Sixteen:Nine - All Digital Signage, Some Snark

George Clopp, RMG Networks

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

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

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

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

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Taylor Hunter, Impactrum

I love the notion of transparent LED displays - the idea of taking a big surface and making it active, without also creating a big, solid wall that blocks the view in and out.

There are "transparent" LED display products - tech that has matured to a level that they look great from the front, but still tends to look terrible from the back side that's not illuminated.

There is LED on transparent film. LG's looks great, but the pitch is so wide it has limited application. I've seen much finer pitch LED on film from Chinese companies, but like the companies using metal grids, this looks like crap from in behind.

So I was really intrigued when I was made aware of a new company called Impactrum, which is starting to market a truly transparent film on LED that can have as fine a pitch as 6mm, but looks great front and back. And can be used on the OUTSIDE of buildings.

The company is actually a spinout from a decade-old Korean LED maker. I spoke with Impactrum's US-based President, Taylor Hunter.

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David Nussbaum, PORTL

David Nussbaum has years invested in the whole idea of creating what are called holograms - but aren't - for high profile concerts and other events.

If you remember seeing video of the Coachella festival a few years ago, and rapper Tupac “coming back to life” to perform, that was done, and many similar events that followed, using a very old visual trick called Pepper’s Ghost.

Nussbaum was part of the company that bought the patents right after the Tupac event, and he had a hand in nearly all the holograms that came after it for the next few years. Nussbaum then went on his own, creating a company that does that same sort of thing, but in a very different way, and a very different business model and proposition.

He took transparent LCD display technology most commonly used for grocery fridge marketing, and tweaked the hell out of it to create more, better light and visuals.

The result is a company called PORTL and product he calls Holoportl, which does what he calls single passenger holoportation.

That sounds way too Star Trek-y for me, but in simple terms, his company has developed a process to capture people on camera and show them in lifelike size on one of his closet-like display display units.

The idea is that someone - let's say a politician - could make a personal appearance, talk and field questions, without going there.

There are a bunch of potential applications for this sort of thing, and while this is not pure digital signage, one of these units could absolutely find a home in a flagship store.

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Vernon Freedlander, Bannister Lake

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

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

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

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

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

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Jim Stoklosa, Adobe

Some very big technology companies have come into the digital signage business through the years, and with the exception of the display guys, most have either exited or their efforts kinda petered out.

Every so often I stumble across something that suggests Cisco is still in signage, but I don't see it.

It would be reasonable to have read news that Adobe had debuted a digital signage CMS, and thought, "Well, I've seen this movie already …" But it hasn't played out that way, and Adobe has for the last 4-5 years been steadily building out Screens - a content management system that grows out of its mature, widely used Adobe Experience Manager platform.

The initial target has been creatives and content managers at companies and agencies that already widely use Adobe products. If they were already developing and pushing content to web and mobile screens, why not also enable in-venue screens?

Now Adobe is kinda sorta coming out of stealth mode and thinking about a broader opportunity, providing an omni-channel CMS for mid-sized to large companies, and their creatives.

I spoke with digital signage industry veteran Jim Stoklosa, who is in charge of AEM Screens.

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Daniel Fleischer, Blip

Getting agencies and media planners out of the process was always going to be critical to enabling small to medium businesses to do marketing campaigns on digital billboards across the country.

The idea of online media marketplaces is not new - and there are certainly lots of ad exchanges and programmatic digital OOH companies already out there.

But a relatively new company - Blip - is going at things differently, and seemingly getting some traction.

The Salt Lake City start-up has a platform that enables small, hyperlocal businesses to do media buys on billboards near them - and only buy as much time and exposure as their budget allows.

It means a local mortgage broker who only has $1,000 for advertising can buy time on a big board or boards, and for the media owner, it opens up new revenue from ad clients that they wouldn't normally chase - because the time needed to open and service these small accounts isn't worth it. This works because Blip is largely filling up unbooked, or what is sometimes called remnant inventory.

Daniel Fleischer has been involved in the digital out of home sector for more than a decade, but he amicably left Ayuda in the wake of its acquisition by Broadsign. Now he runs Blip for Canada.

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David Title, Bravo Media

Experiential is a huge buzzword these days in the digital signage world, and it tends to get pretty loosely applied to all kinds of things.

I've seen projects and read PR pieces describing the work as being experiential, and thought, "Ok, in what way?"

A creative company down in the Chelsea district has been doing experiential media for years, and from the moment the elevator opens up into the offices of Bravo Media, you're into experience. There are projections all over the walls and off-the-wall gadgets like vintage slot machines retrofitted to shoot selfies.

I was in New York last week and had a great chat with David Title, the Chief Engagement Officer at Bravo, about what the company does, and how he defines engagement and experience.

This is the last podcast until the new year, as people should have better things to do around the holidays. There are some 180 back episodes to listen to, if you did need something to pass time or fall asleep. 

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Lee Horgan, Uniguest

More and more companies involved on the sell and service side of digital signage seem to be picking out business verticals and getting very focused on them.

It's a tactic that can work very well if that company already has a big history and footprint in a vertical, and that's certainly the case with Uniguest.

The company built up its business by putting in and managing business centers in hotels - those dedicated rooms or stations where guests can do things like print off a boarding pass or presentation deck. The technology company started getting asked by major clients about whether it also offered digital signage solutions, and like any cagey tech vendor, it said "Of Course!"

But the software Uniguest initially developed in-house wasn't all that good, and the management team decided the smarter and easier path was to acquire a company that already had a solid platform, long history and great people.

Uniguest bought the UK company Onelan, and then followed it up by acquiring a second UK software company Tripleplay. I didn't even know, until I had a tour last week of Uniguest's Center of Excellence in Nashville, that they'd also acquired a Pittsburgh company, TouchTown.

I had a great chat with Lee Horgan, the Chief Revenue Officer, about how Uniguest is building up a vertical solution that starts in hotel lobbies and extends all the way into guest rooms.

We also get into how Uniguest sees a big future providing very similar solutions in the senior living industry, where higher-end residences are looking and feeling more and more like very nice extended-stay hotels. 

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Hadrien Laporte, Smartpixel

If you have ever gone through the process of looking for a condo or house in a development that's still just a hole in the ground or an empty field, you've probably spent time in a presentation center looking over drawings, plans and maybe even miniature models of the development.

Those places start to tell the story, but it requires a serious leap of faith to buy a property worth hundreds of thousands of dollars based on some nice drawings, maps and pamphlets.

There are touchscreen displays that digitize that material, and arguably make it better. But if you really want to sell and close, making people feel like they're virtually immersed in the specific property they're looking at is several leaps forward.

I spoke with Hadrien Laporte, a graphic designer who a decade ago started Smartpixel in Montreal, offering software tools and creative services to help truly visualize things like commercial, industrial and residential real estate.

The company does virtual reality, without the embarrassing, isolating goggles, and does it very well. Smartpixel is thriving, has 60 people and 15 more planned for 2020, and is also planning to expand its product. It also does basic digital signage, when asked, but when you can do 3D visualizations of entire real estate developments, putting videos on screens is a bit of a shrug.

I had a great chat with Laporte about the company's roots, how it does things, and where Smartpixel is going.

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Ravi Bail, PiSignage

The Raspberry Pi micro PC has been on the market for several years now, and is in its 4th generation.

A handful of companies have developed CMS software applications for the Pi - some I'd say more successfully than others.

One that's now been around for five-plus years, and built up both a mature platform and big user base, is PiSignage, an Indian company based in the tech mecca of Bangalore.

I spoke with founder Ravi Bail about why his software consulting firm got into the signage marketplace, and why it went with Raspberry Pi.

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We get into a lot of things, including how PiSignage makes money with a managed CMS that costs subscribers less than $3 a month.

Stephen Gottlich, Gable

I have heard some people in this industry starting to describe what they do as visual solutions, as opposed to digital signage. I'm not sure that really fits in all cases, but it certainly does for Gable, a Baltimore-area company that's been doing analog signs of all kinds for four decades. About 10 years ago, Gable added digital display solutions.

They work with all kinds of end-users - heavily with retail, but also in other verticals - on visual solutions that cover the full spectrum of options. That might mean a contract that involves a big direct view LED display for a venue, but also the meat and potatoes printed and crafted material that just helps visitors find their way around a venue.

I spoke with Stephen Gottlich, Gable's Senior Vice President of Innovation and Strategy, about what the company is up to, and what the marketplace is looking for and doing.

We also get into what he sees happening more broadly in the marketplace, and what he's seen in numerous technology trips to China.

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Daniel Black, Glass-Media

Projection on window film is one of those things that I thought had come and gone from digital signage, with too many technical challenges to make the idea really workable.

But projection is having a comeback, and arguably the company doing the most with it for retail and campaign-based marketing is a scrappy little startup in Dallas, called Glass-Media.

I chatted with Daniel Black, who co-founded the company roughly five years ago and is its CEO. The big differences between the first wave of projection in signage, and now, are better technology and smarter vendors.

The film is better. The projectors are brighter. Specialty lenses mean the set-up takes less space. And the big one - laser projectors are supplanting older-style projectors that steadily needed expensive bulbs replaced, and weren't engineered for commercial applications.

The other factor is guys like Black selling this as a solution, with measurables for retailers and brands, as opposed to a technical thing with short term Wow Factor.

If you've been curious about the state of projection in signage, this is a worthwhile listen.

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Trey Courtney, Mood Media

There's a decent chance that when you walk into a retailer in a developed country, and you hear music or some sort of in-store audio playing, that's Mood Media.

The company is in more than half a million subscriber locations in a 100-plus countries delivering in-store media solutions. While that started with music, it was natural as digital signage technology matured to add on visual messaging.

Now the company has launched something called Mood Harmony, a new platform that grew out of a signage CMS and offers a single user experience to do sound, visuals, social media and even scent marketing off of one platform.

I had a great chat with Trey Courtney, the Global Chief Product Officer for Mood Media, to get the back-story on the company, why it developed Harmony, and how retailers are defining and using technology designed to deliver on customer experience. 

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2019 DSF Coffee And Controversy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Maris Ensing, Mad Systems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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IV Dickson, SageNet

It's now really common that businesses of all sizes and types who decide to deploy some sort of digital signage network look to a solutions provider who will not only help put it in, but help the client go from the idea stage all the way through to ongoing operations.

Effectively, they're outsourcing the whole shooting match to people who know what they're doing. That helps companies stay focused on what they're good at.

Tulsa-based SageNet has been doing outsourced IT work for 20 years, and about two years ago saw enough shaking among its core customers - and had enough requests for help - to branch into digital signage and make it part of a very rich suite of services.

The company brought on IV Dickson, who has been around the signage business forever, to help build out the signage business and function as a subject matter expert in a company that was more conditioned to selling IT network services.

It's worked out, and the company is now mining a lot of new opportunities in verticals like c-stores and QSR.

I had a great chat with IV about SageNet and SageView, what is described as a one-stop shop for everything signage.

We also talk opera. Yeah, opera.

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Matt Schmitt, Reflect

Reflect is one of the longest running companies in the digital signage sector - operating out of Dallas since 2001. The company built up its CMS software business largely in retail, but in early 2017 did something of a pivot into ad scheduling and targeting.

I wondered, when I first got walked through what's called Ad Logic, why Reflect was going in that direction, given the addressable market seemed a little limited and companies like Broadsign had a serious head-start on competitors.

Turns out that Reflect was responding to client needs for something that was kinda sorta digital OOH, but was less about agency-driven media scheduling and more about retail and place-based networks that wanted to monetize their screens with endemic advertising. So in a medical office network, they wanted to schedule and runs ads for, say, big pharma and medical device brands.

I spoke with Reflect's president and co-founder Matt Schmitt about his company's journey, and how Reflect has evolved from a software shop to one offering everything from strategy to creative work and media sales.

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Daniel Griffin, Userful

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

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

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

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

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Paul Peng, AUO

 I was in Taiwan recently for a trade show called Touch Taiwan, and managed to grab 20 minutes with Paul Peng, the Chairman and CEO of display manufacturing giant AU Optronics.

AUO is based in Taiwan, with its main office about an hour south of Taipei in the manufacturing city of Hsinchu. The company has about 42,000 employees globally, including a digital signage business unit that came with the acquisition of the CMS software company ComQi.

AUO makes LCD displays primarily, with a production line that can do glass sizes from Gen 3.5 to 8.5. The bigger the size, the bigger the display.

At one of the two biggest stands at Touch Taiwan, AUO was showing the wide range of display options, from stretch LCDs for retail and transport applications to super-premium 8K displays.

We grabbed some chairs at the back of the AUO stand for the chat, and while Peng does most of the talking, ComQi CEO Ifti Ifhar also gets in on the discussion. The audio quality is a little iffy, just because of where we were ...

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Garry Wicka, LG

LG has gone very big on OLED displays in recent years - making the super-thin, flexible and generally gorgeous displays the centerpiece of the company's marketing efforts at trade shows.

They bend, they curve, they hang like wallpaper and for some of them, they're see-through.

I had a chance to grab a very busy Garry Wicka, the VP of Marketing for LG's US business, to chat about where OLED is at, and how it is being used. We also get into some of the perceived technical issues with the organic displays.

Wicka also walked me through what LG is doing with direct view LED, microLED (which is still an R&D thing for the company), transparent LED film and smart displays.

We also talk about where the company is seeing strength right now in the marketplace.

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