Sixteen:Nine - All Digital Signage, Some Snark

Martin Romanowski, SmartSign

Martin Romanowski is the CEO of the Swedish CMS software firm Smartsign, which has been providing a digital signage solution all the way back into the late 1990s. His company is best known in Europe, and it has offices in eight countries and users in more than 30.

Romanowski and I chatted at ISE in Amsterdam, where his crew had a large booth. One of the big messages was about Smartsign’s ease of use. He agreed easy is an over-used pitch in this business, but when his guys talk about it, he says they really mean it.

Romanowski gets into how the company is seeing great year on year growth, and why the heck there are so many digital signage software companies based in Sweden and Norway.

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Ke-Quang Nguyen-Phuc, Quividi

A lot of companies have come in and out of video analytics for digital signage, but the one constant has been Quividi - a French company with an anonymous pattern detection product a lot of people will tell you is the gold standard for this tech.

I sat with CEO Ke-Quang Nguyen-Phuc during a break at ISE a few weeks ago, and got the rundown on the company and what’s going on with this technology, now and in the future. We talk about the distinction between face recognition and face detection, and what the technology can do for network operators and brands.

We also get into the insights delivered by audience analytics, including how long people really look at screens, and what screens generate the least attention. It's a little technical here and there, but you'll learn stuff.

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Jerome Moeri, Navori

I’ve known Jerome Moeri, the CEO of Navori, for more than a decade, but we’ve never had much of a chance to have a good long chat. That changed at ISE a few weeks ago, when we slotted half an hour to talk about how the Swiss software company got started and where it is going.

Jerome’s a soft-spoken guy, but if you lean in to listen, the story is quite interesting. Navori’s been around for 20 years and the company’s first backers were LVMH, the luxury goods conglomerate that has brands like Louis Vuitton. We get into how the company got started and has grown, and how it now has well in excess of 100,000 software licenses out in the field, including 25,000 on one network in the Middle East.

Jerome talks about the five keys to good software, including a good explanation of native signage players versus web-based ones.

We also talk about Navori’s plans, which include possibly buying some competitors.

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Burr Smith, BroadSign

Burr Smith is the CEO of BroadSign, arguably the most successful CMS software company when it comes to advertising-based networks. His Montreal-based company has contracts with many of the top digital out of home ad networks in North America and Europe.

Things are really good around BroadSign these days. Staff numbers are growing, a New York office just opened and the company has a big party tonight on the Vegas strip.

But it hasn’t always been like this. Smith not only runs the company. He owns it, and steered it through a really rough patch in which the company ran into money troubles when the recession hit in 2008 and 9. That ultimately led to BroadSign filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Smith talks candidly about that period, and how he and a loyal core group scratched their way through and out of that. He also talks about where things are at now, and why his company has broadened into a supply side platform for programmatic advertising.

We spoke a few weeks ago at ISE in Amsterdam.

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Luis Villafane, Maler

Luis Villafane have been email pen pals for years, but I only met him in person for the first time last month in Amsterdam, at ISE. It was a treat, because the guy not only knows the signage business in and out, but is blunt and funny as hell.

If you are a regular 16:9 reader you will remember some of his frank and funny guest posts, like a plea to vendors and service providers to Have The Cojones To Admit And Share Mistakes.

He runs Maler, a digital signage service provider based in A Coruna, on the northwest tip of Spain. Maler is all about managing digital signage networks, and a small team runs some very big networks, like KFC in the UK. Maler recently signed on as the sponsor of the companion 16:9 podcast, called Projects. But that's not why we're talking. He was on my "gotta talk to" list months ago.

In our chat, we talk about how the company got started, what they do, what's genuinely important when it comes to running stable networks, and what makes Luis crazy.

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Francesco Ziliani, SpinetiX

SpinetiX has been on the digital signage scene for more than a decade now, and if you are in the business, you may know them as the Swiss guys who market a really nice little aluminum-clad, solid state playback box. They had that 10 years ago, when a lot of signage networks were still going in with desktop PCs.

What always stumped me was the price - which seemed really high. But in talking to the guys for the last couple of years I came to understand a couple of things - the boxes come with a slick software platform installed and included in the price, and the things last and last. There are SpinetiX boxes that were installed in 2007 that are still happily doing their thing 10 years later.

In a world of $45 Raspberry Pis and $100 Android boxes, a $700 box will seem high. But Spinetix says a really good Total Cost Of Ownership number realized when an operator starts thinking in terms of four, five and even 10 years of operation. Amortize a box and software over five years and it gets pretty affordable.

I met with CEO Francesco Ziliani to talk about his company, when we were both at Integrated Systems Europe a few weeks ago. It was a bit of a cliche, but he brought along chocolate because at trade shows, that's often also known as lunch.

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Chris Riegel, Stratacache

I have been trying to get Chris Riegel for an in-person interview for almost a year, but the CEO and sole owner of STRATACACHE has been a busy guy in recent months, expanding his business organically, but also through acquisitions of competitors like Scala and Real Digital Media.

We couldn’t make it happen when he was on one of his frequent trips through Toronto, but we managed to carve out time in Amsterdam a couple of weeks ago, at the ISE trade show.

Riegel gets into a lot of things in this podcast - notably how his company got to north of $500 million in sales in 2016 and how he plans to double that within a couple of years. We also talk about how he got started and how he manages a high-growth company that now has some 400 people, but is very much centered around him.

This is a seriously smart, ambitious guy. He's also a smart-ass and doesn't bother using much of a filter when it comes to things like talking about companies he sees as the real enemy in this business.

Here's a snippet of our talk, with me asking who he sees as the competition ...

Riegel: I would say without sounding crass or arrogant about it, the companies that we regard as competitors are the guys who really understand marketing and marketing in retail, so you take, potentially, an Adobe who understands that market, specifically. In sector, I don't really see much competition there. Really for two reasons. One, this kind of deep retail practice that we built around PRN, the expertise that we have there, is really unique in the industry. Number two, when we go into provide solutions to customers, we'll go into very large retailers. We're building that network, financing that network and doing a managed service over the course of 3 years, 5 years … there's not a competitor in the space that will do type of financial models that we will.

Me: So you're carrying the paper on the hardware?

Riegel: We carry the paper on the hardware, the service, everything.

Me: Okay.

Riegel: A retailer has the pockets, but little dinosaur arms, so they won't reach into those deep pockets. We call it the T-Rex problem.

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Mike Tippets, Hughes Media Solutions

Hughes is one of those big billion-dollar tech companies that have found their way into digital signage in recent years. Most of them come in making noise and exited quietly. But Hughes has stuck around.

This week I’m chatting with Mike Tippets, who is Hughes Global Media Solutions Group, working out of Utah but pretty tightly tied to the Hughes mothership based outside Washington, DC. Hughes fates back to the days of Howard Hughes, but is now owned by EchoStar, a global satellite services company.

We have a good chat about a bunch of things - from the roots of the company as Helius, what Mike and his team have learned about big growth areas like corporate communications, and how Hughes goes to market as much more than satellite guys who also have some software.

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ISE 2017 Bonus Episode

This is a bonus edition. I did a pile of sit-down interviews last week in Amsterdam with different execs for full-length podcasts, and you will hear those over the next several weeks. I also did some stand-ups that are already live, with four already up. These are the other four.

I normally get these things properly sound-engineered but in the interests of speed to market, I did these ones myself - so apologies if the sound and levels are a little dodgy. And there's no music.

The interviews are with RED-V from Italy, Interactivescape from Germany, AirportLabs from Romania and NodeArk from Sweden.

There will still be a regular episode up on Wednesday, with Mike Tippets of Hughes.

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Special Episode: Chats From ISE 2017’s Exhibit Halls

This is a special edition of 16:9 Podcasts - interviews recorded in and around the RAI Amsterdam at Integrated Systems Europe this week in Amsterdam.

I am doing a bunch of sit-down podcast recordings this week in and around the giant pro AV show, to be streamed in the coming weeks, but I also wanted to grab some quick interviews about things I see in my travels around the many exhibit halls here.

On this episode, you will hear from a series of companies, large and small, including Sony, Sharp, NodeArk and Condeco. These interviews were recorded today and I am posting this as I wait for the press room happy hour to start.

Oh, it has! Yay. 

I'm heading back home this weekend, and next week's podcast will be the normal format.

Also, look for a new 16:9 Projects Podcast, with Michael Tutton, coming this Friday.

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Paul Vincent, Flexitive

There’s been a lot of talk about how HTML5 is the future of digital signage content, and Paul Vincent knows more about that than just about anyone out there. He’s the founder and CEO of Flexitive, an online tool for building advertising and content using everything HTML5 brings to the table.

I first bumped into Paul three years ago at a tech trade show in Toronto. Since then, the product has evolved and matured, but it sums up like this: For something like $70 a month, content designers can use Flexitive to generate dozens of fully responsive ads and presentations - with motion, transitions and even video. You can produce a spot once, and the system will auto-generate different versions in different shapes and resolutions.

The system is mainly used for online advertising, but there’s no reason why it can’t be used for digital signage - and some companies in this business already do.

Flexitive is based in Toronto, but you’ll hear more than a trace of Kiwi in Paul. He’s originally from New Zealand.

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Michael Schneider, ESI Design

I had a chance recently to tour the New York studio and offices for ESI Design, which has done some amazing experiential digital work in public spaces, as well as museums and in retail settings.

Michael Schneider is a senior experience designer and creative technologist at the company, and we spent time talking about the design process behind creating big, interesting and memorable digital canvases.

Among many, many projects through the years, ESI Design was the firm behind the giant fence board-like experience at the Wells Fargo office tower in Denver, and a sensor-driven ambient media wall in the lobby of a building in Washington, D.C.

To Schneider, and to the rest of the team at ESI, it’s not about the tech, it’s about the story.

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Mark McDermott, ScreenCloud

This week we’re talking content management software with Mark McDermott, the CEO and one of the co-founders of ScreenCloud, which offers a platform that looks, feels and works like much of what we do online with other subscription software tools.

 

That’s because ScreenCloud grew out of Codegent, a software solutions company that was, and is, in the business of developing web-based applications.

 

In our chat, Mark talks about how ScreenCloud came out of a search for a third-party digital signage toolset that lined up with what he expected to find, but couldn’t find. So Codegent built one.

Mark talks about his team’s approach, their own thinking around content and built-in apps, and a signage future that’s all about things like data-driven content.

I reached Mark at the company’s London offices.

 

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Leo Coates, The Coates Group

In this episode, I’m having a chat with Leo Coates of The Coates Group, an end-to-end digital signage solutions provider that’s heavily focused on the quick service restaurant sector. The Australian company already has a footprint in 35 countries - everything from rollouts to trials. Now Coates has opened up an office and innovation centre in Chicago - and it’s not a coincidence that Chicago is also the global headquarters of McDonald’s.

One of the most interesting things about Coates is that he’s just 32 years old, having bought the family business from his dad when he was just 24. He’s built it up from there, and expanded some existing business in Australia with McDonald’s and then moved successfully into some giant markets like Japan and China.

In our chat, Leo talks about how the company operates, how data from restaurant systems is critical to what they do, and why he’s building up a team of 20 in Chicago to go after the North American market. We spoke recently in Chicago, just ahead of the company formally opening its offices and showroom.

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Chris Lydle, Google

This week I am speaking with Chris Lydle, who is the global lead for digital signage and kiosk activity at Google. 

 

We had a lengthy, very open chat about the what the technology giant is doing in the relatively small and narrowly defined digital signage market, how its technology fits in, and where things are going.

 

He talks about the importance of partnerships to develop and mine opportunities for ChromeOS and the devices out there that run it. We get into Android. Eddystone beacons. And how Google has fixed some of the grief associated with activating its device management toolset.

 

Lydle is quite open in stressing Google has zero interest in developing a full, competitive content management system for signage, saying simply, it’s just not what we do.

 

We had the chat last month in the lobby of a Denver hotel, when we were both at the Four Winds conference. Great conversation, well worth a listen.

 

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Kurt Dupont, PresentationPoint

We’re talking PowerPoint this week, the presentation software that has usually been regarded with abject horror by people who’ve been around the digital signage industry for years.

While using PowerPoint templates to generate slides for signage systems is the fast lane to mediocrity, that’s not what Belgium’s PresentationPoint does with its software.

 

For the last couple of decades, they’ve used software integrated with the Office application to display real time data from Excel, databases, and RSS feeds, and do dynamic charting.

 

They started years ago with airports - for flights and arrivals - but PresentationPoint is now used in piles of different use cases.

 

I spoke with owner and founder Kurt Dupont recently.

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David Levin, Four Winds Interactive

This week I’m speaking with David Levin, the co-founder and a bunch of other titles at Four Winds Interactive, a content management software and services company based in Denver.

David and I sat down for a chat last week in the Four Winds' offices, a day before his company’s second annual Forward conference, which attracts a lot of hardcore customers and prospects. The event was polished, and there was a good-sized crowd of customers, prospects and suppliers.

We had a pretty wide-ranging, open discussion about his company. Levin talks about the roots of Four Winds, doing interactive music sampling stations. We go into the early days, when the company was offsetting operating costs by renting out the old mansion they used as offices as a wedding venue on weekends, hauling equipment into the basement and taking other gear home.

We also go into the company’s current headcount, which is about 10X the size of most of their competitors. Where most competing companies have a sales team that could maybe field a softball team, Four Winds has about 90 people in some sort of sales or sales support function.

Levin talks about how the company is doing financially, and in a broader sense about where his company, and this industry, is going.

I forgot (duh) to get David to shut off his phone or get it the heck away from the mike, so the master recording picked up a lot of electronic noise from calls and notifications. We've applied noise reduction and cleared most of that out, but if the recording sounds a bit tinny, that's why.

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Ken Sahlin, DOmedia

This week, it’s all about advertising. I’m talking to Ken Sahlin, the CEO of DOmedia, a Columbus, Ohio company that’s in the business of putting together media buyers and sellers using software.

Ken talks about how the company has developed a set of cloud-based applications that make media planners aware of out of home media they can use, and then takes a lot of the pain out of the buying and execution process through slick tools.

We talk about DOmedia's roots, the reason it went into stealth mode for a few years, and how last year the company saw 450 per cent growth.

If your digital signage business touches on ad dollars, you’ll want to have a listen.

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Andrew Farah, Density

This week, Sixteen:Nine speaks with Andrew Farah, the CEO and one of the founders of Density, a San Francisco-area start-up that's going at crowd tracking in a different way.

Density puts a small sensor at the doorway or doorways leading into a venue or a targeted area,uses infrared beams to measure anonymous movements as people come and go, and generates real-time and historical data that can be integrated into different devices and systems, like digital signage networks.

The attraction to digital signage network operators is that it can do accurate crowd counting without using camera-based video analytics, which can get expensive and tends to freak out some consumers and privacy advocates.

In simple terms, what it means is an airport could have digital displays that show security screening wait times, based on crowd density, at different screening areas (and load-balance crowds who will likely go to the lines that are faster). It could also be used for things like telling consumers if tables are free at popular restaurants.

Interesting chat. Well worth a listen.

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Vincent Encontre, Intuilab

This week, I am speaking with Vincent Encontre, the CEO of the Toulouse, France-based interactive software firm Intuilab, which has a great product for reducing the time, cost and complications of getting interactive touchscreen projects together.

Encontre talks about the company's roots, servicing companies like Airbus, and how it pivoted into interactive digital. We spend a lot of time talking about the product, which is designed to allow people with zero coding chops to produce and publish slick multi-touch applications. We also talk about the process of building interactive screen experiences, and how to do it well.

We spoke last month in a Las Vegas Convention Center hallway, on the first exhibit hall morning for InfoComm. As with most of my InfoComm interviews (still three more on the way), it gets a little noisy in the background.

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