Sixteen:Nine - All Digital Signage, Some Snark

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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Luka Birsa, Visionect

This week, I’m speaking with Luka Birsa, the CTO and co-founder of Visionect, a Slovenian tech company focused on solutions that use Electronic Ink.

If you’ve got a Kindle or Kobo e-reader, think of that display but used instead for updated bus schedules at stops, or for telling people whether a meeting room is booked or free. Or on the back of an 18-wheeler.

In our chat, we talk about the origins of the company, and what e-paper is all about. We also answer a big question - Where’s Slovenia?

Luka will fill you in on why end-users would choose e-ink displays over LCDs or other tech, and where it’s a fit and where it’s not. He also talks about what’s coming for the technology - like larger, full color displays that could happily run just off solar power.

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Wayne Rasor, FASTSIGNS

This week, I’m talking to a digital signage evangelist - Wayne Rasor, who runs the digital signage side of the business for FASTSIGNS, a traditional printing company that’s helping its 600-plus franchisees around the world stay competitive by going digital.

Based in Dallas, Wayne has a busy gig educating his own company and its franchisees on how to get into and operate what is a very different line of business for pretty much all of them. In our talk, he concedes its not always easy, but there are traditional sign shops who’ve made the jump and made digital signage a big part of their day to day businesses.

Wayne is Director of Digital for FASTSIGNS - a longtime print guy but also an unabashed nerd who loves trying to stay on top of this business and pass what he's learned along. He talks about how it all works for FASTSIGNS, and about his experience working with one of the company's main partners, Google.

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Jim Nista, Insteo

Jim Nista and I have had lotsa long, interesting talks over trade show cocktails in Las Vegas or Orlando about the state of the industry and what needs to happen, particularly as it relates to content. Unfortunately ... or perhaps fortunately, when I really think about it (hic) ... they were not recorded.

But the other day we got together virtually, and the CEO of Long Beach, CA-based content production shop Insteo chatted with me for a little more than 30 minutes about what Insteo is up to, and how it got there.

Nista has had, like many small companies in this sector, a few twists and turns and bumps on the journey, but things have started to straighten and smooth out pretty nicely in the last year - as he's got the company focused on a variation of a business model that's worked for other companies. Insteo does subscription content - but not the news, weather, sports and entertainment feeds that have been well established by other companies, notably podcast sponsor Screenfeed.

Insteo's content store doesn't offer that stuff - instead focusing on dynamic HTML5-driven templates and update tools that allow small businesses to get screens in their business places that are running contextually relevant content. That may be project status notices for an engineering company, or it might be product menus for a marijuana dispensary.

Jim has been around web services since the days when he had to explain to customers why they'd want a website. He's one of the most knowledgeable guys in the business when it comes to the future of content, and well worth a listen.

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Brian Fitzpatrick, Revel Media Group

Every so often I bump into a company that's stayed well out of the spotlight, kept its collective heads down, and built up a thriving business - while competitors were unaware the company even exists.

Consider Revel Media Group, which is based in the greater Salt Lake City area. Revel is a digital signage solutions provider that leads with content, and since starting up about six years ago, has seen triple digit growth, year after year.

The company was started by Brian Fitzpatrick and a business partner, with Brian having cashed out of a business he built installing and managing very high-end home theatre and home automation systems for stinking rich people.

What Revel does is, effectively, creative and content management as a service. Customers pay a set fee, and get as much creative as they need, turned around as fast as 24-hours. It's not for major brands. But for retailers who have a lot to say and sell, it's a cost and timing model that resonates for them.

We spoke at Seneca's partner conference outside Syracuse, NY earlier in August.

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Jeff Hastings, BrightSign

If you're looking for concrete evidence that the digital signage business is now doing some serious volume, consider the word on this latest Sixteen:Nine podcast from Jeff Hastings, the CEO of BrightSign. His shipping department is packing and moving roughly 1,000 units a day.

Let me repeat that ... a day.

BrightSign designs, builds and markets little purple boxes used by a LOT of network operators as media players. In our chat, Hastings talks about BrightSign’s direct ties to another purple box company in Silicon Valley, Roku, and how that relationship has evolved.

One of the really sharp guys in this industry, Hastings talks about why the company is moving so much product this year, and how it will soon have more than 1 million units deployed. He also talks about where the company and industry are headed.

This was a Skype chat, so you'll hear the odd network hiccup and scratchiness. But it is 99% solid sound.

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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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Florian Rotberg, Invidis

This week I’m speaking with Florian Rotberg, the managing director at the Munich-based digital signage consulting and events firm Invidis. Florian talks about the background of his company, and his impressions of the global digital signage market.

Rotberg goes into detail about the differences between the North American and European/EMEA market, and the challenges American and Canadian companies run into trying to expand across the Atlantic.

We had our chat in a noisier than expected press room in June at InfoComm, just ahead of the Digital Signage Summit he put on there.

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John Wang, IAdea

In this episode, John Wang, the CEO of Taipei-based IAdea, talks about the roots of his company, which primarily makes commercial-grade media players and all-in-one devices for the digital signage market.

He recalls starting up the business right out of school in Taiwan, and unfortunately timing that startup right when the first Internet bubble burst. Wang talks about the idea of Information Appliances - the IA in IAdea - and the journey taken by the company to today.

Now a trusted supplier for many signage software firms and network operators, Wang talks about staying on top of emerging technologies and where his company, and the business as a whole, are going. He also goers into the perils of cheap devices and the importance of commercial, rugged product for the signage business.

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Randy Pagnan, RP Visual Solutions

This week I am speaking with Randy Pagnan, the RP in RP Visual Solutions, an Anaheim, California company that's in the business of designing and manufacturing the special structures that hold signature digital signage projects in place.

In this conversation, done at last month's InfoComm trade show in Las Vegas, Randy talks about the origins of his company and some of the most notable projects he's done, include the giant, curved LED wall in the Westgate SuperBook in Vegas, and the digital-heavy Microsoft stores.

Randy also talks about the future for display tech, and how fine pixel-pitch LED will have a big impact, with LED display as easy to buy as carpeting. His goal: be the best LED carpet-layer out there.

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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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Jennifer Davis, Leyard/Planar

In this episode, I’m speaking with Jennifer Davis, who is Chief Marketing Officer for Leyard and also the VP of Marketing and Product Strategy for Planar, which is now owned by Leyard. So she’s one busy puppy these days.

Jennifer grabbed us a meeting space on the exhibit floor at InfoComm last month, and we spent a half-hour talking about the LED display business, and what it has been like transitioning from a small company based in gloriously weird Portland to being part of a giant LED display company based in Beijing.

We finished off talking about the near absence of women in this business, particularly in senior roles, and what might change that.

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Rick Cope, NanoLumens

In this episode, I’m speaking with Rick Cope, the founder and CEO of NanoLumens, which makes and markets its own line of unique indoor and outdoor LED displays from its facilities in Atlanta.

Rick has a really interesting background, coming out of the US Marines, working for DARPA, making electric cars 20 years ago, and then getting into areas like fuel cells and battery charging systems.

Rick talks about how NanoLumens got started, how his business has grown very crowded, and how he plans to go after overseas companies he believes are violating NanoLumens' patents.  He also talks about the stinger missile he has in his office.

We did this interview on the floor at InfoComm, which is why it’s so noisy. That’s his wife Karen Robinson laughing and yakking in the background. She’s EVP for Strategy at the company.

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Jeremy Gavin, Screenfeed

Jeremy Gavin, the founder of Screenfeed, sat down with me in an empty conference room at InfoComm earlier this month.

Jeremy runs a Minneapolis company that generates great-looking, ready-made content feeds for digital signage networks. Screenfeed, in many ways, reinvented the whole approach to subscription content - moving the business off scrolling tickers and rolling headlines, to a much more visual, curated approach.

It's been very successful and Screenfeed has network clients around the world. Jeremy walked me through how and why he started Screenfeed, and some interesting new research that shows subscription content attracts viewers and drives recall for digital signage messaging. 

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Randy Dearborn, MGM Resorts International

Randy Dearborn has been running digital signage networks since 1993, starting with a skunkworks set-up at Treasure Island in Las Vegas and building that up to a network that now covers 22,000 screens across the MGM Resorts International portfolio. 

He's that company's Vice President of Multimedia & Guest Technology, which puts him in charge of just about any screen you see inside or outside of an MGM property in Las Vegas and beyond. Randy talks about how he applies technology, and how everything he and his team do is based on data and measurement.

Randy is also the current chairman of the Digital Signage Federation, and we talk about where the DSF is at, and where the industry is going.

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Viktor Petersson, Screenly

Viktor Petersson is kind of “the man” when it comes to making digital signage run on a $45 Raspberry Pi mini PC. 

For the last four years, Viktor’s company Screenly has been focused on developing and evolving a signage solution specifically for the Raspberry Pi. In this episode of Sixteen:Nine Podcasts, we talk about why he went with the Pi, the success he's seen  and the kinds of customers who gravitate to Raspberry Pis as a digital signage hardware player. 

Petersson also makes it pretty clear that if you know what you are doing, Raspberry Pi can be a serious, substantial option for digital signage networks.

He was in London when we spoke, and you'll hear the Skype connection get messy for a heartbeat here and there.  

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