Episodes
Wednesday Jul 26, 2023
Digital Signage Yearbook 2023
Wednesday Jul 26, 2023
Wednesday Jul 26, 2023
In this special episode, I chat with Balthasar Mayer and Antonia Hamberger of invidis Consulting, the Munich-based firm that has for many years produced an annual yearbook that takes a deep dive into the digital signage industry.
The new yearbook for 2023 is out, with versions in German and an international one in English that includes quite a bit of copy and input from Sixteen:Nine.
This podcast goes into the story behind the yearbook, its growth beyond first Germany and then Europe, and what readers will find in the 2023 version - which is some 200 pages of editorial (not advertorial) content, including regional market analyses.
The good news - it's a free download.
Wednesday May 24, 2023
Steve Bernard, Ocean Outdoor
Wednesday May 24, 2023
Wednesday May 24, 2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
A lot of digital out of home media is marketed mainly on the basis of reach - essentially the scale of the aggregated network and the audience reach that's realized. It's more about math than science.
But the UK out of home media company Ocean Outdoor is very much interested in the science of advertising, and over the last decade, Ocean has commissioned a series of studies that measure brain activity and how people respond to the visuals of advertising and other mediums like social media.
While a lot of audience measurement is about counting people and characterizing behaviours, Ocean has commissioned five studies that take participants into a lab, put something like an electrode cap on their heads, and measure how they respond to campaign visuals.
The newest study, called Digital Out Of Home: The Vital Ingredient, looks at how digital out of home optimizes the use of social media. The research found that using socially amplified digital out of home, changes how brands are perceived, and the value of their role in the media landscape.
I got a rundown on the background and the findings of this research from Steve Bernard, the Head of Insight for Ocean.
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TRANSCRIPT
Steve, thank you for joining me. For those people who don't live in the UK and maybe aren't in the media business, can you explain what Ocean Outdoor does, its footprint, and that sort of thing?
Steve Bernard: Of course. So Ocean started its life about 15 years ago, and we exist in the UK out-of-home media industry. So what that means is that we are selling premium digital screens to a range of advertisers across the UK. As I said, the business started back in 2008 with just a handful of sites, but in the period between then and now, we've grown our portfolio sites significantly. We now have well over 600 locations in total, and that's largely digital out-of-home screens. So some of those are static digital screens that show static imagery on them. Some of them are moving images so we have the ability to display moving images to the public, and whilst many of those screens exist on what we call roadside locations, so typically to the side of roadways and also on pedestrian pavements, that kind of thing, sidewalks, we also have several screens within internal environments so shopping malls are one of our big sort of environments that we exist in and what marks Ocean out as different from its competitors is that it's very much focusing on selling to advertisers that premium network of digital out-of-home screens.
And indeed, the environments in which those Oceams screens are located, for example, those shopping malls I referred to a moment ago, are often the most premium environments that exist in the UK. So, for example, we have a contract with Westfield, which is one of the largest shopping mall brands globally, and they have a significant footprint in London. So we have the advertising space on the external side of Westfield's locations: two locations in London, one in Stratford and one in White City, and we also have screens in the Edwards and James Mall, which is a premium shopping mall in Edinburgh in St. James's quarter, and we also have a footprint at Canary Wharf Mall. So Canary Wharf, for those who don't know, is quite a key business environment within London which typically has financial businesses. So by having our advertising screens in a location like that, we know we're reaching a very high-end premium audience.
And very quickly we have just started putting screens in Battersea power station which is again, another new premium shopping environment in the heart of London. So what works us out differently is our premium in inventory, and it's very much about digital out-of-home screens.
We're talking primarily because your company has put out neuroscience research, and I'm guessing at least that one of the re reasons you're investing in that level of research is because you do have premium properties, and you're selling your advertising at a premium so there's probably a higher demand for proof of impact and proof of audience on all those things. Is that accurate?
Steve Bernard: Yes, very much so. We always need to identify different methods to measure the effectiveness of premium digital out-of-home. One of the things about the out-of-home universe, if I may call it that, is that it's fairly varied in terms of the formats, in terms of the size, in terms of whether they're digitized or whether they're static posters.
There's a variation in environments as well, and so we know that not all out-of-home sites are the same in terms of the kind of impact that they deliver, and because we specialize in the premium end of the out-of-home universe, yeah, we need a methodology, which not just marks us out as different from our competitors who use more conventional, if I can call it that, research methods, but also something that is going to truly measure the impact of that premium out-of-home space.
So with neuroscience research, what are you doing? I realize that you're not doing it and that you're commissioning a third-party company, Neuro-Insight to do that work, but what's involved?
Steve Bernard: So ultimately, what we're trying to elicit is how people are thinking and feeling about a stimulus that's presented in front of them and to move that into the out-of-home context, what we're fundamentally trying to show is that by running premium digital out-of-home prior to other media channels for any given brand or any given campaign, that primary effect, that first impact is going to have a profound outcome in terms of how the audience discerns those other media channels. And we call that the priming effect, and during the course of the neuroscience studies that Ocean has run over the last decade or so, it's always been about trying to elicit that priming effect of premium digital out-of-home on other oot-of-home formats, for example, which was the neuroscience one or on other media channels completely like television or mobile campaigns.
That's ultimately what we're trying to show is that by leading with premium digital foam, a brand is able to ensure that how people take away the message on the other channels that they've run is fundamentally different compared to if they weren't running that premium digital out-of-home beforehand.
So what happens? You're not taking people who are participating in the research out on the street or anything like that. This is in a lab or something, and you're putting a brain or a skull cap on of some kind?
Steve Bernard: Correct. These studies are largely done in laboratory settings and controlled settings. And yes, as you've described there, the participants are made to wear these kinds of headsets, which are able to measure the various cognitive functions that are coming to the fore, as I say, when that participant is exposed to a particular stimulus or stimuli, be that digital out-of-home advertising or a brand in digital out-of-home advertising or seeing a brand in another context entirely so a TV advert or other out-of-home campaigns or indeed social media campaigns, which will I'm sure I'll come on to in a moment.
So what did you learn? Did it validate assumptions, or has the research surprised you guys?
Steve Bernard: I think we've always had this view that the effect of premium digital out-of-home and not just, can I say pre premium digital out-of-home, but also iconic out-of-home. One of the sites we also have in the UK is Piccadilly Lights. So that's at London's Piccadilly Circus. It's like a mini version of. Times Square in New York, if you can imagine Times Square in New York, Piccadilly Circus is a sort of a version of that, and we've always had this sort of expectation and this view that those kinds of sites are clearly eliciting different emotional outcomes for brands advertising on those platforms versus other more conventional formats.
As I said earlier, it's a very varied sort of universe. But clearly, the way in which someone consumes a message displayed on Piccadilly Lights, for example, or any of these other premium digital out-of-home sites that I'm referring to is gonna be different from how they consume that message on a bus shelter poster, for example, or a more conventional roadside billboard. So we've always, as I said, had that expectation of difference.
So the research is validating. But I think in respect of the lace neuroscience study that we've just launched in the UK and in some of our other European territories, which Ocean is based, we're able to show actually quite an interesting relationship between digital out-of-home and social media and a relationship, which I think for advertisers has yet to be fully realized, and hopefully, with this study, we are drawing attention to the closer relationship that these two platforms have. Digital out-of-home on one hand, and social media on the other, and as a result, getting advertisers and their agencies to think more about how they plan these two media channels together.
Can you give me an example of how they, how the two mediums intertwine, and how digital out-of-home primes social media channels or social media interests?
Steve Bernard: Absolutely. So to set the context a bit on this, typically within the advertising industry, you can put different media channels. So traditional media channels like television or radio, newspapers, magazines, and out-of-home and newer media channels such as mobile advertising or social media, you can have those on a sort of access, and you can look at that access based on how strong those channels are delivering what's called performance. So highly measurable, highly targeted on one side, and the sort of more intangible effects, so branding effects, brand equity awareness, fame, consideration on the other end of that spectrum.
So you have performance on one side and branding on the other, and you would typically see social media at one end of that spectrum on the performance side, and digital out-of-home and out-of-home are widely on the branding side of that spectrum because the view has always been that they do very different jobs. One is highly measurable or highly targeted, and the other is about reaching huge numbers of people in a public space. So one to many versus one to one.
What we have noticed over the last two years, it's probably been going on for longer, but over the last couple of years, is more and more examples of famous people, if I could put it that way, celebrities, influencers on social media, et cetera, promoting out-of-home content on their social media channels. So you'll typically see examples of famous actors or pop stars or musicians generally Tweeting or Instagramming a picture of themselves on an out-of-home canvas. That could be a banner site, or it could be a digital out-of-home screen. but very much promoting themselves on that platform, and we would contend that they wouldn't necessarily do the same thing if they saw themselves on a magazine page, or even in a television advert because a television advert is overtly a marketing function. Whereas the interesting thing, the unique thing about the digital out-of-home and home more widely is that its public furniture, I guess you could say, it's a public message in a very public space, and so I think that's why there's this relationship between known public figures and communications in the public space and that's the out-of-home space.
So that was happening over the last couple of years, we really wanted to explore that more deeply. On the other end of that is that more and more advertisers themselves are promoting their content, their out-of-home content, I should say their brand from a digital screen, on their social channels and we've seen examples from Amazon and Meta and a range of other advertisers who are who are increasingly looking at these kind of really exciting executions that they can deliver on the digital out-of-home space, and rather than sharing on their social feed, on their Twitter or Instagram a conventional advertising message, they will utilize that out-of-home content within the social media space. So you'll get Amazon Prime Video, when they're advertising a certain program, they will have performed an execution on an iconic site or a premium digital out-of-home site, and then they will tweet or Instagram the out-of-home campaign on their social channel, and that's really interesting because that represents a significant step change for our industry.
It's not necessarily just about reaching all of these people who walk past our sites on the ground every week, every month, et cetera. But the opportunity for that advertising to be seen much more widely by people who have not encountered the advertising on the ground, and that leads to all kinds of interesting questions about what is the true reach of an out-of-home campaign and like I say, that's very unique to our industry, given its greater level of creativity that's at our disposal now, given the greater proliferation of high impact digital out-of-home sites, and given the proliferation of a greater level of technology, which enables us to bring these campaigns to life in new and exciting ways.
There's a lot going on there, and so wrapping all of that together, because of this idea, this concept of sharing the out-of-phone campaign on the social media channel, fundamentally, there is a strong relationship between the two. Again, this is something that we've wanted to explore for some time, and we felt that neuroscience, given that it elicits precisely how people think and feel about something that they're exposed to, versus another sort of research technique, like a survey or a focus group, we felt that neuroscience is the perfect way in which to measure the impact of this type of concept that I'm describing.
There's also this interesting phenomenon that's bubbled up in the past couple of years where you have brands commissioning motion graphic designers to create a digital out-of-home ad, usually some sort of anamorphic illusion of some kind on a building where there isn't actually a billboard, but they design it in such a way that it makes you think that there is a billboard there and those seem to get one hell of a lot of social media shares, even though they're not actually physically booking a digital out-of-home campaign.
Steve Bernard: Yeah, that's absolutely true, and again, it's this idea that as an industry in the out-of-home space, we have a unique opportunity to capture the imagination of the audiences that encounter the various creative executions that we deliver.
And it's no surprise when you look at how welcomed and trusted different media channels are, out-of-home quite often appears at the top of those kinds of lists when they're ranking different media channels, which as TV and radio and online, et cetera. Out-of-home does really well in terms of being more welcomed and more trusted versus other media channels.
And I think that's because we have, as I say, just a really strong opportunity to capture the imagination of people as they're going about their daily business in an unobtrusive way. It's also the idea that out-of-home generally is one of the most venerable media channels in existence. There were people putting up painted billboards and painted communication on buildings a long long time ago, and that venerability is everlasting. People will always want to see things in the public space, and seeing them in the public space gives an inherent notion of trust. In a way, we would argue that isn't necessarily the case with one-to-one communications and certainly not online communication, desktop ads, et cetera. We know that brands who are appearing in the public space are trusted because they're in the public space because it is seen as a public medium.
So yeah, we have a lot of opportunities to capture the imagination in welcome unobtrusive ways, and as I say, there's now an opportunity to take all of the benefits of using out-of-home in the physical space, moving those benefits into the online space.
Were the rationale and the budgetary argument for doing this kind of research different a decade ago than it would be now?
I assume that a decade ago, digital out-of-home media companies had to work a lot harder to sell the medium itself, there was still a degree of skepticism, and a lot of it was just being sold on gross audience impressions and not a hell of a lot else, versus today where there is all this level of sophistication.
Steve Bernard: I think that's an evolving story. Fundamentally, the medium is still traded very heavily on reach, how many people any given campaign reaches, the frequency of encounters, and ultimately the number of impacts or impressions that a campaign is delivered, and that's chiefly how it's valued really.
I think one of the great things about this study and any series of studies that Ocean has done with neuro insight over the last decade is that with each of these studies, we are communicating to the wider industry the value of neuroscience., which has a very unique value. Now the company we work with on these, Neuro-Insight, they're a global neuroscience business. Still, they started their life in Australia, and it's very interesting that in Australia because this is not the case in the UK, in Australia, they incorporate what they call a neuro impact factor into their audience currency. So how they value outflow medium in Australia factors in these types of techniques, so it's not just a case of looking at reach and frequency and impact over there, there is implicitly this role of neuroscience coming to the fore, and the data that you see for different out-of-home formats and environments over there, and this is something that here in the UK, we're yet to do with our own out-of-home audience currency, which is called root.
But the long-term ambition would be for this type of methodology, this kind of study to at some point be incorporated into the out currency because, as I say, the out-of-home currency is very robust in that there, there's an awful lot of heft that goes into its methodology and an awful lot of inputs, data inputs there. A variety of sources. As I said earlier, there is clearly a different role played by sites such as the Piccadilly Lights or premium digital formats generally versus more conventional out-of-home formats, which are traded really on reach. There's a fundamental difference in these different parts of the industry.
An advertiser would be able to buy a thousand bus shelter posters, for example, or 2000 billboards on the side of the roads, up and down in the UK, and the value of that is in the reach, in reaching literally millions of people in any given period of time. Where this kind of study differs and focuses on is the unique sort of relationship that a relatively small number but high-impact sites have with an audience, and these kind of sites, these unique sites enjoy strong reach. Still, really their difference with more conventional standard out-of-home performance is that there are relatively few of them. Therefore the impact, if I can use quotations of how it's making an audience think and feel is very unique compared to more conventional out-of-home formats, which are traded purely on reach.
They're not differentiated from each other at all. So a bus shelter is a bus shelter. The same in London as it is in Manchester or Birmingham or et cetera. This is very much about showing the value of these more unique sites, more premium unique sites.
Do you have to invest the time with media planners and with brands to explain this methodology and. what's coming out of it, or do they inherently understand it?
Steve Bernard: No. It's very much the former. We spend a lot of time explaining how we put these studies together. They're complex studies. There are lots of different elements within neuroscience here in the UK. It's growing. It's a developing research study. One we've pioneered at Ocean Outdoor within the out-of-home context, but we do have to spend a lot of time explaining the methodology, there is always a great deal of interest when we go out to present these agencies or out-of-home buying specialists, et cetera, or when we go to clients directly here in the UK because it's quite a unique method because it doesn't have, at this point, a more widespread adoption, I guess you'd say.
So that means its uniqueness means there is an awful lot of interest to hear what we have to say. But it is always an interesting experience, kind of communicating the different elements of the methodology of neuroscience. I mean with the social media study, the vital ingredient, as we've called it, is us looking at the priming role of digital out-of-home on social media channels. There are an awful lot of moving parts to this. All that always relies on that always requires a lot of expectation. Fundamentally what we're measuring, the outputs are cognitive functions, as I've mentioned earlier. These cognitive functions are a mixture of engagement and approach towards a brand, memory, emotion, attention, et cetera and it's these kinds of outputs that we show uplifts for when we're presenting results. But again, it requires constant explanation because these are not elements you could describe them as, which are talked about a lot in research. A lot of the time, when we're communicating, out-of-home research, it's very much in looking at the effect of a campaign on brand awareness, or brand consideration, that kind of thing, and those kinds of terms are much more widely understood on the part of the advertising industry. But these kinds of outputs, like I say, cognitive functions, attention approach, engagement, et cetera, require a lot more explanation.
Is it a differentiator? In other words, would you have a circumstance where a media company, not Ocean, but a competitor Decaux or whoever is seeing planners, and would they actually say, okay, where's your neuro research, or what does your neuro research say? And they would say, well, we don't have any.
Steve Bernard: So neuroscience study within the out-of-home context in the UK is still relatively rare. It's something, of course, as I've said, that Ocean has pioneered because it's particularly about measuring sites, which fundamentally it's harder for the out-of-home currency to measure. So the value of neuroscience to us at Ocean is that we need unique methods to measure the effectiveness of what we would call unique properties.
Our competitors would be less likely to involve themselves in this type of study purely because our competitors here in the UK have a much wider portfolio in terms of volume, right? So in some cases, thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of different out-of-home formats because they're selling scale, reach.
Fundamentally, they're selling size, and they're selling the idea that reaching so many people in any given period of time has an inherent value, which, of course, it does. But as I say, neuroscience is a complex methodology. Still, one which is particularly useful when measuring unique properties and Ocean Outdoor of any outdoor media owner here in the UK has the unique properties, high impact, and famous premium locations, which makes this the perfect sort of methodology to use to measure their effectiveness.
You've done five of these studies over the pace of 10 years, is there a cadence to it? Are you doing one every two years, or are you done now?
Steve Bernard: That was a really interesting question. Each of the neuroscience studies has focused on the priming effects of digital out-of-home on another type of advertising format, from Neuroscience One, which looked at the priming role of premium digital out-of-home on wider outer home campaigns, and Neuroscience Two looked at the television, and we've over the years looked at things like mobile and the effects of priming digital at home on mobile.
I think it's hard to say, but there's been one every, as you say, every two or three years when the time is right. We felt that with this study which began its life last year, we felt that because social media channels were playing much a much more significant role within the advertising industry generally, and not just in the UK obviously but globally, we felt that there was a particular value in looking at the relationship between our own medium and these platforms. Where do we take this next? That's a really interesting question.
This study has already garnered a lot of interest here in the UK amongst agencies and clients. It's also something we have communicated to our other Ocean Outdoor locations. We have offices in Sweden and the Netherlands and across Scandinavia, and there's a lot of interest there. My colleagues and I have been presenting this study at events in Europe. So because of the level of interest that this is generating again, not just here but internationally, I think there will be a lot of ideas that come from this, focusing on areas that we want to explore further. Things that we weren't able to pick up necessarily in the study that we launched last year, but looking at more specific elements within them. So it's hard to say exactly where we'll take this next, but I think there will be a lot of ideas being discussed with us as we take this more widely
For people who have been listening to this and thinking this sounds interesting, I'd love to see the data or see the findings or whatever. Is that accessible, or is that something that you only share with your customers?
Steve Bernard: So it's something that we will always share with our customers first.
It allows us to have quite in-depth discussions with them about their media planning generally. So that's the first aim. We always ensure that the findings are displayed on the Ocean Outdoor website. So if you go on the Ocean Outdoor website now, you will see the findings from the previous four studies and they're readily accessible, and this study, of course, in due course, will be communicated on the website. It's something that we're sharing a lot on our social media channels, as you might imagine on LinkedIn, Twitter, et cetera.
We're always happy to talk to people face to face or on an online forum about the study in more detail. In terms of the data itself, we've found some really interesting things in this study, as I said, these are two platforms, digital out-of-home, and social media, which, in the perception of advertising planners, exist on different sides of the advertising spectrum. But we've proved with this study that there is a significant priming effect of digital from digital at home on what advertisers are already doing on social media. For example, we've seen significant effects on dwell time. So that's the time people spend with an advertiser's brand post. That increased by 32% when the campaigns were primed by digital out-of-home.
Where we've seen a really really interesting finding is what happens when the digital out-of-home content itself becomes a social media post. So rather than an advertiser doing a conventional brand post, they can display the out-of-home campaign on their social channels. We saw, again, a 54% increase in dwell time. So again, that's time spent with that social communication cause of the primary effects of that socially amplified content we've seen increases in emotional intensity, and we've seen increases in a specific cognitive function called approach, which is ultimately or essentially people becoming more positive towards a brand when they see the campaign begin on digital out-of-home, then on social media.
So what we're really saying is that digital out-of-home is making campaigns online more approachable, making the brands more approachable. They're pressing the emotional buttons, which emotion is key in turning attention into long-term memory. We're enabling more time to be spent on social media communication. That's a key role of the priming effect and, most fundamentally, at this point. Finally, it is the fact that if you see the campaign, so let's say you've got an advertiser who uses out-of-home and puts that on their social channel, there is a tangible benefit from doing that for that brand versus if that brand was to just do a conventional brand post on Instagram or TikTok without the participant having seen the campaign in the physical location.
A lot of what I've described here is about the priming effect. But if you take away that priming effect if you just look at an audience who hasn't encountered the digital focus screen and you just compare how they felt about seeing it, seeing that phone campaign, on their social feed in sit versus if they just saw that brand, that same brand doing a standup brand post. There is a tangible benefit for that brand in terms of approach, a 21% increase in approach and a 3% increase in memory. That's really exciting because that suggests a much wider audience out there for campaigns that go viral, and that's the raw power we have as a medium, we can make social content more appealing to that audience.
We can do that for a brand. We're not just giving a brand the great benefits of the physical location, but we are also making a social media campaign for that brand more positive. I'm a part of the audience. It's really exciting, and lots of different layers to this study. So like I say, the results will be fully available for people on our website, but we would also welcome the opportunity to discuss it further at any given time.
All right. Thank you very much for spending all this time with me. That was terrific.
Steve Bernard: Thank you very much.
Tuesday Mar 28, 2023
Brad Koerner, Koerner Design
Tuesday Mar 28, 2023
Tuesday Mar 28, 2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Brad Koerner is a Harvard-trained architect who has spent decades looking at how technology affects and defines built environments. He has a specific interest in technologies like lighting and digital displays.
An American based now in beautiful Amsterdam, Koerner works with both end-users and technology companies. By his own admission, he's obsessed by the question of how digital and interactive technologies are starting to disrupt centuries-old thinking about architectural design.
We met recently at Integrated Systems Europe, where he did a well-received talk on his ideas and observations. He later sent me the presentation deck, and it was pretty clear I needed to get him on this podcast.
In our chat, we get into a whole bunch of things - but focus quite a bit on the terms immersive and experiential ... what they mean and how they get applied.
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TRANSCRIPT
Brad, thank you for joining me from Amsterdam. Can you give me a background on what you do and what Koerner Design is all about?
Brad Koerner: Yeah, thanks, Dave, for having me. It's really an honor. So Koerner Design is my own design firm, and I focus on the future of the built environment, iSPAN, architectural lighting, digital signage, and circular economy product design.
What would be a typical engagement? If there is such a thing as typical.
Brad Koerner: A typical engagement for me is working with lighting design companies to create sustainable products. I've been engaged with a few digital signage and marketing firms looking at trends in digital media. I'm also working with DC Power folks, thinking about sort of infrastructure-level improvements that help lighting and digital signage.
So a company would come to you saying, we are thinking about doing this, but we don't have our heads wrapped around how it would all come together?
Brad Koerner: Yeah I speak a lot. I talk about the future of the built environment through a variety of different channels, and a lot of people find inspiration in the pieces that I do. For example, I just spoke at Integrated Systems Europe on immersive digital environments, and an earlier presentation I gave was called “Every surface is a screen, now what?”
The year before that I presented at Integrated Systems Europe, also on DC Power Systems. These videos go out there and they get people really inspired. They start to see these industries in new ways. They look at their problems with a fresh mind, and they really want to engage them in an innovation process, right? A proper design-driven innovation process. So I help them do a future envisioning session: what are the trends, what are the options, what do they have? Then we turn that into a sort of proper wishlist of product concepts or new business concepts, and then we drive it into the roadmap where it's scoped and prioritized, and they focus on that.
I also then take it all the way out and help 'em with product marketing and marketing communications for those new launches.
So they would come to you because you're not selling them anything other than your insight and expertise as opposed to trying to angle them toward how they're gonna use a fine-pitch LED wall?
Brad Koerner: Correct. I'm agnostic when it comes to all the technologies and equipment.
You talk in your presentations a lot about immersive digital experiences and I'm very curious about how you define immersive because I just wrote the other day about a company that described a billboard along a roadway as immersive, and I thought, boy, that's really stretching to call that immersive, but maybe I'm wrong.
Brad Koerner: I think it's helpful for your audience to understand by background. I'm an architect. I have two degrees in architecture, and when I was young, I always wanted to be a Disney Imagineer as a kid, and that's what drove me into architecture, and then as a side interest, I took up theater lighting and stage set design.
So I really think of immersive digital experiences from that sort of the architectural point of view where you are in physical places, you are surrounded by six surfaces and in today's world, all of those can become digital, they can become luminous, they can become a portal to the internet or to the digital world in some form or another. I've said this because I cross over between architectural lighting and digital signage a lot in my work.
Every pixel is a light source and every light source is a pixel in these modern building projects. And a lot of people still don't quite understand that concept yet. An immersive digital experience is becoming how you design an architectural space, and I think particularly a lot of architects and interior designers are really trailing behind the technology. They look at signage as a thing that's applied after the fact almost like a typical signage project, non-digital signage. They don't yet understand how to take everything they've been taught about architecture placemaking, creating thresholds, creating progression, creating a sense of space or wonder, efficiency or economy for working environments, or branded retail experience. They don't know how to take what they're so good at and apply digital to it and mix digital into that and use digital to create something really engaging placemaking. That's what I mean by immersive digital experiences.
You say they don't know how, but is it the case that they do want to?
Brad Koerner: Some for sure, some absolutely not. I saw Michael Schneider from Gensler speak at the Integrated Systems Europe show a few years ago, and Gensler has a whole group now that's called the Digital Experience Design Group, and this is exactly what they're focused on.
Gensler hired the Head of Imagineering at Disney.
Brad Koerner: Bob Weiss, right? So they get it. For every Gensler, that's out there, There are a lot of architects that think of digital experience design as well, “Don't put a TV on my wall that's gonna show a Coke ad”, right? And they don't get it right. They still think of architecture as concrete and steel and glass and like Le Corbusier's famous quote, “It's the magnificent play of forms bathed in light”, and I've inverted that many times and I've spoken and I said you know what happens when the forms themselves emit light and they become digital, how are you gonna design that? How do you design the element of time?
And with the element of time, you get this sort of very active storytelling capacity within architectural placemaking. So it's no longer enough for you to design a wall and it just sits there forever. You have to think about how that wall will change over time, right? These sorts of cycles of time, whether it's days, weeks, seasons, hours, minutes, or whatever that is, that wall can change dynamically. So why will you change it? How will you use that for placemaking and creating engaging experiences? I don't think most traditionally educated architects and interior designers can really get their heads around that yet. Even lighting designers have this sort of classic preset scene notion when it comes to controls. They're struggling with getting their heads around digital media and that live data stream, live media, and sort of interactivity.
But you seem to be suggesting that this is a matter of time as opposed to maybe it'll happen because I keep writing and talking about how that time is coming fairly quickly when architects and people who design physical spaces are thinking about LED and projection and other technologies as design materials, as design considerations.
Brad Koerner: Yeah. I think it's inevitable. The best science fiction has shown this for decades now. It's shown this amazing potential world we can live in, both the positive and the dystopian use of it like Children of Men. I just spoke in Integrated Systems Europe and I started my presentation by saying, “The future is now!” You look at Blade Runner, you look at Minority Report, you look at Star Trek, and all of those things that everybody still thinks of as like out there decades away in the future, now in fact, is decades behind us, right? And people haven't admitted to where we are, right?
The future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed and digital signage is definitely a world where that is super true, right? You go to the trade shows and a few years ago Sony had an 8k native-resolution digital wall that was eight meters wide and four meters tall, and it was hyperrealistic. That technology exists, but then you go to clients out there and you know they can't afford at any budget, anything, or they simply won't choose to do that, and I think it's inevitable. These architects that are afraid of it, I think what happens is somebody will put a digital sign in their space whether they like it or not for other reasons, and the worst-case scenario is it does become an ad, right? And that's not what they want in their space. So they better get their head around it and integrate it actively into their design concepts and really look at the poetics of it. How can they use simple things like beautiful motion graphics and beautiful textures?
Just like an interior designer would make a material sample board, a swatch board, they need to think of the digital media like that. What is the sort of swatches of digital media that they're presenting to their clients when they're designing these grand lobbies or offices or retailers or whatever?
I wonder though, with Gensler, they are an extremely well-established company with huge clients and everything else, and they work with Fortune 100s, fortune 500s, giant airports, and everything else. But there's a whole bunch of designers that are working with like a regional insurance company or something like that, and they're just saying, we get what you're saying, but our customers aren't gonna spend that money. They want a defined ROI. They don't want something that's just artistic and ethereal and vague in terms of what this does.
Brad Koerner: I think you're talking about a couple of things, right? So first off, there's just cheap, right? You'll always have customers that can never be cheap enough, right? But you have to segment the market, right? There are always customers at the high end of the range that wants the newest, the coolest, the hottest things at the beginning of the cycle. I joke that it's the sort of corporate lobby art budget crowd that always seems to have the money to do those sorts of fanciful things.
But the technology keeps plummeting in price, right? A lot of this technology was indeed available even 20 years ago, but it was at such a price point no one could afford it unless you're like U2 going on a concert tour with a LED screen with the width of a football field. They could afford it but no one else.
Or Comcast and their lobby because they were a cable company before streaming!
Brad Koerner: Yeah, the Comcast lobby, right? What is that already 15 years ago, right? It's like I said, the future is here. It's just unevenly distributed. So the price points just keep coming down until they become more and more common.
Could you have imagined even a decade ago that every little restaurant and coffee shop, and donut shop would have digital menu boards? It's amazing how fast that swept through the market, and right now we have these sorts of virtual production spaces, right? I think it was, what, just three years ago, the Mandalorian showed sort of the first instance of that, and there was that movie First Man Before, I think was the first that used an LED screen in camera on film. Now it's everywhere, right? Every studio around the world is installing these virtual production facilities within a year.
The accelerating rate of technological innovation is a term that’s thrown around, and I don't think people understand what accelerating rate means. AI image generation six months ago exploded onto the scene, and now everyone is using it every designer is thinking about how it's gonna disrupt them, and every content producer is thinking about how they can suddenly reduce the cost of their content generation using this sort of AI image generation, or increase their margin.
That was just six months ago, so I think with the technology becoming so cheap, it's low cost to visualize the concepts. It's such a low cost to design, commission, and program them. The hardware is continually plummeting in costs, so you to open up new opportunities, right? The menu boards in little mom-and-pop restaurants. There will always be the high end of the market going down into the middle end of the market, and they will use these, right? And they will have very smart design teams that come up with real ROI stories for why these things work, and it becomes fanciful and sci-fi today or yesterday, tomorrow just becomes normal and accepted. People don't even think about it anymore. The bottom end of the market will always be cheap. There'll always be people who can never save enough money or be stingy enough. That's in every market, right? Lighting, construction, you name it. It's always like that.
You're suggesting in your presentation that the digital and physical worlds are fusing in that with physical spaces being portals to a virtual world. I'm curious about what you mean by that, and maybe you can give me a couple of examples of how that's actually playing out.
Brad Koerner: Let me go back to when I was in school. I have a Master's in Architecture from Harvard, and when I was there, I did a thesis titled ‘Active Object Surfaces and Zones’ I looked at using physical interactive controls for retail displays and lighting, and this was in 1999. So I was a bit ahead of the scene on that one.
But in the early 200s, I believed that physical spaces would become the best interface to the internet which is, I know, a wild concept for many now. But you have to remember back then we were still using 20-inch Sony Trinitron screens were like the hot technology, and people were still using three-and-a-half-inch floppy discs and dial-up modems but the internet showed so much promise and there were a lot of designers doing really amazing websites and that was very spatial, right? And even just the notion of hypertext itself is very spatial.
So I kept imagining that physical spaces and using your body as the control and creating progression and threshold and a lot of the sort of architectural principles that you see in the internet experience could be combined. But then, in 2007, Steve Jobs launched the iPhone, and little black mirrors hijacked our internet experience, right?
Now though, I think people are over that, and we're saturated with personal devices and little black mirrors everywhere, the retailers are finally waking up to say, Hey, we need that digital in our physical experience, and so are the hospitality providers and healthcare providers. And they're starting to think, wait for a second, now we can tie all this digital data o tour spaces, right? And we can take all these great media that we have on our little black mirrors, and we can put it into our physical spaces. We can create these great experiences, and we can complete this cycle of gathering data from the real world, using it to drive great media content creation, live and interactivity and use it to drive behavior back in the real world, right? And it completes that virtuous cycle, and that's what I mean when I say architecture becomes a portal to the virtual world. A portal you can go back and forth between, right? The digital might come from into the space, and the spatial actions might drive digital data, right?
Can you give me some examples of where you've seen this applied and you think it really works because I've walked into some spaces that retail spaces and other spaces that are called immersive and experiential and thought to myself, being an old fart, cranky and everything that that's nice, but I don't see the point of this and I sometimes struggle with how they're gonna see a return out of this?
Brad Koerner: Yeah, I haven't seen many. Long story short: I think you just have this great divide where you have, for example, a lot of startups doing smart buildings, right? And they're deploying all these sensors, and they're gathering up all this data, but then they don't return that data back to the spaces. The data does very little to act on the physical space. Then you have all this great media content that's out there and you'll throw up media content on these screens, and it's not tied to anything that's happening in the space, right?
So it has no recognition of if somebody's even looking at it or not, much more if that person is gazing at it or wanting to engage it. There's been a lot of crazy stuff. There's indoor GPS positioning using lighting systems and apps. That was a flop. People have tried to tie app experiences into the real world. Not a lot of that has any real success story. You see a lot of these sorts of art-driven installations where I call it the be in Me and My Shadow problem. You can put a stereo vision camera system in space and track people exactly, but then, all they do is show the person's presence on some huge digital wall, and it's like me in my shadow, and there's no other point to it, so you have to think about why you need interaction in a space, right? I say for lighting and digital media, you can deliver the right light or the right content at the right place at the right time. You can use it to create really memorable human experiences, or you can use it to drive action, right? And those are areas that are not well explored yet, right? You don't have a lot of good designers out there connecting all of those systems together to create genuinely good experiences.
I actually worked with a startup called Digi Valet that makes a hotel room control system for luxury hotel rooms. So they make an app that sits on an iPad, but the other half of their system is this black box that interfaces with every physical control system in a modern hotel room like the thermostat, the blinds, the lighting, the media, everything that's Bluetooth, the Bluetooth controlled faucet on the bathtub, the Bluetooth coffee maker, the Bluetooth perfume/scent sprayer, and all that stuff.
And it was great because they asked me to help them. This had a lot of customers, these hotel chains wanted to develop a brand of digital media and lighting experiences as part of this iPad app, right? And it was a fascinating way to think about it. So you're in this hotel room, and you click, I want to watch a movie. It immediately says on your iPad, okay, can we set the cinema lighting? Yes. Can we lower the blinds? Yes. Would you like us to order you champagne and popcorn? Yes.
It totally changes the way you think of the room, right? You don't have lighting control pads and blinds, and you don't have to find the remote control for the TV. It's all about having this really smart butler that just knows what to do when you want to watch a movie.
So if you're a frequent flier or whatever, you travel between different Marriotts, and you use your loyalty card, and it just sets it up in your room. So you don't even do anything; that's your configuration.
Brad Koerner: That's the next level, right? That's future beyond that when you can add in the CRM systems on top of that so it remembers your preferences. Then the next level beyond that is there's almost this genie-like ability where they begin to understand your desires so well that they can start to add magic to your experience that you are not even expecting or the hotel can't do it at scale, right? I just think that's fascinating, like how could you take those principles of experience design and apply them into high-end retail or high-end healthcare, or even just a commercial office environment, right? It's a beautiful UX/UI experience in a space. We desperately need to see more intelligence and creativity around using digital in physical spaces.
Yeah, I wanted to ask about the discipline that needs to be enforced at the start of these things. When I've done consulting in my dark past, I would try to ensure the first question out of my mouth that I would throw at the customer or a client was: why are you doing this? What do you want to see out of it? And so on.
Is that the sort of thing that needs to be addressed super early so that it's not just, “We've seen these big video walls and other lobbies, we want one too.”
Brad Koerner: Usually, the first question I ask is, what's your budget? But that doesn't work too well.
Can you afford me?
Brad Koerner: It's both of those, right? It's what's your budget and why? I think that, first off, many of these companies have a lot more budgets if they want. They just don't want to at first, they don't understand what is possible, they don't understand what it would cost, and they don't understand the ROI on that investment. So it's a real uphill battle, and that tail is as old as time, that's an architect preaching an upgraded finish on the oak panels, or that's a lighting designer preaching adding dimming into the system. It's always like that in these construction projects, and you are right, about the why, you can have all this technology in the world, right? Anything you can dream, you can do, right? So technology is not the limiting factor. It's imagination, right? Imagination is the limiting factor and thinking is almost like a movie director or the early stages of any media content where you have to think in storyboards, right? You have to think in moments of time. You have to think about their journey, what's the user journey, and what's the user experience, right?
If you've seen any of these big design firms, they map user journeys, right? Throughout the omnichannel retail experience, they create these huge flow charts that take up a whole wall. You have to think about that in physical places now. So if you're walking into the shopping mall, do you put signage at the door's threshold? Classically, in retail design, you don't put anything really important at the threshold of the door because you need a sort of decompression zone where people charge into a space. Then they slow down, and then they look around, right?
There's just a lot of classic common sense design stuff that is not being employed in digital signage, particularly in any interactivity, right? You need these new combinations of skill sets that just don't exist yet. You almost need to take a game designer with a world-class architect and make them work together and see what happens, right? You need to take a Hollywood storyboard artist and combine them with a technologist and make them work together and see what happens., and that's what's missing right now from all of this, and I think you have companies like Moment Factory and Gensler and some out there are on that bleeding edge that they are trying to do that. Here in Amsterdam, there's Purple Storytelling, and there are lots of little groups that see the future that they struggle with, right?
I think they struggle to see, and get the clients to understand the potential. I think things like Unreal Engine and live rendering and that sort of starting with a game engine, which is so powerful with live rendering, is going to make visualizing these scenarios so much faster, so much more profound, instead of starting with a classic architectural sketch, and then you went to an architectural photorealistic rendering, but it didn't move. Now architects are using things like Unreal Engine to make these animations, particularly in the luxury real estate marketing firm. Have you ever seen what some of these high-end luxury real estate developments are doing for their marketing? It's unreal. It's Hollywood-grade special effects from just 10 years ago, and they're using it just to sell condos.
You start to take the power of that, and you add it into very specific segments. So, retailers, have their very specific sort of customer flows, customer journeys, and ROI expectations, and hospitality operators have their very specific desires, healthcare facilities, have very different customer journeys. With Unreal Engine, you can now tie together these professions. It's the first time in my career that I've seen this flow complete, that you can use architectural models in BIM in Unreal Engine, and you can show these scenarios. You can animate them, you can set up the interactivity, right? Cuz it's a game engine at heart, and then you can use that for commissioning these systems. I think that will be the next step in all of this.
But are people like architects and those who design physical spaces, are they conditioned and trained and understanding about the ROI needs of their clients? Is that something they've always had to address, or is this new because of this more mysterious ROI that you would see out of an immersive space?
Brad Koerner: It's a great question. I don't think they are. I have two degrees in architecture. I was never trained to think of a business scenario. Again, it's combining different skill sets, right? It's almost like you need to combine an architect with an MBA and think about why, what's the point? It's a real challenge, right? Obviously, if you're a high-end real estate developer and you're doing luxury condos, you know that if you add marble to the lobby, you're going to get a certain ROI. You might not have it calculated, but you understand your customers, and you understand it's going to help with sales. You understand that it's worth it, right? You can't just put chipboard and cheap carpet in, you have gotta do the upgraded finishes, but you also know where not to spend the money, and you know where it’s not going to get return value to you.
And there's an intuitive aspect to that you can never just set up in a spreadsheet, and $5,223.32 will be your ROI in 32 days. You'll never get that precise, and that's why you need a creative mind and a business mind, and they need to come together to figure these things out, but it will happen, right? If you create a great experience for a hospitality provider, right? They'll know it. They'll know it from the customer feedback, reviews, and qualitative comments on that, right? And eventually, that drives revenue for them. But those sort of attribution problems for ROI is vexing in every industry.
Marketing goes through this all the time, but it will happen more and more in physical placemaking with these systems, and I think it's a skill. Again, people have to get good at this. It doesn't exist now, and it's tricky because it combines several skill sets that have never worked together in the past and you have to fuse them to sort these things.
Yeah, I listened to a panel at Digital Signage Experience, and I believe it was somebody from Moment Factory who was saying that in terms of a return, they're now starting to hear from the HR departments of companies who are saying that having an experiential aspect to their lobby and their overall space is incredibly important in terms of recruitment and retainment of employees these days that particularly in technology jobs where you may have several choices as to who you're going to work for, what that space looks like and how you feel in it matters.
Brad Koerner: Yeah. It's like in the commercial office section, right? I forget the exact numbers, but it's $3 a square foot, $30 a square foot, and $300 a square foot, right? Three bucks are your cost of energy, and 300 is your cost of salary, right? So should you focus on saving a few pennies of energy, or should you focus on saving hundreds of dollars of efficiency for your employees and salaries? That's just the concept that has to be employed everywhere. There's this sort of scale of effect that is critical to ROI. Understanding that is often siloed, right? You get a salesperson running in with some smart building system. They're talking about saving energy because we'll turn all the lights off more. And they don't understand that will create a lousy experience for the workers, right? And it will really damage the effectiveness of the workers and retention and all that, right? Same thing with digital signage, anything, right? If you put a big LED wall into a commercial office, will you just put a waterfall on it? Is that going to help make your employees happy? Maybe, maybe it's as dumb as that. But could you do something more sophisticated with it? Could you recognize employee accomplishments live? Could you show employee performance live depending on what your business or industry is, do you give people a pat on the back instantaneously? There are so many scenarios that could be developed around these technologies when, again, when the surfaces you're surrounded by become digital. You need to think about what they do, how they react to you, and how people react to those surfaces.? What is that cycle of action-reaction?
It sounds like you're saying there's more to this stuff than eye candy.
Brad Koerner: Eye candy's great. I'm not going to argue against eye candy. There's a lot in this world that is just for eye candy's sake, and that makes a big difference, right? This is a classic design. This is architecture, this is interior design, this is a brand design, and retail design. Some of it is just eye candy, and people know how to justify that, right? That’s a tale as old as time, right? It's making a statement. It's making a brand, culture, making, and experience. Why does Starbucks charge $8 for a coffee when they spend 50 cents on it?
Because they've invested heavily in how their stores look, they feel and smell and sound, and there's just a lot of eye candy there, right? They consciously built all that so that they could charge that price premium. So yeah, it will just be eye candy for some of the digital stuff. I joke about the waterfalls, but can you beat the waterfall? In terms of your media content, it's mesmerizing, right? It's biomimetic, it makes you feel comfortable. I think humans have these deep-seated connections to natural effects. Maybe you just put a glorious force scene on your huge LED wall, and somehow the best thing you can show, right? I don't know. It could be as dumb as that. You have to test it.
I think the other thing people have to get savvy on is that you don't just build it and walk away. You have to build and operate it, and these teams that are developing these concepts will have to work with the operators, whoever it is to tweak it, right? To look at, we're going to make a whole bunch of assumptions, right? There are cycles of time, there's media content, there's interactivity, there are all these new things that people have to figure out. They can simulate it upfront. Nowadays, they can go into the virtual world during the construction project and get it mostly right or pretty close. But then, who will fine-tune that in the field over time or refresh it over time? Most people don't even think of the media budget. How many people forget about, oh wait, you mean we need a media budget for all these screens we've built? They can't even do that, and it's a long way before you're going to have clients actively spending the money to tweak this stuff and make sure it's optimal over time.
All right. Great conversation. I think we could have gone on for three hours, but gotta cut it off at some point. If people want to find out more about your company or perhaps bring you out to speak to their company or a conference, where do they find you online?
Brad Koerner: They can find me on LinkedIn just Brad Koerner or KoernerDesign.com.
All right. Thank you very much for spending some time with me.
Brad Koerner: Great. Thanks, Dave.
Wednesday Mar 15, 2023
Gavin Smith, Voxon
Wednesday Mar 15, 2023
Wednesday Mar 15, 2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
When I was at the big ISE pro AV trade show a few weeks ago, I yet again saw several products that were billed as holograms, even though they didn't even loosely fit the technical definition.
I am always paying attention to news and social media posts that use that terminology, and once in a while, I come across something that actually does start to align with the true definition of holograms and holography. Like Voxon, which operates out of Adelaide, Australia.
Started years ago as a beer drinking and tinkering maker project in a garage, Voxon now has a physical product for sale that generates a visual with depth that viewers can walk around and see from different angles.
That product is mainly being bought by universities and R&D teams at companies to play with and learn, but the long game for Voxon is to produce or be the engine for other products that really do live up to the mainstream, Hollywood-driven notion of holograms.
I had a great chat with co-founder and CEO Gavin Smith.
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TRANSCRIPT
Gavin, thank you very much for joining me. I know you're up in Scotland, but you are based in Adelaide, Australia, correct?
Gavin Smith: Yes, that's right. I'm originally from Scotland. I grew up here, spent the first part of my life in the north of Scotland in Elgin, and then I went to university in Paisley, Glasgow and then eventually, after working for 10 years in the banking sector, I immigrated to Australia and I've lived in Adelaide for the last 14 years.
That's quite a climate shift!
Gavin Smith: Yes, it is a climate shift. I was speaking to my wife the day before, and it was about 40 degrees there, just now they're having a heat wave, whereas up in Elgin here, it's about 1 degree at the moment.
Yeah. I'm thinking, why are you there in February? But on the other hand, why would you wanna be in Adelaide if it's 40 Celsius?
Gavin Smith: I quite like the cold. I prefer to be in this temperature right now than 40 degrees, that's for sure.
Oh, I just spent 45 minutes with my snow machine clearing 25 centimeters of snow off my driveway, so I wouldn't mind being in Adelaide today.
Gavin Smith: Thankfully I can have the best of both worlds. I'm heading back there in about a week and a half time.
I was intrigued by your company. I saw a couple of LinkedIn posts with embedded videos and thought that's interesting and I wanted to speak more. So can you tell me what Voxon does?
Gavin Smith: Yes, sure. So Voxon is a company that started in about 2012-2013, and it came out of two joint research projects. One was me and my friend Will, based in Adelaide, we had a Thursday Night Lab Session, as we called it, where we went to the shed and we drank a few beers and we tried to invent things. It was a bit weird, science-esque.
So this wasn't exactly a lab?
Gavin Smith: It was a shed. Let's face it, with a beer fridge and there was a lot of machinery, which was in various stages of repair. We used to get hard rubbish off the right side of the road in Adelaide and take it apart and see what we could make.
It was just amateur invention hour. But it was at the start of that project, we built fairly rudimentary machines, CNC machines and we took apart laser scanners and were just inquisitive about how they work from a mechanical point of view. But that then turned into more of a, let's see how far we can push ourselves and learn new stuff, and we've been inspired by sci-fi, Star Wars, all those sorts of things. So we said, let's try and make the sort of 3D display that we'd seen in the movies and those science fiction movies always had the same type of display, and that wasn't a screen, that wasn't a headset. It was always some sort of floating image that you could walk around and you could look out from any direction and the common name for that in popular media was a holographic display. That's what people called it. So that's what we set out to build, and we very quickly figured out that this type of display had to be something to do with projecting images or dots onto some sort of surface that moved and that's because in order to render these little dots that make up the image, inside a space that had physical dimensions, you couldn't make the lights just appear on air. We figured you, you might be able to do some sort of gas or some sort of lasers and things like that. But the way we approached it was starting off by just shaking business cards back and forwards and shining lasers on them, and then that made a line because of persistence of vision.
I always think that Neanderthal man invented the volumetric display because they probably waved burning embers around on the sticks at nighttime and drew those patterns in the air and those patterns really only existed because of the persistence of vision and the extrusion of light through a volume of space, and so that's what we decided to do, and we realized if you could draw a line, then if you could control the laser and turn it off and on again, you could draw a dot. And so we did that by cutting the laser beam with a rotating CD that was stuck on a high-speed drill with some sticky tape on it. We chopped the laser into little bits, and by controlling the speed of the laser, we ended up having a single dot, which we referred to as a voxel, that's what we Googled that a dot in space is referred to as a voxel and then we extrapolated from there and say if we're building these images out of little pixels of light or voxels, we need more and more of these dots, and when you do the math you quickly realize that you need millions of dots of light or volume to make an image, and that's difficult. And really that started us down the road of experimenting with video projectors, with lasers with all sorts of things and more and more advanced moving surfaces, and eventually, we made a small helical display using a vacuum-formed helix that we basically made in Will's wife's kitchen when she was out, in the oven, and yeah, we created a very small image of an elephant. You might call it a hologram at the time. That's what we called it at the time, but it was a volumetric swept surface image. The terminology I'll go into a bit more detail, but at the time it was just a hologram to us, and we thought this was amazing and we'd never seen it before. So we put a video of it on YouTube and some guys in America who were unbeknown to us doing the same project got in contact with us and push came to shove, we decided to join forces and form Voxon, and that was back in 2013.
So when you created this little elephant, was that like a big ‘aha’ moment? Like, “Oh my God, we figured this out”?
Gavin Smith: Yes, very much so. We believed at the time, we were the first people to do this. In fact, we weren't. But it was the first time we'd seen this type of image, and it was literally spine tingly amazing, to see a truly three-dimensional object that you could look down from, above, from the sides, from any angle, and it filled a space the same way as you or I fill a space in the physical world, you could measure its length that's spread, that's height and even its volume in gallons or liters. It had a tangible existence in the physical world and not on a screen as other 3D images tend to do.
At this point, was this a stationary object?
Gavin Smith: Yes, at this point the elephant was stationary and the way I'd created the elephant was we'd figured out, in order to make this elephant, we first needed to have the swept surface moving. So that was the helical screen, which was spinning at about 900 RPM on a very small electric motor and then we had a video projector that we'd managed to get going at about 1,200 frames per second, and in order to create the images, which were cross sections, helical cross sections of an elephant, that was all done offline. So the way I approached that was, we used software called 3D Studio Max, which is a design software, and in that, I modeled a helix and an elephant, and I then intersected the helix with the elephant in the software, rotated the helix digitally, and then I rendered out the resultant cross-section, the boolean operation of one on the other, and this is like taking a drill and drilling a hole into the ground and looking at just a helical core sample.
So really it was like a CT scan of this elephant, but just slice at a time, and then I rendered those images to a file. I wrote some software to convert it to a new video format that we had to invent to compress all that data into this high-speed image stream, and then projected that onto the helix. Now, of course, the timing of the images and the rotation of the helix were not in sync, and so much like an old CRT screen where the vertical shift is not dialed in, the elephant would drift out the top of the display and come back in the bottom, and at that point, we knew that this was all about a combination of mathematics, optics, precision, and timing. And to make it interactive, we'd have to write a real-time computer program capable of generating these images in real-time, and that was the next part of the puzzle.
This was a work working prototype basically.
Gavin Smith: This was a working prototype, yeah.
How big was it?
Gavin Smith: The helix was very small. It was about five centimeters in diameter, about an inch and a half in diameter, and about an inch tall. But because the projector that we used was a Pico projector at the time, and it was about half the size of a pack of cards. This tiny little thing that we got off the internet from Texas Instruments, and you could focus it at about one centimeter away. So all those little pixels were infinitesimally small, so it was a very high-resolution display and very small, and we realized to get these number of frames per second, we'd have to take advantage of one of the most incredible pieces of engineering ever conceived, in my opinion, and that is the DLP chip from Texas Instruments invented by Larry Hornbeck who passed away several years ago, sadly, and that is an array of mirrors that is grown on a chip using photolithography, the same process as you create microchips, and that array of mirrors contains upwards of a million mirrors arranged in a two-dimensional array, and they can tilt on and off physically about 30,000 times a second.
And that's called a MEMS, a microelectromechanical display or in optical terms, a spatial light modulator. So it's something that turns the light on and off at ultra-high speed, and those on-off cycles are what give us our Z-resolution on the display. So that's the slices that make up the display.
Wow. So where are you at now with the company now that you've formed it and you've grown it, what's happened since that very first prototype elephant?
Gavin Smith: Following that we realized that my programming skills were finite. I'd spent 10 years as a COBOL programmer in banking, and I wasn't up to the task of writing what was needed, which was a low-level graphics engine. This didn't need a mainframe, no, and we couldn't afford a mainframe, even if we wanted one.
So we looked up on the internet to see who we could find in terms of programming to join the company, and there were two programmers who stood out. They were referred to as the top two programmers in the world and were John Carmack of Oculus, and then there was Ken Silverman who wrote the graphics engine for Duke Nukem back in the late 90s, so we contacted Ken. John wasn't available so we contacted Ken and demoed to him at Brown University in Rhode Island where he was working subsequently as basically a computer programmer teacher with his dad, who was the Dean of Engineering there, and Ken really liked what we were doing and his understanding of mathematics and foxholes and 3D rendering really made him think this was something he wanted to be involved in. So he joined our company as a founder and chief computer scientist, and he has led the development of the core rendering engine, which we call the Voxon Photonic engine and that's really our core IP, it's the ability to tick any 3D graphics from a third party source, from Unity, from a C program or something else, and turn it into a high speed projected image, which can be processed in such a way as to de-wrap them when they're projected, so they're the right size. We use dithering in real time to make color possible, which is similar to newsprint, CMY newsprint in the newspaper, and this all basically allows us to project images onto any type of moving surface now and do it in real-time and make applications that are much bigger and extensible so we can plug it into other programs or have people write their own programs for our displays.
So you've emerged from being an R&D effort in the shed to a real company to having working prototypes and now you're an operating company with the product.
Gavin Smith: I like to say we've emerged, but I'd very much say we're still crossing the chasm, so to speak, in terms of the technology landscape.
After that initial prototype, we spent many years batting our heads together, trying to work as a team in America, and eventually, Will and I decided to raise some money in Australia and set up the company there. We raised about a million and a half Australian dollars. It was about a million US dollars back in 2017, and that was enough to employ some extra engineers and business development, and an experienced COO and start working on our first product, which was the VX1. Now, the VX1 was a different type of display. We decided not to do the helix back then, and we decided to make a different type of display, and that was a reciprocating display and so we invented a way of moving a screen up and down very efficiently using resonance. It’s the same I guess mechanical thing that all objects have, and that is at a certain frequency, they start vibrating if there's a driving vibration force. So the Tacoma Bridge falling down when the wind blew at the right speed was an example of when resonances destroyed something. But an opera singer, breaking a glass at the right pitch is another example of something that vibrates due to a striving force, and so we found out if we built a screen, which was mounted on springs that were of a very particular weight, and the springs were a very particular constant of Young's modulus, we could vibrate that subsystem and the screen would vibrate up and down very efficiently and very fast, fast enough that you couldn't see the screen. So that's what the VX1 became, and onto the back of that screen, we project images and those images from a swept volume, and the VX1 had a volume of about 18x18x8 cm, I think it's about 7 inches square by about 3 inches tall, and we have a single projector mounted inside of that and a computer and a ton of electronics keeps it all in sync, and we built a software API for it and a library of programs that come built into it. So it's off the shelf, you turn it on and it works.
And so we built that back in 2017 and over the last five years, it's evolved into something which is very reliable and now, you can't tell them apart when they're manufactured at the start, each one might look different with hot glue and duct tape and all the rest of it. But now we have a complete digital workflow. We outsource most of the manufacture of the parts and we do final assembly software, QC, and packaging up and then ship them out to companies we've sold probably about 120 VX1s globally since 2017, and those have gone out to companies all around the world, like Sony, MIT, Harvard, CMU, Unity, BA Systems, Verizon, Erickson, a lot of companies and they've bought them and they're generally going into explorative use cases.
Yeah, I was going to say, it sounds like they're going into labs as opposed to stores.
Gavin Smith: Yeah, they're not going into stores. The VX1 is really an evaluation system. It's not prime time ready for running all day long, and the reason for that is it has a vibration component to it, and also the refresh rate of the VX1 is actually variable within the volume. It's hard to explain, but the apparent volume refresh rate is 30 hertz in the middle and 15 hertz at the poles and so it has a little bit of flicker. But in a dark environment, it's really spellbinding and it's actually used in museums. There's some in Germany and a science museum there. It's been used in an art exhibition in Paris, where the art was created by David Levine and MIT Media Lab and it's frequently used in universities and it pops up in all sorts of trade shows, and it's always a talking point and it always gathers a crowd around it, and what we like to say with the volumetric display from a marketing point of view, or really a description of what it is, it's really about creating a digital campfire. That's the kind of user experience.
It's gathering people around something intimately in a way that they can still have eye contact and maintain a conversation, and each person has their own perspective and view of the 3D data.
The scale you're describing is still quite small and that seems to be What I've experienced with, when I've seen demonstrations at the SID trade show of light field displays. They're all like the size of a soda bottle at most.
Is that a function of just the technology, you can't just make these things big?
Gavin Smith: You can make them bigger, and we have since that point. The biggest display that we've made so far was one that we just delivered to BA Systems in Frimley near London, and fo that one, we've gone back to the helical display for that particular one, and it's. 46 centimeters in diameter and 8 centimeters deep. So that's about nine times the volume of the VX1. So that's a much bigger display.
Now you can, with a swept volume, you can go as big as you'd like within the realms of physics, and what I mean by that is with a rotating display, you can make the display as big as something that can rotate at a speed that's fast enough to make the medium kind of disappear. So if you think about propellers and fans, for example, I've seen pedestal fans that are a meter in diameter running faster than we run our display, and with rotating displays, it's easier to do because you have conservation of momentum and you have inertia which drives the display around, and yet you can rotate the volume as well, have it enclosed so that you're not generating airflow as a fan does.
So for example, if you have a propeller-shaped blade encased in a cylindrical enclosure, and that enclosure is spinning, then you don't get the air resistance you get with a fan and the display that we made for BA Systems is ultimately silent and flicker-free because we're running at exactly 30 hertz throughout the volume, which means you don't get flicker, but reciprocating displays, ones that go up and down, scaling them is more of a challenge because you're having to push the air out the way up and down, and as the size of the screen moving up and down gets bigger, if you're projecting from behind, for example, you also have to start considering things like the flexing of the substrate that you're projecting onto. For a front projection display where you project down from the top, we can go bigger because you can make a very lightweight, thicker screen out of exotic materials and those are materials that are very light but very stiff. Things like air gels and foamed metals, and very lightweight honeycomb structure so that way you can go bigger but we may need to move into the realms of using reduced atmospheric displays, partial vacuums, and things like that to reduce the resistance or using materials that are air permeable, such as meshes that move up and down very quickly. And we have done experiments with those and found that we can go a lot bigger.
However, with the current projection systems that we're using, you then have to increase the brightness because the brightness of the image is also stretched out through a volume. If you imagine a home cinema projector projecting 3k or 4k lumens, you have to consider that each of the images that it's projecting is pretty much evenly lit in terms of all the pixels that you're projecting. Whereas what we are doing is we are projecting these thousands of images, we're only illuminating the cross-section of every object. So we're maybe only using 1% of the available brightness of the projector at any one time, unless you project a solid slice all the way across, which is really you're building up this construct, which is how I explain it to people as it's very similar to 3D printing. If you look at how a 3D printer works, we are doing exactly the same thing, except we are printing using light instead of PLA and we're printing thousands and thousands of times faster.
In digital signage, the thing that always gets people nervous is moving parts, and that directly affects reliability and longevity. How do you address that?
Gavin Smith: So the VX1 is a good example of moving parts in a display that isn't yet ready for long-running and when I say long-running, we do have it in exhibitions, but we have recently engineered it in such a way that the parts that may break or will break are the four springs that drive the machine, and those have been engineered to resonate at particular frequency. Now after several hundred million extensions of those springs, they can fatigue and they will fatigue break and that's something that we're working on, and that might be a month or three weeks of running 24/7, and so we've made those springs user replaceable. You can change them in two or three minutes for a fresh set. So it's almost like the mechanical profile of something like an Inkjet printer where you have to change the cartridge every so often.
And we find with mechanical stuff, people accept mechanical things in their lives as long as the maintenance/utility ratio is at a level they can accept like bicycles, cars, and things like that. You maintain them as long as their utility outweighs the inconvenience of the repair. Now for projection equipment and things like that in digital signage, there are a lot of two-dimensional technologies that are ultra-reliable on those things, big LED panels, 2D video projectors and just lighting. You can turn them on and leave them and you should be okay.
So in our rotating displays and we have another rotating display that we're working on, which we can't discuss just now cuz it's still under NDA, is part of the reason we're going down that rabbit hole or going down that design sort of path because we can make rotating displays, which are very reliable, they're effectively like a record player. You turn it on and it spins around and you could leave it and come back in three weeks and it would still be spinning around, and also a rotating display if properly manufactured within tolerances won't cause the vibration, and the vibration is really the thing that can cause the issues because vibration can lead to fatigue and failure in electrical components, electronic components, small cracks in circuits, and things like that.
So from our point of view, we're going towards rotating mechanics because that ultimately allows us to make things which are reliable enough to be used in a wide range of industries including digital signage, advertising, medical imaging and gaming, and many more.
In my world, there are all kinds of companies who are saying that they have holographic products of some kind or another. As somebody who's doing something that sounds very much like a hologram or close to what we thought of when we all saw Star Wars, what do you think of those things?
Gavin Smith: I don't like to be a troll, first of all on LinkedIn, and so I try to shy away from saying, look, that's rubbish. But what I try to do is politely point out how things work when it's not clear from someone's post how something might work or where it's misleading. Now if you look at the term hologram, it comes from the Greek, hólos and grammḗ, which means the whole message, and in a way, I tend to think of an actual hologram, which is created using lasers, laser interference patterns, and light beams and things like that they don't represent the whole message. Because if you take your credit card out, which is one of the few places you will see a hologram you'll notice that you can't look down on the hologram from above, you can't turn the card over and look at it from the back. They are a limited view of something, and so the term hologram has become, as you say, in popular fiction, and popular media, it's really a catchall for anything that is sci-fi 3D related, right? And it’s misused, everyone calls it a hologram, and our staff sometimes call it a hologram. I like to say it's not a hologram because it has a lot more features than a hologram.
Holograms have some really interesting properties, one of which is that you can cut a hologram into 10 little pieces and it turns into 10 individual little holograms, and that's a really interesting thing. But holograms from a 3D point of view don't exist in signage anywhere. They simply don't. The terminology used to describe things that you see in signage and popular media is completely misused, and I like to go through them and categorize them into different things. And those are, first of all, volumetric displays of which we're the only company in the world that's making a commercial volumetric display. There's one other company Aerial Burton, who are based in Japan that makes a volumetric display, but it's a very high-tech scientific prototype that uses lasers to explode the air and has very low resolution. And then you've got autostereoscopic 3D displays, and they broadly fit into the categories of lenticular displays which are as you probably know LCD panels, which have got a plastic lens array on them that allows you to see a left and a right image, and those left and right images can give you a stereoscopic view. I would call them stereoscopic displays because they're not 3d. You can't look at them from any direction and they don't physically occupy three-dimensional euclidean space, which is what the real world is, and those types of displays come in different formats. So you get some with just horizontal parallax, which means you can move your head left and right and see a number of distinct views. You've got some that you can move up and down as well, and also get a little bit of vertical parallax as well, and there's probably five or six companies doing those sorts of displays. You've got Looking Glass, Lightfield Labs, Acer, and Sodium, so that area can grow. The physical size of those displays can get bigger, but the bigger they get, the harder it is to move further away because you're pupil distance means it's harder to get a 3D view, and also with any display like that, the 3D image that you see because it's the result of you seeing two independent images with your left and right eye, that 3D image can never leave the bounds or the window of the display, and that's something in advertising, which is very misused a lot, they show a 2D monitor with the image leaping out beyond the border of the monitor, and that just can't happen. That breaks the laws of physics, and so that's the kind of three auto stereoscopic 3D landscapes, and it's hard to say that autostereoscopic, 3D display because people zone out and they go, is it a hologram? And no it's not.
The other types of 3D that are popular just now are obviously, glasses-based display, AR, VR, mixed-reality, and we don't really, we don't really mind about that or care about that because it's something you have to put something on your head, and that's our different thing really. So those offer you an immersive experience where you go down a rabbit hole and you're in another world and that's not what we are about.
And then you've got the fake 3D displays, which are not 3D stereoscopically but appear that way, and that's where I get slightly annoyed by those displays, but I understand there are people making types of signage I guess you would say, that is perfectly suitable for a scenario and those are things like Pepper’s ghost which is when you reflect a 2D image off a big piece of glass or plexiglass, and that's the pepper, the famous one, the Tupac hologram at Coachella. I met the guy and spoke to him. He's a really lovely guy and I had a good chat about that, and he knows full well that it's an illusion, but it's the illusion that Disneyland has been using for many years, and it's a perfectly good illusion for a seated studio audience because they see someone on stage and they're doing it now with the, I think the ABBA Show in London is a similar type of setup.
They call them holograms, but it's a 2D picture that's far enough away that you can be made to believe that it's three-dimensional and it might exist at different levels like a diorama. You could have a stack of images, on fly screens or whatever, that appear to be layered, but ultimately they are 2D, and then the one that's come out recently, which causes probably the most amount of confusion for people are the anamorphic projections on large billboards, and everyone's seen these displays on LinkedIn and YouTube, and they tend to appear on large curved billboards in parts of China where the rental of the billboards is sufficiently cheap as you can put these big images up there, film them from one particular spot in 2d, and then put that on LinkedIn and have people comment on it and say, wow, that's an amazing hologram. Even though a) they haven't seen this in real life and b) it's not a hologram and it's not even three-dimensional. It's a perspective-based 2D trick, and so one of our challenges is expectation management, and that is people see large-scale fake 2D images, and fake 3D images and then they conclude that it must be possible and they want to buy one, and then when they see yours they go, oh, it's much smaller than I imagined, and you feel like saying, it's real. It's actually based on science, and you could walk around it.
And that's the challenge we're at just now. Trying to move away from this feeling that you have to have the biggest display in the world for it to be valid, and a lot of the business for us and a lot of the inquiries we get are from the likes of the Middle East, where they want to build very big, very impressive, very bright, very colorful displays and they say, we want a hologram that will fit in a football stadium and fly around in the sky, and you have to say well, that's great, but that's also impossible using anything that's even imaginable today, let alone physically achievable, and so yeah, we are very much a case of trying to be as honest as we can with the limitations, but also with the opportunities because regardless of the fact that our technology is relatively small compared to large screen billboards, we have got the ability to create sci-fi-inspired interactive displays that you can put in personal spaces, in museums, in galleries, in shopping centers, and they really do look like something up close under scrutiny that you might see in a Marvel movie, and that's the kind of relationship we're trying to find with other companies as well.
There are other types of the display as well. You probably talked to Daniel about some of his displays, which are levitating grains of dust and things like that, and the challenge I have with them is yes, you can make a 3D image, but you have to look at how long it takes to make that 3D image and they're really more akin to painting with light. It's long-exposure photography. You have to manipulate something and move it around over a long period of time to bring it, to build a single image, and scaling those types of displays is impossible. It’s the same with laser-based displays, whenever you're moving a single dot around, you run out of resolution extraordinarily fast because it's a linear thing, and even with Aerial Burton exploding the air with a laser they can only do about 1000 or 2000 dots every second, and that breaks down to being able to draw maybe a very simple two-dimensional shape whereas to draw a detailed image, an elephant or anything like that, that we've displayed in the past, it requires upwards of 30 or 40 million dots a second to do that with each image, each volume contains millions of dots.
Where do you see this going in, let's say, five years from now? And are you at that point selling products or are you licensing the technology to larger display manufacturers? Or something else?
Gavin Smith: So at the moment what we're doing is we're looking for projects that we can scale and one of the first projects that we're working on just now and the technology can be applied to a range of different industries. As you can imagine, any new display technology. You could use it for CT scans, you could use it for advertising, for point of sale, for a whole lot of different things. But you have to choose those projects early on when the technology is immature, and that is low-hanging fruit if you want to use that term, and so our low-hanging freight at the moment, we believe is in the entertainment industry, digital out-of-home entertainment to be specific, which is the likes of video gaming and entertainment venues, and so 2018, we were in the Tokyo Game Show with one of our machines, and we were situated next to Taito at the company that made Space Invaders, and their board came across their senior members and they played with our technology and they really liked it. And so we entered into a conversation with them and over several years, we have built a Space invaders arcade machine called Next Dimension, and that's using our rotating volumetric display with three projectors each running at 4,000 frames per second and a large rotating volume, and we've written a new Space Invaders arcade game and Taito has granted us the license to bring that to market. In order to do that, we're now doing commercial testing and technical testing which involves taking the technology into venues, play testing it and getting feedback from the venues on the suitability of the game and the profitability of it as a product. So with that game, our plan is to follow in the footsteps of the previous Space Invader game, which was called Frenzy made by Roth Rolls. It sold 3000 or 4000 units globally. So if you could do that, it would be a profitable first venture in terms of bringing technology to market, and at the moment, we're looking to raise some capital. We need to raise $2-3 million USD to do the design from the manufacturer for that and build the first batch of machines which would be rolled out globally.
Now, that's really seen for us as a launch of technology using the IP of Space Invaders as a carrier, a launch vehicle for the technology, but once launched and once our technology is widely known and understood, what we then plan to do is build our own revenue generating model and technology platform that can be deployed to venues around the world who can use this as a kind of an entertainment device where you can run different IP on it from different vendors and do a sort of profit share with the venue owners. So a cinema, Chucke CheeseB, Dave & Busters, those types of venues, as well as bowling alleys, VR arcades, and all those types of entertainment venues that currently is starting to grow in strength, largely because people are now looking for entertainment experiences, not necessarily just staying at home.
COVID obviously threw a curve ball our way as well. When our Space Invaders machine was sent to Japan for testing, COVID had just happened so it went into internal testing within Taito, and then Square Enix who owns Taito, their parent company decreed that Taito would no longer manufacture arcade machines but would license their IP only so that kind of threw a spanner in the works and they've come back to us and said, we'd love the game, but we want you to bring it to market, not us. So that's one thing we're working on just now. There's a video of Space Invaders: Next Dimension on YouTube that you can look at, and it's a really fun experience because it's a four-player game. We've added the volumetric nature. You can fly up and down during sub-games. You can bump your next-door neighbor with your spaceship and get a power-up. It really is for us a way of saying, look, this is a new way, it's a new palette of which to make new gaming experiences and the future is really up to the imaginations of people writing software.
All right. That was super interesting. I learned a lot there and some of it is, as often the case, I understood as well.
Gavin Smith: That's great. I'm glad you understand. It is a hard thing to wrap your head around, especially for us trying to demonstrate the nature of the technology in 2D YouTube videos and LinkedIn videos, and you really have to see it with your own eyes to understand it, and that's why this week I was over for a meeting with BA Systems, but I took the opportunity to spend several days in London at a film Studio in SoHo, in London, the owners very gratefully let me have a demonstration group there, and I spent two days last week demonstrating the product to ten or so companies come in and see the technology, and it's only then when they really start to get their creative juices flowing and that's where POCs projects kick-off.
So that's what we're looking for just now, are companies that have imaginative people and they have a need for creating some new interactive media that can be symbiotic with their existing VR and AR metaverse type stuff. But really something that's designed for people up close and personal, intimate experiences.
If people want to get in touch, where do they find you online?
Gavin Smith: So we have a website, which is just www.voxon.co. Voxon Photonics is our Australian company name, and you can find us on LinkedIn.
Actually, my own personal LinkedIn is generally where I post most stuff. That's Gavin Smith on LinkedIn, you can look me up there around, and then we have the Voxon Photonics LinkedIn page and we're on Twitter and Facebook and YouTube as well. We have a lot of videos on YouTube. That's a good place to start. But if you wanna get in touch, contact us via Voxon.co. Drop us an email and we'll be happy to have a meeting and a video call.
All right, Gavin, thank you so much for spending some time with me.
Gavin Smith: My pleasure. Thanks very much for having me.
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 09, 2022
Alan Larson, 65cubed
Wednesday Nov 09, 2022
Wednesday Nov 09, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
65cubed makes and markets a technology solution that has the triple benefit of making commercial displays, like big roadside LED boards, look better, last longer, and still use substantially less energy .
The company has a small box that plugs in between the media player and display controller box of a display set-up, using a ton of graphics capabilities, smarts and supporting technology to make, it says, even lower-end, lower cost product from China look great.
I had an interesting chat with 65cubed partner Alan Larson about the technology - which I suppose is a form of video wall processing. It gets a little technical in parts of the discussion, but Larson does a good job of not taking listeners too deep into the technical weeds.
Color reproduction and image quality are important to brands, but the really intriguing aspect to this is the ability to get another year or two out of the capital investment in a big screen, while also reducing the month to month energy usage bills.
Power usage is a much bigger issue in Europe at the moment, but it's something that every media owner with big, bright displays should be looking at, as energy bills rise and, in Europe these days, energy availability is constrained.
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TRANSCRIPT
Alan, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what your company 65cubed is all about? I just came across it literally a couple of days ago and don't know a lot about it.
Alan Larson: 65cubed is a color management server product designed for LED walls and other video sources. Its roots are better than a dozen years old in the high-end color management space that you might see in a very eclectic home setting, or more commonly post-production studios where color has to be absolutely spot on.
What we discovered a couple of years back as LEDs came on, was that as we modulated the color signature, there were significant changes in the power signature. So we started experimenting with that and discovered that we could apply our technology combined with some aggressive time of day, environmental conditions style algorithms to create an aggressive product for an environmental impact on LED walls and that's what sort of got us started.
We can make the color on a digital wall look very amazing, we've gotten literally cinematic events on walls before. We usually range between 18-20 to the low 30s on average for a digital wall, especially outdoor settings that are on 24/27 and it varies based on how the customer wants their image and what the foot traffic or automobile traffic might be.
So when you say 18 to 30, what do you mean by that?
Alan Larson: If you are using say 100 Amps peak on a digital midsize wall, the second we turn our system on at the same brightness and color correct it, it'll usually drop that peak amperage, down to 75-80% max, more typically it's sitting in the 60s, I would suppose because most people don't wanna blow their eyes out with the brightness, and a byproduct of that is we've noticed that a lot of people that sell wall time, the arbitrage people go through for the bids, is they request about a 10% grayscale on whites to lessen the risk of their walls being overloaded.
By definition, when we take the power signature down, the advertisers are free to do what they want. We don't care what they do because we're not on that side of the game. But that's a byproduct. You simply don't get the power swings that you would in a wall that does not have our product.
So the advantages are both energy savings and better-looking visuals?
Alan Larson: Yes, and the byproduct of energy is that because you're not stressing those LEDs as much, they run cooler. We contend that lower stress on the system and its ability to react to external conditions of interest that that'll extend the display life and what that means is that the display owner is in it for keeps, in other words, we've noticed that some people just flip the displays. They bring 'em up and they're looking for somebody else, like any property, those that use it as a long-term investment are very interested in seeing the net present value of that asset go up and know it's gonna stay up.
And our guess is somewhere around 12-15% increased display life. In a display the size of a roadside, that's a very substantial saving over time.
Yeah. So if you can lower the energy costs while extending the operating life, that's a double benefit there, right?
Alan Larson: The studies we've done so far on outdoor signage, to put in layman's terms, we estimate that the savings on an average wall, call it about 25% conservatively, because we can be very aggressive in low viewership time periods like overnight, is about the same as saving two average American homes electricity every year.
And the media company won't really care about that, but they will care about what it means to their bottom line.
Alan Larson: And to your point, Dave, when I get asked who is your market? My market is typically the guy that owns the OpEx and the EBITDA for the company. As we've found again, our roots are on the studio side, but as we've talked to asset owners the price point and fulfillment of their displays are market-driven. Their costs underlying, they're the only ones that really care about it, because they're gonna get what they can get based on the location and so forth.
So if we can take 25% out of their most consistent ongoing costs, by definition, that asset owner's gonna earn more money.
So would your typical customer then be somebody in Oklahoma, who has a small media company and they’ve got five digital billboards along a highway and they are looking for ways to save money on that? Is that most typical or are these big media companies?
Alan Larson: We don't care. If they have one sign, to us that savings are linear. Each sign has the same impact, of a given size. Our market is those asset owners.
For example, I'm working on a project with a company that owns, I think around 40 roadside billboards, and they can blanket it across. Now they're in the rural Midwest, and what's especially of interest to them is that in the overnight hours, we can turn the savings model into the 40+ percent range because of the way we can manipulate the pixels on the screen and drive down the power consumption even further.
How do you do that?
Alan Larson: It's probably best I don’t give away all our secrets because some of what I'm describing is in the patent-pending process. The underlying technology, I think, has around 14 or 17 patents in the color management space, and just by reference, the roots of this company come out of ex-Kodak people in their digital color division.
The actual author of most of the patents is the retired Chief Technology Officer for that division with a Ph.D. in Color Physics out of MIT, so it's pretty heavy stuff. When I talk about some of the concepts of the color gamut, most people's eyes go shut in about half a second. So we have to be careful to tone it down a little bit.
Count me among those!
Alan Larson: The overnight hours, basically what we do is we sit between the video player and the wall’s controller. So in a production setting, you unplug the HDMI into the video controller and insert our box between the player and that video controller, and then put another little segment of HDMI cable and we're in line between the two, and what happens is, because we know a particular color red, let's call it the OU Crimson color. That's a branded color. We can reproduce that color to that PMS standard if you're thinking of it as a paper representation. We've never seen it. If someone says, I want to bid with pure IBM Blue, I think we'd probably win the deal. Now, what that means is that we put a scope against a screen, and we measure upwards of 8,000-9,000 patches. We call them patches, but they're effectively samples. So if I feed that OU Red to the screen, I'm gonna make this up because the numbers are huge. Each digital pixel gets a digital command that tells it what colors, how to turn the pixels on, how bright it should be, and so forth.
But let's just say in simple terms, the color for that OU Red is the number 1234. We have a very nice reference scope that looks at it and says, we got 1234, but the best that screen could spit back, because all the pixels in the world are made in one big bucket over in China, it spits back 1662. “Why?” It's cuz it does. It has nothing to do with the controller. It has nothing to do with anything else. Then we know. Oh cool. So that means we have to send at the number 1553, whenever we see 1234 for any given pixel and it'll spit back the actual image of 1234, and poof, we do that for all the colors in the gamut and that's what brings out the true color.
Now, a lot of people talk about, moving the white point. That's a fallacy in our world because a white point is actually what's called D65 or 6,500 Kelvin is pure white. When you properly set red, green, and blue (RGB), when they're running to true calibrated and color-managed perfection, that white is the Venn diagram intersection of those color spaces. It never moves no matter how bright it is. So when we reduce the illumination of a screen, we're actually bringing down the mathematical values that told the LED to be bright, not the mathematical values that keep the color in perfect harmony, which makes a very nice cinematic look. In the evening, you can drive down the freeway or in Nova Scotia, a remote road with trees around it, and the colors are beautiful. And at night we take a much more aggressive use of the color black in a way that people can't see cuz black on an LED wall is electrically the value of 0 Amps. So if we query 20-30% of that screen in a mathematical way, no matter where we had it set, that amount of additional power is gonna disappear cuz those LEDs are physically not doing anything, but it really looks nice and we don't tell people how we do it because we can't do that.
And you're able to do more at night simply because you don't have to drive these things as hard, right?
Alan Larson: We've never actually put up a light meter, I know we could, but we use the absolute location of the display itself, and the nice thing is the geolocation of every place on the earth has an exact sunrise and sunset time that changes every day of the year.
So that means in Nova Scotia, the Sun's gonna set at 4: 28 this afternoon, which means somewhere around 4 o'clock or maybe a little before, we'll start taking the brightness part of that mathematical equation, slowly move it over, perhaps 45 minutes or so into a full post-dusk mode where it'll be in an evening setting and then when the asset owner says, there's nobody on this road, let's flip in the low viewership mode because from, say 11 o'clock till 6 in the morning, only three cars go by, but we're required by contract to keep that wall alive. So it's a combination of how the marketing people wanna see it and what's appropriate for the marketing setting.
When we do things like Las Vegas, we can't be as aggressive, because they just love brightness out there. But I will tell you that some of those absolutely huge walls that you see, I'm assuming you've been to the strip, it's nothing to take 50 grand a year and cost off of those walls.
So when I am buying your product, am I purely buying the box and the technology that's in there, or am I buying a service and a platform?
Alan Larson: Yes. The answer is the latter. The box is a computer. It's a very fast computer that has boatloads of GPUs and processors because it's creating absolute color, and saturation is different at each pixel level, which means we can maintain grayscale visibility in an almost black setting.
Most of the time they dither out and they're just a blob. You can actually see the changes in the subtleties of the shadows, and I'm gonna go back to your question, but a point I wanted to make earlier is because of that purity, that absolute control at a pixel level, your image will be more in focus, and it's simply because the processor captures the subtleties between each pixel to the point where the processor doesn't give up and approximate them as a cheap TV would, and all of a sudden you see what the director intended, not what a lower cost video display processor was able to produce.
Now, back to your question about pricing. We sell our product in a tier of four ways. For lack of marketing intelligence, we call it the base product. It's the kind of product you would use, say in a conference room or a church where you turn it on and you just want it to look nice and you're gonna turn it off. The energy savings piece is incidental because they don't care, and they plug it into a 110 circuit and call it a day. We sell that as basically the asset with the color management system and everything they want to use on it is basically a manual setting.
Then the next one, which we affectionately call our Energy module and pops in all of the automated features for geolocation time of day, anything you wanna do that is environmentally based or schedule based, it'll take over. In fact, when we take the color way down to the point where you go, gosh, it's dim, the color management system can actually pull, this is the patented stuff, out warm colors or blue colors or whatever would add a little zip back into the picture. Now is it absolutely pure to the King's English studio? No. Does it look better? Oh yeah, it does.
So that means you can create a very pleasant brand running it about 25 to 35% of the power signature, and I'd have to show it to you cuz once you see it, you go, huh? What do you know, those facial tones came out. So that part of the product is typically sold on an energy split, software as a service model, either as an asset purchase or as a software as a service, continued service. And it's based on an energy savings model. So technically if you were in Nevada versus New York, the price point for the same asset would probably be different in our eyes. But in all cases, the customer always wins. If they purchase the product, they will always be cash positive in less than 24 months and thereafter.
Yeah, that was gonna be a question was, yes, you could save money on this, but is the cost of the technology at a point where you're not really saving, you're just saving on your energy bill or whatever?
Alan Larson: No, our play is, I gotta be able to look a CFO in the eye and go, you'll be better off with us. End of conversation. I don't care if you give a damn about color, you'll be better off, and quite frankly, the entertainment companies that have a customer that comes in for three days and gambles, they honestly don't care, right? ? Cause their market is to get people behind a slot machine.
And other people, if you go into a boardroom setting or someone that cares about their brand, oh heck, they don't care about the energy. They want it to look perfect. They're there to impress their customers. So it depends on the market. And by the way, the device is always hooked via a very secure tunnel to our server farm in Rochester, New York, which means nobody can actually get into the server. It's impenetrable, and the only way you access it is through a web app that can run on any device and you can watch the behavior. You can see how much the machine is ready. You can see how much if you elect to put onboard storage and so forth, and you can do all the manipulation of the screen via the web, no matter where you are.
Since I brought that up, I'll shift to the fourth piece of our product, which is smart automation. Because we're keeping a heartbeat pulse on that machine, if the video path goes away, either to or from, the technician on duty will get an immediate alert on his cell phone. If we're hooked to a UPS and the UPS is alive, so we're alive, but the network's connection goes down, then more than likely there's a power failure somewhere else. Once again, we'll notify them immediately, and the reason we can do that is that the server farm is that which actually notifies the technician, not the device itself. So it's saying, “I lost my baby out there in the middle of nowhere. I'm gonna tell somebody about it.” As a byproduct of that, the third tenant that we sell to, and this is for people that just have a desire for it, we've been asked and have done camera installations. There are a lot of controllers that do camera installations, which is fine. It's nothing unique, but again if someone is having a hard time with a consumer paying their bill because they want absolute validation of their display ads, we'll just have the server snap a picture every three seconds and log it both locally and up on the server, and if somebody asks a question, here, knock yourself out. Here's a log of everything that happened, and if we throw an error at the system, then if the camera's up, we would immediately turn a live feed on and make that feed available to the technician via that text. So in rural settings like where you live and a lot of the mountain states, these guys in bucket trucks drive two hours just to find out they didn't even need to go there.
For example, we were at a sports bar where the network went down for six minutes and the technician got an error. By the time he read the error, the system was back up. So he calls and says, What the heck happened? We go, go talk to your network people. That's exactly what happened. It's that kind of stuff. The idea behind this smart service is that we do not want the distributors that buy and resell our product to get a call at 11 o'clock at night because the consumer found something wrong. We want them to be able to call their customer and say, by the way, “if it's of interest to you, I remediated a couple of issues last week. No problem. That's just what we do for you because we care”, and that's why we built it. That was all based on the distributor. Because they have a business to run and every time they have to service a wall for no reason, it just takes away their bottom line above and beyond what the customer bought. This is a distributor feature.
So I've been to many trade shows, but trade shows that included booths for companies who were specifically in the business of video wall processing for LED video walls. I'm thinking of companies like Brompton and I understand at a base level, I guess at most, that you're running your signal through these boxes, which optimizes and improves the visuals that get pushed to the screen and therefore make it look better.
Is that essentially what you're doing here or is this like another component?
Alan Larson: No, it definitely conditions the video signal. In the high-end video market, a couple competitors I can think of, on a studio set, you'll see Black Box, where they actually condition the camera. I've seen Lumigen in high-end settings.
We're similar in those products. There's a thing called a LUT box. We are the highest-resolution LUT box on the market. We got our name 65cubed because we're a 65x65x65, that's the cube, RGB-based technology. The nearest competitor that does something like this, I think is 37 cube and most of them are like 17, and most of the calibration style activities we've seen from all companies are one-dimensional, not three-dimensional, and again, we're basically hitting the color management system for a digital wall with a sledgehammer because we happen to own the asset.
Our sister company is owned by the same investor as we are so we have untethered access to all the software assets.
So is this the sort of thing that you purely sell as a product or would you license it as well to a big-time, top-five LED manufacturer so it would just be incorporated in the overall product?
Alan Larson: We would welcome it because it's a lot easier to sell and implement, for example, there are two ways that our system gets installed. Because we can't control the quality of any given panel that goes on a wall, regardless of the manufacturer, we always scope the system to start with.
So if someone owns some walls along Interstate 10 and they said, we want these fixed, we'll actually go in a bucket truck for a couple of hours and scope the screen, and once done, it’s done and every display that's of the same bin of LED, they're done. But if it's an oddball, you go do it.
For a distributor when they receive their great big crates of panels from China, they take one out, they're usually like 6 inches x 12 inches or foot by foot or wherever there are. They just lay it on the floor, hook a controller to it, put the scope against it, and go home for dinner. And then that entire set of crates that came in the same shipment are all done, and so the customer never gets involved in it. But no, the underlying technology of our sister company is in thousands of high-end monitors that are used in commercial settings, high-end gaming, that kinda stuff.
Who's the sister company?
Alan Larson: The technical name is Entertainment Experience. Their trademark company is called EE Color, and it's embedded in our technology. We're both owned by the same group.
Is the product something that would be used across any manufacturer?
I mentioned the top five companies that perhaps sell a lot of this stuff at least to the major media companies, for the sides of buildings and roadside billboards, and so on. Or is this more the thing that's gonna really improve lower-tier, lower-cost products?
Alan Larson: I can't speak for the quality management of any manufacturer. The lower quality products, distributors that don't sell the top three or four name brands. They love it because they can go and compete for head to head. We have clever tools we give them. We give them an image that's basically duplicated side by side and play it in duplication on the screen, and then we tell our processor to physically not process the left side of the screen pixels and the right side we do, and it's visually impressive because the telltale evidence of digital walls that are pushing too much electricity and don't portray are people.
We went to the Infocom Show last June, I believe we went with a partner, a distributor that resells our product. We were the only ones that had people, not swirling colors and mountain scenes, right? Because we can produce the facial tones of anybody, whether you're Caucasian, of color, just as if you're looking at them in your face. When you get the people's faces right, I guarantee you the rest of the colors are in.
Typically what happens is people look like they sat under a sunlamp all day. Another telltale evidence of a screen often aging is that white looks turquoise. That just means the whole color skew is pushed way out, and when we bring that back in, and by the way, when it's pushing purple, it's pushing a lot more electricity too. When you bring it into white, the white is is the byproduct of the red, blue, and green in concert. We don't create white, white happens, is what I'm trying to say.
For the lower-cost products coming over primarily from China, one of the criticisms is that they use LED light admitters from a really wide “bin”, a wide assortment of bins with different Color properties, and everything else. Is the proposition here that that's not the same worry if you're using this kind of technology?
Alan Larson: No. We usually tell the distributors who buy those. You have to pay attention to the bin numbers as they come in because yes, they vary widely and you find that the distributors are pretty clever. If they pull some panels out that look odd compared to the rest of them, they literally sort them. It sounds like a big pain in the neck, but they don't want their customer to have a checkerboard on the wall.
But no, typically the rule is if you receive another shipment that the manufacturer declares is of the same bin, you hope that the manufacturer has integrity then you go with that. What you typically find is, let's assume the bins are off by 5% or 6% in the color signature, and it's on the side of a wall, along a freeway somewhere. The energy curve is gonna be taken care of. These colors won't be textbook, but again, you have a viewing discussion with the consumer for about two seconds when they look at the screen. otherwise, they're gonna hit that semi in front of them. So you don't have to be as particular on roadside displays as you do in company settings or boardrooms.
You mentioned coming out of the studio world and so on. Is this primarily a product for outdoor displays that you're gonna see from a long distance or is this the sort of thing that you could use indoors for 1.8-millimeter fine pixel pitch walls?
Alan Larson: Actually, today I'm going over to a manufacturer's US distribution center, and I'm gonna be working with their team to set up a 0.5-millimeter, 5x9 foot wall in their boardroom. Now, the finer the pixel pitch, the more amazing the product actually.
So last question: I was curious about energy savings.
I work quite a bit with a company over in Germany. We collaborate on things and they asked me about energy concerns in North America I say, people are aware of it, but it's not a point of discussion. Obviously, it's a huge point of discussion now in Europe. Are you getting questions at all about that and are the customers interested in that side of it?
Alan Larson: We're more interested than people we've found. In fact, one of the reasons I went to the DPAA shows a couple of weeks ago. One of my missions was specifically to look for potential distributors in continental Europe for that very reason.
I've traveled extensively in my career overseas and have put a lot of time into Europe and the Middle East, and it's a whole different world over there, and the weird thing about Americans, and probably Canadians too, is they've never been more than 250 miles from the day place they were born and like in Dallas where I live, you don't see any news about New York because it might as well be Germany. They don't get it, there's just not something that would register. So the European thing here is nothing more than news on the nationals every so often.
And you don't have US media companies or maybe Canadian media companies as well expressing concerns about the cost of energy and interest in your product primarily because of that. They're more interested because of the color properties?
Alan Larson: If they pay the bill for that asset, they care. When I was at DPAA, I got killed with acronym soup because I come out of the high-tech industry, databases, applications, and computers, and I could have given you the same three letters and some acronyms, and I would've thought it was something different. So I sat there and just listened and looked for the context and by and large the word “energy”, and the word “perfect color” wasn't mentioned once in the five days I was there, and hence I met with an architectural engineering firm that’s all about energy and they went, you have uniqueness here that we believe as we do these great big installations will give us a competitive advantage, and that was the most productive meeting I had all week, actually.
So back to your question about the majors. I have approached the likely candidates that are the big display owners, the people that make them and some have amazing products, don't get me wrong, We've looked at a couple of them, call it the top three or four, and we go, you know what the difference is between some of the cool things they're doing and what we can provide, that just validates our market. We don't care if we so-called compete against them because that's goodness. Because they're doing the right thing for the environment. That we're trying to do. We're sensitive to that. So the European piece is very important to us. We're just attempting to get a foothold to get our product supported locally.
All right, Alan. If people wanna know more about the company, where can they find it online?
Alan Larson: If they go to our website, they can fill out a simple form that says, “I wan to know more” and that's about all it does, and I'll call them right back, or I'll have somebody in our group call them back.
That's 65cubed.com, right?
Alan Larson: Right!
All right. Thanks again for spending some time with me.
Alan Larson: Thanks very much.
Wednesday Aug 24, 2022
Telmo Silva, ClicData
Wednesday Aug 24, 2022
Wednesday Aug 24, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Integrating data has increasingly climbed the priority list for more ambitious and involved digital signage and digital OOH projects. The big driver for that is how near or real-time data makes what's on-screen automated and triggered, which means more timely, targeted and therefore relevant messaging.
Lots of CMS software companies offer some degree of data integration and on-screen presentation, and we're starting to see some third-party companies that work mainly in digital signage - like Screenfeed - also offering data display toolsets.
We're also now seeing well-established data handling companies making themselves known in this sector, particularly to help make some of the more complicated set-ups both happen and then reliably, and securely, work. ClicData is a software firm based up in the northwest of France, but has clients globally that use its Business Intelligence platform to bring data in from more than 250 sources - into a single, harmonized data warehouse.
I spoke with co-founder and CTO Telmo Silva about Clicdata's roots, how its platform works and how it can be applied in digital signage applications.
Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS
TRANSCRIPT
David: Telmo, thank you very much for joining me. Can you tell me what ClicData is all about?
Telmo Silva: I started ClicData in 2008 as a pharmaceutical-focused data analytics company, and later branched out a little bit into making it a wider-used data analysis, data management and data intelligence tool for all sectors, and hence the name, ClicData from ClicPharma before, and yes, this tool is really the culmination of that learning in the pharmaceutical sector that we thought is applicable to really any sector.
David: Okay. So if I'm sitting here listening to the beginning of this podcast, some people might be wondering, those in digital signage and the AV sector, might be wondering, okay, why am I listening to this? How does it plug into that sector?
Telmo Silva: Absolutely, and it's funny, Dave, because an acquaintance of ours asked me, should we do this podcast? And I said, yes, absolutely, because everything generates data and digital advertising is definitely one of the factors.
You have to know where you're spending your money and what you're requiring and who's looking at things, and one of the first clients we had in the early days was actually a Canadian company out west that had this technology on elevators to take snapshots of peoples and try to recognize their age group and their demographics and as they're playing the videos on the small screen on the elevator, try to figure out what's the retention? Are their eyes moving and moving away from the screen and so forth, and how long do they stay hooked for those short 30-second clips, and things like that? And that was actually my first introduction to digital advertising and a use case for ClicData, a very successful use case, and I was hooked on that.
I was hooked into that so much that where ClicData is based out, which is France, there's a very large history of retail companies here that spent a lot of money on aisle advertising, and they start using those concepts, not only in terms of video and monitoring but also in terms of monitoring the paths of customers through their stores, optimization of aisles and things like that, where to put the digital signs and advertising and so forth, and all that generates a lot of data that you have to make sense of. And this is really well ClicData comes in, right? Those point solutions with digital advertising are part one, but without actually collecting all these from the different stores, and different locations that start making sense of it, it's just data, right? It does not turn into information until you do something with it and that's really where we come in, in trying to bring as much data from the different systems and different points of information really that a company may have, or a client may have and bring that into something that makes sense, that you can aggregate, that you can slice and dice, and then further down the line, then expose that to your customers, and say, okay, this is what you paid for.
David: So you're aggregating and harmonizing and developing insights around the data as opposed to being a collector of data, right? Like you're not doing any of the computer vision or sensor-based work yourself?
Telmo Silva: We do not, but we do have all the necessary connections just with the different systems. Unlike potentially other systems that are very well standardized, each vendor of those displays of those collectors may have their own interfaces, APIs and so forth. They may have their own storage formats and as you use the different systems, your challenge is really to understand, how can I connect to this one now, and how can I extract information that I want out of that. And our connectors are actually quite flexible in that sense where we have fixed connectors for some of those systems, but for others, we have generic connectors that you can kind of configure to tap into that data.
David: Would this be something that might be called middleware?
Telmo Silva: I would say potentially, yes. It depends on your definition of middleware. Ultimately we see business intelligence at least the portion of data analytics and reporting that we offer, as the next step before you feed it back and you go, okay, now I understand the results that I've received here, what improvements are we gonna make? And we start to cycle again, right?
So again as an example, you may start receiving data from certain videos and start saying, okay, this is the demographics and so forth, can I make some adjustments to my campaigns or to my videos or to the sequence of videos that I'm displaying? Again, I'm going back to that video on the elevator concept and optimising that, so it is part of that loop of data collection, data analysis, making decisions based on that data, and then feeding that back into the loop again.
David: When you started the company accessing data from all kinds of different data sources was very complicated and time-consuming, and you had to get all kinds of permissions and all kinds of meetings and phone calls and everything else to work it out.
One of the things that I gather has changed over the last decade or so is that most platforms now have APIs, it's easier to get stuff out of them, and so on. So has your role lessened, or has it increased because they're always changing and there are so many and if you're an independent company, like a digital signage company, a software company, you have to stay on top of that, or you would use a company like ClicData that's spending all their time doing that and making it easy?
Telmo Silva: To answer your first question, it has actually increased, right? Whereas before we would ask a vendor whether that be Facebook or Google and say, our mutual customers have data on your advertising network, right? And again this kind of can expand to any type of data vendor or data collector that we may tap into and before they would basically know it's our data, and the consumers of course start reacting against that, right? Today, If you do not have an API, if all you do is get my data into your system, but not give me anything back in return, then I don't want anything to do with you.
And we've seen backlashes at times with Facebook, Cambridge Analytics and things like that, where those types of sharing are also kinda gone another way rather, but nonetheless, today, if you do not have an API, then you're a second-class citizen on the internet and on the software technology stack. So that is great but an API is still an API. It is a programming interface and it does require some knowledge and it's not a standard. Just because we call it an API does not mean that they'll follow the same standard, it's very well organized, and it’s very well understood. So every API has its nuances, its little quirks and its own way of paging through the amounts of data that it can offer.
And so our role has actually increased due to that, because again, as I was mentioning before our connectors know how to deal with those different variations and those different formats and schemas that the data may be provided with. So in that sense, it's actually increased the need to have a tool, like ClicData, to be able to tap into those APIs and bring it into a format that is easily digestible by any analytics tool, including our own tool.
David: How much is involved, if you wanted to do this yourself and let's say you wanted to Integrate information from four different business system sources or whatever, within your company? Is that something that would take a morning, a month, or a year to do if they weren't using something like ClicData?
Telmo Silva: If they were not using something like ClicData, they obviously need somebody technical, but it would take an extensive amount of time for development, and again, large companies still do that, where they write custom interfaces to bring the data and amalgamate them into one single source of truth. This is where millions of dollars are being spent on data warehousing projects and business intelligence implementations and so forth. So not having a tool like ours definitely would require a good technical team, and again, depending on the sources, potentially database analysts, database experts, SQL developers, API developers, whether they do it in Java or Python or what have you.
And then bringing all that into a data warehouse will definitely take more than just a few days. In my previous life, prior to creating ClicData, that was my bread and butter, and these projects would go on for 3-6 months. With ClicData, if we have the connector that you need or if you can configure your API connector and you have a basic understanding of APIs, you should be able to do that within a day, to connect three or four data sources and start seeing the data flow through into ClicData.
David: So on a project launch basis and certainly on an ongoing operating basis, it sounds like if you're running a spreadsheet model on this and a business argument, it would take a huge amount of cost out of the equation and time, and these are people you don't need to hire?
Telmo Silva: It goes on to just beyond hiring and the people behind it, because, having somebody who can accompany you if you're not an expert or in the technical side, then it may be worth it. But the bottom line is the continuity of it as well. It's okay to build a prototype. It works once but the next day, you don't want to have to do the same thing, right? You don't want to have to copy and paste the data into Excel or out of Excel again and repeat and so forth.
And also, technology is what it is, business evolves as it is, and so you always need these adjustments. It is an investment that you have to make towards being data-centric, being data-focused and to say, I want to build these systems that collect the data on an ongoing basis that I can automate the reporting that can save you time as well in reporting these numbers back to your team or your clients or your management team and all this combines into the ROI that you're looking for, and yes, there is a technical side of it as well that there will be savings, whether it's in consulting or in minimizing, at least the number of times that you involve them, to gain access to your data.
David: If I'm a customer, what am I buying and how am I paying for it? Do you buy an enterprise license or is it software as a service?
Telmo Silva: It is totally software as a service. We do not offer any on-premise installations of software, and this is because we want to be rapid at giving new features, new connectors. Connectors continuously change, and there's new software in the market and we wanna be rapid in making those available. So software as a service is really our model, and what you get when you subscribe to when you get one of these subscriptions, which is monthly or yearly based, is you get basically all the connectors. You get a data warehouse, a database available to you through Microsoft Azure, that's our partner, and you can have your data stored in over eight different regions around the world: US, Ireland, Canada, Germany, France, and a few others, and once you have that data warehouse, that’s your piece of the database there, the data starts flowing through the connectors. Once that is in your data warehouse, then from there you can actually build downstream flows, you can tap into it directly with Excel if you want, or you can use our dashboard tool to start creating dashboards and graphs and charts and tables indicators.
You can share those dashboards with other people. You can publish them to your customers, et cetera, and then you can just automate these things so that it just does that every day or every morning or every hour.
David: Is that the primary output that you would see for digital signage and digital out-of-home home networks, probably more so on the digital signage side, would be data visualizations and dashboards?
Telmo Silva: I think that would potentially be one of the use cases, analyzing the data that's coming through and making decisions based on those as normal reporting and analytics data tools would. The other part of it and some customers of ClicData do this is they just use the collection capabilities of ClicData and the data warehouse to store their data, but then they feed that into other tools of their choice, tools that potentially they wanna do some more advanced machine learning on the data, maybe they want to write their own special code to analyze it, or maybe simply feed another system that requires this data to consume it and so forth.
ClicData is really a multifaceted tool that can be either used just for collection and aggregation of the data or all the way through to data visualization and analytics.
David: Okay, so you would have almost like templates or widgets of some kind that would be able to do develop dynamic charting and things like this based on what you select?
Telmo Silva: Absolutely, much like you would do on a pivot table in Excel, to drag and drop some columns, and the chart starts taking shape with columns, rows and so forth. That's exactly our design, it's very user-friendly as much as we can, we do have a lot of options for styling because not everybody likes the same styles and colors, but in essence, it's very much an Excel-like data visualization tool built into ClicData.
David: If I'm a digital signage CMS software provider and I'm working with, let's say a financial services company and they wanted data visualization, if I wanna put that visualized chart into a schedule, so it shows up on the digital signs around the workplace. Is that an HTML file or how do you get that up on a screen?
Telmo Silva: If you want to embed our dashboards into third-party applications, into screens, we have quite a few customers that have screens around the office, we have a railroad train station system that actually publishes our dashboards on every single station and stops with the schedules and things like that, and their performance, so are they late, etc.
So you can definitely embed that, and it's just simply a URL. You put that inside an iFrame, inside your web page, and the iframe immediately refreshes if the data has been refreshed, so you don't have to do anything, you just have to open it up in a browser, maximize the screen and boom, your dashboard is live and will refresh automatically.
David: Aare there any kind of limitations on how real-time it is or is it just how you wanna set it and how it works at the other end, in terms of data generation?
Telmo Silva: Our schedules have the ability to go on a minute basis to your data sources and pull the data in, however you can use our API, because we too have an API, to push data in, and in that case, the push is up to you. If you wanna send it once per second, you can. These will not be full data loads. These have to be small packets, a few rows, a few hundred rows at a time, potentially.
But you can use our API to bring in real-time data, and again, the same concept, whether we pulled it or you pushed it, everything downstream gets refreshed and gets activated for you.
David: I suspect that's a conversation that you and your sales engineers have at times with resellers and end users, “Sure we could do real-time, but for the application you're talking about, do you really need that, or is every minute or every five minutes fine?”
Telmo Silva: Absolutely, and this is why we stopped our schedule at one minute. Again, you have to be really in a high traffic, high volume situation, and to be able to make a decision in real-time, and that's ultimately the key, right? It really is up to you and there's the cost associated with you developing a push notification to other systems as well.
So it really is up to the customers, but yeah, in some sectors there are times that some folks ask for real-time when in fact, their data doesn't change on a daily basis. Case in point, Facebook, they themselves only refresh their own metrics or expose their own metrics on a much larger time scale. So for us to do real-time with certain systems and certain data sources is just refreshing and using bandwidth for nothing.
David: Do you have to make statements and assurances around privacy of the data or that's not really your issue, whoever's collecting that data or you're gathering that data is the one that's gonna have to worry about that, you're just enabling the use of that data?
Telmo Silva: Even though obviously data privacy and respecting the customer's data is our number one thing, we do have a role to play. If we're talking in Europe, GDPR is a huge thing. Every country has their own protection laws and privacy protection, like the California Data Protection Act. Every country and state and province has their own or has started some type of laws and regulations. Us being a European company, but with customers in North America, we have to be very careful. This is why we're almost the only ones that actually are able to start your data warehouse in any country that you wish in those eight regions that we've mentioned, and that's step number one, but we are a data processor for you. We don't know what your data is, but we are processing your data for you. It's our application, and we are responsible to make sure that there's no external access to it, that if there are court orders, we have to make sure we validate and check them with our customers and so forth.
Luckily that has never happened, but we don't know what your data is. So we are not able to be really responsible for it, but that's part of our terms of service. If you put data that you are not entitled to use or process if you put data that is not legal for you to own, that's the responsibility of our customers, but obviously, we would have a role to play in that in this GDPR system where we are responsible to at least point out or give it out if asked legally, obviously.
David: I assume you get a lot of questions around security as well.
Telmo Silva: Oh, absolutely, and again, this is why we partner with Microsoft Azure. Our expertise is really making the software intelligent, and easy to use, that it processes fast, that we can process thousands and thousands of files and sources and dashboards a day, an hour really, and not really on the physical and digital security of these data warehouses and systems. And this is why we rely on Microsoft Azure severely. We have a strong SLA with them to protect our property and our customer's property, their data.
David: I know almost nothing about the technical side of what your company and others like it would do, but I assume that a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of security is on the Azure side and you take advantage of that and you let them worry about that, but, make sure that you're working according to their policies, right?
Telmo Silva: Absolutely, but it also takes our knowledge to encrypt the data and to make sure that their configuration is set up correctly. I think that is the positive and negative of cloud-based systems, like Google, Amazon and Microsoft. It's so easy these days to just start a server anywhere and start putting data into it. It's much harder to make sure that nobody else has access to it and to make sure that it's protected and so forth. And even within Microsoft, there are some checks and balances there as well. We can’t say, just because it's Microsoft's or Amazon or Google that takes care of your data, we're pawning it off on them, and if something happens, let's go to court.
That's not how it should be handled. There has to be some responsibility on the people using those systems, and how we code the application, and to make sure all the settings are set up correctly. So it is a team effort between the vendors and us, and also our customers to make sure that they're comfortable with the fact that we are ISO certified, SOC certified HIPAA compliant, et cetera. This is time and an investment on our part to make sure that they should not be just for the sake of having a stamp, on your website saying, “We are ISO certified” and that's it. It does take effort from both companies and all parties involved to make sure that the data is secure and private.
David: So Microsoft is a major business partner, but they're also a competitor, through Power BI?
Telmo Silva: That is correct. Power BI, their visualization tool is a competitor to our data visualization module, not necessarily to the whole ClicData platform, and they do an excellent job at it as well.
David: But I assume your company has its share of competitors, right?
Telmo Silva: I believe there's data visualization for every type of business in the world. Power BI, Tableau, ClickView. I don't wanna name more than three, but there are at least three hundred of them, and let's not even go beyond those, let's just talk about Excel, there’s some amazing visualization in Excel and it has been around for years. So there's a lot of great experience, but again, these are tools and they are distinct separate tools, and if you have to load up Excel or Power BI or whatever every day to hit refresh, and then export it out and think about security and access, then that's the downside of these tools. They do a great job for that initial data investigation but are terrible for the ongoing maintenance of it.
So what we say is, whereas we may not be as advanced as some of those tools, potentially. If you're trying to do something very specific that only Power BI can do, maybe we cannot do it. The upside of using our tool is that you don't have to do anything else. The data is there as soon as it's refreshed, the dashboards know that the data is refreshed, it immediately sends emails out to the people that are on the list for receiving this dashboard, and they get it on their mobile app. They get an alert, whatever, right? It's all automated for you.
So if you want to spend less time wasting copying and pasting and using Excel and these tools, then, these are the types of platforms that you need to look for.
David: I assume the other thing is that you stay on top of it because APIs change and data sets change and everything else and if you just had it developed yourself internally or if you outsourced the development, a month later, the schemas and things could change and all of a sudden it doesn't work, right?
Telmo Silva: Absolutely. We see that with the big players obviously, Google, Instagram, Facebook, and others are constantly improving their APIs. Security keeps changing around the world. We're phasing out certain types of security, TLS 1, TLS 2, et cetera, and APIs need the security, they need to be compatible with it. So this is really where most of our customers get their benefits is to say, okay, ClicData is taking care of all that for you, and then make sure that the data keeps coming in, and flowing into your data warehouse.
David: So if I'm a digital signage content management systems software provider, or Perhaps an AV/IT systems integrator who has an ask from clients or wants to incorporate this into their service offers, what's involved?
What are the first questions you have to ask them? Do you support this, do you support that, or are there any really real barriers?
Telmo Silva: We start by looking at their data sources, right? If we can't bring the data, if they're using a very specific format of a very specific system that we cannot gain access to, typically very old ones then we're upfront about it. We say that you're not gonna get this data in, and you're not gonna be able to report it.
David: It's on a mainframe system or something?
Telmo Silva: Mainframe, believe it or not, we can connect to it. It is important for us and believe it or not, there are still a lot of customers, especially in the retail sector that does mainframe, IBM series of servers, those things that we thought don't exist. They exist and they exist in quite a lot of companies. So we still support those. But sometimes it's just very cryptic or the format. I cannot give you an example off the top of my head but we have this, as I mentioned before, a very robust kind of API connecting connector that takes a lot of options, and most of the time we can configure it to fit.
But yeah, if you're a provider of data that pretty much says: I'm not giving you access. I can only give you monthly reports or something like that. Yeah, you can import those reports monthly by hand. Is that something that you really wanna do, et cetera? So we discuss alternate solutions like that.
But yeah, that would be the first step. The second step is what are their objectives? Are they looking for visualization and embedding these dashboards and putting them back to their customer in a self-service mode so they can monitor the success of their campaigns, their ads network, et cetera? Or is this internal use for analytics and so forth? So we discuss those items to make sure that ClicData is the right solution for them, and if all checks out, I think then the next step is just to get a trial account for 15 days and connect a couple of data sources, see what you can build. We have an in-app chat tool that allows them to ask questions as they go along during their trials. Ask your questions, ask how you can do things and get that first initial prototype, and that's a big advantage of being a SaaS product, there's no installation, you lose nothing, right? You don't have to install or return servers. You just get started, start connecting your data and start playing around with your data and start visualizing and prototyping within your team, get success quickly, get motivated quickly as well. That's a big part of it, and from there, you just start your subscription level.
David: What level of skill do you need?
Telmo Silva: To do complex things, you definitely need some SQL sometimes, some function programming, as you do with Excel, we are all different experts in Excel. There are those of us that use Excel just to type in numbers and your basic drag and drop, and that's it. And then there's those that know to do Lookups and they know a few more functions and then there's those that do Macros in Excel, right? There are different skills, and with us, it's the same thing. It really depends on what you need to do and how much your data needs work. So we have our own kind of Excel-like language that they can use, very similar to SQL as well. They can do a lot of things with the data.
We needed to make ClicData very powerful, and very flexible to ensure that we will not be stumped by a specific need or a specific customer request. But at the surface, we also try to make it easy with a strong UI to write those hard-to-write functions behind the scenes through an interface that is a little bit easier to use.
David: So at a minimum, you want somebody who has an interest or a knack for this sort of thing, as opposed to Margaret in Sales and Marketing saying, “Here, you do this!” and she gets the deer and the headlights look?
Telmo Silva: Absolutely. Now you can, if you have, and some customers of ours do this and they split the work of connecting and making the data available versus consuming the data, right?
You have your technical person, the person that knows the data very well to create these kinds of slices and catalogues of data and make them available to the rest of the team, and the team then goes in, either with our dashboard editor or report editor, and does their own dashboards and their own kind of visualizations or with other tools as well. So there are also those splitting of functions that sometimes are important to put in place into a company.
David: ClicData is in Northwest France based in Lille, correct?
Telmo Silva: Yeah, we have three major offices. That is our head office, the engineering office in the north of France. We have one in Toronto, Canada, and we have one in Texas so we're all over the place a little bit.
David: So Europeans are gonna engage through your European offices and Canadians and Americans can find a couple of offices on this side of the pond?
Telmo Silva: That's correct.
David: Where do they find you online?
Telmo Silva: ClicData.com
David: It's important to say there's no “k” in the click. Somebody got to it before you could get the one with the “k”?
Telmo Silva: I believe so, or maybe at that point in time, we wanted to make it very even with four and four, Clic and Data, I'm not sure.
David: Oh, they'll find it. Thank you very much for spending some time with me.
Telmo Silva: Thank you for having me.
Wednesday Aug 03, 2022
Hans Feil, Etulipa
Wednesday Aug 03, 2022
Wednesday Aug 03, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
E-paper displays are, by far, best known for the little e-readers people use instead of printed books. The core technology used for those readers is what's also being used for things like meeting room displays and updated bus stop schedule signs that run off batteries and, in some cases, solar chargers. But that's all been in black and white and gray. Color displays, and particularly displays that can do full motion graphics and video playback, have largely stayed in the bucket of future technology.
A small Dutch company is well along the path of changing all that - using something called electro-wetting display technology that gets its brightness from the sun, and would be used as low-energy alternatives to big LED video displays used for out of home advertising.
In this podcast, I have a detailed chat with Etulipa founder Hans Feil, whose company is rapidly evolving and maturing the technology, and has a big investment and R&D partner in Daktronics, the big South Dakota-based LED manufacturer. We get into what the technology is and how it works, its differences with other kinds of e-paper, how it sets up, and its benefits.
The company is still at the advanced R&D stage, but far enough along that it anticipates being in small quantity production next year, through a manufacturing partner in Taiwan.
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TRANSCRIPT
Hans, thank you very much for joining me. Let's just get right to it. What the heck is electro wetting display technology?
Hans Feil: That's a good question. It's what they call reflective display technology. Of course, you probably know about it already, but if people don't know, the introduction that I made is that I say you probably will have an e-reader, many people have e-readers nowadays and it's black and white and a little bit slow, but you can read it outdoors. If you take your iPad outdoor in the sun, it's difficult to read. We have something like your the display on the e-reader, but then with color and it's fast, and that's the that's the difference.
So it's a reflective display technology. It reflects light so there's no back light behind, it doesn't emit light. So if you take our display into the dark, you don't see anything unless you light it up with a back light or front light. So that's for newcomers. If you're a chemist or a physicist or a scientist, I’d probably say it a little bit different, in the sense that what we do is that we manipulates liquids colored oils, and we have a layer colored oils and with little cells with oils and we can make small droplets with it and the size of the droplets we can.
For instance, if you compare to print, many people have ink-jet printers and if they would take a magnifying glass and look at the paper, they're see little cyan, magenta and yellow droplets on the white paper, and what we do is we’re mimicking this printing with cyan, magenta and yellow. So we have a white paper or white reflector, we call it. And we have three layers of glass on top of it with cyan, magenta, and yellow oil and each individual layer, we can switch this oil droplets, making them small or big. And if all the layers are spread, it's black because you don't see anything, all the lights are absorb. And if there are all the droplets are small, white or nearly white and depending on which droplets you switch and can get all the colors of the rainbow, and that's all very low power.
From what I read on your website, unlike traditional, if you wanna call traditional ePaper, what we would know from E-ink displays primarily, this can do 25 frames per second motion, which is quite a bit different because when you see something change on an ePaper screen, it goes nuts for a fraction of a second as it reorganizes itself.
Hans Feil: Yes, and in our case, it doesn't really reorganize, droplets just become big or small and it goes very fast.
Was that a big step to get to the point where you could change them that quickly or is that kind of inherent in the technology design?
Hans Feil: It comes automatically with the technology. It has never been slow.
And with ePaper, and I'm certainly not banging on Eink, but they spent 20+ years advancing their color displays and they'll put out press releases saying we now have more color support than we used to but basically it's been a very long road to get 'em to full color.
You're saying you've got full color gamut right now?
Hans Feil: Yes, but also in our case, it was a very long long route too. The first paper of Rob Hayes and Johan Feenstra from Phillips Research was from 2003, so 19 years ago, this nature paper, where they're first showing to the world electro wetting display, or at least the concept and some examples. So that's 19 years ago and since then we are working very hard on progressing technology, making better making it possible to manufacture displays and so forth. So it's also a very long route.
So what's the tie, if there is one to Phillips?
Hans Feil: Right now, there is no tie except that we are located here in Eindhoven, what they call High Tech Campus, Eindhoven and it used to be the same campus, but smaller from Phillips Research in the old days. So the technology originally, the effect of switching oil droppers, was initially invented here a few hundreds of meters a away from the place where I'm standing now.
Am I remembering correctly that you have a background with Phillips as well?
Hans Feil: That's correct, yeah. I worked what they call the Phillips Research Labs since 1988 in various functions, but mostly quite scientific work in the old days, when it was a very scientific lab. And then I worked for a number of years in battery technology, lithium polymer batteries, and by the end of the 90s, and I got in touch of the guys who started this electro wetting displays, I think in 2004, so I'm 18 years active in electro wetting displays already.
So like you said, it has been a bit of a road then?
Hans Feil: Yes, sure.
When did Etulipa start?
Hans Feil: I’ll share a bit of history. At Phillips, when we were working on electro wetting display technology, we did a spinoff called Liquavista, you may have heard the name. It was early 2006 and a little bit prior to that, there was interest from the German automotive mirror manufacturer, a very big one, who wanted to see if this technology could be used for rear view auto dimming mirrors, and at that time it looked very promising.
In fact, after co-founding Liquavista, half a year later, together with an old colleague, I cofounded Miortech and Miortech was dedicated to use this electro wedding display technology for rearview mirrors. So by the end of 2006, we started this company, Miortech, trying to make the mirrors. Turned out to be that technology was not as fast as we hoped so there was a lot of development work to do. We really had to go back to the drawing table. In fact, we found out that there was a better way of making electro wetting displays with a different architecture that solved most of the initial problems. We patented that and then we started making prototypes of this mirrors, but basically it was a little bit too late, the market evolved and these automotive companies didn't want to really want it anymore.
But also in fact, if you're trying to make a mirror with small oil droplets or small cells, there's also always some light scattering from this droplets and so we could never get this mirrors fully free from haze. It was always a little bit of haze, so it was not good enough. So by the end of 2012, so it was almost 10 years ago, we said these mirrors are no good. It's a display technology. We have our own patented way of making electro wetting displays, maybe there are display companies who are interested in, for instance, licensing this technology, the way that we make the devices. Turns out to be not so easy, but at some point of time, we were asked, “Can't you make outdoor display with this technology?” And in fact, that's the sweet spot of electro wetting display.
If you really want to have bright, reflective colors, you need CMY, the stack of cyan, magenta, yellow. Just black and white display plus color filters is just not bright enough because you are throwing away two third of the light and so for reflective, you need CMY, and this stack has always a certain thickness because of the glass thickness, which also mean that it limits the the pixel density that you can reach. The rule of thumb is that the the thickness of the stack, CMY is roughly in the same range as the pixel size. And for outdoor displays, if you have a 10 millimeter pixels that's pretty good, that's pretty high resolution already.
So we made a few samples with CMY, very simple samples. And we went along to outdoor display companies, including Daktronics at the time, it was 2013 or 2014 or something like that and we showed it to the folks at Daktronics and they liked it. So they said this looks promising, of course, it was very early days, we just had samples. But since then, we have worked together with Daktronics. They became a shareholder, supporting us all the way, step by step from small displays to black and white displays to full color displays that we have right now. So the story started in 2013, when we stopped the mirrors and said, okay, we need to move to outdoor displays with this, and I think it was a good bet.
Did you find yourself going in the direction of outdoor displays because of market size or was it more the case of a company in Daktronics that specializes in large format, outdoor displays, was interested in it and therefore you had an automatic market partner?
Hans Feil: No, the funny thing is, when we were still at Phillips and we were looking for what kind of markets we would first do with Liquavista, with the technology. I did some research on different markets and I found out that outdoor display markets was in the sweet spot of the technology. But then, and we are talking about 2005 or something like that, the venture capitalist who invested in Liquavista really want to go in mobile displays. So it was at a time when Nokia was still big and the market was growing so reflective displays for cell phones was the automatic market and we put aside the outdoor display at that time.
So talking about my first PowerPoints I had and spreadsheet about market sizes for electro wedding displays for outdoor was already in 2005, so I had it always in my back of the minds and I had presentations ready when we made the switch. That's the reason why we visited Daktronics and a few others. So we didn't make the move to outward display just because of Daktronics, we had chosen for outdoor displays and it just fits with Daktronics.
So just like LED displays, the kind that are manufactured by Daktronics primarily, these displays have a pixel pitch, correct?
Hans Feil: Correct.
So there's a gap between each pixel basically?
Hans Feil:. Yes, they're point sources, sort of.
And right now it's 10 millimeters, which in LED terms would sometimes be referred to as P10 or something, but I'm reading that you anticipate that you can get it down to 2.5mm?
Hans Feil: Yes, that's correct. We already have made samples with TFT back planes with 2.5mm pixel pitch. So right now we have P10, so that are the first displays that we're making but the next stop would be 2.5 millimeter and also larger tiles.
At P10, that's very competitive with conventional billboards that you would see on the side of a road and up above a building, that sort of thing. 2.5 means you could have it as a sidewalk level display that somebody would be able to view quite nicely from say 10 feet away?
Hans Feil: Yes, exactly, like bus stops, sidewalks and that kinda stuff.
Yeah. Do you have to get even tighter than that, and is it possible if you wanted to do print and bus schedules and things like that?
Hans Feil: If we want to go to smaller pixel sizes, what's needed is somewhat thinner glass. So right now, the glass that we use is 0.5 millimeter and we have a stack of number of pieces of glass but if you go glass that’s 0.2 millimeter or 0.3 millimeter, we can go to pixel sizes of 1 or 1.5 millimeter.
Is that something that's possible, or it's not even developed yet by the glass manufacturers?
Hans Feil: Oh no, the glass is there. There's even thinner. Basically, we do it step by step, but the glass is there.
So this isn't a wish, it's just a when?
Hans Feil: Yeah, exactly. There are many things that are a when.
These units are, again, similar in certain respects to LED displays in terms of they have cabinets or tiles, and they stack together?
Hans Feil: Correct.
What are the sizes of these tiles, and are there limitations as to how many you can put together or is it modular and it can be as big as you want?
Hans Feil: It's modular. The the tiles that we have right now are roughly 10 inch, and we have six tiles in one panel. That's how we build the displays that we have here in our backyard. And the next step with 2.5 millimeter, we're looking for 21 inch tiles so there'll be bigger tiles and smaller pitch, but there are no limits in how big you can make the displays of it. It's just metal scaling up the electronics and it's all modular.
With the video support, I read that right now you're demonstrating animations and not full color video. Is there a reason for that or is just a matter that that's what makes sense right now?
Hans Feil: Yeah, that it's mostly electronics development. There are two parts to this, one is the uniformity of the tiles. We are constantly improving the uniformity so the gray scales and the gray scale definitions become better and better, so that's what's needed, and the electronics development is a separate thing since we have to see how fast we can make the electronics work with the number of gray levels we have. Right now, it's designed with 7 bits color so you can have 128 droplet sizes per color, which for reflective is very much, to be honest, the uniformity is not so good that we can really make this one on the 128 droplet sizes very precise. It's a little bit less but that's all about scaling up the electronics.
In the advertising world, generally speaking for digital out-of-home advertising, they're not using full motion anyways, except for spectaculars in Times Square and those big wrap arounds and so on. There's one heck of a lot of deployed stock that is just digital posters basically?
Hans Feil: Yeah, for example, along freeways, you're not allowed to do any animation and so on.
So as long as you can address full color and have the clarity that people want, they're happy?
Hans Feil: Yeah, with the first display out here, it was a test for us to see what's the color space that we can see, what's the impression that we have, and so far we are quite happy.
In fact, all the visitors that come along, many of them do not have very high expectations because they don't know what to expect with reflective colors and the the veterans, so to say, who have seen reflective displays before, they know when colors are dull. But everybody was surprised when they walk outdoor and see what we have in terms of color and brightness. People are amazed.
I believe I saw that these displays can handle 15,000 lumens, that's the maximum brightness?
Hans Feil: To be honest, we didn't measure it exactly yet. That really depends on how much sun comes on it. It scales perfectly with the with the amount of sunshine in the environment. It's like when you have newspaper, I don't have to tell you, of course, that newspaper in the bright sun is very bright but because your eyes are accommodated to the brightness of the environment, you don't do not really notice that it's so bright and that's the same with our display.
In fact, here’s a funny story, the cameraman who made his shots for the video clip that we have, he was he was used to taking shots of video or display and he suddenly realizes that he didn't have to adjust all his systems when the sun goes behind the cloud, the display didn’t become less bright because the trees and the grass, et cetera, also became less bright. It was then when he realized, okay this is different from what I've seen so far because LED displays are brighter compared to the surroundings all the time.
Yeah. It's wildly different, it's the opposite of outdoor LCDs, which are the primary things used for display totems to advertise street furniture, that kind of thing. They're always battling the sun, they've gotta be at least 2500 nits to eve overpower glare and so on, and you're saying, the brighter it is, the better it's gonna get?
Hans Feil: Oh yeah, it's fine. But also, today's very gray weather here and I've been there with visitors when it was raining in and it still looked pretty good. It's only when it's getting really dark, likewhen the sun goes down, then you really notice. But it's the same with your eReader. At some point of time, you realize, okay, now I do not see enough contrast anymore, I have to switch on my back light or front light or whatever you have.
That backlight or front light, whatever it may be, that's running off of a battery that's charged by solar collectors, right?
Hans Feil: Yeah, that's correct.
So you can be completely autonomous from electrical power grid, but is there enough power out of that battery to do cellular connectivity for updates?
Hans Feil: Yes, sure. In fact, the trailer that we have out here, that was designed to have an LED display mounted on it, so that there's a little bit big battery, but it's one solar panel, a lead acid batteries in this trailer. In fact, we have never charged this one, never. Previously we had a black and white display on it and with our color display, the power consumption of our display is so low, we don't need to charge it.
One thing I noticed in the reference photos is that the units have seams. It reminds me of 5-10 years ago when the LCD manufacturers every year would come up with some definition or description of even narrower bezel or seams in between the displays, and when LED came along, that got of a lot interest just because the seams went away, and people who were designing spaces were saying, okay, I wanna use LED instead, because there are no seams.
Are you getting any pushback about that about the seams that exist and will those with time go away?
Hans Feil: Pushback is a big word, but people do notice the seams, and although the seam here that we have here is smaller than the width of one pixel, so if you walk to the display, of course you see the seam, and we prefer to have narrow seams or no seams, but you can see the seams. If you walk away, they become less noticeable, and if you cannot discriminate between individual pixels anymore, then the seams are also becoming very thin or hardly visible.
With LED display, if you walk toward the display, at some point of time, you can see the individual LEDs, right? The image breaks down and it become little light dots. And in our case, you start noticing the seam more and more. If you're really standing in front of it, of course you’ll see many seams, but when you walk away on to say 30-50 feet for P10 pixel then it's hardly noticeable anymore. But again, of course, everybody wants to have thinner seams or no seams. So we have a program working on that to get them thinner, less noticeable. And also in future, when we go to larger tiles, seams will become thin.
We had a big outdoor advertiser here in Holland who who used our 100 square meters screens with P10 pixels, and said that this solution would be good, and not to worry about the seams very much because for 100 square meter display, you're standing 50 meters away or even more, and you won’t see the seams anymore.
Where's the product at, are you now shipping or is it still in R&D?
Hans Feil: No, we are now in the testing phase. So we have it out here in the backyard. The next display will be made and shipped to South Dakota for evaluating by Daktronics and their customers. By the end of the year, we are targeting to have a production capacity with our partner, URT in Taiwan, for 50 square meters per year, which isstill not much, but it's doable. And then early next year, we think the first display will be used by first customers here in the region because turns out there are parties that connected to us that have been waiting for low power display for many years but they couldn't go anywhere because the only thing that they had was LED, right? And now they have this option which some of them were looking for it for many years already.
We have a client who, every two years, was making calculations about power consumption of the display and every two years he was disappointed that it was never low enough, and now suddenly he got in touch with us and said, this is what I need. So he’ll probably use a number of our displays in the first half of next year.
Are the upfront costs for this going to be higher than that for the upfront cost of conventional LED displays for the same footprint and are the savings more on the backend because you're not using power?
Hans Feil: Yeah, that's correct. Right now, we are making them in small quantities So the price is not really reflecting how it can be. But indeed, there is a huge savings in situations where people have to make a connection to the grid, which can take months before they can get a connection, and it’s also very often very expensive. We had one small, black and white display in a New York City bus stop, it turns out to be that the solution with our displays in that bus stop with a solar panel and a battery was 30% cheaper than the original version with LED displays, which were connected to the grid.
This connection to the grid and all the work that, that goes along it and permits and so forth, make it very expensive. So even when there was a battery added and a solar panel added, and our display was more expensive than the LED one, it was much cheaper to have reflective displays. It was also new for us at that time.
So going forward into 2023, if I am a outdoor media company in, let's say Australia, and I want to buy this, am I going to be buying it through Daktronics, or will you be licensing this more broadly than that?
Hans Feil: Most likely through Daktronics. Probably the first smaller smaller display here in the region, we will install ourselves because that's more convenient, it's nearby, et cetera. But once this becomes bigger and more mature, it's our goal, our business plan that we will be creating the panels and Daktronics will make displays with those panels and sell them worldwide.
And as you scale up maybe the existing manufacturer in Taiwan who right now might be a contract manufacturer doing small lots, you would figure it out from there what kind of manufacturing capacity you’d need?
Hans Feil: Yeah. So for now that they have enough capacity, there should be no problem.
We are open for talks, the whole consortium of URT, Daktronics and ourselves, if there are any other major display company who says, okay, I also want to adopt electro wetting displays, because we always believe if we want to make this successful, we should not really keep it all for ourselves.
And there's lots of money to be made,-without a lot of grief-in licensing.
Hans Feil: Yeah, we're open to do anything that's reasonable. But there are many in fact, maybe all the major display companies that at some point of time tried making electro wetting displays and did R&D but they found it very difficult and stopped with it.
We have our own technology, what we call second generation technology with different approach and we solved all those problems that were there with the first generation electro wetting displays. It has taken some time, but it's worked quite well now.
I'm looking forward to seeing it at some point, somewhere. I hope I don't have to go to South Dakota in the middle of the winter, but you never know.
Hans Feil: Well, you could also come here, but I'm not sure if you are in Europe anytime soon.
Yeah, well, Eindhoven has a better football team than Brookings South Dakota, so that would be a better trip for me.
Anyway, thank you very much for spending some time with me.
Hans Feil: Yeah, I'm very glad that I got opportunity from you to talk about this. And I hope you can watch our display anytime soon, either here or in the US somewhere. Seeing is believing, in fact, and reflective is just different.
Yeah. I completely buy into the idea that it's one of those things that it's interesting to read and to hear about in a podcast, but to walk up and see it is where you're gonna close the deal.
Hans Feil: Yeah, exactly.
All right, thanks again.
Hans Feil: Thank you very much, and hope to see you soon.
Wednesday Nov 10, 2021
Florian Rotberg, Invidis
Wednesday Nov 10, 2021
Wednesday Nov 10, 2021
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
The Munich-based digital signage consultancy invidis has been doing an annual yearbook publication for the past decade that is something of an industry bible for the European and Middle Eastern markets, and with each annual edition it gets a little more detailed and broader in its scope.
The company does a German version and another one in English to service the rest of the region. There are many, many industry reports out there purporting to have a real understanding and data about the digital signage industry, but most of those reports are expensive and frankly not worth the money.
The invidis yearbook, in contrast, is rich in detail, and full of insights from people who know the business at an expert level.
And the best part, it's a free download - with the report bankrolled by sponsor advertisers.
I caught up with Florian Rotberg, one of the principals at invidis, to talk about this year's insights, and why the focal point for 2021 was on what they call green signage.
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TRANSCRIPT
Florian. Thank you for joining me. You're just back from Dubai!
Florian Rotberg: Thanks for having me. Yeah, it was very exciting in Dubai at Expo 2020, and we spent a few days there. It was still very hot, but it's fascinating to see how immersive signage can be in today's show.
Yeah. There's digital signage all through the Expo site, right?.
Florian Rotberg: It's fascinating. It’s LED with a lot of projections. During normal times, you don't see that much projection, but in this special country pavilion, there were 180 of them, it's fascinating to see. It's also great to see what works and what doesn't because some of the countries run out of money or never really had a good plan and you feel it immediately. So you enter the room and go, “oh, that's crap, I’m leaving,” and unfortunately, sometimes you have to wait two to three hours at some of the very popular pavilions. So then it's not a good experience, but in general, it's fascinating to see what's the coolest thing.
It's not only LED and projection, but it's also how that's really integrated in architecture and not only how it integrated into the room, but also a lot of mirrors. So one of my favorite things, and I've talked about it many times before, it's really how you combine signage, how you combine LED or projection with mirror. You can do fantastic things and you see some really cool pavilions.
Yeah. There was a new observatory that just opened up in New York, overlooking Madison Avenue in Midtown and it's got a big LED wall, but it's also three levels of mirrored ceilings and floors and walls and everything else and reflects like crazy. I was trying to wrap my head around it, but it's that kind of thing where it becomes just an infinite space.
Florian Rotberg: Exactly, and it feels immersive and it can create great experiences there, and we took 1400 photos and 70 hours of video, so we’ll put everything together in the next week we would publish it on Invidis Meets World on YouTube where you can watch it and we will show a lot of other stuff also obviously.
What is invidisXworld?
Florian Rotberg: So invidisXworld is something we started before the pandemic, and we decided because signage is so much about content, so much about the whole room, it's not only the digital canvas, but how people move in front of the screen and what a brand or the vendors really want to achieve.
And so we decided, we have to travel. We have to go there. We have to talk with the people who designed it, and we have to just experience ourselves and then to tell the audience how it really feels. So we just hired the camera team, and we went off to Sweden and to Berlin which is still both in Europe, so it was easier to reach, and we spent a week there and talked with dozens of experts and visited museums. Some of the museums just opened for us because they were all closed because of a lockdown, and we went to Volvo, to H&M, to different places, to headquarters and talk with the guys who are responsible for that. It's a fascinating show and people like it and we get quite good feedback.
So we're working in a visual medium, and you're actually using video?
Florian Rotberg: Yes!
How clever.
Florian Rotberg: To be honest, I always thought photos are so cool, it's so easy, but unfortunately video is so much better, but it's very expensive. It's not just you spending a week somewhere, you have a whole camera team, and almost like a broadcast team, we have a video guy, sound guy, a producer, and you have to feed them and that is sometimes difficult. So you have to manage them almost like kids, but at the end of the day, you get some really good footage afterwards and it’s worth the trouble.
For people who haven't been to Dubai, as you say, it's fascinating. I find it extremely weird, but the degree of digital signage there, all these projects, and a lot of them are big budget projects, are they instructive or are they one-offs where you look at them and go, that's really cool, but, that's not something that's ever going to scale?
Florian Rotberg: It's changing. In the past, it was just about the “wow of the moment” and afterwards, they all forgot about it. Nobody cared about maintenance, and after a year it just looked horrible, because nobody invested in content and nobody cared about it, and to be honest, even till today, the majority of the digital touchpoints are still not really connected to any backend systems or so and there are various reasons for that.
One is when they open something and then they forget about it. People change jobs really fast. So even the person who is responsible for that leaves a job after a year or so, and so nobody has ownership anymore, and last but not least, these countries are relatively small, so reaching scale is very difficult, even for big chains, maybe maybe 40 stores or so getting scale is difficult.
And they're interested in the “wow” and unfortunately not so much until four to five or seven year long contracts.
But you said it's changing?
Florian Rotberg: Yep. It's changing, getting smarter, getting more connected. To be honest, the region is the most digitally advanced region with a very young population.
They have two-three mobile phones, and they're very open to all of this stuff. So it is changing, and we talked, while we were there, to one of the biggest telecommunication companies there, and we were at one of their flagship stores and they now have 170 stores and they have really good connections, and they really think in customer journeys.
We also visited a smart hospital, which was really cool. You identify yourself when you enter the hospital with your ID card and then it takes a photo of you and then you walk through the hospital and it detects you and makes sure that you're in the right room, that the right person is there and everything. So very smart and they’re really starting to think about journeys and to improve processes. So at the smart hospital, the process before was three days with all the examinations until you got to stand for your visa renewal, and now it's down to 30 minutes, which is incredible, and this is only possible with digital.
So I wanted to chat for a number of reasons, but the principal one was the yearbook that Invidis puts out. Could you explain what that is and how it works?
Florian Rotberg: Some people call it the Bible of the industry. I'm not sure if I would call it that, but yeah, it's an annual book we have been publishing for 11 year now and it's free to download on Invidis.com and it basically gives a yearly update about the latest trends. We have lots of rankings there, especially this year since it was quite interesting. You know, like the largest CMS providers worldwide, and which verticals are most important for digital signage, etc.
We just give an analysis of the market, what has happened and also an outlook on what trends are coming up and what to understand, and the main topic this year is Green Signage. I know many of your listeners are based in North America, but over here in Europe, it's a huge topic. During the pandemic, the interest in more sustainable solutions has improved dramatically, and so more and more brands are looking to also operate their signage networks more sustainably, and what's most interesting when we did all the research is that 80% of the carbon footprint of a digital signage project is during operations. So for five-six years, the whole thing is operating. It's not so much the production, it's not so much the shipping. Yes, it's still 10-20%, but 80%, that's the biggest lever, and so it's not only about buying a more sustainable, more conscious signage solution, but it's really about how to improve existing installations.
And there are so many things you can improve and you can reduce power consumption with the right content. Turning it off at night, it's so unfortunate that the majority of the signage runs 24/7 even if there are no people around. Kiosks systems, they all run 24.7. There's no reason if a kiosk system is somewhere on a factory floor and the floor is closed or in the evening, or at night, it's still running. In the beginning, especially with LEDs, obviously they consume a lot of power. So there are a lot of levers and ways to be more conscious and more sustainable.
Do you think part of that is simply the early days of the legacy of digital signage software and hardware is that you were afraid to kind of power it down cause it would come back?
Florian Rotberg: Exactly. Yeah, that's the main thing, at least that’s what the technical integrators always say. Some, especially on some more recent screens, turn off the sensors, the light sensors and everything because the marketing department wanted the red as close as possible to their official red and obviously that doesn't work if you change the brightness of the screen but things are changing really fast.
And what's most interesting now with the pandemic and about sustainability is that signage has become a CEO topic for the first time. In the past years, they never really cared about digital signage, but now they really have to report it to their shareholders: how they could improve operations, where they could reduce the carbon footprint and digital signage plays an important role.
Interesting. The yearbook is primarily focused on Europe and the Middle East, right?
Florian Rotberg: Yes. That's how we started. We started this in Germany and then we extended it and now it's more or less all over Europe and every year we add a few more countries. Last big thing was the Nordics, and currently we're working on France, Spain and UK, so next year, we will also have rankings for these countries, and yeah, especially in Europe most markets were quite national markets and now some bigger international players are really growing and Europe is seen as one market, and so it's important to have all of them and that includes the UK.
Yeah, despite Brexit. Is what happens in Europe indicative of what is happening globally or is it its own thing?
Florian Rotberg: The whole green stuff is probably the most advanced in Europe.
Yeah, you don’t hear about it in North America. Honestly, I've never heard anybody bring it up.
Florian Rotberg: Yeah, but over here, especially in the Nordics, it's very important, and just for example, electricity is 10 times more expensive in Germany compared to Korea, for example. Even the designers and the engineers who create new solutions, they're not aware of how important power consumption is and life is changing, and I think this whole climate debate we are currently having, I think it will become more important, not only in Europe, but also in the US.
I know that Europe and the Middle East primarily, I've heard other people talk about the real action these days being in China and in India and I wonder how hard it must be, particularly with China, to try to wrap your arms around who the major players are, what activities are going on, any of those things?.
Florian Rotberg: Yeah, China is a very difficult market. There's a lot of potential but it’s very difficult as an analyst, really, to look at the market and it's so different.
Interestingly enough, there are a few bigger digital signage integrators based in Europe and North America who also have offices in China and they’re pretty much doing this stuff for all the big luxury brands and so. So there's some European and then North American guys who really are trying to do stuff in Shanghai and the big cities, but the general market is just huge, and you probably talked to Chris Regal or so, because he's very successful in India and in China, but he's targeting more of the mid market and the European players, they're just looking at how to bring Italian and French brands to China.
And those European brands and other brands, would they rather bring familiar companies into the country to do that for them, as opposed to hiring local firms?
Florian Rotberg: At the end of the day, that's the case, but that's also with North America, that's the success of the media to be honest. Media’s strength in Europe is that they represent America, the American customers here.
So what is happening in terms of the yearbook? Obviously we're hopefully coming out of a rather rough couple of years. I noticed in the report that the countries in Europe, at least that had a particularly rough time were France and the UK versus some of the other countries that were down, but not to the same level. Why did that happen?
Florian Rotberg: Because of the lockdown. We had different levels and different lengths of lockdown, and just looking at Australia, they had a three months lockdown. Now that obviously has a huge impact because the stores were closed, and even if it's a brand that’s willing to spend money and to upgrade the stores, they couldn't because technicians weren't allowed to enter the stores.
I know, in past discussions around this, that Europe's an interesting market in that dominant players in many respects are dominant by country, as opposed to across the continent?
Florian Rotberg: That has been the case, absolutely. But this is currently changing. So we have, we call them the Top 3, they are the three largest pure play digital signage integrators, and they've all been acquired more or less by private equity and now they're buying competitors in the big markets. All three of them really try to grow into a pan-European or international player.
But in relative terms to the North American guys, AVI, SPL, Diversified and Stratacache, they're tiny, right?
Florian Rotberg: They are tiny. They hope to change that but they are very small. But to be honest if you look at AVI, SPL or even Diversified, they're not pure digital signage, they do a lot of Pro AV, IT stuff, so you should compare apples with apples, but still X times larger than the biggest in Europe.
AVI, SPL just announced, I think, it's called the Experience Technology Group. So they seem to be recognizing that they need to get more serious about signage and venue based displays.
Florian Rotberg: Oh, yeah, and I love what they do. They're really smart in creating this platform to manage different AV solutions and everything. So I think that it's a smart approach, and also now looking out to create more immersive experiences because if you have expertise there, you can really export it throughout the world. So that works quite well.
But in Europe, we still have the problem of 25 different languages and really creating concepts, which you need to understand the culture and yes, there's a big difference between Sweden and Spain or Italy and Ireland also. So really to understand that, and that was a reason why there were large local players and still, if you look how these big three or at least three for European sizes and how they're growing, they all built up little local creative teams and sales teams in each countries because you need to have this local expertise, you need to speak the language of the client, and you need to understand what they really want to achieve.
You've done a ranking of the Top 10 Global CMS software platforms, and I'm making some assumptions that there are some CMS platforms in China that you and I probably have never even heard of and that they are probably huge as well. But were you surprised by who showed up on this list?
Florian Rotberg: Some surprises, yes. I mean there's a small asterisk next to it. So it's just the best of our knowledge, obviously. I'm sure there are many but one big problem is always Samsung. They never report anything, and it's really difficult.
So the largest one is Stratacache. It's a little bit more than 3 million active licenses, and one of the surprises was that the top three players were Navori. I'm not sure if many of your listeners have heard about Navori. They're based in Switzerland.
They're pretty big in North America actually.
Florian Rotberg: Yeah, not so much in Europe, funnily enough, even though they came out of Europe and yes, they have more than 1 million active subscribers. So that's quite cool, and then you see some more vertical ones who are growing through acquisitions a lot and socialists like BroadSign, it's great to see. We have followed BroadSign for more than 15 years now, and it's great to see how they have become the standard in the digital out-of-home industry. It’s quite impressive.
Yeah, they've risen to a level where they pretty much own that vertical and I always try to coach software companies that you really don't want to be a generalist. You want to have a focus on something and they probably more than anybody have done that in digital out-of-home.
Florian Rotberg: Yeah, but the same with Four Winds etc., they all are specialists, or at least they are focusing more and more on certain verticals.
Yeah, Four Winds barely calls itself a digital signage company now. They're talking about the workplace and the same with Ops Space.
Florian Rotberg: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I think there was just an announcement in that space today.
So what are you seeing in terms of trends in the industry? As you mentioned, the shift to, or the interest in green signage is one thing. What else are you seeing happening out there?
Florian Rotberg: The biggest challenge currently across the world is to manage the supply chain shortage. Unfortunately, that won't go away in 2022. If you read the Financial Times, if you talk to all the people, you just read it every day and most people expect that to last at least until the end of next year.
And that's pretty bad news because the order books are as full as they were before. There's a lot of demand for signage at the end of the pandemic, and unfortunately 2022 will still be a difficult year. Secondly, we have a shortage of talents and whoever you talk to, I'm sure you also get calls about companies saying, we're desperately looking for a new manager and I get them every day and that's a huge issue and then shortage in diversity, shortages of women, of everything. It's still a very male dominated thing, and today InfoComm opened and I'm sure the majority of them are men, as always, and so we see these three shortages: supply chain, talent and diversity.
When I get asked to organize panels particularly with an organization like the AVIXA, which has diversity initiatives and everything else, they really encourage me to make sure that I'm finding women and people of color and so on, and I'm completely supportive of that, but it's hard.
Florian Rotberg: It is hard, yeah. It's not easy. I fully understand, but alsowhen you look more in the new work, in the hybrid world, it's all about hybrid and that's very challenging for everyone. It's easy to have everyone at home. It's easy to have everyone on location, but managing these hybrid workspaces is very difficult. How can you create meetings where everything feels included and often you communicate with eyes and with every single one that's very difficult to do when alf of the people are somewhere at home or so. So you need lots of creativity and innovative solutions to manage that. So that's also something which will definitely remain.
And we're seeing gimmicks coming up there, like this idea of the metaverse and using quasi holograms, so that it feels like you're sitting across from a real person when it's not obviously, do you see any potential for that stuff?
Florian Rotberg: To be honest, it's a one way road because it's nice for the guys who are in the office, but for the guys who are sitting at home in front of this small screen, it doesn't help them at all, and you need to have both sides and you need to empower both sides, and so I think at the end of the day, it's difficult to solve and we haven't seen any solution.
I think the cool part is teleportation stuff, and last week in Dubai, there was also an IT show. It was just the biggest and it was unbelievable how full it was like before the pandemic, and they had these cool mirrors and everything. So it looked like somebody was in the room, when obviously he wasn't. And so it's great to see, but it doesn't help people at home, and so that still remains a challenge.
And I wanted to go to that show. I've seen some videos of some booths from some companies, and it looked insane.
Florian Rotberg: It was, and a lot of booth people were waiting an hour more. Can you imagine that? Just to enter the booth because it was so full, it was unbelievable. We all had to wear a mask, no question about it, but we waited more than an hour just to get in. So yeah, it was amazing, and we produced lots of videos and we will publish that in the next couple of days.
It's really cool stuff, especially in regards to retail technology, all the cool stuff, all the fancy things were robots and solar, but also AI and how it really works, and then some simpler solutions in all of these checkout carts and everything, and also these devices which measure you so you don't have to find the right size without using camera technology, because obviously that's something which most people don't like. And it's interesting to see what kind of solutions there are. Much of the stuff, it's really something where you're thinking, oh, it'd be great. If they would roll that out in the future, the majority of them are still in the prototype phase, but hopefully we will see lots of this coming up.
Your report coined a term, “Deep Signage” which I had not seen before, but I understand it and this idea of integrating back office systems with other business systems within a company. It sounds like that, particularly in Dubai, is really coming into play.
Florian Rotberg: Yeah, we try to form this term, deep signage, because for us, it's important that you connect as much as possible, as long as digital is just a layout on something existing. It won't really offer the experiences everyone needs and the benefits. So you have to connect it to the back office, and especially when we talk about moving away from just digital signage CMS, all the way to a digital experience platform, then you need to mix everything and then really connect. So deep signage is something we believe is one step towards digital experience.
Yeah, and how do you define digital experience platforms?
Florian Rotberg: Oh, that's difficult. Yeah, when you download our book, we have a little picture there, and it's four stages. We start with a digital poster, which is the most simple one. Then we have digital signage, then we have a digital signage experience platform, and then the ultimate is digital experience platform, because there's a totally different approach to it, and when we talk about DXP, it’s not digital signage or mobile or online, which is in focus, but it's really the data, it's the experience which is in focus regardless on which channel you play it out, and it's really orchestration of all of the different channels and different stories and media platforms, and that's what digital experience platform is about.
But then many customers ask us who does it and who's good at it, and it's very difficult. There are only very few companies and most of them are totally vertically organized players like Zara,, I'm sure you know them, because they do everything, they own the factory, they own the warehouse, they own the shops, and they own the data and for them, it doesn't matter if you go into a store, try something out and decide to buy it online, because they own the whole value chain and this is one of the few companies who really are able to deliver a DXP and make the most of it, but more will come definitely.
If you're a smaller company, is it something you can even contemplate at a different kind of scale?
Florian Rotberg: No, it's not worth it. I think you need to be very large, to be honest, and to really put up a DXP project, you probably need a few million just for setting it up.
You mentioned private equity companies and some of the integrators in Europe, or are you seeing a lot of private equity activity?
Florian Rotberg: Yes, it’s unbelievable. So much money in the market. That's the reason that conservation is speeding up so fast, it's unbelievable.
Why do you think that is right now? Is it distressed companies?
Florian Rotberg: No. We were surprised not at all, but maybe that's also a European thing because the governments took care of that and so most of them kept their employees, which is a good thing now, because they didn't have to retrain new people so it's not about that.
It's more about that the crisis wasn't really an economic crisis. It was more of a human crisis, and so most companies still have a lot of money, except if you are a Chinese real estate company, then maybe you don’t. But in general, they have a lot of money. The private equity companies, they're looking for new ways of spending it, and they all buy into the digitization of stationary retail. They fully understand that times have changed and you can only survive if you're fully digital, and so that's probably why they like it.
And then there are also some of the trends like we have the first valuation of more than a hundred million in Europe for an integrator, and this is one of the thresholds where, you know, private equity likes to come into the market. Zeta Display, they were almost at a hundred million valuation and it's not much compared to the top three in the US but for Europe, that's quite big, and that that made it really interesting for many others.
You also, in the report, talk about changing roles of the different companies in the ecosystem and how there are dinosaurs, disruptors and discovers. What do you mean by that?
Florian Rotberg: Ah, that's quite interesting, especially when you look at software companies, some of them are reinventing themselves, and in the past,, there was the value chain and there were clearly defined roles. There was an integrator, the integrator usually owns the lead with the customer and he chose certain software and certain hardware and that was it basically, and then you did some stuff in the back and, but I think Chris Regal was the first one, when he quit Scala, he said “oh, I'm sick of just having 3-5% of the project, I want to have more”, and so he decided to build around software this whole end to end solution.
And then other companies, software companies from Sweden and other parts of Europe, they're really also trying to change the way the value chain works. So they really want to be ISV+. So they want to do everything except hardware . Obviously the investors love that because that's every single sale which would have recurring revenue and nobody wants to touch hardware, and Chris Regal always tells us that you need to also to understand how to learn, to manage it. Otherwise the service you mentioned will be really expensive. So it's interesting to see if this ISV+ model will work out for them.
So that sounds like the dinosaurs are those who refused to adjust and adapt, and the disruptors are those that are doing things differently?
Florian Rotberg: Yup. We have some smaller, more aggressive players coming into the market and also players like Spector, many people hadn't heard about them and now they have become really relevant
And there are also companies that, in some cases, are very large companies that can come into the market from outside, like consulting companies like Deloitte and so on and disrupt things as well, right?
Florian Rotberg: Absolutely. On a different level, but yes, Accenture, Deloitte, all of these guys and they are really close to the big enterprise. So usually they do at least double digits, sometimes triple digit contracts with blue chip companies every year and they're trusted names. So it's an easy one for BMW, Adidas, Nike, or whatever to hire one of them and to ask them to create a new digital concept. Unfortunately, most of them don't know how digital signage works.
Yeah. So they always invent this great stuff. It looks fantastic on PowerPoint and everything, but then at the end of the day, they need to subcontract it to the signage contractor to solve the whole thing and make it work, and we have also seen the big four have failed as a digital signage company, and so it's interesting, but eventually they will buy some digital signage companies I think.
Or hire smart people, you know? Over here in North America, I think about Gensler and Publicis Sapient, and they have some super smart people working for them now who really get this space and get the technology and everything else. So they're getting there, but it's a very small percentage of people within very large companies..
Florian Rotberg: You mentioned Gensler, it's fascinating, and I'm sure we talked to the same people there and it's really fascinating how with new projects now, they make more money with digital stuff rather than the traditional architectural stuff. So that's fascinating. Not revenue wise, but from the bottom line, and that's interesting to see because if you do digital consulting, obviously your margin is higher than with your standard architectural work. So it's fascinating to see how architectural companies like this are really getting into the digital space and if you don't see it as just a layer really integrated, you need to plan it from day one.
Last question: Is there a piece of technology or an emerging technology that gets you particularly excited?
Florian Rotberg: We are both not the youngest anymore. We have seen many technologies come and go, and I know one thing that never works is 3D.
So we were a little bit surprised to see how 3D in this false perspective on this LED wall worked, but I still think it's a hype, to be honest.
Analytics, sensors, and IOT will make a difference, no question about it. But it’s not one technology, it's more, I think a mindset of connecting everything and measuring everything and adapting to the audience in the milliseconds. I think that's something we're changing. It's probably a whole range of different technologies.
Yeah, I'm of the same mindset. I tell people that the stuff that excites me would probably bore the pants off of them, and just in terms of its the operational stuff is being able to affect messaging based on what the data is telling you, and it may be really boring saying, go this way instead of that way, because that's too busy over there or whatever, but that's fabulous stuff and it makes a difference or whatever venue it is works.
Florian Rotberg: Exactly. It's more the stuff under the hood, which really gets me excited and that's also where you can really improve processes where you can really add value, and so that's what we are mostly working on, and obviously customers want to pay for the glittery stuff on top of the rest. But no, but that's where we see the biggest changes happening in the future.
So if people want to read the 2021 year book, how do they get it?
Florian Rotberg: It's free to download at invidis.com and I think you also published an article, so you can also find it on your website a link to that, but it's free to download, it's 200 pages and not only this year's edition, but if you also want to read some auditions, please come to our website a and download it there.
And you're able to produce it for free because you get advertising sponsors to support it, right?
Florian Rotberg: Yes, but it's still more work than we get from advertisements, I can tell you that
It was a pleasure catching up with you as always.
Florian Rotberg: Thanks for having me.
Wednesday Sep 22, 2021
David Labuskes, AVIXA
Wednesday Sep 22, 2021
Wednesday Sep 22, 2021
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
There is a whole pile of back seat driving happening lately in the pro AV and digital signage communities about how to run a trade show in the COVID-19 era, and much of the focus has squarely been on Dave Labuskes, the CEO of AVIXA, which runs InfoComm and co-owns the even larger trade show ISE.
The show is happening in about a month in Orlando, and with other big trade shows saying never mind for 2021, there are endless questions and suggestions about the prospects of the show even happening.
It will, says Labuskes, unless there are measures like government-mandated closures. Given that the show is in Florida, that's probably not going to happen.
Labuskes has done some frank interviews lately that went into deep detail about InfoComm and COVID, and the business. I spoke with Labuskes late last week and did not see the value in rehashing and revisiting a lot of what he said, so in our chat we talk a little about how things will come off and why. But we spend a lot more time on bigger picture stuff about how trade shows fit, and whether a niche industry like digital signage can find a well-defined home and community at big, omni AV shows like Infocomm and ISE.
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TRANSCRIPT
Mr Labuskes, thank you for joining me. I wanted to get into a number of things, but I also didn't want to just rehash some recent conversations you had in an hour long interview last week with Tim Albright from AVnation that went into a lot of frank discussion about where InfoComm is at and everything associated with that, but I can’t cCompletely ignore that, and I just wanted to ask, where are things now , has anything changed in the last week since I watched that interview?
Dave Labuskes: Mr. Haynes, it's good to be here. There have been a couple of other events that have announced cancellations, but there's been nothing that's changed in AVIXA's policy with regards to InfoComm. We still see a runway to a fantastic event with fantastic people conducting fantastic business.
It's been described as being the last trade show standing this fall, but that's not really true. There's all kinds of events going on here, there, and everywhere.
Dave Labuskes: Yeah. There's a lot that's described that isn't necessarily really true, David. But yeah there's events and trade shows happening every day, all around the world, and I'm actually a little confused. For an industry that is really based on overcoming challenges and doing the impossible and making things happen that nobody believed could actually happen, there is that sort of a sentiment that trade shows can't take place right now and that just simply is not true. They're taking place every day.
So I have mixed opinions personally. I was supposed to be doing a mixer down at InfoComm and decided not to do that, and that wasn't really so much about I don't think InfoComm should even happen or anything else, it was just as simply a fact of, I didn't quite see how a cocktail party, where everybody was wearing a mask and being asked to stand six feet apart would work terribly well and the optics were weird.
It's one of those things where I could see a trade show happening, but I didn't see that happening well, and we don't need to get into all of that. I'm curious more about whether or not you're enjoying all the armchair opinions from people who say what you should be doing, but have never actually run a tradeshow?
Dave Labuskes: Before I had this job, I was a partner at a large architectural engineering firm, and one of the gentlemen that was on the search committee that was interviewing me for this job, James Ford, owner of Ford AV and I'll never forget where he was sitting in the boardroom, he leaned forward and said, “Dave, you've got a really good gig, like why would you want this job?” And I'm like that's a great question, and I try to answer it, and he's like, “But Dave, here's the thing: You're running one of the largest consulting practices in the world and if you have a management meeting and you decide to go liveleft, then everybody's going to leave that meeting and they're going to go left, and the jobs that you're interviewing for you and your team are going to decide to go left, and then 50,000 people are going to tell you, you should go right!”
I actually celebrate varied opinions. I do think a lot of people express an expertise that is perhaps inflated in their own perception. Trade shows, they're a complicated industry. I've been doing this now for eight years and I have people on my team that have forgotten twice what I'll ever know. The interplay between the various different constraints, the challenges that people throw out there as though they're simple challenges. Yeah, they're a little frustrating, but I signed up for it. Nobody made me do this job. I was forewarned, so maybe I'm the one that has an exaggerated impression of my expertise.
Is part of the problem just simply that it's Florida and Florida is this eternally weird place at the best of times, but it's got a particular problem and people all the way up to the governor of the state who don't seem to recognize that, “Hey, maybe there's a bit of a problem happening here.”?
Dave Labuskes: Yeah. I think I'll be a little more politically correct than that, and it was nice for you to try it, but it isn't my first rodeo here.
(Laughter) I wasn't trying to bait you. I just think that's a big part of it and the people, the armchair opinion makers who say why don't you just move it or why didn't you just do it in another city? There's a little bit of baggage associated with doing that but just simply speaking, it's a part of the country that has a particular exacerbated problem, but doesn't seem to want to recognize that it has an exacerbated problem.
Dave Labuskes: It all comes from the jurisdictions and it all comes down to point of reference, right? You can also just say, is it the problem that the event is in the United States, right? Because if you look at the United States and compare the United States to other countries, we're not necessarily getting a straight-A report card.
What I have said, and I know we don't want to have the same conversation I've had already with others, is that I don't think the brush that should be used in making that decision is Florida. I think the brush that we should use in painting that picture is Orange County. There's parts of California that may or may not be behaving in the same fashion you or I would do.
So I think you have to look at where are you going to fly into, where you're going to be, where are you going to have dinner, where are you going to sleep? Those types of things, and when you get to that stage orange county this morning had 79.4% of their population over the age 18 having had one shot of the vaccine. They've got a mask order that was issued by the mayor strongly recommending that masks be worn inside any public space. They've got plummeting hospitalization rates, death rates, positivity rates at 12.4%, I believe.
So, I think, unfortunately the world and this country and all of the states have this polarization thing going on, and yeah, would it be more comfortable for people to attend an event somewhere else that are looking from afar and don't take time to do all that research? Probably. The headline, the abbreviated picture, is challenging, but I do think that there are people that are going to make a decision that attending a trade show weighed against other factors just isn't for them this year, and I think they'd make that decision regardless of where it is.
Yeah. I guess that's the other thing that you didn't know you were signing up for was having an extensive ability to talk in genealogical terms.
Dave Labuskes: This is a true story, David. Last year, I came home from the office, and at dinner I said to my wife and son I spent an hour today reading a scientific study about the efficacy of washing your hands with cold water versus hot water, and that is not something I ever anticipated taking place in my career, I will admit that. (Laughter)
By the way, it is just as good. You just don't tend to wash them as long because it's less comfortable, but...
I'm just impressed I was able to say epidemiology.
Dave Labuskes: Happy with that. These are words that were not part of our vocabulary two years ago, right?
Just drafting off of some of that: CEDIA which AVIXA has a relationship with because you co-own ISC had their event last week or the week before in Indianapolis and I won't go into how that went business-wise or anything else, but I'm curious if you had AVIXA folks there and did they see how things were done? I know they had signage and kind of cues on whether you are comfortable with people coming close and all that sort of stuff. Did those things work?
Were there things that you learned from that you can take away and apply to InfoComm?
Dave Labuskes: First part of the question: No, we didn't have anybody from AVIXA at that event that I'm aware of. Not that I know of, but I'm sure there were people there that were AVIXA members. We do have a close relationship with CEDIA. Obviously we have a partnership over a very large joint venture that owns and operates ISC and ISR and DSS. The show itself is owned by Emerald Expositions, and we have our conversational talking relationship with Emerald as well. In fact I have a call next week with Emerald to talk through lessons learned.
I was in Louisville, Kentucky a couple of weeks ago at a SISO conference, which is the Society of Independent Show Operators. So it's Emerald, Informa, and mostly the for-profit trade show organizers and AVIXA was invited to attend. The industry of trade show organizers and meeting planners and event planners, we've joined arms and we recognize that this is a problem for all of us that we have to share best practices with, we have to share learnings with, we have to talk about what works and doesn't work.
It's kinda like the AV industry and as I'm learning more about it, the digital signage industry where people compete, but they also have a comradery where a rising tide lifts all ships kind of a thing, and so I think all trade show operators are working through this, associations as well are famously collaborating with regards to sharing information and learning and helping each other. So that's a good part of the pandemic.
I would imagine one of the things that all these organizations collectively learned, if they didn't already know it, is that the whole virtual trade show thing just really doesn't work. Does it?
Dave Labuskes: It certainly didn't work in v1.0 of 2020. I think v1.5, and we're starting to get closer to 2.0, I think there's hope for it. The best visual I saw over the last 18 months is talking about books versus movies, and you don't convert a book to a movie by putting it on a podium and filming somebody turning the pages. And I think that probably is a closely apt description of what we all did with our first version of the virtual events. But I think you can tell a story, very effectively in print or in film, leveraging and celebrating the differences of the media.
Where I am at now and where AVIXA is driving towards, and you'll see more developments about this in the next couple months is more about how AVIXA delivers on its mission, leveraging physical events and digital platforms, and how do they interface and interact with each other? How do they mutually benefit each other? What's good in one, that's not good in the other?
Not a lot of good, special effects when you're reading a book, but a lot of great imagination when you're reading a book. Not a lot of ability to be character development through introspection in a movie, but it's really easy to do that when you're reading.
I think if you look at education, you look at delivery of information from provider to consumer, that can be done pretty effectively digitally. I think about human interaction and the break time during class is almost impossible to create digitally. That doesn't mean it is impossible. So I see a lot of assumptions that we made in order to achieve X, we needed to convene people face-to-face being challenged. But I also think that all of the pundits that got online in March and April of last year and said, this is the end of face-to-face, and we're going to be digital for the rest of our lives, have seen that they were probably not right with that either.
I think the one thing that I took away, or what I have enjoyed about these virtual events is the ability to attend round tables panels presentations on demand. So I don't need to be somewhere or sit at a certain place, set aside things then at 10:00 AM, I'm going to watch this.
Just the simple fact that I got stuff going on. I can't do this today or right now, that I could click on it and see. Yeah, somebody from Brand X explaining this to me on my terms, and if I'm bored, I just click out, I don't have to stand up and walk out of the room and embarrass the presenter or anything like that. That part I like.
Dave Labuskes: I do too, and that's the irony of it is. If one of the things that all of us like is the absence of time and geography constraints, right? So it doesn't matter if that panel discussions take place in London or Nova Scotia or Orlando, you can still receive the outcome of that panel.
Why are we saying that they should be organized and delivered between 9:00 AM and 4:00 PM Eastern time on Tuesday and Wednesday of next week? That's where I get to this. I think it's more about a digital presence and digital community, a place where people interact when it's appropriate for them to interact, where they can organize their interaction times.
I'm old enough to have been in chat rooms on Prodigy and AOL and you remember you would organize with people like I'm going to be on at eight o'clock tonight for an hour, because you can only afford an hour. Because we were charged by the minute, and then I think that's what we have to recognize. So in that regard, I'm really excited about the fact that I'm not a trade show organizer, instead I’m an association that is committed to an industry and an industry community, and what I can do is build that community both digitally and physically.
What do you think of the suggestion that the days of the big macro show are cloudy and that regionalized events make more sense, so an InfoComm Southwest, an ISE UK, that sort of thing? And granted that was tried a little bit in the past year, but that was out of necessity as opposed to design.
Dave Labuskes: Yeah, I'm intrigued by it. But I think the loudest proponents of it are the attendees, not the exhibitors and the attendees don't pay. Doing ten small shows only costs a little less than doing one big show or less than doing then ten times doing one big show. The cost of doing a show has a fixed amount. Even in the smallest show, you're going to pay an X and then get to the big show, you may only be paying 2X where if you're doing a regional show, like 10 times, you are close to 10X, and your ROI on each of those events is smaller because your audience is small.
Now that's using all the old rules. So if we go back to the last question, if I can segment an audience for an exhibitor and say, I'm going to bring people that have spending authority over half a million dollars that have a project next three months, it's going to require a high-end audio system. That's going to change that algebra, and so I don't think you throw it out the window, but economics has a factor in these things and it's easy to say I would rather go to a small event in Nashville, but the problem is I have to find somebody to pay for it, and even if you say I'm happier to go to a small event in Nashville, I bet you don't want to spend $195 for a ticket to go to that event?
I get the hunger for it. I get the desire for it, but I don't see a business model around it right now. We've never been successful at small events being profitable. There have been good strategies like, before ISE launched. We did small roadshow events from country to country, it was before my time, but I hear stories from the old timers about the amazing sort of experience of going from hotel room or hotel conference to hotel conference across from Warsaw to Budapest to Rome type thing. And we've done them in advance of launching our Bangkok show. We did it in advance of launching our Mumbai show, but those become feeders to a larger event that has a more sustainable business model. We did a lot of what we used to call round tables, for example, we did the AVIXA round table in Baltimore where you'd have 15, 20, maybe 30 people come to them, and so you were spending a lot of money on an event that served 15, 20 or 30 people, and we just felt like there were better ways of spending the industry's money than that.
The demise of Digital Signage Expo certainly raised the eyebrows at AVIXA and got you guys thinking, although you've always had digital signage as a component, you've had pavilions for many years, but there was an opportunity and a sense that something needed to fill that void. Granted, it's been refilled to some degree since then, but the show hasn't happened yet so we'll see how that comes off.
How do you build up the digital signage affinity for InfoComm? Cause I've gone for many years, but I go to have a look at the gear. I'm not a gear head, but I write about it and everything else, but I don't really see it as an end-user show where a big retailer, those kinds of people are going to come to that they maybe they send their gearheads, but more likely it's the integrators that sell into big retail and so on are there are there, so how do you make all that kind of come together over the next couple of years?
Dave Labuskes: Boy, there's so much in that question, David. We should talk more often, I enjoy this.
Yes, it is an unfortunate demise and it didn't get folks in the AVIXA thinking. Yes, we've been looking at the digital signage industry for a long time. I do think it's a community within the larger industry that needs to be celebrated, and that's that other point with regards to small regional shows versus big shows. I think we see lots more shows within shows taking place, and I think that's probably the right solution, and I'm biased. I think AVIXA has the right place to build a home within a home for the digital signage community.
First of all: there was this interesting dynamic between the association and the show operator, right? From an association perspective AVIXA has been having conversations with DSF, with DS-LATAM, with digital signage of Asia, and the various different entities in Europe. When you move from our association to association, one of the ways I think I actually described it to Rich Ventura, he and I were talking probably years ago and it's like you and I, David, are best friends, but our dads owns the competing gas stations on the corner, and so we can go to school and everything and be friends there but when we came home there's limits.
That was kinda how I felt like it was and I felt like there's a window there to not have that dynamic. Now, some of that's changed and I respect Questex. I respect Paul and don't know him well, but I know him and I've had conversations with him and he's a smart guy and I believe he's committed to delivering a successful event. I think it's being honest, looking at what does an organization want, what is the community best one? And making honest agreements and commitments to each other, and then keeping them. There are advantages to working together, and I think the end goal is that “home within a home” and “a community within a community.”
I think the challenge and opportunity for digital signage and InfoComm is the scale of the InfoComm show and the specificity and the heart and relationship with the digital signage community, and I think if we work together, we can build that home within a home. I think it can be more than a guest room. It can be an in-law apartment. It can be a place where it's identified and that's, yeah, I'm disappointed that you're not going to be there, and I know the mixture is just one manifestation of that home within a home, and we look forward to being able to do it in the future.
Absolutely. One of the logistical problems or mechanical problems, so to speak, with a big show like an InfoComm is: yes, you've created these pavilions through the years of digital signage pavilion and some of the vendors have been in that, designated zone, so to speak, but the biggest players are the display manufacturers, and they've always had their spots, their Primo spots, and they're serving a whole bunch of audiences at InfoComm, not just the digital signage people. So how do you figure out a way to create a show within a show when you've got Sony in the front row, Samsung's got a giant booth in the middle of the hall and so on. You're never going to be able to herd them all into one hall, so to speak?
Dave Labuskes: Yeah, so what do you do then? I think what you have to do and we're down to the details of tactics, right? But I think you start to curate attendees' journeys. You use content as the honey to attract and people will come where content is and content can be delivered where people are, and that's the challenge of starting a trade show, but we've done that. We know how to form a trade show and it takes time and it takes continual feeding until it becomes a self-feeding cycle, and then you have to create a journey that is guided a bit so the attendees that are coming from retail or the attendees that are coming from the advertising agencies can get to where they will be able to extract value and some of that will require tour guides, not maps and serendipity, because it's too big to just let somebody lose, but we have that problem now with end users in general at the show, you described as gearheads, but about 40% of the attendees at a typical InfoComm are end user buyers. It's part of what makes that show so valuable to exhibitors.
A lot of them are brought there by channel members. The consultants are bringing their customers, the integrators are bringing their customers. But a lot of them are brought there by us too, with promoting them and developing conference content that would be of interest to them, creating a nucleus of community. It's all very explicit, but it doesn't happen by chance. There are hosted buyers that are brought in to shows around the world. There are groups that are sponsored. There are other associations that are partnered with. Richard runs our Asian subsidiary. He's a genius at identifying influential associations within the geographies and partnering with them to offer programs. Organizations like the Indian Architects Association are partnered with our InfoComm Mumbai event, and they are holding content conferences for architects in conjunction with our event. All of our channels want architects at it. Those types of strategies are part of the town and the team that works on these.
Last question, looking ahead a few months to ISE and it's hard to do the crystal ball thing, but I gather things are calmer in Spain. I don't hear very many people at all saying, hell no, we're not going to Barcelona or anything else, maybe that'll bubble up, who knows? But is ISC in Barcelona going to be normal-ish?
Dave Labuskes: Yes, I think so. Again, like you said, the crystal balls are not crystal clear and now, after the last series of conversations, I think I'm going to put the crystal ball into the same place where I put “pivot” and “agile” and “unprecedented” but yeah, the biggest indicator that you would have about and event like ISC at this stage five months out is sold show floor space, right?
I don't think we've even opened registration for attendees yet, and show floor sales are, I think they're probably about 8% off of 2020. I guess there's no such thing as quoting me because we're recording this, but it's within that ballpark of the size of the last event at the Rye, which is, really the last event to compare it to. So if it's 90% of that size, 80% of that size, I think that's, that absolutely fits into your technical definition of normal.
And there were lots of people who said, because you're going to Barcelona, as awesome a place as it is, it may mean you see a slight drop because people who might go to ISC in Amsterdam, because they can drive there, maybe would not go all the way to Barcelona?
Dave Labuskes: Yeah, but there's other people that are going to drive to Barcelona that wouldn't have driven to Amsterdam. And yeah not a hundred percent a repeat audience, but…
Well, I’m not driving to Barcelona.
Dave Labuskes: Yeah, me neither. (Laughter)
That's those armchair spectators that you talked about earlier, right? We did the homework to make a determination about that, and we love the Rye. We would love to have stayed at the Rye, but the Rye isn’t big enough to hold the show as it was moving forward in the future and it was starting to have a negative impact on attendee experience and you start to have those different factors impact a show and reach the value of the show.
I'll just be happy if I can find my way around.
Dave Labuskes: Yeah, it's a beautiful city. I'll tell you what it's like. It's the opposite of the Rye. It was one of the things I joked with Mike about. Finally I figured out how to get through the Eye without getting lost, and now we've decided to move the show.
Yeah, me too.
All right. I appreciate you taking some time with me. I suspect you're a busy fellow these days.
Dave Labuskes: Never too busy for you, sir. Congratulations on your recent deal. I'm really happy for you.
Thank you!
Wednesday Jul 14, 2021
Sean Wargo and Peter Hansen, AVIXA
Wednesday Jul 14, 2021
Wednesday Jul 14, 2021
The trade organization AVIXA invests a lot of time, resources and dollars into trying to get a handle on what's going on in the audio-visual industry, and regularly publishes reports, briefs and even video explainers for members.
One of the big efforts is an annual industry overview, and the the most recent one provides a picture of industry that got kicked really hard in the shins in 2020 but appears to be coming out of it now.
Sean Wargo, AVIXA’s Senior Director of Market Intelligence, and economic analyst Peter Hansen kindly set some time aside to walk through some of the findings, and drill down a little more specifically into how digital signage was impacted in the last 18 months or so, and how things look going forward.
The good news is things are already looking up, and the forecast is pretty darn sunny for AV and signage.
The cloud platform I use for recording had a bad hair day, so you will come across a little back and forth about who could hear who, and Peter's audio eventually just disappeared on us from the file, so the episode is about five minutes shorter than normal as we nipped out the dead-silence and stitched it together. Things happen but it is still well worth a listen.
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TRANSCRIPT
Hi guys, thanks for joining me. AVIXA does a lot of research about what's going on in the marketplace. You recently pushed out a big one. What's that all about and what did you find? I know that's a big question.
Sean: Sure Dave, happy to be here. So we do an industry forecasting effort every year, that we refresh every year, we call it our Industry Outlook Trends Analysis (IOTA), Since we're in the tech industry, we have to have acronyms, of course. But the idea is that we're hoping to essentially provide guidance on the size and direction of all things proAV. We've drawn a pretty big definition for what that means, some more IT-sounding technologies are sometimes included.
Long story short: the idea there is a revenue forecast that companies can use to see where the opportunities lie, challenges, etc. As you can imagine, particularly important as we come out of the pandemic and are looking towards recovery.
Now, is that something that as an AVIXA member is expected, or is it a bonus part of membership? I don't belong to a whole bunch of industry associations, so I don't know if this is normal or something you just saw a hole and decided it needed to be filled.
Sean: Yes, in the sense that most trade associations will do some sort of industry forecasting effort. AVIXA, formerly known as InfoComm, had studies that had been done through the years. We decided to do it a few years ago, it was to step up the game a little bit, go a bit deeper, broader with our analysis, and expand upon that forecasting effort. So we have a two-part offering to the marketplace.
There is a lot of that research that we will share with the membership, whether in the form of briefings, webinars, presentations that Peter and I will do out to the membership to help them understand the broader trends. But we also offer it as a paid offering. So dashboards, deep reports, forecasting notes, a whole bunch of additional deliverables that a company can buy into for those that are really needing to immerse themselves in data to make strategic decisions. So a little bit about a little bit of both.
As somebody who spends all this time looking at this industry and writing about it, one of the challenges I've found is finding useful, relevant, trustworthy information about digital signage in particular, there are endless reports that you can see pop up on Google alerts, but they're all coming out of India, and the handful of what I would call legitimate research companies that are taking a look at this space are also generally looking at other stuff.
So there's this real sort of absence of focused information about AV and particularly signage, at least it seems that way.
Sean: Yeah, definitely true.
I think there are a lot of offerings out in the marketplace for market research about any given topic, especially if it has any currency, if there's any buzz happening in the marketplaces about a certain issue, you're going to find a lot of studies that you can subscribe to.
I think we wanted to approach it as an industry kind of insider, having the direct need for the information ourselves, we recognize that there was a gap, as you're noting, for digital signage conference and collaboration, all the bits and parts of the industry just really weren't well captured, measured, forecasted, etc. So it was part of why we stood up for this improved version of forecasts a few years back.
Also because while you might find say bits of pieces of research on a certain segment. There's not a lot available that tells you the complete package, the complete story of pro AV. We recognize though, as you're noting by the lack of offerings in the marketplace, what that's telling you is there's not a lot of people that know a lot about the business. And so we also wanted to make sure we partnered with a company that has broad subject matter expertise, lots of analysts covering the underlying product categories, to provide that expert analyst commentary and input to crafting a forecast. So methodology and vetting of partners were really important to us as we built this out as well.
What's the important stuff that companies should be paying attention to?
I get asked every week by somebody, what's the total bullet total addressable market for digital signage or for workplace digital signage or whatever it may be, and I also see endless presentations that assign a value to the overall digital signage marketplace, whether it's North American or global, and I look at this big ass number and think, okay that's an impressive number, but what does that mean and is it meaningful for a company? Or is it just a big number to impress people?
Sean: That's a great point, and I think, what you're hinting at is that it's a starting point. So what a lot of companies are looking for, let's pick a manufacturer as an example. If you're a display manufacturer, you're wanting to see how big that total addressable market is, so you can calculate things like market share, you can plot your own growth forecast off of it, you can say, all right if the market's growing 80% compound annual growth rate, we're expecting better or worse based upon our specific situation. Maybe we can do better and get to 16 or 20. So it's a starting point. It's a reference point.
What a lot of companies are looking for is that kind of reference point, whether it's global, to a specific geographic area, to a specific product segment, to a particular market they're serving. They need input and validation or a challenge to inside expectations. So that's what we're hoping and wanting to provide out there is that third-party view of a market situation. Understanding that in some cases that big fat global number that everybody likes to point out may not be useful to a very local company. But it can, when whittled down and segmented via some of the filters, can provide them a TAM number that they hey can then use inputs to craft their own forecast.
Peter: Everyone disagrees about what a TAM of digital signage exactly means, and that's where we like to help people get dashboard access.
So they can understand, “do I dip my toes into the content side?” You know, the server storage, transmission and that are billions of dollars there. Or, I'm really focused on exclusively the screens along with the infrastructure, mounts, and stands, et cetera.
And so you end up with these different numbers there and to some extent, we try to take a stance and say it's a big market and an AV company, it can be working with all this, but also, we allow and encourage folks to dis-aggregate because we also don't really want them to take a step where if they are doing digital signage, they have to do XYZ. Your business should fill whatever niche it thinks it's best at, and that one number, as you say, can be a little ridiculous just to look at a single number from the perspective of most companies, because no company probably will fit exactly. “I only do North America for all parts, all every single product that goes into that number that is on the headline.”
It must also be a challenge to draw a distinction around what is digital signage because I have seen no end of product pitches out there that have talked about collaboration displays as being digital signage and vice versa.
How do we wall this off? How do we say what digital signage is and then assign a value or a forecast?
Sean: Yeah, that's probably the most important step of the process of forecasting is your definition phase. How are you drawing a circle around that particular segment or the industry as a whole and as Peter mentioned we want to make sure that we're including in our definitions a broad enough opportunity set.
Digital signage is a great example because I've seen digital signage forecasts that really are only the displays, and that's it, as if digital signage was only a display on a wall, forget the mount for a second, forget the media servers and AV servers that are feeding the content to it, forget the networking backend that may have to be built out to support the content distribution. So there's an ecosystem there that when we did our definitions phase, we purposely drew our circles a little bit larger, our definition is a bit broader to allow for a company to talk about, you know what, I'm in digital signage, but I'm going to serve this particular segment of it, this particular facet of it and that'll be my opportunity area.
An example for us in signages, we include a very big number for what we call media servers, and the reason is that as we all know, you put a display. We think of it as the hungry display now needs to be fed, it needs content, and so you need servers to basically aggregate, distribute, optimize that content out. So that's a big area of spend within the signage category as a solution area. Soit's the right question to be asking, as you're looking at numbers is how do they define, and then of course, how do they measure, what assumptions are they making? What inputs do they gather? Those kinds of things to evaluate the research offering.
So we're coming out of... I hope we're coming out of a very rough 17 months or so and COVID-19 obviously had a pretty significant impact. I'm looking at a slide here that said 2020 was $214 billion in revenue for the AV industry globally. What had been the expectation for 2020 prior to the pandemic?
Sean: Sure. I think when we did our forecast in 2020, it was around when we started it in November of 2019 ‘cause that's when you start your forecast process, you gather your input. So right around March, April was the time we're looking at our numbers and saying, okay, here's what we had thought would happen. Now we have the pandemic. What do we think is going to be the impact? As you're sitting in May, which at that point, the assumptions we made is, maybe this is like many other viruses that have hit us where it's one or two waves and then it goes out, and so possibly by the end of 2020, the situation is improving and that there are vaccines being distributed, that most of the waves are done, all that kind of stuff, and we expected a return to business. So we expected 2020 originally to be only about a -8% in terms of revenue decline. In the end, when you look at all the surveys we did through 2022 AV providers, manufacturers, distributors, the final analysis said it was more like -17%. So double the decline that we originally forecast, and that's often what happens is you only know what you know at the time. You tend to be pessimistic or optimistic. I would say we were about the middle of the road. But we ended up providing that down. So the two 14 numbers that you're looking at now is much less than it would have been in normal time, say normal trajectory, but there's an upside to that too.
So because 2020 was worse, we seem to be in that recovery mode meaningfully. Now that. It looks like the trajectory coming out is even steeper. So you have bigger growth percentages in 2021, in 2022, and then it starts to level out by 2023 and 2024. So that we're able to say by 2022, we think a good portion of the globe is starting to look like what it did in 2019 and exceeding those revenue peaks as we come out of this.
Is it deferred spending or that money that didn't get spent in 2020 is lost, and this is a new budget?
Sean: It's a bit of deferred spend, certainly, but it's also an adaptation. One of the big trends that we've highlighted in our reports is that the pandemic was a disruptor, not just because it shut down industries and economies, but also because it forced us to shift to remote everything, work, play, education, et cetera, and there are some lingering effects. I think we're in an experimentation phase right now where we're trying to see what does return to work look like. How hybrid is it? How virtual, how in person?
So some of the spendings are an adaptation. It's learning t, and now emphasizing and investing in new ways of interaction, new ways of engaging audiences and workers and students, et cetera. So there's a bit of both, but I would also point to innovation. One of the things that disruption does is you start to think differently about the way you do business, and so new solution areas that we probably haven’t even fully thought of yet that kind of come out of this also is the mother of growth and an investment in our industry. But we look from a macro econ side. So Peter probably has some addition he can add to that in terms of how the economies and industries recovered too.
One of the things that we cover, we have a strong macro econ section of our reports and one of the primary things that we look at is how is GDP expected to change, recover, et cetera, as we come out of the pandemic. And so, that has looked brighter and brighter. 2021 has a strong GDP estimate for us in many parts of the world. There are some challenging areas but we then benefit from that as that improves, we start to grow and improve as well. So I will look to that economic improvement as a kind of contributor and a driver of pro AV growth too. Not without challenges though.
When you set your filters for zeroing in on information, can you get a sense of the hit that happened overall for global AV in 2020? Can you drill down to the hit on digital signage?
Peter: Yeah, so digital signage is actually one of the technologies that have been mostly closed to AV overall in the last year and this year, which I don’t think is that surprising.
We talk about AV and how it pertains to the wider economy, we usually link it kinda at the start of our presentations, reports to GDP because it reflects the economy because AV is an in-person specific technology in general, thinking about live events, sports, museums, but it also has its collaboration side. And digital signage is a minor part of that, so big solutions that are used at stadiums, it’s part of branding in malls, etc. But it’s also part of the communication: a grocery store needs to communicate restrictions to its customers, a fast-casual restaurant has a platform to use maybe for point of purchase assist as well. So it suffered from the lack of in-person activity. But it’s also been supported in some areas because it's such a flexible communication, a distanced, safe way to communicate to clients.
In the last year, it was a little bit over 15% drop and it's recovering quite strongly this year about maybe 10-12% bounce back in 2021. So kind of following the overall industry numbers with those percentages.
In terms of what's happened in the past year. Obviously, a lot of it's coming back. Some of it's deferred money, some of it is new money, but when you take billions of dollars out of an industry, not everybody's gonna be able to weather the storm and come back. Do you have any sense at all of what the impact was on the numbers of companies and jobs?
Sean: Yeah. Good question. We did some survey research in 2020 to track this, to see how providers were being impacted along the way, and what we were seeing is, unfortunately, a steady, let's say 1-2%, each week that was saying, I've had to close my doors for good. And so there was real attrition.
What was the total? It's really hard to tell because of things like stimulus and other modes of say, sustaining your business to where people may have gone into almost a hibernation mode or a sustenance mode just to keep things rolling, but it looked like in terms of attrition of individuals, so laying off riffing roofing employees, it was probably about an 8% decline in staffing over the firms that we're tracking and were surveying throughout the process. So yeah, real impacts to real people and real businesses.
One of the interesting things that I could see happening was companies, particularly live events companies, who obviously couldn't do concerts or conferences or anything else. Some of them pivoted and started doing some interesting things like virtual audiences in sports arenas and things like that.
Did you see much of that? And were these things short-term measures or did they turn into industries?
Sean: Yeah, the jury's a bit out in terms of how much that's going to be a lasting impact, but those kinds of pivots or innovations, creative uses of their skills in technology and services is what allowed live events to not go to zero. So we saw a 60% decline in revenues for live events in 2020, just a dramatic horrific impact on that business. But I think they did shift over to things like content distribution, streaming services, capture, and optimization of content for then later streaming.
As you noted, they did support virtual events. In some cases, event managers would stand up on a store virtual studio and still would use some technology. I know, for example, AVIXA, to support some of our events, we would rent a green room in order to do some footage that we could then port over to put a virtual backdrop and all sorts of stuff for some of our creative presentations. But yeah, I think it's that kind of innovation that helps these businesses to at least persist through the period. If not, in some cases, perhaps shut down temporarily in order to re-emerge as businesses re-emerged.
Yeah, and some things like those extended reality virtual studios just came out of nowhere, but seemed to be a really hot trend now.
Sean: Yeah, definitely. I'm curious to see how much of that stays because what we've learned is that trade shows don't work virtually. I think we've all tried that and replicated that booth to booth experience, the trade show floor experience just doesn't happen very well on virtual. But a conference track does. So you can really imagine a world where let's say a major trade show could wrap around its edges, some virtual content to hype up the show before it starts, continuing the long tail of content afterward to engage audiences, and so that gives a live events company opportunity on-premise, while the show's going on, but a tale of opportunity around events too, to help capture and read and distribute content.
So I think there's a number of interesting business models that could come out for a live events company around this kind of audience extension, content extension, content optimization, virtual studio, all that kind of things. It will be interesting to see.
if you go back 15-16 months to March of last year and started to look at the industry and start to do some of these forecasts. Are there things that you expected to happen that didn't happen and other things that did, that surprised you?
Sean: Originally, we did not expect the conferencing and collaboration category to boom, quite as much as it ended up. So our original forecast around conference and collaboration, which in all fairness, largely was about conference rooms, auditoriums, in-person kinds of venues for office buildings. So we expected that industry, that market to decline a little bit, let's say a few points, so not bad, and in an environment where most things are, double high or low double-digit declines, conference, and collaboration, that's a pretty strong outcome.
In the end though, we saw a flood of money going into it consistently through licensing, through kits for remote work support, all that kind of stuff just really made up for it. So the whole support of remote was an even bigger phenomenon than we originally had forecasted, probably partially because we did, as I noted before, we believed that there would be a return to more in-person stuff earlier in the process, late 2020, and by now we'd be pretty much fully back. So that would be one of those things that was a bit more pronounced than we had originally thought, and that's a lot of what it was is not necessarily complete surprises, but more pronounced versions of things than you would've expected originally.
Okay. Thank you very much, guys. Just one last thing for Sean, just very quickly, if I'm listening to this and I want to have a look at the latest report or highlights of the report, where would I find that?
Sean: Sure. Probably best to reach out to me, at swargo@avixa.org. We have some resources on our website, avixa.org, but starting with me can point you in the right direction probably a bit more efficiently.
Thanks again for taking some time with me.
Sean: Thanks so much, Dave.
Wednesday Apr 28, 2021
ACE Roundtable: Personalization In DOOH And Digital Signage
Wednesday Apr 28, 2021
Wednesday Apr 28, 2021
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
As vaccination rates climb and we can seriously look at getting back to some normals in our daily lives, there's a lot of discussion happening around what consumers will expect, and accept, in terms of personalized digital marketing.
Things like appointment-based shopping and personalization grew more prevalent because of lockdowns and necessary pivots by brands, and consumers are now somewhat conditioned to services that are more tuned to their needs.
But at the same time, there are still lots of concerns about things like being tracked in some way by technologies.
We talked about all this on a recent roundtable panel organized by Advocates for Connected Experiences, an umbrella organization that involves numerous industry associations and bodies that touch on advertising, retail, marketing and design.
I moderated the session, and noted how great it was that the gender balance was completely off, with one guy and a bunch of super-smart women.
My panelists included:
- Kim Sarubbi, who chairs ACE
- Debbie Haus, Retail Touchpoints
- Kym Frank, Geopath
- Cybelle Jones, SEGD
- Beth Warren, CRI
- Laura Davis-Taylor, InReality
- Stephanie Gutnik, Verizon Media
This is a special edition of the podcast.
Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS
Wednesday Apr 07, 2021
Mike Casper, Azumo
Wednesday Apr 07, 2021
Wednesday Apr 07, 2021
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Generally speaking, the sun doesn't play very nicely with LCD displays when they're running outside.
The brightness has to be cranked just to cut through glare, and all kinds of R&D work has to be done to effectively get out all the heat that builds up when a screen runs out in the sun all day.
So what if there was display technology that actually did well in direct sunlight?
There's e-paper, but that tech can't do the full motion or rich colors that are inherent in LCD displays. So how about a display that's reflective like e-paper, but is otherwise a more conventional LCD flat panel?
That's the premise behind Azumo, a Chicago company that has developed a micro-thin front light for LCDs, taking the place of the backlighting arrays that illuminate millions or billions of TVs and display monitors. By day, in bright light, an Azumo-equipped display doesn't even need a light on, front or back. And at night, that front light illuminates the screen.
Right now, Azumo does smaller displays for industrial and medical uses, and is developing the tech for tablets. But the company is equipping its production lines to do larger displays, with the idea that customers like media companies and QSR chains would take a liking to digital posters and drive-thru order screens that didn't run up big power bills just to be viewable.
I spoke with Azumo CEO Mike Casper.
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TRANSCRIPT
David: Mike, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what Azumo is all about?
Mike Casper: Yeah. Thank you, Dave. So Azumo is a display technology company that is really enabling something we call LCD 2.0, and that effectively is using all the great things about LCD, but it's making it much more energy-efficient, much more effective for all environments and ultimately safer on the eyes as we stare at screens more and more these days.
David: And how is it different from the LCDs that we all know in traditional consumer or primary commercial displays?
Mike Casper: Sure. So most LCDs that are out there today, the vast majority of them are transmissive LCDs and so the way that these work is the pixels essentially act like shutters of light, and so they either close or open allowing what's called a backlight to light up the screen and let the light pass through. While these backlights in these older transmissive style LCDs, they only allow about 7% of the light to make its way through those pixels.
So 93% of all this heat and light and really wasted energy generated is stuck behind the LCD and so with this new style, and what we're helping to enable here at Azumo is what's called a reflective LCD. Essentially what the LCD manufacturers have done is put a mirrored surface on the back, so no light can pass through it but what happens instead is that light from the outside or external lighting will reflect off the surface and that's the way that you can see the display. So it's saving 90% energy, much better viewing in bright sunlight and outdoor environments, which is why it's a great application for signage.
David: So it's a little bit like electronic ink in that you're using natural light to illuminate the visual surface. But different in a whole bunch of other ways?
Mike Casper: Yeah, exactly. You're spot on. So E-paper and electronic ink were some of the first successful versions of reflective displays. Now those just like paper, ePaper paper are more diffuse and it's a lot easier to have light bounce off the surface and so if you've ever read a Kindle or a Kobo or any of these e-reader devices, they're fantastic out in the sun, the battery lasts a really long time. But just the way that those work, they're somewhat limited in color, a lot of them are only black and white or have some muted colors.
But I think more importantly they're pretty limited with how fast they can update themselves and so they can't really do video or some of these other great things that we're used to with LCDs. Reflective LCD on the other hand can help to overcome some of those limitations with ePaper.
David: So all of the compromises that you might have to make with the paper, particularly if you want to do motion media or really rich saturated colors and all that stuff, it's very difficult. But with this, you're effectively using the conventional LCD displays except your lighting from the front to the back, right?
Mike Casper: Exactly. The vast majority of the LCD architecture is essentially the same and so you're able to get high-resolution, full video, refresh rates, all those great things about LCD, it's leveraging almost the exact same manufacturing process so there's a nice, robust supply chain. There's just a lot of great things about reflective LCDs that many people don't know about.
David: So do you manufacture finished displays or is your technology something that goes into the displays that are made by mainstream commercial LCD manufacturers?
Mike Casper: Good question. At Azumo, we manufacture and design and manufacture what's called the front light component. So we're really the lighting component, the key enabling technology for these higher-resolution reflective LCDs.
Because it's fairly new, what we've done with our supply chain is as we've been working with some of the major LCD manufacturers to package their display with our front light and then we'll sell the whole module to a variety of OEM customers and industrial and medical and other consumer products. However, now that the industry's starting to build and improve upon the reflective LCD and know more about us and the fact that our front light does exist, they're also starting to purchase the front light directly from us, and then they'll create the module and sell it to their customers.
David: What does that front light look like? I'm trying to picture it.
Mike Casper: The best part is it's invisible. So you almost can't see it.
David: That’s why I can’t picture it. (Laughter)
Mike Casper: That's one of the key features for front lighting. So essentially we're a light guide component and light guides have been around since even when LCDs first started because most light guides are used, as I was describing earlier, for traditional LCDs, you have to light it from the back.
And so most light guides are hidden behind the screen. You don't even see them. They're typically buried within the module and it's very easy to hide them ‘cause you have the LCD on the front. If you try to take that same light guide and put it on the front of a reflective LCD, it has to be completely transparent. So that's why it hasn't really worked using conventional lighting methods in the past and why something like our invisible front light is such a critical component because you want the user to see all the beautiful things apart from the LCD, not any components sitting on top.
David: So is it like LED edge lighting with kind of a sheet or something?
Mike Casper: Effectively, yeah. So we're using a modified edge lighting approach that is able to get an LED coupled into our material and when I talk about our material, it's about 50 microns thick. So it's about 1/20th of a millimeter, extremely thin. This is why we're able to get that embedded in the top layer of the LCD and the way that our system works, we're still able to capture all that light from the LED, channel it in, and then serve as a light guide that can deliver the light to the front of the reflective LCD when needed.
David: So why would I want to do that?
Mike Casper: So the biggest reason is really two-fold:
Power savings is number one. Using reflective LCD with our front light module, can save 80 to 90% power consumption compared to some of the other EMS of technologies like micro-LED or OLED, or compared to even some backlit LCDs. So power savings is number one. You're actually using the light around you when you use a reflective LCD module and especially in the case of signage, oftentimes this is outdoors, you got the bright sun out there, let's use this great light source we have here which is the Sun. Why not just use that to our advantage? So that's the main reason.
The second being, viewability in all environments. The Sun in that example looks fantastic, the brighter the sun, the brighter the display, and then in the case, if you're viewing it at night or in a darker environment, that's where our front light will turn on and so you get a nice glow on the display without it being distracting to the user.
David: It seems from what you're telling me, like the application for this in terms of large format displays would be for high brightness outdoor displays. Is that a reasonable assumption?
Mike Casper: Yeah, I think that's a great application for it.
When you look at what other display technologies are trying to do for high brightness environments there's a lot of challenges, right? You've got to pump a ton of light, whether you're using Emissives, micro-LED, or OLED, you're just pumping so much brightness just to try to beat the sun and it's a lot of wasted energy. So yeah, I think that's a fantastic application right off the bat.
David: Yeah, I've done some work recently around outdoor displays and talked to a lot of industry people and they're cranking 3500 nits, 5000 nits, that sort of thing and the amount of power has got to drive that, but also for those guys, when you talk to them, they talk about the sun being the enemy. They're doing everything they can to counteract the impact of the sun, whereas it sounds like you're putting these out there and saying, “Bring it on!”
Mike Casper: Exactly the brighter the sun, the better. So yeah, I think that you're exactly right, that's the key. All these other display technologies are having to do all these workarounds, even think about micro-LED or LED billboards. They don't even have to be micro-LED, just regular LED billboards that are having to pump fans and other cooling mechanisms just to overcome the heating element of making these so bright during bright environments. The whole point of having LEDs, I thought was to save energy, not consume more.
So I agree the sun is their enemy but in this case, with a reflective LCD, it actually boosts the performance.
David: So to use the example of a Phoenix or Las Vegas, if it's outdoor street furniture at a transit shelter, that sort of thing. Through the day if the sun's out and beating down, do you even have lighting on?
Mike Casper: No. In that environment, you wouldn't need to. We could see there would be sensors, maybe some brightness sensors that if it start to get cloudy and whatnot, it could turn the light on, but 80-90% of the time, you would have the sun out, it would be bright enough to see on its own and you wouldn't need any external lighting.
David: I suspect you've got an engineer or you're an engineer and you've done the mathematical models. I'm curious what kind of money this would save?
Mike Casper: Yeah, it's quite a bit, especially when you start talking about many of these digital displays that are out there right now, a majority of them are LED billboards.
And today, some of the recent studies that have been done on the standard billboards outdoor for the transportation area are already consuming the same amount of energy as four households in the United States within a year, and so just one LED billboard that's running throughout the bright sun, throughout the night is already consuming a significant amount of energy. With reflective LCD, this could be reduced by 90%.
David: But you can't replace a LED billboard with a reflective LCD display, can you?
Mike Casper: Yeah. So what would you end up doing, I think it is very similar to how the LED billboards are built, where the modules are essentially started to daisy chain together to make larger sizes. You can do the same thing with these reflective LCD modules.
You can have a very nice thin bezel and have say up to 55-inch diagonal displays, just be tiled next to each other until you build up the full size that you need. It’s also another benefit with the Azumo light guide, the front light that we're able to use. Most light guides have a bunch of LEDs along the edge that have hotspots and so this is why most backlit LCDs have to have some sort of a bezel or border to block those hotspots. But because our material is so flexible, we're able to actually bend that all the way behind the display. We are able to get a nice tight radius of about half a millimeter. So our border can be really thin and enables you to tile these close to each other.
David: So this would be the equivalent of the super-duper-oh-my-god-amazing, add a few more adjectives in there, narrow bezel display?
Mike Casper: Yeah, exactly.
David: So they would just be like a hairline and I guess at a distance, you wouldn't even see that, like a billboard?
Mike Casper: Right. It's all about that viewing distance. But yeah, especially when you're able to get some of these higher resolution LCDs in the tiles themselves, you can start doing just as good dynamic content on both as opposed to an LED billboard as well.
David: So I suspect there are some people listening to this thinking this is interesting, but whenever there's new technology like this, the costs are through the roof and it sounds amazing, but it's not financially feasible to do it. So what are the cost implications of this?
Mike Casper: Yeah. Good question, and I'd say we're at the forefront of it right now. You're starting to see over the past year or two more and more of LCD manufacturers showcasing these reflective LCDs in larger sizes. So I think Sharp maybe showed a 32-inch or around 30-inch last year. I know JDI has been showing a few examples over the past few years. Same with BOE up to 55-inch, I believe.
So they're starting to showcase this potential, and with that, I should say is, I think they're also trying to understand the market dynamics and pricing. The good thing is that because it's built on the LCD infrastructure, which has been out there for years and years, fully capitalized equipment, minimal switching costs. So I think they're able to fundamentally keep the prices within an LCD realm, nothing crazy where you've got to go build a whole brand new,OLED fab or anything like that. You can actually use some of the LCD manufacturing capacity that's already out there.
But then like any new technology, as you said, it's lower volumes to start and how do you price it and extend that out over time? I think that's still to be determined.
David: So if you're working with a Sharp, NEC or a company like that, are they getting your layer at the original manufacturing line or is it something that they would add after the fact and say, “okay, now it's reflective”?
Mike Casper: Yeah, so what we're doing at Azumo, with our front light technology, we're scaling up our production lines for these larger sizes as we speak, and so everything we've done over the past few years has been on displays ranging from one inch up to about eight inch diagonal.
Just last year, 2020, we installed some new production equipment that enables us to go up to about 20 inch diagonal, and so in order to get to these larger displays, we're going to be installing some larger equipment to handle these larger panels. So today, our products can be found through the smaller displays and we're working with the LCD manufacturers to be scaling that up in the future, to be able to offer this to the signage industry for these larger panels as well.
David: So it's not a physics challenge or anything else, it's just a matter of having the right equipment to do the larger displays?
Mike Casper: Exactly.
David: How do you deal with intellectual property? If you're dealing with Chinese manufacturers, there's a bit of a history there. I'm not totally sure how fair it is, I don't know. But there's always some antsiness about working with overseas manufacturers about their intellectual property and what's going to happen.
Mike Casper: Sure. What we've done at Azuma, wwe're located in the United States as our headquarters, we do have some operations in China.
And most of our core IP elements are actually still produced on equipment here in the United States, fairly close to us too, in suppliers that we use, so we're able to keep it close to the chest, especially those really core IP elements, I think that's always a key strategy for any display technology. But also recognizing that the entire display ecosystem for the most part is in Asia. So, you're going to have to be, as you scale the business or scaling technology, you're going to have to integrate along the chain there, and so finding ways to, from us, just determining at what point we have the production here versus a different location where we're still able to protect and maintain our IP.
I will say too, it's one of those where we're always constantly innovating as well, and so filing new patents on new technologies as we're developing is another strategy of ours as well.
David: So with those displays that are already out there, you mentioned the smaller ones getting up to as large as 20-inch, but a lot of it's a one-inch, eight-inch, that sort of thing. What are they being used?
Mike Casper: Yeah, so all of the smaller products, when we first launched a little over three years ago, really the only reflective LCDs in the market at that time or monochrome, for the most part, going after industrial and medical applications, a lot of handheld products that we're using have these smaller displays looking for that power savings, and we're working very closely with Sharp. We're actually one of their value-added partners in their preferred lighting component for their reflective LCDs.
So a lot of these handheld industrial products, medical products, IoT products, are out in the market today using our modules, and what's exciting for us. In the second half of this year, we'll be delivering some tablet products with our technology and reflective LCD embedded as well. So stay tuned for that, but that should be out the second half of this year.
David: So that would be good for, again for medicine, but also for things like restaurants and so on, outdoor dining patios and people taking orders that way?
Mike Casper: Yeah, that's another great application.
The particular customer set for this tablet is more in the education space. Children staring at screens all day long, reflective LCD also has the benefit of being a little healthier on the eyes, so you're not blasting light from a backlight or from an OLED screen in your kids' eyes all day long,
David: I guess it extends the battery life too, right?
Mike Casper: Exactly.
David: What is the operating life of your technology? Does it have any impact? A normal LCD might be 60,000 hours, does it bring it down to 50 or increase it?
Mike Casper: Yeah, I think at least in terms of applying it for UV protection, a lot of those other materials and coatings that need to be applied for outdoor signage applications would still be applied here as well.
So being able to get the 5-7+ year lifecycle needed for the UV protection can be incorporated. The LCD side, which I think is very similarly to how these LCDs are being used. Now what you might find actually is, because of many LCD specs that are quoted today for outdoor applications like you said, the 60k hours, that's probably actually more tied to the backlight because the backlight has to be pumped up so bright to fight the sun that it’s probably burning those LEDs out in the backlight. It's not actually the LCD itself, but probably the LEDs.
So I think you could even extend that because you're not getting, you're not fighting the sun with those.
David: Again, talking about the sun, some of the issues that have been around with outdoor LCD is obviously glare, but the one that really concerns operators more than anything else is that the displays are going to burn out and they're going to turn black. I think what they call isotropic, is that still a reality or because you're taking daylight heat out of the equation, it’s not really a worry?
Mike Casper: That's a good question. I think probably the verdict's still out on that, but I would imagine that because the sun reflecting is actually making the screen brighter, I think you'd be avoiding that issue. But that's a good question. I don't know if there's been enough longevity studies with it quite yet in terms of what the long-term implications would be.
David: How long has the company been around?
Mike Casper: Azumo started in 2008. So we're coming up here on our 13th, 14th year.
David: And how did it get started, like what led you down this path?
Mike Casper: Good question. Bringing out the memory bank here. So we started down a completely different path. We actually started the business with technology around advertising signage in the sports industry specifically.
So we were putting illuminated advertising logos, frozen in the ice of hockey rinks. Imagine all those logos on the ice that are always there and just started blending into the background, we could make them disappear and start glowing, in between whistles. So that was how we started the business and the technology, nowhere near LCD displays, but it helped us really think about different ways of creating really thin lighting.
As you may know, ice for hockey rinks is pretty thin. They're about an inch thick or so, so you've got to have lights that can go really large and really long, but being very thin and invisible, and so over time we adapted that to now provide a front light for these reflective LCDs.
David: See in Canada, you could also do them in curling sheets.
Mike Casper: Yep, we looked at that as an option.
David: And then you saw how small the market is? (Laughter)
Mike Casper: Yeah, there were some good advisors and investors early on that suggested we pivot a little bit.
David: Yeah, just advertising in general, a lot of startups get into that and then they realize, “oh, this is actually hard!”
Mike Casper: Yeah. It's a lot harder than it sounds.
David: Yeah, the technology is the easy part. It's schmoozing media planner.
Mike Casper: Exactly. The ecosystem and the industry were just not what we anticipated, and luckily for us, the reflective LCDs had been improving and had a need and so that enabled us to pivot the business and move to what we are today.
David: So where are you at now in terms of size of the company, number of people, all that sort of stuff?
Mike Casper: Yeah, so we're almost 30 people now. Our headquarters is here in Chicago, in the United States. We've got about 20 different sales rep organizations globally now, both in North America, throughout Asia.
We are still venture-backed, so we've got a great set of investors that are knowledgeable in the display industry and focus on energy savings, and the last round that we'd closed was our Series B.
David: Okay, and what are the plans in terms of getting into transitioning or expanding, I guess would be a better way of describing it from what you've been doing to date, to getting into the sort of thing that we've been talking about for digital out of home and QSR drive-through displays, that sort of thing?
Mike Casper: Yeah, and so that's a current growth area for us that we're putting a lot more effort behind. So the new production equipment, as I mentioned, can get up to 20-inch. There are some applications now that we can get into these smaller signage spaces and work closely with our LCD customers on some modules. So we're going to be showcasing some of those here coming up and then really expanding our production capabilities next year and getting on some of this larger equipment, being able to handle these larger panels, larger signage applications grow as well.
David: Are you feeling the pressure to get on the outdoor stuff?
Just because of the pandemic and how drive-thru has gone from something that a lot of people do to something that in a lot of cases is the only way you can get food from a fast-food joint.
Mike Casper: Yeah, that's a great example. I think, there's definitely an increased demand and an interest that we're hearing from the LCD customers, because a lot of them already have a lot of those relationships with the out of home, and so we're already hearing it. more of a reverberate through, which is due to the pandemic.
David: And do you want to be a brand or do you want to be just like a component inside that the manufacturers know about, but the regular digital signage ecosystem and certainly the end-users wouldn't know, wouldn't care?
Mike Casper: That's a good question. I think, right now our focus is working very closely with the LCD manufacturers and serving them as our customers. In the future, we do see opportunities to partner with them, especially because we live and breathe this low-power reflective LCD, day in and day out, and so we think there are some opportunities to work together to create our own joint modules that are even further optimized, whether that's branded with us or something else, that's still to be determined, but either way, we want to partner with the LCD manufacturers and really drive the technology and performance to serve this market.
David: There are observers in the industry who say that LED is going to completely take over. Between micro-LED and just fine pixel pitch LED, the need for LCD is slipping away and it'll be a niche product.
I don't totally buy into that, but I can see how things are transitioning. Where's your head at with that?
Mike Casper: There's obviously a lot of talks, like you said, with micro-LED and while there are great benefits with that technology I will say too, the LCD industry is massive. The ecosystem, the supply chain, there's a lot of vested interest to adapt that technology because it is a great backbone, and so that’s why I think micro LED, it's not going to take over. There's going to be great places for it, absolutely. But LCD is still going to have a predominant position, and that's why we're coining this reflective LCD as LCD 2.0, it's just taking the great things about LCD and adapting it for the world of the future, and I think especially with outdoor, it's a great application for it.
David: Is there a lot of education that you have to do with the display manufacturers or do they get it and by extension, do you think the same thing will have to happen as they adopt it, that they'll have to educate their buyers?
Mike Casper: Yeah, definitely a lot of education, because for those that know a little bit about reflective LCD, you're probably thinking what you saw with transflective LCD years and years ago, right?
Like the first Game Boy, for those in the audience that played that, or remember that, that had a transflective LCD, which was retty grainy, had pretty bad colors, and so a lot of people I think have that in their head when they hear reflective LCD. “Oh, how great can it be?”
So now that the industry is being able to leverage the Azumo front light, which is this again, transparent portion of it that enables the underlying LCD to have much higher performance, much higher resolution, better colors, et cetera. So there is a re-education about what reflective LCD is now versus what many people may remember it in the past.
David: If you don't know what you're looking at, and you had a reflective LCD and a conventional LCD with the same brightness and basically the same panel, just lit from the front versus the back, would an observer be able to see the difference?
Mike Casper: So depending on where you are, you'd see a couple of things different.
So obviously in a bright outdoor environment, that would probably be your first obvious difference you'd notice where the reflective LCD looks fantastic, the backlit traditional one is going to have that glare, the contrast is going to get muted because all the blacks look a little grayer and the colors look more washed out, and you're fighting the sun which is going to overpower any backlight. So that'd be the first noticeable difference.
If you're in a darker room or if you're really close to the display. Again, depending on what the application in the viewing distance looks like, the backlit LCDs at least historically have had a higher resolution and a little bit broader color gamut. Now a lot of that is due to the fact that reflective LCDs are still fairly new but they're increasing that color gamut and the resolution. Some of the latest ones I think are shown by Sharp are close to 300 PPI now. You would notice it today, there's a slight difference. But that’s a question of what's the application: are you watching it on your phone, 18 inches from your face, and you've got the latest and greatest Netflix movie on? Or you're providing information to a user that might be walking by in an outdoor environment?
So there's definitely some room for improvement, but they're making a lot of strides and a lot of sealing room here.
David: So if I'm to use the time-honored example of Coca-Cola and their particular Pantone red, would you be able to replicate that red?
Mike Casper: Good question. With working very closely with the LCD manufacturers and tuning their color filters, we can actually put,t in our front light, we can have an RGB LED set that has finely tuned wavelengths, and I'm getting a little technical here, but we can essentially tune the color to match the color filter of the LCD to really boost that color gamut. And so that's where we can start getting towards that Coca-Cola Pantone and really the broader color gamut that's required for signage.
David: Okay. All right. Really interesting. If people want to know more about this, where do they go?
Mike Casper: You can visit our website, www.azumotech.com. We're also pretty active on LinkedIn and you can reach out to us at any time. We'd love to chat about your application and really appreciate the time here today.
Wednesday Mar 03, 2021
Matthew Rubin, Futuresource Consulting
Wednesday Mar 03, 2021
Wednesday Mar 03, 2021
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Matthew Rubin and the other analysts at the UK-based research firm Futuresource Consulting spend much of their time looking at the electronics industry - both the consumer and commercial sides.
Rubin is a senior analyst with the firm and puts a lot of his working focus on the pro AV and digital signage market. His point of view is behind research reports that look at what is happening in the marketplace, and also forecasts what is expected to happen in the coming months and years.
We had a great chat talking about where signage and pro AV are at, a year into the pandemic and a year into the brakes being slammed on a lot of planned work.
We get into many things, including the states of direct view LED and LCD, and we also talk broadly about how businesses are doing, and when a turnaround is expected.
TRANSCRIPT
Matthew, thank you for joining me. Can you explain what Futuresource is all about and your methodology to some degree? Like, how do you guys do your research?
Matthew Rubin: Yeah, of course, so first of all it's best to explain that I'm a Senior Analyst at Futuresource covering the professional displays categories. So that's looking at LED, projection, a lot of work early on LCD and then obviously interactive now, and Futuresource tracks the whole technological scene. I work on the B2B side so very much within displays, but we have a team that focuses on the education sector and we do a lot of work on professional audio as well.
But we have a B2C side, so really focusing on the whole range of consumer electronics but also, entertainment and how people are engaging with that across the spectrum and I think it's all really intertwined. So it gives us this really great opportunity to see the whole spectrum across the B2C and the B2B landscape. But yeah, so we, in terms of methodology, it depends on the product category, but on the display side, is a really good example: we've really perfected and spent a lot of time developing, over about two decades, particularly on projection, tracking service and that's really a vendor-led service where we get direct data feeds from about 90% plus of the spectrum of all the vendors, and they give us their volumes, down to a module level and we correlate that, really dig into some deep analysis around it and provide really detailed data back to everyone in the ecosystem, not just the vendors but all throughout the supply chain.
So that can be used as tracking very down into specific segmentation levels but also trend analysis, really what's driving the market. We also do a lot of forecasting, so looking out to about five years, we've got to understand what's happening in the industry, where it's going and you achieve that, not just by speaking to the vendors, right through the ecosystem, including end-users. We really need to understand who is using the technology and what they're using it for and what we think they're going to use it for in the future as well, which is really vital.
That's one of our best-developed services and we have that across display categories, but we also do a lot of consulting work as well. A lot of our clients come to us and ask for us to really find out something very particular and an answer to that and that utilizes a lot of our existing data, but we also have great connections across the B2B side technology landscape. So we're able to get so much knowledge together from our network, from our data, and our own knowledge from working in the industry for a couple of decades now. So we're able to offer a very broad spectrum of services there.
It must take quite a bit of work to win the trust of the different manufacturers, because you're, as you described, asking them to send a data feed of sales volumes and everything else, so you must have some pretty significant NDAs or other kinds of agreements.
Matthew Rubin: Yeah, absolutely, and that's a testament really to the way that Futuresource has been around for quite a while and the kind of level of trust and accuracy we've managed to maintain, like I said before, over a couple of decades.
The projector service, I think is our oldest, about 20 years and it's so deeply ingrained in so many of our partners now that it's really a key part of the process and actually, we're trying to replicate that now with an LED tracking service, which is so much in demand and I know a topic you spend a lot of time looking at as well. But it's a different world and it's speaking to a completely different ecosystem, especially in China.
So we're seeing again from having to build that trust and from the ground up there, and it's a slow process and absolutely it's something you can't rush.
Yeah. It must be particularly hard with Chinese companies just because of the way they operate and the government funding and behind a lot of them.
Matthew Rubin: Yeah, generally speaking, they're not used to that kind of methodology in terms of sharing that level of data with third parties effectively. Some have experience with it, especially those that already have operations or have purchased foreign businesses that use that kind of methodology and so have shared that around their businesses and up to the parent company. That helps certainly a lot, but generally speaking, yeah, it's certainly more difficult than internationally outside of China.
Yeah. So a company like Leyard that bought Planar, they would have been exposed to how all this works and be perhaps a little more comfortable with it.
Matthew Rubin: Yeah, absolutely. A lot of the big LED vendors from China have, as I said, made a few purchases recently and I think they're still in that process of sharing those kinds of methodologies and that kind of data throughout the company, but it's happening quite quickly. I think they are becoming much more comfortable with that level of sharing and confidence, particularly in a brand like a Futuresource, where we have that relationship elsewhere, but it needs to be developed with them.
How much of a problem, if it's a problem at all, are all of the full research companies coming out of somewhere in Pune, India primarily who clog up the news releases every day with forecasts for digital signage that appears to be pretty much nonsensical. Do you compete with them or is that stuff just out there and it grabs the flotsam?
Matthew Rubin: It's hard to say, isn't it? I think so much of the research industry is built around trust and brands, as in research brands that you're comfortable with and you're aware of, and those are the ones you really end up paying a lot of attention to.
I think it's something that's similar to what you'll get across the internet. There's massive information out there and if you already know your stuff, you'll go straight to certain sources and you're a great example. You will filter out the kind of information that you're getting and what you're willing to share with your readers and your listeners, and I think it's the same across the spectrum, I think of course, you are going to get quite a lot of information out there from any research house that can churn out content, but you pay attention to maybe a much smaller percentage of that.
That might actually know the industry?
Matthew Rubin: Yeah. Yeah. That certainly helps, doesn’t it?
What a concept.
So in terms of the industry, one of the reports that you guys put out in the last three, four months, maybe more recent than that even, was megatrends in the context of digital signage and pro-AV, what's happening out there?
Matthew Rubin: I think. First of all, you've got to really recap what's happened in 2020, and you've got to recognize the difficulties, I think, live events in particular and digital signage faced. Without these kinds of live events driving the market, you have this real dip in demand, right? And it's put a lot of businesses in a very difficult position and similarly, with digital signage, why will end-users or advertising companies, why will you invest in these kinds of displays that really have been growing up until 2020, these eye-catching LEDs or high brightness projection, really impressive displays that you see in big cities around the world.
Why are you going to invest in that when you simply don't have the eyeballs on the screen, on the high street? You're not going to invest in that? 2020 as a whole, mostly speaking outside of China and outside of APAC has been a massive struggle and undoubted struggle and you don't have the basic drivers behind creating some real investment there undoubtedly but saying that there have actually been some really interesting and cool positive stories out there. An area that we track very closely, slightly in the left-field of what we're talking about is interactive displays and we actually have another tracking service on that here at Futuresource, but there has been a huge amount of demand for that kind of technology, particularly in the education vertical, where there's been such a drive to invest in, their need to help children learn remotely in a hybrid fashion, more interactively.
So many of them have laptops in schools and there's a huge drive behind investing in that and in some cases, it's a realization of how far behind certain countries are progressing on the technology side. A great example of that is actually in Germany and there's a lot of investment behind digital pockets there and there's a great hope that will speed things up very quickly. But as a general concept, while most of the display industry has been in decline, that's actually been growing very strongly in China and outside of China. So that's a real positive story and even within the projection, an area that is probably on a bit of a long-term decline slowly and really struggled during 2020, but even within there, there are pockets like ultra-mobile projectors.
And that's partly driven obviously by consumers sitting at home and wanting that cinema experience. But also people wanting mobile office spaces, really looking ahead how are people going to use the office space? What kind of displays do they need in them? How much space you need between employees. It's really a question. This can be very difficult to answer until we know a lot more about the virus and the antiviruses and how that looks going forward. But mobile projectors are a cheap and easy way to have that kind of flexibility there.
But that's us thinking more about what has happened and moving forward. I think a really interesting theme that we're trying to build upon is this idea behind merged displays and by that, we don't mean literally merging displays into one device, but situations, applications where you want to utilize LED, LCD and projection. I think a really great example of that is within the retail vertical. Again, another area that's really struggled during 2020 without people on the high street typically and in Europe and the US. But again, there's going to be this huge need to encourage shoppers back out onto the high street and that is around this idea of maybe every store, instead of having hundreds, thousands of stores do cover the broadest area, you're moving to an idea where almost every store is a flagship store. That means fewer stores, admittedly and that obviously is a necessity due to the high growth of online shopping anyways. It's pretty much an unsustainable business plan in the long term. But when you start thinking about every store becoming this flagship store, you have a great need to really integrate displays and audio as well within that in some cases, but really invest in creating this experiential shopping experience.
So it's not just a basic transaction, but it's an opportunity to really build on the brand and brand awareness and really draw people back out of their homes, which is something that is really going to be an area of retailers need to focus on.
Yeah, certainly there've been all kinds of forecasts and prognostications that the way that consumers shop has been changed forever. They've developed new habits like buy online/pick up in-store, buy online/do curbside pickup, all those sorts of things, but we're still at a time when there's lots of talk about that, as opposed to we're still in the pandemic, so we don't really know yet how consumers are going to behave after all this has done, will they just go back to how they did things before, or are the forecast right that this is how people are going to shop now. They want to just roll up and have somebody bring what they bought out to their car and hand it over.
Matthew Rubin: You're right, there is a consensus that these things are here to stay. Online shopping is going to dominate to a much greater extent than it was before.
And in all honesty, it's hard to say. That is obviously based on the fact that was an existing trend moving pretty much in one direction. It's pretty easy enough to assume that is going to therefore be ingrained more heavily in the way that consumers act. But another way, the way that we look at this and try to understand where things are heading is that you can pretty much put most countries on a chart in terms of how far online shopping penetration has already reached before this, obviously 2020 is a bit of a misnomer, but how far that had already reached in terms of multi-channel click and collect or all of these things you mentioned that the kind of modern way of shopping and actually the UK is funny enough, one of the most advanced in that area and it's pretty easy to assume that other countries, as they are clearly going on that similar trajectory, you can almost plot where they are more likely it ended up.
There are some slight variances around that, of course, in terms of literally just geography what's possible in, in more dense cities and countries compared to a place like the US where you have these very high pockets of populations and then fast spread out areas. But even then you get this whole area of drones flying products around, which isn't possible in much of the UK.
But really I think you can pretty much plot a lot of countries along this line. So you can see the future or at least the near future for a great many of them and certainly here in the UK, it was already very heavily ingrained: online shopping, as I said, click and collect multichannel and the way that people interact with retailer is far beyond that idea of just seeing an advert, maybe on TV, and just going in-store. There are a great many touchpoints and I think part of that and the way that the thinking is evolving is that stores are a hugely important part of that but not so simple in terms of just going there to buy something. It's something, almost part of a marketing budget where there's a great opportunity to invest in the brand, in helping people remember that brand and what it stands for and technology plays a huge role in building that.
How closely do B2B and B2C trends kind of correlate? In other words, if we're seeing a big spike with purchases of 4K LCD TVs, does that trend seem to track as well on the B2B side for commercial displays?
Matthew Rubin: I think it inevitably does, but for different reasons, and that really ends up just being that the manufacturers put a lot of investment behind the latest and greatest to be that 4K and even that, it's hard to argue has been pulled literally by consumers, it's mostly been pushed by manufacturers. But because so much investment goes into the production line, it makes so much sense to move everything over and move everything in that way B2B, maybe where you would only need 1080p and realistically that is, is all you'd ever need. It still makes financial sense to move almost all production over if not all to 4K.
So it does have an absolutely direct effect on it. Similarly, with projection, you get some similar trends and desires around laser technology and much higher brightness that the consumers are demanding and that's actually really helped on the B2B side and the wider applications you can use there and actually, that flows backward and forwards, particularly on the projection side, but in terms of display panels, I think it's really just almost, I don't want to say forced on B2B, but it just makes efficient sense to follow the B2C side.
Yeah. I was curious about that. If. Product development is by and large driven by the B2C side just because of volume and everything else. I have heard, I haven't had this confirmed, but heard that much of the Genesis of smart commercial displays, the ones with embedded systems on chips had to do with just having a whole bunch of available SOC processors and what are we going to do with them, “let's make commercial displays smart displays.”
Matthew Rubin: Yeah, I'm not sure about that one in particular. But, I suppose it's one of those very particular to LCD. If you look at LED and what's going on there, that's another one to closely watch in terms of what is really driving it. You have the likes of Samsung who are a very consumer or they do a huge amount of business on the B2B side, but they're hugely focused on consumers as well and they see a huge future for microLED in the living room and the investment that they're pouring in there will absolutely flow and help the B2B side and what they're going to do there and what they're capable of because there are still big leaps and bounds to be made in manufacturing processes.
So that's a much earlier stage, but possibly a much clearer example of how the B2B and B2C sides interact and it all comes down to investment, doesn't it? And who's drawing the investment, is it the masses of consumers and will they demand enough of that product versus commercial entities?
Where are we in terms of the shift from LCD to LED? You had companies talking about this being something that was going to happen over five years or so that LCD video walls would go away replaced by LED video walls, but I keep hearing the price delta is still pretty substantial between LED and LCD.
Matthew Rubin: Yeah, you are right. A thing we like to talk about a lot is moving towards price parity but in a literal sense, it doesn't really mean that they are going to reach the exact same price or at least not in the near term. It's more than in terms of consideration for a business, it’s within the realms of possibility to consider LED instead of LCD in many years. Whereas before the price of LED was way too much and way out there and there are some other considerations as well around your ability which has generally been solved now, but the price Delta was huge. Whereas now we are actually entering phases where LED can be chosen above LCD and it makes business sense and sometimes that's to do with the longevity of the device. It can be to do with the flexibility that LED offers that LCD might not be able to, but absolutely we're certainly not at the point where they are, and I just don't expect it in the next year or two for sure, where one is exactly comparable in terms of price to the other. But again, it also depends on what you're doing with it. As I mentioned, if you really want a custom display, LEDs are your only choice. If it's a very bespoke setting, you could go down the route of projectors, but that has its own difficulties.
And equally, as you scale up to very large displays, it's about willingness to accept a bezel maybe if you're building up a big LCD display, which you wouldn't have on LED and you don't have the same exponential cost as you go up in size there, there are huge differences and even then moving on from there, when you have to think about geographically, it's simply a much cheaper product in China because there's just so much of the supply chain there and a lot of government support behind manufacturing. So yeah, it's an even easier choice in China, which is really well. We're seeing a huge uptake in LED often or the expense of LCD.
Is the sense in the industry, in the display industry that LED will largely shift apart from outdoors stuff from the conventional manufacturing, the SMD surface mounted devices to microLEDor perhaps miniLED, but more likely microLED, is that where it's going?
Matthew Rubin: Yeah, I think it's inevitable that this is where the money is flowing into microLED and really that's what everyone wants and it's a desire at least to make it compete more effectively with LCD in terms of the density and just image quality, which is really impressive now.
But this is also the idea behind mass transfer technology and that's really where we’re expecting to see a bigger flip in terms of pricing of technology of LED and when it really becomes feasible on a mass scale as compared to LCD and that is across consumers as well as B2B.
But there are still a few of these leaps that need to be made and realistically not expected in the next two or three years. You reach out to vendors and you hear sometimes quite wildly different expectations in terms of timelines in terms of what's going on there. So I think there are still some technological leaps that need to be made in terms of processes and manufacturing. But the end goal is the same, really it's almost matching LCD's curve and maturity, but it is a bit more premature at that stage.
So I gather the big challenges are still getting the manufacturing times down using techniques like mass transferring all the LED dye, but directly tied to that is raising the quality controls level so that the number of flaws, when you mass transfer those LED dye is absolutely minimized otherwise what they call the yield becomes a problem, right?
Matthew Rubin: Yeah, and I think the yield and a lot of issues around just generally durability around LED was a theme and an issue over the last few years, but very much less so now. From what we understand, I mean, it's a moving scale, isn't it? It's much better than it was, but it's still obviously room to go. But a lot of that investment is really trying to build up this next generation of plants and how they manufacture LED displays and I think that yields have been progressively improving at such a rate that is not as much of a priority as it perhaps was in the last few years.
The other megatrend that was identified by Futuresource, well one of them anyway, had to do with AV over IP. What does that all encompass?
Matthew Rubin: Well, it's not my personal field that I spend a huge amount of time on. We have a team that's literally dedicated to AV over IP and the benefits that it brings in a range of spectrums, but it's still quite a field that's in early development, I suppose. In some cases, again, it's a field of educating the users around the benefits of using AV over IP and a whole range of fields and applications.
And I think, and again, it's not an area that I focus on too much. But it's certainly an area of a lot of growth opportunities but one of the barriers is just understanding the technology and understanding the leap forward, almost in how you transfer that data.
We, of course, can't really envision when things get back to normal because of vaccine rates and variants and everything else, but I've spoken with a number of companies that are saying, “We're starting to see things turn, we're expecting by Q2 or maybe Q3 business will get back to what we would perceive to be normal.”
At a macro level, understanding that everything is in flux, does Futuresource have a point of view as to when the digital signage and AV industry will start to come back to normal?
Matthew Rubin: Again people like the term, what is the new normal? And we're all hoping it goes back to at least something that we understand and resembles from previous experiences and like I said, it's easy to say things at a macro level, but I think even again, it goes back to this idea of geographically there are hugely different experiences of what's happened with COVID in Asia and China, compared to the US and the UK is another example that is hit very hard.
And what's interesting is actually, we've just finished our Q4 2020 data submissions in processing there and there are some bright spots and we're already seeing a relatively strong LCD market in particular and as I said before, a lot of that is propped up by interactive. It's not digital signage, so we say that's certainly still really struggling and it’s all tied around this idea of when can people go out in groups and do the things that they used to do and generally speaking, we think around the middle of the year, we should start seeing a lot more activity around that. But again, all of that ties back to every country is able to get the vaccine out at different rates.
In the UK, it looks like we're pretty much ahead of the curve, which makes it a nice change. So it's easy to say around here, the second half of the year, we would expect a very much improved market for digital signage and the AV market and that also encompasses events that we expect and hope to be able to go ahead, but again, take a step back though it's unlikely to be much international travel in particular. That's really hard to predict, much later we think in 2021 with a lot of red flags countries is how the UK government has termed it, but countries that we don't expect that travel we allowed until they have reached a certain level of vaccination and that's going to be true of so many places and without travel, without tourism, without that kind of investment, so much hinges on that as well.
Even with live events as well, how can you expect artists to go from one place to another or sports teams and so it's all really very much interconnected. So, at a very high macro level, absolutely middle of the year, we would start to see some real positivity there. But in terms of really hitting recovery levels, we're probably talking around Q4 at the earliest to hit some of the real peaks and that's of course true. We are expecting a really big, notable bounce back in demand. We do think there's a lot of pent-up demand, a lot of businesses that have kept devices going for longer to avoid that kind of initial investment of refreshing technology and that's totally understandable. Why would you invest at this point, a very high-risk stage, for many businesses.
But we expect a big flow of investment within certain verticals. Obviously, there are some verticals that are probably going to struggle for the whole of 2021 and it won't be real until 2022 that you see a real rebound there, but there are a lot of enterprises in a lot of signage areas where we'd expect to see a fair bounce back, particularly in the second half.
All right, Matthew, thank you for spending some time with me. I appreciate it.
Matthew Rubin: Anytime. It's been a real pleasure and it's always great to talk about these high-level themes that are going on, and we have so many detailed conversations with so many partners. It's good to talk about what does that all mean and where is it going? And a timeline like this, it's all very unpredictable, which makes it more engaging.
All right. Thank you.
Wednesday Dec 02, 2020
Kym Frank, Geopath
Wednesday Dec 02, 2020
Wednesday Dec 02, 2020
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED - DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Measurement in the out of home advertising industry used to be as low tech as people with clickers, parked on roadsides and busily counting the cars going by.
That would give media companies a really basic sense of how many eyeballs MIGHT see a billboard in a given time period.
The out of home industry has long since matured, and a lot of it is now digital ... and much more varied than billboards and transit shelter posters. Measurement has also matured in a big way, and has grown super-sophisticated.
Out of home media is very much a for-profit business, but a key player on the tech measurement side is actually a non-profit ... supported by hundreds of companies in the ecosystem.
Geopath is populated by data scientists and site auditors who do audience location measurement based on a pile of different data sources - the biggest one being aggregated, anonymous data from smartphones.
Geopath's tools, which are used by media owners and brands, help build a current view on the mobility, behaviour and attributes of out of home audiences.
A lot of this stuff is way the hell over my head, but thankfully Geopath's President Kym Frank is very good, and patient, at explaining things to knuckleheads like me.
TRANSCRIPT
So, Kym, for those people who don't know much about Geopath, can you explain what it is and how does it work?
Kym Frank: Sure. So Geopath is a really unique organization. We've been around since the 1930s, we were formed as a joint initiative between the OAAA, which is the Industry Association for out-of-home advertising, the ANA, which is the Association of National Advertisers and the 4A's, which is the Association for Agencies.
So we have existed since the 1930s with the sole objective of measuring out-of-home, digital out-of-home, and all its formats advertising. We're a nonprofit and we are still to this day, governed collectively by agencies, advertisers, and the media owners themselves.
So being a nonprofit, I assume you're funded by your members.
Kym Frank: We are. So each of our members pays dues to our organization that supports the development of our measurement system and the maintenance of our measurement system itself. So it's a really great setup, because everybody just pays a fraction of the cost to develop these metrics and then they are able to be, universally used by the entire buying community, across all the different formats that we measure.
So who would be typical members?
Kym Frank: So we have a lot of out-of-home members from the big operators, like Clear Channel, Lamar and Outfront, all the way down the line to some small members who have three or four billboards, maybe.
We also have agency members, so big holding company agencies down to independent local specialists. And then we also have some advertiser members as well. In fact, our executive committee has representation from Coca-Cola and representation from Constellation brands, which is the brand that owns the Corona brand, and so we have grown quite a bit. In 2015, when I joined, we had 180 member companies and as of today, we're at approximately 390 members.
Nice. You've doubled it and then some. I'm sure you tell the board about it, right?
Kym Frank: I do all the time.
Is there a for-profit competitor, like a company out there that has data that you would pay for and measurement that you would pay for?
Kym Frank: Sure, so we don't say we have competitors. We say we have “friend predators”.
Geopath provides currency level measurement, and I would say we probably measure 95% of the industry, but there are other kinds of measurements that are out there. People might want to understand how their campaign performed in terms of conversions, so did our mall ads drive people to make a purchase? So there are a lot of other companies out there that are doing that kind of measurement for sure.
So that’s more on the analytics side, right?
Kym Frank: Absolutely, so more custom solutions, things along those lines. There's a lot of technology out there that measures things in different ways, like I know you and I have spoken about facial detection technology, and people who are connecting to the individual devices, so there's a lot of different methodologies out there.
This will seem like a really obvious question, but I'm going to ask it anyways, cause I'm not very bright. Why do media companies need measurement?
Kym Frank: That is a good question. So advertisers across channels, this is not an out-of-home problem. Advertisers across channels want to understand, what did my campaign deliver or, on the front end, what should I be buying with my advertising dollars? And how much of it should I be buying? So that they can understand the scale of a campaign that they're purchasing, are they reaching the right people? Are they reaching enough people? How many times are those people being reached by my ads? It's really important to advertisers.
In the old days on, by old, I mean like 10-20 years ago, even that’s recent, a lot of out-of-home was just measured by gross audience counts, right? Like highway traffic or foot traffic meters, that sort of thing?
Kym Frank: Yeah. So when I joined the organization, the legacy metrics, a lot of that was coming from rubber hoses in the road, like the department of transportation, traffic counts. So nowadays we're able to use things like connected car data and mobile device data, but that was not available.
So yes, they were using manual counts. In fact, if you go way back in time, we used clickers, so people would stand under a billboard with a clicker in their hand and count the number of cars that went by in an hour.
Yeah. And the same thing in shopping malls, there'd be somebody there with a clipboard just clicking away?
Kym Frank: Yep.
Amazing. So is good audience measurement something that just validates making immediate investment, or is used to also optimize the investment that you're making, that you've already decided? Like, I'm going to be in this market, I'm going to do these things, but I want to know a hell of a lot more about the audience and then tune the media and tune the campaign so I get more out of it.
Kym Frank: Absolutely. Optimization is key and it's a lot of what we've been working on since I joined the organization. When I joined, we had the ability to target pretty standard demographics. So I'm interested in reaching women 18 to 34, but since we've updated our measurement system, we now include information across 8,000 different audience types. So you're able to understand which units I should be advertising on. If I want to build a campaign to reach people who are likely to be buying a new car within the next 12 months, it's really changed the way out-of-home is bought more from more as an audience channel than as a patient vehicle.
Now, both are still very important because you want to reach people in the right location, but you also want to make sure you're reaching the right people.
And where does the data come from? You mentioned geolocation data from mobile phones, but there's a whole mashup of things you use, right?
Kym Frank: We, so we have a data fusion engine is what we call it. We take a number of different kinds of data sets, there's just no silver bullet that does everything, so we combine a number of different data sets for what they are best at. So we are using mobile device data, that's typically data that's captured by apps that people have opted in to have their location tracked on their phones. That's all anonymized and aggregated, so we're not ever following around one unique device or anything along those lines. We get data from connected cars. We have data from Maps, we still do validate against some traffic information and real-time data that's available from other sources.
We're partnered with Claritas, that's survey data for some audience targeting. It's a huge data stack and a lot of modeling that goes on to develop the product that we provide to our members
Are things like census data also important?
Kym Frank: Absolutely. In fact, I know that the census has been very troubled, due to COVID.
And a guy at 1600 Pennsylvania.
Kym Frank: I didn't say that. But yeah, the census has been very challenging, but it's very important, not just for Geopath, but it is something that is utilized across pretty much everyone who does any kind of survey at that population level. So really very important.
Yeah. I think you've said in the past that the best data that you get, if you had to look at all the different elements, is the mobile data, right?
Kym Frank: Correct. That is the biggest piece of what we built.
If I have a media network, an out-of-home media network of some kind, and I don't know, let's say I'm in hospital waiting rooms or whatever, if I don't have some degree of measurement, if I've not part of Geopath, If I don't have that kind of data available, will a media planner even look at my network?
Kym Frank: I think so. I mean, it certainly helps to have data attached to it and it has to be data that the buyer feels comfortable with, but there are certainly strategies that would involve using a network that maybe does not have a level of currency.
The fact that when you're talking about a network along those lines, while they may not have impression and data or reach and frequency data, usually everyone has some kind of first party data. You may know if you're a hospital network, how many patients you have, you may know if you're at a gas station, how many receipts are generated.
So there's always some kind of data available, but certainly currency data and impressions data or reach and frequency data, that's what a buyer's really looking for.
Yeah. You've mentioned currency data a few times now. Could you explain what that is? Cause I'll be honest, I'm not totally certain what you mean by that.
Kym Frank: So when we say we measure currency, it's really because those are the impressions that are being bought and sold for the channel. Every channel has its own kind of currency. So a lot of it's measured by Nielsen, which you may be familiar with here in the United States measures television, and so then we provide that currency for out-of-home.
And is there a challenge with there being different currencies and having some sort of a common currency?
Kym Frank: And that's exactly why Geopath was created, it was to provide a common currency across all of the different formats of out-of-home. So prior to the generation of this organization, every different operator had their own sets of numbers and it was impossible for a buyer to put them together. Because we have built such a large database of all of these different operators' inventory, it makes it really much easier for a buyer to go in and say, okay, I bought inventory across 30 different operators, but I know what it delivered collectively because the currency is very common and that's really come a long way, because as we've recently announced, we launched in-venue measurement. So prior to this past year, Geopath was not measuring things like airports and malls and bars and restaurants, but we were able to stand that up and we look forward to our buyers really being able to buy a package of roadside inventory and combine the data with in-malls or in-bars or in-airports and get a comprehensive number.
Yeah. Those are two very different dynamics when you're talking about highway billboards or spectaculars in big cities and then talking about screens and bars and all that, like that must've been quite an exercise to figure out how you equate all these different kinds of mediums in one platform.
Kym Frank: Right and every network is very different, yeah. We have partners who have jukeboxes in bars and then we have partners who have very large screens inside of transit hubs and measuring each one of those is very different. We measure every screen, every spot we audit them all. It's pretty complicated, it's the only thing we do, it's our priority So we want to make sure we're doing it right.
So when you say it's the only thing you do, it’s like you have a bunch of data scientists working for you?
Kym Frank: I sure do.
Those are expensive.
Kym Frank: I have a team of auditors. We really do have two products, right? We audit the inventory, so we have to make sure it's where they say it is, that the signs are the size that's been reported. We measure the angle, the oncoming traffic, whether that's foot traffic or oncoming car traffic, we measure all of the different places where a sign can be seen from, so that's really step number one, so I have a team of auditors also who spend a lot of time looking at inventory and just making sure that it's in the right place.
So we have an audited inventory database that has millions of locations across the country in it and then we measure those units, and that's really the data scientists.
So if you weren't doing an audit, what's your read on how accurate network representation would be?
Kym Frank: It really depends on the network. So we just really did a whole re-audit of everything we measure on roadside and back in the day when people would report, which direction their units were facing. For instance, if you think about a billboard on the side of a highway and the highway is, let's say it's 80 East and the unit was on the westbound side, they might say it was a westbound facing unit. But now when we go in, we actually can go into satellite imagery and look at that unit and say, it's not actually perpendicular to the roadway. It's not actually facing that one direction and getting it to the exact degree. And the reason that's important is if you're approaching a unit on a highway, we want to know at what point in time, can you see that unit so that we can accurately measure how many impressions it's delivering.
Yeah. I'm up in Canada in Nova Scotia, which is just all forests, it’s like Maine or New Hampshire or whatever. And, when we go down to see our daughter, she lives about 40 minutes south of us, and there's a Wendy's billboard that I've seen for the last two or three years and wondered if they're selling this to Wendy's because you can just see the top of it. Because all the trees have grown up at a level and I'm sure if they were looking at that and wondering, why am I paying for this? Because nobody can see this unless they just recognize the colors and go, okay, that's a Wendy's billboard back there somewhere.
Kym Frank: Yeah, we really do take into account exactly how long oncoming traffic and, it gets even more important, Dave is when there's a digital unit that is showing multiple ads. So how many of those ads can someone see as they're approaching the unit becomes a really important part of our measurement system.
So with the audits that you do in the height of a pandemic, how do you do that? Is it all of using satellites, and asking people in local areas to go onsite and take photos?
Kym Frank: So we do use photo sheets from our members, almost always have photos of their inventory, cause they share them with advertisers after a campaign.
So we take those photos, but then we do use satellite imagery, and there's some really great information in Google maps. Now we can actually pretend we're in a car within Google maps and drive down the road and go, at this point in time, this is when you can start to see that unit, and once the car passes this location, you can no longer see it. So we've been really empowered by Bing and Google, developing these great map technologies.
We've been on a number of round tables over the last few months for different things. And you've spoken a number of times about how things have been going through COVID-19 and how you measure movement of people and activity in general. And there was certainly a dip, but it seems to me the last time we were talking and from stuff I was looking at, it's come back to really pre-COVID levels of activity.
Kym Frank: Correct. So when we're talking about the number of people who are leaving their houses on a daily basis, 75 to 76% of people are going out on any given day. Usually that would be closer to the low eighties, so there is a little bit of a depth, and then the miles that people are traveling nationally, we are at 92%, I believe this week versus the week prior to COVID impacting traffic in March. So there's a little bit of a way to go.
What I think is really interesting about the data is it's a very significant market-by-market and it varies depending upon where a market you are looking at. New York was obviously very severely impacted, but there's places in the country where traffic is actually higher now than it would have been in March.
And it has that kind of measurement being important for both the media owners and the brands to understand that, yes, you may have this sense that we're in lockdown and nobody's going out or anything else, but here's the data that says otherwise?
Kym Frank: A hundred percent. So one of the reasons we put the data out and we really thought it was going to be a very temporary situation back in March.
One of the reasons we put it out was people were saying things like there's no one on the road and we knew that was completely not true. There were people on the road. In fact, there were quite a number of people that were out on the road. So we try to avoid that focus group of one phenomenon where people go, “I was driving yesterday and there seemed to be less cars.” So we put those data out and it's funny cause I was having a conversation with my counterpart at a radio company who said that he's using the Geopath data to combat the same kind of conversations that he was having with advertisers and brands who were saying, “There's nobody on the road, so no one's listening to the radio,” and he said, we go in with the Geopath data and we say, “No, look, there really are people on the road,” so it's been a huge benefit for our channel to have access to those data in near real time.
And I really do have to be thankful to so many people who helped us get that solution up off the ground super fast. We had an entire committee of some of the smartest people in the industry working alongside us. as things were getting really pretty ugly in the country, back in the springtime, who really helped collectively stand up something that was very reliable, very stable, and very fast.
The industry as a whole, you've got a lot of brands, particularly retail brands who have been really struggling and other ones that have done well through all of this, have you seen a shift in buying an investment in media at all? Or is it just sluggish like most things are sluggish these days?
Kym Frank: Yeah, I think every channel has been impacted. Advertisers are more cautious with their dollars right now, so we certainly felt impacted, as a channel, but things are starting to look up for us and I think the same as is true, whether you're looking at television or radio or print, we're all just coming out of this depth now, and then looking forward to next year, we've got some pretty good projections. It looks like out-of-home will bounce back. So I'm really excited about that.
I still get emails and phone calls from startup companies all the time who want to do or are planning to do, or in an early throws of doing a place-based network in some sort of defined venue, whether it's groceries or I don't know, ski resorts, I'm making stuff up at this point, but, are there pieces of advice that you provide and also, do you have insights on what of those startup networks have a better shot than others?
Kym Frank: So we always suggest, and we're happy to give some advice to folks if they want to give us a ring before they put the screens up and before they put the signage up, to just understand what are the best places, locations, angles to optimize reaching people prior to making the investment. Like we have a lot of information on duration of ads and duration of content and how to optimize that kind of stuff from a mathematical perspective before you make an investment in putting up inventory.
We can get access to that information because we're measuring so much already. So one of the things we're working on right now is curating norms so that we can understand if you're going to put inventory up in a bar or a restaurant, what kind of impressions can you expect to deliver? So that people can really figure out, okay, before I put the investment down, is this going to be worth it? Am I putting the screens in the right places? Am I running the right kind of ad durations and ad spots?
I think also to reach out to people who own that kind of inventory and talk to them and ask, “how is your network performing?” before they go in, so I think the out-of-home industry really is a pretty unified industry where everybody recognizes that we can't compete with each other. We need to compete for ad dollars but when we compete with each other, we just don't do as well. So it's an industry where there's lot of people who are very generous with their time and very willing to help.
Yeah and I think that's important because I run into so many early stage business models where it's just all about the venue, and this idea that (let’s say Bars) there's so many liquor brands out there and there's all these craft ones and so on, so there's so much money available for advertising, and then they start this thing up and realize, “oh my God, advertising is actually pretty hard.”
Kym Frank: Right. At the end, making the choice between being a local network versus a national network or somewhere in between, is also something to really think about.
Are you going to be selling every screen you own to the same advertiser, or are you going to be splitting that up and selling it regionally or locally? Because that has an impact on how you staff your sales team for instance, and how you structure your network.
Yeah. Going back to a mobile location data and the whole fuss about privacy. There was another instance up here in Canada, a couple of weeks ago. The Canada's privacy commissioner went after a big shopping mall operator saying, “You were invading consumer privacy by using anonymous video analytics,” and I went off on that because it said right in their own report that it was anonymous so what was the big deal?
When it comes to mobile location data, have you had to tread carefully around using that and how you present it, or do people just take it as a matter of course?
Kym Frank: Yeah. So there's two things in that question, right? There's the “what are you doing and are you doing it responsibly?” And then there's the “are you speaking about it responsibly?”
And I know I sound like a total broken record about that because I get concerned when people say they're doing things to sound super sophisticated and tech savvy, and then they get you in trouble because you're talking about what you're doing in a way that's just not responsible. So when we built our system, we built it in such a way that it was as responsible as humanly possible so much so that we probably went to the extreme because it's so important that our currency not step over line.
We built it deliberately to not cross over any lines, but then when we speak about it, it's again like a broken record, you’ll almost always hear me say, it's aggregated and anonymized. In fact, I think the vast bulk of our members probably say it’s aggregated and anonymized multiple times per day, because it's now been so drilled into us that we are in the public space and we want to make sure that people know we're not doing anything that people should be concerned about.
Is it a case where you see less of a focus from consumers because they've already made that bargain, so to speak, if they're going to use Uber or something else that absolutely requires location for it to work effectively that, “Okay, we've signed off on that. We're okay with that,” versus camera's on and the out-of-home display and they're saying, we didn't sign off on that, so that's terrible but the anonymized data that comes off of a phone, we're okay with that.
Kym Frank: Yeah. Online has been doing it for so long and people are so used to it.
“I was shopping for shoes and then the pair of shoes I looked at has now been following me around my browser for a week.”
I think people just accept that's the case. The camera thing, I know you and I've had this conversation a multitude of times. We do not really use any kind of camera technology. If we have a member who has cameras installed, we will take their data as a calibration point, but we don't actively use that ourselves, but it just makes me laugh that people get upset by facial detection technology, because everybody had VHS tapes with cameras running in every location across America and no one ever really got upset about it, but suddenly there's a technology that actually makes it more responsible because you're not recording people as they're shopping and for some reason that makes people upset.
Do you not use the computer vision stuff more so because it's an analytical tool as opposed to an audience measurement tool?
Kym Frank: For us, it's just not scalable. We measure millions of locations across the country, and some of those locations don't even have electricity running to them, and some of those locations, that's not allowed and it's just not a scalable technology if you're measuring millions of locations.
Are there mountains, so to speak that you're still trying to climb in terms of amassing more data and developing even deeper insights?
Kym Frank: Certainly. The conversation about recency, so how recent do the data need to be, and at what cadence does it need to be reported? So those are conversations that are more business implications than data implications, that we're having with our membership, because out-of-home is typically still bought in four-week cycles, so do we need daily data?
And a lot of this has gotten escalated by the increasing footprint of programmatic buying that's happening in our channel. So it's pushing us forward, certainly COVID has pushed us forward from an evolutionary standpoint on data, because everybody wants to know what's going on with COVID last week, not three months ago. So that is certainly on the forefront for us. And then, I think as a channel, less of a Geopath issue, but more of a channel is demonstrating the true value that out-of-home can bring to an advertiser or a brand, how we can drive increases in purchase and how we can drive foot traffic?
And again, I say that's not a Geopath problem. We don't really do attribution or campaign effectiveness and to say it's an out-of-home problem is not true either. It's just a media problem because every channel needs to find ways to demonstrate its value and I think it's hard for everyone, how do you demonstrate that somebody listened to a radio ad and then made a purchase? So connecting those dots, it's a media challenge.
Do you see a time when there'll be a demand to have real time data being used for out-of-home?
Kym Frank: I think near real-time certainly. I don't know that we need to know what happened an hour ago, but certainly we would like to know as recently as possible. Right now, there's just data costs associated with processing that level of data so we have to make an assessment on the return on investment in investing in that level of data for everyone who's using the data. Is it worth it to invest in storing, processing and accessing that level of data? I don't think we're quite there yet.
So last question, what should we be seeing out of Geopath in the next year?
Kym Frank: So Geopath is in a pretty big R&D phase right now with our Insights committee, really trying to answer the questions that we were just discussing. So what levers do we need to pull for the next five years, to fuel the next five years of growth for out-of-home?
So we're having those conversations now, I think we're going to continue to grow our membership. We have a constant stream of new networks coming online. In-venue, we are doing doctor's offices now, we're doing grocery stores. So I think the other interesting thing that's happening right now is the question of what constitutes an out-of-home network?
So that line is very much blurring for us. We're seeing a lot of wrapped cars. We're seeing stuff that used to be shopper marketing type networks, now coming over to the out-of-home side. And then there's also what typically would have been considered television, but a television in a location like a bar or a restaurant and we're starting to measure those now too.
So what constitutes out-of-home, is I think the big question.
So is that media owners, for people who do things like shopper marketing and so on, following the money?
Kym Frank: I think following the money, but also following the data. Because we have the ability to measure those networks, it's like the best of both worlds for them, right? Maybe they weren't being considered for an out-of-home buy in the past because they were shopper marketing, but now they can also put metrics behind what they're providing on the shopper marketing side.
All right, Kym, thank you very much. That was great.
Kym Frank: Thank you so much. I'm really honored to be a part of this.
Honored. Wow.
Kym Frank: Yeah.
You obviously lead a sheltered life.
Kym Frank: Well, recently for sure. (Laughter)
Wednesday Jul 29, 2020
Peiman Hosseini, Bodle Technologies
Wednesday Jul 29, 2020
Wednesday Jul 29, 2020
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED - DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Reflective display technology has been around for 20 years or more, heavily led by E-Ink.
A start-up that comes out of the R&D labs of Oxford University in England - called Bodle Technologies - is just beginning to make the shift from development to commercialization on a display product that is kinda sorta like E-Ink, but done differently.
Bodle takes the same basic approach of reflecting light from other sources - like sunlight or room lighting - to show images, instead of using back or direct lighting like LCDs or LEDs. Unlike E-Ink, Bodle's tech is not based on using electricity to move microcapsules of ink around a display. It's done differently, using layers.
I spoke with co-founder and CEO Peiman Hosseini, who in our discussion does a nice job of explaining the technology and how it works. The end result is a display surface that supports precise colors and can do full-motion video.
One of the things I found interesting in our chat is how manufacturing can be done using legacy technologies, like the equipment used to make read/write DVDs. So the speed to market and costs are not the same as having to fund and build brand new manufacturing capability.
Electronic Shelf Labels are the initial target market for Bodle, but the company also sees a future in larger public information displays, where access to power is problematic.
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TRANSCRIPT
So Peiman, pleasure to meet you virtually at least. We've not met in person and I'm almost completely unfamiliar with Bodle Technologies. So the best way to start is, can you give me a rundown of what your company does and how they got started?
Peiman: Yeah, sure. So Bodle really started as a spinoff at the University of Oxford in the UK. While I was doing my postdoctoral research there at the Materials department, we found this interesting optical effect, which in short is essentially a way to generate color using interference. You can think of it a little like the butterfly wings, where wings don't really have those gorgeous colors, it’s really the structure and really the way light interacts with the structure that generates its color. So what we found out was that we could create gorgeous colors and use a much simpler way, so much more straightforward technique to deposit the spin using vacuum techniques. And then between these sort of different layers, we would add a special material that's known as a phase change material.
The interesting part about this material is that it can change its optical properties, and it can modulate the light that's reflected off the surface. So, essentially, we generate a technology that can be applied to a surface and then zap it with some energy, you know, an electrical pulse essentially, and the optical appearance of that surface will change. So, that was the whole idea behind this paper. And we published it in 2014. It was a very interesting and non-trivial optical effect that we discovered and once we published the paper, we immediately thought what we can do with it, you know, what would be something you could do with this technology? And that essentially led to a Bodle.
We found that Bodle about a year after the paper was published. So, end of 2015, early 2016. And then the company slowly grew over time. We raised quite a few million pounds from the UK Oxford VC area, and we just reached a point where we essentially are starting to move away from an R&D type of project into a genuine company, looking at products and looking at customers, looking essentially at what we can do with this new technology.
And you recently took over as CEO, right, you had been one of the co-founders and Chief Technology Officer?
Peiman: Exactly. So, as I said, I was one of the founders and the founding CTO, and I have been the CTO for four and a half years essentially. And more recently, we had reorganization of the company tackling the COVID issue and so on. So essentially, I moved to a CEO position now, and I’m looking forward to making a more commercial effort towards the company.
I am definitely not an alumnus of Oxford University - they probably wouldn't even let me on the campus - but I understand the base idea of what you're describing. How would you distinguish this from what I'm more familiar with, which would be E-ink or electronic ink?
Peiman: Yeah. So, in e-ink technology, you have these particular ink balls, if you want to call it that, which probably move around into this special medium. And so essentially the technology is about applying an electric field, moving these balls in and out of the vision of the reader and generating color. It's very, very good technology for black and white. I own a Kindle, you know, it has been extremely successful in creating this sort of reflective display ecosystem. So the Kindle being the best, I would say, example out there. And really what they're doing with their technologies is moving these inks, these little balls of things around and it has some some pros and some cons. So you know, there are some good things about it and some bad things about it like every technology.
What we are doing is very different. Our technology doesn't really move anything anywhere. So we essentially have, as I said, this sort of special material that really can change the optical appearance of a surface. So instead of having a surface that you're generating by moving around these ink, you are changing the color of the actual surface by changing its optical properties. So it's a way that we also use to generate colors. You know, if you, for example, are thinking about having a nice beautiful red, what you would do with e-ink is you are essentially working on your inks, you're creating a new type of red ink, and then you use ink to kind of generate the color and then you apply your electric fields to that ink moving up and down. So what we do is very, very different because in essence, all our pixels and all our corals are the same. The real difference between them is just the thicknesses of the layers that we put on top of each other, so if we have a slightly thicker or slightly thinner layer, we can generate, say, a blue collar or a red collar.
So essentially making the whole thing gets a little bit simpler in a way that the structure itself is always the same. And really, the differences between these colors are the various thicknesses of the layer. And that's only possible because we are, as I said, working with interference of light. So the materials that we are using don't really have any special color. So if you take these materials, and you look at them in the bulk form, they're either gray or transparent, and don't really look like anything. But if you put them in a certain layer on top of each other with very specific thicknesses, then they become red or a very gorgeous yellow or very gorgeous blue and so on. So that's, I think, it's a very different technology but the idea in the end is the same.
Is it ink-based as well?
Peiman: No, it's not. We call it a Solid State Reflective Display, because the materials that are involved are kind of solid and sturdy materials.
And the market for this appears to be similar to what e-ink could be going after. What I saw on your website was electronic shelf labels, public information displays, the back-faces potentially on personal devices, that sort of thing but again it’s a different way of doing it, right?
Peiman: Yeah, it's a different way of doing it. So, if you think about the first e-ink Kindle, the first product came out in 2007 together with the very first iPhone and and really you know, as of today you can buy these products and they evolved over time, but still there is really a need for in the market for something that is a little bit more than just reading books. Because, you know, black and white works well for books but you want to read, say a magazine or you want to be able to surf the web, or read your emails, and do all sorts of things on a reflective type of display. So everyone who's working on reflective displays is really trying to expand that market beyond just reading books.
You know, everybody wants to get into the next generation products. And e-ink has been around for a very long time and there's still trying and still making progress today. We are a very new technology and a very new concept, but we are able to do the same. And, as I said there are some fundamental differences between the two technologies but I think everybody agrees that if you can generate color, if you can have a display that is reflective, that can switch with video rate characteristics, then there is a huge market.
I think it's estimated that the current market is somewhere around just shy of a billion dollar. But if you add these abilities like color and the video rate, the market jumps up to $5 billion in a few years. And I think that's kind of easy to understand because you think about when you go to a store and buy the next generation Kindle or whatever that can show you different colors, it’s video capable and still you don't have to charge it every day. I think it could be something that people want to buy and that's really what our company enables.
I don't want to make this about e-ink versus your technology at all, but it's what I'm familiar with and what listeners are probably most familiar with, but with e-ink, they went from monochrome to starting to support a base number of colors, very limited range and then I have seen demos, I believe that SID display week of e-ink doing video or a very variation on video, kind of low frame rate, low resolution motion.
You've mentioned video, what is your technology capable of doing, kind of doing something that equates to an LCD at, you know, 30 frames a second or 60 frames a second?
Peiman: Yeah, so the technology that we're developing essentially has an incredibly quick transition. So one of the strengths of the technology is that, because it's a solid material that is transitioning between different phases, you're not really moving anything around. So the speed at which you can refresh the pixel is extremely fast, so video rate is definitely something that you can do. Obviously, as for every bi-stable display technology, and for those of you guys who don't know what bi-stable means, it means that if I unplug the display, the last picture that I was showing will stay there, so our Technology is just like that, like bi-stable. Something that's bi-stable naturally will consume more power if you're trying to refresh the image, because obviously just from a physics point of view, you don't need to apply energy for the image to stay there, you will need to apply a little bit more energy when you want to change it. Obviously if you want to show videos and you want to show continuous videos, the power consumption will go up.
But the idea is not just about showing videos, because everybody thinks you want to watch YouTube videos, and you want to watch it continuously. Sure, that’s one application but another one is simply user interface responsiveness. So if you have something that you're scrolling, for example, you want to see a nice and fluid type of scrolling movement. If you're opening your emails, you want to see something that opens up without flashing your eyes with some picture or without you really noticing that it’s refreshing.
So that is also something that you can achieve with a video capable technology. And that's something that generates other market opportunities on handheld devices that is just beyond just a YouTube video that you want to watch. So, you know, what we think is that video is important for videos, obviously. And it's also important to enable other types of devices and applications, but otherwise, they are simply not there today. So you don't have a sort of reflective type of display when you have a nice and smooth scrolling, for example, and that's partially because of video issues with these technologies.
Yeah, certainly when I've seen electronic ink displays and when you see whatever the image or the text be refreshed, it kind of goes haywire for a split second at least, the screen goes kinda crazy, and then it locks into the next visual. And you're saying that doesn't happen?
Peiman: No, with our technology that doesn't happen. That's because we use techniques like random access capability, which means you can address one pixel without having to worry about affecting the neighboring pixels.
With that sort of capability, you don't have the flashing behavior that you have with electronic papers type of applications. But, you know, it's really about the application. If you just want to read a book, if you're sort of flipping the page and it has to flash for half a second, that’s normal. But if you want to do more things and you want to do next generation things, then that might be an issue.
One of the things that struck me as quite interesting were some of the visuals on your website, one in particular for, I guess, a commuter rail service or something where you had real-time train information and station information on glass.
You know, I've written a little bit about companies that are doing mesh-LED displays that would overlay glass, or LED and film that would apply to glass or be inside of glass, but it tends to be low resolution, not the sort of thing that's readable and would be able to give you arrivals and departures times and that sort of thing. This looks like, you know, a fully readable application, that could update pretty much on the fly. Could you describe what that's all about?
Peiman: Yeah, so that's why when we were trying to develop the technology, we were also thinking about what will be a nice application for this specific pros of our technology and one thing is because our pixels are so thin in our backlinks and the electronics that go behind these pixels. It's so simple, you can apply those sorts of displays on pretty much any substance. And you know, every display is either made of glass right or you build the display on top of glass. And this sort of reflective appearance, capability to show information in public spaces in businesses anywhere really, it's one of the things that is appealing.
You can think of even having it in your bathroom mirrors, right? In the morning while you're brushing your teeth, it shows you the weather, and it shows your list of places you have to be that day. But you could technically do these things with today's technology, right? You can put some OLEDs on top, you can put some micro-LEDs but, as you said, it's just that feeling of something that's emitting light in your face, it's not what we think would be interesting from a customer experience point of view.
What we consider interesting is, you want to have an environment within your home where you interact with surfaces that appear natural. So you will have something that is not trying to grab your attention constantly, something that almost fades away around your house and your environment. And if you want to interact with it, you can, and it would almost look like a moving magazine, kinda right out of a Harry Potter movie. Something moves and it can give you information, but it's not bright. And every time you pass next to it, it just shines out, so someone goes, “Oh, what’s this?” and you go, “Oh, it’s the Thermostat”.
So from that point of view, having a reflective technology that can be applied to any surface, that can be applied around your home on anything, it can be appliances, can be anything really. That's what we think of display-anywhere type of application, that I think, has a lot of interesting features and a lot of design concepts that go with it. That you can’t really do today, you can’t really do these sorts of things today. You need a new technology which is why we founded Bodle.
Yeah, I remember, several years ago, Corning put out a couple of videos, I believe they were called “A Day in Glass” or something like that.
Peiman: Those are the best demos I've ever seen. That's essentially what we are like.
So if you've seen those videos, this is the sort of thing that would apply to that?
Peiman: Yeah, exactly. That's the sort of application we have in mind for this technology.
Okay. In my world of digital signage technology, one of the use cases you mentioned is public information display, how do you see your technology being used?
Peiman: So, I think there are a few examples today, where you have some public information displays that essentially need to change almost daily, right? And you want to show some kind of information with it. Just because of the environment, say you are outside, and you are somewhere Sunny, like California, you cannot really use normal display technology. I mean, you could and there are people who have done it and it essentially has a liquid crystal display, a gigantic crystal display, with essentially a fridge, that’s cooling it all the time and even consuming power and all that. So that's possible, but the idea is, you can just have something smaller, you can have something that's not constantly consuming power, that you can still read very well outside, almost like you would while reading a piece of paper that can be refreshed remotely.
I can't remember who told me this, but there are places like in Australia where if you want to change the bus, they have a bus timetable around the country, for which every bus stand there, you got to spend $25 to change because someone has to go there and open that thing, put the new one in and so on. And, you can only do that so many times, right? So if you had a sort of technology that allows you to interact with the public more efficiently, in a better way, in all sense, then I think that would be beneficial for everyone, you know, the public, the company who makes it, the company who manages it, so everybody would kind of benefit. That’s really our vision.
As for every display technology, you want to start with a sort of relatively small display, right? Because it's easier to make. For a startup such as ours, having some handheld device, an ESL device, those things are smaller and easier to make technically. But then eventually as you're scaling up, and your equipment gets bigger, and the kind of capital you have at your disposal gets bigger, then you can address these other markets and signage, I think is a very nice example, and something that we could also do. That's, you know, down into the future.
One of the things in the use case you're describing with transit information displays is when it's being done with e-ink and the limited number of applications today in London, Australia, Slovenia and a few other places, is they are solar powered. Is your technology able to do what it needs to do, just based on a solar collector on a transit post?
Peiman: Yeah, absolutely. The technology's no power. So all you need is a source of a few volts for some time just to refresh the display, so that will be absolutely fine. And yeah, I think you're right, if there are places where getting a display to fully connect to the mains is an issue and ESL is another good example. So you know, when you have an electronic shelf edge and you might have 10,000 in a large store, so you cannot plug them all at one main line, just the whole logistics would be a nightmare. So all of those are actually battery powered. So you have to have a technology that is Bistable, so it consumes energy only when you're changing the picture. And it doesn't consume a lot of power. So you can essentially leave it on for a few years out of a couple batteries. And that's the sort of thing our technology can do.
And in order to drive information to the screen, what would be used and how is it connected?
You know, in my world of LCDs and LEDs and so on, there's a separate computing device or an embedded computing device and it's got a signal cable that's plugging in and driving the display, how would it work here?
Peiman: It will be similar. So you know, with displays usually what they have is that some electronics are on glass, some electronics are on a chip that’s bonded to the glass, and then there is a little component outside that which manages all of those things. So ours wouldn't be much different. It would be maybe slightly better sort of versions, more adapted, sort of designed for our particular technology, but in the end it would be just like every other technology.
One of the challenges that I've seen through the years with e-ink, is they come up with something new, they add color, they add bass motion, that sort of thing. And when I start asking about the cost of these things, they tend to dance around that or they will tell me a price and they'll say, “Whoa, that's not very competitive, and why wouldn't I just use more contemporary or conventional technology for this?”
Where are you at with that? And how do you get over it? You're at a startup level, I assume you don't have the economies of scale yet.
Peiman: No, that's true. So one of the strengths of our technology is that we essentially have reinvented an old technology. So if you have ever owned or used rewritable DVDs or Blu Ray, essentially the technology that was in these devices, these optical media is very similar to what we are using in our display. So materials, there's sort of active materials, the phase change materials were essentially invented for that application, and it used to be a big business. But nowadays, obviously, nobody uses DVDs and Blu Rays anymore, certainly not the rewritable ones. So those companies have acquired a lot of know-how and a lot of equipment to do those things and now they're sort of simply not using them. There are very few players now that can do these sorts of media. So what we think we can do is essentially take these know-how and take these lines that were used for this old technology and just use it for different applications. So instead of making rewritable discs, we will make displays with them. And essentially, that's one of the, I think, key advantages.
We don't need to invent new processes, we don't need to invent new types of equipment that do these things, because every time you do that, obviously you have yield issues every time you have to understand how to fabricate something from scratch, but we're not doing any of them. What we are doing is just simply taking all this knowledge that was long gone with all the patterns that have expired, and really thinking about doing something completely different that makes it in a way, inexpensive to manufacture. Also that’s why in a relatively short amount of time, we made a lot of progress, because we were able to take knowledge from these people and companies that really can't wait for something new.
So that's what we believe and we run manufacturing analysis, we run a lot of cost estimates and all that, how our technology is gonna compare to other technologies. And we believe we can be a lot cheaper than what's out there simply because it's a simple, and well known manufacturing technique, just for a new application.
Okay, so when you have a scale opportunity like electronic shelf labels (ESLs), one of the challenges that I've certainly heard is retailers love these things, but when they have to put $4,000 or $10,000 into an individual store, they look at the price of the individual tags and multiply that by 4,000 or 10,000 and have a heart attack, and so it doesn't go forward.
Are you suggesting that your method and manufacturing would make that much more feasible and they'd be able to see the ROI quicker?
Peiman: Yeah, and I think that's the main problem. I think the problem is that people cannot see what's their return, right? If they spend that money, what exactly is the return you're going to get in terms of these investments?
One problem is an accounting problem. So as they're spending money, they're thinking, “okay, this thing is essentially gonna replace labels, so I'm gonna save some money”. The guy who goes around and changes these labels, for sure, but then it's still a lot of money they have to spend. So what we think we can do, which is more than simply showing a price, is also adding the colors and video capabilities to these products that can essentially add more branding and merchandising type of sort of play to ESL. So it's not just about showing a price, it's not just about saving money on replacing labels, it’s now a way for you to be able to sell more Pepsi or something or sell more things because now you can play with colors, effects and have it say, “Look, today this costs less than yesterday!” So this is the sort of idea. I think you can then change a little bit of the business model that today's just thinking labels and add ways for them to get a return on investment directly from their customers.
But there is a big but. If you only can show a limited amount of colors and you can only show a limited amount of functionality, then they cannot really do that. Which is why we think adding color, adding the customization features is so important. As I said, you can change these colors by just changing thicknesses, right? So we can make a display for a certain retailer and then make a completely different one for different retailers, and that doesn't double our investment. That's a slight rise if you want. So that kind of customization is interesting to these people in this ecosystem. Because they can do more and they can see how this becomes more than just labels.
Can you do specific Pantone colors? Everybody talks about Coca Cola Red and how Coca Cola would not accept another red, it has to be there red.
Peiman: Yeah, you can do that. You can very, very precisely hit a certain color that you like, for whatever reason, which is what we are pitching to people essentially. That's one of the things that we think is very interesting, being able to match your brand color.
You mentioned early on that you're in this transitional phase coming out of R&D into commercialization, where's that at and when would somebody be able to buy a Bodle Technologies product or is it more that they would license the technology?
Peiman: So, we essentially have started operations in Taiwan where they are taking whatever we develop in Oxford, and then just make it manufacturable, so instead of making a few samples per month, we can make hundreds and so on. And it's just the beginning of our scale-up operation. And the goal is to, you know, within 18 months to get to a proper pilot manufacturing, have our partners and get to the product, where we are going to launch our very first product, which is going to be on ESL and start getting to the market with this differentiated product.
From there, the idea for the company is to essentially slowly move into more complex products and eventually sort of the holy grail of every reflective display player is an e-reader that can show colors, videos, and so on. That's why we found Bodle, to get into e-readers, but we saw that there is this more short term opportunity in ESL, and that's where we want to hit first.
That's very, very interesting. Thank you so much for spending some time with me.
Peiman: No problem. Thank you so much for inviting me and I hope we can talk sometime in the future, and I'll tell you all about Bodle and how we sold.
Keep me posted. And to find your company, it's bodletechnologies.com?
Peiman: Yes. So bodletechnologies.com and you'll find all about it.
Perfect. Alright, thanks again.
Peiman: Thank you so much.
Wednesday Apr 29, 2020
Florian Rotberg, Stefan Schieger - Invidis Consulting
Wednesday Apr 29, 2020
Wednesday Apr 29, 2020
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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Wednesday Apr 08, 2020
Sean Wargo, AVIXA
Wednesday Apr 08, 2020
Wednesday Apr 08, 2020
AVIXA, the trade association for the pro AV industry, has started doing a weekly impact survey with members in North America and internationally - as a way of understanding how hard the pandemic is hitting business, and the collective point of view on what is happening, and will happen.
As you might imagine, things don't look so hot. Sales are down, and revenues with them. Jobs are being furloughed or ended. And even businesses that would, in theory, be rocking - like video conferencing - are struggling with supply chain issues.
But it's not all doom and gloom, and even in rough times, good things can happen.
Sean Wargo, AVIXA's Senior Director of Market Intelligence, runs the impact surveys. He was kind enough to take some time the other day to walk through what he is hearing, and also what AVIXA is doing with and for its members.
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Wednesday Jul 31, 2019
Joe' Lloyd, NanoLumens
Wednesday Jul 31, 2019
Wednesday Jul 31, 2019
I sometimes get white papers and research that a vendor hopes I report on or talk about, and then decide against it because the information is hopelessly skewed in favor of that vendor.
It's a bit like those recipe pamphlets that suggest you don't just add a cup of this, it has to be specifically the vendor's "this."
That's not the case with an interesting total cost of ownership report that looks at the perceptions and attributes of LED vs LCD video walls. The report was put together by the Atlanta LED manufacturer NanoLumens, but you'd barely know Nano made the big effort to put this together.
It's an interesting read, and a free download - albeit with the understanding the company wants to capture who all is grabbing it.
I spoke with Joe' Lloyd, NanoLumens' Global VP of Marketing and Business Development, who put the survey together and got it out the door. We get into the why of the survey, and what turned up in results from more than 400 respondents.
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