Episodes
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 01, 2020
Chris Riegel, STRATACACHE (2020)
Wednesday Apr 01, 2020
Wednesday Apr 01, 2020
These are some of the oddest, craziest, scariest moments many of us have ever experienced.
If you're sick, you'll hopefully recover quickly.
But the global economy is now very much under the weather, so to speak, and it is not at all clear when it will get better. Businesses are shuttered and many won't open again, or if they do, they'll probably come back in a different way.
The digital signage and digital out of home sectors are hit just like everything else, and this virus is going to take out companies the way it is indiscriminately taking out 100s and 1,000s of people.
I wanted to spend some of the next few episodes talking to smart industry people about what they're hearing and seeing, as well as what they're doing.
First up is Chris Riegel, who runs what is now the STRATACACHE Group of Companies. We've spoken in the past, but I wanted to speak with Chris because he's very smart, well-travelled and connected, and always has an ear to the ground.
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Wednesday Mar 25, 2020
Mark McDermott, ScreenCloud
Wednesday Mar 25, 2020
Wednesday Mar 25, 2020
ScreenCloud has been around for five years now - a pure software startup that aimed to bring web technology fully into digital signage.
Now the London-based company has roughly 100 staffers in the UK, US and Thailand, and is evolving from having an SMB focus into servicing enterprise business.
I've spoken to co-founder Mark McDermott in the past for this podcast, but I wanted to catch up for a couple of reasons.
First, I wanted to know why such a relatively young platform was completely re-architected recently.
But I also wanted to dig into some thoughts from Mark I saw online about workplace communications and digital signage more generally, in a time when a pandemic has left on-premises screens unseen, and many to most workers doing their jobs at home.
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Wednesday Feb 19, 2020
George Clopp, RMG Networks
Wednesday Feb 19, 2020
Wednesday Feb 19, 2020
RMG Networks has been doing workplace communications and employee engagement since the days the Dallas company was known as Symon Communications.
There have been some interesting twists and turns in the story of RMG - like a curious spell as a digital out of home media company that ALSO did the legacy Symon stuff. But the management team is now squarely focused on the high opportunity workplace vertical.
I had a great chat with George Clopp, the Chief Technology Officer for RMG, about where the company is at, the evolution of its Korbyt CMS, and how what it does differs in the marketplace.
Among the particularly interesting things - content decisions that are determined and automated, using machine learning, or AI. Have a listen.
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Wednesday Oct 02, 2019
Daniel Griffin, Userful
Wednesday Oct 02, 2019
Wednesday Oct 02, 2019
Like a lot of people in the digital signage industry, I tend to think about video walls in terms of the display hardware, and what's running on those big beautiful screens. I know precious little about what's happening behind the wall to ensure it all looks good.
Userful has been making waves for a few years now by offering a software-driven product that drives visuals accurately to screens, and allows for the sort of flexibility and instant switches that are needed in scenarios like control rooms.
While traditional video wall systems can tend to have a lot of often expensive hardware and software to control the screen and send pixels where they need to be, Userful has been marketing products that are now cloud-based and require minimal hardware.
I spoke with Daniel Griffin, the company's VP of Marketing and a company long-timer. We talked about how Userful came about and about a business that's still known for video walls, but is finding its way into other aspects of visual communications around workplaces because of its AV over networks capabilities.
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Wednesday Sep 11, 2019
Marshall Thompson, Signet
Wednesday Sep 11, 2019
Wednesday Sep 11, 2019
Workplace communications have developed into a very active, very big vertical for a lot of companies across the digital signage ecosystem - but most of their activity has involved screens positioned around the white collar and, increasingly, blue collar workspaces.
For most companies, workplaces is A vertical. For Signet, it is THE vertical, and the Silicon valley-based company has built up a tidy business being laser-focused on workplaces and particularly on the briefing and experience centers of Fortune 5000 companies.
These are the high-touch, big visual impact designated areas that companies build to entertain, inform and hopefully close major customers - using everything from big video walls to interactive displays.
I spoke with Marshal Thompson, who runs client solutions for the company. We get into what Signet does and how it found its way into corporate communications, the thinking and impact of these briefing centers, and how workplace communications is so important to attracting and keeping talent in hyper-competitive places like Silicon Valley.
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Wednesday Jul 24, 2019
Mike Kilian, Mvix, On Workplace Communications
Wednesday Jul 24, 2019
Wednesday Jul 24, 2019
Just about anyone involved on the sales or management side of digital signage these days knows that workplace communications has pretty quickly grown into one of the most active and interesting verticals.
With QSRs, the other hot vertical, you're doing menus and digital promo posters. In the workplace, all kinds of interesting things are possible, and can make a difference.
In this podcast, I spend some time with Mike Kilian of the DC-based CMS and solutions company Mvix. I've done a podcast in the past with Mike, but based on chatting with him at Infocomm, we decided to do a new one talking about the opportunities and challenges of digital signage in everything from offices to factory floors.
It would seem like the rise of big data and IoT sensors would open up a lot of possibilities to visualize data and automate content. But in this conversation, you'll learn it's not that easy to do when IT people are worried about security, and the machines and sensors that could spit out useful data have few standards or common formats.
If you are a business communicator, this is a useful listen.
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