Sixteen:Nine - All Digital Signage, Some Snark

Michael Schneider, Gensler (from InfoComm Connected 2020)

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

I was kinda sorta off last week and did not record a new interview, but I have this audio track from a recent online event that's well worth sharing.

The pandemic shifted InfoComm 2020 from Las Vegas to online last month, and one of many educational sessions held at InfoComm Connected was about experiential design.

I was the host, and my guest was Michael Schneider of the giant global design firm Gensler. I've known Michael for a few years, first at ESI Design and now at the New York City offices of Gensler, where he runs the Media Architecture team.

The session was called Designing Contact-Free Building Experiences, and was a chat about how the global health care crisis is forcing a re-think of using and navigating public and commercial building spaces.

Where much of the experience in big buildings lately has been about Wow Factor, health safety and utility are now in the mix.

The session was a video call, with a chat recorded ahead of time and then live Q&A. About 20 minutes in, you will hear the tech jump in with a few questions.

I'll have a fresh podcast, with transcription, next week.

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Frank Olea, Olea Kiosks

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

I love kiosks when they serve a real purpose - making it faster, better and easier to do something.

Olea Kiosks does just that - making high-utility but also good looking kiosks that exist to make something easier - like speeding you through an airport or checking in at a hotel or health care facility.

The company started decades ago as a moonlighting woodwork shop, through Frank Olea's grandfather. It grew into a thriving business doing a ton of work on trade show exhibits. Over time, those exhibits added more and more technology, and gave Olea a lot of direct experience with electronics and software.

Now the company is squarely in the kiosk business - with standard lines and a fair amount of custom work.

Olea grew up in the family business and eventually took over as CEO. We spoke recently about what his company is doing, the challenges presented by a pandemic, and how even when touching things can seem scary, a kiosk makes more sense than one to one contact with people you don't know are healthy or contagious.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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Panel: AVIXA Digital Signage Power Hour On Access Controls In Pandemic Times

The trade association AVIXA is running a series of digital signage "Power Hours" that are designed much more as roundtable discussions than webinars.

I've been moderating them, and while they are available for playback on demand via AVIXA's YouTube channel, it's a conversation that works well as just audio.

This session was on the new demands out there for technology-driven access controls, and messaging for retailers and other venue operators who are slowly re-opening to a new normal.

I stripped out the presentation the guys from Invidis did at the front end of the hour, since they do refer to visuals. This is the conversation, which featured:

• Beth Warren from CRI
• Jay Leedy from Diversified
• Ben Reynolds from Stratacache
• Chuck Lewis from Palmer Digital Group
• Florian Rotberg and Stefan Schieker from invidis.

 

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Paul Harris, Aurora Multimedia

The COVID-19 pandemic has produced a wave of new or re-marketed products intended to address one of the many new problems businesses face in re-opening and bring people through their doors each day.

My email inbox is filled each morning with pitches from Chinese manufacturers selling screens that also have sanitizer dispensers, and smartphone-sized gadgets, with cameras, that do quick body temperature scans that are intended to flag people who may be running fevers, and therefore may be carriers of the coronavirus.

A lot of these products look, and are, the same, and it would be impossible to keep up with all the options and sellers. But I was intrigued by a New Jersey AV tech company, Aurora Multimedia, that came out recently with a solution that seems a bit more substantial. It was designed from the start to integrate and work with other building systems, as well as offer alternative uses beyond this pandemic.

Aurora has versions of a temperature check screen that are as large as 21.5-inches, and they have the company's versatile control system in behind it.

I spoke with Paul Harris, Aurora's CEO, about the thinking behind the product, and how it is turning out to be something of a saviour for some AV reseller partners who were struggling to stay relevant with their pre-pandemic products and services.

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Florian Rotberg, Stefan Schieger - Invidis Consulting

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

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

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

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

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

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Chris Riegel, STRATACACHE (2020)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Mark McDermott, ScreenCloud

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

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

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

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

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

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George Clopp, RMG Networks

RMG Networks has been doing workplace communications and employee engagement since the days the Dallas company was known as Symon Communications.

There have been some interesting twists and turns in the story of RMG - like a curious spell as a digital out of home media company that ALSO did the legacy Symon stuff. But the management team is now squarely focused on the high opportunity workplace vertical.

I had a great chat with George Clopp, the Chief Technology Officer for RMG, about where the company is at, the evolution of its Korbyt CMS, and how what it does differs in the marketplace.

Among the particularly interesting things - content decisions that are determined and automated, using machine learning, or AI. Have a listen.

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Vernon Freedlander, Bannister Lake

Dynamic data has grown into a buzz phrase in the digital signage industry, with lots of talk about how the ability to automate and visualize data results in relevant, always updated and fresh content on screens.

It's relatively new to many companies in this industry, but for a few, it's old hat.

A little company in the Canadian tech hotbed of Kitchener-Waterloo has been doing dynamic data for a quarter-century. Bannister Lake's roots are in dynamic graphics for broadcasters, and that's still a big business. But the company also does dynamic data for digital signage, and is growing that side of the business.

If you watched any of the big matches at the US Open tennis tournament last fall in New York, you saw an amazing set of LED displays at the venue showing graphics and stats. That was Bannister Lake under the content hood.

I spoke with industry veteran Vern Freedlander, who's now a part of the Bannister Lake team.

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2019 DSF Coffee And Controversy

A couple of weeks back I was in New York for the annual Digital Signage Federation Coffee and Controversy event, which I moderated.

I was able to grab audio last year and post as a podcast, and this year we managed the same. The audio is OK, at best, but you should be able to hear just fine.

Your big challenge will be discerning who is saying what, because the session was me and five great panelists, all with terrific insights and experience.

The topic was privacy and proof, as it relates to tech being used for retail and advertising insights. The speakers were:
- Dylan Gilbert, Policy Fellow at DC-based PublicKnowledge
- Laura Davis-Taylor, the Co-Founder of Atlanta's HighStreet Collective & LivingRetailLab
- Kym Frank, President of New York-based Geopath
- Amy Avery, Chief Intelligence Officer at New York agency Droga5
- Jeremy Bergstein, CEO of New York agency The Science Project

By all accounts it was a great session that could have gone another hour or more. The DSF is working on video clips, as well, which will be available to its membership.

Please note it is double the length of a "normal" 16:9 podcast.

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Maris Ensing, Mad Systems

I wouldn't want the job of trying to boil down what Mad Systems does to an elevator pitch, unless it was a very tall building with a very slow elevator.

Based in Orange County, California, Mad Systems is technically an AV system designer and integrator, but these are not the guys you'd hire to put in some video-conferencing gear and some screens in the lobby.

It's not unfair to suggest the Mad in Mad Systems has to do with Maris Ensing and his engineers being a bunch of mad scientists. Go through the company's project portfolio and you find out they've put together a steam-driven aircraft and a 20-foot high tornado.

The company also did a big part of one of my favorite projects - the alumni center at the University of Oregon, which has a set of very tall, but moveable stacked LCD displays.

Ensing and his team have got involved in all kinds of things over 20 years, but in our chat, he talks a lot about a new AV management system the company has built from nothing - called Quicksilver. Among many things, Mad has patent applications underway for a new kind of facial color and pattern recognition system designed to instantly personalize visits to places like museums.

I'll let Ensing explain that and other things. This was one of my easier podcasts. He had a lot to say and there was little room for questions. Enjoy. 

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Daniel Griffin, Userful

 Like a lot of people in the digital signage industry, I tend to think about video walls in terms of the display hardware, and what's running on those big beautiful screens. I know precious little about what's happening behind the wall to ensure it all looks good. 

Userful has been making waves for a few years now by offering a software-driven product that drives visuals accurately to screens, and allows for the sort of flexibility and instant switches that are needed in scenarios like control rooms.

While traditional video wall systems can tend to have a lot of often expensive hardware and software to control the screen and send pixels where they need to be, Userful has been marketing products that are now cloud-based and require minimal hardware.

I spoke with Daniel Griffin, the company's VP of Marketing and a company long-timer. We talked about how Userful came about and about a business that's still known for video walls, but is finding its way into other aspects of visual communications around workplaces because of its AV over networks capabilities.

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Marshall Thompson, Signet

Workplace communications have developed into a very active, very big vertical for a lot of companies across the digital signage ecosystem - but most of their activity has involved screens positioned around the white collar and, increasingly, blue collar workspaces.

For most companies, workplaces is A vertical. For Signet, it is THE vertical, and the Silicon valley-based company has built up a tidy business being laser-focused on workplaces and particularly on the briefing and experience centers of Fortune 5000 companies.

These are the high-touch, big visual impact designated areas that companies build to entertain, inform and hopefully close major customers - using everything from big video walls to interactive displays.

I spoke with Marshal Thompson, who runs client solutions for the company. We get into what Signet does and how it found its way into corporate communications, the thinking and impact of these briefing centers, and how workplace communications is so important to attracting and keeping talent in hyper-competitive places like Silicon Valley.

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Jeff Hastings, BrightSign (2019)

I've done a podcast interview with Jeff Hastings in the past, but there's a lot going on with BrightSign and it was time for a catch-up with the CEO.

BrightSign will ship about 300,000 little purple digital signage players this year, at a clip of something like 1,200 units a day. The players have become their own hardware category - as in, "Are you planning to use PCs, smart displays or BrightSign boxes?"

In our chat, we talk about why BrightSign devices have so much traction in the marketplace, and why so many software and solutions companies are signing on now as integrated partners.

We get into the thinking behind a service called BSN Cloud that is now coming out of beta testing and into wider release.

And we talk broadly about what CIOs and IT managers need to think about when they start looking at large, scaled digital signage networks. The IT guys I used to refer to as the Dr. No crowd are now very much on board with using special purpose devices that just work, and don't bring the headaches of full PCs and their operating systems.

 

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Michael Provenzano, Vistar Media

Programmatic media buying and selling for the digital out of home marketplace has been going on for many years now, and grown a lot more sophisticated, and a lot more used.

Just as the digital OOH business has matured and expanded in the last few years, so have some of the key players - notably New York City-based Vistar Media, which has been at it now for eight years and is seeing crazy-good growth these days.

 I spoke with co-founder Michael Provenzano about the online roots of his business, and how he took much of the same approach into a medium and supporting tech business that was, at the start, kind of all over the place.

 We had a great chat talking about what Vistar does, why it built its own CMS, the role these days of data, and whether programmatic is the answer for media-based digital signage networks, or maybe just PART of the answer.

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Mike Kilian, Mvix, On Workplace Communications

Just about anyone involved on the sales or management side of digital signage these days knows that workplace communications has pretty quickly grown into one of the most active and interesting verticals.

With QSRs, the other hot vertical, you're doing menus and digital promo posters. In the workplace, all kinds of interesting things are possible, and can make a difference.

In this podcast, I spend some time with Mike Kilian of the DC-based CMS and solutions company Mvix. I've done a podcast in the past with Mike, but based on chatting with him at Infocomm, we decided to do a new one talking about the opportunities and challenges of digital signage in everything from offices to factory floors.

It would seem like the rise of big data and IoT sensors would open up a lot of possibilities to visualize data and automate content. But in this conversation, you'll learn it's not that easy to do when IT people are worried about security, and the machines and sensors that could spit out useful data have few standards or common formats.

If you are a business communicator, this is a useful listen.

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Fab Stanghieri, Cineplex Digital Media

Canadians all know Cineplex as the dominant movie theater chain in that country, and the Toronto-based company has also been expanding its reach, in recent years, into other related lines of business.

Cineplex now has entertainment-centric restaurant-bars, is bringing Top Golf into Canada, sells out of home media and runs a thriving digital media group that's doing most aspects of digital signage for major enterprise customers in Canada and beyond those borders.

Fab Stanghieri was a senior real estate guy with Cineplex, charged with building and managing the company's movie house portfolio. He had digital media added to his responsibilities a few years ago, and while it was unfamiliar territory at first, he's embraced digital to a degree that it is now his primary focus in the company.

I was passing through Toronto a couple of weeks ago, and Fab kindly took some time to show me around new office space, which is set up to help ideate, deliver and manage digital signage solutions for Cineplex clients.

 

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Dan Hagen, 10net

Dan Hagen is a relatively young guy, and a bit of an Energizer Bunny. I know of him as the 10net guy from Vancouver, but I was surprised to learn in a conversation that he has been involved in digital signage since before it was called digital signage.

He was a funding founder of Mercury Online Solutions, which in the late 90s and early 2000s was a big player in this business. That company sold to 3M, and as way too often happens, things went south quickly when a plucky little company gets absorbed into a monster of a company.

Hagen did a few things but eventually found his way to 10net, which is a solutions provider that does most of its work in Vancouver, BC, but is now trying to establish itself south of the border in the Pacific Northwest and beyond.

In our chat, we get into how 10net does things, the kinds of projects it works on, and our shared point off view that sum of the most effective digital signage jobs out there are, at first glance, kinda boring looking.

There's not a lot of sizzle in things like backroom screens for safety messaging on ferries, but they make a real difference.

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Neeraj Pendse, Elo

Elo has been doing touchscreens for 40 years - way, way before marketers started cooking up phrases like customer engagement technology. Over that time, the company has shipped more than 25 million units.

So Elo knows touch, and interactive.

Based in Silicon Valley, the company has in the last few years made a pretty big push into digital signage with everything from countertop displays to big 70-inch touchscreens that look like giant tablets.

I spoke recently with Neeraj Pendse, the company's VP Product Management. His responsibilities include Elo’s large format and signage products, the EloView service, and the commercial Android roadmap and devices. We get into a lot of things - including what works and doesn't in interactive design, how Elo differs from touch overlay companies, and why a touchscreen manufacturer developed and now markets device management software.

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