road. We were out selling our ad player and we had a global brand that wanted us to make custom monitors for them, and then we got introduced to BrightSign that way, so we optimized our monitors for BrightSign’s box and then when they came to market with their own all in one chip, we were the first ones to integrate it and bring it to market, and that their platform took it to a whole nother level from functionality and connectivity.
And they've brought all the programming you can do to all the touch screens and interactivity, so that just elevated it to another level from where we had developed.
I'd assume that kind of removes some of the R&D headaches and challenges that you're facing because they have that figured out and you just got to snap that board in?
Randy Guy: Absolutely, especially on the content creation side and the interactivity. We used to do layer touchscreens where it was quite the challenge to program and everything else, and they've got all that canned in the package and it's very simple. Everybody's familiar with it. That makes it a lot easier technically for sure.
Does it add a layer of comfort as well when you're working with resellers and integrators that you can say it's BrightSign under the hood and they feel better?
Randy Guy: Oh, absolutely. They are an award-winning platform and software and their support and the reliability and the products themselves. People love them, so absolutely, it provides a layer of comfort.
They've done a nice job. It's at a level now when I talk to people, they're saying we're thinking about PCs, or maybe we're going to use smart displays or maybe we'll use BrightSign boxes. So it's at a level now where it seems to be its own category.
Randy Guy: Absolutely. They've done a great job and their products are exceptional. Between the support they provide and the product quality and reliability, it's definitely a bonus to integrate their products into our stuff and the digital signage world and their retail and point of purchase world really resonates with our solutions.
I guess there’s not really an installed base, but from the numbers of products out there, what would be the percentage of them that are connected versus just working off of a memory card?
Randy Guy: I would say probably 75% are working off a memory card. There might be more than that that's connected, but how often people update content is never as often as they want to or they think they're going to when they roll out an application.
So if it's just working off a memory card, it's not connected. If there's a problem, something locks up or whatever, does anybody know, or you're completely at the mercy of the local store manager?
Randy Guy: If you're not connected to the internet, then you're not going to have visibility for that time. The beauty of our products is that if there's any kind of power issue or for any reason, the unit reboots, it fully auto starts, it doesn't require any interaction.
They're designed not to go down, to be honest with you. That’s the beauty of our platform is to know the OS and things like that you're going to have challenges with. As far as locking up and having to reboot or something like that, we just don't have those challenges in our platforms.
So the bigger challenge in a lot of respects is just all the stuff that you can buy off Alibaba that says it's a looping ad display or whatever and those are, I'm sure out in retail as well, and those who go down, maybe they don't have the routines to come back. So somebody would look at that and go, this sort of stuff doesn't work, I don't want to buy this.
Randy Guy: Absolutely. If there's any opportunity for the unit so you don't have to choose a menu or do something to start the device, that's a challenge. Retailers lose power all the time. A lot of stores shut down power at night. So no one has the stomach anymore to have those touchscreens, and if you rely on the store manager or the local staff to keep your signage running, you're in trouble.
So it has to be plug and play and it has to be autostart, and it has to correct itself if there are any power issues or anything like that, it has to take care of those challenges on its own. You can't rely on any human help at the store.
Are there any limitations as to what you can do, like it'll only run standard definition video or anything like that?
Randy Guy: No limitations. Any kind of crazy resolutions that the screen manufacturers come up with, we find a way to integrate them in our displays and make that available to the content guys. I'd say the stretch bar LCD is a challenge. Well, content is always a challenge because there's content creation and getting it updated and getting it approved by all the different parts of whether it be brands or manufacturers that have to approve the content. But when you start changing the resolutions from standard 16:9 or standard 1080p, then that's when they start having real delays and challenges and that can mess up a project. It's more on the content creation side than it is us being able to deliver the content on the screen.
Are you seeing demand? I did a podcast recently with another company, Instorescreen, and they do inline shelf edge displays that are like ribbon displays and that sort of thing. Are you getting the ask for that sort of thing?
Randy Guy: We absolutely participate in that market. I think it's going to be a challenge long-term though. I think you can overwhelm the customer at some point. You can have too much video. You can have too much color. In fact, we've had displays where people are trying to take the color out and they're making it more monochrome looking almost on a regular display.
So I think that there's a place for those solutions. I think it's going to be more higher end, higher dollar valued products. I can't imagine that we're going to see shampoo or toothpaste full of LCD screens, telling you what the price is on every one of those shelves that are trying to sell those, but I can see where a higher end item, for example, home audio, $200-$300 items. I can see where you can use stretch displays for something like that to not only educate the customer, but there's more to it, like specs and technical information to give on something like that, and then the dollar value supports the spend on the digital signage. I just can't imagine a shampoo or a toothpaste driving in a value to warrant having a digital signage solution. So that's my take on it.
I think it's going to be very targeted for certain categories, maybe new products or something like that, but I don't see a future where every shelf in the grocery stores has a screen on it. That's just me personally. I just don't see it.
I always liken it to a kaleidoscope effect, and years ago, working with a company that was going to put screens in like flat panel displays with ads on them on casino floors, and they engaged me to walk around the casino with them and ask where they should put them on. I said not in here, period, because there's too damn much going on there. They're just going to get lost in all the other razzle-dazzles that's there, put them in the entryways, put them in the common areas, it's the same thing. If every shelf edge has motion media going, that is just, like you say, it's overwhelming.
Randy Guy: Absolutely. Humans can be overstimulated, they'll just tune it all out. I think that you'll lose the effectiveness of it.While I think there's a more targeted market for shelf edge, I don't think it's going to be a hundred percent off the shelves or an opportunity in my mind.
Is it easier now to go into stores because 20 years ago there was no power in the floor, very little power at the merchandising areas, in the shelf gondolas or any of that stuff so you had to do drops of power cords and this and that, all kinds of hacks to get power to the screens. Is it better now?
Randy Guy: Absolutely. In the places where digital signage and point of purchase kiosks are located, the retail owners are finding a way to get power to those locations. They see that it's a necessity. We used to end caps in some of the largest home improvement stores and things like that and they didn't have power, but now they're seeing the benefit that they need to get power there.
Another benefit of a lot of our products is that you can use power over ethernet, which makes it low voltage. So you don't have to do a power drop with a certified electrician and worry about code and pulling permits, and things like that, and you can move the product around a whole lot easier with a network cable than you can trying to find a power outlet. So power over ethernet solved a lot of those issues for people that were hesitant to run a power drop but it's pretty easy to run a network cable.
Do you see much business outside of retail?
Randy Guy: Oh, we do. Like I said, the digital signage world in general is starting to warm up, especially the interactive touchscreens. The start of the pandemic was a scare for us because of all the noise around touch screens and surfaces and transmitting COVID, but that went away. Thank goodness. That was going to be a real challenge for the market if that hadn't changed, so that put a scare in us big time.
One of the biggest applications we're seeing uses for our small form factor of touchscreens is people are able to control larger screens, almost using our screens as a remote control. So you get the bang for the buck, you can have interactivity, you have a robust solution. You can go through a lot of different content, but it's being thrown up on a bigger screen where you get a bigger experience and then you can engage people that aren't actually touching the interactive part, so you can engage people all around the store or the lobby or wherever since they can see what's going on. So we think that's a pretty cool solution and almost a cheaper way to put interactivity on a large screen TV is by having a control box. That's a lot lower cost.
You don't want to have a 65 inch touchscreen. You can, but it's going to be really super expensive, and people are, other than wayfinding, a lot of people aren't comfortable walking up huge screens and start banging on it and touching on it, there's a hesitation in that sense and when you're so close to a big screen, you can't really take in all the content anyway. So we love solutions where we use our small screens to drive larger screens, we think that has a lot of legs.
Yeah, and with LED video walls, with some exceptions, for the most part, you really don't want people walking up to that LED wall and touching it in any way.
Randy Guy: Exactly. Touchscreens have always had a little hesitancy from the public, but they're getting used to them with the tablets and iPads and those types of devices, they're getting used to coming up and touching smaller screens, but you're right. You don't want them touching the bigger screens and people were a little bit leery of doing that anyway.
You recently added an open operating system for an all-in-one display that has ARM processors and can run on like Linux and Android. So it shifts or provides an alternative to BrightSign. Why did that come about?
Randy Guy: Just supply chain issues. We can’t have enough options in the world right now. We have some specific clients who are using those platforms. At the end of the day, we're a contract manufacturer. That's our customization angle is that we want to make whatever product you need. So it was twofold. One, the product supply issues, and anything could happen in this world from a supply chain standpoint, it was what we've all figured out. And number two, customers really want that solution. A lot of people are already using that solution. We felt that we were missing some market share and some opportunities there. We wanted to be able to offer any platform they want to use and pretty much be a one-stop shop.
So if you had a screen network that was using a lot of Android driven boxes or Android smart displays, they didn't want to add this into the network, running something that’s different. They would prefer that this be Android too?
Randy Guy: Absolutely. So if they've already spent the time and money to develop an Android app and they're supporting it then they want as many devices as they can get on that platform. So they don't have to support multiple platforms. So we were getting shut out of a lot of opportunities,where they insisted on something running Android. They loved our product, but they had to have Android. So that was a challenge.
And as we talked about before, their only other option probably would be to go on Alibaba and then cross their fingers, right?
Randy Guy: Absolutely. Being a US-based company is a huge advantage over Alibaba and those types of companies of the world. Just from the standpoint, we support all our products in the U S. You've got credit terms. You've got RMA support and it's just a lot easier to handle projects and a lot more comfortable on the thrust side of things. So we see that as a huge benefit owning our own facility in China, we're cost competitive with anybody in the world. So we take that factor out.
So the ability to have inventory and samples and can support projects, US-based you know, that gives us a big advantage.
Yeah. You could have a contract manufacturer in Shenzhen, but if they're busy on something else, well, too bad.
Randy Guy: Absolutely, and then, those guys, they don't like to run a 100 units or 50 units or 75 units and then run 75 this week and you come back three weeks later and want 30 more, that doesn't go over. You don't stay in their graces very long, but customization and projects, that's been our business for 21 years.
Someone might order 500 pieces today and if they come back three weeks later, oh, shoot. I should've ordered some spares, I need it. That's what we do. That's not a challenge on our end. A lot of people resonate with that and they appreciate that. They get a flat pricing on stuff like that, and we're here to serve them and make sure that they get what they need. And if they need an extra 50 units for gosh sakes, we're not gonna penalize them or be mad that they need 50 more units because the quantity is low. We've got to see the bigger picture, the whole thing.
In 2022, what more are we going to see out of Bluefin?
Randy Guy: We've got a couple of surprises up our sleeve that we're designing on. There's a few segments of the market that that we think are underserved, that we're really eyeballing. One thing about being a small company is that we are small enough that we care about the customers and we listen to customers, but we're also big enough that we can take care of the customers and we're getting a lot of feedback from a couple of different channels in the market that they're having a heartburn with and they're struggling with, and being a small company, we can pivot and try to meet some of those needs of the customers where they're having issues. So we're excited about a couple of initiatives that we've got, hopefully gonna roll out here in the first half of this year.
Hopefully prior to InfoComm, and so we've got a few things coming out. We'd love to get back on here and talk to you about as we move along.
All right. So if people want to know more work and how can they find you online?
Randy Guy: We are TheBluefin.com.
The only other thing I have on here I wanna make sure we cover, our supply chain issues are resolving quickly, so we're offering more products to hedge against future supply chain issues. Logistics is still a challenge, but our lead times are back down in our normal four to five week range now. Getting the product to the United States is different. Air freight is reliable, but it's really expensive right now, ship freight is not reliable and it's still expensive. So it's a double edged sword there, but from a production capability, we're getting back into business, we are ready to roll. From that standpoint, we are seeing the pandemic kind of fade away on the supply chain side from component issues.
All right, Randy, thank you so much for spending some time with me.
Randy Guy: Oh, absolutely. I appreciate you having me on, I look forward to coming back soon with some more exciting news.
Wednesday Feb 16, 2022
David Crumley, HUSH Studios
Wednesday Feb 16, 2022
Wednesday Feb 16, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Experience is one of those soft, squishy terms that gets used a lot in the context of digital signage - using displays and content to attract, engage and leave a desired impression with the people who go through a designed space.
There are many projects that get described as visual experiences that aren't a lot more than screens on walls that are running stuff, but a Brooklyn company called HUSH Studios is absolutely in the business of designing and delivering visual experiences that can communicate the mission, values and products of big corporate clients.
HUSH has done interesting work in the corporate spaces of some of the biggest and most familiar brands in the United States and beyond. The company came on my radar after it pushed out a case study last year showing what was done at Uber's newly opened corporate campus in San Francisco. It's a digitally-driven space, but much more inventive than just a big fine pitch LED on a feature wall.
I had an interesting chat with David Crumley, the Austin, Texas-based Technology Director for HUSH. We get into the thinking and technology challenges of these kinds of projects, what works and why, and his life being the guy who has to make the big ideas into something that exists or can be made, that makes sense, fits a budget, and works reliably.
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TRANSCRIPT
David, thank you for joining me. What does HUSH do, and what's your role?
David Crumley: Hush is an experiential design firm based in Brooklyn. Our mission is to design experiences for the most dynamic organizations in the world. Our work is around the globe. Our goal is to seamlessly integrate architecture and digital technology to create custom experiences for the workplace, employees, guests and transform the built environment with technology.
My role is the technical director and I focus on the kind of AV hardware and systems side of it and we have other technical directors that focus more on the software side.
So you would go onsite, do site surveys and all that, at least in normal times, and basically work with the big thinkers who say, “we want to do this” and you say, okay, or sure we can do that?
David Crumley: Yeah, that's actually a great way of describing it, and how I often will talk with my team. We have an amazing creative team of art directors, architects that come up with amazing concepts, sketches or quick renders and then my job is to then look at that and figure out, okay, how do we make that? What technologies can we use? Hopefully it's something that exists already, so it's not building something from scratch, sometimes it is.
And then working with a huge ecosystem of partners on the client side and the build side to bring it all to life.
So at least part of your time is spent understanding the emerging technologies and building relationships with different vendors to understand whether these guys will deliver or they're going to be a problem?
David Crumley: Exactly, right. We spent a lot of time working with LED manufacturers, lighting manufacturers, AV integrators, fabricators, physical computing partners all over the place to figure out, to know, and have a jumpstart on what products or options are out there. What will make the most sense to be permanently installed? Because our project has a lifespan of 10 plus years. So it's crucial to have those relationships in that knowledge of all the hardware and technologies out there.
The company's key statement is: we mix content, space and technology to communicate an organization's mission, vision, and products.
I'm curious how you get to that, because there's a lot of corporate mission statements out there that somehow managed to be lofty and, in their words, but also empty. Like I'll look at their mission statement, I go, okay, what does that mean?
David Crumley: Yeah, that's a good question and to be totally transparent, that is not my area of expertise. Thankfully, we have a huge team of strategists and creatives that spend a lot of time upfront working with the clients to distill that down, to figure out the essence of what we should be creating and what should be built and what the messaging should be to actually translate the company's brand and mission and identity in to these experiences that can easily turn into something where it becomes more complex or convoluted.
I think Hush does a really great job of distilling that down and finding the essence of what needs to be communicated and doing it in an artful and thoughtful way, which is one of the main reasons I've worked with them so long and enjoy the work we do there.
Do projects lead with digital or is it more a case of, it's just a common outcome because the technology makes sense?
David Crumley: It's a bit of both. We do start with digital, that is our bread and butter. We are excellent at taking data and content and using that to create amazing visualizations and content and lighting animations, and what not with these projects, but we also do a lot of strictly analog work as well. So super graphics, like fabricated elements that go within the building itself.
We have a few that have no digital components at all. It's just strictly analog type work. It really depends on the space, the client, the brief, bost of our projects do have digital aspects.
Do the clients or potential clients come with a brief in mind? Do they have an idea that we want to do a huge video wall in our lobby or whatever or are they saying we want to communicate our mission, our brand, what should we do?
David Crumley: It's a bit of both, honestly.
We prefer whenever it's the latter, because we have more of a blank page to work with and we can do those extensive strategy design concepts in phases and really figure out what makes sense for the client, their brand and for the space. But on the other side, we do get a lot of projects where the building is built, they have SPECT hardware, they have a big system, but they have nothing to go on it and so we come in to figure out what kind of content or what makes sense on it. So we do a bit of both of them as well.
I would imagine the latter is maybe not problematic because it's work and it could still be interesting and all that, but to you you're confined to what you can do, right?
David Crumley: Oh yeah, exactly.
Your company's worked with a lot of very big global brands. Why do they come your way?
David Crumley: That's a good question. I think they are drawn to the work we do that I kinda mentioned earlier where we will work closely with them to distill down what the message and what the concept is.
I think we do a great job of integrating media and content into the architecture, to where it's not just screens on walls or big video wall, like you said, and for the clients that want to have that tight integration between architecture, technology, content, storytelling, I think that's where we stand out and our body of work and luckily that gravitates with a lot of clients, and when they come to us, that's what they want and that's what we do well. And so we're typically set up for success in that regard.
You mentioned storytelling. I found a lot of corporate lobby video walls and experiences or whatever, it's not so much storytelling, at least with the early ones, it has been more about just the wow factor!
David Crumley: Yeah, that's very true, like big, bold, fast content, just trying to do that initial kind of wow moment, like you said. And another approach we do is like a slow burn where there is a wow moment in the scale and the architectural elements, but we're not showing all our cards or all the things that technology can do. It's a bit restrained, both in the content and the tech and it allows the content to be a longer enjoyable thing, especially for employees that come into a lobby every day where they don't see everything it can do the first time and it just becomes repetitive.
Yeah, it's interesting when you say slow burn, because I often talk about how the wow factor jobs tend to have a best before date or an expiry date where it just becomes this very expensive, big piece of wallpaper. So, yeah, strategy is super important for that.
Let's talk about a project that got Hush on my radar, the global headquarters for Uber in San Francisco. Can you describe what was done there?
David Crumley: Yeah, so we were brought on very early. So it was one of those ideal situations that I mentioned, being a blank slate where the client knew they wanted to do something in their lobby for a new headquarters building built in San Francisco. It's a multi-building complex and there's one building called, MD2, that is the main entry point and it's an amazingly designed building that has this beautiful open lobby space and they knew they wanted to have some sort of interactive installation there. And we were brought in to do strategy and figure out what made sense.
We did a bunch of concepts, but then they would narrow down to two that we luckily had the time, budget to actually build out and flesh out both of those concepts with full renders, motion tests, some initial drawings to really flesh them out and all the different content modes, presented our way up through the organization and got buy off on one of those concepts, which is called, The Stream and that was ultimately what was built and the concept behind that on a super high level was just translating Uber's activities into beams of light and motion that would be constantly flowing through the lobby and resolving in a kind of high resolution canvas at one end of the lobby that could be used as a means of providing storytelling, not traditional content, but it would at least be a have the resolution and surface area to provide, video content and a mix of motion graphics and whatnot.
So we worked on that project for, I think the design was about three years, design, construction fabrication, so it was a long-term project and we installed it last year and it officially launched this year, and components of it are being scaled to other Uber lobbies throughout the world that we are in the process of doing now.
I believe at one end, there's a fine pitch LED video wall, if you want to call it a conventional video wall that you might find in a lobby, but a lot of what was done was custom fabricated LED almost like light tubes and things,right?
David Crumley: Yeah. So you're exactly right on the LED wall. It's a fairly standard LED wall but it's about eight feet wide, about nine feet tall. And, above it, and throughout the lobby are these custom tubes. We worked with a fabricator called Machine Histories down in Los Angeles. And again, going back to the privilege and opportunity to have a long design process. And the time to prototype, we worked with them to create two prototypes of these LED tubes and they are utilizing the Martin DC strip, which Hush has used on quite a few projects. And I'm a huge fan of it because it has long cable runs for the power supplies and 16 bit color depth, 60 frames per second,. So I knew I wanted to use that to begin with, but we had a challenge in that we needed to have the tubes as thin as possible, like everything in our architecture team wants to do as thin and sleek as possible, but we also needed to have the content viewable as close to 360 degrees around the tube so we spent a lot of time figuring out the right diffusion, the right placement of the LED, figuring out cable management actually almost productizing the tubes where we worked with the fabricator to make a custom PCB connector from tube to tube, so all the tubes can be easily removed and replaced for maintenance.
But in the end, we ended up having over 2200 of the Martin 15 millimeter strips used in these tubes and there's an overhead component that's suspended from the ceiling that makes this a tube array above your head, as you walk in through the lobby. And that's I think just under 90 feet long and at its highest point, it goes up to 25 feet.
The lobby has a single height area and then it opens up into a double or triple height space and the tube array actually bins up and goes up to the upper area over some suspended bridges. And then we also built a large wall behind the reception area using the same tubes that forms about a 22 foot high screen by 28 feet wide low-res with the same tubes, but it makes this huge statement that has a bit of transparency to see the stairs behind it in between the tubes and you can actually get behind the tubes and see the same content from both sides.
I don't know the budget or anything else, but I assume that if Uber really wanted to have high-res tubes or just make the whole thing high-res, they would have the dollars to do that, but they've gone this way. Why was it done that way? They just liked the idea of keeping it low-res or is it more visually interesting that way?
David Crumley: There are a few criteria. One, the visual aspect since the architecture of the lobby has lots of slats and repeating linear elements that the tube array compliments really well.
To your point, the LEDs are premium LEDs from Martin, the tubes are custom fabricated, there's a lot of work. So certainly that money could have been put toward more traditional LED displays or high-res, but having that kind of art more integrated into the architectural design as well as something that just looks different and unique to the space, and we also had another criteria to keep in mind is that this lobby is an unconditioned space and we could not add any additional cooling. So we were trying to keep heat energy consumption to a minimum within the space, which the LED strips are great for.
= So it's an interesting overall discipline that Hush has in that there are creative shops who produce the material for big LED video walls and corporate lobbies and so on and there are vendors who could come into that space to say, yeah, we can put a 1.2 pixel pitch wall right along the whole breadth of the lobby here and there, nut in order to really pull this together, you've got to be creative, you've got to have technology sourcing, and you've got to have a whole bunch of engineers in the middle to pull all this together right?
David Crumley: Yeah, and that's one of the great things about Hush is that we have architects on staff. We have more traditional art directors and designers, motion graphics designers, myself as the hardware background, creative technologists that do custom software dev. So running this actual experience as a custom piece of software that our team built in open frameworks and actually multiple applications written but that does a mix of rendered motion graphics as well as real time content that uses a whole interactive system that I haven't even touched on.
So yeah, I feel like to do what we do, you have to have all these different kinds of departments and disciplines under one roof.
Yeah, if you don't have that, can you really even be competitive in these kinds of jobs?
David Crumley: Yeah, it's difficult, because if we didn't have this mix, we e could potentially do the initial concept and then that would then have to be bid out to another firm to build and then potentially another firm to do the software. It becomes costly, I would imagine the cost would then be probably double what it was.
Yeah, and finger pointing!
David Crumley: Oh yeah, exactly. One throat to choke is a good and bad thing, but depending on whose throat it is.
You referenced content, I'm curious, when you talk about being able to visualize Uber's activities, what's going on there, are you tapping into an API that has analytics that are showing how many drivers are on the road right now or whatever?
David Crumley: We sourced data but there's no live data feeding it, which we do a mix of content for our projects. Sometimes it's the live API, sometimes it's an existing data set. And with this, we use existing info to build our content around. We do have some things, future content modes we're working on, that'll pull more live data.
But the real time component of this, the interactive mode that I mentioned, is using an array of nine depth cameras that are in that overhead array, and as guests walk under that array, you are disrupting the stream of information flowing above you in the tubes. So you can see ripples within the content, and then as you approach the high-res screen at the end of the lobby, once you reach a certain threshold, it reveals a curtain animation that reveals a more traditional video content on the high-res wall. So you can actually trigger that content.
I recognize that you're on the technical side of this, but I have to ask this anyways, experience is a really soft squishy kind of term. How does it get defined with these kinds of projects and how do you measure and know when you know something is working, that it is delivering an experience?
David Crumley: Oh, that is a great question. I'll take a beat to think about that. Because I'm very much on the technical side and not on the more feelings side of it, for lack of a better term. But I think I personally look into social media posts or seeing what people's reactions to the work we do and how photos are being shared and how they're connecting to it and we, as a company, do analytics in terms of number of guests, their engagement time,what videos they trigger, dwell time, all those things, which we turn into actual intellectual reports for our clients to determine that.
But I think it's more the kind of personal anecdotes that I find appealing, just how they talk about it's this amazing experience they haven't seen before, or even this particular experience is viewable through the storefront windows and this building is across the street from the arena where the Golden State Warriors play, so it gets a lot of pedestrian traffic. So you see a lot of photos of other people talking about it as well.
With the pandemic, we've had this shift of head offices being the Mecca, so to speak, and that's where you go. Too many companies have people working from home. I'm curious if that has changed the business, changed the way you have to approach corporate spaces and are companies scaling back, or are they seeing this stuff as even more important?
David Crumley: I think it's the latter. We were worried at first, a couple of years ago when everything happened. But then as we talked with clients and saw briefs coming out and seeing articles and blog posts from industry thought leaders, we came to realize and also we agree with the stance that things like what we do and Uber’s lobby and other headquarters, I think helped make the office a more appealing place to visit, because it's to actually get employees there especially with content that is refreshed or ever-changing, or that's data-driven because it's something special to see and interact with.
And so luckily, since the pandemic started, the work we've been doing hasn't slowed down and we're still seeing briefs and clients wanting to do these types of engaging experiences in their offices, public space.
You mentioned content being refreshed, is that something that you have to really push on clients to understand that guys lighting this up is a great first step, but it's a first step you need to budget and think about what's on this display and what's in this experience for, as you said earlier, 5-10 years?
David Crumley: Yeah, it's extremely important. I think anything we do, we prepare a content matrix and we'll propose evergreen content that can live throughout the life of experience and then also content that needs to be refreshed or changed or in the case of it being data-driven or built off on a data set, the frequency of that. So there's kind of incentive to keep it fresh, like you said, and for a lot of our projects, after we deploy, we'll build in a certain amount of time for content updates over the next year, two years. That's part of the scope so we can help make sure that happens because it is easy a lot of times for it to be up, everyone's happy and then forget about it.
Even though we build our own content management system and adjust it to each project, and even though it's user-friendly to use and built to update, it's not always used by every client, obviously. So it's extremely important to do that and continue to update the content like you said.
What do you do in cases where you have a corporate client or potential client who already has a corporate digital signage network with standard flat panel screens in the sales area, maybe other areas as well and they're using already have a CMS of some kind that they use and they have a certain way of doing things and you're trying to plug into that, does it become problematic?
David Crumley: It's tricky, I'm not going to lie. And we always get the requests like why can't you just use the CMS we have? And it's possible, it's not easy and by the time you factor in all the customization that's required, it’s typically more expensive than just using the custom CMS that we built and then editing it or adding features or modules to do everything that's needed.
So we almost always will use our core CMS and in the scenario that you said that's come up recently and we're actually building a feature for our CSM so as you use it to create content that's real time and targeting our custom displays, it will actually render out that content in a video format. And so the company can use their existing digital signage system to use that video as well so the content can be shared across.
So you would have a reverse API, so you could push stuff out to other systems?
David Crumley: Yeah, exactly.
Is there technology, let's say super fine micro LEDs or the LEDs you're starting to see embedded in architectural glass that you're waiting on it to mature and then use?
David Crumley: Yeah, I feel like over the last two-three years, so many projects or clients or partners have recommended doing LED glass or the LED film that can be applied on glass and it's getting close. We haven't used it yet because it just hasn't been the right resolution or the right brightness or for a myriad of reasons. I am certainly excited by it, but I'm not quite there yet to be able to spec it.
And even the OLED displays, we haven't really spec’d those yet for the same reason, for content burn-in and just how they work, but I think this year, I'm starting to feel more comfortable with those and we're starting to include those in some of our designs and proposals.
And yeah, the micro LED, I'm extremely interested in. We had a project last year where I tried to use it, which didn't go super well because the product just didn't live up to expectations. But I think again in another year, I think we'll be close if they can get the kind of coating process down to be consistent across it. But I have not seen that yet.
You're using a lot of LEDs. Do you have to worry about proximity to people? Are you encouraged by the increasing number of manufacturers who are doing these kinds of coated modules?
David Crumley: Yeah, I'm interested in the coating. That's what I was referring to, not being consistent across the panels yet to where we had a project where it had the coating, but then it almost looked like you painted a brick wall with different shades of paint.
Since we tie it so tightly into the architecture, we try to incorporate ways to naturally keep people away. So like for Uber, for example, we have a nice trim piece around and then the interactive spot for you to deal with it is 10 feet away and, it's a natural stopping point and so it's just using the human nature of not getting too close to a big, bright wall to help protect it.
Do all the business systems now seem to be a lot more secure, but open through APIs. Are you able to get out a lot more data?
David Crumley: Yes and no. It's still a little tricky in most regards to get truly live data from a lot of companies for exactly what you said for security, privacy reasons. And then just making sure that data format of the API doesn't change drastically, that's been a big challenge for us. So typically, we'll use live data, but it'll be in a way that can be formatted or have an intermediary step to then make sure it continues to work with our software app.
Through these last two years I would imagine the standard practice when you're working on a project like the Uber one that started well before the pandemic, you would go onsite, you'd be in San Francisco for two weeks or whatever, figuring all this out.
Have various Hush people had to mostly do this remotely?
David Crumley: It was a mix. We started the design process before and then we did a few site visits before everything shut down. And then we luckily did the prototype review the year before, I guess it was 2019 that we did a lot of the prototype reviews, both in LA and our studio in New York with the client and then during construction, we were not on site until it was essentially installed or close to being installed. And we had a small team that went during the tube and hardware installation. So myself included, I was on site for a couple of weeks at, but it was still a very small team and limited, and we had to do multiple trips spread out over a long period of time, but it was close to normal, but it was still very hard and tricky and you never knew who was actually gonna be able to be on site because of COVID protocol and which team you're going to be working with.
Last question, if you can even answer this, what is Hush working on that you're allowed to talk about?
David Crumley: That's a good question. I mentioned we're scaling the streamed experience that we did for Uber's headquarters to multiple locations and that's wrapping up now for the main locations and it doesn't have the tubes, it has various just direct view LED walls, but what's nice about that is they're each a little different because they're all tied into the architecture of the space. One is a fairly traditional, single flat wall, but another one has a mitered 90 degree corner and is a very long canvas, I think the resolution's a little less than 7,000 by 900 pixels, so ultra wide format. And then another one has a radius corner around the wall because that's how the architecture was. And it was nice on our end that we developed the software to smartly scale the content across all these different aspect ratios, sso that's deploying now.
We have a few projects for some financial institutions that are launching now that one of those uses LED strips, this time from S&A, along with a direct view LED wall that is incorporated into these kinds of fins that does this kind of reflected light back on the wall behind it, which is really nice. Hopefully I will be able to talk about it more in another month or two. And then, we have some other things early in the concept phase, but probably not allowed to talk about any of that.
Yeah, I would imagine when you talk about account wins and all that, in certain respects, it’s a much bigger win when you also have the contract about being allowed to talk about it until it’s done.
David Crumley: Exactly. And that's, going back to the Uber project, it's nice that it's ground level, public accessible. So many of our projects are on the top floor that you have to get through security or be invited to see. So, we love the ones that are a little more public facing.
Yeah, me too. There's been a few times when, like the LAX airport with the international terminal with all the work Moment Factory did there, I wanted to see it, but I had to go through post security on a flight to Japan or something if I wanted to see it. So never have.
David Crumley: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I've been to LAX so many times. I've not been in the Bradley terminal to see it. And then one time I tried to get to it and had a long layover and tried to connect my terminal to it and it was an exercise in futility and I could never get there.
All right, David, thank you so much for spending some time with me.
David Crumley: It was my pleasure.
Wednesday Feb 09, 2022
Jared Jones & Alisa Semyekhina, DBSI
Wednesday Feb 09, 2022
Wednesday Feb 09, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
There are a few companies in digital signage that have picked a vertical market, got into it, and stayed very much in that lane.
But I can't think of any other companies in the sector that operate like DBSI, a Phoenix-area company that provides and manages a full-featured digital signage solution for its retail banking customers, but also designs and builds branches, among many things.
The company has been around for 20+ years and its customers range from small regional credit unions to whale accounts like Wells Fargo.
For the last eight years, DBSI has done a survey of banking customers that benchmarks the adoption rate, state and trends with respect to in-branch digital efforts. I've been through the deck and noted a lot of interesting insights about how on-screen messaging is being used, and how banking customers see the ROI.
I spoke with a couple of folks from DBSI - Jared Jones, a Digital Transformation Strategist, and Alisa Semyekhina, the Head of Digital Signage.
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TRANSCRIPT
Jared and Alisa, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown on what DBS is all about, where you're located and what's the range of work that you do?
Jared Jones: Yeah. So DBSI is located just outside of Phoenix, Arizona in Chandler. In short, our mission is really just to redefine the banking industry.
We found a very unique way to fuse together the design build aspect, the equipment aspect and of course, technology up to including to be a little bit more parts of this podcast, digital signage.
Yeah, it's interesting, I assume DBSI the DB is designed to be built, and it's interesting that you do the actual design of bank branches and credit union branches and so on.
And that digital signage is not just a bolt on thing. It's like a big part of what you do, Right?
Jared Jones: Yeah, absolutely. All too often, what we're finding is our clients. Whenever you use the bolt-on approach you get a lot of finger pointing and the messaging is concise with the staff, the members and customers get a very choppy experience to where it's whenever you're able to house it all under one roof. It allows you to really take a very intentional and proactive approach to all the different elements of the bank branch process.
And this is what DBSI does. You're not also servicing the healthcare industry or hotels etc. Like banking is your vertical.
Jared Jones: Exactly. Exclusively we are vertically actually. And that's really one of our competitive advantages. Simply due to the fact, whenever you work with a local architect.
We found that the banking credit executives have to spend, I've seen it everywhere for a week to a month, really just educating them on the industry or maybe industry’s best practices, what their customers and members are really trying to achieve. How do you really try to guide the flow?
So by exclusively dealing in the banking industry, it allows us to develop our own best practices. That way we can almost take a driver's seat and really educate our clients on the industry, what it's really evolving into, how we can maybe stroke the footprint. We understand what a teller cash recyclers.
We understand how to move into MADEC too, to where we can lower that to you and things of that nature. So again, my us exclusively dealing in this industry and allows us to take the driver's seat. And really educating our clients rather than having to local educate a local architect.
And I assume that with the banking industry, like many industries these days, really don't want to have a whole bunch of service providers doing one aspect of what they do. So if they can nail it down to, okay, you guys just figure this out for us and help us with it as opposed to let's put together a team of vendors and make this happen.
It's just cleaner this way. Right?
Jared Jones: So it's not really that single point of contact. And it just allows us to really take ownership over the entire project and allows us to ultimately own the project and allow us to deliver.
So is it strictly in the United States? Are you in other countries doing work?
Jared Jones: Presently, we were just in the United States.
We have either current or past projects in all 50. But we do not do it internationally.
So, I live in Canada, I don't really know the banks down there other than ATM machines when I'm traveling. But if I were a U S resident, what institutions would I.. Are you guys active with who they might know and that you're allowed to talk about?
Jared Jones: Wells Fargo, we do a lot of business with a super regional down there in the south, Navy federal credit union, they utilize our technology. And I would say those are probably our big three. A lot of your listeners will understand the reality of what you do.
So you have big whale clients like Wells Fargo, but you also do small or regional credit unions sort of thing.
Jared Jones: We've done business with, like I said, I went from Wells Fargo to and obviously they are in the trillions and asset size to where, we also deal with very local community credit unions 700 million assets.
We're having this chat because you guys as I'm interested in speaking with you, anyways, but so you have a benchmark report that you put out that looks at the state of digital signage and the adoption rate of it.
How was that put together and how often have you done that?
Jared Jones: Yeah. So we started doing the annual digital signage benchmark about seven or eight years ago now. And essentially what it is like I told you before, we tried to take that very intentional approach, very data centric, data driven into our process.
So with that, we really want to understand what the industry was saying and how they are leveraging it. Of course you don't allow us to better refine our best practices. But now we've actually grown to about, I think just over 400-430 respondents different banks and credit unions and allowing us to get an insight into how, or I guess if and how they're using digital signage in their branches and headquarters
So you are doing a survey of some kind?
Jared Jones: Yeah. Yeah. So it's an incentive-based survey. It's actually a unique approach we use because there are a couple of barriers, sometimes whatever they are accepting guests from different vendors. We actually offered a $10 gift certificate either to the executive filling out the survey.
Or we were going to donate that $10 in a charity of their choice. So it was fun. It allows us to give in their name cause I don't know how familiar you are, but that's actually one of my most passionate favorite parts rather than working with community banks and credit unions is their true commitments to their community.
So through this, obviously we get the data that we can share with the industry and then they get a continuation of their mission to do right by their community.
Okay. So let's talk about what you found in the 2022 report. It's called off the charts. Were there any surprises?
Jared Jones: Yeah. Yeah. So a work surprise that I actually found was that only 6% of digital signage content was going to be utilized for onboarding to a little lower cost channel or either mobile platform. For whatever reason, this has been a hot topic item for probably the last 10-15 years.
We're making executives try to actually onboard their clients to a little bit lower cost channel. And I don't want to speak for other industries. I can only assume that being the same, but it is a lot cheaper for me to sign up for a different financial product, like a savings account or checking account, or maybe even a credit card.
Whatever I can offload it into a mobile channel. It allows them to take it from, I think it's just over maybe $3-$4 a transaction, all the way, I think maybe 20-25 cents. So that was probably my biggest surprise, but at least I think you end up more.
Alisa Semyekhina: Yes, definitely. I actually had a lot of surprises from the survey.
I would like to share study with content management like flex systems. So we noticed that the increase of actual expenditures for the software increased, but with that also increased the stress level. So I was actually interested to see the correlation between that. And one of the interesting facts was that our clients will, but then or just banks and credit unions marketing manager teams, they'll be looking for features and capabilities.
So again, just displaying content is not good enough for them. It's actually looking for a fast approach to deploy to all branch networks. And we're talking about not just one or two branches, we are talking about 300 plus branches. So how efficient you are with that? And the next part is about the IT side because again, if you're using, let's say flash drives, you are not going to be efficient. You need the whole team or facility teams, or IT teams to go to each branch and deploy content. And that's where, again, that disconnect is. So many different vendors teams are working on content or deploying content that you can not be on time with weather information, weather rates change, or anything like that.
And with that your branch team is left with no support from the marketing team. So that's where I found one of my biggest surprises.
Yeah. I was interested in that, the big pinpoints. Within the banking industry with respect to digital signage was managing the content and creating content for it.
And also worrying about the side of it. I find it quite amazing that you still have vendor or primary end users who are using flash drives and don't have scalability or anything. Is that just a function of this version, one of what they were doing and that they learn the hard way that they should not have done, or are they just keeping with what they were doing originally and not even understanding that there's an easier way?
Alisa Semyekhina: I think your spot on Dave I think it was the conceptual phase for even proving that digital signage has a place in their branches.
And with studying, and that's like having the conversation with quite a few of our clients who are transitioning to a different solution. And as we are not only partnering with software companies, but also content creators. So with that, when we have conversations we are coming from different perspectives.
Again, what's the best solution for them? And of course, again, the ease of deployment, ease of creation, content, ease of updating content. And it's also on the goal. Now, everything has to happen on the goals. Yeah. When you update your content from your cell phone for example, or bring that experience, that's differentiating you from anyone else down the street?
So if I'm coming to a branch and they see my name on the screen welcoming me. Yeah. I would love to see that. But can software support. So I think it's proving the concept and then moving into a different level where, how do we do that? And that's where I think most financial institutions need help.
Is it a function of the financial institutions and the communicators within those companies, understanding that this is not a technology investment, as much as it's a communications investment, and you have to think content first and the technology is important, but it's the underlying stuff.
Alisa Semyekhina: I think it's also an interesting point where both of them need to be going hand-in-hand.
It has to be a strategy of what technology as well as a strategy for content. And they believe Jared has some more thoughts on that.
Jared Jones: Yeah. So to your point, yes, of course it is a technology investment, but it's also an experience investment. All too often, what we're seeing inside these branches and headquarters is a stale environment. Wherever you're actually gonna have to take that intentional approach behind your digital signage strategy, it allows you to have complete control over your end points with the right content and system.
Anywhere from as granular, as changing the hours that your content is going to display, whether you want it client facing or staff facing, or it's that very hyper customized content. What Alisa was just talking about, where either I can say, what am I walking or make your credit union say welcome Jared or something of that nature.
So really it's an experience investment is how I think about it.
And do you have a sense I'm sure you do have, what's truly impactful content and messaging in the branch. Because when I go to my local branch, after I do this interview, I've got to go to the bank. I'm going to walk in there and it's going to have digital signage behind the counter showing me news headlines and the weather, and then some kind of generic messaging about the branch.
And I'm just thinking they've made the investment, but they really haven't thought through the content because I just came from outside. I know what the weather is. And I don't need news headlines when I walk into a branch.
Jared Jones: And really, that's where we start to differentiate ourselves as you're well aware and I've listened to several episodes.
I get your understanding of it, the placement of screens, and you have the quality of the screens, but really that's just one pillar. And really, I would almost say the second pillar is going to be this content development. It's not just saying, Hey, now we offer free checking or here's the local news headlines, or maybe the weather or something of that nature.
It's really about getting that hyper vocal content. One of the more rewarding things that I get about working with these community banks and credit unions, like I said, is their community involvement.
So whether it's setting up scholarships, whether it's going to be volunteering for habitat or community, whether it's going to be charitable donations, Whenever, each branch has its own, little fun mission.
It creates a little bit more sense of community. It allows a little friendly competition and ultimately it allows the communities to win. I don't want to speak for other industries but I think right now people are more concerned with the missions of the businesses that they do business with. So whether it's Tom shoes, whether it's going to be, I buy a pair and they donate a pair of Bomba socks.
Again, I bought a pair of hair. I want to feel good about where I'm spending my money, where I'm spending my time. So whenever these banks or credit unions can educate their client base saying, Hey, I just raised $52,000 or something. It makes me feel good. Hey, they're actually taking my money and they're investing it back for my community, which obviously I care much about. I really like that approach.
I'm looking at some of the results of the survey and what gets shown on the screens more than anything else is promotions and branding, right? Is that the right approach or is that just what people are doing and you would move more towards community messaging?
Jared Jones: That is an approach. That's really where we're going to work with the marketing teams and really understand what their overall overarching business objectives are. Yes, of course, product education is one. Then we're going to actually move into that community involvement piece, then we're going to go to meet the team that way we build a sense of trust and a little bit of camaraderie that way I can understand who my Baker's going to be.
So there were seven pillars and actually I want to pass it back over to Alisa to go into a little bit deeper dive from content creation on where would you like to focus for that embraced strategy?
Alisa Semyekhina: Dave, you raised quite a great point about promotions. So many promotions, as traditionally speaking, have short legs, right? We are talking about just something very actionable. There is a headline, there is a copy and so in so many cases, it's not actually thought through based on the campaign-level because the campaign-level it's, again, we are connecting on an emotional level and we are connecting with our customers' members from the lifecycle approach, what's important to them, where they are right now, why they actually add the branch and how we can help them?
So we're moving from that transactional mindset into an advisory mindset and be able to speak to them and see where and what they're doing right now at the branch, how we can help them, how we can migrate them, let's say to mobile channels to again, be time efficient, give them time back because rather than coming to the branch and coming to the branch only for very specific reasons, like are we starting out something, are we at the stage where we're setting up our business or we're buying a new car and all those questions being answered, not something where we go and Google, which we can, but it will be that approach where you actually mean something and that’s personalization of experience.
And you saw the report as well, one of the surprises I saw was that displaying rates were 46%, I believe and that's a high rate of displaying just the rate and you're competing with a cell phone. So if I see a rate on a screen, I want to know, am I getting the best of the best rate? But if I’m actually connecting with my members or customers on an emotional level. For example, if I had refinanced, if someone else got a fantastic experience and they shared that experience, I want to know what happened, I want to work with that person, because again, I want that experience as well.
So I think a lot of marketing teams realize that, and they know that they probably just don't have time to implement that moving from a promotional side into the community side.
Yeah, it sounds like if you, for cost and resource reasons, use commodity information like financial rates, that sort of thing, it's great in terms of the amount of time you have to allocate to this, but you're not resonating, you're not reaching your customers. You're not striking an emotional cord with them. You're just telling them stuff that they can get elsewhere.
Alisa Semyekhina: Absolutely.
Looking at some of the outcomes of the report, one of the things that I found interesting is that the perfect formula for doing content is a blend of in-house and agency work. So if you just do in house work, maybe you don't have the creative chops and the understanding of reaching people emotionally, if you just do agency work, it's going to take all your budget.
Alisa Semyekhina: That is very true, but we also work with teams of 1-3 marketing teams, and they have to actually not only spend time on digital signage, but on everything else, they're wearing so many hats. And they have ideas, the question is always time and priorities.
We've been working with many small towns and we are amazed at how many great ideas they have and what we are actually doing is we're helping to streamline, help them to actually set the structure to content calendar, to again, content creation and helping them where they need us. Because at the end of the day, we don't want to do everything for them, because like you said, if you're outsourcing everything, then you lose that connection with the core of your institution. And if you are doing everything in house, you don't have time for everything. So with this, we're working as a partner with our clients to make sure there is that balance.
And of course, sometimes you want to outsource something because it could be time consuming. So for example, we are talking about animations or drone videos or any other fun projects that you would like to bring into your space, whether it's headquarters or a branch, but again, you have to hire someone or you have to look for someone and that's where our expertise comes in.
One of the other data points from this year’s report, I was struck by how built out the banking industry and credit union industry is. The great majority of them and particularly when you get to the larger institutions have digital signage, but I also get a sense that while there's a lot of digital signage activity out there, maybe a lot of it isn't done all that well yet. Is that a fair statement?
Jared Jones: Yeah, it is. And that's what Alisa was talking about as far as we've had the pleasure of working with teams of all, consisting of one to probably two or three dozen, depending on the size of the institution.
It's really interesting and it's really not just from an asset size of the bank or credit union, as far as their sophistication or their level of intentionality that they're able to put beyond their concept development because marketing teams tend to wear very many hats. So unfortunately they are constantly being pulled in all these different directions. So I guess in short, to answer your question, there's not really a rhyme or reason as far as the size of the team. It's more so just the priority list of the bank or credit union for the content development.
Another point that was made is that the understanding of what to do inside the branch is pretty broad. Maybe some institutions could do it better, but the next big area to be looking at developing is outside the branch. How would that work?
Jared Jones: Yeah. One of the things that we're actually trying to leverage in digital signage is really trying to take it from the interior approach to also increase its reach from the exterior and that of course means implementing it into the pillars of the drive-through to actually implement two-way video in the drive through lanes themselves.
And essentially what that is, is what we like to say is almost like a 24/7 sell element while the basic credit unions are traditionally only open for about eight to nine hours a day, whenever you have a strategy that's going to be going branch and exterior wise, it allows you to really gain potential clients that you could be having in that community and allows them to just draw recognition to the branch and invoke that feeling to get them to come in.
There's an argument to be made and I've heard this a few times that the pandemic and the need to restrict access into retail operations, including banks and so on has forced people who were maybe digitally hesitant to learn how to do online banking and mobile banking and so on and therefore the branches which were already started being narrow in terms of their audience are getting even narrower and forcing banks to rethink what a branch was all about and how it worked and so on.
Is that happening and does that connect to how digital signage is being rethought in those branches?
Jared Jones: Yeah, absolutely. Just internally here at DBSI, we've seen a drastic shift from the way our banking and credit union customers interact with their clients to where you actually see a drastic shift into the drive through and that's where we want to try to pivot. And say, hey, we need to get that homogenous feel from not only from your social media and interior. Now we actually need to start pushing this digital signage into your drive through and then actually we started looking inside, incoming into the exterior branch and the pillars.
So it's really not just a one trick pony, if you will. There's a very intentional approach to where we ensure that it's a proper placement where the clients really interact with it.
If you had to define an ideal mid-sized non flagship branch indoors and out, what would be the mix of things that are there and what are you showing on those screens?
Alisa Semyekhina: I would say it's going to be a lobby screen and something behind the teller line. So it could be a single screen. It could be 2x2 video walls, but again, we're talking about non flagship branches. So usually you're going to see some two screens or maybe one screen depending on the footprint and the mix of content and that's where the strategy of content is coming into play, like what's the percentage of content to show behind the teller line and in the lobby area. So that's where the community involvement piece, business recognition and involvement in charitable events are coming into play.
You already made that point about whether to use all kinds of information. We don't want to see that. We want to connect with our community, with our members and customers, and then provide them The advisory function and educational function behind the teller line, because that's where we see a lot of financial education and security content. Especially in the past two years, I saw the increase of that content over there.
I would say from the interactive experience, tablets in medium-sized branches are going to be more prevalent than interactive kiosks. So you will see those more in the flagship branches. And again, allowing that mobility as well at the branch.
And when it comes to interactive, what's the content mix? When people interact with touch screens, what are they using it for? Because I've been in branches where they had touch screens and then blinked away on them and thought I didn't really need to use this. I could have used my phone or I don't see the point of this. That's just like, “Hey, we've got a touch screen, please use it!”
Alisa Semyekhina: You are so spot on, because again, there has to be a strategy for having interactive digital signage in your branch. Just placing the interactive screen on a tablet doesn't mean that it is magically going to be utilized and you'll also need to train your branch team to actually use that technology to their advantage.
And what we've seen when we are working with our clients is actually the information about getting them to understand that this is your tool to dive into the products and services onboarding tutorials. We actually create those and recommend our clients create those, quick 1 to 3 points with maybe even videos or static images on how to quickly onboard on whether it's mobile banking, IE statements, or anything like that. Because again, our clients have 60-70 products and services, you cannot remember all of them. So this is the tool that they are going to be using. So it's probably not specifically for customers and members, it's more for the branch.
The last thing I wanted to get into was ROI. One of the questions in your survey was, why are financial institutions investing in digital signage? I was intrigued that one of the big reasons was modernizing the branch look and feel, but the biggest ROI thing that I came across which was encouraging, was it boosting sales.
Jared Jones: Yeah. I think going on three or four years that we’ve seen that we made this approach or assumption transitioning to ask on this question, because all too often, I feel like marketing teams are being asked, “what's the so what?” Is it just a matter of looking pretty as it, like you said, it says it is just about modernization.
As Alisa was just talking about, the average financial institution has anywhere from 50-70 products and sometimes even more. And also the play there is, depending on what publication you read, if it's going to be hovering around this two to three, as far as average financial products per household. If I consider you my primary financial institution, and really the main contributor is that just a lack of knowledge? So let's say I have a credit card at one credit union and then maybe a checking and savings account at another bank. And then now I'm going to actually have my brokerage account, and my insurance with each individual institution. So that's going to be four or five different FIs there. And that's simply because I didn't realize that the credit union or bank that I primarily go to deal with three-four miles away from my house has all those products and services.
So really what we just educate our clients and their customers is just gonna be centralized around product education and more importantly, product utilization, because it's not about just increasing your financial product. It's more so about helping your clients really guide them down that financial journey.
All right. This was super interesting. The benchmarking report, how does one get that? Do you need to be a client?
Jared Jones: So we actually have it published on our website at dbsi-inc.com under our blog section. Of course, I'm sure our contact information is going to be listed in the podcast so please feel free to either reach out to either myself or Alisa, and we'd be more than happy to get you a copy.
Alright. I appreciate you guys taking some time with me and I hope you're enjoying the weather down in Chandler, which is way nicer than it is here.
Jared Jones: Just a little bit, just a little bit. You'll get the last laugh in summertime though, I promise.
That's correct. All right. Thanks again.
Wednesday Dec 15, 2021
Henrik Andersson, Instorescreen
Wednesday Dec 15, 2021
Wednesday Dec 15, 2021
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Retail experts have long spoke about the so-called zero moment of truth - that time in bricks and mortar stores when shoppers are in the aisles and making the decision about which product they're going to pull off the shelf and put in their basket.
Getting digital signage into stores, with screens doing messaging when people are in a shopping mindset, has always been a big business driver. But putting screens right in the aisles has been a challenge for a few reasons - the main one being how conventional screens would eat up shelf space.
Display manufacturing has advanced to a level now that it's possible to put strips of high resolution LCDs right on the shelf edge without getting in the way - introducing color, motion and the possibility for things like dynamic pricing.
But the solution is not just the display. There has to be a whole system behind it, and that's where Instorescreen comes in. The Hong Kong-based company has a solution that actually meets the scaled needs of retailers and brands, so that you can do things like drive as many as 96 ribbon displays - with different content to each - off a single Lenovo PC.
I had a good chat with Henrik Andersson, the CEO of Instorescreen.
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TRANSCRIPT
Henrik, Thank you for joining me. We've spoken a few times in the past, but for those who are not familiar with Instorescreen, can you run through what your company does? What are you all about?
Henrik Andersson: Yeah, So Instorescreen is a manufacturer of hardware, mostly monitors and technology for digital signage. We are 20 years old and today, an exclusive partner of Lenovo.
It's a curious set up in that you're based in Florida, but you're Danish, I believe, and a lot of the company is over in Hong Kong, is that right?
Henrik Andersson: Yeah. So our headquarters is in Hong Kong, and I'm very close to Danish. I'm Swedish...
Ah okay, you're Nordic.
Henrik Andersson: Yeah. So our headquarters is in Hong Kong. We have three manufacturing sites in China and yeah, that's what we are doing today.
And is it privately held or are you publicly traded?
Henrik Andersson: We are privately owned.
One of the things that has struck me about what you do versu and what's historically happened in retail digital signage is, I would say the different waves of signage and retail have involved putting conventional flat panel displays all over stores, which was then followed by doing video walls instead hiving them all together, and the third wave seems to be now that the technology is there to try to put displays right in the aisles, right where consumers are making decisions, as opposed to just being part of the overall look and feel of a store.
Is that kind of why you went on it the way you did?
Henrik Andersson: Yeah. So the story is that Instorescreen is created to be a supplier that works outside in, instead of inside out. If I explain that very quickly, we come from true OEM manufacturing and we have been listening to the customer to see how we can make the right product for the customer in the right location? That has been the key.
Inside out is more like if the customer calls in and you show them what you have, and we didn't want to work that way. So what we have done is that we have created different solutions that are OEM based, but we have based them on a whole, like retail. So for retail, we have been looking to see how we can replace or how we can add screens and technology into the retail environment. Based on that, we created shelf edge displays. We worked through the biggest manufacturer of LCD screens, and we have been working very closely with them to create the right size, length and height.
When that's finished, we have a solution that could be on the shelf edge. It can be on the header and so on. The second step here is how are we going to drive them? What is the most intelligent way to drive them? And that's where it comes in with our solution, where we call it inDAISY, it's a data chain technology where we can utilize one 4K computer running up to 96 screens. Second generation that's coming next year, we'll also be able to push power through to the DAISY chain. So we will be able to push both power and data through one single cable.
This is the partnership with Lenovo, and with the DAISY chaining, is it one signal to as many as 96 displays, or could it be addressable, like it could be 96 different signals?
Henrik Andersson: It’s 96 different signals. So each screen will get an ID, and based on that ID, you can have different content, so each screen would have different content.
This wouldn't be 96 pieces of video, though, right? It would be images?
Henrik Andersson: No, 96 pieces of video.
Wow. That would take a pretty serious graphics card.
Henrik Andersson: No, not really. Our data chain works as the way that you think about a canvas that's 4K and each ID is taking a spot from that canvas. So for example, if you have the header display that’s 1920x360, the first header takes location 0 to 1920 down to 360, that's ID #1, ID #2 starts besides that and takes from 1920 to 3840 and down to 360, and then the shelf chassis starts below and they are taking left-right, left-right, and then by utilizing the Lenovo computer, we could have four 4K outputs so we can get four times that resolution.
So with retail in the many years that I've been involved in this space, one of the challenges has been trying to get displays right into where the merchandise is.
But the problem has always been that if you put a conventional flat panel display into that space, it's going to eat up merchandising space. It's gonna eat up the shelf space that you want for talking about the product. One of the big drivers here I assume is that this takes up space. That it's a way to not take away from that merchandising space and stockings space?
Henrik Andersson: Yeah, we have been working very closely with the manufacturer of the gondolas to figure out how much space we can take without taking up on any merchandise. So we are taking up about one and a half inch to 1.7 inch in height, and then we are following the two foot three foot and four foot lengths.
And this is using LCDs?
Henrik Andersson: That's LCD, yes.
And I gather that the reason you're able to do this now is you can now natively manufacture LCDs at these sizes?
Henrik Andersson: Yeah, we don't use any resize. When we started this project like eight years ago, we used a resize to test and see how we can get it to look and how it should work.
Today, we are natively producing them. There are benefits of natively producing them. One of the biggest is that you get the same every time. So if you put like 10, 15 of these side by side, you want all of them to have the same backlight. You want all of them to have the same color, of those kinds of features.
And the biggest one is probably to get down in price. By utilizing a cut down like a 55 inch down to be making one shelf edge. That's a lot of waste doing that by using native screens. If the volume reaches X, we will be able to be very competitive. We are calculating, we should be able to go way below.
A hundred bucks a foot.
Yeah, because I remember when these thin ribbon LCDs first came out and I would see them at places like NRF, about six, seven years ago, the salespeople work in the boosts wouldn't even tell me a number in terms of price, because I gather it was ghastly, but that's changed.
Henrik Andersson: That's changed a lot. For example, we could have a two foot display today for around 200 bucks.
And who is putting that in? Is it the brands or is it the retail owners?
Henrik Andersson: It's both. It's both. It has been the latest 4-5 years. It's a lot of brands. It's getting more retailers, and today, it's mostly retailers on end caps.
And do they see this as part of their business model, their merchandising model that they'll sell end caps and now it's digital.
Henrik Andersson: Yes, and that's information they see that they have, by just using packages, they cannot inform the customer of what the product is doing by utilizing video screens. Now they can inform me what's the benefit with this product and that product they can also do in different flavors.
They can tease you by looking at how good this is with their eyes and so on, and one of the key things everybody's talking about right now is dynamic pricing. You will be able to change the pricing very quickly. You're able to change products on the shelves. You will be able to Collect external data.
For example, if we say which employee has allergy medicine and so on, we can publish the pollen count onto the shelf fetch in real time.
Are these replacements potentially for electronic shelf labels or are they kind of complimentary to them?
Henrik Andersson: Today, it's a compliment. I can say that mostly due to the price, but as the price is still getting lower, I think they are direct competition to the ESLs, I think they are, because you have more dynamics on an LCD screen than you have on an ESL.
With an ESL, you can do the price and maybe a barcode or something that's maybe two or three colors. That's about it, right?
Henrik Andersson: Yeah, here you can have a full color spectrum. You can have movies, you can have touch screen functionality. There are so many things you can do. We can integrate the sensors so you can scan your membership and get your special price.
There's so many things that we are investigating right now. What's going to be next?
And doing that is contingent at all on the kind of back office systems that our retailer has as to whether they have the data and everything to make that?
Henrik Andersson: Here is where we work very closely with a lot of partners that build softwares.
So we worked with, for example, Microsoft, Oracle, all of them where they have the backend for the retailers, and then we were working with the digital signage companies, that’s how we can get data between those two systems.
Is that a challenge at all in terms of working with the different digital signage, CMS options out there that they need to have a platform that can work with this high-end Lenovo box?
Henrik Andersson: No, it's not a super high end Lenovo box. It's a computer called P 340. That has an Nvidia board inside before 4K output. So a signage software will work with our solution and most of the times when we talked to a signage company, they found this complicated and it took them 15 minutes and said, oh, this is so easy.
So yes the Daisy chain and all of that kind of feature sounds very advanced, but we made all the technology on our board. So the digital signage company doesn't have to think. That technology, they just have to follow publish on our full 4K cameras.
I guess they would have to, depending on how their CMS works, maybe introduce some new resolutions that they didn't previously have, like 1920x360 or whatever you were describing?
Henrik Andersson: No, they publish 3840x2160 full 4K resolution, and then our data chain board based on the IDs are taking spots from those full 4K canvas.
What about LEDs? I have seen some manufacturers at trade shows again, who were showing shelf edge strips that were based on fine pitch LED. Is that a consideration or not the right way to go on this?
Henrik Andersson: The problem we have with the LEDs is the heat. We have been investigating working with LEDs because there are benefits where you can easily make new sizes. We have to make a tool and new tooling costs about $1.5 to $2 million to make a new size.
So if someone says, we don't want 3 feet, we want 3.2 feet. That's a very expensive thing. But in LEDs, it's doable. But we have power usage, it's almost 10 times more, and then we have the heat. So if we take a whole retail store and we put these LEDs out, it could be that you have to start getting more air conditioning units, basically.
I never thought of it that way. Certainly think of all those LEDs, even though we all think of LEDs as being incredibly energy efficient, if you're using thousands of them in a whole store, maybe millions of them, and that's just a lot of little lights to feed.
Henrik Andersson: They're made for outside. You could use them if you could spot the installations. I think they're fine. LCD is more energy efficient.
The problem that I've seen with the LED versions is simply that to get the resolution, the granularity of the information down to a level that is legible like an ESL or an LCD is you're talking very fine pitch and it adds to the cost.
Henrik Andersson: You cannot do it. So if we look at our header display, for example, it's 1920x360 in resolution. That means we have 360 pixels in height. If you go to an LED, you're down to maybe 30- 40 pixels.
And the net result of that is the visuals just don't look very good, vright?
Henrik Andersson: Yeah, I guess they will have a resolution of 150x30 or 150x40. Right now, our is 1920x360.
So it looks like a 1994 desktop monitor?
Henrik Andersson:It depends. From a distance, and if you do the content right, it will look quite okay. But if you go down to price tags and QR codes, coupons, things like that, they will never work. And we can do that as well. We can publish coupons and everything to the shelf edge.
So maybe down the road 3-5 years after micro LEDs mass manufacturing gets sorted and the yields are up and everything else, maybe that's an option, but certainly not right now?
Henrik Andersson: That's something we look into. We have really started looking at that, but it's way too early.
What kind of research has been done to measure the impact of a planogram that's just conventional shelf labels and things like that, versus a portion of a planogram that has your digital shelf edge elements to it?
Henrik Andersson: Yeah. So what we have seen now is that it's a wow factor. That's one of the things. If you walk in the store and you’re making about 80% of your decisions in the store, and if you get a wow factor, you get something that triggers your brain, you will buy that product. On top of that, you have tools and gadgets, things that need to be explained.
It would be like powered rails. So we say vitamins, anything that needs to be explained, an energy drink, those kinds of fine benefits. I like telling you that by using this product we give you these benefits. We are seeing between 20% to about 300% based on product.
Sustained or just like when it first goes up?
Henrik Andersson: It continues. We have some data from pharmaceuticals when they're explaining a product where we have 300-400% uplift, and we have also inside retail on produce and stuff like that. We have a huge growth.
Are those brands the ones that have used other types of digital signage, like more conventional, flat panels around a store and maybe I assume it wouldn't have had anywhere near the impact, just because it wouldn't be as close to the product?
Henrik Andersson: That has been a thing. They have advertised on digital signage screens in retail, but most of the time they are too far away from the product. So due to the impulse of buying.
The further away you are from the physical product, the less sales are you going to make.
One of the things that you were telling is your solution in tandem with Lenovo, your partner, you're doing in-store analytics as well?
Henrik Andersson: Yeah, we have a solution that we are introducing at the NRF which we call smart vision. It's a full analytics platform utilizing Lenovo servers and multiple cameras to collect data from the retail environment.
This is also applicable not only to retail we're doing even in transportation, education, fast food. It's about collecting data on how many people are happy walking in, or sad walking out, where they're walking. We can see the paths of walking. We can see where most people are spending most time, and how long they are standing in front of that product. We can also trigger things. We can see for example, that there has been a spell of a drink in aisle six, and we need to call the janitor to get that clean up. We are also working on things to see if they are putting things in their pocket, or they're putting things in the cart. We can see if someone is acting violent or has a tendency, if something could happen. This is what we work on. We'd like machine learning together with Intel to figure out what kind of information we want.
So you're using Intel's OpenVINO?
Henrik Andersson: Yes, we are using OpenVINO as the base.
Retail analytics using computer vision has been around for 15 years, maybe even longer. So that part is not new. What's distinct about what you do versus some of the more familiar ones that are already known in digital signage?
Henrik Andersson: It’s probably our dashboard, an easy way to get an overview and also the flexibility to pick the things you want. We are trying to do the same here as we do with the screen work outside in, instead of inside out, we don't tell the customers that this is the data that we think you should have. We are asking them what data do you want to make your business better.
Most of that is basically to combine multiple cameras, to get the whole view. Instead of having one camera inside of, by one header display by using this, we can see the moving paths in the store. We can see, for example, during X hours a day, we have this many visitors, but we only have this many cashiers open. Then they can move things around in the store to create something more streamlined.
You want green lines across the whole store. You don't want to, like some aisles are more visited and otherized. You want all of them to move like a typical Ikea. Where you want to go, you have to go with the whole store, even if you want to get the thing at the end of the story.
Yes, you do and it's not my favorite way to shop, but...
Henrik Andersson: That's the way to create impulses on the way to the thing that you're intended to buy. Look at the carts at Ikea. You buy so many things on the way to the exit that you'd never planned to buy.
The reference case that I'm familiar with for your company, is a seat to table store down in south Florida? Is that still your biggest deployment for this, or, where have you put your screens in?
Henrik Andersson: That’s the biggest single-store deployment. We are deploying in multiple stores, but often as a single end cap or category, and there will be a lot of announcements next year of full grocery stores that are getting this installed.
More than just an end cap, but if it takes you to tape, for an example, we have about 200 screens in that store, including shell fetches, header, square screens. So that is an Intel Lenovo and initial screen show, and everybody's welcome to come down and look at it.
So that's your living lab, or you can walk people through and go here's what's possible.
Henrik Andersson: Yeah. So that's where we test everything from the analytics to the screens to do dynamic pricings, everything is tested there and that's better than having it in our own office.
Lenovo is one of those very large computing companies that has been on the edge of digital signage and some of these companies like HP and so on, they're in they're out. You don't really know what they do, but it sounds like Lenovo has made a concerted investment of capital and people into the space.
Henrik Andersson: Yes, Lenovo has grown a lot in the OEM division. I think when I started working with Lenovo OEM, there were about five guys. Now they're up to 50-60.
And just working specifically with you or are they active in other areas as well?
Henrik Andersson: Basically, it's the whole thing. If you're working outside in instead of inside out, trying to figure out solutions for each individual company. It could involve computers only or it could involve computers and monitors.
One of the things we did in 2020-21 was a full line of monitors with anti-microbial coding on them. So they are like killing viruses and bacterias. But one of the key things as well is that the whole chassis is aluminum. So it's 95% sustainable.
And is that an ask that you get from retail now?
Henrik Andersson: Mostly Europe, because they don’t want anything that has plastic in them anymore.
That'll be a big change if it starts to happen here.
Henrik Andersson: So if you go to a grocery store in Sweden, for example, you have to pay 50 cents for a plastic bag. That's what it cost. If you want to bring the groceries home, you have to pay 50 cents for the plastic bag.
Yeah. That's starting to happen here in Canada as well. And I'm constantly buying more bags cause I forgot to bring the ones I have in the car.
Henrik Andersson: Every Swedish guy has a car full of such bags.
What do you see happening in the next couple of years with the kind of work that you do? Do you imagine there are going to be other companies developing copycat solutions? For instance, I was in Taiwan when we still could travel about two and a half years ago, and I know that AUO, which is a huge LCD manufacturer, has a whole feature wall of odd shaped ribbon displays and things like that, so it seems like this would be accessible to more accompanies now.
Henrik Andersson: Yeah. So AUO is one of our partners. So if we look at a couple of their sites that they have, we have been part of their engineering process. We are being part of developing the size, the functionality, the backlight, all those kinds of things.
So AUO is one we have HKC, we have BUE, we work with all of them. Will be the products similar to our products on the market. Yes, there will be. We are trying to be innovative. We are trying to make it easy. Most of our competitors are basically working as if each screen is an individual screen. They're using an Android board put in there and by using an Android board inside, you will be able to push one content to that screen. The problem you're going to face is if we put multiple screens up, for example, you have a limitation of how many units can be connected to a WiFi network.
You would have a limitation of power plugs. You need so many power plugs to have power to each display. Think about the digital signage licenses. Now, this is nothing but fun for the signage company, if you have 3000 screens in a store and each screen has a built in a hundred players, that 3000 licenses. And also about servicing them, it should be easier to take one away, put one back, you know what a computer is, you have something that needs to be updated in one location, not 3000 locations.
So in other words, you could source something like what Instorescreen has off of Alibaba or wherever you want to go. But the simple question that you would ask or somebody smart would ask or somebody else who's smart would ask is will it scale? And it just doesn't, as you just described.
Henrik Andersson: No it doesn't, and to get it with the, know what we are able to today to have very smart servicing options. We have longtime warranties. We have technical people on 24x7 call. It's a disaster if a retail store shelf edge goes black. For example, we need to fix that very quickly and not call an Alibaba contact and you get a new screen in three weeks.
Yeah. That doesn't work so well. All right. This was great. If people want to learn more about your company, where do they go online?
Henrik Andersson: They can contact Lenovo OEM or go to lenovo.com or they can go to instorescreen.com.
All right. Perfect. Thanks for your time.
Henrik Andersson: Thank you very much.
Wednesday Nov 24, 2021
Saurabh Gupta, Ultraleap
Wednesday Nov 24, 2021
Wednesday Nov 24, 2021
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
If you have been in the industry for a while, you'll maybe remember all the excitement around using gesture technology to control screens. That was followed by the letdown of how crappy and feeble these gesture-driven touchless working examples turned out to be.
Like just about everything, the technology and the ideas have got a lot better, and there is a lot of renewed discussion about how camera sensors, AI and related technologies can change up how consumers both interact ... and transact.
Ultraleap is steadily developing a product that lets consumers interact with and experience digital displays using sensors and, when it makes sense, haptic feedback. The company was formed in 2019 when Ultrahaptics acquired Leap Motion, and the blended entity now operates out of both Silicon Valley and Bristol, England.
Leap Motion was known for a little USB device and a lot of code that could interpret hand gestures in front of a screen as commands, while Ultrahaptics used ultrasound to project tactile sensations directly onto a user's hands, so you could feel a response and control that isn't really there. Or something like that. It's complicated stuff.
I had an interesting chat with Saurabh Gupta, who is charged with developing and driving a product aimed at the digital OOH ad market, one of many Ultraleap is chasing. We got into a bunch of things - from how the tech works, to why brands and venues would opt for touchless, when touchscreens are so commonplace, as is hand sanitizer.
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TRANSCRIPT
Hey, Saurabh, thank you for joining me. Let's get this out of the way. What is an Ultraleap and how did it come about?
Saurabh Gupta: Hey, Dave, nice to be here. Thank you for having me. Ultraleap is a technology company and our mission is to deliver solutions that remove the boundaries between physical and digital worlds. We have two main technologies. We have a computer vision-based hand tracking and gesture recognition technology that we acquired and on the other side of the equation, we have made a haptic technology using ultrasound. The whole premise of how we came about was we started out as a haptics company and that's what our founder and CEO, Tom Carter, built when he was in college, and it was a breakthrough idea for us to be able to deliver the sense of touch in mid air using ultrasound was how we started, and to be able to project haptic sensations in mid-air, one of the key components of that was, you need to understand where the hands are in space and for that we were using computer vision technology by Leap Motion to track and locate user’s hands in space, and we had an opportunity to make an acquisition, and some of your listeners may already know about Leap Motion. Leap Motion has been a pioneer in gesture based hand tracking technology since 2010. They’ve got 10 plus years of pedigree in really refining gesture based hand tracking models. So we had an opportunity to purchase them and make an acquisition in 2019, we completed the acquisition and rebranded ourselves to Ultraleap.
So that's how we started. As stated in our mission, it's all about focusing on user experience for the use cases of how users are interacting with their environment, and that environment could be a sort of a 2D screen in certain applications, the application that we'll probably talk about today, but also other aspects of augmented reality and virtual reality, which are on the horizon and our emerging technologies that are gaining more ground. So that's the central approach. How can we enhance the interactivity that users have with a physical environment, through an input and an output technology offerings with gesture as input and haptics being the output?
The whole gesture thing through the years has been kind of an interesting journey, so to speak. I can remember some of the early iterations of Microsoft Kinect gesture, sensors, and display companies and solutions providers doing demos showing, you can control a screen by waving your hand, lifting it up and down and this and that, and I thought this is not going to go anywhere. It's just too complicated. There's too much of a learning curve and everything else.
Now, the idea as it's evolved and like all technology got a lot better is, it's more intuitive, but it's still something of a challenge, right? There's still a bit of a curve because we're now conditioned to touching screens.
Saurabh Gupta: Yeah, you're right. One of the key aspects here is that gesture has been around. There's been research that goes back to the early 90s, if not in the 80s, but computer vision technology in general has come a long way. The deep learning models that are powering our hand tracking technology today are a lot more sophisticated. They are more robust, they are more adaptable and they are able to train based on a lot of real world inputs. So what that really means is that since the computing power and the technology behind recognizing gestures has improved, a lot of that has manifested itself in a more approachable user experience, and I completely accept the fact that there is a gap and we've got 10 plus years of learned behavior of using a touchscreen. We use a touchscreen everyday, carry it in our pockets, but you also have to understand that when touch screens became prevelant, there was the type keyboard before that.
So the point that I'm making here with this is that we are pushing the envelope on new technologies and a new paradigm of interactivity. Yes, there is a learning curve, but those are the things that we are actually actively solving for:
The gesture tracking technology should be so refined that it is inclusive and is able to perform in any environment, and I think we've made some really good steps towards that. You may have heard of our recent announcement of our latest hand tracking offering called Gemini. The fundamental thing with Gemini is that it's based on years and years of research and analysis on making the computer vision, deep learning models, that power that platform to be as robust, to be low latency, high yield in terms of productivity and really high initialization, which means as part of the user experience, when you walk up to an interface, you expect to use it right away. We know we can do that with touch screens, but if you put this technology complementary to an interface, what we are solving for at Ultraleap is: when somebody walks up to a screen and they put up their hand to start to interact, the computer vision technologies should instantly recognize that there's a person who is looking to interact. That's number one, and I think with Gemini, with the deep model work that we've done, we've made some good progress there. Number two, which is once the technology recognizes that a person wants to interact, now can we make it more intuitive for the person to be as or more productive than she would be with a touchscreen interface? And that's where I think we've made more progress. I will say that we need to make more progress there, but some of the things that we've done, Dave. We have a distance call to interact, which is a video tutorial attraction loop that serves as an education piece.
And I'll give you a stat. We ran a really large public pilot in the Pacific Northwest at an airport, and the use case there was immigration check-in, so people coming off the plane, before they go talk to a border security agent, some people to fill out their information on a kiosk. So we outfitted some kiosks with our gesture based technology and the rest were the controls, which were all touchscreen based and over multiple weeks we ran this study with active consumers who actually had very little to no prior experience using gestures and we did this AB test where we measured the gesture adoption rate on the kiosks without a call interact, before a call to interact and after a call to interact, and it increased the gesture adoption rate by 30%, which means that it certainly is helping people to understand how to use the interface.
The second stat that came from it, that at the end of the pilot, we were almost at 65% gesture adoption rate, which means almost more than 6 out of 10 people who use that interface used gesture as the dominant interface for input control, and the third piece of this was how long did it take for them to finish their session? We measured that using the gesture based interaction, the time was slightly higher than for the control group that was using a touchscreen, but it wasn't much, it was only 10% higher. Now one can look at that stat and say in a transactional setting where you know, it's going to take you 30 seconds to order a burger, adding an extra second can be a problem, but at the same time, those stats are encouraging for us to think about when we look at that as the baseline to improve from.
So if I'm listening to this and I'm trying to wrap my head around what's going on here, this is not a gesture where you're standing 3 feet away from a screen and doing the Tom cruise Minority Report thing, where you're waving your arm and doing this and that is, can you describe it? Because you’re basically doing touch-like interactions and the ultrasonic jets or blasts of air or whatever are giving you the feedback to guide you, right?
Saurabh Gupta: So we've got two avenues that we have going at this from. One is for the self service type offering, so you think of check-in kiosks or ordering kiosks at restaurants or even digital wayfinding, digital directories. We are solving for those primarily led at least in the first phase led by our gesture tracking technology. So gesture being the input modality, complimentary to touch.
So, what we do is we build a touch-free application, which is a ready to use application that is available today on Windows based media players or systems to convert existing touch screen-based user interfaces to gesture, but what we've done is we've made the transition a lot more intuitive and easier because what we've done is we've replicated and done a lot of research on this and replicated interaction methods or gestures you would call it. I hate to use gestures as a word, because it gets tagged with weird hand poses and things like that, people pinching and all of that. For us, it's all about how we can replicate the same usage that a typical average consumer will have when she interacts with a touch screen based interface.
So we came up with this an interaction method that we call Airpush which is basically, to explain it to your listeners, it's all about using your finger and moving towards an interactive element on screen. But what happens is the button gets pressed even before you approach them based on your forward motion or interaction. Now, the smart math behind all of this is that not only do we track motion, but we also track velocity, which means that for people who are aggressive in terms of their button pressing, which means they do short jabs, we can cater for those or people who are more careful in their approach as they move towards the screen, the system is adaptable to cater to all types of interaction types, and we track all the fingers so you can use multiple fingers too or different fingers as well. So these are some of the things that we've included in our application.
So that's one side. The second side is all about interactive advertising, immersion and that's where I think we use our haptic technology more, to engage and involve the user in the interactive experience that they're going to. So for self service and more transactional type use cases, we're using primarily our hand gesture technology. And for immersive experiential marketing, or even the digital out-of-home advertising type of use cases, we are leading without haptic based technology.
And you're involved on the digita, out-of-home side, right? That's part of your charge?
Saurabh Gupta: That's correct. So I lead Ultraleap’s out-of-home business. So in the out-of-home business, we have both self service retail, and digital out-of-home advertising businesses that we focus on.
David:. So how would that manifest itself in terms of, I am at a train station or I'm out somewhere and there's a digital out-of-home display and I go up and interact with it and you're saying it's a more robust and rich experience than just boinking away at a touchscreen. What's going on? What would be a good example of that?
Saurabh Gupta: So a good example of digital out of home activations is that we've partnered with CEN (Cinema Entertainment Network) where we've augmented some of their interactive in cinema displays that are being sold from a programmatic perspective. Now the interactive piece is still being worked into the programmatic side of things, but that's one example of an interactive experience in a place based setting.
The other example is experiential marketing activations that we've done with Skoda in retail malls and also an activation that we did with Lego for Westfield. So these are some of the experiences that we've launched and released with our haptics technology and on the self service side we've been working with a lot of providers in the space you may have heard of.
Our recent pilot concluded with PepsiCo where we are bringing in or trialing gestures for their ordering kiosks for their food and beverage partners. So these are some of the things that are going on on both sides in the business.
David:. So for the Lego one or the Scoda one, what would a consumer experience?
Saurabh Gupta: So these are all interactive experiences. So for Lego, it was about building a Lego together. So basically using our haptic technology which obviously contains gestures as the input, moving Lego blocks and making an object that was being displayed on a really large LED screen at one of the retail outlets and in London, so a user would walk up, they would use their hands in front of our haptic device to control the pieces on the screen and then join them together and make a Lego out of it and while they're doing that, they're getting the sensation of the tactile sensation of joining the pieces and that all adds up to a really immersive, engaging experience within a digital out of home setting.
So you get the sensation that you're snapping Lego pieces together?
Saurabh Gupta: Yeah, snapping pieces together, controlling so you get the agency of control, and it's one of those sensations that gives you a very high memorability factor.
I don't know whether you track the news. This was in 2019. We did actually a really extensive activation with Warner Brothers in LA, and what we did was at one of the cinemas down there for Warner Brothers’ three upcoming movies, Shazam, The Curse of La Llorona, and Detective Pikachu, we added interactive movie posters using haptics in the cinema lobby, and this would complement the digital poster network that was already existing at that location, and over the course of the activation, which was around six weeks long, we had almost 150,000 people that went through the cinema and we actually did in partnership with QBD, we did a lot of analytics around what the. performance was of an interactive movie poster experience within a digital out-of-home setting and got some really great stats.
We measured a conversion rate between an interactive experience versus a static digital signage experience. The conversion rate was almost 2x, 33% increase in dwell time, like people were spending more time in front of an interactive sign versus a static sign. Attention span was significantly higher at 75%, 42% lift in brand favorability. So these are really interesting stats that gave us the confidence that haptic technology combined with gesture based interface has a lot of value in providing and delivering memorable experiences that people remember.
And that's the whole point with advertising, right? That's the whole point. You want to present experiences that provide a positive association of your branded message with your target consumer, and we feel that our technology allows that connection to be made
One of the assumptions/expectations that happened when the pandemic broke out was that this was the end of touchscreens, nobody's ever going to want to touch the screen again, the interactivity was dead and I made a lot of those assumptions myself and turns out the opposite has happened. The touch screen manufacturers have had a couple of pretty good years and the idea is that with a touchscreen, you can wipe it down and clean your hands and do all that stuff. But you're at a far greater risk standing four feet away from somebody across a counter, ordering a burger or a ticket or whatever it may be.
So when you're speaking with solutions providers, end user customers and so on are you getting the question of, “Why do I need to be touchless?”
Saurabh Gupta: Yeah, it's a fair point, Dave, and let me clarify that. Look, from our perspective, we are focusing on building the right technology and building the right solutions that elevate the user experience. Hygiene surely is part of that equation, but I accept your points that there are far greater risks for germ transmission than shared surfaces, I totally accept that, and yes, there is a TCO argument, the total cost of ownership argument that has to be made here also.
The point that I will make here is that we fundamentally believe and being a scale-up organization that is focusing on new technology, we have to believe that we are pushing the technology envelope where what we are focusing on is elevating the user experience from what the current model provides. So yes, there will be some use cases where we are not a good fit, but contactless as a category or touchless as a category, maybe the pandemic catalyzed it, maybe it expedited things, but that category in itself is growing significantly.
A couple of stats here, right? The contactless payment as a category itself, 88% of all retail transactions in 2020 were contactless, that's a pretty big number And assuming that retail is a $25 trillion dollar market. That's a huge chunk.
But that’s about speed and convenience though, right?
Saurabh Gupta: Totally. But all I'm saying is contactless as a category is preferable from a user perspective. Now, gesture based interactivity as a part of that user flow, we fundamentally believe that gesture based interactivity plays a part in the overall user journey. So let me give you an example.
Some of the retailers that we are talking to are thinking about new and interesting ways to remove levels of friction from a user's in-store experience. So there are multiple technologies that are being trialed at the moment. You may have heard of Amazon's just walk out stores as an example. You don't even have to take out your wallet and that is completely based on computer vision, as an example, but there are other retailers who are looking to use technology to better recognize who their loyal customers are. So think of how we used to all have loyalty cards for Costco or any other retailer.
They're removing that friction to say, when you walk through the door, you've done your shopping and you’re at the payment powder, we can recognize who you are. And if we recognize who you are, we can give you an offer at the last mile, and in that scenario, they are integrating gestures as part of the completely contactless flow. This is where I think we are gaining some traction. There is a product that we are a part of that hasn't been announced yet. I can't go into details specifically on who it is and when it's going to be released. But we are part of a computer vision based fully automated checkout system that uses gesture as the last mile for confirmation and things of that nature. That's where we are gaining traction.
Overall point here is that we are focusing on really showcasing and delivering value on how you can do certain things in a more natural and intuitive way. So think of digital wayfinding at malls, right? You have these giant screens that are traditionally touchscreens, right? When you think of that experience, it has a lot of friction in it, because first of all, you can't use touch as effectively on a large screen because you can't swipe from left to right to turn a map as an example. We fundamentally believe that the product could be better with gesture. You can gesture to zoom in, zoom out, rotate a map, and find your direction to a store. Those kinds of things can be augmented. That experience can be augmented with adding just a capability as opposed to using a touchscreen based interface. So those are the high value use cases that we are focusing on.
So it's not really a case where you're saying, you don't need to touch screen overlay anymore for whatever you're doing, Mr. Client, you just use this instead. It's tuned to a particular use case and an application scenario, as opposed to this is better than a touch overlay?
Saurabh Gupta: I think that is a mission that we are driving towards, which is, we know that there is potentially a usability gap between gesture in terms of its evolution than touchscreen. We are looking to bridge that gap and get to a point where we can show more productivity using gesture.
And the point is that with our technology, and this is something that you referenced a second ago, you can turn any screen into a touchscreen. So you don't necessarily need a touchscreen and then you can convert it to gesture. You can convert any LCD screen to an interactive screen. So there is some deep argument there as well.
What's the kit, like what are you adding?
Saurabh Gupta: Just a camera and a USB cable, and some software.
And if you're using haptics feedback, how does that work?
Saurabh Gupta: So haptics is a commercially off the shelf product. So it's another accessory that gets added to the screen. However, that contains the camera in it so you don't need an additional camera. That also connects to external power and a USB back to the media player.
So as long as you've got a USB on the media player, you're good, and right now your platform is Windows based. Do you have Android or Linux?
Saurabh Gupta: Good question, Dave. So right now we are Windows based, but we know it's of strategic importance for us to enable support on additional platforms. So we are starting to do some work on that front. You'll hear some updates from us early next year on at least the hand tracking side of things being available on more platforms than just Windows.
How does economics work? I suspect you get this question around, “All right. If I added a touch overlay to a display, it's going to cost me X. If I use this instead, it's going to cost me Y.
Is it at that kind of parity or is one a lot more than the other?
Saurabh Gupta: It depends on screen size, Dave, to be honest. So the higher in screen size you go, the wider the gap is. I would say that for a 21 or 23 inch screen and up, the economics are in our favor for a comparable system.
And are you constrained by size? I think of all the LED video walls that are now going into retail and public spaces and so on, and those aren't touch enabled. You really wouldn't want to do that, and in the great majority of cases with this, in theory, you could turn a potentially fragile, please don't touch surface like that into an interactive surface, but are you constrained to only doing things like a 55 inch canvas or something?
Saurabh Gupta: This will require a little bit of technical explanation. The Lego example that I talked about was targeted on, I would say a large outdoor LED screen. So the concept here is that if you want one-to-one interactivity.
So what do I mean by one-to-one interactivity? One-to-one interactivity is that basically when in our interface, when the user approaches the screen, there is an onscreen cursor that shows up, and that on screen cursor is what is the control point for the user. Now one-to-one interactivity for us to achieve that where the cursor is at the same height or there's no parallax between where the finger is and where the cursor is, for that you have to be connected to or at the screen, and when you are connected to the screen, based on our current camera technology, we can control up to a 42 inch screen for one-to-one interactivity, but we've also been doing exams showing examples where if you connect the sensor to slightly in front of the display, then you can cover a wider area and we've been able to showcase examples of our technology being used on up to a 75 inch LCD screen in portrait mode.
So then any larger than that, the scale gets a little wonky, right? Cause you've got a person standing in front of a very large display and it just starts to get a little weird.
Saurabh Gupta: Yeah. It's like putting a large TV in a small living room. So you need to be slightly further away because then it gets too overwhelming, and for that, we have worked with certain partners and they've done some really interesting work like this company called IDUM, they built a pedestal and so that pedestal encloses our tracking device, and that can be placed several feet from a large immersive canvas, like a LED wall, as an example, in a museum type activation, and people can walk by and then they can control the whole screen with that pedestal slightly further away from the screen.
So it's like a Crestron controller or something except for a big LED display!
Saurabh Gupta: Exactly. It's like a trackpad in front of the screen, but slightly further away.
Gotcha. All right. Time flew by, man. We're already deep into this. You were telling me before we hit record that your company will be at NRF and you may also have people wandering around IEC but if people want to know more about your company, they go to ultraleap.com?
Saurabh Gupta: That's correct. Ultraleap.com, we have all the information there and David, it was great to talk to you and thank you for the opportunity.