Episodes

6 days ago
6 days ago
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
This podcast is a bit different, as I am on the other side of the interview table - answering questions instead of asking them.
That's because this is the last Sixteen:Nine podcast with me as the host. I've been doing Sixteen:Nine for almost 20 years, and the podcast version for the last nine. I'm retiring. I'm 67 and it is time to slow the hell down.
I'm not leaving the industry, entirely. Just dialing back to a few side hustle gigs and other work, working more when the weather gets cold in my part of the world and I'm looking for distractions and extra money that will get Joy and I away from that cold weather for a bit.
Think of this as my exit interview, done with my friends in Munich at invidis, who have been longtime content partners and will now edit and manage Sixteen:Nine. This makes me happy, as I didn't want to just stop what I think is a valued part of this business.
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TRANSCRIPT
Balthasar Mayer: Welcome to the Sixteen:Nine podcast. This is Balthasar Mayer.
Antonia Hamberger: This is Antonia Hamberger.
Balthasar Mayer: We have a very special guest today. He is the bullshit filter of the digital signage industry. He's the head, heart, and driving force behind Sixteen:Nine, one of the rare people who manages to produce a trade publication that makes you laugh and gives you something to learn at the same time.
He also keeps the digital signage industry with his beloved industry mixes at trade shows, and he's never afraid to cut through marketing fluff and speak his mind and now he's retiring, and we are very happy to have him here on the podcast. Welcome, Dave Haynes. Thank you.
Dave Haynes: Yes, I was joking. This is the exit interview. It's like leaving a company.
Antonia Hamberger: It is the exit interview, and we were thinking about just turning things around. Your blog is called Sixteen:Nine, and we're now doing the Nine:Sixteen edition. You'll get nine questions where we just let you ramble on a bit about your career, and then you'll get sixteen questions where you'll give us rapid-fire answers.
Dave Haynes: Alright, I'm drinking Vice beer because I'm in Munich so this could get salty by the end of it.
Balthasar Mayer: That is our goal to make it salty, and interesting at the same time.
Antonia Hamberger: Dave, you've been doing this blog for 20 years. You've been in the industry for even longer than that. So I guess I'm wondering what made you go into digital signage? How did this happen in the first place?
Dave Haynes: I was in the newspaper industry. I was a daily newspaper reporter. I started in 1979 at the Winnipeg Free Press, and my first job out of school, working for a newspaper, was covering the rock music scene. So my first three years in the newspaper, I was interviewing rock bands like Billy Joel, Ozzy Osbourne, you name it, back in the early 80s, late 70s, just about anybody who was big at that time. I did an interview with them, which was quite interesting. At times, you would get lovely people and sometimes you'd get absolute a-holes, and everything in between.
Antonia Hamberger: Probably also a lot of drunk people, drunk rock stars?
Dave Haynes: Ozzy definitely was impaired, and Billy Joel, he stopped in Winnipeg on the first stop on his North American tour back in 1981 or something and he was just off a plane from New York, he and his band, and they had a press event at a Holiday Inn in Winnipeg, and he was very tipsy. He'd been having cocktails all the way from New York. So that was pretty interesting. I've had a number of those kinds of interviews.
So anyways, then I continued in newspapers for several years, became an editor, and got bored with being an editor in a market where not a lot of bad things happened, and as a journalist, you're not praying for bad things to happen, but they're much more interesting to write about than calm, stable situation.
When the newspaper started talking about doing new media, getting into digital, I stuck my hand up and said, I'll do it. So I took the newspaper online in 1995, one of the first North American papers to go online, and did that for four years and reported directly to the publisher and nobody on the executive team, including the publisher, bought into my concerns that this was going to be a problem for newspapers. They just tended to think this was a passing fancy. It wasn't really gonna happen. So, I just got frustrated and left and weirdly went to work for a company called Elevator News Network that was putting digital screens, LCD panels in elevators, office tower elevators in 1999. Very complicated, very expensive.
I started out as the GM for Western Canada, but pretty quickly became Vice President of Operations for the whole show. So I was putting screens in 70-story office towers in the elevator shops, in the shafts, and running all the cabling in the elevator shafts, and very expensive, very complicated, and very frustrating because you're dealing with unionized labor. With elevator companies, where they wanted to charge you $250 to stand there and watch you, that sort of thing. So I did that. There was a shotgun merger with another company in the US that was doing that, and I walked off the plank with the rest of the Canadian management team and found myself looking around, going, okay, now what do I do? And I ended up starting my own digital out-of-home media company, putting screens in. Public walkways in the underground walkways at downtown Toronto which was a great idea, but probably ten years too early because I would go to advertising agencies and say, I'm doing this, and they would look at me like… What?
Digital out-of-home was just not a thing back then. So I was the dreaded pioneer lying in a field with arrows in my back, having done that. So I didn't make a lot of money out of that, and my wife, bless her, said it would be great if we had an income. So I started working for what is now known as ComQi. At the time, it was called Digital View, and then it became EnQi, and then it became ComQi, and I was a business development person. So I was doing sales and looking around going, how did a guy who used to interview Rock bands become a sales guy for a software company?
But I did that and went over to Broadsign because they offered me more money and then the Great Recession hit in 2008-2009, and that was that was it for salespeople. That company, Broadsign, ran into deep problems at that point. They totally rose back up like a phoenix, and they are a powerhouse now, but at the time, they were in trouble.
So that was 2009, and I decided, okay, do I wanna work for somebody else or do what am I gonna do? And I just decided to go out on my own and start just doing writing and some consulting, things like that. But early on, when I was still with Digital View, I decided to just look at the industry and the level of “thought leadership” that was available at the time. It wasn't very good. A lot of it was just nonsensical or badly written, and I thought, okay, I understand this space at this point. I've been doing it for seven years. I know how to write. So I just, for the hell of it, I just started Sixteen:Nine, and never thought that this would be something that would define my career, my later-stage career for many years, and be like a full-time job, and generate real money. So it just happened.
Antonia Hamberger: But we're all glad it took that turn for you, Dave, because I don't think anybody would take you for a good salesperson. I think you're much better off as an editor and publisher. Because you would just say the truth and would probably offend a lot of people.
Dave Haynes: That was one of my problems when I was doing business development. If we lost a deal, if I could understand why the target company went in a different direction, I would be fine with it, and I think to be a really good business development person or “salesperson”, you've gotta just want to be a killer. You just wanna win every deal, and it doesn't matter whether you're the right solution, you just wanna win the deal and my mind doesn't work that way. I probably wasn't best suited to it.
Balthasar Mayer: So just to understand, you founded Sixteen:Nine in 2006, and then you went full-time on it in 2009?
Dave Haynes: I wouldn't say by 2009, I was full-time, but I liked doing it every day. But it wasn't necessarily my main thing. It was just something that I'd been doing, and I kept on doing it because I felt, so I had, at that point, I had a following, and it felt something of an obligation to do it.
In the first few years, I would have a Google ad on there, and every quarter, I would get like $37 or something from Google ads. But then I started getting questions saying, “Hey, can we advertise on this?” And so I would just get inbound, and that just built up and built up to become inbound. It took a while, but it was all inbound as opposed to me shaking trees. It took a while, and it was like making real money, and it was something that would be a proper income for me. At which point, I was able to back off doing much in the way of consulting or writing for hire and just mostly do Sixteen:Nine.
Antonia Hamberger: For somebody who's been in the industry only a few years, I'm wondering what the industry was like when you first came into it, and what you hoped to contribute?
Dave Haynes: It was very embryonic. A few people understood it. When people would ask what I did, and I would tell them digital signage, they would just have to give me a sort of tilted head and say… Huh?
Antonia Hamberger: I still have to explain it on a weekly basis to people outside the industry. So I can't imagine what it was like 15 years ago.
Dave Haynes: There are so many more reference cases now, whereas before you would have to say, you might be in a store, and you might see this. Now it's like everywhere. So I just have the digital menus in any quick service restaurant that's digital signage, and posters that you see on the sidewalks that's digital out-of-home/digital signage, and they go, okay, I get it.
In those days, it was very expensive. Few people understood it. There were far fewer vendors. A lot of the companies that were providing software in particular were companies that had, in a lot of cases adapted that software from other purposes like broadcast and turned that into something that would also work on as sometimes described a narrow cast, just like narrowly defined network as opposed to something sent out everywhere.
It was in those days not well known, not well understood, and I just felt that the writing that was available back in 2006 was a lot of buzzword bingo stuff, crossing the chasm, paradigm shift, all these nonsense phrases out of business books, and I just thought, if somebody's just gotta write something that says, here's this thing, here's why they're doing it, here's what's good about it, here's what I think is problematic and how it could be done better. So, it was a little bit of my, I don't wanna say bully pulpit, but it was a way to express my advice without being mean or anything else..
Antonia Hamberger: Were there any trends you predicted really early on that then became true or didn't?
Dave Haynes: Oh, I saw everything. I would say more than anything else, you could see that whereas in the early stages, it was something that was nice to do, I clearly saw that this was going to be something that was needed to do for a company. It was going to be mission-critical. It was just going to be fundamental to how retailers and other businesses designed a space in the same way that they're thinking about their furnishings, thinking about their lighting, their HVAC system and everything else, they're gonna start thinking about, okay, where does the digital fit?
And in the early days, it was to build a space and then look for empty space on a wall and go, okay, we'll put the screens there, even though in a lot of cases it wasn't the appropriate place to put it. I'd say the other thing was pretty obvious, and I started writing about this in 2011 but I could see LED was gonna come and come hard and start to supplant flat panel displays just because of all the benefits and the flexibility that I have. I invested a lot of time in in the last few years, went to Taiwan and China and everything else to visit factories and really fully understand what it is as opposed to just writing about it and taking what the manufacturers are saying because manufacturers as is their way, their marketing people tend to fledge the facts and play pretty fast and loose with what something is versus what it really is.
Antonia Hamberger: In a lot of cases, they don't even know what it really is.
Dave Haynes: This is true. It's the thing about the digital science industry. A lot of the companies still are run by technical people, engineers, electrical engineers, software developers, and everything else. They're not good marketers. Then they hire people to do their marketing for them, and those people with some notable exceptions, don't understand a damn thing about the space. So they just parrot what their executives say, which is far too technical and people don't understand it, and I always try to bang on people that if you're going to market your product, for God's sake, provide some relevance and context and to use my Canadian term, give me an explanation as to why I should give a crap about this and why should I care?
Antonia Hamberger: I guess that's a thing that a lot of companies in the digital signage space struggle with. Finding those people who want to understand their product on a technical level. But we don't just wanna bash in the digital signage industry because there's a lot of great things in the industry, and. So what's your favorite thing about the industry?
Dave Haynes: If we're talking in technical terms, I am impressed and encouraged and excited by how LED in particular is opening up all kinds of new possibilities to start to think in terms of displays being a building material, being a finish, being the curtain wall glass, being something that's a full exterior of a building. That gets way beyond just this idea of a screen on a wall, which is how this industry was defined for a whole bunch of years.
Thinking about the industry, it's a relatively small industry. Even though we tend to think that it's giant and it's booming and everything else, in pure terms, it's very small compared to most technology industries. But that means you get to know a lot of people all over the world, and there's no shortage of knuckleheads, but I would say by and large, it's full of really great people, and because it's a small industry and it gets together two or three times a year at different events, I've got to know people all over the world and develop friendships with people all over the world that I never do at all in doing other work, which is fantastic. I'm friends with the Invidis folks, and here I am in Munich having a beer.
Antonia Hamberger: Yeah, and we're always glad to have you. But you've also done a lot of trips over the years, right? You went to Taiwan. You visited some display manufacturers last year.
Dave Haynes: Yeah, I spent a week in Taiwan in October.
Antonia Hamberger: So what was the best work trip you had during all that time?
Dave Haynes: The best trip I had. I did an extended consulting gig on digital signage for a mobile carrier, a telecoms company in South Africa, and I went down there three times. I never would've gone to South Africa. It's very expensive. It's a long flight and everything else, but I was there for, I think, six or eight weeks, I forget now, and so I spent a lot of time in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and that was absolutely fantastic, and it was just something I never would've done otherwise.
I would say the most interesting stuff has been going to Asia just because that's where it all emanates, and I think the second time I went to Hong Kong was when LEDs were really starting to come out. It was kind of a big moment for me in that I don't like to go to tourist places, although all of Hong Kong is really a tourist place, but I like to go off the beaten track, where you don't see all the people with their cameras and everything else and I was just walking in this district and saw over a nightclub entrance, a very large billboard, a LED billboard, that in North America would be a press release. There'd be all kinds of buzz about it, because look at the signs of that.
Antonia Hamberger: In Germany, let me tell you that will be the breaking news, the news of the year.
Balthasar Mayer: Talk of the digital signage town.
Dave Haynes: But there, it was just there, and it really told me that, okay, this is where this is gonna go where it just becomes commonplace. Because it was already there, and when you go to Asia, it's way over the top from what I've seen from a distance in China. I've been to China, but I haven't been in several years now, pre-COVID covid where you see entire skylines that've got LED lighting. Whether it's mesh lighting or they've got larger lighting that's illuminating the whole building, but entire skylines that are synchronized.
I don't really want that in whatever city I live in with all the light pollution. It looks amazing, but it's not appealing in another way, but China, Taiwan. Hong Kong and Seoul, all those areas really are instructive as to the possibilities, as well as Dubai. But Dubai's just insane. I don't think that's a marker or an instruction of anything. It's just a crazy place.
Antonia Hamberger: No, it just also has tons of money in that place.
Dave Haynes: The building tires skyscrapers on a change order.
Antonia Hamberger: Dave, was there ever a particular moment when you realized that your blog really has influence, because I know almost everybody in the North American proAV and digital signage industry knows you and reads you. But that has taken a while. So was there a moment when you?
Dave Haynes: Oh, it was immediate.
Antonia Hamberger: Yeah? Oh.
Dave Haynes: No. There were a couple of moments. Early on, I said I'd gone from one company, with Broadsign, and I went up to Montreal to do the interview. They'd approached me, and I was walking the hallways, and one guy came around the corner and said, “Oh, Dave Haynes, I read your stuff” and I went, oh, really?
Antonia Hamberger: This is something we still have to achieve still.
Balthasar Mayer: Yes, this is a big goal for us. Did you ever sign an autograph?
Dave Haynes: I have signed autographs which is absolutely bizarre. I was asked, can you sign your business card because there's somebody back in the office that'll just be thrilled and I go, really? I don't want to see what's gone wrong in your life, but the big thing that has always stuck with me is the number of times that companies have told me that part of their onboarding process now for new employees is, there's the parking lot, here's your parking assignment, here's this, that's your desk, here's your wifi password, and so on, here are the instructions for healthcare and this and that, but here's what you need to do on a daily basis, you need to subscribe to this thing, and you need to be reading it every day to stay current in this industry.
I've had dozens of people tell me that I'm just kind of part of their workplace operations that they've told people as part of learning this business, you need to be reading this every day, and yeah, that's always been really heartening and nice to hear.
Antonia Hamberger: So apart from reading Sixteen:Nine every day, which is an obvious thing to do as part of your daily routine, what advice would you give to someone just entering the industry?
Dave Haynes: Learn it. The flip side of what I was just saying is I'm always astonished at how many people I run into who've been in this industry for ten years or more, and they had no idea about Sixteen:Nine or something else that they're not learning about their industry, and I'm flabbergasted by that. How can you work in an industry without investing any time to learn emerging technologies and trends and everything else?
I would say just invest the time. Make sure you invest the time to read about it and look at things with curiosity, but also with a degree of skepticism because as you guys well know, there's a lot of trade press and a lot of PR that's just cheerleading. It's just shaking the pompoms about, “This is amazing” and “This is world’s first” and all that. I've spent 18 years calling bullshit on things that it's not the world's first, and if it is, who cares? It can be the world's first, but it has no business application. It's just eye candy.
So spend the time looking at stuff. Try to get your head past the wow factor and the eye candy side of things because we collectively go to trade shows and we will see people at certain stands, I won't name them, but they're slack jaws staring at this technology there going, oh my God, that's amazing…
Antonia Hamberger: Did I hear the word hologram just now?
Dave Haynes: I didn't say it but…
Antonia Hamberger: I saw you thinking it!
Dave Haynes: Yes. It is just thinking about what the business application is, what you're gonna do with it, and get past whether you think it's amazing looking because as I've said for years and years, eye candy and wow factor have very short shelf lives. They're exciting the first time you see it, second time it's eh, third time you just walk right on by it. And that's a lot of money to spend on something that people aren't really paying attention to.
Some of the best digital signage out there. I started using the term boring signage a few years ago. Some of the best digital signage is crushingly boring, but incredibly relevant to the people who are looking at it. Like, how busy is this washroom? Do I turn left or right? Is this lineup faster if I go this way or that way? It's just data, but it's immediately relevant to the people who want to know this. They don't need to see a hologram of somebody dancing or whatever, or pretending they're a security control agent. They just need something saying, “This line over here” because we're using AI to measure or computer vision to measure the density of lineups that this one's gonna take five minutes. The one you're right in front of right now is gonna take you 12 minutes, so they're gonna go to the left, down to the other one, and that's gonna load, balance the venue, which is awesome. It just makes operations better, but for the people who are all about the eye candy, it's not not very exciting. But it works. It beautifully serves its purpose.
Antonia Hamberger: So learn about the industry. Take your time, learning everything you can. Learn about new emerging technologies and don't get wowed too easily by flashy stuff.
Dave Haynes: View everything with a degree of skepticism and a business mindset of, okay, even if this is super cool, would anybody use it, or does this scale? Some of this stuff is amazing. But given the cost of it, there's never gonna be a whole bunch of them.
Antonia Hamberger: Balthasar, do you want to throw some rapid fire corners?
Balthasar Mayer: Dave, you ran Sixteen:Nine for almost 20 years. You gave great insights for the industry, and you're giving it over to us at Invidis. I really hope that we can keep up the spirit of Sixteen:Nine. We will try our best.
Dave Haynes: You’ve got big, smelly shoes to fill.
Balthasar Mayer: The smelly part we can do. So we have sixteen rapid-fire questions for you.
Dave Haynes: Sounds like a game show.
Balthasar Mayer: Yeah, it's in celebration. It's a celebration for you. I have sixteen questions. You try to answer them as rapidly as possible. Since this is your exit interview and your celebration, you are allowed to put one sentence into it. We are not that strict with the rules. We're a little flexible today. Today, on our very first podcast. You need another sip of beer, or are you ready?
Dave Haynes: I'm good.
Balthasar Mayer: Then let's begin. What is your first big thing you do in retirement?
Dave Haynes: Ooh, boring yard work.
Balthasar Mayer: After the show, wine or beer?
Dave Haynes: After what show?
Balthasar Mayer: ISE?
Dave Haynes: That's Spain, so wine.
Balthasar Mayer: Infocomm?
Dave Haynes: That'd be beer because it's hot.
Balthasar Mayer: What do you like more: conferences or trade shows?
Dave Haynes: Conferences.
Balthasar Mayer: In conferences, on stage or in the audience?
Dave Haynes: I like both.
Balthasar Mayer: Blog or the newspaper?
Dave Haynes: I'm a newspaper guy. Unfortunately, I love the tactile side of newspapers, but they're hard to find. So if I'm in New York, I'll pick up The Times.
Balthasar Mayer: Hardware or software?
Dave Haynes: Hardware.
Balthasar Mayer: Hologram or MicroLED?
Dave Haynes: MicroLED.
Balthasar Mayer: What was the coolest story you covered in Sixteen:Nine?
Dave Haynes: Oh boy, that's hard to give a snappy answer to.
Balthasar Mayer: You can give the top three because it's the exit interview.
Dave Haynes: I would say going to China, going to Taiwan, and, I always remember the LED billboard that is at 8 Times Square. It was back ten years ago or something in front of the Marriott Marquee in Times Square, they lit up what at that time was the biggest LED board, certainly in the United States, and probably among the biggest in the world and I saw the room where they had all the servers and everything else, and then I was there when they turned the thing on, and that was pretty cool.
Balthasar Mayer: True MicroLED or OLED?
Dave Haynes: They are so different. True MicroLEDs are still in their infancy. OLED is getting a lot better than it used to be. But I still don't see it as a digital signage project product by and large.
Balthasar Mayer: I messed up the numbers, but what was the silliest story you covered.
Dave Haynes: Top three allowed. Oh. Most of those, I just don't run.
Balthasar Mayer: We’ll change the question. What was the absolute silliest press release you got?
Dave Haynes: It's a tie between those Guinness World Records and those with the Frost and Sullivan Awards, which you buy. You don't win an award, you buy a Frost and Sullivan Award.
Balthasar Mayer: But I have to say I love the Guinness World Records stories, but yeah, you're right.
The coolest person in digital signage you interviewed?
Dave Haynes: The coolest? Can I say the best interview? That's easier. Chris Riegel, CEO of StrataCash, founder of StrataCash. Sole owner, as far as I know. Insanely smart guy. Very dry sense of humor, but so knowledgeable and so blunt. It inevitably or very reliably was a great interview.
If he talks, people should listen.
Balthasar Mayer: We heard about your past. So, what was the best interview you ever had aside from digital signage?
Dave Haynes: Oh, boy, I had a whole bunch of really great interviews when I was doing the entertainment industry. I think one of the ones that always sticks in my mind is Bryan Adams in his very early days, when he was still playing in local nightclubs and not in arenas or anything else. I had a chat with him at our offices. He came up there and he was playing at a local spot, and said, are you coming tonight? I said, yeah, I'll come. Is your wife coming? Yeah, she's gonna come with me, and I said, come and see me, and went up to see him after the first set, he said, did your wife come? I said, yeah and he said, let's go.
So he sat down with Joy and I and friends of ours and shot the shit in between the sets. Super nice guy. I met some rock people who were idiots, but he was among the truly nice people, and that's always encouraging that fame doesn't get to them.
Balthasar Mayer: The most useless digital signage tech you've ever seen?
Dave Haynes: I know I rag on holograms. I do think they have a role. I just think they're overstated in terms of their applicability. Also, robots, screens on roving robots. Those are almost universally pointless.
Balthasar Mayer: A technology you didn't think would make it, but became successful.
Dave Haynes: These are hard questions.
Balthasar Mayer: Was there ever a thing you were wrong about or you misjudged?
Dave Haynes: Oh, never!
You know what? The rotating LED rotors, when I first saw them, I thought they were interesting, but those will disappear in a couple of years. To Hypervisions' credit. Hypervision is the company that markets them more than anybody. They've done a great job of marketing their product and getting people excited about it and I have seen instances of it where I think it's really applicable, but I've seen lots of other cases where I just don't get it. I was wrong there that I thought that would just disappear, but they've done a good job.
Balthasar Mayer: You’re at fifteen questions now, so here’s question #16: Imagine you run a successful trade block for almost 20 years. You were very successful, and are a guiding star in the industry. If you retire, what is better: simple goodbye or emotional farewell??
Dave Haynes: A simple goodbye.
By the time this gets up and listenable, I already have my goodbye post written, and it's me riding off into the sunset on my lawnmower.
Antonia Hamberger: We couldn't top that. That picture of you riding off into the sunset on your lawnmower. We wanna preserve that memory of you.
Dave Haynes: Just imagine a cowboy on an electric lawnmower.
Balthasar Mayer: Nevertheless, thanks, Dave, for all the things you've done from all of Invidis. We’d really try to hold up your flag, and I think it's your time to have the last words.
Dave Haynes: Thank you. I've known Florian and stuff and you guys for quite some time now. Got to not just be industry colleagues and people doing the same work, but friends as well, and when I decided to wind things down, I'm 67 now and at some point you gotta do it or you're gonna be sitting at a computer when you're 85 and trying to remember your name.
I think I'm leaving it in good hands. I've got a lot of respect for what you guys do with the yearbook, with your day-to-day stuff, and everything else. It would've been challenging to just have some person come into the industry and try to have a little baptism by fire understanding it, so to have it taken over by people who already know the industry, know the people in it, know the goods and bads, and understand some of the bullshit, that makes it a lot easier to kinda back out of it, and as I've said to you and I said to others, it's not like you'll never see me again, I'm gonna stay in the industry. I just decided I didn't want to do this every day first thing in the morning. I would be better off health-wise to get up, have my coffee, and then do some stretching and go for a walk, and things like that, instead of banging away on a keyboard.
I'll be around, I'll still go to ISE and do other things. I'll probably still do some writing on Sixteen:Nine, but just as a guest editor as opposed to the daily editor. So it's been great, and I think this is gonna work out really well, and I'm excited for it.
Antonia Hamberger: We're excited too. Thank you, Dave.
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