Sixteen:Nine - All Digital Signage, Some Snark

Jerome Moeri, Navori

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

Switzerland's Navori is among the most enduring and respected firms on the software side of the digital signage industry - widely used globally and known for being an early adopter of emerging technologies.

I did a podcast session with CEO Jerome Moeri about four years ago, and a new product release coming out of Navori presented a good reason to get back together recently.

The lab side of the business has been working, for several years now, on an AI-based computer vision platform designed to do audience measurement for retail and digital out of home. The product is called Aquaji, and it pairs with Navori's well-established CMS software.

I asked Moeri about the thinking - given there are numerous commercial and open-source computer vision options already on the market. We get into why, what it does, and how it differs with what else is out there.

We also talk about the state of the business and industry on what we all hope is the tail end of COVID. We also hear his expectations that the coming year will see a lot of consolidation of the software ecosystem, through acquisition. Intriguingly, Moeri says Navori will be making a couple of acquisition announcements soon.

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TRANSCRIPT

Welcome, Jerome. It's been a while since we've talked, I looked up and saw that we first did a podcast almost four years ago now, which is amazing how time goes by. How has things been for Navori in the past year? I've spoken with many companies and generally speaking, they've done okay through all this mess. 

Jerome Moeri: Yes, the pandemic was a moment of truth and the travel ban was very difficult for us because we are an international company and our business is based on traveling. So it's been difficult. So we had to refocus on the research and development to end this pandemic with many innovations.

Yeah, I was curious about that. You've had to adapt to selling only online when so much of your work, with your with the guys I know over here in North America, is relationship-based and Jeffrey and Jordan are on planes a lot visiting clients, and now they've had to do everything online. Have you gotten good at that? 

Jerome Moeri: It's been difficult but surprisingly our revenue continued to grow last year in 2020 and North America was not affected at all by the pandemic. It's quite surprising, but this is what happened and the Middle East and Asia also kept the same level of revenues.

In Europe, it's a bit different. We had a slight drop because, in Europe, we were traditionally working on bigger projects, big deployments in retail, and most of the deployments were put on hold. It was a bit more difficult in Europe but North America and the Middle East and Asia are good. So we did not have any impact. 

We've been able to do everything remotely using Teams and I guess it has not been too difficult for us because our company is 20 years old so we have a base of customers and all the recurring orders. But I had a thought of the young entrepreneurs, that puts a lot of effort into creating a company and for them, it's been very difficult because they did not have a strong base of customers to face the pandemic. 

Yeah. I would imagine a lot of your customers are kind of enterprise-level and as I've heard from some other companies, they just carried on knowing that this thing would end and they had the resources and they already had a plan in place.

Jerome Moeri: Yeah. We also had to open an online store and start selling online for the entry-level products and we have set up we had to set up full logistics, to take into account this pandemic 

I've heard that from other companies where they've had to kind of branch into things they wouldn't normally do or don't really want to do, but you have to adjust.

Jerome Moeri: Yeah. We had to do it in such a way that we can still continue and not change our business models, and remain consistent working with partners. The development was a bit sophisticated, but we've been able to to to complete this development. 

Has customer needs changed over the past year, are they asking for different kinds of things?

 

Jerome Moeri: Yeah when the pandemic last year came up, we were in the middle of  research and development projects based on computer vision. So we had to stop everything and release a product that is a computer vision system that is integrated into our digital signage and it's managing how many people can enter and how long they would wait if they have to wait to get in the store and we've been able to also to detect whether they are wearing a mask or not. And we did that to help our customers, especially retail in Europe because they needed a solution to open their stores while following the regulation from COVID and so we released an add-on called, “Access Control” which was dedicated to this type of use and it did help a lot our customers in Europe. 

I've seen a lot of reports around access control systems and thermal readers and things that will meet the people coming in and out of a retail environment or another environment and I've been very curious about how much actual take-up there's been of that. I think it's quite interesting, but because I'm cocooned, so to speak where I live and I'm not traveling and seeing this stuff, I've not read a lot of indication that there's been much take-up in retail, but are you seeing it happen?  

Jerome Moeri: Yes. It's very important in banks, in department stores where you have multiple entries. A human being cannot count and check how many people are in when you have multiple entries, for instance, and only the computer and the software can do that.

It has not been deployed so massively, to be frank, but for downtown department stores or banks, or flagships, it's being used intensively and it was just a solution we tried to bring on the market and to help our customers. 

You've just released a new product that you were referencing earlier with computer vision, it's called Aquaji? 

Jerome Moeri: Yeah, so access control was a digital signage product. So it was related to our digital signage product so a maximum of users may take profit of it and it's because when the pandemic happened, I assigned 50% of our R&D team on computer vision starting in 2017 and we have made some prototypes and investigations and also market insights because we thought it was a market that was related to the digital signage or to the OOH and at the same time, it was different in the sense that it's pure AI.

And we found this potential market interesting. This market would be worth, according to the insights we get, more than $1B within five years, just the software for artificial intelligence in retail. 

Now the whole idea of audience measurement using computer vision and AI has been around for 15+ years, there's a number of pretty well-established vendors out there doing it, and we've even seen some of the display manufacturers like NEC, in particular, coming up with their own version of it. And there are open source libraries that have computer vision, open-source code, all that sort of thing.

So I'm curious, why did you see the need to develop your own when there was a lot of it out there? 

Jerome Moeri: So first because such companies do not have digital CMS software in digital signage and the connection between both systems is very interesting because the content is on the digital signage end, we thought we had to make these developments and to release a new range of products.

The second point is that this is true, that you have a lot of open source code, viable from the web, with some models enabling you to do some computer vision. When we did research and development, we found out that most of these companies have a level of accuracy at about 40% and this technology is consisting, mostly of counting bodies, not detecting people. So if you have someone passing by multiple times when you have employees, it's just the body and the censors are doing a great job in counting bodies but the computer vision is not needed to count bodies or shapes. What we have developed is we created our own engine, just like we did in digital signage and what makes our system special is that we can combine and create multiple models. So we create models and we combine models to reach a degree of accuracy beyond 90%. This is the first differentiator. 

The second differentiator is that because we can identify people when someone is passing by multiple times, we catch only one person, and because we identify people, we can say how long they waited in line and how long they stayed in the store. 

And for the OOH industry, we have also developed a technology which is detecting the field of vision of the people passing by and we can determine, whether they had an object within their field of vision. It can be a product for the retail application, or it can be an advertising panel for OOH, for instance. And we can say if they had the object within the field of vision, and if they looked at the object, or if they interacted with the object and for how long. And so these are the main differentiators. And the reason why we've been able to achieve this is that the engine was created by us.

We used to collaborate with university researchers, and we also made our own models and we made an assembly of multiple models. So this is why we can reach a degree of accuracy of 90%. 

Does the platform only work with Navori's CMS? 

Jerome Moeri: Yes, absolutely. 

Okay, and how does it run? Is it running off of the same device that's being used for the media playout or do you need a separate device?

Jerome Moeri: We need a separate device, like a PC for the moment, but in June we'll be releasing a small device that would deliver digital signage, a media player plus computer vision, including the camera. 

Okay, so an all-in-one thing. 

Jerome Moeri: Yes and it will be far cheaper than the PC solution and it will be all in one.

The reason why digital signage and computer vision are interesting is that within the digital signage system, for each impression of an ad, we have the ideal audience demographics, how long they stay, what is the opportunity to see, conversions and stuff like this?

So it's a plug-and-play solution that doesn't need to play with API and to create complex and sophisticated systems. The second reason is that digital signage can play some content and choose content according to what the camera can see. So we can reverse the model and adjust the content according to the audience. And again, this is plug-and-play.

I have always been curious about the idea of audience measurement-triggered content, so a male 40 to 60 walks in front of the screen, serve content that's contextual to that person. 

It's always been interesting, but I've wondered how often it's used and how much of a demand is there from brands and from retailers to do that because it could get complicated in terms of the scheduling and planning for that, right? 

Jerome Moeri: No, you just set conditions and within a few clicks, anyone can do it from the UI and it's always good to adjust. With the content triggering, you have two ways. You may adjust the content on the fly, and you may trigger it. I agree that for the triggering, it's a bit special or figuring is more for emergencies, but I just think the content on the fly is something fully automated and it's very easy to do. 

And do your customers have their heads around that? They understand the possibilities ‘cause I can see them going, “That's interesting, but that sounds awfully complicated, maybe we'll do that later.” 

Jerome Moeri: I think it might take several years to make people use this type of solution, but the product is available now, so it's still a product for pioneers. And you should also consider programmatic systems.

I’d like to connect Aquaji with a programmatic system so we can deliver some very detailed and accurate statistics on the audience so the cost per impression may rise because of the qualification of the audience. And at that level, we can also measure the level of interest of a given content, because we can compare one content to another, to find out which one is more efficient than the other.

Yeah, that to me is the kind of the secret sauce of these computer vision platforms that I don't think gets enough attention is the idea that you can take a look at dwell times and attention levels, piece by piece, and adjust the content accordingly instead of just shoveling it out there and hoping people notice.

Jerome Moeri: Yes. Precisely. 

Do you offer some sort of a dashboard that your customers can then use to see what's going on and understand it? Because if it's just log files and it's just a bunch of numbers. 

Jerome Moeri: Yes, we have beautiful dashboards within the Aquaji user interface and that's not made much for scientists, but it's more for marketing people and advertising people, so it’s for everyone. 

We tried to simplify as much as possible. But at the same time, we also have an API for data scientists that may retrieve information of cross-analysis with other business intelligence systems. 

Do you see this product working more in the digital out-of-home sector or do you see retail being the big take up?

Jerome Moeri: We've addressed both markets, but I think OOH might have maybe 30% this year and 70% for retail. This is originally a marketing product, enabling people to move better about their customers, the traffic, their activities, and the customer experience and most of the features are marketing oriented. 

Have you found your company being drawn more and more into the digital OOH side of things, just because of contracts that have come up? 

Jerome Moeri: Yeah, contracts/opportunities. I think digital out of home is a very interesting market, especially from the backend, because it's quite complex, you have to create rules and you have a lot of algorithms.

From our standpoint, the requirements are quite busy because it’s full-screen content, you usually don't have dynamic contextual content on the screen, no automation, and stuff like that. It's a market that is very interesting from the backend. We are clearly a contender on OOH. There is an incumbent company, which we appreciate a lot by the way and we try to make a difference with this integrated computer vision solution and we think it would be successful. 

We will start the test of Aquaji next week at Istanbul Airport. It's a bigger deployment. They have, I think a thousand displays, it's a combination of LED displays and system on chip displays and they will make some tests with the content automation. So according to the audience, we might adjust the content on the fly.

In the past, when companies have looked at using computer vision hardware and software, they have often tended to just do a sample of locations and extrapolate data based on that sample, just because the hardware and the software costs to do it across all of the display is just cost-prohibitive. 

I'm assuming that's changing and when it comes to things like Istanbul airport, maybe you're not at every screen with a computer vision node, but you can deploy them more broadly.

Jerome Moeri: Yeah. We will release our own hardware and we have simplified the process in such a way that this technology becomes scalable and deployable. Because all the analysis is done on and the numbers are important, but they are less important than the comparison over time, especially in marketing, but also in OOH, because you have to find out the trend.

If you are a restaurant, you need to make sure that your customer has not waited more than 10 minutes in a waiting line, for instance, you need to limit how long people stay there in the store based on demographic, age, gender, and stuff like this because it reflects the attractiveness of your store, its assortment, layout and things like this. 

You have to measure how many people are in store and it's also very important for retail and we created a product that is doing these types of measurements and can adjust the signage at the same time and I think the cost of Aquaji won't be so different from digital signage after two years. Today it's 30% more expensive than digital signage, but within two years, I can tell you, it will be exactly the same price. So twice the price of digital signage to be clear. 

So with scale, that'll come down. 

Jerome Moeri: Yeah. We'll develop a small device, plug-and-play, and what is also interesting with Aquaji is that we can plug the system into an IP camera. So any camera pre-installed, we can use the video feed to make the analysis. So we don't need a physical camera next to it or something, to make the analysis. We can plug our system into the security cameras because you already have security cameras to feed them data for inbound people, outbound people, queuing and so we can use these cameras, so it would be a facilitator, the deployments. 

How much pushback do you get from venues when you start talking about using their security cameras? 

The whole idea of computer vision, particularly in North America, gets people all excited about an invasion of privacy, which usually is completely wrongheaded, but nonetheless, they're excited about it. So how do you work around the privacy issue? 

Jerome Moeri: The degree of intrusion of Aquaji is far much lower than a traditional CCTV that retail companies have been using for the last 30 years because we don't store biometrics. We don't store data that are related to individuals. We aggregate on the fly information and so it's very close to the sensor.

I remember you had a case in Canada, you had the case with Fairview, I think because this company was storing the biometrics on the backend, on the server for analysis. We don't do that. We don't store biometrics at all and we are compliant with GDPR. It depends on the regulation, whether you film inside or outside, but we are fully compliant with GDPR.

So privacy is really a concern for us. This is also why we don't process the kids under 18 years old. We don't track the races and we have a fully encrypted process and we don't store anything that is personal, whether biometrics or images or stuff like this. So I don't think this system is so intrusive. This is for Europe and Canada, with the GDRP. We developed the software with about 50 features. The user can adjust the features of the software to be compliant with local regulations because GDPR might change from one Euro country to another.

Then you have the United States, except one of two States, there is no regulation, so it means that the customer can store with Aquaji, the biometrics on the central database and share this information with business intelligence and other marketing material. So, It really depends on the country. We can do everything, but in some countries like Canada and Europe, the user has to restrict the software in such a way that it is compliant. 

So you run a company, between yourself and your R& D people who are usually pretty early on emerging technology trends. You guys were early adopters of system-on-chip, you were early adopters of Android. 

What are the trends you're seeing out there that you think are going to get attention and traction within the digital signage ecosystem? 

Jerome Moeri: I think the digital signage industry is pretty much stabilized now, the software, the display, and software targeting the low-hanging fruits so they deliver a commoditized software and they try to approach the market whether directly or indirectly. And then you have professional software like Navori and at Navori, I would say in the United States, for instance, about 40% of the top digital signage operators are using the Navori OEM and the scale is greater than it used to be a five-years back. And the way I see how the industry would evolve is that these digital signage operators would become stronger, they are doing a lot of acquisitions, including internationally, and these big operators would continue to grow and for the proficient digital signage network, they require sophistication, they require the support of multiple display brands and operating systems and they want to do everything. So, for the top part of the market, we would continue to get stronger. 

We will also do some acquisitions, some acquisitions would be announced very soon and so there will be some kind of consolidation for the bigger digital signage operators and for the rest of the market it will be taken care of by display vendors and probably the software for all the basic use cases.

Yeah, you've had Samsung and LG out there for a while now with their own CMS software. and Samsung in particular has really started to aggressively market MagicInfo in a way that they didn't do for a very long time. You see the big display guys doing that more and more? 

Jerome Moeri: Oh yeah, you can tell how good the software is in its ability to incorporate artificial intelligence in its coming technologies.

It's interesting when you're talking about Navori doing acquisitions. I was curious about that because I get a lot of phone calls and emails from venture capital firms and independent investors who are saying, “Hey, we're interested in acquiring companies, who are out there. Can you help us with that?”

And it seems like there's a lot of activity around that right now. I don't know whether they're looking for distressed companies or they just see an opportunity to grow. 

Jerome Moeri: Yeah, from the software standpoint, you have a lot of national companies, a company that is leading or a number two for a given territory like Germany or Italy, Spain, and these companies, they have a problem because their market is not large enough and they have some market share, but it's not enough to finance the research and development. And these types of companies are typically the best company to acquire and these are our target companies. 

So who are you buying?

Jerome Moeri: I can't tell you today that if you are patient enough, I’ll tell you when it will happen. 

I'll find out when everybody else does, right? 

Jerome Moeri: Nope. You would find out earlier, two days before. 

Alright, Jerome. It was great to catch up with you.

Jerome Moeri: Thank you very much, Dave. I wish you a great day. 

Thank you. Take care. 

Bill Robertson, NextGen Video Information Systems Alliance

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

Suppose something bad happens - like a tsunami or a gas leak - and the alert messaging comes up on TVs and digital signage screens in English text. That's great, except if much of the viewing audience consists of first-generation immigrants who barely speak or read English.

It's pretty much the problem, right now, with public alert systems, and a volunteer organization called the NextGen Video Information Systems Alliance is trying to fix that. Called NVISA for short, the body has come up with a way to add universal graphic elements to emergency alerts.

Called Visually Integrated Display Symbology (or VIDS), the system can be adopted across a wide range of communications platforms, notably digital signage.

In this podcast, I speak with alliance member Bill Robertson about the thinking behind these graphical alerts. We also get into detail of how digital signage network operators and solutions providers can plug into the system and put it to work.

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TRANSCRIPT

Bill, thank you for joining me. What is the NextGen Video Information Systems Alliance and why did you form it? 

Bill Robertson: The NVISA, as we call it is a group of like-minded initially technology companies that had different pieces of technology that were primarily focused at the upcoming ATSC 3.0 broadcast standard. We had different elements that we could use or leverage and many of us that formed the NVISA were members of the ATSC, what was referred to as the “I Team”, implementation team, where we talked about this and helped present some of the elements that are the standards that embodied in ATSC 3.0. We saw more opportunity in getting together and not just being standards based and focused on those particular things, but how could we leverage this? What could we do together as a group, again, of like-minded individuals to be able to represent these things.

And some of it too is not necessarily having to wait until people adopt that new standard, but what could we do today? What could be leveraged with even today's technology? So the initial start was some technology companies, but more broadcasters and other people have joined the Alliance to help modulator what's going on, what and how it could fit, what other things we could do.

So it's been a nice thing about this next gen video thing does not necessarily say that it's gotta be the next in this type of standards implementation, but what else could we do to improve the whole idea of information? 

Okay. So I was interested in this because I got a press release talking about how your organization had put together a series of recommendations for symbols to use for alerts, correct?

Bill Robertson: Yeah, and that was actually our first product in Working Group 1. I was a chairman of that particular group and what we focused on is a recognition that there are things in the broadcast groups in North America, primarily the United States and Canada, where there are members of the community, emergency managers, females on the United States side, whether Canada on the Canadian side, that issue alert information and the alerts can go out over radio, in audio broadcast and they can also go over television. People have seen these in the United States, they're usually accompanied with different tones to get your attention, to make sure you understand, “Hey, this is an alert. This is information.” 

Well, the interesting thing about those is they're represented in, if it's a television thing, there's an oral component and a visual component. We've got text crawl, we've got audio that's associated with it. The trick is that those particular things have never been really associated with something that wasn't texts that had to be read. Or it might be a full screen display that takes over the primary programming and displays what the event is about. But we've seen more of a situation where if we could represent those with a graphical element, we could do a couple of more things. Number one, you're not reliant on them being able to read the particular alert, what it is. That seems a little strange, only in the fact that if English or French may not be your native language, let's say we needed to represent something to a Spanish community, to a Slavic community, whatever it might be, that if we can use symbols that are more generally understood to represent a particular event that's happening at that time, we think that is a better way to help communicate. 

So it's not just saying, you have to have the text and you have to have a crawl representation or you have to have a full screen slate, but many times, when you see this, if you see a lot of other symbols, like Stop signs’ got a standard shape for them and people will know what they mean, others signs, things like that represent information that can be conveyed without having to do any kind of motion, without having to display anything else. If we can put that symbol up there, we can definitely communicate. 

There must have been a lot of debate around the symbols?

Bill Robertson: There's some interesting things around that. There actually was a good body of work that was already done. So we leveraged a lot of that and some of these are ISO standards. There's actually an ISO standard on different societies; it's actually referred to as societal security emergency management guidelines for color coded alerts. In that standard they represent, okay, “here's a color code” and we adopted that into our recommended practice. One thing I should point out too is NVISA's not a standards group. We are coming together as a coalition of people and we're publishing these kinds of work as a recommended practice. So it's an idea that, here's some things that we've put together as like-minded individuals and we think has roots not only in this particular part of the industry, but in many other things, again, wherever there's visual displays and digital signage is the perfect example. Hundreds of thousands of these displays all over the place that could take advantage of a similar kind of thing. And by us mapping these things or looking at these symbols and bringing that together, it really helps. 

Another ISO standard for graphical symbols for public information, again, most of these, by the way, tie with hazardous waste or potential electrocution, you've seen some of these things as you approach a building many times, those kinds of things, but there's another group that's called the National Alliance for Public Safety GIS goes by the acronym, NAPSG and they've done quite a bit that goes beyond just electrical symbols or gas, chlorine gas, natural gas, those kinds of symbols that you would put up as warnings to the general public. But they've done things to incorporate elements like floods, hurricanes, tornadoes. 

And so we leveraged a lot of the work that was done and didn't just say, “okay, we're going to take this symbol.” Now some of the symbols, I will tell you, are a little complex if you start to squeeze them down onto a small display size, but they do a pretty good job of conveying the information. A tornado looks like a tornado, the symbol is pretty well described. There's other things too, where a flash flood looks like a house with waves so you know there's things going on. 

What we had to do was they didn't cover a lot of the event codes that are used in public alerting. So we had to either craft a couple of things around it, or reference them in a slightly different way. There's things that can be communicated to the public that are just simply information, for example, a school closing would be an information. It doesn't have to have a sign that might jump at you and scare you into action, but it's an informational type of thing. Maybe an exclamation mark or maybe we did a little cloud symbol with an ellipse to say, “Hey, there's information here, and pay attention to it.”

One of the important things that we did was not just about the symbols, but was also in adapting these ISO standards for people that are colorblind and to reference the symbol with the particular essence of the alert, “is this a really traumatic type of event?” For example, a tornado is a pretty substantive short fuse, quick action type of thing. Your life, limb, property are in potential danger. So we escalated some of these alerts to be represented not only by the symbol, but we added something to the symbol where we did a double underline and that was again to reference this, if I just put up the same symbol, for example, flash flood and flood watch look like the exact same symbol, but by adding a color border around them, we can represent them differently. So red with a double underlined says, “Hey, pay attention” More information to exchange and reference things. “Hey, this is an important thing.” “It's red.” “It's got this.” 

We also looked at the idea of contrast so that if the font was done in a proper way, and it had a certain speed to it, things like that, but it would be enough contrast. So people that had again, either colorblindness, maybe in the red, green spectrum or other things like that would still be able to at least read the text or be able to discern the difference because the double underline is different than a single underline or no underline. And that's again, the basis of what we did.

Yes, there was some debate, there was a lot of stuff, but I think we centered on some really good elements that we came up with to really represent what we were trying to go after. 

Yeah, I think there are three tiers of alerts. Is that accurate? 

Bill Robertson: We actually have five groups and that doesn't mean that the symbols change but group one, which is the most important one, for example, I use a tornado warning, something that has a substantial impact and again, a short fuse, it's a very timely thing you needed to take notice very quickly. In group one and group two, we use the same symbols. We use the same color background, but we have a unique thing that we set. One of them is an example. If you were to tune into your TV set and you happened to be watching while the alert is being sent, the typical scenario is that the alert pops up there, maybe we can put the symbol up there too, the alert scrolls by, and then it's over. It's done. You switch back to regular programming. 

The trick there is that the alert is still active. The alert hasn't gone away. The fact that you're still in a danger situation is still there. It just so happens that it just doesn't show up on the TV screen. So what we've done is set up a situation where the symbol would pop up and then the crawl or the text information would be displayed associated with that. Now, when I talk about a crawl, typically on television, you're familiar with these things, ticker-tape crawls, we went across that kind of stuff. Again, if that symbol pops up with it, you've got some association. If it goes away or let's say you tune in after it's already displayed, you don't know you're under an alert.

So we have a scenario that says: Group one has the symbol and the text displayed together. Group two uses the symbol, but no text. The nice thing about that is, for example, you might have a, let's say a tornado warning for an hour. You're in an active storm cell area. You've got a tornado warning and it's active for an hour. So now I can pop up the thing with the texts, say you're under a tornado warning, but then I can leave the symbol on the screen. It's not really blocking a lot of other information and programming is still up, but I've got persistence in that group too, that says I can leave the symbol up for the duration of the alert, not meaning I know how long the crawl is, but the duration of the alert says, what does the emergency management group say the duration of this event is, and keep it up for that period of time. So we've got like a watermark. So it's using the same symbol, it's in the same position and everything.

And so when when the crawl goes away or that information goes away, that symbol can persist. Now, this has deeper meaning in the future, that might be a clickable type of link. So here's an example:say the alerts have already been broadcast, the alert, the audio, everything has already gone. I tune in 10 minutes later. I see the screen. It's got that little icon up there. I wonder what that's about. I don't have to go search someplace else. It could be a clickable link. So on my smart TV or my display or whatever device I happen to be viewing this particular content on. I could click on that and it would take me to a page or to an area where I could find out more information about what that event is, what's going on, do I need to be prepared for what's happening? 

So that persistence in those really severe alert things really helps us set a standard and I say that loosely in a standard body type of thing, but in a way of representing important information and giving guidance on how it could be used to form a sense of iconography that people could use in the rest of their display technology.

So what would happen if this wasn't done, or I guess because this is just brand new, what's happening right now in terms of alerts. Is it just a problem that a lot of it's in text and it's just an English? 

Bill Robertson: Yeah. You're going right down that path. The situation that we have, and obviously I'll speak a little bit more to the United States because of the EAS system in the United States, the primary alerts are done in English. That's it, that's the kind of the native thing it's done in English even if it's a Spanish station. The worst case scenario is it could be a Spanish radio station and you’re still going to get the alerts in English. And that's not very good for that audience. 

So in the same context you would have English text information on a Spanish channel, so if you're looking at a video display and all of the programming, all the advertisement, everything else is all in Spanish, you've got your target market. All of a sudden, I pop up in emergency information, which emergency managers are really seeking to communicate to as many people as they possibly can. I want you to get this information out. It needs to disseminate to as many people as possible. 

And so if you just typically look at the normal things, there's no sign, there's no icon. You're going to get an English text crawl. You're going to get English audio over a Spanish station. That's not very good in really trying to communicate what's going on and to whom they can really discern that information and take action on it. The idea of this alerting is to be able to know whether you need to take action and what type of action you need to take. Typically that's described in these alerts, that's an important situation. 

So the idea is if we can take this stuff forward and people start to adopt this “VIDS” idea or this visual information display symbology. That's how we've coined the term VIDS to represent and do a better job of leveraging the stuff we've already vetted out. We vetted out the icons we've done the colors. We've done a lot of other things. It doesn't mean people couldn't modify that if they want it to, if there's something that they want to present a slightly differently, perhaps for a station ID type thing, but it's really to help bring this together. Bring this symbol that is universal. If there's no language issue with presenting the symbol and therefore it can be more easily discerned by people that don't have that native language skill or a may not be able to read the text, may have a visual impairment about reading it, or don't have the language skills because it's done only in one particular language.

And I assume it's important to have everybody on the same page in terms of the symbology use, because if you have five ways of showing a condition, you're just causing people to look at it twice and go, “okay, what does this mean?” 

Bill Robertson: Exactly and that's why, again, what we did is, we didn't invent that. It wasn't an idea. In fact we loathed the idea of trying to build graphic symbols because a lot of the stuff was already done. It’s “can we leverage them?” 

And by leveraging the stuff that's already out there and doing a little bit of improvement in what we think is by adding the double underline, so you can differentiate both the elevation of the alert, because again, the symbols could be the same in a flash flood and a watch, which isn't as meaningful or impactful if it was a flash flood warning that, that's the next step up. 

So that actually by the way, ties back into the group. So group one is the event codes or the event information is displayed with a symbol. Group two is the symbol-only to persist for those really important alerts. And then we go into group three, which has a yellow color again, focusing on what we should do for cautions or warnings and types of things. It uses a single underline under the symbol, again, to differentiate it, so we know where we are with the symbol, and represent that in terms of, “Hey, this is something of importance. It's not as critical as a red alert, but you've got a yellow alert.” So again, that color coding, we think is important. There's blue that we do with some symbols and most of the blues are done as informational types of things. Again, it's not a critical life/limb/property type of event, but it's something that's informational. Again, school closings or a road closure someplace because of Some kind of construction thing or accident even as it may be. 

And then the final one, is group five is a green background, no underline under the symbol. And that's really, again, a level of information, but they're typically for tests. So this is just, you could in essence, ignore it. “Don't worry, it’s green. Everything's okay. We're fine.” It's just up there to help say, okay, I can't read the text, but I understand this is just a simple message. No action necessary. 

So I'm an end-user with a digital signage network of some kind, let's say on a university campus, or I'm a digital signage software vendor, or a subscription content service as well.

How do I use this? How do I plug into it? What are the implications of operating it? 

Bill Robertson: We've had a couple of companies already implement VIDS in their character generation devices. One of our partner companies in NVISA has done this and we actually have some examples of what this looks like, which I can send you the YouTube video links I think would be very nice because again, when people see it, in a classic sense, a picture tells a thousand words and so they can see it and they get a better understanding of what these different types of things look like.

But for the content providers and especially the digital signage network, we would love to see them adopt this similar thing. And there's a couple of things around it, but again, the symbols are there. We have them available in JPEG and SVG format so they can grab the symbols. We've gotten the table already built for what event codes they're associated with. So we've done a lot of the groundwork. All we need is more people to gather the information that we've already provided and adopted into their product. 

The one thing that they will need in that environment and we've seen a lot more of this, and this is coming from my work, let me say my day job at digital alert systems,is we build the devices that listen for the event codes, that listen for the emergency managers and even in some respects the emergency managers use our equipment to generate the alerts that go out over the air, over the internet. And when we receive those, we can pass that information into the signage systems, into the character generators, into those things. So in other words, for the most part, they're doing their normal thing. They're showing and displaying the content that is already set up for that sign. if it's a map in a mall, if it's a menu in a restaurant type of thing, whatever it may be, they're doing their normal work. We can send them a message over IP that just says, “Hey, if this display is in this location, given some geo coordinates about where it might be, then here is the alert that you're currently under.” And Dave, part of the stuff that I look at around this is there's an idea that in college campuses and facilities, enterprise facilities that have a lot of signage around in their particular campus areas, they live in what I call a hyper bubble.

So it's a hyper-local bubble there. They're sitting here and they get information and they exchange it inside the building or inside the campus. There's not a lot of recognition of events that might be going outside that could impact them. Again, there's a lot more of these and we've been doing a lot of work in my day job about facility managers and other things about adopting this type of technology, because if I'm in that environment and what's really good, is these signage elements have a great way to communicate. It's fast, it's a great way to communicate, you can get very impactful messages, and when I say impactful, I'm talking about again, just because I get an alert, what I want to do is know, okay, I'm under an alert, but what should I do? If it's a gas leak, is it chlorine gas or is it natural gas? What should I do? 

Those things all come into play about information that you can exchange about these. Plume maps, there's a whole range of different things.

If we can then pierce that hyper-local bubble and bring in information. So for example, a campus is part of a city, part of a County, part of a state, and there may be events that are happening across that entire environment that they need to know what to do and if we can bring that information in and transfer it into those signage components and it's in a form that’s not only well known or is going to hopefully become more well-known in the typical broadcast community and cable casting community, then these people will recognize, “Oh, okay. I see it. I've got an alert information and I can display it.”

That's using an interim box of some kind that's sniffing for all that stuff. What happens right now, if I'm in a jurisdiction where there's an Amber alert, or if there is some other kind of public safety alert, that's pushed out to smartphones and to broadcasters and so on? 

Are they also using some sort of an interim device or is it just sniffing like a data cell or getting something triggered out to it that causes a message to pop? 

Bill Robertson: There's a couple of different things because, in the United States and Canada, the United States has what's called FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but they have a server that is called IPAWS which stands for Integrated Public Alert Warning System (IPAWS) and it uses a technology that's called CAP (Common Alert Protocol). Again, we're talking about the government, so there's going to be acronyms. 

There's a similar type of thing that is run by a private company in Canada, and that entire methodology of alerts go through those kinds of clearing houses. Now the important thing too, is not every alert goes into those servers. In a local thing, let's go with some Teton County, for example and I want to generate an alert, it might just go out over the air and the sheriff there generates the alert. It goes out over the air. It never goes and sees IPAWS. So you can have some local ones and if you're not watching for those, you may miss them, but there is this idea of these integrated servers in Canada and in the United States. 

The problem is those devices or those servers serve a ton of information because there's a lot of agencies that are on them. What you need to do is to act correctly and so at every television station, every radio station, every cable head-in, there is this intermediate box that its job is to listen and monitor those things and it's also set up with a set of filters. So it's looking, saying, “okay, I've got all of this information, but is it important to me?”

Number one, does it rise to the level that I've set? I'm not going to get every alert and broadcast it, then you end up with a really bad situation of just constantly crying Wolf and no one pays attention to it. So the idea is to have a device, an intermediate device that monitors this feed, these feeds, and it says, “okay, is it for my area? Does it rise to the occasion that I need to pay attention to it?” And if it does, I basically need to decode that and turn it into text and audio because many times, for example, the ones in Canada, they don't come with audio. We actually use a text to speech engine to create that, and cause it to create the audio for the particular message. 

So the nice thing about that is: that capability that idea of having this intermediate device is to monitor, to look and to format it, so that the downstream devices, the character generators, the digital signage content only have to react to what we say is important because you preset it for what values you want and it has all of the information necessary for that. Here's the text, here's the audio, play this, represent it this way. 

So in a lot of circumstances in the digital signage world I would say 80, 90% of the networks that are out there are running as software as a service. So the end users may be using a service that is used by hundreds of other companies.

Does the central digital signage software CMS company need to have one, a listening device for all of its networks or one for each of its networks, or how would that technically work? 

Bill Robertson: There's a couple of different ways to do it and it's not dissimilar to the way that a lot of cable and even some broadcast companies have done central casting. So they've got remote locations, transmitters set up in one city, but they're actually being fed content from another remote city. 

Depending on the level of engagement, and the reason I say that level of engagement is in the United States, the FCC says that you have to have very specific standards. In other words, there's a requirement that says you must monitor off air signals and you must monitor the FEMA iPAWS feed. Again, that's under the purview of the FCC, for example, or in Canada, the equivalent situation where you are required to do that. In an area it's not a requirement, you can phase yourself into that and that way, if the central CMS system has the capability of discerning, “If I send it to five areas.” And in Canada there are SGC or special geographic codes in the United States. It's they're called FIPs codes, very similar to ZIP codes so that you've got an area that is defined.

If I send 10 different area codes, let's just use that as the idea. If I send 10 different area codes to the CMS, then the digital signage content management system is able to say, “This is an alert for this area code and I can send the alert information only to those receiving points.” So if I have the capability of breaking up my content or the alert going into those receive points, then you can do it in a central point because I can assemble it back to that central point, I can send information out and it's a great way to do it. It really is going to be dependent on kind of the design typology and how much addressability that CMS provides for different locations. 

All right. So if I am, again, an end-user or a digital signage solutions provider of some kind. I've read about this, I've listened to this podcast, and they're interested, what do they do? 

Bill Robertson: One thing that they could do right now is they can download the VIDS document the recommended practices from the NVISA website that's www.nvisa.org and so  if you go to the nvisa.org website, you can download this recommended practices and the symbology. Once they take a look at that and understand what we're talking about in the context of the symbols and things like that, we can make available the symbol set, we've got that available for them, and we can talk to them more about specifics on integration and then some of the other companies that they can talk to about how they would be able to assimilate that information, get it into their displays, where does the information come from? How was it received? What protocols are used? And that kind of stuff. So we can take them through a number of different things, but I really would encourage them to take a look at our recommended practices.

One of the things that we did in the practice document is make sure that it wasn't based on things like scan lines or pixels but really is a ratio, it's a relationship because if it's a 16:9 display, or if we rotate it for a vertical presentation where it's 9:16 or something else we want to be able to have the the icons and these text types of elements in the same relative position. Again, if it's a smaller screen, I'm not giving you fixed sizes for the number of pixels, there's a ratio of banner height to symbol height and that's an important distinction too, so that we can be very flexible in whatever format the display might be.

All right. That was terrific. Very interesting stuff. Thank you so much for spending some time with me, Bill. 

Bill Robertson: Dave. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. 

Again, if they just visit the www.visa.org website, take a look at the documentation, give us a shout, let us know if we can help!

 

Matthew Rubin, Futuresource Consulting

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

Matthew Rubin and the other analysts at the UK-based research firm Futuresource Consulting spend much of their time looking at the electronics industry - both the consumer and commercial sides.

Rubin is a senior analyst with the firm and puts a lot of his working focus on the pro AV and digital signage market. His point of view is behind research reports that look at what is happening in the marketplace, and also forecasts what is expected to happen in the coming months and years.

We had a great chat talking about where signage and pro AV are at, a year into the pandemic and a year into the brakes being slammed on a lot of planned work.

We get into many things, including the states of direct view LED and LCD, and we also talk broadly about how businesses are doing, and when a turnaround is expected.

TRANSCRIPT

Matthew, thank you for joining me. Can you explain what Futuresource is all about and your methodology to some degree? Like, how do you guys do your research? 

Matthew Rubin: Yeah, of course, so first of all it's best to explain that I'm a Senior Analyst at Futuresource covering the professional displays categories. So that's looking at LED, projection, a lot of work early on LCD and then obviously interactive now, and Futuresource tracks the whole technological scene. I work on the B2B side so very much within displays, but we have a team that focuses on the education sector and we do a lot of work on professional audio as well.

But we have a B2C side, so really focusing on the whole range of consumer electronics but also, entertainment and how people are engaging with that across the spectrum and I think it's all really intertwined. So it gives us this really great opportunity to see the whole spectrum across the B2C and the B2B landscape. But yeah, so we, in terms of methodology, it depends on the product category, but on the display side, is a really good example: we've really perfected and spent a lot of time developing, over about two decades, particularly on projection, tracking service and that's really a vendor-led service where we get direct data feeds from about 90% plus of the spectrum of all the vendors, and they give us their volumes, down to a module level and we correlate that, really dig into some deep analysis around it and provide really detailed data back to everyone in the ecosystem, not just the vendors but all throughout the supply chain. 

So that can be used as tracking very down into specific segmentation levels but also trend analysis, really what's driving the market. We also do a lot of forecasting, so looking out to about five years, we've got to understand what's happening in the industry, where it's going and you achieve that, not just by speaking to the vendors, right through the ecosystem, including end-users. We really need to understand who is using the technology and what they're using it for and what we think they're going to use it for in the future as well, which is really vital.

That's one of our best-developed services and we have that across display categories, but we also do a lot of consulting work as well. A lot of our clients come to us and ask for us to really find out something very particular and an answer to that and that utilizes a lot of our existing data, but we also have great connections across the B2B side technology landscape. So we're able to get so much knowledge together from our network, from our data, and our own knowledge from working in the industry for a couple of decades now. So we're able to offer a very broad spectrum of services there. 

It must take quite a bit of work to win the trust of the different manufacturers, because you're, as you described, asking them to send a data feed of sales volumes and everything else, so you must have some pretty significant NDAs or other kinds of agreements. 

Matthew Rubin: Yeah, absolutely, and that's a testament really to the way that Futuresource has been around for quite a while and the kind of level of trust and accuracy we've managed to maintain, like I said before, over a couple of decades. 

The projector service, I think is our oldest, about 20 years and it's so deeply ingrained in so many of our partners now that it's really a key part of the process and actually, we're trying to replicate that now with an LED tracking service, which is so much in demand and I know a topic you spend a lot of time looking at as well. But it's a different world and it's speaking to a completely different ecosystem, especially in China. 

So we're seeing again from having to build that trust and from the ground up there, and it's a slow process and absolutely it's something you can't rush.

Yeah. It must be particularly hard with Chinese companies just because of the way they operate and the government funding and behind a lot of them. 

Matthew Rubin: Yeah, generally speaking, they're not used to that kind of methodology in terms of sharing that level of data with third parties effectively. Some have experience with it, especially those that already have operations or have purchased foreign businesses that use that kind of methodology and so have shared that around their businesses and up to the parent company. That helps certainly a lot, but generally speaking, yeah, it's certainly more difficult than internationally outside of China. 

Yeah. So a company like Leyard that bought Planar, they would have been exposed to how all this works and be perhaps a little more comfortable with it.

Matthew Rubin: Yeah, absolutely. A lot of the big LED vendors from China have, as I said, made a few purchases recently and I think they're still in that process of sharing those kinds of methodologies and that kind of data throughout the company, but it's happening quite quickly. I think they are becoming much more comfortable with that level of sharing and confidence, particularly in a brand like a Futuresource, where we have that relationship elsewhere, but it needs to be developed with them. 

How much of a problem, if it's a problem at all, are all of the full research companies coming out of somewhere in Pune, India primarily who clog up the news releases every day with forecasts for digital signage that appears to be pretty much nonsensical. Do you compete with them or is that stuff just out there and it grabs the flotsam? 

Matthew Rubin: It's hard to say, isn't it? I think so much of the research industry is built around trust and brands, as in research brands that you're comfortable with and you're aware of, and those are the ones you really end up paying a lot of attention to.

I think it's something that's similar to what you'll get across the internet. There's massive information out there and if you already know your stuff, you'll go straight to certain sources and you're a great example. You will filter out the kind of information that you're getting and what you're willing to share with your readers and your listeners, and I think it's the same across the spectrum, I think of course, you are going to get quite a lot of information out there from any research house that can churn out content, but you pay attention to maybe a much smaller percentage of that.

That might actually know the industry? 

Matthew Rubin: Yeah. Yeah. That certainly helps, doesn’t it? 

What a concept.

So in terms of the industry, one of the reports that you guys put out in the last three, four months, maybe more recent than that even, was megatrends in the context of digital signage and pro-AV, what's happening out there? 

Matthew Rubin: I think. First of all, you've got to really recap what's happened in 2020, and you've got to recognize the difficulties, I think, live events in particular and digital signage faced. Without these kinds of live events driving the market, you have this real dip in demand, right? And it's put a lot of businesses in a very difficult position and similarly, with digital signage, why will end-users or advertising companies, why will you invest in these kinds of displays that really have been growing up until 2020, these eye-catching LEDs or high brightness projection, really impressive displays that you see in big cities around the world.

Why are you going to invest in that when you simply don't have the eyeballs on the screen, on the high street? You're not going to invest in that? 2020 as a whole, mostly speaking outside of China and outside of APAC has been a massive struggle and undoubted struggle and you don't have the basic drivers behind creating some real investment there undoubtedly but saying that there have actually been some really interesting and cool positive stories out there. An area that we track very closely, slightly in the left-field of what we're talking about is interactive displays and we actually have another tracking service on that here at Futuresource, but there has been a huge amount of demand for that kind of technology, particularly in the education vertical, where there's been such a drive to invest in, their need to help children learn remotely in a hybrid fashion, more interactively.

So many of them have laptops in schools and there's a huge drive behind investing in that and in some cases, it's a realization of how far behind certain countries are progressing on the technology side. A great example of that is actually in Germany and there's a lot of investment behind digital pockets there and there's a great hope that will speed things up very quickly. But as a general concept, while most of the display industry has been in decline, that's actually been growing very strongly in China and outside of China. So that's a real positive story and even within the projection, an area that is probably on a bit of a long-term decline slowly and really struggled during 2020, but even within there, there are pockets like ultra-mobile projectors.

And that's partly driven obviously by consumers sitting at home and wanting that cinema experience. But also people wanting mobile office spaces, really looking ahead how are people going to use the office space? What kind of displays do they need in them? How much space you need between employees. It's really a question. This can be very difficult to answer until we know a lot more about the virus and the antiviruses and how that looks going forward. But mobile projectors are a cheap and easy way to have that kind of flexibility there. 

But that's us thinking more about what has happened and moving forward. I think a really interesting theme that we're trying to build upon is this idea behind merged displays and by that, we don't mean literally merging displays into one device, but situations, applications where you want to utilize LED, LCD and projection. I think a really great example of that is within the retail vertical. Again, another area that's really struggled during 2020 without people on the high street typically and in Europe and the US. But again, there's going to be this huge need to encourage shoppers back out onto the high street and that is around this idea of maybe every store, instead of having hundreds, thousands of stores do cover the broadest area, you're moving to an idea where almost every store is a flagship store. That means fewer stores, admittedly and that obviously is a necessity due to the high growth of online shopping anyways. It's pretty much an unsustainable business plan in the long term. But when you start thinking about every store becoming this flagship store, you have a great need to really integrate displays and audio as well within that in some cases, but really invest in creating this experiential shopping experience.

So it's not just a basic transaction, but it's an opportunity to really build on the brand and brand awareness and really draw people back out of their homes, which is something that is really going to be an area of retailers need to focus on. 

Yeah, certainly there've been all kinds of forecasts and prognostications that the way that consumers shop has been changed forever. They've developed new habits like buy online/pick up in-store, buy online/do curbside pickup, all those sorts of things, but we're still at a time when there's lots of talk about that, as opposed to we're still in the pandemic, so we don't really know yet how consumers are going to behave after all this has done, will they just go back to how they did things before, or are the forecast right that this is how people are going to shop now. They want to just roll up and have somebody bring what they bought out to their car and hand it over. 

Matthew Rubin: You're right, there is a consensus that these things are here to stay. Online shopping is going to dominate to a much greater extent than it was before.

And in all honesty, it's hard to say. That is obviously based on the fact that was an existing trend moving pretty much in one direction. It's pretty easy enough to assume that is going to therefore be ingrained more heavily in the way that consumers act. But another way, the way that we look at this and try to understand where things are heading is that you can pretty much put most countries on a chart in terms of how far online shopping penetration has already reached before this, obviously 2020 is a bit of a misnomer, but how far that had already reached in terms of multi-channel click and collect or all of these things you mentioned that the kind of modern way of shopping and actually the UK is funny enough, one of the most advanced in that area and it's pretty easy to assume that other countries, as they are clearly going on that similar trajectory, you can almost plot where they are more likely it ended up.

There are some slight variances around that, of course, in terms of literally just geography what's possible in, in more dense cities and countries compared to a place like the US where you have these very high pockets of populations and then fast spread out areas. But even then you get this whole area of drones flying products around, which isn't possible in much of the UK.

But really I think you can pretty much plot a lot of countries along this line. So you can see the future or at least the near future for a great many of them and certainly here in the UK, it was already very heavily ingrained: online shopping, as I said, click and collect multichannel and the way that people interact with retailer is far beyond that idea of just seeing an advert, maybe on TV, and just going in-store. There are a great many touchpoints and I think part of that and the way that the thinking is evolving is that stores are a hugely important part of that but not so simple in terms of just going there to buy something. It's something, almost part of a marketing budget where there's a great opportunity to invest in the brand, in helping people remember that brand and what it stands for and technology plays a huge role in building that.

How closely do B2B and B2C trends kind of correlate? In other words, if we're seeing a big spike with purchases of 4K LCD TVs, does that trend seem to track as well on the B2B side for commercial displays? 

Matthew Rubin: I think it inevitably does, but for different reasons, and that really ends up just being that the manufacturers put a lot of investment behind the latest and greatest to be that 4K and even that, it's hard to argue has been pulled literally by consumers, it's mostly been pushed by manufacturers. But because so much investment goes into the production line, it makes so much sense to move everything over and move everything in that way B2B, maybe where you would only need 1080p and realistically that is, is all you'd ever need. It still makes financial sense to move almost all production over if not all to 4K. 

So it does have an absolutely direct effect on it. Similarly, with projection, you get some similar trends and desires around laser technology and much higher brightness that the consumers are demanding and that's actually really helped on the B2B side and the wider applications you can use there and actually, that flows backward and forwards, particularly on the projection side, but in terms of display panels, I think it's really just almost, I don't want to say forced on B2B, but it just makes efficient sense to follow the B2C side.

Yeah. I was curious about that. If. Product development is by and large driven by the B2C side just because of volume and everything else. I have heard, I haven't had this confirmed, but heard that much of the Genesis of smart commercial displays, the ones with embedded systems on chips had to do with just having a whole bunch of available SOC processors and what are we going to do with them, “let's make commercial displays smart displays.” 

Matthew Rubin: Yeah, I'm not sure about that one in particular. But, I suppose it's one of those very particular to LCD. If you look at LED and what's going on there, that's another one to closely watch in terms of what is really driving it. You have the likes of Samsung who are a very consumer or they do a huge amount of business on the B2B side, but they're hugely focused on consumers as well and they see a huge future for microLED in the living room and the investment that they're pouring in there will absolutely flow and help the B2B side and what they're going to do there and what they're capable of because there are still big leaps and bounds to be made in manufacturing processes. 

So that's a much earlier stage, but possibly a much clearer example of how the B2B and B2C sides interact and it all comes down to investment, doesn't it? And who's drawing the investment, is it the masses of consumers and will they demand enough of that product versus commercial entities? 

Where are we in terms of the shift from LCD to LED? You had companies talking about this being something that was going to happen over five years or so that LCD video walls would go away replaced by LED video walls, but I keep hearing the price delta is still pretty substantial between LED and LCD. 

Matthew Rubin: Yeah, you are right. A thing we like to talk about a lot is moving towards price parity but in a literal sense, it doesn't really mean that they are going to reach the exact same price or at least not in the near term. It's more than in terms of consideration for a business, it’s within the realms of possibility to consider LED instead of LCD in many years. Whereas before the price of LED was way too much and way out there and there are some other considerations as well around your ability which has generally been solved now, but the price Delta was huge. Whereas now we are actually entering phases where LED can be chosen above LCD and it makes business sense and sometimes that's to do with the longevity of the device. It can be to do with the flexibility that LED offers that LCD might not be able to, but absolutely we're certainly not at the point where they are, and I just don't expect it in the next year or two for sure, where one is exactly comparable in terms of price to the other. But again, it also depends on what you're doing with it. As I mentioned, if you really want a custom display, LEDs are your only choice. If it's a very bespoke setting, you could go down the route of projectors, but that has its own difficulties.

And equally, as you scale up to very large displays, it's about willingness to accept a bezel maybe if you're building up a big LCD display, which you wouldn't have on LED and you don't have the same exponential cost as you go up in size there, there are huge differences and even then moving on from there, when you have to think about geographically, it's simply a much cheaper product in China because there's just so much of the supply chain there and a lot of government support behind manufacturing. So yeah, it's an even easier choice in China, which is really well. We're seeing a huge uptake in LED often or the expense of LCD. 

Is the sense in the industry, in the display industry that LED will largely shift apart from outdoors stuff from the conventional manufacturing, the SMD surface mounted devices to microLEDor perhaps miniLED, but more likely microLED, is that where it's going?

Matthew Rubin: Yeah, I think it's inevitable that this is where the money is flowing into microLED and really that's what everyone wants and it's a desire at least to make it compete more effectively with LCD in terms of the density and just image quality, which is really impressive now.

But this is also the idea behind mass transfer technology and that's really where we’re expecting to see a bigger flip in terms of pricing of technology of LED and when it really becomes feasible on a mass scale as compared to LCD and that is across consumers as well as B2B.

But there are still a few of these leaps that need to be made and realistically not expected in the next two or three years. You reach out to vendors and you hear sometimes quite wildly different expectations in terms of timelines in terms of what's going on there. So I think there are still some technological leaps that need to be made in terms of processes and manufacturing. But the end goal is the same, really it's almost matching LCD's curve and maturity, but it is a bit more premature at that stage. 

So I gather the big challenges are still getting the manufacturing times down using techniques like mass transferring all the LED dye, but directly tied to that is raising the quality controls level so that the number of flaws, when you mass transfer those LED dye is absolutely minimized otherwise what they call the yield becomes a problem, right? 

Matthew Rubin: Yeah, and I think the yield and a lot of issues around just generally durability around LED was a theme and an issue over the last few years, but very much less so now. From what we understand, I mean, it's a moving scale, isn't it? It's much better than it was, but it's still obviously room to go. But a lot of that investment is really trying to build up this next generation of plants and how they manufacture LED displays and I think that yields have been progressively improving at such a rate that is not as much of a priority as it perhaps was in the last few years. 

The other megatrend that was identified by Futuresource, well one of them anyway, had to do with AV over IP. What does that all encompass?

Matthew Rubin: Well, it's not my personal field that I spend a huge amount of time on. We have a team that's literally dedicated to AV over IP and the benefits that it brings in a range of spectrums, but it's still quite a field that's in early development, I suppose. In some cases, again, it's a field of educating the users around the benefits of using AV over IP and a whole range of fields and applications.

And I think, and again, it's not an area that I focus on too much. But it's certainly an area of a lot of growth opportunities but one of the barriers is just understanding the technology and understanding the leap forward, almost in how you transfer that data.

We, of course, can't really envision when things get back to normal because of vaccine rates and variants and everything else, but I've spoken with a number of companies that are saying, “We're starting to see things turn, we're expecting by Q2 or maybe Q3 business will get back to what we would perceive to be normal.” 

At a macro level, understanding that everything is in flux, does Futuresource have a point of view as to when the digital signage and AV industry will start to come back to normal? 

Matthew Rubin: Again people like the term, what is the new normal? And we're all hoping it goes back to at least something that we understand and resembles from previous experiences and like I said, it's easy to say things at a macro level, but I think even again, it goes back to this idea of geographically there are hugely different experiences of what's happened with COVID in Asia and China, compared to the US and the UK is another example that is hit very hard.

And what's interesting is actually, we've just finished our Q4 2020 data submissions in processing there and there are some bright spots and we're already seeing a relatively strong LCD market in particular and as I said before, a lot of that is propped up by interactive. It's not digital signage, so we say that's certainly still really struggling and it’s all tied around this idea of when can people go out in groups and do the things that they used to do and generally speaking, we think around the middle of the year, we should start seeing a lot more activity around that. But again, all of that ties back to every country is able to get the vaccine out at different rates. 

In the UK, it looks like we're pretty much ahead of the curve, which makes it a nice change. So it's easy to say around here, the second half of the year, we would expect a very much improved market for digital signage and the AV market and that also encompasses events that we expect and hope to be able to go ahead, but again, take a step back though it's unlikely to be much international travel in particular. That's really hard to predict, much later we think in 2021 with a lot of red flags countries is how the UK government has termed it, but countries that we don't expect that travel we allowed until they have reached a certain level of vaccination and that's going to be true of so many places and without travel, without tourism, without that kind of investment, so much hinges on that as well. 

Even with live events as well, how can you expect artists to go from one place to another or sports teams and so it's all really very much interconnected. So, at a very high macro level, absolutely middle of the year, we would start to see some real positivity there. But in terms of really hitting recovery levels, we're probably talking around Q4 at the earliest to hit some of the real peaks and that's of course true. We are expecting a really big, notable bounce back in demand. We do think there's a lot of pent-up demand, a lot of businesses that have kept devices going for longer to avoid that kind of initial investment of refreshing technology and that's totally understandable. Why would you invest at this point, a very high-risk stage, for many businesses. 

But we expect a big flow of investment within certain verticals. Obviously, there are some verticals that are probably going to struggle for the whole of 2021 and it won't be real until 2022 that you see a real rebound there, but there  are a lot of enterprises in a lot of signage areas where we'd expect to see a fair bounce back, particularly in the second half.

All right, Matthew, thank you for spending some time with me. I appreciate it. 

Matthew Rubin: Anytime. It's been a real pleasure and it's always great to talk about these high-level themes that are going on, and we have so many detailed conversations with so many partners. It's good to talk about what does that all mean and where is it going? And a timeline like this, it's all very unpredictable, which makes it more engaging. 

All right. Thank you.

 

Gary Mundrake, TSItouch

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

Gary Mundrake's company, TSItouch, has a tag line that flat out says The World Needs More Touch.

He'd like, of course, to sell the world more touch technology, but there's a larger story about his 10-year-old company's activity in the digital signage and pro AV marketplace. He and his team sell the technology, but they're also evangelists for interactive touch.

The company sells a range of touch technologies that generally get applied as retrofits to commercial displays, making them interactive. When the pandemic really started hitting about a year ago, there was a lot of debate about the future of touch screens. Would people still be willing to use them, if they were a host for contagions?

While there have been reports here and there suggesting the virus can live on a surface for a long time, the prevailing opinion from medical research is that surfaces like touchscreens present far, far less risk than one-to-one interactions with other people.

So getting things done by touchscreen is likely going to be faster, easier, better and safer than dealing one to one at an order counter.

We talk about the touch business in broad strokes, how certain technologies apply, how the past  year has been and how the next months look for TSItouch and the touch ecosystem.

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TRANSCRIPT

So Gary, thanks for joining me. Can you give me the rundown on what TSItouch is all about? 

Gary Mundrake: Thanks for having me, David. TSItouch primarily manufactures touchscreen and protective solutions for large format displays, as well as a lot of video walls. Obviously there’s some other ancillary things we do, but that's our primary focus., 

avid: Oh so that's why you call yourself touch? 

Gary Mundrake: Make sense when you think about it. 

You have this tagline on LinkedIn and elsewhere that talks about the world needing more touch. What do you mean by that? 

Gary Mundrake: Metaphorically, I guess in the age of COVID, we're all looking for more touch, just human interaction. But purely as a marketing tagline, the world needs more touch. We're trying to promote touch screens, but with a little tongue in cheek, just the world needs more touch in general. 

You have in your product line, a bunch of different kinds, there's PCAP, there's IR and there's I think ShadowSense. Why are there different types of touch overlays and how do they sort themselves and how do you know what to use for what? 

Gary Mundrake: So and we back up a little bit, I say this often I say: touch is a commodity if you think about it in the market space, it's a commoditized product. Where we differentiate is everybody wants that commoditized price, but they all want a custom solution. So when you take and compare responsiveness to features, to aesthetics, to price, you end up in a situation where one size doesn't necessarily fit all well. So while we have a run rate of all those different products, it's really matching the solution to the end customer and that means matching the touch functionality with the display functionality in the environment they plan to use it.

So you have to have that broader selection of solutions. We do a lot of touch, obviously for Samsung, NEC, LG, and those type of display manufacturers and if you look at all of these displays they have, the reason that they have more than one 55-inch display is that they have different markets and are trying to meet with it much like we have more than one type of touch solution for that 55-inch display.  

The theory being is to get the customer what suits their needs best not what we are trying to sell.

When it comes to, the one I'm most familiar with is PCAP, because that's what we use on everything from tablets to smartphones, is that by far the most demanded product? 

Gary Mundrake: In the large format market space, It's really not even close to the demand for IR. The reason for that is IR, relatively speaking is a much lower cost solution and it meets the needs of so many customers. It just meets the bill. 

When touchscreens started coming out, you can thank Steve Jobs for making them ubiquitous to the end-user. When they first started coming out, we had companies that bought touchscreens and we'd say what do you plan on doing with it? They're like, we don't know, but we just want to have a touchscreen. They were willing to buy touchscreens because they were touchscreens, not because they had an application. If you fast forward to where we are now in the market space, people view touchscreens almost like cash registers in retail and digital signage. 

The touchscreen isn't the selling feature, it's the functionality they want. They want that to be almost invisible to the fact that it's there if that makes sense. So it's about performance and cost and application. Other retail environments we operate in, where aesthetics is more important than functionality, and other environments where the price is more important than aesthetics, and then sometimes applications won't work in this environment or that won't work in that environment. 

A good example is, if you're familiar with the LG and Samsung outdoor displays that are getting fairly ubiquitous, they come on a factory-installed protective glass that prevents you from putting PCAP on it. So we use outdoor IP65 rated IR. Most people when they call you their first question is can I get a PCAP on this? Because they think that's what is the right solution? But the reality is it's not because you can't apply a PCAP to that display. So it's constantly tailoring the need but IR is consistently the go-to product for price and functionality.

So with IR, you're not going to get the degree of maybe accuracy and snappiness that you might get off of PCAP, but you can do it at far less cost. Is that a way of describing the trade-off? 

Gary Mundrake: No, the trade-off isn't really accuracy. The accuracy of IR, it’s s actually more accurate than PCAP. If you think about it, PCAP is effectively a grid of invisible wires running through the glass and most manufacturers of PCAP have a set number of wires. So you have X running vertically and X running horizontally. So on a 55-inch, the space in between that wire set is X, when you go to a 98-inch, the space in between that wire set gets much bigger, which results in a loss of fidelity. 

Whereas in IR you're adding more LEDs to the strips to accommodate for the size. So your accuracy stays linear from a 32-inch up to a 32-foot video wall. It's really the aesthetics people like PCAP because it's got that flat front aesthetic. It does give you a little bit smoother perception, but functionality. I think the IR is performing just as well. But aesthetically, it's never going to look as well. 

And with IR, just to describe it, you've got these rails that sit around the perimeter of the display right, and then it's triangulating where your finger is?

Gary Mundrake: That's correct. yeah. So you're essentially blocking light with the IR and those rails, now there are different technologies within IR, some are made better than others and then if you take something like the ShadowSense, which we mentioned earlier, which is almost a hybrid of that IR and some cameras, if you think back to the old day of the optical touch, that's no longer used, but that gives you a little bit more of fidelity and functionality beyond PCAP and IR. 

How do you handle IR outside? I'm looking outside right now, up here in Nova Scotia and we had, I think, 16 inches of snow yesterday and I'm wondering about digital street posters with all that snow sitting in the frame of this thing.

Gary Mundrake: Sure. So we actually deployed about 50 of these to the Nova Scotia ferry system about two years ago. Not Nova Scotia. The other side of Canada, British Columbia.

But that was an issue and a concern they had as well. So when we do outdoor touchscreens, it goes back to that solution that meets your needs, not what we're offering. So if you're in an environment where you're going to see snow load, then we actually integrate a heater system into the IR touchscreen with a thermostat in it. So it melts that snow that accumulates on the shelf. If you're going to be near a very wet environment, like along the coast, then we incorporate stainless steel, even though it's powder-coated it turns out powder coat doesn't really stand up to the abuse of the ocean spray for any little nick. 

So you can take a standard outdoor display and for a 55-inch, we actually make, I think it's six different products depending on the environment, they all have the exact same functionality per se, to the end-user, but the built processes are different, and the components are different depending on the application. So I think what you’ll see is, our sales team spends very little time selling and very much time consulting. It's understanding what's your application and not just your application, meaning it's retail or it's corporate, but it's the environment that it's going to operate in and all those other factors 

Is your sales team talking directly to end-users, or are you dealing much more with manufacturers and solutions providers?

Gary Mundrake: I would say that it's mostly with the solution providers, the integration companies that are all out there, but for more complicated projects, we end up working directly with the end-users through the resellers.  We actually sell directly to end-users.

Our goal is to sell through the resellers and distribution partners, but we do spend a lot of time visiting with end-users, consulting with them in conjunction with our reseller partners. 

Which makes sense. So we've been going back and forth since COVID hit and talking about the impact this was going to have on the touchscreen business, when it first bubbled up, me not knowing anywhere near as much about the touch industries as you did wonder, what this was going to mean and whether it was the end of touch screens, as we knew it, at least for a while, and that hasn't played out that way at all, has it? 

Gary Mundrake: So it has not. When COVID first hit and became really full-blown, I would say a bit of a pause. I would say that over the past 10-11 months that we've been going into this, it has been a great opportunity for other forms of interactivity to get some press and get out in the public and deal with questions like is voice going to work, is gesture gonna work, will QR codes work? And I think in some instances, there are some companies that have come out and they've done well by COVID, not implying they tried to take advantage of it. But, it gave them an opportunity for their capabilities to get some sunshine and maybe some more serious luck than they would have pre-COVID. But that being said, there's nothing that's been out there, and we look at it I would say daily, that's really come in and said, this is the game-changer.

My argument since we started this company in 2011 has been that way as long as your primary method of interfacing with your cell phone is a touch screen, that's going to be the primary method of interfacing with digital signage. When cell phones start using something else as a primary method of interface, that's when we need to really look and start really doing a shift. 

It's helped as well that the science and the findings that are coming out of all this are evolving and whereas in the early stages, there seemed to be this sense that touching things was dangerous, over time it's evolved to the realization that surfaces are not a particularly efficient carrier or host or whatever you want to call it for COVID that the risk is exponentially higher in talking one-to-one with people, right? 

Gary Mundrake: Yeah. I believe when COVID first started coming out, there was an overabundance of caution and concern and a lot of unknown and certainly, over time, it has become apparent that pathogens can pass on a surface. They always have, and always will be able to, but the probability of someone becoming infected with COVID by touching a surface is very small and the probability of you contacting COVID by touching a touchscreen is even smaller. As an example, I used a few months ago, if you can open up, pick your retail establishment and a person can get in the door. So they opened the door. They pick up products, they pick up merchandise, they pick up food, they go to the counter, they use the restroom. If you can do all those things by your touch screen is where people are going to get infected, it just doesn't make sense. I think that most markets have accepted that fact.

And some markets have made touch as the method to communicate. They went the other way. They said I can clean a touchscreen so if you don't have to talk to the person at the counter, you're not going to get a person to person transmission, because it turns out machines aren't actually breathing, coughing, or sneezing and they're fairly easy to clean, but I can't really wipe down the person at the counter. 

Yeah, I noticed that going back to April or something, there was a demo for a McDonald's in the Netherlands and they had their self-directed, self-guided ordering kiosk in place and that was their primary form of transactions for exactly that reason. McDonald's made the decision that yes, you're going to touch something, but this is way safer than talking to somebody four feet away over an ordering counter and that was my big molar to realize, “now I get why this would make more sense.”

Gary Mundrake: Yeah. Last fall, probably I guess maybe the September, October timeframe. We did, I don't know, maybe 150 screens that went into a hospital network. I don't know West Coast, entirely for visitor check-in because they didn't want visitors coming into the hospital to approach people behind the counter and they did a pretty rapid deployment of a lot of screens into that one hospital network. And by and large, it seems that larger rollout type customers, people that have been doing, I'd almost call them rolling rollouts for years, they just continued through the pandemic. They just kept doing it. Some companies that were starting to do rollouts apart of the pandemic went on pause, and now we're starting to see them reappear and reinitiate, but certainly, it impacted our business. We took about a 30% hit in revenue last year. We did keep our staff, but we took the revenue hit, but we are seeing a continued positive trend. I wouldn't say that we're back to where we were going into this but I do see that sometime April-May, we'll start seeing a real trend toward our revenue returning back to its pre-COVID days. 

Is the business, do you expect it to be the same, or has it evolved in terms of the profile of applications?

Gary Mundrake: So the touch applications haven’t really evolved that much. We, as a company have evolved a little bit. As I said, in the intro, we're primarily manufacturers of touchscreen or protective solutions. So we're seeing more emphasis on protective solutions, but also concurrent with what we've said, okay, what else can we do to bring in revenue?

When you're seeing, revenue declines and that, what else can we do? So we've started doing some kitting for customers. It turns out we sell one component of our solution, most of the time when you're installing a touchscreen, you've got a touch screen display, a player, a mount, and other attributes that go with it. And historically, we build up kits of these and ship them out to the customer. And over the past 8-10 months, we've gotten more into putting this all together. So we'll ship this project for you and we'll ship you out the whole solution to your retail store or to wherever it's going to. So they get one pallet.

 So it's kinda, it's moving away from our core business and I don't want to say that that's what we want to become. But, it offsets some of our costs. That's not a wildly profitable business, but it does offset some costs. So we do those kinds of things. But I think by and large, the market will come back to touch and we'll be doing pretty much what we were doing two years ago, two years from now. 

So I'm curious if you're seeing new kinds of applications. I wonder about things like remote meetings now that we're all trained to and conditioned to doing Zoom calls all day long and team meetings and so on. 

If I was in a Home Depot and I was trying to figure out how the hell to do something with plumbing, which is terrifying for me. If I could talk to a subject matter expert from Kohler, from the floor, I would rather do that than talk to some guy in an orange vest who may or may not know anything about plumbing and it might be just talking out of his butt.

Gary Mundrake: So there's this whole idea of doing things remotely and the example is an interesting one and it puts a lot of flavor and context around that. The issue that I think you run into in that environment is if I go into a retail store and we do a lot of displays for retail stores and some big box stores, people don't necessarily want to communicate with somebody else. That's why they want to use the touch screen. They want to be able to go in and do it at their own pace and browse their own way. 

Like you said, the guy in the orange vest may not know what he's talking about, but the people that are looking for that kind of help, they're probably not going to feel comfortable doing it over the VTC per se, they're going to do it at home before they go shop, before they go into the big box store. If I need to understand how to, I'm trying to think of something, you would go to Home Depot and not know how to do it, so what kind of hinges to put on the cabinet door? 

I think most people have researched online before they went to the store. I don't think they would get to the store and then say, “Oh, I'll go up to this kiosk. I'll hit a button,” and one the backend of that, managing that capacity loading on the back end of it. So you've got rooms full of people sitting there and I also think, by and large, people don't like talking even though we've all become, video calls are ubiquitous right now. I think by and large people don't really like talking through video machines. VTC has been around for years and years and years, right back to the days of the poly-com even the late 80s, early 90s.

So it's been around 30 years and it has a market space, but I believe people don't want to do it as a routine way to communicate. That's just my opinion. I just don't see it. I think the applications for touch that you'll see post COVID are eliminating that check-in person or adding even more density of touch into retail environments, larger box stores where you can go up to the screen and find your own inventory or find your own part. 

Prior to COVID, we were seeing a lot of it going into the dressing rooms with mirror walls. It was a pretty big uptake in that, but I think by and large people don't want to talk to other people via a camera in a public store. To me, it's the idea of using voice to communicate, get rid of your touch screen, and use voice And I always say, imagine being in the airport, you've got 300 check-in kiosks for a United airlines up there in a row. Can you imagine 300 people simultaneously trying to check in each one, yelling at their own machine? 

I say, the world needs more touch, right? We go back to where we started. People like togetherness. They like feeling together. They like feeling involved. You yelling at a machine is not very comforting.

They also like privacy. So people like to be with other people, but they like privacy. People don't want to stand there in front of a TV and talk to this machine, not knowing how loud the modulator is. So the person on the other end hears them while everybody in the store is hearing and going, who’s that tool? It's like the person that's walking around the store, talking on their cell phone, they're yelling into their phone. Now imagine that, on every aisle, a home Depot somebody's yelling, that'd be entertaining for some people. 

I think the application is more of giving people information that helps them make a buying decision on-premise and that's really where I think in the retail sector, it goes and then in more of the services sector, it's a lot of the wayfinding, the guiding, the check-in tasks that you can eliminate a person for without eliminating the experience. So when you're looking at the hospitality and those environments, they want people to have the experience. So if it comes down to just a mechanical transaction, I don't think hospitality will adopt it. But the flip side of that is, prior to COVID, cruise ships were doing a booming business with touchscreens because it was easy for people to get information: Where am I? Where's my restaurant, my bar, my casino, my pool, my room, all those things. And those kinds of things, I think will come back and I think they'll come back even stronger. Because it gives you an opportunity to review, to give someone instant information that you'd know they're looking for.

Yeah. Cruise ships actually might be safer than they used to be. Just because people will be hypersensitive now to washing their hands and doing all those sorts of things. Not that I'd go on one, but they're probably going to be safer. 

Gary Mundrake: Since we do a lot of business with cruise ships, I'm not going to say anything about cruise ships. (Laughter)

I am curious. There's a company up here in Canada that is marketing elevator buttons that are hover based. So you just have to put your finger near the button, you don't have to touch it cause therefore it's safer and I've seen a number of hover based products like that out there where it's a kind gesture and I keep looking at him and thinking 99% of the people are just going to touch it anyways, if they're a quarter inch or way, they're just going to bang it unless you have somebody right there telling them no, don't touch it.

Do you see any potential for these things? 

Gary Mundrake: No. 

Your elevator button example. How many times have you been in an elevator and somebody pushes the button and the little indicator lights up, “Okay. You selected Floor 47” and they push that same button five more times, even though they have a positive reinforcement of a button and have a back lit light, showing them it's been activated, they keep pushing it anyway.

So you're going to hover and it's going to light up and you're going to assume that worked? If you don't trust the touch, you're going to trust the hover? And to why, again, it goes back to the why, if you're in an elevator, you came from somewhere and you're going to somewhere 

You touched 20 other surfaces on the way in and out. 

Gary Mundrake: And really the elevator button that's what's going to get you? 

It's like having the giant steak and stuffed potato, and five gallons of wine and then saying I can’t have that piece of Pecan pie because I got my health to worry about here. 

Sounds like a good night though. 

Gary Mundrake: It does.

I'm curious about the touch industry as a whole. Is there a Holy grail, something that everybody wants to resolve that still needs to be figured out, or is the Touch industry where it needs to be in terms of the technology? 

Like it does what it needs to do and the big challenges are the normal stuff, like getting costs down, making it more efficient, making it snappier, or whatever?

Gary Mundrake: I think by and large, and I say this right now, and tomorrow I could be made a fool of, but I think the state of the art, it's pretty much there for what you're asking for to do. The real advances, I believe in touch are going to be in the PCAP market that we talked about earlier. If you think about your typical cell phone, that's going to say a 3.5 inch screen or whatever, so the manufacturers spend millions of dollars marrying that perfectly design touchscreen to that perfectly designed device and the interface is perfect all the time and they make millions and millions of them. Whereas we're taking a touchscreen that's made in the thousands and marrying it up to displays that many have never been married to a touch screen and maybe we're only doing it in the hundreds. 

So there's a little bit of finesse involved in adding that PCAP touch to that display and I think the real advancement will be refining that to make that less cumbersome so you don't run into issues with responsiveness in the light because you have a poorly matched solution and it removes that finesse. Now the flip side of that is as long as it requires finesse, it makes it harder for other people to mimic us. But I think that's where the real advance is, it's making that PCAP a more stable product for easier integration. 

And then ultimately of course, like everything, we get asked all the time, “if I buy a million, are they free?” Everybody wants the price to go down. Actually, that's what I tell people. I tell people frequently, even if you buy a million of these, they're never going to get it for free. Some people believe that. Yesterday, in a discussion with somebody, they said what's the price for 500? I said this is the price for 500. And they said, what's the price for 5,000? And I said, really seriously, it is not going to get free. Even if I quote you a million of them. But somehow people have that in their minds. I'm just going to keep buying it, asking for more and more until it gets to free, but it's just not going to go there.

The price will continue to decline. Obviously we've had some impact on the US with tariffs, for products coming out of Asia. Fortunately, we bring products in and out of multiple countries. We don't get hit on every product with that but I think some refinement of the PCAP technology and the price point coming down will only further saturate the market space with the products of touch.

All right. That was great. Thank you very much, Gary, for spending some time with me. I appreciate it. 

Gary Mundrake: Dave. Thanks for having us And please don't forget: the world needs even more touch. 

 

Travis Peterson, Snap Install

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

Companies that specialize in deploying digital signage networks don't always get the kind of respect they deserve in this industry. 

They can get called "hang and bang" guys, when in reality the job is complicated as hell. Getting digital signage networks properly installed and running across hundreds or even thousands of locations involves a LOT of project management and coordination, and a lot of vetting and training to ensure the techs who show up know the work, what to do and how to behave.

Travis Peterson started Snap Install about 10 years ago, having learned his installation chops working in home AV systems. Those can be fun jobs - putting slick audio and video systems in the homes of stinkin' rich people - but to scale an installation business, you need high volume commercial work.

Based in Minneapolis, Snap Install now has a big core staff and hundreds of trusted contractors around the US and Canada, who take on high volume digital signage deployments in venues like restaurants, retail and health care.

We had a great chat about the challenges he always faces, and the bigger ones presented in the past year. We also get into where Snap starts and stops, and why his team does the stuff they're good at, and leaves things they probably could do to their partners.

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TRANSCRIPT

David: Travis, thanks for joining me. Can you tell me, because maybe not everybody knows what Snap Install is all about? 

Travis Peterson: Yeah, thanks for having me, Dave. Snap Install. we're a nationwide service provider. We're located out of Maple Grove, Minnesota. For those of you not familiar with Minnesota, it started in the twin cities area, and we are a nationwide service provider of skilled labor. So in other words, we're brokers of services. 

We have 54 employees at our corporate office and then 700+ contractors across the country that worked for us directly. Businesses and manufacturers hire Snap to provide installation service solutions really from coast to coast, so our job is: we represent our clients in a professional manner and follow up on the design scope of work to get the job done. Now that job could be a thousand plus site rollout across the country or one service call in a rural area. 

David: Are you focused just on digital signage or is it one of many things that you do?

Travis Peterson: Digital signage is the primary focus and represents the majority of our business. But we also have two other verticals that are defined. One is the healthcare industry and then another one is the relocation of executives across the country, their residential homes actually.

David: Oh, really? Interesting. So what do you do with that? 

Travis Peterson:  It's actually one of the main reasons the company got started. I was fresh out of college. In my second job, I was working for a company back just over 10 years ago and that company had a similar business model, but it was B2C compared to our business model B2B, and back then you go to Amazon, you could throw a TV in your cart and you could have added installation to it. The company I was working for, we would send the technician out to the home. 

And I started a B2B platform there and worked with some relocation companies, and executives moving across, they got expensive equipment. We would dismount their equipment, movers pack it up, ship to the new house and then we'd reinstall it. As that company as much as I loved working there and really got my first taste of a small business, it's where I became addicted to the small business platform. I realized that as it became unethical, I had two choices. One: go to sell insurance like my dad and possibly golf, probably a lot more and have a lot more freedom and residual income coming in or start a business. And I decided to start a business and I went to one of our biggest clients at the time, as that business was falling apart and said, “Hey, if I started a company, would you follow me and be my first customer?”

And he said, absolutely. We had a good working relationship. He knew that the company wasn't doing well and he asked me two questions. I'm 26 years old at this time. And he said, “Do you have any money, Travis?” And I think I might've had about $5,000 to my name and I said no, and he said, “do you have a business plan?”

In my head, I was saying, what the hell is a business plan? I said, no. He said hop on a plane and fly out to Philly, let's talk. Did that and we put together Snap Install and the focus was primarily three things? We call them our three pillars. Our people, what I'm most proud of is our culture. Our partners, which are all of our customers, and then our technicians across the country.

And with that focus on those three pillars, we've really over the last, it'll be 10 years here in September. We've seen success. And as I was stating the primary focus, the reason we started was the relocation and that's what his business, his other business does is they help relocate executives and we do that AV work for them. So as we succeeded with that, we branched off over the last 10 years into the healthcare facilities, into the digital signage world. 

David: Yeah, I would imagine when you looked at digital signage and thought, “okay, the  one and two gig things with the executives is interesting, but if we want to scale, we've got to find something that offers scale and signage does that.”

Travis Peterson: You nailed it. The onesie twosies are great, but when you get the thousand site rollouts, that's really our bread and butter and it's really where the company grew. 

David: When companies describe themselves as service providers, I always push back on them and say, where do you start and where do you stop? What's the range of services and what's the stuff you don't do? 

Travis Peterson: I think that's a great question and I think that question is just as important as what you do. One thing we are not is we don't provide system consulting or design. We don't provide any hardware or software and we also don't run a knocking system for system monitoring.

Plenty of other companies do all that stuff and we don't, and we're also the type of service provider that some others aren't out there. We know when to say no. We know when to say that either when our partner isn't going to set us up for success or when it's just not in our specialty. Think high-level integrations.

We have boots on the ground across the country. We have high-level technicians and we also just have warm bodies that sometimes just need to show up and swap out an HDMI or turn off a PC player to get a backup and running and all those skill sets. We aren't the type of company that's going to say, “Yes, we can do that.” We make sure that we can define it and follow through on the scope of work and then get the deliverables back to our customer and represent them in a professional manner as well. 

David: There are some of your competitors who seem to be focused on specific areas. I don't rattle them off cause you don't need to know that or listeners don't need to know that, but maybe they are heavy on C-stores or maybe they're heavy on QSR. Do you have a vertical that you tend to focus on or is it more just what do you need to do and let's talk? 

Travis Peterson: So our goal is to provide solutions to our partners and we're a vendor-neutral company.

We have partners ranging from that focus on healthcare, that focus on QSR, that focus on kiosks, and what we try to do is really embed ourselves with our partners and make sure that we understand what their goals are and that we can deliver on the scope of work. So when we say “our focus”, we're in all of those.

But our focus isn't on a specific vertical within digital signage. Our focus is on our partners and making sure that we can deliver on their needs and they range in so many different ways. If you asked me where the majority of our work comes in the digital signage, I'd say it'd be through healthcare and QSRs 

David: Healthcare would be interesting right now. I'm guessing you haven't done a lot in the last 10 months? 

Travis Peterson: For some, yes. And for some, no. It's changed, COVID has changed the way we've had to do business and as many people listening can probably attest to. For one, on the healthcare side is the clinics. What we've seen a big increase in is them utilizing digital signage more to educate their customers: A, for social distancing, maybe. B, for not having to while they're sitting in the waiting room, it's limited usage in the waiting room or whatnot. They're utilizing a lot of those things then all the way back to the doctor's office. Putting signs up in the office. So while they're waiting for the doctor, it's there too. So for some customers, you're absolutely right.

We've seen a huge decline and then other businesses actually boomed since Q2. 

David: Okay. So yeah, you wouldn't be going into primary care facilities like a hospital or something like that, but tons of clinics are still seeing patients and they need to communicate with? 

Travis Peterson: Yeah, and now we have some of our customers, they're even working on medical carts that offer the vaccine that we're helping integrate and deploy at hospitals too.

David: How would that work? 

Travis Peterson: So the card is designed in different ways to ensure that it holds the vaccine and then it monitors, without getting into too many details, it's providing care for the customers as they come through with minimal contact, for the actual nurses or practitioners to the clients.

David: Now you said that you don't have a knock, you don't do recurring managed services and things like that. Is that a headcount choice or complication choice, or is it that you don't want to compete with your partner? 

Travis Peterson: More the latter. As being vendor-neutral, it's also very important that we aren't competing with our customers as well.

We are about 98% labor and that 2% falls into on-site materials that we sometimes are forced to provide. But some of the recurring services that we have started dabbling into that have worked well for both our partners and ourselves is preventative maintenance type work, we call them health checks.

You go out and you do a thousand site rollouts. That equipment needs to continue to function and function properly. And us providing maintenance on that regularly, where we show up just to check it and provide the right deliverables back to our customers. So they have that peace of mind as they charge their customers to ensure it's actually working is good too and a lot of companies are being audited on that type of stuff too lately. So we can help them be proactive on that and make sure we get ahead of the game instead of them having to pay maybe for a 90 minute response time when they call us and it's a fire truck having a roar out there as quick as possible to get a PC back up and running.

We've seen some value in that. And also with COVID, a lot of systems are collecting dust over the last nine months and those systems are going to need to be powered back on and up and running here soon. And we've seen a majority of our partners already proactively planning to get us out there and get those up and running.

So it really depends on the retail store or the location, allowing us to come in and do that. But we've seen a big uptick in that as of late. 

David: When you describe partners, would they most typically be like CMS software companies or are they manufacturers as well? 

Travis Peterson: A wide variety of all of them, some resellers as well. 

David: And so for a reseller or a kind of a local solutions provider, if they get a big gig, they just know that they couldn't possibly do a four-state rollout or a nationwide rollout?

Travis Peterson: Exactly. Or sometimes they might just want boots on the ground. It might be an integrator, and they're trying to do a very large project in a state that they aren't located in, and they're going to fly out one specialist, but then they want eight of our techs to show up and run wires, mount screens, check and actions and they're the guide on-site, where they direct other people around. 

David: Digital signage is one of those things that goes from very simple stuff, like you could get a gig in a workplace where you're putting in meeting room displays or video conferencing displays, that kind of thing, but it can go all the way to the other end where you have a 300 foot LED video canopy.

Do you cover the whole waterfront or is there a sweet spot for what you do? 

Travis Peterson: That's a great question. And it ties back to my point of us being willing and able to say no when we need to. If we can generate a scope of work that can be consistent from coast to coast, that's where we succeed.

And that scope of work needs to be done from any tech across the country. And as you can imagine, when you're dealing with 700 plus technicians, their skill sets have a wide variety of range. So some of those high-end projects, we absolutely do those. Sometimes it's only in specific Metro areas. We work with our partners, but getting back to figuring out what the partner needs and the systems they're trying to put together and have assembled, that's where we come back working with them and say, we can do this, or unfortunately we aren't the right partner for this, but if you can send your people out to do this portion, we're happy to do the mounting and other things along those lines to make sure that we're meeting each other's needs.

But it does tie back to that say no when you need to say no, because, in our industry, it's funny, you think you'd be in a good spot as a business when your competitors don't do a good job. But unfortunately for us, it's completely the opposite. There have been some companies, service providers throughout the years in this industry that have really put a bad name on the nationwide service provider.

And that doesn't help us. That actually hurts us when our partners, as we're trying to sell to them, they already lost that trust as a small business. For me, every client we get, we have to work so hard to get it. So it's so important to keep those. And from their perspective, when you hire a nationwide service provider and they worked so hard to sell that deal, and then their nationwide service provider screws it up, it's going to be a pretty hard sell for us to get that trust back from them and tell them that we're different than what they've already experienced.

David: How important is aftercare because, in the olden times when I used to travel, I would go through airports and mass transit, terminals, and all that sort of thing. And I would see video walls and they were badly in native calibration and had been left way too long. But I get a sense that in a lot of cases you have customers who, or somebody has the customers who put these things in, and then they forget about them or they're there, but they don't worry about the colors drifting and all that sort of stuff. 

Travis Peterson: It happens all the time. I've even been in airports where we've performed installations, say at a quick-service restaurant, I've actually gone back there and fixed some cable management ‘cause I walked by and was like, “God, we've done that.” But when you're at a retail store or anything, you have so many employees going around and things get touched, cable management falls because someone was messing with stuff and the calibrations off, cause it's been two years. So you nailed it on the head.

It's a service we provide and we feel the ROI is there, but some people don't budget for it. And when they don't budget for it, it's hard to justify adding that cost because it isn't always cheap either. But the value is there and there's nothing worse from my perspective when you walk into a restaurant and three screens are working, one's off, or the cable management hanging, and I know I'm going to be biased and nitpicky when I see something small or maybe the average consumer might not be. But that value is there from our end.

David: Even my local bank, outside of Halifax, I go in there, there's almost always one of the screens out and I've got to a point where I know the manager and I'll walk in and go, “that one's out again”, and we've actually gone behind the counter and monkeyed around to try to get things going again, even though he doesn't know who the service provider is, I know who it is, but I'm not going to call them or anything else.

But like you say, you get nitpicky and you want to see it working properly. 

Travis Peterson: Yeah. If you ever know it's Snap, you better call me Dave. Cause we'll get on and fix it. 

David: You're probably not allowed in Canada right now. 

Travis Peterson: It's true. We do have technicians in major Metro areas though.

David: Oh, there you go. Aren't there tougher environments than other ones to do, like what are the hardest venues to do installs in? 

Travis Peterson: Pre COVID or post-COVID? (Laughter)

David: Let's talk both.

Travis Peterson: Pre COVID, I think airports always take the cake. It's just, you gotta go through more security. You got a lot of people walking around there for it all the time. Also overnight work, after hours. So we are structured in-house at our corporate office, we have full-time nighttime employees that are doing the project management because we have enough work where we do a lot of overnight work, but that's where it's tough. So we have different tiers of our technicians. We have primaries, tier one, tier two, tier three. And our primaries, they're our bread and butter guys.

They're from across the country. They live in a brief Snap Install. When we have nighttime work and we need to utilize them for that, then during the daytime, which is still a high priority of work, we gotta bring in the other crews and make sure that they're up to speed with handling that higher workload that was there for the primaries that are covering the nighttime or vice versa. So it's a challenge for us logistically in making sure no matter when the work comes across or where it is, we're providing that high level of service that we promised to our customers. But as far as physical locations, I would always, I think put airports at the top, but we do a lot of work in airports because when you walk through airports, there's a lot of screens everywhere. There's a lot of business to be had. 

David: So I've written about this, that it's a bit of a blessing in disguise. If there's anything good that comes out of COVID and there's not very much at all is that a lot of projects that would normally have to be done overnight and normally done if they're done through the day with a whole bunch of hoarding and a whole bunch of disruption, those venues are mothballed right now and you can go in and start and stop a project, just work in the daytime for a week and you're done without ever having to be there at midnight. 

Travis Peterson: It has been the one blessing that COVID has provided us is fewer consumers walking around and more daytime work. But the other problem that comes with that is a lot of people just cut their budgets immediately and said no more technology, digital signage spending.

I always see not a lot of our partners take some hits there too. So as great as it is, we would take pre-COVID any day over post-COVID in regards to the number of projects that were being awarded. But a challenge for COVID too is with us is I had to take my network team and I actually add two people to it. And our network team is really the team that drives the compliance and relationships with our contractor’s and it became a full-time job for two employees just to manage the different state regulations, county regulations for our techs because we felt the need for communication needed to be at an all-time high for our network. But also we felt the need to educate them and make sure they were aware really from Q2 all the way to now, is we were trying to stay ahead of the game and let the technicians know that safety is number one and what their state was regulated on, what they could and couldn't do and make sure in some cases we were considered, I'm missing the word right now, but a needed service, where if a cop pulled some of our techs over, which was happening, we had a sheet that could provide them that they were essential workers, and it was needed. And we were providing that documentation because we were essential workers, we were in healthcare. We were doing the type of work that the States checked off and said, “You're good to go.” 

So that became a full-time job and that became a challenge. And we were seeing us spending resources and money on things we never had to in the past and it was good. And as much as COVID has hurt many across the country and many businesses, I look at it as a blessing in disguise.

In one way, if you look back a year from now, the Q1 of 2020, Snap was firing on all cylinders. We were chasing our tail in many ways and then COVID hit and it really slowed our business down, about 70% for a little bit. But it allowed me to take a step back and work with my leadership team and take one step back to take two steps forward.

And we didn't let anyone go due to COVID. But now, since then we've brought on 14 new hires and our complete company is restructured in a way that we're built for growth. And I strongly believe that if that never happened, I wouldn't be in the spot where I'm at as growing through some of those challenges.

And then also our company. I think we'd still be chasing our tails in a lot of ways, instead of being prepared for what's ahead now which we feel 2021 in digital signage is going to come back and it's going to come back roaring and we're excited about it. 

David: Your business is one that relies heavily on human factors. You've got your 60 or so full-time employees, but I think you said 700 contractors or something like that. That's a lot of personalities scattered across the country and you have to stay on top of them all. You have to rely on them showing up, and then you've got by extension, and I remember this from my own time being VP Ops of a company and running another company that you could have the install techs there, but you're still on the phone yelling at an electrician who was supposed to be there at 11 and it was 12:30 and so how do you get past all that and have you learned a way to do it?

Travis Peterson: Lots of gray hairs and probably die at a young age. (Laughter)

No, you know what, our whole business is built of relationships and we don't have a product that flies off the walls that we can box up and ship out to our customers. Our product is technicians, it's humans and humans make mistakes. I make mistakes every day.

And that's okay. One thing with our customers, it's a sales pitch. We don't lie to our prospects. We tell them, “Hey, there's going to be days that you don't like us, cause we're going to mess up,” and that's okay because what we can promise you is every time we mess up, we're going to do the right thing. And we're going to figure out a solution to have you have a happy customer. But I'd be lying if I said there weren't days I wanted to pull my hair out. One of the most frustrating parts about this business model is our 50+ employees in-house, we could work our asses off, check every box, make sure everything's perfect, and that technician who we've maybe never physically met that we're sending out to a site failed us, and sometimes that's on us because we don't do our checks and balances, but sometimes it might just because he or she's having a bad day. So things we do to prevent that is: in the last five years, we've completely invested into our network team that builds the relationships, holds our tech compliant, insurance all the county, whatever it may be.

And then also we have reviews with them and they know how they're graded. So our technology and other investment, we've made every tech out in the field has an app on their phone. It's the Snap app and that's where they do all their work. It's where they accept their jobs, where we can see when they're completed with the job, all the deliverables come through, but then they also know their rating on a job and some businesses out there have some prospects or even clients to this day, they ask us, “Hey, your competitors say they have W2 technicians across the country, you guys have subs, why are they better or why are you better than them?” And I dunno if it's about who's better or not, but I'm a strong believer that the contractor model if used appropriately and is accountable, is stronger than the W2 model in some ways.

And I tie that all back to competition with the W2 employee. They might get complacent. They might not care as much. They might call in sick or do something elsewhere with subcontractors, you actually have that competition level and if you're transparent with them and show them that other people in their areas are knocking on the door, looking for that work, it doesn't mean that we make them compete with each other and hold it there to their throat every day. We actually are all about building relationships. Long-term, we don't just throw it out to a marketplace and cross our fingers. Our techs work directly with us and we build those loyal relationships. But that competition aspect is, you scratch our back, we'll scratch yours. But at the same time, I need you to keep up that accountability because I hold myself accountable and I expect you to hold yourself accountable. As we're paying you for this work. 

David: There are some, I'm aware of at least two matchmaker services out there, that kind of dating services for AV techs. You put in a need and different techs in that region can respond to it and bid on the deal. Are they competition or is that really a onesy twosy thing that you don't tend to play in very often? 

Travis Peterson: Onesy twosy thing that we don't play in at all. Our value add, some of our technicians, they work for our competitors as well. And we're okay with that. We're transparent and saying, that's fine as long as when you're doing our work, you're putting our work first and actually it's a two-way street. A lot of them come back and say, gosh, we wish you had this work because you treat us way better because you pay us quicker because you do this, and this.

And with the onesy twosy company is that is our value add is really the project management feature we offer in house with those 50 plus employees. If you call Snap as a client of ours, you're calling the same person and they know exactly what job that you're talking about. They can connect you with the right person. They can provide the tier one or tier two support service they need to, and that pays dividends for our customers because there's nothing worse than getting a call from your customer saying, “Hey, the TV just fell,” or “Hey, this didn't happen” instead of a call from us being proactive and saying, “Hey, this happened. If you want to reach out to your customer, that's fine but here's what we're doing about it to make it right and here's how we're going to make sure your customer has a smile on their face at the end” 

David: Are the jobs getting more complicated because you now have a lot of direct view LED and a whole range of new products. In many cases, the cabinets have different shapes. The mounting systems are different. There's very little in the way of universal standards or anything else. So you go into a job and the techs have to crack the manual and everything. All of a sudden, look at the back and go, okay, this is yet a new wrinkle that we haven't seen before.

Travis Peterson: They're definitely getting more complicated and a real man read manuals is what we tell our kids.

There are lots of techs out there that will say, “I got this, I don't need to look at a manual as anyone that's an expert in their field.” But it's become clear as the complications get thrown, our way is we have to make sure the documentation is there. We have to make sure the expectations are the same from what we think our customers expect to what they actually expect of us and lay that out and in our technology having checkpoints. So as a technician goes through the job, that person has to actually check off the things they're doing to ensure that we're following it step by step. Because if you do the wild west, so you just say, hang it up there and let's just hope it's right.

That's not going to work. There are steps you have to follow and we work with our partners to make sure that it's laid out and very clear so that it can be followed with a scope of work.

David: Last question: is there a piece of advice that you provide to your partners and if you're exposed directly to your end-user customers, you try to get across to them to smooth out the job?

Travis Peterson: Yes. Some of them let us be more involved than others, but for us, it's communication and getting us involved as quickly as possible. Not to give advice and tell you what's right or wrong, but we've seen a lot of things. We've been in business for almost 10 years now. It's not our first rodeo. We do this all day, every day. And what some customers might not realize is checking those boxes and having the checks and balances prior to deployment is so important. And in the end, it saves them a lot of money and we don't do it to rattle their cage and cause more issues. We do it to make sure we're being proactive before that deployment starts so they can save money in the end and we can avoid fewer trips.

David: Do you have to try to convince them of the value of a preliminary site survey? 

Travis Peterson: I think it depends on the stage of the relationship we're out with our customers for those the ones that we've been working with for a long time, they see the value, maybe they didn't at first and then we had to sell it to them and show them why now they know it's there, but it is something that can be challenging at times where that customer doesn't want to pay that small fee for the survey upfront and we allow them not to, but in the end, they paid triple what it would've cost because if they avoided a couple of things that they could have covered. 

David: Yeah. They think it's a cash grab until I find out actually, no, we should have done it.

Travis Peterson: Exactly and it's definitely not a cash grab for us. It's more of a break-even to cover our asses on some other things going forward. 

David: All right, Travis, I appreciate you taking some time with me. 

Travis Peterson: I appreciate that. 

David: Thank you.

 

Gary Feather, NanoLumens

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

I'm just coming off a bunch of research and writing about direct view LED, so it would be reasonable to think I know my stuff.

But this is technology that's evolving rapidly, and when you get into the weeds, there's still a whole bunch to learn and understand about LED.

Gary Feather is the CTO at the Atlanta-based LED display manufacturer NanoLumens, which has been an innovator for many years in the large format display space. We've gone back and forth through the years, by email, discussing advances. He offered to put his headset on and have a podcast chat about some of the emerging and changing technologies he's seeing.

We go into several things, most notably the rationale and use of displays that have engineered coatings that protect the screens from day to day abuse, whether that's accidental or intended. 

Gary has an electrical engineering degree, so acronyms and technical terms roll off his tongue like snarky remarks do with me. The result is a discussion that's maybe a little more technical than normal. But if you are into direct view LED, you'll learn some good stuff over the 30 or so minutes.

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TRANSCRIPT

So Gary, thanks for joining me. I just recently finished a big report on Direct View LEDs. So I think of myself as something of a Mr. Smarty Pants about this stuff, but you sent me an email while you're rattled through a whole bunch of things that are happening in the space, and then I thought to myself, oh I really don't know much about this industry at all. The more you learn the less, so one of the things you talked about it, and first of all, let me back up here and just explain who you are and what you do with NanoLumens. 

Gary Feather: Sure. I'm Gary Feather, the Chief Technology Officer at NanoLumens. I've been with NanoLumens for seven years. I left Sharp corporation in the LCD business to get there, and we really had a great opportunity to see the evolution of LED display from discrete devices, SMT devices, and now the new evolutions we're seeing in the market.

So one of the areas when I was over in China, about three years ago, I saw the first iterations of LED Display modules that had some sort of an epoxy coating on them, which is since being described in ways like an adhesive onboard or glue onboard. You're suggesting, or at least your email was suggesting that we're going to be seeing a much more of a shift to that sort of thing.

Gary Feather: The industry is looking for wider application of LED displays and with that comes durability and reliability requirements. A surface that is coated is going to be dramatically more durable than one that has physical soldered devices. So generally the surfaces become an important aspect for both installations, as well as utilization of the display in active environments.

Now, the idea with coating these things is because they're there, the LED chips are soldered on that they can easily be bumped off and they can be extraordinarily difficult to repair. I've seen lots of LED displays wherein the corners a few of the LED chips have been flaked off and other ones have been scraped off.

So this certainly protects it. The concern that was being raised, at least in the early days of it was the image quality is not as good and there were worries about how the heat got out. Has all that stuff been resolved? 

Gary Feather: Like any problem you're trying to solve, you mitigate certain aspects to make them viable.

Let's go way back to the LCD panels space. When LCDs first came out, the reflectivity of the screen was a problem. And so we used what was calLED the triacetate cellulose film on the surface so that it looked more anti-reflective. So surfaces have been an issue we've been addressing in the display industry really since the beginning of the industry.

Now we have a really exciting space to work in. We have a surface that we engineer with the materials we choose, Silicons through all varieties of epoxy materials of which then the processing allows a surface treatment to be customized to that, which optimizes the application of the display. So I would suggest while it's not part of the display, it has the capability to greatly enhance display performance now and dramatically improve over time in the future. 

Is there any issue with the coating trapping the heat at all or does it go at the back? 

Gary Feather: Certainly the coating is an insulator.

The management of heat and thermal calculations allow different approaches to get the heat out of the devices. Heat is a product of the efficacy of the LED, How many Candelas you get per watt, and then the brightness of the display is your Candelas per meter square. 

So depending on how bright you want the display and what the efficacy of the device is and what the physical size of the device is, management of heat then use those three parameters. That's an interesting aspect as we look at smaller LED dye, going from a standard size to the mini-LED to the micro-LED, the challenges of getting the heat properly out of that device to keep the junction temperatures in the range to ensure the reliability of the dye itself under operation. 

The other worry I've heard or at least had raised was the whole idea that because these are module tiles that you put on a kitchen or bathroom wall or whatever that if it's coated, you can't just replace an individual dead LED dye, you've got to replace the whole module. Is that genuinely an issue or a bit of a red herring? 

Gary Feather: Most anything can be repaired. The question is trying to monetize the value of that. So do you have an LCD or an OLED television? 

I do. 

Gary Feather: And how often have you repaired that?

Let me count: zero. 

Gary Feather: Okay, so we know where we want to go, and so the red herring maybe is to live in a world where we repair things as a starting point. So we design it to be repaired. We design it to be disassembLED and we design it to then be worked on. That generally adds dramatic cost to a product. So as the maturation of the systems reach the levels that we know they will hit, a philosophy of repair has to be disregarded and you have to look at the fact that solutions will last for the life of the product and meet the customer's requirements. 

I don't want to downplay this as an issue. I just want to say we know the destination and we know we've moved magnitudes on that from the past where people were repairing things daily to monthly to yearly, and now sometimes never repaired at all. And these transitions we're talking about, they are critical to building a sustainable competitive market where LED if you will, Inorganic LED is able to rival any of the other display technologies that are out there. 

So when I first started seeing these glue onboard or hardened LED modules and cabinets, I thought, okay, this is the way the industry is going to go, and I've been watching it for three years now and I've seen a number of smaller to midsize Chinese manufacturers come out with products, but I haven't seen any of the major manufacturers come out with anything with the arguable exception of the microLEDish products from the big guys like Sony and Samsung and LG that have some sort of coating on it, but there doesn't seem to be much in the middle, is that going to change? 

Gary Feather: So you're saying other than the leaders in the market with regard to a vision for the future, putting coatings on their boards so that they meet these requirements you haven't seen the other smaller companies, which aren't major players doing it?

I think you've answered your question. 

What I mean though, is I have seen four super-premium products, like Samsung's The Wall, Sony's Crystal LED, and LG’s Magnit, they have some sort of coating. I've seen from Cedar and CreateLEDs and companies like that, they have coated products, but I don't think I've seen stuff from Absen and Yuna Lumen and Layrd and some of those companies who are pretty big players.

Gary Feather: Well, YunaLumen showed at ISE a year and a half ago or so roughly, the coated boards. Everyone has initiated an effort. They have to decide why they are doing it, what purpose are they adding, what benefit do they add to the display and why is this better than the other solution?

So let's take a few other areas of why. If I want to wipe down a surface and in today's environment, wiping down surfaces may be an important aspect, I have to have a surface that's solid, that allows me to wipe it down. So now you see displays, LED displays for indoor that have IP5X and 6X ratings on the front. That would have been unheard of just a couple of years ago. So inherently we've increased the moisture capabilities of these displays. In addition to the fact that we've allowed you to have a surface that is cleanable, and that may be for dust and dirt, but it also may be for germicidal purposes and others related to our current environment with regard to the pandemic.

So I think you see a lot of emphases too, as to the durability, you can hit it with a hammer. Not hard, but you can hit it with a hammer. You can try to pick off a part, but you can't. But now, more importantly, you're able to wipe down the surface and moisture condensation. Somebody accidentally splashing something on the display isn't going to have a negative effect because there are no open electrical circuits on the face of the display anymore. So these number of forcing functions will drive to the right solution. 

Let's talk a little bit about that surface though, so you talked about: It's an engineered surface and on the early CLEDis product or Sony micro-LED, in 2017, if you looked at it off, you could see dimples in the process they use to coat it. That was what they were using at that time. But the idea was you, if you realize you can have a shiny surface or a gloss surface, you can have a matte surface and these have been demonstrated at shows or you could have an engineered surface because within an epoxy material, over Silicon, which is much softer, but with an epoxy material, I can then go back and re-engineer that surface to accomplish a number of things with regard to the viewing and potentially optical effects of that surface to optimize the operation of the device. So I think the coding in general and the terminology used of glue onboard is probably not a good descriptor, but an engineered coated surface has a significant potential to change the way that adds value to the LED display.

Yeah, the whole description of glue on board just seems to cheapen the product in a way. 

Gary Feather: I would agree with that, Yes.

It sounds like a hack and I know that's not really the case. So is the whole idea of an engineered coating to be table stakes moving forward, like if you're going to have a large format display you really should have that?

Gary Feather: Only in particular configurations. Outdoor displays, which still use coat. SMT devices and discrete LEDs, because they're adequate for and allow the performance and durability for the environments. There isn't a good reason to coat that display because the characteristics we're talking about achieving aren't necessarily even used in that application.

They may have louvers for coating, to cover the sun. They have their own maintenance approach that they take to those displays. So I think you focus on mostly indoor display applications and those in which are in close proximity to people and/or in atrium areas where you're going to have weather conditions resulting in condensation and others and you want to build a more robust indoor solution for an atrium class area.

NanoLumens did this gorgeous long LED video wall on a walkway at Charlotte North Carolina's International Airport, and that's going back two-three years now, I assume that doesn't have a coating on it, but that would be a good example of something that would benefit from that because of all the people walking along with the roller bags and everything?

Gary Feather: Absolutely and that falls into that category of durability, and you want to be integrated with the display as some people have put films on the surface of the displays to result in that. It's literally a peel and sticks either by the tile or by the display, and that tends not to be, when it's not integrated, not to be a good solution for the durability, reliability that we talked about.

Yeah. I've seen some of that. It didn't look very good. So tell me about Flip chips and SMT. 

Gary Feather: As you know, we're probably in what I call the fourth generation for LED exploitation into digital signage and as you highlighted early with the Magnit projects and others with LG, we have commercially moved into a space where LED inorganic devices for displays actually will move into the classic space we see with LCD type solutions in OLED.

The transition though is, we started with all these monochromatic LED almost tubes at one point and in the first generation and all of us saw lots of signs that were either the yellowish colored signs or whitish colored signs that were monochromatic and then moved to the discreet LEDs in a triad position and that's your generation too. And it's a great solution mixing the colors with RGB and then that migrated to a more svelte designed with SMT, sticking them all in a flat package and soldering them down to the board. 

In all those cases, you are taking a dye, putting it in a package, testing it and statistically picking out the good from the bad, throwing away the bad ones after it was finished and determining what is then good for the next level of assembly. So you can see we're integrating things a little bit more each step. Now from SMT, we've got a two-step we're going to do here. SMT parts, if I don't have high confidence in pre-testing my flip-chip parts, then I can mount the flip-chip devices into an SMT package and have an RGB LED in an array to make a pixel in a package, and then I can pre-test it. 

Now, the reason somebody does that is if there are particular constraints with regard to the Chroma or the Luma, that is the exact wavelength and the exact brightness of the device, and you stick them down there without pretesting, the likelihood you'll get the performance you want is very small. So by pre-testing parts then you know that they're in the band you want, and what's typically calLED binning in our industry, and you can assure that when you put the whole display together, all the individual elements meet the requirements you have for a particular wavelength, a plus or minus so many nanometers and then a particular brightness or elimination from that device. So with that in mind, you can't jump all the way in. Now, if you can pretest in a flip-chip configuration the devices in what's classically now calLED a cartridge, then I'm able to check the devices before I mount them and then put them down. 

So here's where we need to realize that magic just occurred in the system. When we talk about a chip much like your home phone going from wired to your cellular phone being wireless, the golden copper wire bonds are going to disappear in the flip-chip. Now, the reason I care about that is because the number one reliability problem I have is associated with the metalization and the wire bonding, so I lose the wire bonding. I lose the epoxy. I lost all the assembly issues that made SMT dye mount wire bonds may be less reliable. And I moved to effectively weld two-terminal devices down at a surface, with no wire bonds and no chance of breakage. So a dramatic shift in that area, it means I might be able to pre-test the part, I put the part down by welding it, put it in an SMT package and I build something that's pretty much going to endure any kind of environment. 

So is the Flip chip and SMT, is this what's more commonly broadly known as a chip on board? 

Gary Feather: I think as you wrote an excellent piece the terminology has been used differently by everybody and I just cannot claim that you and I have the same terminology, but let's take this slowly.

If the die is pre-packaged effectively into a format where it's bumped and ready to be mounted on a surface, that is flipped chip by definition, forget where it's going, but you're going to flip-chip the part. Now we've been flip chipping semiconductor dyes since the 80s. We bump them in a process, they have little bumps on them. Then we actually flip them upside down rather than wire bonding and reflow the whole device. I ran a facility in Texas instruments that did that very function. So the technology isn't new, but the issue being, you remove wire bonds, which is good. Now, how do I want to do that?

As I said before, put them all in one package, just in one package and test it or put it on the whole board. If I put it on the whole board and let's say a typical board size is something like 150x337 millimeters. So I might break that down into a couple of chunks but I'll have 5,000 pixels on any one board. If I can't pre-test stuff, it would be hard to put down 5,000 at one time. So I flipped a chip a package and I tested them, but if I can pre-test them now I put them directly on the board and these are the options that we have today in the world today that go onto a polyamide board material.

So you're mounting it right onto what you would classically call a PCB or a printed circuit board and that's good actually down to pixel pitches, probably around six-tenths to four-tenths where you can literally flip chip and then COB. So flip-chip, don't put them in an SMT package, flip chip put them right on the surface of the board. And when you do that, you get a C of RGB LEDs, besides C of RGB LEDs that are welded in place, not wire-bonded. Most of the early Sony solutions there, their particular displays were wire-bonded. So by removing that variable now, and you can pre-test the devices.

Now you can put down more than three at a time and get them right. You may be able to put 3000 down and get them right. So the shift from the flip-chip is a methodology. COB is an implementation. You can see OB dye or you can see OB flip-chip. I strongly suggest you see the flip-chip. 

Okay. So what does all this mean in terms of manufacturing and for the end-users? 

Gary Feather: As we look at the application of the move towards flip-chip and the move towards COB, let's talk about flip chip first. A packaging company that sells LEDs taped in the reel, so you might put 2,500 on a reel will have classically bought a package from a packaging maker, they would have purchased the dye on a wafer from a wafer manufacturer, and then they would have wire bond machines and they would have sealant stations to put an array of these down, put the dye in the package with epoxy, bond the wires out and fill it up with material. So you can see in the supply chain, you have wafer manufacturers, you have package manufacturers, you have packaging companies that put them on a reel and then they send it to a company that does the SMT process. So that would be basically the standard process today. So there's another two step process for this: the company that's selling the taped devices with the LEDs on them wants a better device at a lower cost and by putting a flip chip into the package, as opposed to die, he can increase the reliability, the durability, if he's able to pretest that he can improve his yield and subsequently, he can still sell a package, but it's a flip-chip package as opposed to dye mounted package. So he can win on that. Now, when he does that, what he realizes is he can vertically integrate backward and try to pick up some of what's going on in the dye, cause he needs to know more about that function.

And when he does that, he forms relationships with these LED manual factors and the companies building the flip chip devices. Then what immediately happens the company doing the flip-chip devices realizes why don't they just build the whole solution? Because why are they shipping things off to somebody to put it in this classic package?

So from that perspective, the company building the LED might get absorbed quite a bit because he's been taken over by the guy making the die. So that's one area. 

The other area is your SMT company. So while they need to put parts on the back, if the front is COB, they really have no idea how to do any of that, they no longer can take flip-chip devices, put them on a board because it's not an SMT part anymore and build an array of those nd then reflow all those devices as appropriate and then coat those devices. So companies in the supply chain that classically did one side did the other side and then shipped it off to the company are now in a situation where they have to consider, they have to go somewhere else to have that work done. They don't have that tool and equipment. 

So the supply chain is evolving and streamlining as well? 

Gary Feather: Right and what you'd expect, and let's move all the way down to let's say LCD TVs, the glass is built with the switch, the optical light switch in it as part of making the solution by a company like Sharp or a company like Samsung or others, OLED fits in the same category. So as you can integrate more of these pieces together, certainly the overall output is improved in yield, the costs go down, the automation increases and subsequently it allows you to build a different model for that. So many people that were doing Parts of this job got absorbed into the totally more integrated solution.

In this case, eventually a CPB based solution with inorganic devices placed in a more effective way on a large area board with results that give you the display performance you're looking for, that will result in a large area displays built that a factory, completely not tiLED in the 110, 120, 130 inch range with inorganic LEDs that you buy much like you buy an LCD or an OLED TV today is just bigger than those tech technologies can support and are not tiLED anymore, but completely finished and a finished product at home. And that's what you're seeing with the solutions from the big people, as you highlighted before Samsung and LG. 

Does all this make it easier for a company to spin itself up as an LED display manufacturer when they're not really manufacturing, they're just saying they're a manufacturer? 

Gary Feather: I list in our internal strategic competitive list 30 key companies that I think are integrated manufacturers. There are about 140 that are out there. So indeed today in LED-based displays, there are many people that are brokering talent from other people to provide solutions to customers and adding very little value to the actual solution. So in one way, it does allow that. On the other way, these companies may decide they want to be vertically integrated all the way to the customers. And so they may not open that up. So we have yet to see how that actually works as they fail. There are factories that are doing many LEDs today and some microLED capabilities, but the new factories built, we're in the 50 to 70,000 square feet, and they allow processing of a lot of materials. So I assume any serious customers will be considered until those factories are full. 

Let's talk about costs that have been coming down through the years. And I assume that's a function of buyer volume and manufacturing advances and everything else is this whole kind of shift going to also lower costs?

Gary Feather: Absolutely. The integration of these functions will lower costs. Part of the cost is yield. If the yield increases, that's immediate money into your pocket, but let's look at the whole solution. We talk about how we have the LEDs certainly, and we have drivers for the LEDs that support that and then the controlling system that goes with that. The automation of these systems from this, these are mostly now today, pulse width modulation non-persistent displays that are constant current devices. So that's what we build. So basically we build a light bulb that goes on and off fast enough so you see the mixing of the RGB the way you'd like.

As we look at the drivers, what's happened with the drivers is they used to be inaccurate and imprecise. And they were almost like analog, even though they're digital from device to device based on lead length drive, performance, voltage, and many other noise factors. So today, if you look at the newest release devices from the leaders in the industry, we have now integrated solutions in drivers that are so much more advanced. So what used to be in a single, it would take, say 64 packages are now in a single package associated with performance. So as you would guess, the cost has dropped as the level of integration has gone up much the same way with Silicon devices. So one of the big cost drivers in this is driver technology and driver technology continues to advance at a level that's quite phenomenal is the ability to control the LED and controlling the LED is absolutely the critical part of being able to create incredible images with LED technology. There's nothing like the speed, the performance, the color of an LED, and with the right driver in an amazing world opens up what people can do with these devices to give the user a perception that you otherwise never felt.

Yeah, in doing the recent report I did on LED, I got the sense that the marketplace is shifting from being fixated with pixel pitch, and who's got the finest pixel pitch displays and so on to a more mature market that understands visual quality is everything and you need to have a great control system, great drivers and everything else.

Gary Feather: That's absolutely true. Also, let's go back, this is the need, The need of the display initially was a sign and the sign basically is communicating fairly bold things in very large spaces, but the market shifted starting in 2014 to video displays. So what we're trying to do is replace and or meet the kind of performance with an OLED device.

They realize it's all about what the user perceives and having worked with creatives In the Hollywood structure with regard to images and within the whole physical sciences, the best stories are told in the dark. So the black are so important for you to feel the life-like nature of an image and we are just now addressing contrast ratios that begin to be a priority to realize very little reflected light of the display results in our blacks because we're off, obviously when we're black, we're not like an LCD trying to hold back the light, so more like an OLED. But once the black is attained and reflected light is mitigated and the contrast ratio. it's higher, the image comes alive. 

So that's one factor. The other is a bit depth. As you go down for the brightness, the eye becomes so much more capable to see the black areas and you've got to make sure you don't stair step that, that it's a nice blend because that's what reality is. As you look at things and the result is it's the second area bit depth is accurate and precise. This resulted in images that do appear lifelike and there are about four other parameters, but those two I think is what really brings an image to life and allows for a story well told. 

This is all pretty technical for a lot of people. If I'm a reseller or particularly if I'm an end-user, how valuable is it to understand and get into the technical weeds on this stuff? Or is this something they don't really need to know? 

Gary Feather: I don't think they need to know it at all. In all honesty, not for any reason other than seeing is believing and you want simple messages to people about simple things. As I said, we're going wireless with the way we connect devices, that's a big deal. We're trying to emulate a lead contrast ratio, that's a big deal. We moved to the control set. You get the right color in the right spaces. No fake colors along the way in color matching across the whole CIE space that you've covered. That's a big deal. People can get that right color, reliable, durable, and looks real. That's probably the message. 

The details of that are having the marketing spend to give that information to people. So they get it in a way that's valuable to their customers because when you're done, you want to look at it and be wowed with what and that's the only thing the customer sees. All the technology you and I are talking about is effectively what is behind the product to assure that's attainable 

From my perspective, I think it's always good, particularly if you're making a six-figure decision to have at least a decent understanding of what's under the hood matters.

Gary Feather: Right and I think we can put together information for people to ask the right questions to basically audit what they're getting to make sure they're not buying last year, the year before last solutions, which will be limiting and they're moving into the solutions that are not limiting going forward.

All right, Gary, that was terrific. I think we should do this again sometime. Very insightful. 

Gary Feather: It's an interesting market and you're going to see, I think about a hundred million in flip chips this year at retail and probably as much as 500 million in 2022. So this shift is occurring pretty fast in a $6 to $7 billion industry.

So I think that elements an important takeaway. Building durable products for long life, that's a great takeaway. And I think maybe the most important element is that LED now we'll begin to stand side by side in a larger format for what we've seen in the past with LCD and OLED. 

Okay, Gary. Thank you.

Gary Feather: Thank you, Dave. Appreciate it.

 

 

ACE Roundtable: The Tech That Worked In 2020, And Going Forward

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

Just before Christmas, I moderated an Advocates for Connected Experiences roundtable that tossed around thoughts on what technologies were used to get us all through 2020, focusing on what really worked, and will continue to work into 2021.

It was a video discussion on Zoom, but it translates nicely to audio. I had technical issues with the planned podcast for this week, but this is a worthwhile, albeit last-minute stand-in.

The first voice you hear is Kim Sarubbi, one of the founders of Advocates of Connected Experiences, or ACE.

Also on the discussion, Joe' Lloyd from AVIXA, Kym Frank from Geopath, Beth Warren from CRI and the DSF, Cybelle Jones from SEGD, Bryan Meszaros from OpenEye Global, Asif Kahn from the Location-Based Marketing Association, and myself.

This podcast is produced with the kind, ongoing support of ScreenFeed, the digital signage content store. Get awesome-looking, engaging and automated subscription content for your screens.

 

Kevin Cosbey, Seneca/Arrow

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

When I got into digital signage 20+ years ago, and for many years after that, PCs dominated the media player side of the business.

The big questions were around whether to use Windows or Linux, and products were differentiated on things like size and ruggedization.

That's changed in the last few years, with more and more digital signage networks going in that used low-cost embedded players in smart displays, or worked off special purpose media players or adapted set-top boxes.

That's shifted the ground for Seneca, an upstate New York specialty computer company that's been in the game for decades. Seneca is part of the Denver-based AV/IT distribution giant Arrow.

There's no doubt fewer digital signage networks now run on PCs, particularly when there's only simple messaging like menu boards. But demands have also changed, and a lot of networks that are based around messaging are driven by real-time data and analytics that need serious computing at the edge.

Kevin Cosbey has also been in the industry for a bunch of years, and the last several have been with Seneca, where he leads business development in the digital signage sector.

We had a great chat about where PCs fit right now in the industry, and we get into how and why Seneca has put resources into developing supporting software that makes commissioning PCs way easier, and gives partners new and better remote management tools.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

So Mr. Cosbey, we've known each other for a very long time, but for those people who don't know Seneca and to a larger extent, Arrow, can you say what that's all about and what you guys do? 

Kevin Cosbey: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Dave. Thanks for taking some time out of your day today. I really appreciate the opportunity.

So Seneca has been a 30 plus year organization that has its roots in traditional technology distribution, and over the course of those 30 years, six years ago, Arrow Electronics actually acquired us, and since then we've been part of the Arrow family as it worked. Ultimately, for those that are familiar with Arrow, a lot of people might just have the normal idea that Arrow's a big IT distribution company, but we fall under the services group. So our focus still is around services as it relates to digital signage services, as it's around technology to build a real solution and not just focus on speeds and feeds of hardware. So Arrow is a big massive company but the nice thing is: Seneca still runs through our veins.

And the company's based in Syracuse still, right? 

Kevin Cosbey: Yep. The majority of our engineering group is in Syracuse, support’s in Syracuse, and we've got a light manufacturing facility still in Syracuse and a large manufacturing facility in Phoenix. 

Okay, and Arrow's based in Denver, right? 

Kevin Cosbey: You got it.

So when I look at the Seneca website, I see that you guys are into broadcast surveillance and digital signage being the key solution you talk about. What percentage roughly, I don't need the exact number of the work that Seneca does is around signage?

Kevin Cosbey: It's about 50%. 

Oh, okay, so that's a big part of your business. 

Kevin Cosbey: Yep, absolutely. 

And how has that shifted through the years? 

Kevin Cosbey: When we first started getting into, what I like to consider niche computing, we were really that digital signage OEM focused company. And then through the years, through those 10 or so years we've really focused and dialed into niche computing, that created the new division of the security group. And they've been growing through the years as well. 

So we used to be like a hundred percent ish, on the niche computing focus in digital signage and over the years, security and surveillance has grown substantially. 

Okay. And with signage itself, I've been doing this for 20 plus years now, and when I got into it and for the first many years, it was all about what kind of PC to use and that's what people used and the debates were around do I use Windows or do I use Linux? And the PCs are being marketed and sold as much on form factor and processing power as really anything else, and a lot has changed since then. And I'm curious how it is with the business in that, you know you talked about a niche, how do you make the argument now of using a PC versus using a system on chip smart display versus using a set top box or an HDMI stick, whatever it may be. 

Who's still using PCs, and am I wrong in thinking it's a niche and It's used more than I think? 

Kevin Cosbey: Great question. Glad you asked it. So it's a lot to unpack with that question cause you know, similar to you, I've been in space for 15 years. I've seen a lot of interesting changes in the industry as a whole, way back when everything was PC, and it's not to say we were just thinking the industry is going to stay running Intel based platforms forever. We saw that higher performance chip sets are coming out from different chip set manufacturers and here we are today with a variety of capable chipsets that can produce and run 1080p or 4k content on a display.

There's a lot of differences in our industry however, where not everyone just needs to have a 1080p fullscreen content running 365 days a year. There's more to it, there's more stuff that's happening at the edge today than there was 10 years ago and that's what we're keeping up with.

Now, I do want to back up a little bit though and say the PC used to be pretty much the media player way back, and now we're seeing ourselves and I use this analogy a lot. I don't mean it that we were the best out there, but we were like the iPhone. We were the first to market as a media player. And then you started to see Android phones and you started to see all these other bits and pieces. Now, the nice thing is all of these other bits and pieces that are getting added to the marketplace, they validate our industry as a whole. So when we have SOC out there that is grabbing market share and when we have other purpose built devices that are grabbing market share, it's increasing our entire industry value. 

So yeah, we don't have a hundred percent of the pie anymore, but as that pie expands, we continue to have significant market share and that's really what we're after. We're not going after some folks that may consider SOC to be perfect for what they need and ironically, actually many instances where SOC is running, we're actually the primary media player and SOC is used as the redundancy, which I love that partnership. That's a really good useful way to have technology ensuring redundancy in high impact environments and really important environments.

Yeah, I've heard that in a few cases for kind of mission-critical displays like Airport displays and so on where the smart side of the display is the fail over but the big video wall or whatever is handled by a much beefier industrial grade box. 

Kevin Cosbey: Yup. And then just another aspect of your space, despite the entrance of other folks in the industry that are producing media player type solutions or media streaming devices, year over year we've had consistent growth.

There's a lot of massive enterprise networks out there that will usually only consider using a Wintel based platform and that's just based on the way their corporate structure works, the way their staff works, the way their entire organization functions on a global perspective. 

And in a lot of those cases, when you have an IT team with a bunch of Dr. Nos who only say no, we only use a PC or whatever, are they not also quite often saying, and we only use Lenovo, or we only use this brand name or that brand name, there are our kind of base contractor vendor for PCs? 

Kevin Cosbey: Great question. And historically, prior to Seneca being part of that Arrow family, we used to just have the Seneca stuff, and now that we're part of the Arrow family, we are an HP OEM, Lenovo OEM, Dell OEM. So we can still wrap all of the goodness of Seneca, which is, building systems specifically for an enterprise level opportunity and adding all of the functionality to that device. So when someone hits that power button, it runs the exact experience they want it to run. So reducing that setup time significantly at the end user destination. 

Yeah. Let's talk about that. I've been out to the Seneca facility in Syracuse a couple of times when I used to live much closer than I do now and that was one of the big things is when you're buying your PCs, your media players, whatever you want to call them servers. It's not like buying something off the shelf at a Best Buy or at a big box from a computer manufacturer. It's commercial or industrial grade. There's a lot more going on.

Can you lay out what you guys do that would differentiate it from a manufacturer that's not going out to thousands of units a day? 

Kevin Cosbey: Absolutely. So you've just hit on one major key point is that we're not producing thousands of devices and then figuring out how to sell it. We have two major channels, two major go to market strategies.

One is our OEM space and we are an OEM equipment manufacturer, or contract manufacturer for a lot of software companies out there that want absolutely nothing to do with hardware. So we bear that burden on their behalf. We grab their IP, their brand, their software, and we build it into our systems, our reference design systems, and we manage logistics. We manage just in time inventory so they can focus on software. We focus on hardware and that end user/end customer gets a device, a purpose-built device that is branded as that experience now. 

I was just going to say, I remember several years ago when Intel came up with its Nuc which was a nice little tiny box, but it looked very much like a consumer grade plastic box that would be perfectly fine on a credenza in a home or something like that. But then Seneca came out with its own version of the Nuc and it was the same reference design, but it was industrial grade. It was fabulous. It was made for business use, it was ruggedized to actually work out in the field for more than a week or something.

Is that kind of how you guys approach this, in that ”we do computing, but this is thought through in terms of what the use cases are”? 

Kevin Cosbey: That's exactly right. You sold it better than I could have Dave. But yeah, that's exactly right. We've become, over the few decades that we focused on niche computing, experts at taking off the shelf technology and designing it in a very purpose-built manner. So yes, Intel is a great partner of ours. We use a lot of their technology in a lot of our stuff, but we've recognized that Intel is for mass consumption on a lot of their platforms and digital signage isn't really looking for just a mass consumption solution. They're looking for something that's a little bit taken a step further and thermal design is important. Power supply embedded in the system is important. Output is important from an HDMI perspective or display port, whatever that case is. And that's the stuff we take from the Intel board itself and we'll grab USB hatters off of it to increase the IO on our chassis. We'll do all these creative things to take what exists from a global consumption perspective and take it to that next level to ensure it's perfect for what the industry needs, not just that customer/ 

The rise of things like audience measurement technologies, computer vision, that sort of thing and demand for more computing at the edge of a network, at the device that may be pushing content to the screen but that device is also being asked to do computer vision tasks of some kind and so on, has that helped the sales effort as well, in terms of you can maybe do that with a smart display or maybe possibly, probably not with a set top box kind of device, but you can buy a small form factor, industrial grade PC that you can tool up with on i5 or an i7 or whatever and it can do multiple things off of the same unit? 

Kevin Cosbey: Spot on again, Dave, you're crushing it out there on the hardware side. Exactly. To your point, we're starting to see and have really for the past few years that there's a shift from our perspective where not everything has to be computed in the cloud and a lot of stuff needs to happen at the edge, and as that edge becomes more in demand from a computing perspective, from a headroom perspective and future-proofing perspective, that's where we're starting to see folks that used to be on an i3 actually start looking at an i5 and i7, and of course you've got Moore's law, right? Where the computing capabilities at the edge just become more powerful as the years in technologies increase.

So even some folks that we were able to get away with, if they're doing 4k at the edge and running some other computer, maybe they used to be on an i5 and now five years later, we're actually seeing that to keep up with that same demand an i3 is going to be appropriate. So it's both ends of the spectrum.

And then as you get into the larger stuff where it's like a Time square video wall, that's our hardware throughout the partner, Diversified. And that was built specifically with really crazy computers in mind and crazy videos in mind. And that's very, purpose-built high compute power is required for that type of solution.

Yeah. You guys have servers that drive any number of very large seriously large pixel displays, right? 

Kevin Cosbey: Yeah, like the Orlando airport that is like a mile or so of continuous displays that is using our hardware for hardware synchronization and hardware synchronization, again, getting that compute down to the edge instead of constantly relying on the cloud, you're not going to experience latency. You're not going to experience any major issues at the edge. It is as full-proof as it can possibly get. 

And at the edge, the demand, and really the rise of dynamic signage, this idea that what you're gonna see is based on what other business systems are telling you is that sort of decisioning that maybe you could do it in the cloud, but really it needs to be at the edge at the individual devices too, to work best? 

Kevin Cosbey: Yeah, and just having that latency no longer a concern, so if you're doing drive through type menu boarding solution, and you want to do as much analytics as you possibly can to design content around certain environmental information, it's best to keep that computing at the edge, because there will be no latency going up to the cloud computing and then coming back down to the device.

So having those decisions made at the edge is far more powerful than having to send everything up to the cloud. The same reason that, a Tesla car, the amount of computing that is done inside of the car is substantially more than probably people think. 

So you guys have started marketing something called Maestro, can you tell me what that is and where that came from?

Kevin Cosbey:  Yeah, absolutely. So we recognized that out of our OEM group, a lot of the OEM folks have started to sell to a broader group of people, the channel. And over the years we started seeing that, all right, now we have these five-six media players, and we've got these 28 software partners, and I'm not going to do the competition here, but it comes up with a ridiculous amount of combinations of hardware to software. 

And now we've got to have all of our partners telling us, “Hey, Kevin, I really want to have an HDN with a BroadSign app”. Okay, now we've got to put in that information and then we build to order and send that out.

Instead of having all of these different SKUs and part numbers in a very complex and convoluted way, we grabbed all of our software partners. So that's Broadsign, Navori, SignageLive, Appspace, Ping HD, Acquire Digital, and then on the analytics side, we've got Ad Mobilize, Visibility and we've bundled them into a single platform called Maestro. And that comes on all of our media players as a simple, easy to use out of box software tool. So it just helps people automatically optimize the operating system for a digital signage environment. The next step is you just click on BroadSign, for example, if that's your CMS, it auto installs all of the BroadSign programs that are required to run on that system.

It changes anything that BroadSign needs to the operating system. So everything is taken care of. And then of course, if you want to add Ad Mobilize to that platform, you click on add, Ad Mobilize, it installs it, and now you have a very simple point and click setup process and a BroadSign and Ad Mobilize player right out of the box.

And what led to that? 

Kevin Cosbey: It really was just mostly confusion. We had a database of all of these part numbers, all of this stuff, and we realized we need to get everything together in an effort to be more aggressive in our channel space. So we've got a lot of really good channel customers, but we need to make their install process as easy as we could possibly make it, reducing their time at the install. So we've partnered up with the same folks that they're partnered up with to make their lives as easy as we could possibly make it. 

So one of the features and benefits, I'm just looking at the webpage here is you talk about saving hundreds of keystrokes. How is that? Just because of all the monkey business to get multiple systems working? 

Kevin Cosbey: Yeah. So you've got Microsoft Windows, which is a wonderful operating system. I can't say anything negative about it. But ultimately it's built for mass consumption. So again, how do we take something that's built for the entire world to use from an operating system level and make it perfect for signage?

Usually when somebody gets a media player that's running on a Windows environment, they've got to go through and they've got to do certain things to the operating system. They've got to do this to the graphics card, through the drivers. They've got to do this and X, Y, and Z. Well, instead of having the installer do those things to suppress errors, so you're not going to have errors on that top layer of content, which I'm sure we've all seen out, out in the wild. 

This Maestro platform that the minute you boot it up, when it goes into the operating system, it auto goes through all of this stuff so that technician doesn't have to do anything. And then it goes through a reboot when it pops up that second time, then you're installing BroadSign. Broad sign has certain things that need to be done, certain hooks into the operating system that need to be done with a mouse and keyboard. We've just done it by just clicking BroadSign and installing it goes through that whole process. So we've scripted the whole process. So yeah, maybe a hundred clicks isn't the same for installing Ping HD or it's only 50 clicks for BroadSign, but it hovers around a hundred clicks that we've actually gone through the setup and jotted down how many clicks we're saving folks on average.

So in essence it's removing what can be a giant pain in the ass? 

Kevin Cosbey: That's it, yeah. We'll change that to the marketing slogan. (Laughter) 

There's something to be said sometimes for plain language. 

What's been the response from your ecosystem? 

Kevin Cosbey: Really happy. It's been this thing in my head for a while and there's risk involved when you're doing it. Paradigm shift within the organization and our engineering group got behind it, all of these folks got behind it into this. How do we make the channel so much easier? And we've gotten incredible feedback from our partners that we didn't think we were going to get. And it's just been like, I don’t know, heartwarming a bit that we're hearing such good feedback, like “You guys have thought of everything.” Wow. All right. That's pretty cool. That's good to hear. It's been really good. 

And was that all done in house or did you have to find a third party to do some of this stuff? Because you're mostly gear guys and not software guys.

Kevin Cosbey: We’re mostly speeds and feeds dudes, but ultimately we've got pretty good software engineering prowess when it comes to an operating system level stuff.

We've been building operating systems because we build hardware. We've been doing it for decades. Now,  if someone said, “Hey, Kevin, can you build me a CMS?” No, that's not our game. That's not our software expertise, but absolutely OS level stuff, that's our area of expertise.

Before I hit the start button here, we were also talking about something that was introduced earlier and you said it's going to spin up a lot more in 2021 called X-Connect?

Kevin Cosbey: Yeah, that's right. We've had a platform called X-Connect in our security and surveillance group for about five years, so it's been developed as a very mature platform and it allows people to, from a simple dashboard, see all of their network, video recorders, right in the security and surveillance group. And it would allow them to see all their IP cameras. So from one dashboard, they can see everything and they can manage those devices.

Of course, that bright light went off in our group saying, “Hey, guys we see a pretty big need for this in the digital signage world.” That the difference is now that instead of it residing on a massive beefy high performance server, we needed to figure out how we take all of that incredible goodness in seeing what's going on in the server environment and bring it down to an itty bitty little media player that is sometimes running a little Intel Celeron chips up, and of course we can't impact content. Content is the number one thing that has to be running on these devices and if we have any impact on that, then we're just going against the grain. 

So it took the engineering group quite a while, but they were able to successfully deploy this X-Connect platform, which allows monitoring and management and the management is the big key function here. Anybody can send out a monitoring platform to see green lights and red lights. But if you want to actually reduce your truck rolls, you've gotta be able to remotely manage these devices. So what this system allows us to do is it sends out remote commands down to devices. Of course, simple reboot commands, that's all table stakes, but now we're at a level where I'll use an example, we've got a customer where they were complaining that out in the wild, it was in a retail environment for whatever reason, people were somehow bumping into the power button and it would somehow get that graceful reboot going well.

We went to the engineering group and with the customer working with us, they were like, “can't we just get rid of the power button?” Yeah, technically we could. So through the X-Connect platform, thousands of devices out in the field didn't require a truck roll and remotely, we disabled the power button on the system. So now technically the only way to reboot it is remotely through our system, which our partner and managed service provider is providing all those services. So a really cool application.

 Yeah. I get a sense, through the years, when it comes to truck rolls, there are times when something catastrophic has happened and you absolutely need a technician there, but there's one hell of a lot of truck rolls that are just about a cable that's come loose or power button turned off or something, right?

Kevin Cosbey: Yeah, absolutely. I was just on a call before chatting with you, Dave, where one of the big topics of that discussion was it's the unknowns that are going to kill a network and truck rolls are the big unknown. So if we can mitigate that and bring it down to a manageable level where it can be understood almost as how many truck rolls do you think are going to happen for a network. And then on the back end, a managed service provider or an integrator or whoever it is on the X-Connect platform can resolve stuff remotely and allows organizations to scale their network a lot faster than they otherwise would.

So with your CMS partners, a lot of those guys, like the Novari's and so on, they have device management of some kind that's built into their software front end. Is what you bring with X-Connect supplementary or is there an API, does it replace what they have, how does all that work? 

Kevin Cosbey: Yeah, it's intended to be the single pane of glass for an organization, and it does have an open API framework. The nice thing about the X-Connect platform is if organizations need to ingest other information, then we can ingest that information into X-Connect.

So for example, Novari, they've got a great platform that can see a lot of what's going on in the device. But because we're the hardware manufacturer, we can just see more of the technology layer of the technology stack. So in addition to what's going on with Novari, we can potentially ingest information from an IP camera, we can ingest information through HDMI CEC, we can ingest information through an SOC platform like magic info. So the idea here is that X-Connect has the capability of becoming that single pane of glass, to manage and monitor, not just the immediate player, but the entire stack. 

This is a little bit like what BrightSign is doing in terms of they've got boxes and then they've got a device management platform as well that kind of removes the need for the CMS provider or the solutions provider to develop their own thing. Is it a bit like that? 

Kevin Cosbey: I mean in the rudimentary sense of monitoring and managing, yes.

In the higher level, more in depth perspective, our design and I'm no expert on the BrightSign platform, but our design is not very proprietary in that it is an open API framework and we can add on a host of other devices, if you want to add on perhaps a Lenovo device, no problem. HP devices, no issue, Dell devices, all good. So it's a little bit more open and you can manage an entire network of stuff and not just to the Seneca media player. So we're looking to go after, how do we help manage the entire infrastructure? Not just one piece of the puzzle. 

And it doesn't have to be x86 based? 

Kevin Cosbey: Written out, x86 based for basically monitoring the device itself, but then the device itself becomes its own gateway and it allows to see other stuff on that same network. 

Which is why you could see a Samsung smart display for instance. 

I'm curious, are you seeing other kinds of companies that are digital signage pure play companies or really even AV integrators or like that, just different kinds of organizations. I'm thinking like access control companies and other ones that in the past year have seen the need to be able to push information to larger screens. Are you starting to see non-traditional players come at you?

Kevin Cosbey: Honestly on the PC side of the house, not really, no. We're seeing a little bit more where our traditional competition from 10 years ago is not consistently our competition as much as new entrants have become a competition. 

By new entrants, you mean like the smart display and set top boxes and so on? 

Kevin Cosbey: Yeah, exactly. But from a traditional x86 based system Wintel based platforms and this is just a gut reaction based on the industry, Seneca has focused so heavily in the digital signage space that I believe we've become strong leaders in the PC based digital signage media play world.

Yeah, certainly there's three or four other companies that are selling into the same ecosystem, but in their case, it usually seems to be, “and we also do digital signage or this is among the things that we do” versus you guys, you're saying it's 50% of your business and you've got full-time people who that's all they do. 

Kevin Cosbey: Yeah. We've got an engineering group that's what they've been doing for 10 plus years. 

All right. So what might we see from Seneca/Arrow in the context of signage in the next 12 months? 

Kevin Cosbey: I'd say you're going to see a lot of us, virtually of course, this year we're really excited about the Maestro platform and the X-Connect platform.

It puts us into a very serious solution offering for digital signage, just as we've been talking through this and you just mentioned a lot of folks have historically provided a small PC and we've done that for years. But now we're taking that next level. We always took that next level from a hardware side to making it a little bit more purpose-built and now we're starting to really dissect the whole process.

So we're dissecting what our channel folks are doing, what are integrators doing, what do managed service providers do, what is the digital out of home space doing and how do we solve some of those industry problems? With technology and then of course, we've got a big Arrow behind us that we're happy to be a part of.

So we offer Arrow Credit and financing to support really massive projects or projects that are just $10,000. We've gotten very creative in grabbing some of those Arrow pieces that historically we didn't have the capability of offering because of size. 

Yeah. I assume that if you had a very happy moment where you had an end user come to you and say “really interested in this, but here's the deal I need 40,000 units by the start of June” Old Seneca would probably say no versus now, you could actually say and I don't know if you could do that kind of number, but you could do a big number without people having a heart attack.

Kevin Cosbey: Yeah. I'll still fall out of my chair, but I'll get back in the chair pretty quickly, whereas before I'd be left on the ground.

But you'd be lying on the ground with a smile on your face.

Kevin Cosbey: Yeah and the other cool thing with Arrow capital too, is we've partnered with our software partners. So we support the project with that end customer. So if it's, I don't know, Staples that wants to do a 2000 unit deployment, we will support the entire financial burden of that project and then let's say a software company, X is working it with us.

Arrow capital will pay that software company for those three years of contracted services on day one. So now we've got a solution that allows our partnerships to be a little bit more financially stable as well. 

All right. Kevin, thank you for spending some time with me. I really appreciate it.

Kevin Cosbey: Thank you, Dave. Happy new year and really looking forward to seeing you and everybody in the industry one day, maybe this year. 

Yeah, one day. I think it might not be until the fall, but fingers crossed. 

Kevin Cosbey: Fingers crossed, yeah. 

All right. Stay safe. 

Kevin Cosbey: Thanks Dave. You do the same.

 

Sam Ward, Soofa

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED - DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

There are several media companies – from giants to start-ups – offering smart city display solutions, which are, effectively, outdoor totem displays that run local information, backed by advertising.

But there’s only one – Boston-based Soofa – that actively markets a product that runs entirely off solar power and uses e-paper as the display canvas.

The company grew out of MIT, and had its start with a bench unit that allowed people to sit and relax in parks and public squares, while they charged their phones at the Soofa unit.

Soofa evolved into public displays, with large-format e-paper screens on totems  (think very large Kindles) and management software that allows cities to inform and guide city residents and visitors.

Unlike many of the smart city projects out there that seem to be smart mainly as a way to win a digital out of home advertising concession, the local governments that tend to opt in with Soofa are more interested in distributing information and fostering community.

They’re also attracted to Soofa because the hardware and install costs of a Soofa display are a fraction of the cost of a typical full-color, daylight-readable outdoor LCD display, and all the related hardware and construction work needed to put one in.

I had a great chat with Sam Ward, who is in charge of building up the roster of cities and companies working with Soofa.

 

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TRANSCRIPT

Sam, thanks for joining me. Can you give me the rundown on what Soofa is all about and what your role there is? 

Sam Ward: Yeah, absolutely. Soofa was founded out of the MIT Media Lab, here in Cambridge, back in 2014. We're a female founded team and our hub is in Cambridge, but the team is distributed across the country these days. We create the Soofa Sign, which is a solar powered digital sign that is found around the country. Right now we're in Boston, Atlanta and Western Massachusetts. 

My role at Soofa, I'm the director of growth. So I manage all things related to bringing on new partners through building our community of city users, as well as our advertisers, and then discovering new ways to introduce people to Soofa and the brand. 

So if you go to the city of, I don't know, Columbus, Ohio (I'm pulling locations out of my ass) but what is the pitch? 

Sam Ward: So for the city, the pitch for a Soofa sign is really a smart city kiosk or signage that helps build their communication with constituents.

It's a real-time platform, a CMS they can use to upload content and link real-time hyper-local content on the digital screens, which we can install with them throughout the city. They're all solar powered, super easy to install. It only actually takes 30 minutes to install a Soofa sign. And then after that we work with them to make sure there's great content on there for the community, whether that's real-time transit, health updates, which have been very relevant this year.

And then also we're able to share interesting pedestrian data insights with the city, so they can start measuring the usage of whatever is near the signs that they install, which has been really valuable. Again, especially this year. 

And how do you do the pedestrian insights? 

Sam Ward: So the pedestrian insights are generated from a sensor, which is placed in all of our signs. And a little bit of fun background about the company. We actually started back in 2014, where we developed a solar powered Charging Bench which also provided those pedestrian insights. So that was something that our founder, Sandra managed to get President Obama to sit on one with her on the White House lawn.

So that really kicked off that product. But the sensor we brought from the Bench to the signs because the city had great use for that and it also serves our advertisers as well as a measurement tool. But basically how it works is that it's able to track WiFi that smartphones admit and then every sign is calibrated, so that gives us a real time measurement of the wifi signals that it is picking up within a radius of the screen. 

So this is anonymized and it's not using a camera or anything? 

Sam Ward: Correct. No camera. It's totally anonymized. So we're very cognizant of the city's needs and the public's needs for privacy around that sort of thing.

So there's a few companies out there like display manufacturers, specialty display companies, and smart cities companies that have totem style displays, full color LCD outdoor rated and everything else that they sell into cities and into media companies to some degree, the distinction with what you guys do is that you're using e-paper, correct?

Sam Ward: That's right. 

And that effectively means you've got a very large Kindle that you're parking out on a sidewalk or a public walkway of some kind? 

Sam Ward: Yeah, that's right. So it's a 42 inch screen. We sometimes jokingly say it's the largest Kindle you'll ever see. Obviously it is able to withstand weather, the outdoors elements and the solar powered. I think like some of the main differences between Soofa and those other products are, yes, we use e-paper and we're solar powered and, we're solar because at the end of the day, our mission of the company is to be smart, social and sustainable. So there's no electricity needed, obviously no need to rip up a sidewalk to install the sign. Like I said, it only takes 30 minutes and four bolts to install. So cities really like that. It makes the unit economics very favorable. It's pretty inexpensive to produce compared to some of those flashy competitors with the bright LCD screens, and the signs can be moved really easily too. So cities love that because if there's construction, it's super easy to just place the Soofa sign somewhere else in the meantime. 

And with the electronic paper, that is what allows us to keep that power consumption much lower than a typical digital screen, but also at the same time, it's a higher resolution. It looks better. There's no glare. So it's really worked out for the product to have that electronic ink screen.

How do you deal with it at night? 

Sam Ward: We do have light bars that are part of the sign. So the screens are illuminated depending on the time of year, about 16 hours per day, and the light bar comes on at sunset. And then the signs go to sleep at night, so between again, depending on the year, but between around 10:00 PM to 5:00 AM, the signs will go to sleep.

Could you do a 24/7 if you needed to with the solar charging that you have? 

Sam Ward: Yeah, I think we could, if we needed to. We'd probably have to do a few backup battery swaps but I don't think it's something we'd want to do, full time, all signs, 24 hours a day with the current solar power and capabilities that we have now. Also with our pedestrian measurement, there's not a lot of people walking by in the very early hours of the morning, so we made the call to let the signs go to sleep at night. 

Yeah. I was mostly curious because if you were doing things like showing transit times, and so on, obviously the buses are still running at midnight. 

Sam Ward: Yeah, that is very true. If there was, for example, a public emergency, we can make special calls for one-offs, if we need to leave the signs running for longer. 

I have this sort of mixed opinion of the whole smart cities display movement, because I've seen a number of media companies produce display totems that are clearly just digital ad posters with some sort of smart city veneer to them that says, “Hey this is smart and this is special and you should have this too”, but those things would not exist were it not for the fact that they're there to sell advertising. 

Is what you do different? 

Sam Ward: Yeah, absolutely and I think that's a really interesting question because we really believe that if you're creating some sort of smart kiosk that is touting itself as innovative for the city, for the constituents, it really should be. And if it is effective in that way, it's going to be a win for everyone, for the city, for the actual people walking by, and also for the advertisers that are on the screen. 

Because if you can create a habit of people, knowing that they can come to that kiosk or in our case, the Soofa signs to find relevant real-time information, transit, weather events, city communication, then they're going to pay more attention to that device as they go about their daily journey and for Soofa, we actually used to have a different screen layout, which maybe was more in that world of, “we have a platform” and most of it was advertising. And we had a lot of long discussions about the product and ultimately changed our screen to have what we call the newsfeed or engagement layout that we currently run, which features a prominent advertisement, but also has a lot of local relevant content on the screen at all times. So it's able to serve everyone's needs while being the best version of itself for the pedestrian. 

Yeah, from what I've seen in some of the images, it feels like a newspaper if you remember those things.

Sam Ward: Yeah, absolutely. The electronic ink is certainly helping there, especially when you see one in person, it really is. Electronic ink is a little bit uncanny cause we're not used to seeing it on that scale. So it's really pretty eye-catching in person and yeah, it does look a lot like a newspaper when it refreshes.

It has a really interesting electronic paper, it has an interesting way that it refreshes the screen. It almost looks like an Etch-a-Sketch or like almost, I don't want to say glitch really, cause it's not a negative thing, but it refreshes in this really interesting way that still creates that movement that's eye-catching while still looking like paper. So it's really interesting in person. 

Yeah. It freaks out for a split second and then it comes back.

Sam Ward: Yup. Exactly. 

I've been intrigued by that. Does it matter to brand advertisers that you're primarily dealing in monochrome? Will they place ads when they know it's only in black and white?

Sam Ward: Yeah we've found that people have a normal amount of, I guess confusion or maybe hesitation that you would have with any sort of unique media placement. It's not a straightforward color bus shelter, or billboard. There's definitely a level of education involved when you're creating a product that's unfamiliar to an advertiser, but that's also a benefit because it's unfamiliar to the pedestrian as well, and in that way it's eye catching and harder to ignore. And then also with the monochrome, we're able to put signs in great locations because as we abide by different city laws that are created to stop distracted driving, right? 

Our signs for pedestrians are pedestrian centric. We don't measure car impressions. We're able to place the signs in better locations because of that. And then also again, with the higher quality screen display that you get with electronic ink a lot of advertisers love that, especially for really crisp, like vector images or photography looks really amazing on the signs. And then finally with the monochrome, the signs are informational. It's almost like native advertising to that neighborhood. If you're gonna advertise on, let's say like the Somerville, Massachusetts Soofa signs, that people are going to have a certain level of authenticity and trust already built in by advertising on the Soofa sign screen in the Soofa sign screen format, cause they're just used to seeing good, interesting local information already in that place. 

So through those, things were able to bring people around on the monochrome, but we also do sell a static platform branding of the sign themselves. So if we have an advertiser, who's like “My brand is green. I really need green.” We can do different products where they can wrap the signs with their brand and then also do digital ads that are maybe more informational at the same time. So you still get that branding punch but with the real time screen content. 

E-Ink, in particular, does have some versions of its product that supports color. Have you gone down that path? 

Sam Ward: Yeah. That's definitely something that we keep an eye on. We work really closely with E-ink, the company itself, which is also a company that was founded out of MIT.

And they've come by, we've seen the color screens. Right now, they are not quite stable enough for outdoor use, at least not in the exact way that we would use them with a Soofa sign. But I do believe that at some point, within the next few years, we'll definitely have a version of the Soofa sign, which has some color capabilities on the screen.

And for managers and for things like the local news feeds and so on, do you provide the software for that and the service to feed that stuff in, or just a CMS platform and then your clients use it from there? 

Sam Ward: We do, we've built our own CMS in-house here, so that's how we run the ads on the screens. That's how we are able to deliver the advertisements on a CPM basis first off for the advertisers. We're able to actually deliver based on how many people are walking by and pace towards a goal throughout the end of the month, which our advertisers love. And then in terms of our city clients, we build custom APIs depending on what they want on their screens. 

Obviously we can connect with the big companies, to show what's local, what's happening. We pull from, I think we use Google news as our API and we pull relevant news content that has the name of that neighborhood in the titles of the articles. So different things like that, depending on what we want to show in that particular neighborhood where we always try to make the content on the sign as relevant as possible for where it's showing up. 

Can you describe a good representative deployment that you have out there with a city?

Sam Ward: Yeah, I think one of my favorites, and I think one of the most impactful deployments is the one that we did recently was in the city of Revere this past summer and their main reason for wanting to bring Soofa signs to their community was for communications around COVID and also bilingual communications, which is really important.

So for them, when we launched the sign. We launched and then I think I saw content coming in from them this morning. They're really good about keeping it up to date. But they launched and had a pretty big pool of content regarding health updates testing in all different types of languages which was great, and then that was paired with real time transit data since we were putting the signs around some highly trafficked transit locations. 

Also we've been running polls which have been very great for engaging the community in a way that's really simple for pedestrians to engage with their signs, which is why you can ask a poll question. Sometimes we work with the city to choose something that they're curious about, like what would you like to see brought to Revere, for example and then people can actually text in their answers to that poll question. So that's when all the pieces of the screen are working in harmony like that's when you get a really great experience for everyone, for the city, for the pedestrian, and also for the advertiser who may want to reach that particular neighborhood.

They're not interactive screens, “directly interactive”, they're interactive because they can then do something else using their phone or whatever, right? 

Sam Ward: That's correct, yes. They are not touchscreen. Although people try to touch them a lot because they're used to the Kindle. 

Yeah. I guess virtually every screen you see out there, you now assume you can touch it and do something with it and it's not always the case. 

Sam Ward: Yeah. We've always had interactivity. It’s how you can be on your phone and interact with the polling questions. We have this texting interactivity, which has been really successful for getting more pedestrians engaged, but we also have a self service platform called Soofa Talk, which is mostly used for local businesses who want to post Soofa signs in their community and we have self-service plans. They can pay for a monthly plan and then post the signs, but community members and community groups can also sign up and post the Soofa signs in their neighborhood for free, so we've always had that functionality to involve the community more.

If they're open and want to create content. I think it's good to have both options, which is, if you just want to engage with the sign, you can quickly text and answer into the poll. You don't need to sign up for anything, but if you want to have a longer-term engagement, maybe you have a community group that throws free local events, you can sign up for Soofa Talk and actually post to the signs yourself as well. 

Do you find when you're talking to different municipal governments, that you have more success with those who are motivated to find new ways to disseminate community information versus those municipal governments who are motivated by finding incremental advertising revenue through media concessions?

Sam Ward: Yeah, that's a good question. We definitely have found the most success with governments that are looking for a communications device or that want to use the sign for wayfinding because they can brand the vinyl on the sign as well. So that has been a big value add for them, but I would say the rev share isn't totally off the table though. That's definitely something that people care about and is part of the process of selling signs into a city because we do rev shares with our city partners as well. 

But I think in order of importance, it really is the communications piece that comes before that with a Soofa instead of your traditional out of home platform.

And if it's a smart city kiosk kind of display, like the ones that are on the streets of New York. I'm blanking on the name of the company, but those things are expensive and then you've got all the infrastructure costs too, as you said earlier to trench and get power out to wherever the display is going to be and do all those other things.

 

How do costs compare between the two? 

 

Sam Ward: We are significantly less expensive for cities to install and start using their Soofa signs. That was a big part of developing the product itself. That was always a really big consideration in building something that is flexible and movable, solar power, and easy to install.

I don't have the exact number on hand, but compared to some of our competitors, we are 1/10th of the cost of that piece of technology. 

And do you have customers who go down your path primarily on a cost basis and they see what they're doing as making a reasonable compromise, or do they look at what they want to do and realize, “Hey, e-paper, monochrome doesn't really matter. It does the job that we want it to do.” 

Sam Ward: It's more of the latter. I think cost is always a consideration, but I think a lot of our city clients, they're using Soofa as a completely different tool. It's not really an out-of-home platform for them. That's a nice value add, like “Oh, local businesses can advertise here. Regional businesses will get a rev share.” But at the end of the day, they're trying to buy a communications platform, a way-finding tool, a pedestrian data tool. It hits all those marks for them, and then at the end of the day, you'll also get a rev share. So that's nice too. 

When you sign up with Soofa, are you getting the software and support and everything else in like a one-time buy or do you buy the hardware and then you pay a monthly fee to have it supported? 

 

Sam Ward: So for cities, we have different types of ways of working depending on what the needs of the city are. I'd say the most traditional is co-investing in a sign, paying some part of the upfront cost but then using the rev share to either pay off the rest of the sign, or maybe, we have different situations with different cities. 

In some cases, the signs we actually install without costs if it's in an area where we know there's going to be a lot of advertising interests, we can make the argument with the rev share, we'll pay for the sign itself. Or sometimes we enter into neighborhoods with a sponsor who is wrapping the signs in their brand, really cares about that neighborhood and is sponsoring the signs to bring them there so that the city doesn't have to pay any fees at all.

And then support and maintenance is ongoing for the city again, different plans, but most of the time that is at no cost to the city itself. 

Okay, so you're flexible and adapt according to the opportunity and the circumstances. 

Sam Ward: Yeah, it really depends on where the city is, what the advertising and revenue opportunity is, but we all figure out what works for every city. We always want to help people bring Soofa signs to their communities in any way that we can. So it's definitely case by case.

Do you find you're getting inbound or do you have to go out and evangelize to generate interest in the Soofa? 

Sam Ward: I think a little bit of both. For cities, our branding is really strong from those bench days. The team definitely did a lot of events early on and also got a lot of press back in 2014-2015, when we launched the bench product and I'm a big proponent of top of funnel and brand advertising, obviously, and that's worked really well for us, building that brand early on. So we see a lot of inbound interest from cities. We also have benches all over the world, so people see the benches and get curious about what Soofa is and discover the signs themselves.

But we also have a city growth team who are constantly reaching out to new cities who we think would be a great fit or could see a benefit from any of the different values that the signs bring. So that's on the city side. 

With new advertisers, I'd say it's definitely a lot more outbound as we try to grow the Soofa brand just in the out of home space. We definitely came into the market more as a smart city tool. We're very familiar with that side of things. But now we're really working hard to grow our brand in the out of home space and make more connections there too. 

 

I assume that there's a lot of value in expanding the time to develop really great creative that looks good in black and white, because you could imagine all kinds of creative that somebody just tries to save a file as black and white and it looks like crap versus I always think of this company in Slovenia called Visionect. It’s a great little company, but they're fabulous at designing for that medium, like th all their little displays look great in black and white. 

 

Sam Ward: Yeah, there's definitely a technique to it, and we provide design services to all of our clients as part of our campaigns, because that's great to have, and I think it makes the campaigns better. I think it makes the creative look better.

 

A lot of the time it's as simple as keeping the messaging straightforward. I always say to think about the context and keep it authentic for who you're trying to reach, which neighborhoods you're in. If you can like calling out the actual neighborhood that you're in or the city that you're in making the message relevant, but then also using high contrast, vector images, very simple language, keeping things big and bold. So your typical, out of home best practices just with that extra element of let's make sure this looks amazing in black and white as well. 

 

We've talked a lot about cities, but do you sell into other verticals like campus and workplace?

Sam Ward:  We focused mainly on cities and we also work with private commercial real estate as well. So for example, for anyone who's familiar with the Boston area, we work very closely with WS Development who developed the Seaport area in Boston. So we have different relationships but mainly across cities and then private landowners.

I know we've had conversations with colleges in the past but that hasn't been a main focus of the product, at least not up to date. 

Okay. So for something like the Seaport development, you've got a property developer owner who wants to have signs that kind of guide people, provide wayfinding, provide information on what's going on in this development?

Sam Ward: Yeah, absolutely. It's a huge tenant support for them. So, the wayfinding is more about, “Oh, here's a directory of all of these amazing stores that are in the area” and these real estate areas that are developing across cities, they're really trying to build their own brand, like building the brand of the Seaport in Boston, like they have their own events, they're always trying to get more people to the area to support their tenants. So Soofa signs work really well in that capacity. 

Do you have a handle on the content that really seems to hit with people? 

Sam Ward: I always say when I'm onboarding a new advertiser, I say to keep things contextual, authentic and relatable really for the people that are walking by. Our signs are pedestrian centric, they are part of the fabric of the neighborhood, we call them the neighborhood News feeds, so that's always the best practice for advertisers with Soofa signs. 

And we know this because obviously we have measurement capabilities with different campaigns, whether people have texts and calls to action, QR codes, or if we're doing something more advanced, like a study using mobile data and some other partners.

And then we also do a lot of field testing for our clients. We'll actually send someone from our team out into the neighborhood to interview passers-by about what they think about an ad and people love things that are contextual to that neighborhood, that makes sense for them, that have useful relevant information. So it's really all about that neighborhood authenticity, at least with Soofa sign content, but I think you'd get pretty similar feedback on any sort of out-of-home platform. People want to see stuff that's relevant to them. 

Yeah, and just shoveling News feeds that you can see in a thousand other places, it doesn't make a lot of sense but being hyper-local does. 

Sam Ward: Exactly. We had someone who was doing some brand work with us and he said something that stuck out to me and he was like with Soofa signs, they don't want to see The New York times, they want to see like the Summerville Daily or whatever the Gazette is of that particular small neighborhood, that's really what they're there for.

So what might we see out of the Soofa in 2021? 

Sam Ward: We have a lot of aggressive plans for expansion with our city growth team. We're always talking to a number of new cities across the country.

We have a pretty heavy focus on the east coast right now, but we also have a rep working in California and I believe as of this morning, we have a new rep who's going to be working out of Austin, Texas, which is really exciting. So really trying to expand the network across the country which will be amazing, both from a city perspective, really building up the community. It'll allow us to develop new products with all of these new cities who have Soofa signs in their neighborhoods, and then also for our advertisers we've traditionally worked with. A lot of regional brands or national brands that have a very hyper-local campaign or focus in one of our current networks. But once we're national, it will enable us to really work with more national brands who want to speak in a hyper-local way, but have a national media strategy.

So that'll be pretty exciting as well. 

All right, Sam, thank you so much for spending some time with me. 

Sam Ward: Yeah, thanks so much. This was a lot of fun.

 

Jackie Walker, Publicis Sapient

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED - DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

There is a long history of very large companies of all descriptions finding their way into the digital signage industry, but they have tended to come in with fanfare and then exit quietly out a side door.

Often, the digital signage effort is a bit of a skunkworks that doesn't have a lot of energy behind it within giant companies that do a 1,000 other things.

That does not appear to be the case with Publicis Sapient, a giant interactive agency that has offices all over the world, 20,000 staffers, and a product and service called Premise, that does digital signage among a bunch of things.

The company has been working on it for 10 years, and has some very big, but unnamed clients using a platform that is all about data and speaks directly to the concept of omnichannel and the goal of producing content once and publishing to many devices and platforms.

Jackie Walker has been working on Premise since it was just a notion, and is what they call the capability lead. We had a great chat about the roots of Premise, how the team works with clients, and the present and future of signage, which is all about APIs, data and the end of walled software gardens.

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TRANSCRIPT

Hi, Jackie, we haven't met in person, but it's great to meet you virtually. I have certainly known about Publicis for many years at Sapient and when you were dabbling or when the company was dabbling in signage through Sapient Nitro. So I was intrigued recently when I saw a press release about Sapient and a platform called Premise, and I wanted to find out all about it, and you're the product manager (product lead) on it? 

Jackie Walker: That's right. I have been working on it for the last 11 years, so I am very close to the solution. 

This is your baby. 

Jackie Walker: This is my firstborn, yep. 

Is it temperamental? 

Jackie Walker: Yes. I have had two human babies since, but this is the one. 

Okay, let's go to the very basics of it. What is it? 

Jackie Walker: Yeah. So let me tell you who we are first, for those of your listeners who don't really know who we are. The Publicis group is, of course, one of the largest media holding companies in the world, with about 80,000 employees. A few years ago, Sapient, which was an independent company, was acquired by Publicis.

So now we are Publicis Sapient. We're about 20,000 employees, in 53 offices worldwide and in terms of our capabilities, we’re basically the digital transformation hub of Publicis group. So we think about strategy, consulting, customer experience, and then agile engineering, and so about half of our people are really technologists and engineers. And we think about how we digitally enable our clients in terms of both, the way that they work and also the way that they serve their customers. So pretty broad scope. 

I've been with the company for over 10 years. This was my first project. It wasn't called a Premise when I joined, and really what we were trying to do was, back then, that was when everybody was just learning how to spell omnichannel and put it on a PowerPoint slide, and really my first project was, we called it the Super Secret Airport Project and back then the idea was to take the airport space (because it is a slightly underserved market) and really think about how we fleshed out an omnichannel solution. So we built this end to end platform that was all about content management, real-time data, airport flight data, and built the solution that would enable our clients to drive their websites, their mobile applications, and then later digital signage from one common platform.

So that was really the frame. 

Was this driven by a client ask or was this like a hole in the market that you guys thought you could fill? 

Jackie Walker: I think it was a “hole in the market”/”wouldn't it be cool if”, right? So there was a group of people in Boston, the spouse of one of our team members who worked for SH&E, an airport consultancy, and they were talking about the ways that airports really struggled to communicate consistently with their customers across channels, right? Back then it was not uncommon that an airport would be operating 3-5 content management systems for each of their individual platforms, and so the idea was that we should consolidate this, right? We have a unique point of view, we have a skillset to do all of this, website development, app development, content management, system development from an enterprise lens. Let's see where this goes. And then we started signing up airports to actually deliver some of those capabilities.

Now, is it in the DNA of the company to build your own platforms as opposed to partnering? Because 10 years ago, it's not like somebody was wandering around the streets saying, “Please, God, somebody come up with a digital signage CMS.” There were all too many of them. 

Jackie Walker: Yeah, that's very true. So we partner a lot and typically, even from the beginning, when we started this program, we were using SDL Tridion, which was a pretty well-established, web, and mobile CMS at that time. That was really the content foundation of what we were building.

We didn't want to build a “CMS” to use that kind of terminology, because most of our clients if you think about it, are operating enterprise CMS solutions, and so part of the “what if?” was, this novel idea that a customer could change their content in one place and that content change would immediately publish on their website, their mobile app, their digital signage, which is a little bit of a different frame of the problem, I think. 

Yeah. Certainly, you know you're joking about omnichannel and learning how to spell it, the whole premise has been around for a very long time, but I've noticed in the last two or three years, it's really come to fruition and you seem to get a lot of pushback from larger companies, potential clients essentially say, “I don't want to have 4-5 different platforms to do my messaging, I want to do it off of one thing and it should go everywhere. I don't want to have this walled garden for digital signage and another walled garden for mobile, communications, and so on.”

Was that the thinking? 

Jackie Walker: A hundred percent, and again, back then, like omnichannel, was a word on a PowerPoint, right? We had these cute diagrams that contained phrases like “all your enterprise services and you're going to have this API layer”, and everybody had to learn how to spell, right? And then all of a sudden magically all these consumer channels are just consuming data consistently through these APIs and it's all gonna work. That was really, I think the North star of that vision, but it's taken a little while for clients to actually get to that level of sophistication and that's been one of the things we've been watching closely is that progression where this dream of having these fully API enabled enterprises is now getting to a point where that is the expectation, right? 

Clients have all their infrastructure in the cloud, they're using common systems. They're starting to do consolidation across content, and now they're starting to do consolidation of data. And to me, that's the other key piece of the puzzle, it’s not just thinking about the content and the customer experience and the POS or the product inventory systems or their content management system, but then also thinking about how their customers interact with all of that data, all of that experience, and making sure that data is able to be used consistently across channels. So no content silos, no data silos. 

And when you started down this path 10 years ago, shared data was not easy. You could have these conversations, but they would say, integrating with our data set and all that is a quarter-million-dollar job, or it's just not possible, or you can't see it where it's not secure or we're worried about it being secure and on, there were all these problems. Now, data's pretty easy to get out, right?

Jackie Walker: That's right, yeah. It's definitely gotten much easier and just the flexibility has improved greatly as well. I think clients are used to it as well. You know, you're going to have an interface that you're exposing and then all of your channels that you're deploying are pulling from that content.

So I think, yeah, there's been a huge transformation there, which has been a big enabler. 

Do you have to, when you're working with clients, explain that integrating data is more than just being able to pull a number from one directory or folder or whatever it may be and make it show up on a screen and make it show up on another device, that there's more to it than that? 

Jackie Walker: Yeah. So I think that's the thing that's really interesting about digital signage, and I had the benefit of building websites and building mobile apps before we started on digital signage, so I had that digital experience frame of reference, right? This is how it works, this is how you're going to build a web page that's going to be pulling content from 10 or 11 different data sources, stitching that together and you understand how that works. And then you look at digital signage and it's a little bit of a novel problem, right? Because there are some differences with digital signage. Like the analogy I use is, if you build a mobile app, you're going to build one piece of software, you're going to deploy it on a cloud infrastructure, back then it was a physical infrastructure. You deploy it on infrastructure, your problem as the enterprise, like the client-side is worrying that you're hopefully releasing defect-free software and your infrastructure, your cloud is stable, right? You don't have to worry about Tom, Dick and Harry's mobile phone. Do they have connectivity? Is their phone charged? Like all this stuff, right? That's not your problem and the customer understands that. 

With digital signage, every little digital sign you put out in the world is your baby and now you're responsible for making sure that it has power, it has the internet, it has content, no matter what happens, it has content, and so there was a little bit of reframing that we had to overcome to be able to make sure that we were solving that problem comprehensively. And those differences really ended up being what guided the product development for premise and the digital signage solution was this idea that we were thinking about bridging that gap between an API enabled customer ecosystem and deployed digital signage at scale. So we were trying to fill that hole between the two. 

Yeah, there's been any number of very large companies that have decided, we're going to write a digital signage module or we're going to branch into this. And they get a basic platform working where files are playing one after another, maybe not even with a black gap in between them or whatever, and they're rubbing their hands together and saying, “Hey, we've done it!” 

There are a lot of problems that can develop, as you've said, and I suspect you guys discovered over time that once you have all these deployed devices in all kinds of different environments, all kinds of hell can break loose. 

Jackie Walker: Yeah, absolutely and I think that's an important differentiation too. I think there are so many signage solutions that were born out of looping media, right? And so the conversation is how do I build the best playlist? And there might be interruptions, there might be things that go into that but by and large, you're thinking about full-screen video, how many video segments of the screen can I have, maybe I'll have an RSS ticker, like you're thinking about slicing and dicing the screen, but your primary content is video content.

And I think for us, we've always been approaching this thinking about modularized data-driven content. So even if you think about what we are doing in the airports, we weren't just thinking about a video playlist, we were thinking about what's the list of restaurants that's going to show up. What's the list of restaurants that are going to show up that might be different if I know that there's a flight delay next to that gate, and so all of that is query-based data. 

Back in the day, our first clients were using Flex for the interface. Obviously now everything is HTML5, but it's all modularized content and so I think it's a different way of looking at the content problem as well. Are you thinking about big  full-screen content? Which again, then you're thinking about how you manage a playlist and make sure that your large video files get moved down to the device without getting corrupted, all that kind of stuff.

Whereas if you're thinking about this HTML5 content, it's just a little bit of a different frame of reference in terms of what you have to be able to do, the different pieces that come together to enable that, and then the analytics as well, right? Like how are you getting a level of analytics that is again, akin to what customers are used to from web and mobile channels. 

So tell me what Premise is, and if I'm a cranky CMO or CEO in a meeting with your team, and I say, “why do I need this versus brand X digital signage CMS that I'm already using?”  

Jackie Walker: Yeah, I've had many experiences where I've worked with customers who have already gone through a digital signage selection process, they've already picked their partner. And they say, “Okay, we are working with X platform and now we want to deliver an experience on top of that platform, what can we do?” And the problem is typically that they didn't ask the right questions about the software capabilities when they were doing the platform selection and then when it comes to the time to actually think about the experience, now they're designing backward from the platform capabilities, as opposed to designing forward from the customer experience, which is the position you always want to be in. So I think when I think about what Premise and how it's different, it's really thinking about in-venue experience enablement. 

We say in-venue because we might mean a QSR, we might mean a retail store, we might mean a hotel. So any physical place, we're really focusing on the real-time analytics and AB testing capabilities, and we're focusing on integrations and that is really at the forefront. So if I'm working with a QSR, the starting point is going to be the point of sale, it's going to be their product database, it's going to be their product photography. We're going to want to know as much as possible about their data models and so that we are thinking about it from what can we reuse, what do we tack onto, what are the places where we can create leverage points from what they already have, and then we're filling in the gaps, to be able to support the additional needs for digital signage that are maybe slightly different than what their needs are for web or mobile. 

I might not have big video assets for the web, or certainly for mobile. I might want to use different types of product photography, I might need some different ways of thinking about that. So that's really the approach for us and I think a lot of our clients understand it because they've dabbled and what they've seen with other solutions is that they're not able to get the level of integration that they're expecting.

So they'll go through the initial conversations, the technical design and think we're going to integrate with our CMS. And I think, when you say those words, they can mean different things to the vendor and the client, right? The vendor might mean I'm going to pull a data dump every seven days and the client thinks, if it's integrated to my CMS, I'm going to make a change in my CMS and it's going to publish, and so I think a lot of clients are now starting to get to that level of sophistication and understanding where they're realizing that there is a little bit of a gap between what the current capabilities are in the market and what they want to deliver.

I had a conversation with someone in the hospitality business that manages a bunch of properties. They do a lot of merchandising of their onsite restaurants, their shows, all that. You can think like a Vegas casino type, that frame of mind, so they have all kinds of stuff that they're trying to sell customers and all of it is manual. So if they need to change the priority of a piece of content, there's a huge manual effort to go in and update their playlist on all of their screens. So we talked with them about what would it look like to build an AI engine on top of that? 

It could look at occupancy in restaurants. It could look at ticket sales, yield projected versus what they've actually sold. So it could prioritize what are the things that I merchandise to my customers that are meaningful. I don't want to merchandise a restaurant that's sold out, that doesn't help me, it doesn't help the customer. 

And what we found is that the level of metadata to be able to fuel an AI engine to be able to start to do some of that, even on a rules basis, just didn't exist in the digital signage solution they were using. Even at that level, when you start to want to deploy AI and start to get more sophisticated about the ways that you're deciding what content goes on the screens, I think the current vendor set, the current solution set in digital signage is somewhat lacking and that's really why we're in the business and we're pursuing it so aggressively is that we keep hearing more and more of our clients talk about this unmet need.

And is that a function in a lot of cases of them being in there refresh cycle where they're there four years in with a particular vendor realizing they like the notion of this, they like the outcomes of screens and so on, but they need to do more, and they're now realizing their initial platform that they went with just doesn't cut the mustard, so to speak? 

Jackie Walker: Yeah, it's a mix of both, some of our clients are in refresh cycles, some of our clients have just done pilots and they're realizing that maybe what they thought they were going to get out of it isn't really coming to fruition and then some of our clients are starting to look at this for the first time, right? They're recognizing, especially QSRs at the drive-thrus, that's a huge area of focus for us right now, because of COVID obviously you look at the market in the US, like 80% of QSR still have paper at the drive-thru. Now 90% of their business is going through the drive-thru. So there's this huge gap between the capabilities that they're able to deliver.

How are they going to meet customer expectations and the solutions that they have available? And we're really saying if you're going to do it for the first time, don't think about what you want to do tomorrow, because maybe you just want a JPEG of your menu tomorrow, but once you make that huge CapEx investment, especially outdoors, be smart about what you're going to do there because in the next five or seven years, you're going to be wanting to do a lot more, probably. You're co-investing in data initiatives, in loyalty programs, how do you connect the dots? That's always my big call to clients, is to think about what's the customer experience roadmap? And being a little bit aggressive so that you're not making a mistake on the hardware you're deploying, or even if you're buying an all-in-one solution that you're working with a partner that's not going to be able to grow with you.

This sounds much more like an engagement, a project, as opposed to “All right, I'll buy my software. I'll use Publicis Sapient’s Premise, and you know, Bob's your uncle, that's it. You may get some support.” 

It sounds like you guys want to be in the weeds with the client, from the ideation stage, all the way through to execution, right?

Jackie Walker: Yeah, you're hitting the nail on the head. So the play for us is not the digital signage licenses, so to speak. That's not the piece that we're interested in. It's not a set it and forget it solution. I think there's a well-established part of the market that does that really well, like grab it and go.

What we're really trying to do is work with customers who are looking for more involved customer experiences that are really trying to use this channel to make an impact on their business, that recognizes the value of analytics and AB testing, and that are thinking about how do they pave the path to driving differentiated customer experiences over time? And so there's a little bit of consulting, there are a few creative services, there's a ton of technology, all that kind of comes together when we're engaging with a client. 

I'm going to assume that your preferred client or the clients that you end up getting are those who have a history with agency services and work already, because they know how you guys roll and how things happen versus somebody who maybe started out with brand X digital signage CMS and has never really worked with an agency other than maybe producing some creative for them and all of a sudden there's a full-tilt engagement, which is, you still got a few zeros attached to it and there's a lot more involved.

Jackie Walker: Yeah, I think that's right, and it could be either, It could either be the marketing services side or it could be the systems integration side. So we definitely have had a lot of success in using the solution with existing clients where we already have a technology footprint with them and then it becomes about how do you leverage what you're doing in one part of the business on this additional channel? I think that's a huge part of the value proposition. 

Yeah, and certainly a macro trend within digital signage is this idea of one throat to choke or turnkey solutions, I don't want four vendors, all pointing fingers at each other when there's an issue. 

Jackie Walker: Yeah, absolutely, and I think that can be a little bit of a double-edged sword, right? Sometimes I think about what happens, and I've seen this with a number of clients where they treat digital signage as a siloed point solution.

“I'm going to buy digital signage,” and even the terminology, like a digital menu board is a great example, it sounds like you're buying a physical thing. 

“I'm Bill, I'm buying an object.” 

Honestly, that's a lot of how it's sold by a lot of companies, which I think is goofy, but nonetheless, they saw it as SKU, as a thing.

Jackie Walker: Yep, absolutely, and I think what is becoming accepted is this idea that digital signage is a digital channel. It is like your website. It is like your mobile app. It is a digital touchpoint for a customer, and I think we, as an industry, haven't done enough to push the capabilities and the thinking around the types of experiences that clients can deliver. It's been allowed to function as this kind of siloed thing on the side. So you have, even in an organization, the people who are buying digital signage are often not the same organization that's managing the rest of their digital customer channels, which is also a little bit mind-boggling sometimes.

So that's another piece that I always try to encourage customers to think about. This is not a, not just a marketing problem, it's not just an IT problem, and it's certainly not just a store-ops problem. It's actually an intersection of all three and you need to make sure that you're bringing all three of those organizations along for the ride, to make sure that you're going to end up with a solution that actually works and delivers value to the business.

Yeah, years ago I had a very large multinational brand consulting client that was putting signage solutions into their stores and the department I was working with was relationship marketing and they referred to themselves as the land of misfit toys. 

It was just like skunkworks, they caught all the stuff that nobody else wanted to do. It makes me curious because I've seen this with other very large companies where they have created digital signage business units or effort, and it's functioned largely as a skunkworks and you can tell it's a skunkworks, and sometimes the people who are running it are people who put them there to get them the hell out of important meetings or whatever.

(Laughter)

I’m not saying that in the slightest with what you're doing.

Jackie Walker: I’m glad I gave you that impression. 

Not in the slightest. You know your stuff, you've been doing this a long time, so in the larger context of Publicis Sapient, how much of an effort and how much visibility does this have in terms of the overall company? I know it's hard to give a percentage, but... 

Jackie Walker: That's a great question. I think there was a period where it was a little bit of a side business, so to speak. We were doing things like this airport managed services platform for wayfinding. We had a bunch of different clients. It ended up extending to like retail casinos, we had a sports stadium that was using our wayfinding platform, but it was a little bit of this thing that was allowed to continue to progress, and then, I think what has happened in the last couple of years, as we've shifted our focus to digital business transformation, and I actually remember really well a conversation I had with my boss, like when we started internal communications around that change and frame. 

I said, I'm really excited about what this will mean for the work that we're doing with the Premise because it's so tightly aligned to our strategy as a business, and he looked at me and I said, if you think about it, so many of our clients do so much of their business through their physical footprint when you think about retail, when you think about QSR, it's insane for us to not have an offering that directly addresses the opportunity, to drive business impact in their physical venues, right? And the reality is, if you look at the solutions that are available, it's not a place where we're going to be able to readily partner with existing companies, existing CMS, digital signage solutions, to be able to deliver those types of outcomes. So for us, we actually think about it as the market is moving in this direction.

We had a ten-year plus headstart, I think. A lot of people in the industry will say that the future of digital signage is probably going to be driven by software, and I think we're in a really great position to springboard that for ourselves and realize outcomes for our clients, in an accelerated manner because of this asset with Premise.

Yeah, there are not many good things to say about COVID, but it has forced an accelerated digital transformation plans of a whole bunch of companies, retail, QSR, and beyond, from something that we're going to do in three to five years to something they had to do in the next three to five months to survive, and I gather you've benefited from that. 

Jackie Walker: Definitely. I think it's just been this, at Publicis Sapient level, it's really validated our strategy. I am a little bit of a Kool-Aid drinker, like I really believe in the work that we do, that's why I've stuck around so long personally.

And that's also why I haven't made the choice to go to a more traditional digital signage company. I think that the unique perspective that we bring to the table because of the scope of work that we do for our customers every day, the focus on omnichannel, the focus on customer data, the focus on AI, the focus on marketing efficacy and performance marketing, we just have a completely different perspective and a completely different group of people and experts that we can bring into engagements to deliver outcomes that would be just absolutely impossible otherwise. 

Now the last time I went to the National Retail Federation Show, there must have been at least 20 booths, maybe a lot more companies, all showing retail analytics, shopper analytics, computer vision-based stuff, sensor-based stuff. 

You're talking to a lot of retailers, you're talking to a lot of large corporations. Do they see this as being as important as the vendors seem to think it is?

Jackie Walker: That's a great question. I personally get frustrated with all these point solutions because I think they do end up being just that. 

It's like queue management, so we're going to instrument the environment, we're going to understand the queues and then that's going to help us optimize customer service, or we're going to now measure everyone's temperature when they come in and that kind of theater around it is going to make people feel safer and better, and so there are all these little solutions that pop up that isn’t well integrated. It doesn't all come together particularly well, right? Beacons, one of my favorite examples, we talk so much about Beacons and it's like the mobile beacon and what are we going to do? And the push notifications, and now there's a ton of movement around geo-fencing and QSRs too, you know, to hook into kitchen operations, but they're really the same technologies that could be, if done right, enabling a ton of different types of capabilities of customer interactions, of different ways of driving value for the business on the customer, but instead, they're thought about as these little things, dot one kind of additions, that doesn't particularly connect. 

So I think that's a hard pill to swallow. They each has their own, it's a different SaaS model. You have a SaaS subscription for this, you have a SaaS subscription for that, so I think that's a big challenge. So that's something I try to think about when I'm working with customers, what are the existing initiatives they have? What are the existing capabilities they have and how do you stitch them together in meaningful ways so that you're maximizing their current investment, but also thinking about how you connect the dots moving forward. 

I think QSR has some great opportunities ahead of it, with regard to different service methods. So now they're pushing so many customers to mobile order and pay, which is fantastic, but they're going through the drive-through still, like how do you deal with these customers? Because if you're showing them the same menu board that you're showing somebody who's. trying to order, you just wasted an impression, so to speak, with that customer, right? You could have told them something new and different. You might have totally different messaging for them because you know them, or even if you don't know them, they already ordered, right? Or if it’s a delivery driver, you know that it's a delivery driver. You could know that. So how do you start to think about the intersections of these different service models and different technologies to create better customer experiences? 

You mentioned customers. Are there any customers you're actually allowed to reference and say, yeah, we work with these guys? 

Jackie Walker: Not today, Dave, you know how that goes. (Laughter)

Oh yeah, the big agencies and big clients, you don't mess with those accounts and upset them in any way, but we can think of Fortune 100, Fortune 500 kinds of companies? 

Jackie Walker: That's really the target group and the group that we work with the most. Yes, absolutely.

All right. this was terrific. We could have chatted for a lot longer. It was very nice to virtually meet you and hopefully, we meet each other in person someday. 

Jackie Walker: Absolutely, when there’s offices again, right? (Laughter) 

All right. I really appreciate you giving me some of your time. 

Jackie Walker: Absolutely. Thanks so much, Dave, take care.

AVIXA Digital Signage Power Hour - Roundtable - Commercial Real Estate

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED - DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

I have been working with both AVIXA and invidis for most of the year on a series of monthly roundtables, called Digital Signage Power Hours.

They’ve all been great, but the one we did recently on experiential media in real estate was particularly good … because of the people who kindly provided their time.

We had David Niles, who created and still works on the Comcast Experience, one of the earliest and still one of the best projects out there involving LED in real estate.  

We also had Amahl Hazelton, one of the big thinkers at the famed experiential creative agency Moment Factory. Cybelle Jones, CEO of SEGD, was on, as was Jeremy Koleib, whose Consumer Experience Group works with property companies on big LED projects. And we had Emily Webster, the Senior VP of Creative at New York’s ESI Design, which is behind some of the best experiential real estate you’ll see in real estate.

We could have chatted for hours, but we had 50 minutes. Listen, learn and hopefully enjoy.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

 

Kym Frank, Geopath

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED - DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

Measurement in the out of home advertising industry used to be as low tech as people with clickers, parked on roadsides and busily counting the cars going by.

That would give media companies a really basic sense of how many eyeballs MIGHT see a billboard in a given time period.

The out of home industry has long since matured, and a lot of it is now digital ... and much more varied than billboards and transit shelter posters. Measurement has also matured in a big way, and has grown super-sophisticated.

Out of home media is very much a for-profit business, but a key player on the tech measurement side is actually a non-profit ... supported by hundreds of companies in the ecosystem.

Geopath is populated by data scientists and site auditors who do audience location measurement based on a pile of different data sources - the biggest one being aggregated, anonymous data from smartphones.

Geopath's tools, which are used by media owners and brands, help build a current view on the mobility, behaviour and attributes of out of home audiences.

A lot of this stuff is way the hell over my head, but thankfully Geopath's President Kym Frank is very good, and patient, at explaining things to knuckleheads like me.

TRANSCRIPT

So, Kym, for those people who don't know much about Geopath, can you explain what it is and how does it work? 

Kym Frank: Sure. So Geopath is a really unique organization. We've been around since the 1930s, we were formed as a joint initiative between the OAAA, which is the Industry Association for out-of-home advertising, the ANA, which is the Association of National Advertisers and the 4A's, which is the Association for Agencies.

So we have existed since the 1930s with the sole objective of measuring out-of-home, digital out-of-home, and all its formats advertising. We're a nonprofit and we are still to this day, governed collectively by agencies, advertisers, and the media owners themselves. 

So being a nonprofit, I assume you're funded by your members.

Kym Frank: We are. So each of our members pays dues to our organization that supports the development of our measurement system and the maintenance of our measurement system itself. So it's a really great setup, because everybody just pays a fraction of the cost to develop these metrics and then they are able to be, universally used by the entire buying community, across all the different formats that we measure. 

So who would be typical members? 

Kym Frank: So we have a lot of out-of-home members from the big operators, like Clear Channel, Lamar and Outfront, all the way down the line to some small members who have three or four billboards, maybe.

We also have agency members, so big holding company agencies down to independent local specialists. And then we also have some advertiser members as well. In fact, our executive committee has representation from Coca-Cola and representation from Constellation brands, which is the brand that owns the Corona brand, and so we have grown quite a bit. In 2015, when I joined, we had 180 member companies and as of today, we're at approximately 390 members. 

Nice. You've doubled it and then some. I'm sure you tell the board about it, right? 

Kym Frank: I do all the time. 

Is there a for-profit competitor, like a company out there that has data that you would pay for and measurement that you would pay for?

Kym Frank: Sure, so we don't say we have competitors. We say we have “friend predators”. 

Geopath provides currency level measurement, and I would say we probably measure 95% of the industry, but there are other kinds of measurements that are out there. People might want to understand how their campaign performed in terms of conversions, so did our mall ads drive people to make a purchase? So there are a lot of other companies out there that are doing that kind of measurement for sure. 

So that’s more on the analytics side, right? 

Kym Frank: Absolutely, so more custom solutions, things along those lines. There's a lot of technology out there that measures things in different ways, like I know you and I have spoken about facial detection technology, and people who are connecting to the individual devices, so there's a lot of different methodologies out there. 

This will seem like a really obvious question, but I'm going to ask it anyways, cause I'm not very bright. Why do media companies need measurement? 

Kym Frank: That is a good question. So advertisers across channels, this is not an out-of-home problem. Advertisers across channels want to understand, what did my campaign deliver or, on the front end, what should I be buying with my advertising dollars? And how much of it should I be buying? So that they can understand the scale of a campaign that they're purchasing, are they reaching the right people? Are they reaching enough people? How many times are those people being reached by my ads? It's really important to advertisers. 

In the old days on, by old, I mean like 10-20 years ago, even that’s recent, a lot of out-of-home was just measured by gross audience counts, right? Like highway traffic or foot traffic meters, that sort of thing? 

Kym Frank: Yeah. So when I joined the organization, the legacy metrics, a lot of that was coming from rubber hoses in the road, like the department of transportation, traffic counts. So nowadays we're able to use things like connected car data and mobile device data, but that was not available.

So yes, they were using manual counts. In fact, if you go way back in time, we used clickers, so people would stand under a billboard with a clicker in their hand and count the number of cars that went by in an hour. 

Yeah. And the same thing in shopping malls, there'd be somebody there with a clipboard just clicking away?

Kym Frank: Yep. 

Amazing. So is good audience measurement something that just validates making immediate investment, or is used to also optimize the investment that you're making, that you've already decided? Like, I'm going to be in this market, I'm going to do these things, but I want to know a hell of a lot more about the audience and then tune the media and tune the campaign so I get more out of it. 

Kym Frank: Absolutely. Optimization is key and it's a lot of what we've been working on since I joined the organization. When I joined, we had the ability to target pretty standard demographics. So I'm interested in reaching women 18 to 34, but since we've updated our measurement system, we now include information across 8,000 different audience types. So you're able to understand which units I should be advertising on. If I want to build a campaign to reach people who are likely to be buying a new car within the next 12 months, it's really changed the way out-of-home is bought more from more as an audience channel than as a patient vehicle.

Now, both are still very important because you want to reach people in the right location, but you also want to make sure you're reaching the right people. 

And where does the data come from? You mentioned geolocation data from mobile phones, but there's a whole mashup of things you use, right?

Kym Frank: We, so we have a data fusion engine is what we call it. We take a number of different kinds of data sets, there's just no silver bullet that does everything, so we combine a number of different data sets for what they are best at. So we are using mobile device data, that's typically data that's captured by apps that people have opted in to have their location tracked on their phones. That's all anonymized and aggregated, so we're not ever following around one unique device or anything along those lines. We get data from connected cars. We have data from Maps, we still do validate against some traffic information and real-time data that's available from other sources.

We're partnered with Claritas, that's survey data for some audience targeting. It's a huge data stack and a lot of modeling that goes on to develop the product that we provide to our members 

Are things like census data also important? 

Kym Frank: Absolutely. In fact, I know that the census has been very troubled, due to COVID. 

And a guy at 1600 Pennsylvania.

Kym Frank: I didn't say that. But yeah, the census has been very challenging, but it's very important, not just for Geopath, but it is something that is utilized across pretty much everyone who does any kind of survey at that population level. So really very important. 

Yeah. I think you've said in the past that the best data that you get, if you had to look at all the different elements, is the mobile data, right?

Kym Frank: Correct. That is the biggest piece of what we built. 

If I have a media network, an out-of-home media network of some kind, and I don't know, let's say I'm in hospital waiting rooms or whatever, if I don't have some degree of measurement, if I've not part of Geopath, If I don't have that kind of data available, will a media planner even look at my network? 

Kym Frank: I think so. I mean, it certainly helps to have data attached to it and it has to be data that the buyer feels comfortable with, but there are certainly strategies that would involve using a network that maybe does not have a level of currency.

The fact that when you're talking about a network along those lines, while they may not have impression and data or reach and frequency data, usually everyone has some kind of first party data. You may know if you're a hospital network, how many patients you have, you may know if you're at a gas station, how many receipts are generated.

So there's always some kind of data available, but certainly currency data and impressions data or reach and frequency data, that's what a buyer's really looking for. 

Yeah. You've mentioned currency data a few times now. Could you explain what that is? Cause I'll be honest, I'm not totally certain what you mean by that.

Kym Frank: So when we say we measure currency, it's really because those are the impressions that are being bought and sold for the channel. Every channel has its own kind of currency. So a lot of it's measured by Nielsen, which you may be familiar with here in the United States measures television, and so then we provide that currency for out-of-home.

And is there a challenge with there being different currencies and having some sort of a common currency? 

Kym Frank: And that's exactly why Geopath was created, it was to provide a common currency across all of the different formats of out-of-home. So prior to the generation of this organization, every different operator had their own sets of numbers and it was impossible for a buyer to put them together. Because we have built such a large database of all of these different operators' inventory, it makes it really much easier for a buyer to go in and say, okay, I bought inventory across 30 different operators, but I know what it delivered collectively because the currency is very common and that's really come a long way, because as we've recently announced, we launched in-venue measurement. So prior to this past year, Geopath was not measuring things like airports and malls and bars and restaurants, but we were able to stand that up and we look forward to our buyers really being able to buy a package of roadside inventory and combine the data with in-malls or in-bars or in-airports and get a comprehensive number.

Yeah. Those are two very different dynamics when you're talking about highway billboards or spectaculars in big cities and then talking about screens and bars and all that, like that must've been quite an exercise to figure out how you equate all these different kinds of mediums in one platform.

Kym Frank: Right and every network is very different, yeah. We have partners who have jukeboxes in bars and then we have partners who have very large screens inside of transit hubs and measuring each one of those is very different. We measure every screen, every spot we audit them all. It's pretty complicated, it's the only thing we do, it's our priority So we want to make sure we're doing it right. 

So when you say it's the only thing you do, it’s like you have a bunch of data scientists working for you? 

Kym Frank: I sure do. 

Those are expensive.

Kym Frank: I have a team of auditors. We really do have two products, right? We audit the inventory, so we have to make sure it's where they say it is, that the signs are the size that's been reported. We measure the angle, the oncoming traffic, whether that's foot traffic or oncoming car traffic, we measure all of the different places where a sign can be seen from, so that's really step number one, so I have a team of auditors also who spend a lot of time looking at inventory and just making sure that it's in the right place.

So we have an audited inventory database that has millions of locations across the country in it and then we measure those units, and that's really the data scientists. 

So if you weren't doing an audit, what's your read on how accurate network representation would be? 

Kym Frank: It really depends on the network. So we just really did a whole re-audit of everything we measure on roadside and back in the day when people would report, which direction their units were facing. For instance, if you think about a billboard on the side of a highway and the highway is, let's say it's 80 East and the unit was on the westbound side, they might say it was a westbound facing unit. But now when we go in, we actually can go into satellite imagery and look at that unit and say, it's not actually perpendicular to the roadway. It's not actually facing that one direction and getting it to the exact degree. And the reason that's important is if you're approaching a unit on a highway, we want to know at what point in time, can you see that unit so that we can accurately measure how many impressions it's delivering. 

Yeah. I'm up in Canada in Nova Scotia, which is just all forests, it’s like Maine or New Hampshire or whatever. And, when we go down to see our daughter, she lives about 40 minutes south of us, and there's a Wendy's billboard that I've seen for the last two or three years and wondered if they're selling this to Wendy's because you can just see the top of it. Because all the trees have grown up at a level and I'm sure if they were looking at that and wondering, why am I paying for this? Because nobody can see this unless they just recognize the colors and go, okay, that's a Wendy's billboard back there somewhere.

Kym Frank: Yeah, we really do take into account exactly how long oncoming traffic and, it gets even more important, Dave is when there's a digital unit that is showing multiple ads. So how many of those ads can someone see as they're approaching the unit becomes a really important part of our measurement system.

So with the audits that you do in the height of a pandemic, how do you do that? Is it all of using satellites, and asking people in local areas to go onsite and take photos? 

Kym Frank: So we do use photo sheets from our members, almost always have photos of their inventory, cause they share them with advertisers after a campaign.

So we take those photos, but then we do use satellite imagery, and there's some really great information in Google maps. Now we can actually pretend we're in a car within Google maps and drive down the road and go, at this point in time, this is when you can start to see that unit, and once the car passes this location, you can no longer see it. So we've been really empowered by Bing and Google, developing these great map technologies. 

We've been on a number of round tables over the last few months for different things. And you've spoken a number of times about how things have been going through COVID-19 and how you measure movement of people and activity in general. And there was certainly a dip, but it seems to me the last time we were talking and from stuff I was looking at, it's come back to really pre-COVID levels of activity. 

Kym Frank: Correct. So when we're talking about the number of people who are leaving their houses on a daily basis, 75 to 76% of people are going out on any given day. Usually that would be closer to the low eighties, so there is a little bit of a depth, and then the miles that people are traveling nationally, we are at 92%, I believe this week versus the week prior to COVID impacting traffic in March. So there's a little bit of a way to go. 

What I think is really interesting about the data is it's a very significant market-by-market and it varies depending upon where a market you are looking at. New York was obviously very severely impacted, but there's places in the country where traffic is actually higher now than it would have been in March. 

And it has that kind of measurement being important for both the media owners and the brands to understand that, yes, you may have this sense that we're in lockdown and nobody's going out or anything else, but here's the data that says otherwise? 

Kym Frank: A hundred percent. So one of the reasons we put the data out and we really thought it was going to be a very temporary situation back in March. 

One of the reasons we put it out was people were saying things like there's no one on the road and we knew that was completely not true. There were people on the road. In fact, there were quite a number of people that were out on the road. So we try to avoid that focus group of one phenomenon where people go, “I was driving yesterday and there seemed to be less cars.” So we put those data out and it's funny cause I was having a conversation with my counterpart at a radio company who said that he's using the Geopath data to combat the same kind of conversations that he was having with advertisers and brands who were saying, “There's nobody on the road, so no one's listening to the radio,” and he said, we go in with the Geopath data and we say, “No, look, there really are people on the road,” so it's been a huge benefit for our channel to have access to those data in near real time.

And I really do have to be thankful to so many people who helped us get that solution up off the ground super fast. We had an entire committee of some of the smartest people in the industry working alongside us. as things were getting really pretty ugly in the country, back in the springtime, who really helped collectively stand up something that was very reliable, very stable, and very fast.

The industry as a whole, you've got a lot of brands, particularly retail brands who have been really struggling and other ones that have done well through all of this, have you seen a shift in buying an investment in media at all? Or is it just sluggish like most things are sluggish these days?

Kym Frank: Yeah, I think every channel has been impacted. Advertisers are more cautious with their dollars right now, so we certainly felt impacted, as a channel, but things are starting to look up for us and I think the same as is true, whether you're looking at television or radio or print, we're all just coming out of this depth now, and then looking forward to next year, we've got some pretty good projections. It looks like out-of-home will bounce back. So I'm really excited about that. 

I still get emails and phone calls from startup companies all the time who want to do or are planning to do, or in an early throws of doing a place-based network in some sort of defined venue, whether it's groceries or I don't know, ski resorts, I'm making stuff up at this point, but, are there pieces of advice that you provide and also, do you have insights on what of those startup networks have a better shot than others?

Kym Frank: So we always suggest, and we're happy to give some advice to folks if they want to give us a ring before they put the screens up and before they put the signage up, to just understand what are the best places, locations, angles to optimize reaching people prior to making the investment. Like we have a lot of information on duration of ads and duration of content and how to optimize that kind of stuff from a mathematical perspective before you make an investment in putting up inventory. 

We can get access to that information because we're measuring so much already. So one of the things we're working on right now is curating norms so that we can understand if you're going to put inventory up in a bar or a restaurant, what kind of impressions can you expect to deliver? So that people can really figure out, okay, before I put the investment down, is this going to be worth it? Am I putting the screens in the right places? Am I running the right kind of ad durations and ad spots? 

I think also to reach out to people who own that kind of inventory and talk to them and ask, “how is your network performing?” before they go in, so I think the out-of-home industry really is a pretty unified industry where everybody recognizes that we can't compete with each other. We need to compete for ad dollars but when we compete with each other, we just don't do as well. So it's an industry where there's lot of people who are very generous with their time and very willing to help.

Yeah and I think that's important because I run into so many early stage business models where it's just all about the venue, and this idea that (let’s say Bars) there's so many liquor brands out there and there's all these craft ones and so on, so there's so much money available for advertising, and then they start this thing up and realize, “oh my God, advertising is actually pretty hard.”

Kym Frank: Right. At the end, making the choice between being a local network versus a national network or somewhere in between, is also something to really think about. 

Are you going to be selling every screen you own to the same advertiser, or are you going to be splitting that up and selling it regionally or locally? Because that has an impact on how you staff your sales team for instance, and how you structure your network.

Yeah. Going back to a mobile location data and the whole fuss about privacy. There was another instance up here in Canada, a couple of weeks ago. The Canada's privacy commissioner went after a big shopping mall operator saying, “You were invading consumer privacy by using anonymous video analytics,” and I went off on that because it said right in their own report that it was anonymous so what was the big deal? 

When it comes to mobile location data, have you had to tread carefully around using that and how you present it, or do people just take it as a matter of course? 

Kym Frank: Yeah. So there's two things in that question, right? There's the “what are you doing and are you doing it responsibly?” And then there's the “are you speaking about it responsibly?” 

And I know I sound like a total broken record about that because I get concerned when people say they're doing things to sound super sophisticated and tech savvy, and then they get you in trouble because you're talking about what you're doing in a way that's just not responsible. So when we built our system, we built it in such a way that it was as responsible as humanly possible so much so that we probably went to the extreme because it's so important that our currency not step over line. 

We built it deliberately to not cross over any lines, but then when we speak about it, it's again like a broken record, you’ll almost always hear me say, it's aggregated and anonymized. In fact, I think the vast bulk of our members probably say it’s aggregated and anonymized multiple times per day, because it's now been so drilled into us that we are in the public space and we want to make sure that people know we're not doing anything that people should be concerned about.

Is it a case where you see less of a focus from consumers because they've already made that bargain, so to speak, if they're going to use Uber or something else that absolutely requires location for it to work effectively that, “Okay, we've signed off on that. We're okay with that,” versus camera's on and the out-of-home display and they're saying, we didn't sign off on that, so that's terrible but the anonymized data that comes off of a phone, we're okay with that. 

Kym Frank: Yeah. Online has been doing it for so long and people are so used to it. 

“I was shopping for shoes and then the pair of shoes I looked at has now been following me around my browser for a week.” 

I think people just accept that's the case. The camera thing, I know you and I've had this conversation a multitude of times. We do not really use any kind of camera technology. If we have a member who has cameras installed, we will take their data as a calibration point, but we don't actively use that ourselves, but it just makes me laugh that people get upset by facial detection technology, because everybody had VHS tapes with cameras running in every location across America and no one ever really got upset about it, but suddenly there's a technology that actually makes it more responsible because you're not recording people as they're shopping and for some reason that makes people upset. 

Do you not use the computer vision stuff more so because it's an analytical tool as opposed to an audience measurement tool?

Kym Frank: For us, it's just not scalable. We measure millions of locations across the country, and some of those locations don't even have electricity running to them, and some of those locations, that's not allowed and it's just not a scalable technology if you're measuring millions of locations. 

Are there mountains, so to speak that you're still trying to climb in terms of amassing more data and developing even deeper insights? 

Kym Frank: Certainly. The conversation about recency, so how recent do the data need to be, and at what cadence does it need to be reported? So those are conversations that are more business implications than data implications, that we're having with our membership, because out-of-home is typically still bought in four-week cycles, so do we need daily data?

And a lot of this has gotten escalated by the increasing footprint of programmatic buying that's happening in our channel. So it's pushing us forward, certainly COVID has pushed us forward from an evolutionary standpoint on data, because everybody wants to know what's going on with COVID last week, not three months ago. So that is certainly on the forefront for us. And then, I think as a channel, less of a Geopath issue, but more of a channel is demonstrating the true value that out-of-home can bring to an advertiser or a brand, how we can drive increases in purchase and how we can drive foot traffic?

And again, I say that's not a Geopath problem. We don't really do attribution or campaign effectiveness and to say it's an out-of-home problem is not true either. It's just a media problem because every channel needs to find ways to demonstrate its value and I think it's hard for everyone, how do you demonstrate that somebody listened to a radio ad and then made a purchase? So connecting those dots, it's a media challenge. 

Do you see a time when there'll be a demand to have real time data being used for out-of-home? 

Kym Frank: I think near real-time certainly. I don't know that we need to know what happened an hour ago, but certainly we would like to know as recently as possible. Right now, there's just data costs associated with processing that level of data so we have to make an assessment on the return on investment in investing in that level of data for everyone who's using the data. Is it worth it to invest in storing, processing and accessing that level of data? I don't think we're quite there yet. 

So last question, what should we be seeing out of Geopath in the next year? 

Kym Frank: So Geopath is in a pretty big R&D phase right now with our Insights committee, really trying to answer the questions that we were just discussing. So what levers do we need to pull for the next five years, to fuel the next five years of growth for out-of-home?

So we're having those conversations now, I think we're going to continue to grow our membership. We have a constant stream of new networks coming online. In-venue, we are doing doctor's offices now, we're doing grocery stores. So I think the other interesting thing that's happening right now is the question of what constitutes an out-of-home network?

So that line is very much blurring for us. We're seeing a lot of wrapped cars. We're seeing stuff that used to be shopper marketing type networks, now coming over to the out-of-home side. And then there's also what typically would have been considered television, but a television in a location like a bar or a restaurant and we're starting to measure those now too. 

So what constitutes out-of-home, is I think the big question. 

So is that media owners, for people who do things like shopper marketing and so on, following the money? 

Kym Frank: I think following the money, but also following the data. Because we have the ability to measure those networks, it's like the best of both worlds for them, right? Maybe they weren't being considered for an out-of-home buy in the past because they were shopper marketing, but now they can also put metrics behind what they're providing on the shopper marketing side. 

All right, Kym, thank you very much. That was great.

Kym Frank: Thank you so much. I'm really honored to be a part of this. 

Honored. Wow. 

Kym Frank: Yeah. 

You obviously lead a sheltered life. 

Kym Frank: Well, recently for sure. (Laughter)

Stephan Odörfer, 4tiitoo

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED - DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

While we all have learned, and mostly remembered, to wash or sanitize our hands after we touch surfaces, the ongoing pandemic has undoubtedly made a lot of people antsy about touching any surfaces unless they really, really need to.

Self-service screens are one of those surfaces that makes at least some people jumpy, and things like voice-based ordering or throwing screen controls to the customer's smartphone have come up as alternatives.

Now 4tiitoo, a German company that mainly does eye tracking for workplace environments, is touting a solution that would enable doing things like ordering a burger at a restaurant chain to be contactless.

A built-in sensor on the kiosk would track and respond to what a customer sees on the screen, all the way from a welcome message and through to order confirmation.

This is not stuff out of a sci-fi movie, but a riff on existing technology that takes endless mouse work out of repetitive office jobs and allows workers with greasy or occupied hands to navigate and update a screen just by looking at it.

Stephan Odörfer, one of the founders of 4tiitoo, walked me through the thinking, and how it all works.

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TRANSCRIPT

David: All right, Stephan, can you give me a rundown on what your company is all about and what your technology does broadly? 

Stephan Odorfer: Sure. So at 4tiitoo, what we're doing is all about natural interaction, using your gaze, first of all, but in some use cases also combining speech and gestures. So basically combined, I would say natural interactions that humans can do. So what we're mainly doing nowadays is we are controlling standard workplaces, from accounting to support centers to engineering, and largely replacing the 50 year mouse, so that means, while you're having your hands on the keyboard, you start typing and when you want to select a different input field, for example, in your SAP environment, you just look at this field, which you're doing anyway, and you continue typing because our software understands what you want to do and basically predicts the intention and proactively helps you in your daily tasks.

So this is what we are usually doing for several years. Now, what we have been doing lately is hands-free or completely touchless interaction in kiosk situations, or in dedicated restaurant situations where you use your gaze, as you do today, you browse through the menu, an automatic disc will roll a list while you're reading it and our system understands that you are currently in reading mode and obviously what do you want to do at the end of a page? You want to continue scrolling it? So the system automatically scrolls for your reading speed and what it also does is obviously if you want to select a salad or a burger, you just look at these items, and then we developed a special way to basically trigger these elements, because it's not about just looking at them and boom, it happens. That's not good. So it's rather a way to basically first select something and then trigger something just with your gaze.

So this is in a nutshell what we're doing. 

David: The restaurant applications for self-service ordering and so on, was that something that was already an ask from operators prior to COVID or is it because of the pandemic that this is now something that's being put together? 

Stephan Odorfer: It was clearly connected with the pandemic, the topic of people being afraid of touching surfaces or the need in restaurants to continuously make sure that these surfaces are clean. We have seen this in manufacturing environments. We have seen this for a long time already so we have productive solutions for people on the shop floor, having gloves, et.c.controlling their shop flow terminals just with their case, so that they can continue doing their actual job with their hands. 

Now going into the restaurant business, it's quite similar because it's a clear interface, you have a bunch of options that you can touch or click on and now basically look at, and it's not a complex interface. So what people are doing there usually is pretty similar and due to the COVID-19 situation, people were looking at solutions for not having to touch things, on the one hand, and what we could offer with this technology is not only replacing this need to touch something but it's also using our gaze technology, we also see what people are interested in and based on this information, we can predict what the user wants to have, in this case, what he's looking for and then in this case, can propose recommendations for based on his current view, his gaze history, not based on the history of other people, but on his very history. And, therefore we can not only make his experience more personal, more individual, but also create a potential for upselling and cross-selling, from the store.

David: So you're using machine learning or some kind of computer vision to do that? 

Stephan Odorfer: Yes. So it’s a local based technology because privacy is an important topic for us. So it's not being transmitted in the cloud, everything that we do here in this personalization runs on the local system and what it basically does, it understands where you're looking at and what you're not looking at, which is very important.

So this is an area where we have already filed several patents because one of the most important things is obviously at work is what you look at and how you look at things, but what is also very interesting is what you're not looking at, because in your peripheral view, our autopilot works. So, the autopilot in our brain basically works if I say two plus two, in our brains, it just makes sense. But if I say 42 times 17, there are not that many brains where the solution comes up. So we need to focus on that and do the math, but the automatic part in our brain that is basically getting, selecting what should be put in or focus. So in this area, when I'm scrolling, for example, let's say scrolling through a menu in a restaurant that has different pizzas. For example, what I'm doing is, I'm basically quickly running through a page and I'm scanning things like we do if we do a Google search, for example, what is reading each word and if it makes sense, if our autopilot says, “Hey, this could be an interesting result,” only then we put our focus on it and then we read it and then we decide, and we basically understand what you already get rid of in your autopilot, because this is very important to create a better funnel and to create better results in less time. 

David: Okay. So when the original, maybe not the original, but the most familiar gesture sensors out there, the Kinect sensors that came out maybe 10 years ago, there were attempts at that time to use gestures as an interactive interface for screens and the objection I always had and observed, was that there was a big learning curve for people to figure out how to use this, and I would imagine in something like a restaurant environment, where a lot of the goal is to speed up transactions, speed up decision-making and everything else, how do you get past something where you're walking up to a screen for the first time and it's an unfamiliar interface?

Stephan Odorfer: That's a very important question. You're absolutely right. The older folks out there probably remember the Minority Report scene with Tom Cruise, where he's doing all these fancy moves and controls the computer with that. Well, think of this as if you would do this next too. The learning curve you were mentioning, it's also a topic of how long you want to do this until this is more a sports event than an operation off of a screen, right? Your eyes are constantly moving anyway. So before you touch something, before you gesture, or just pointing at something or click a mouse or whatever, your eyes are always already at this point that you want to address. And that's the magic of eye tracking. 

So the question is how do we make sure that, in our standard environment, there’s a steep learning curve that people get familiar very fast with this technology and on the other hand, in a kiosk mode, people get that it's a robust environment, it's a robust operation. It's completely a hundred percent sure operation in terms of that the user knows what's going to happen and what to expect, etc. because this is necessary that people would accept it. And what we came up with is a way to confirm things and rethink from basically his gaze information so that we can predict what he wants to do and why we have done this is because this is something that we are focusing on, so the company itself is seven years old, but, my partner and myself, the founding partners, we are focusing on this technology now for almost 10 years. And we came up with, if I remember the first days and the first month and years, it looked pretty different, in terms of how we control computers today.

So let me explain with an example. If you look at things, a button for example, what it usually does today, it has a so-called dwell time, which basically means time taken between you looking at a button and it triggering within a specific time of say two seconds or whatever. So as always, it's taken too long for a nice interaction and it's too short and therefore too many false positives, if you speed it up. So what we came up with is basically a way that you select within a split second, you select something, you can basically think of in a Windows environment, you can select on the desktop if you click an icon, if you click it once; you select it, if you click it twice to double click, then you trigger it. But you can also look at once, select it and then press return, that's basically the same. So you select it and then you trigger it. And that's the same, what we are doing. So you look at a burger and you select it, right? If you want to trigger this and put this in the cart, for example, then every time you select something, a button pops up that basically triggers the selection and to put it into the cart or whatever happens, forced by this button. So it's always a two step system and that's robust enough, but if you know how to deal with the system, you can do it super fast because our eyes are controlled by the fastest muscles in our body.

So no matter if you are looking from the lower left part to the upper right part, you can do this in a split-second while if you would need to move your hand, that would take much longer. 

David: And if you want to select something, are you blinking or doing something like that to confirm?

Stephan Odorfer: Yes, this would be a possibility to blink, but blinking is also controlled by the autopilot in our brain. So nobody is actively blinking except for these specific situations where you blink an eye to show somebody that you're winking, so that's a specific action, but if you would need to blink to every time that feels awkward, it is possible to control the interfaces with blinking and eye tracking is something that is here for many years for decades, in time. And where it came from is from psychological studies, from marketing studies. We all know these heat maps, search results, et cetera, where it also came from is that it's possible for impaired people to control a computer. So that's the great way and the only way for many people to take part in this world, that is the internet and communication, etc. And if they can only use their eye muscles, because everything else is not possible anymore. Then this is a great way,but there are other ways, better ways to trigger things which are not blinking.

Another opportunity would come up, maybe in your mind would be nodding, but anything like these blinking and nodding has too many false positives. So that's why we came up with this other solution. 

David: So walk me through this, if there's a hamburger chain and you have a self-service ordering kiosk and you're using your technology, I walk up to this thing, what is it telling me right away? 

Is there a message that says you can navigate this whole thing just using your gaze? 

Stephan Odorfer: Yes. It would not be that it's only possible, right? So you should always have a fall back option in this case, this would be touch, right? Because you don't want to force people in a direction you want to offer them a better way or different way in the first place.

And after they experienced it in a better way. So it would be introduced to folks as, “Hey, you can touch me, but you can also just look at me and I will understand what you want to do.” And, based on this very first approach, the system basically understands, “Hey, there's a new customer approaching me”, so the system understands that somebody is looking at the system and it can welcome the customer. And based on this, if it's a new customer who is not familiar with this technology at all, then it's very simple, either he can take a short tour in the situation, which is , I would say something like 5-10 seconds long, basically just to understand what it is and I see great potential in terms of viral marketing here, because, just think about somebody controlling the device just with his gaze, and  his buddy is filming this and putting this on YouTube showing how innovative this solution is basically, right? So he understands, okay, this is how I can do it. And then for example, if he goes through the list of burgers in this case, he doesn't need to learn anything. That system understands that this guy is reading and it scrolls automatically as a biometric. So there's no need to understand something. The only thing you need to understand is basically that you look at a button and you see a little shine around this burger, for example. So that must integrate into the user interface and the corporate identity of the brand, obviously and it gives a little shine so that means it's selected. And then this button pops up and since this is the first time for a user this button popped up, obviously the user will have a look at this button, so that's the way we say, “next time, you're going to look at this pattern. You're going to select this burger to put in the cart, understood? And then you just look at the button.”

And then you've got to go because you don't need to learn anything else. You just know that it's a system that scrolls automatically for me, and you understood this because you experienced this and if I'm looking at a button, okay, this other button pops up and once I'm looking at this button, I trigger it. If I'm not looking at this button, it's vanishing right away after a split second. 

David: So if I decide, I want the cheeseburger with bacon, a prompt will come up and if I look at it, it will confirm that I want that and put it into my “shopping cart”? 

Stephan Odorfer: For example, we have different buttons in such an interface, for example, the amount, so I want to have two burgers or three burgers, what is the difference if you use gaze control instead of touch control or something. Nowadays our eyes are our sensors, they sense information and put it into our brain. What we are doing, it's not only sensing, we are also making our eyes the actors, so they are acting actively.

So for example, if you think about driving in the car and you have both your hands on the steering wheel and  you want to change the radio station. If you're familiar with the car, you know, without having your eyes looking at the center cockpit, where you need to put your hands to turn up the volume or to change the station, right? Because you just know where your hands need to go, but if you need to look at this element, for example, you see +++, you would need to create the information within your peripheral view. If you look at +, you need to create the number that you're currently at, right next to the interface because you need to understand that you are at 3+ and you can now stop looking at +++ because it goes up gradually. Similarly, if you say how many burgers do you want, then you just look at one of our five buttons, one, two, three, four, five, because that way the restaurants know what amount of burgers or salads or whatever people are usually having. So, you don't need to choose 28 salads or something. 

David: So you go through that whole ordering process and then you would use more conventional payment systems like credit cards, or maybe even a phone scanner, NFC tap or something like that. Is there a point because you're already using a camera and you're looking at the retina or the iris of the viewer, could you make payments off the biometrics of that person's unique eye characteristics?

Stephan Odorfer: It’s theoretically possible, yes. And, if you look at many Asian countries, it's already the standard, right? It's not something sophisticated, that's already something that they do on a daily basis. 

David: But they don’t have GDPR there. 

Stephan Odorfer: True. Absolutely true, and that's exactly why I said it's theoretically possible. Biometrical identification, for example, this eye tracker that we are using can also be used to log into your Windows system, using the Windows Hello technology and what it basically does is it's not sending the data anywhere, it’s basically the same if you use your iPhone or your Android phone, that you use the same infrared based camera technology to identify that it's you, but it's only asking, is it you or not? You don't need to have the connection to a database. That's the main difference here.

As I said, it's theoretically possible, but this is not that's neither a focus of ours, nor it is something that is necessary in this case, because what you can actually do is you use a QR code to pay, that's one thing, use a touchless credit card or debit card to pay, so there are many ways of contactless paying in a way. What it furthermore does and I pointed this out a little bit earlier, already. So while you are browsing this, and looking through the menu, basically, what we understand is what are you interested in? Because we know that such an eye tracker collects data at about 90 Hertz, so 90 times a second. We understand where you're looking at and this information can be used to basically understand using this autopilot information, what you're interested in and what not. So in this case, for example, we can say right before the checkout, “Hey, you were thinking about taking this ice cream dessert.”

So why not offer it again at the checkout, but as we know what kind of ice cream you looked at and thought about and based on this case pattern, we understand that you really thought about this, so it's not historical information, it's personal.

And therefore you have a much better conversion rate of having upselling and making the cart size larger. 

David: If I'm a kiosk manufacturer and this intrigues me, I have QSR or other retail clients who might be interested in this, what are the hardware implications for this? Do you need to add a separate PC that just does that processing? Is there a separate, specific camera that you need? Those sorts of things? 

Stephan Odorfer: So an eye tracker consists of three different parts. One thing is the infrared lighting, so that's LEDs like you also have in your iPhone and Android phones today, you have a camera, a solution that is basically the same here. There's a special infrared camera and you have an ASIC, so it's a dedicated chip on board on the eye-tracker itself that does all the math, because through the USB port that is connected, only X, Y coordinates and X, Y set coordinates of your eyes are transmitted. So there's no camera image transmitted or saved at all. Everything is calculated in memory and just not saved at all. Also in terms of privacy, this is a standard equipment that can be easily built into the hinge of a notebook. So it's really small sothe volume you need to put into your existing kiosk solutions is really tiny.

And they're the only thing that is necessary. It needs to be put below the screen so that you can easily track the whole screen range with this. 

David: Okay, so you don't need a separate PC running an Intel or that sort of thing to make all this happen. It can just happen off of a pretty simple hardware setup? 

Stephan Odorfer: While you can do that, it depends on the use case that you want to do. For example, if you want to do the prediction, intention prediction parts that I was referring to, and this is something that is not produced on the eye-tracker itself, that is something that runs in the software on local hardware and therefore you should have an up to date device. This could be an Intel processor because the Intel processes have a dedicated deep learning algorithm embedded that we can use, and therefore much lower CPU consumption needed because it's already built in. So the commands are built into the hardware itself. 

David: So if you had a touchscreen kiosk, you could have both functions like all those stuff that the touchscreen kiosk normally doe, could run on there and your technology could run in parallel. You don't need two separate devices to do all that as long as you've got enough hardware. 

Stephan Odorfer: Yes. 

David: Okay. There was a big fuss recently up here in Canada, where I live, about a shopping mall using cameras. And even though it was anonymous video analytics, it was misinterpreted and there was all kinds of upset about it, even though there's really no reason to be. There's nothing, no privacy invasion happening there.

How do you get past that with customers who worry about it and with the general public? Because even though what you're saying is, it's only the eye coordinates, people are going to see cameras and go, “Oh my God, my invasion, or my privacy is being invaded here!” 

Stephan Odorfer: It is absolutely important. So first of all, it uses a camera, but it's a sensor. So it means that the camera images are not saved anywhere. So that's the first thing. Then in terms of our company, we are based in Munich in Germany and Germany has a very strict privacy law. So even in specific areas, there's this even going further than GDPR requests and for the company itself and for me and my partners, this is a very important topic, because we want to make our vision. 

And our mission is to make computers understand us humans and not us humans to understand how our computers operated. This has been for many years that we had to learn how things work. It's now time that computers understand and predict how they can serve us because that's their duty. So in this way, we need to have a better understanding of how we can serve and therefore we need data. If you don't have data, and say if you want to learn swimming in a pool without water, it's not possible. So you need the data. Therefore we have that.

We have certificates of Germany Privacy, that's nothing familiar outside of Germany, probably, but it's a DECRA, it's called a data audit which makes sure how we handle data, how we process data, how we delete data and how we, anonymize and pseudonymized data and aggregate data. So to really make sure that the data we use, has nothing that can be transferred to any individual. That's very important because I don't want a big company to understand what I'm interested in.

The model that we follow for data privacy is basically, something is on one side of the wall, so that's the local part and then there's a part on the other side of the wall. To make this more plausible, think that you're searching for a result and you need to access data online, because this is something that we also do. If you need to load more information, for example, they are doing an e-commerce search and you're loading more information, more t-shirts that you're looking for. So our way is that we ask for a hundred new results and locally, we only use 10 of them. So the guys can put a hundred results in the system, but they don't know which ten of these hundred are we using and needing. So that's basically how you can get around that somebody else is building a model about the person you are serving.

So that's one thing and thinking about these kiosk solutions where all the data i, on the device anyway, and as nothing is transmitted to a server, to do the local optimization or the local personalization, there's no problem in terms of privacy. Furthermore after the session is done and somebody else appears, then we start from scratch basically in terms of the data and personalization.. 

David: Last question. Is this all what we've been talking about conceptually, or are you in the field with self-service kiosks that are doing all of this? 

Stephan Odorfer: So for now, three- four years, what we are doing is we are equipping large enterprises for their standard places, right?

So that's efficiency in ergonomics and benefits. The same goes for the shop floor, so we have productive environments running in a hands-free touchless interaction, not collecting a burger, but just confirming a step in your assembly process, for example. So that's what we're doing through the pandemic.

We have seen this request from hardware, software and solution providers on the one hand, but also from the customer's side since they are looking for other ways to solve their problems. So this is something that I'm pretty sure we're gonna equip, in a few weeks, for example, a completely touchless QR system of a large company that offers their guests to understand more about the company and understand how to get around, sort of a compass, for example, completely touchless, and that's pretty much the same because you have somebody approaching a terminal, the system says, “Hello!”, when it comes to you and you use it for 1-3 minutes, and then you move on.So that's very similar And, so I'm looking forward to seeing this in kiosk environments. 

David: So the interest is absolutely there, but we're still in fairly early stages of seeing this out in the marketplace. Yes. 

Stephan Odorfer: Yes.

David: Okay. Very nice to speak with you. Thank you so much for spending some time with me.

Stephan Odorfer: Absolutely. Thank you for the invitation. 

Chris Feldman, Sharp NEC Display Solutions

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED - DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

A few weeks ago NEC Display, which is now Sharp NEC Display Solutions, started marketing a new product called NEC MediaPlayer.

I saw the note and I thought, "Oh, OK, I'll write about this." But then I didn't, because I couldn't make heads or tails of what it was about.

This podcast interview helped me clear the fog, and I suspect it will for others. MediaPlayer is software designed to work with the Raspberry Pi hardware that NEC uses as an alternative to the System on Chip offers from its display competitors.

MediaPlayer has two aspects:

There is a simple signage, LAN or sneakernet platform that allows companies to do things like put production KPIs or other content up on a screen, without investing in a full signage platform, because they don't need a full signage software platform.

And there's a foundational CMS set-up that is there for the 15 or so CMS software partners who do digital signage on Raspberry Pi. If an end-user or integration partner uses NEC displays that support the Pi, they can select and install that software image right out of MediaPlayer.

People who have been around digital signage for many years will likely wonder - Did they do Vukunet ... again?

No, this is not that the rebirth of the circa 2009 NEC CMS and ad platform.

I spoke with Chris Feldman, the product manager for NEC MediaPlayer.

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TRANSCRIPT

David: Chris, thank you for joining me. I wanted to talk to you about NEC, because I saw some PR about NEC media players and I read it and then I read it again and I thought I'm not quite getting what this is, so it would be lovely if we could walk through what NEC media players are all about. 

Chris Feldman: Cool. Yeah, thanks for the opportunity.

You're not the first. I think the confusion is that the media player exists in two parts and it's obviously tied to the system on a chip (or SOC) space in digital signage. A number of years ago, we released our displays that use the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3a as an open source platform for associates, allowing a lot of users to utilize that and the whole open architecture kind of digital signage.

But one of the things that we found, as we're getting feedback from the market, was that it's great that we have this open architecture, but people really need an out of the box experience with it. So they need something where as soon as you open it up and turn it on it's got to do something other than just give you a desktop operating assessment screen.. 

David: Cause not everybody's a nerd and wants to develop that way. 

Chris Feldman: Exactly. And, I think initially our thinking was, there's so many tools out there that people are just going to rush to it and be like, yeah, this is great, which is what they're still doing. But the fact of the matter is they needed an out of the box experience and so that brings us to the first part, which is the NEC media player. And so what we've done is we've looked at the media player experience overall And how it can fit within the NEC display, NEC display ecosystem, so to speak,and that's what we developed. 

We worked together and we developed this media player that we had delivered onto the display. it comes pretty loaded so it's the standard image now on all the Raspberry Pis that we sell and we've also upgraded from the Computer Module 3 to the Computer Module 3+, so you're getting a bit of a bump up in CPU performance, but also the hard drive or the EMT on the internal memory on the device itself, it's bumping up from 16 gigs to 32 gigs. So you're getting a little faster CPU speed, and you're getting twice the amount of memory in there and then the mini player itself is really giving users the ability to really get up and running with signage very quickly.

So we looked at things like playback, so it was important not to have gaps. People want to have, whatever images they have up there or videos or combination thereof, they want them to play slide-to-slide without any kind of black space or dead space in between.

The new player does that and addresses that issue that was on the Pi. And so what we're able to do is we have that going, you can connect to it locally, so you can walk up to it, there’s a USB drive., I'll plug it in. You can use the wireless remote that comes with the display to actually load content onto the internal drive of the Raspberry Pi. You can use a wired keyboard as well, but one of the cooler things is you actually have the ability to control it over a network. So if you have a closed network, like a LAN setup where you have all your screens running the media player, you can actually talk to all of them, control them, and so you can set up playlists, you can set up schedules, you can set up everything that you're doing, with regards to content, over a network. That's a really powerful tool that we have there. We've added some things like streaming services, so you can actually stream content to it. You can have URLs that are accessible because it does also support touch. So say you have a lobby space in your corporate office, and you want to have a way to tie into a content you already have without having to spend more money, just to have this new digital sign that you have, you can just utilize your webpage.

And then the cool part about it is it actually utilizes the display itself, that's one of the great things about using the internal Raspberry Pi, as opposed to an external Pi. One of the things we have is a real-time clock and a watchdog timer to maintain the high-res of the display.

But we can also tie into the human sensor that we have either externally, with our KTRC kit or the one that's built into our VNP series displays that we offer. So you could have essentially a slideshow running and then when it sees someone walking in front of it, it could switch over to that website or switch over to that HTML file that you're looking at, if you're doing it by finding that type of thing. And then if you touch the screen, you can actually interact with it, which is a really powerful tool to offer customers just through a standard media player that's included with the Raspberry Pi.

The second half, which is where a lot of people get confused is, again, looking at signage and what people wanted to do. These media players are great and what we designed was not designed to be an “end-all be-all” of media players. It's a great little device that offers a lot of functionality but the reality is once people really start to see the value of digital signage in their place, whether it's a retail establishment, quick stores, restaurant, corporate office, hospitals, wherever it is, and they start to see that potential, they'll want to do more things. And so to do that, you really need to have a true CMS running on the device.

So we looked at that and we looked at the negative feedback that we received on imaging the Raspberry Pis on our displays and what we did is, we created this CMS platform within the media player. So when you have the media player running, on the top is a series of tabs that essentially denote what you're doing. You simply just arrow over to the CMS tab and then on there currently we have about eight or nine partners, and this list is growing, you can then move down and select a partner and you get a description of what that partner does, and then the option to install that software. So you can actually go to a company, or certainly a partner like Screenly or Yodeck, select their software, and if you're already using it, let's say you have a Screenly account, you have that up and running on regular media players throughout your facility. Now you want to add these displays with SOC, to expand your digital signage. You can click install, it will install the Screenly software, and then it'll run as a Screenly player on your network and you can manage it just like every other device you have working.

And so that's where people are kinda getting lost because it's like a two-part construction to what we have. 

David: So it sounds like in your first part of the description, many to most of the components that you would need, or in commonly found in a digital signage, CMS software platform particularly on the management side, but it's not marketed or presented as a CMS, and if you have customers who will want to go down a little path of using a commercial CMS, you have options to do that. 

So am I right in thinking the first part of what you're describing is meant for companies that let's say already have a software development team of some kind, and they're looking for a signage platform that has foundational software and APi so that they can develop their thing on top of that without using a commercial CMS. Would that be accurate?

Chris Feldman: Mostly. So first of all, it's designed around a LAN, right? You're not going to have, say like a quick service restaurant where you're managing several hundreds or thousands of stores. It's designed to be a closed loop, so to speak. So if you have a building, you don't pick a large company out there like Motorola, right? So if you have several campuses together, you can have a  local one off here in Schaumburg, you would have these displays on the wall and the administrator can access them and load content to it.

But if you wanted to go to where they are, where they're downtown, you would need a separate set of media players running. So they're not really designed to be cloud-based, it's not really inter-connectable, so to speak and they all have to be on the same network and then they'll run existing content that you have. So it's for the user that needs more simple signage, not necessarily looking to invest in the expense of a CMS software, and then it still gets you into that realm, right? It still gets you into digital signage but you don't have the minutia control that you would over through a CMS.

Let’s take Rise Vision, for example, those guys have a lot of control over what they're doing and we're not really trying to do that. What we're trying to do is get you in the ground floor, so to speak, get you a media player with enough robust functionality that it's actually useful, but at the same time, we want to be able to encourage you to work with any one of our partners.

David: So let's say a manufacturer who wants to visualize some KPis from the production floor and just do it in that one facility over the LAN on a few displays. They could do this to find that you are all for that particular visualization that's coming out of, I don't know, Power BI or whatever it may be, throw that on there and you've got what you need. 

And then the second tier of this is when you have partners, like Screenly or Yodeck, who already develop to Raspberry Pi that could be part of a well-defined ecosystem and your customers can look at the different options and go, “okay, these guys are more oriented to what I want to do, and I'll use that.”

Chris Feldman: Yeah, if they can handle that. 

David: When I first read this PR, I was thinking they’re not doing Vukunet again, are they? 

Chris Feldman: (Laughter) You’re not the first one to mention that, but no, this is not Vukunet. 

David: For those who don't understand what they we are going on about, about 10-11 years ago, NEC came out with a free CMS platform and a kind of a companion advertising platform called, Vukunet and AdVuku and I think the most accurate thing to say would be that it was a little early in the development of the ecosystem for that to really catch on.

Chris Feldman: Yeah. And, ironically, I was actually involved with that as well. Maybe that's why I was chosen for this one, there's a lot that goes into it and you have to play to each other's strengths and one of the things about, the digital signage world is, it takes a village, right? These systems and these projects can get rather large and cumbersome, it's no longer just somebody going, “Oh, I want to throw a PowerPoint on the screen or a PDF slide from my menu board.” No, the amount of functionality that people need and some of the more complicated logistics really needs to take multiple partners to successfully launch one of these, even a moderate sized one to the market.

And what we're trying to do is we're trying to simplify that, we're going to bring in as many people as we can together, so that it's easier for people to basically bring that to market. 

David: So if I wanted to use Screenly as my CMS, working with NEC media player, with the software components that you were describing earlier, I assumed that there are similar components that Screenly has written and everything else, so how do you work around them, nto clash with each other? 

Does a lot of the NEC media player functionality just shut off? 

Chris Feldman: Yeah, literally that's what happens. So when you select that partner, it becomes that partner's player or that partner's end point or however you want to refer to it.

So there's going to be no confusion. There's gonna be no clash, ‘cause that was honestly one of the original concerns when we were supposed to find what you're trying to do here, we didn't want to create something that was gonna create problems for us later. The idea is we want to work with these partners as well as we can and deliver an experience that we can have that QC control, to the end-user.

David: Are there device management things like what you're describing with the wash-dock timer and things like that, that a developer like a Screenly or Yodeck or whoever can tap into if they don't have that themselves, or are there elective components that you can use? 

Chris Feldman: Yeah. We work with a company called signageOS and they're helping us with this whole partner onboarding, and one of the things they do is they tie into that. So if they require things like CEC control, so you can utilize the remote, control it, or it ties into the touch capability, they're handling that vetting portion. And, in addition to that, we also have, and I like to refer to, is one of the best kept secrets in the AV, which is our never said administrative tool.

I don't know if you're familiar with that. So again, it's one of our best kept secrets. Never said administrator is a tool that's been around with NEC for, I've been with NDC about 12 years now, and it's been around as long as I can remember, and it is networkable management for all your displays from desktop monitors up through projection, right?

And as long as they're all connected, via a network, you can do all kinds of really great things. You can monitor them, they can set it up where if somebody were to change an input, for example, it blows my mind every time, every time you have a large screen somewhere, everybody wants to look at it and say, “Hey, can I get the game on there?” And then try to press the buttons and if you didn't laugh them out, all of a sudden you turned off whatever your digital signage application is and the screen is blank and so if you have a large building, it would be nice if the screen could tell you that because the screen already knows, and that's what it can do. You can set up a series of tasks that it can do, you can set up a time task where, if you're a school system and you want to shut off all your projectors at night to save the bulb, do you have the ability to do that? You can say, “okay, five o'clock turn everything off” and it'll do that and everything connected to it will do it, whether it's a screen projector, desktop monitor, what have you, and that is, available for download on our website and the standard edition is actually free of charge, and it's one of the reasons why it's the best kept secret. So it's something to use and it's an incredibly powerful tool that you can utilize either within your own facility or if you are a reseller or an AV integrator.

This is something that you could also leverage as a service with your customers. So you can say, “Hey look, Mr. Customer, I can set this up. I can put all these screens on the network.” Obviously he will charge a fee for that and that's what it's there for. And that can be also tied into the available APis and so our Raspberry Pi, which talks to our display could then also connect to never said administrator.

David: What’s the adoption rate for Raspberry Pi? I mean smart displays have been around since the early 2012-2013. The early ones weren't very good, but they've gotten better and I would say the whole idea of SOC displays is fairly mainstream now, there's a lot of them out there. 

NEC, to my knowledge, is the only company that's gone down a different path with these slot loaded Raspberry Pis. How has that gone? And where are you with it? Is it right across your product line or just on a subset? 

Chris Feldman: So we have a very wide breadth of screens that we actually utilize it on, screen sizes, everything from our 40 inch, whether it's a VRP series all the way up to our 98 inch screens. And that also includes our ultra narrow displays so the video wall displays as well. And so we have all these different screen lines that you can utilize within your network and tie into the software that you're using, like one very clear example, it's called Full Beamer. It's a great tool and they have this really awesome application that you can do video walls with Raspberry Pis by literally taking a photo with your phone. So you take the software, you load it onto a screen to take a picture of what the screens look like and each screen will have a QR code on there. You'd load that onto the website and it'll automatically scale the content, regardless of rotation onto the wall, which is an incredibly powerful tool that they can do with our screens.

David: Why Raspberry Pi versus just putting in an ARM processor and doing what most of the other guys are doing? 

Chris Feldman: Twofold. First, we've had a modular philosophy around everything that we do for computing for a long time. We've had OPS forever and then before that we had the SPC slot, and that's worked out really well for us. We've had a lot of really great successes.and we've got a lot of really great feedback on it. 

So when we moved into SOC, what we didn't want to do is we didn't want to move away from that. We wanted to give customers that option and in addition, we also didn't want to necessarily build in the cost of the SOC into a screen that they're buying if they are not using it. So if they want to use a PC, they're not using SOC, why pay for it, or if they're using something external, why pay for it? So that's the first part.

And the second part is really the, just the whole developer community around the Raspberry Pi, cause it's one thing to be having open architecture, because if you look at our competitors, everyone, they're all open, there's APis that are out there. Right now with the Raspberry Pi, you have kids sending these things to the moon, right?

You have all kinds of really amazing things that people are building with Pi. I saw one application, I think it was a year ago, maybe two years ago, where somebody took a Raspberry Pi and connected the accelerometer that you have for your cell phone to it and then when you rotated the display, the content would rotate with the display. It was a really amazing thing that they were doing, with that smaller SOC.

So that's what we're really trying to leverage with the Raspberry Pi inner displays, is that not just the level of creativity that affords the user, but just the global community built around it. People are really doing amazing things with it because you get stuck in something and you can on the web, post on a message board and somebody may have already run into that problem, and so that's what we wanted to do, what we wanted to leverage. 

David: The interest in Raspberry Pi when it first came out and it probably still is that it's a $35 to $45 micro PC, and therefore I can save some money there.

Often don't seem to understand that there are other things that you have to buy with it to get it all to work and it doesn't end up being 45 bucks. It costs more than that and it is a micro PC positioned, it’s something for makers and hobbyists and so on. Although there are millions out there and as you say, there's a huge development community, why would you go down that path instead of the Intel smart display modules or compute modules?

Chris Feldman: The smart display modules, we actually are implementing as well. So the next generation displays will have the SDMs, available as a flat, And then the computer module will actually install underneath it, so if you look at the way that the screen is actually built, you have two halves, right? 

You have SDMs and you have SDML, right? SDML takes the whole thing and the rest takes just a third of it. The unused portion is what the Raspberry Pi will connect to, so we're not going to connect to the SDM slot. And when we're specific about that, we're not connecting to that portion of the display. It's connected to its own proprietary connector on the other side, but you have that ability, so you could do things like run the Raspberry Pi and, potentially, another accessory that you have in that slot, that's running off of it.

David: So you could use the Pi for media play out, but you could use an Intel i5 for computer vision, like your NEC application or something like that?

Chris Feldman: Right and, again, the idea behind adopting the Pi was really built around the community that exists with the Raspberry Pi. It's one thing just to create a small SOC type PC, a little chip you drop in with some memory in the CPU, it's another thing to drop something in there that has some momentum behind it already, people already developing behind it. And as we were later to the market than everyone else, we wanted to leverage that, we wanted to have something that already had a development base behind it when we hit the market.

I think when we launched, I think there were probably a dozen companies that we had on our website that already had CMS software that was running on Raspberry Pi, and we linked them right at the bottom so people get up and running very quickly.

David: You've mentioned there's about eight or nine on there now with your dropdown?

Chris Feldman: So the eight or nine are actually the partners part of the overall CMS platform that's on the Raspberry Pi. So if you look in the Pi itself, those are the eight or nine I talked about, those are the ones that are actually on the Pi. But if you go to our website, we actually have a media plan link on our website, it's actually connected. 

Any one of our large format displays that have a Raspberry Pi slot, there's literally a link that you can click and say, “Hey, check out a new video player.” You click that link. It'll take you to our media player site. Go into all of the detail that I'm going on with you today and then, at the very bottom, there'll be a list of all the existing partners today that are on that Pi and then there's another button you can click, which will show you everybody that we know of that's working on the Pi. It's more than eight, right? So we probably have, and I have to draw a blank here, but probably about 15 partners total. 

David: Okay. Is there any particular market or attribute about the kind of end users who are gravitating towards this technology solution versus, I don’t know, I see a lot of smart displays being used for QSR because it streamlines the install and things like that, or is there a representative kind of user who would go down your path? 

Chris Feldman: That's really the great thing about the associate market as it is right now. A lot of CMS companies are rendering using HTML5, or through a standard browser or streaming something from a source. You can move away from like a standard type PC, to something like an associate and save a fair bit of money. The cost on screens will come down considerably, to buy even a small form factor PC, like an Intel that can oftentimes costs more than display, right? So now if you have this SOC that can then run that other content, that's an assumption being handled by a head-end, and it's acting as an endpoint.

You can do a lot of really amazing things with it. And I don't think it's, yes, I can appeal to a specific vertical. You're really going to appeal to those that are looking to get into the signage market. But I've always been a little shocked by it, because there's an economy of scale that we're dealing with because, there's a screen, there's software, there's PCs, there's tablets, there's all these parts that kind of go into it. And then you have to multiply it by the number of locations that you want to have it in there, it's not just one screen from the menu board. The average menu board size is three. So if you take three times the number of stores and very quickly that number gets very large. So we can do something like this and be able to deliver that competing solution to the customer that lowers the cost of ownership and those that may have been wavering or, not necessarily, very motivated to adopt this, now it becomes much more inviting for them to do it.

David: I have a feeling that you can't tell me who, but I'll ask anyways, and you can just say generically if necessary, do you have some good reference cases on large-scale deployments of viewer displays with the Pi inside?

Chris Feldman: So we just released the media player and the Compute Module 3+ on our displays, we are just starting to deliver those now. So there is one case that will be listed soon so we can build a reference on our website and then those will start to develop as that grows out. 

David: Is that retail?

Chris Feldman: It was in the QSR space. 

David: And like hundreds, thousands, millions?

Chris Feldman: When it's released, we'll be able to tell you. (Laughter)

David: All I know is that it's just a burden of anybody who is trying to market in this industry that the bigger the client, the harder it is to get permission to say anything about the job. 

What will we see going forward with the media player? I know you mentioned OPS for the displays, but, how do you see this evolving over the next year? 

Chris Feldman: Like I tried to mention earlier. So when I first started with NEC, if you looked at the kind of PCs that were being purchased, you're looking at a very low  type PC, moving up to a higher end type of tower PC with a video card, it was a standard bell curve, right? So the Core 2 Duo was the workhorse, the vast majority of screens that you saw out there were running something similar to an open Core 2 Duo, they were everywhere from airports to all other verticals, but as signage has continued to evolve, software design has gotten better, that standard bell curve is in verdict. So that middle of the road PC is not really seeing that much traction, the higher end PCs that are going to give you much more power and much more dynamic content because they're getting so much smaller, like the new, i5 STM that we have coming out, that performance significantly better than the previous generation i7. So you're getting all this power in this one device, that you can do. real-time 3d renders for wayfinding. So instead of just having a flat space looking map for your lobby, wayfinding, you could have an interactive 3d model that literally shows the walkthrough to go to where your location is at, those types of things. 

And then on the lower end of things, you can get your information out, your menu board information out, your HD, PLEX shows or video content with audio, all that running on an SOC and the market is changing in the way where like the low end and the high end are becoming the dominant competing solutions.

So that's what we're gonna see. I think we're going to see a lot more screens with built-in computing kind of leading the charge, but then I think also extension. So being able to get video at higher levels so are you talking 4k-8K, from a tower PC with a high-end video card, talking a lot of RAM, doing really dynamic stuff out to display as well so that's where signage seems to be going. 

David: All right. That was great. Thank you Chris, for spending some time with me. 

Chris Feldman: Thank you very much.

 

David Niles, Niles Creative Group

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED - DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

In a technology landscape where even last year's big thing tends to get old quickly, it's pretty amazing that the lobby-filled LED installation at the Comcast tower in Philadelphia remains one of the best visual experience projects out there ... more than 12 years after it was first lit up.

If the project is unfamiliar, imagine walking into a very large corporate office tower lobby, admiring the wood walls that line it, and then seeing those walls are active, and that there are little visual stories being told.

The project went live when few people even in this industry knew all that much about direct view LED, doing a 4mm wall years ahead of when AV people started thinking and marketing in terms of pixel pitch.

I spoke with David Niles, whose little company did the original job and continues to work on it, through a recent LED upgrade.

We get into his long background, starting in architecture and early computer graphics, and evolving into pioneering work with HDTV, again years ahead of when people were using terms like 1080P.

We also talk about some of the other work done by his team.

I spoke with Niles last week as he puffed a morning cigar in his central Florida backyard. I was staring out at my Nova Scotia backyard, wondering when predicted snow flurries were going to blow in.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

 

TRANSCRIPT

David, we'll get into the Comcast experience, but that's not the only work you've done through the years. Can you tell me about your company and what you do? 

David Niles: If I would start backward, what we do today is, I make large scale multimedia experiences. Mostly for, I guess you would call it public art spaces and buildings, sometimes residences, all over the world. And that's what I do today, where I started is, it's a long list and I'll try and go through it quickly. I really started out in architecture. As a kid, I was fascinated with building and really enamored with architecture. I thought it was extremely novel. I was 10-12 years old, reading all Franklin Wrights books and studying his plans. By the time I was 12 or 13, I taught myself how to be a draftsman and I could draft, and eventually went out in my early career, designing and building outdoor cafes, stores, interiors in New York City. But I was always frustrated with this idea that as novel as I thought architecture was, it was turning into this sort of commodity for run of the mill things and I believe that the future of dynamic art is really in that thing called television. So very early on, I was fascinated with the idea of television and the medium of video and in the early part of my career I was involved with video art, very early pioneers of video art and in New York City where we would run out in porter back and we would shoot all kinds of things that we thought were for art. 

Parallel to that was involved with music and music recording and engineering, sort of altogether and theater to some extent, live theater, and that eventually melded into me getting more and more involved with the medium of video and television, summarily rejecting the idea of broadcast television. It was terrible, those television shows had terrible graphics, horrible lighting, and all this other stuff. 

One day I was sitting in a loft with some friends of mine and we're looking at this video, art that we were making and other than the three or four people in this room, looking at some protracted very boring thing that we shot and realized that we really weren't doing anything and that maybe, being popular and television needed change, needed revolution.

So I decided at that moment that it was more important to get involved with the idea of changing television and bringing art to the popular medium, rather than narrowcasting in this, three or four guys in a room, looking at video feedback on a monitor and thinking it’s wonderful. So I started to get more involved with the idea of taking what was then non-broadcast equipment and seeing if I could adapt this into making a more popular video with it and I was about 18 or 19 years old, I met up with an investor, who lived in France, who felt my ideas for creating a revolutionary mobile unit, that would permit us to go out and shoot and create on the spot more organically, without all of the baggage of what broadcast television was, at least in those days, if you wanted to go out and shoot outside, you were talking about a 50-foot trailer with 25 guys with screwdrivers, cameras that weigh 400 pounds.

He put up the money to invest in making a video mobile unit that would permit us to do that and it was a long story, but eventually, that mobile unit ended up in France and he invited me over to shoot a jousting competition in Carcassonne and this mobile unit that I built, it's a one-man show. This is one guy that had one, two-inch machine and three IVC 300 cameras. These were semi-professional, well they were professional cameras, but they were not high-end RCA, Marconi cameras. This sort of almost looked like a bread truck, it was a small van that housed all of this stuff.

And I basically went to France to shoot this jousting competition and ended up staying in France and convincing this investor to let me take it apart and rebuild it and make it better and this is years before there was any sort of private television or private videotape production in France. It only stayed on television and we pioneered the idea of creating broadcast facilities in France, to supply the French channels and eventually American and basically world channels for sporting events. 

Years later, I was able to buy out the original investor, because business was very slow for the first five or six years and set up my first company in France, where we ended up building that first original mobile unit, but ended up building nine more and became the premier facility in Europe for HBO, ABC, CBS, French television, German television, English television, in high-end video production.

That was France. Of course, pioneering, I was always pushing the envelope of never being satisfied with the state of the art of the existing equipment. It was too heavy. It was too complicated. It wasn't innovative enough. So I have an engineering side where I would go back and look at this hardware that existed at the time and modify it, adapt it, and create these sort of revolutionary for their time outside broadcast vehicles and studios, and somewhere in the early 80s, I had a reputation for being a hardware pioneer and Sony & RCA were constantly throwing new ideas at me and new products that they were developing.

Sony came along and they said, “We have something we want to show you, David” and I said, “what would that be?” 

“Something called high definition television,” and they took me into a room and they showed me the very first prototype for high-def TV and a transfer of this high-def TV that was made to the 35-millimeter film and I looked at it and it blew me away. “Holy mackerel!”

Now, this was a frustration that we'd had in Europe for something that Americans wouldn't understand is that if you produced a 65-pallet television on videotape, the French channels would not accept it. They would not accept videotape. They would only accept 35-millimeter film. So everything that we produce, whether it be a TV commercial, or anything else, or even a commercial for the cinemas, because in France, they put commercials in cinema, we would have to convert our videotape to film, and the only way to do it in the 70s was to do an elaborate kinescope process that Technicolor had developed. 

So we would have to produce absolutely perfect 65-pallet television and then take it through this kinescope process to create, well, 35-millimeter film that looked pretty good, but of course, it's limited in resolution and contrast ratio, but it looked pretty good, so we were constantly trying to get the best we could possibly get. So when I saw HDTV for the first time, looking at a video picture with a better than thousand line resolution and a contrast ratio that was amazing, I was blown away and I said, I've got to do that. So I spent several years negotiating with the NHK in Japan and Sony to allow me to buy the equipment to launch HDTV, which is what we did eventually. In France, we opened up the first studios in the world that actually produced HDTV, not necessarily for broadcast, but for transferring to 35-millimeter film, because we looked at it as either a new medium or a medium that would compete with 35 millimeter, which is the beginning of the HDTV revolution.

Our studios in France were very successful and we produced the first commercials in HDTV, the first movies in HDTV behind and a lot of our customers were calling from America, New York. And I said, “Wow, I need to expand my company,” to open up a New York office, which is what we did in 1987. We opened up 1125 Productions in New York, which was a fully equipped HDTV studio and production facility in New York City. It was an enormous financial investment but parallel, if you look at the history of HDTV, HDTV in 1987 was a very disputed medium as the American broadcasters really didn't want to know about it. The cinema community, of course, said you're not going to replace anything, you're not going to replace this beautiful film with the electronic medium. So it was a very challenging, uphill battle. 

It's a very long protracted story so I'll try and make it shorter. 1125 Productions was mostly a a very sophisticated post-production studio that we had on Fifth Avenue with mobile units. Eventually, I needed to start to produce HDTV programming on my own to start to fill the void as we needed a studio, and we eventually took over the Ed Sullivan Theater, where we built HDTV studios in New York and that's my television career. 

There's a lot involved, though I'd say it's a long story after that, but you know my roots and storytelling, show-business, theater, music,etc. everything else lends itself to, again, going back to this idea of these enormous pictures and these enormous experiential things that we could do with HDTV, that we really couldn’t do with it any other video mediums. 

So in the Sullivan theater, we built a 60-foot screen, and did perhaps through the photorealistic projection and we opened up a Broadway show called, “Dream Time” that ran for 145 performances and the big feature of the dream time, aside from being successful, was that it had fully integrated photo-realistic HDTV imagery that was projected with live actors, and you couldn't tell the difference between the live actors and the projection. It was actually a really cool show. 

What year was that? 

David Niles: That's 1992. And still, if you Google, “Dream time”, you'll see that there's even a Wikipedia page that some people put on, I had nothing to do with it, that talks about it. 

We eventually then sold The Ed Sullivan theater to CBS to do the Letterman show. I opened up studios around the corner in the studio 54 building and continued doing HDTV and other stuff and then got involved with Radio City Music Hall and Madison Square Garden, again, in the form of HDTV, but, more so with Radio City Music and their desire to expand the holiday show, which is the most important product that they're doing there, into bringing a LED screen at that time, one largest in the world that covered the whole back of the stage to be able to embellish the Radio City Music Christmas show, which we did. 

We put the screen up and we created an entire animated and coordinated sync to the background for their holiday show with great success and that brings us to where Comcast came into all of this. 

Yeah. I was going to say there's a lot of connective tissue here that I wasn't really aware of. 

David Niles: Yeah, it was interesting. Comcast, the backstory for Comcast is Comcast, at that time, in 2000, was basically a lot of administrative offices spread, pretty much in separate office buildings all over Philadelphia and Comcast became the major tenant for a spec building that was being proposed by a company called Liberty Property Trust. Liberty Property Trust are real estate developers in the Philadelphia area and my original contact was with the real estate developer that came to me and, I guess it was 2000, 1999, and they had this idea to do this spec 53-story office building in Philadelphia, and they wanted to create a sales center to pitch either anchor tenants or many tenants for their revolutionary new thousand-foot tall building and they found me and they came in and they saw what we could do, and I came up with an idea for creating a sales floor with a lot of virtual things and a lot of features that were like this experience that as soon as you walked off the elevator and it was one long interesting almost theme park ride to sell you on the idea of moving into this building, and the main feature of this thing was a room you ended up in that I designed, it was in the shape of an oval and you would sit in this room and it looked like you were in this oval-shaped room and in front of you was a 16-foot wide by 10-foot tall granite wall and this Brent wall was actually one of the materials of the spec building that Stern had designed, that Liberty Property Trust wanted to build, and the lights would dim automatically and it would go into this 10 minutes show that we produced, that would start out making you believe this is going to be a sales pitch for a building - it's going to have 25 elevators and it's made of granite and it's got 4,000 off spaces, and all of a sudden, you're now going through this 10-minute thing about falling in love with Philadelphia with shots of Philadelphia and interviews with JL and other key people and the architect, about the wonderfulness of being in Philadelphia and why you needed to be in this building. It was a very compelling, absolutely beautiful film.

And at the end of the film, it goes back to this granite wall and this granite wall slides away physically. And it reveals real windows that are actually looking out onto the site for which this building is going to be built and long story short, the lead tenant for this building became Comcast. Comcast decided at that moment, they wanted to unify all of their 5,000 workers into this new building and that this was going to be their new headquarters, and eventually, as they started to build the building, Brian Roberts, who's the CEO of Comcast had made frequent trips to Japan, he’s a very innovative guy, absolutely really smart. 

He decided that this lobby, that Stern had designed, this huge lobby and all of these wood panels. He wanted something that was going to make his 5,000 employees inspired and feel good about moving into this new building. The developer that developed the building, wanted to at the same time, create an instant destination for this new tallest building in Philadelphia and basically, I had just finished doing Radio City and they'd heard about it and they. invited me to pitch them my ideas for what to do in there. And our pitch was that we wanted to do something that was unexpected and we created a whole bunch of animatics and things, and we said if you put screens up in the lobby, you can do time and temperature and because Comcast is basically a cable TV operation, we're going to put up thousand channels. Things that would be typical, but it looked fine and then I said, wait a minute, let's talk about the unexpected, what don't we expect to see? And we incorporate something that is ever-changing and inspiring without interfering with what I consider to be private time of the public. 

Private time of the public means that, when you come through the front door of Comcast and you're walking towards the elevator, you can't do things that are too intrusive, that are screaming at you, not audio-wise, but screaming at you for your attention.

For the Comcast side, it was doing something that would be more a gift to the city. Something that was more socially redeeming without being video art, video art in a negative sense and it had some meaning. For the Liberty Property Trust side, it was their subway station name, that's underneath the Comcast building and there were another 10,000 people that come through that lobby every day, so how can we create a meaningful destination for these people coming up the staircase that allows them to enjoy something and then not feel as though they're missing something if they walk away from? 

So we created this idea of one doing the unexpected and two, using theatrical things because people relate to people, where we take ordinary people doing extraordinary things, that are like fun things to watch and from that, we created this whole plethora of things that could happen up there. And then Comcast came back and they said, “David, these ideas are great. This is wonderful. We love it. But how do you create hundreds of hours, thousands of hours of original programming, because we don't want to be constantly producing for this thing cause it's very expensive, and keep it fresh?” 

So, I went back and designed what we called a content delivery system, which is the system for which we actually get this content up onto the screen that is ever-changing, that's able to create its own content, by connecting pieces of pre-recorded content together in a logical fashion, not random so that it stays fresh. And Brian Robert said, “Okay, David, you can do this, but you've got to guarantee me that I will have two years worth of content that's going to remain valid and appear to be new all the time, without creating hundreds of thousands of hours.” 

Remember that basically scenarios in the Comcast center last about a minute, there's a minute and then it'll go back to being this wood wall, disappearing and then coming back. We rotated about 1200 pieces of content every day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. That's a quantity of content that's impossible. I mean broadcast stations don't even do this. 

This was like in the mid to late 2000s and nobody was talking about direct-view LEDs other than people with jumbotrons.

David Niles: Oh, that was the first challenge. In the mid two thousand, you were looking at LED screens that were 6 millimeters, 8 millimeter, 10 millimeter, jumbotron, so it was first because I needed this to be photorealistic, you had to believe that what you were looking at was actually real, that was part of the magic of it. So I had a longstanding relationship with Barco broadcast from my television days because they make a lot of broadcast products and Barco was doing LED, but LED in 6 millimeter and 8 millimeter. And I went back to Barco and with Barco engineers, we developed the idea of doing a 4 millimeter pixel pitch wall, which for 2006 was revolutionary.

We did tests, we set up eight screens in studios in New York, did subjective tests, objective tests. Again, there were other competing companies that wanted to build this screen, Mitsubishi wanted to build this screen, Daktronics wanted to build this screen, and we eventually ended up developing this with Barco.

Comcast eventually was convinced that Barco was the way to go, and we ended up doing the first NX4, a huge screen. It's 80 feet and it's up to almost 6 million pixels, 6,000 pixels wide. This was revolutionary for its time and then, of course, a content delivery system to be able to deliver to this. There were no servers that would do anything, no pipeline that would do anything larger than HDTV 1920x1080, and we're trying to feed something that's 2000 pixels wide by 10,000 pixels across. That's not going to happen. 

So we ended up designing and building a content delivery system that was capable of doing that. But again, Brian Roberts and Comcast came back to me and they said, “Listen, this is the front face of our building. This is our image. This has to be mission-critical.” And of course, I go back to my days in television, where there's no such thing as something going wrong, you don't do a live downhill skiing event from Switzerland, it's feeding 20 million television sets. There's no such thing as “Oops, the camera doesn't work.” That doesn't happen. I mean it does, you just don't see it. So in designing the content delivery system, we designed several levels of redundancy, such that, in the event of any failure behind the scenes, it would automatically switch over and change so that the problem would remain invisible on the screen.

And in the first eight years of operation, the screen was never turned off. It never ever went down. After eight years of operation, a couple of years ago, it was the end of life for the NX4s so we actually changed all of that, but basically, the new installation, the new content delivery system, and the new screen is based on the same original design. So what levels of redundancy we had built-in, you can't see the problem if there's a problem and eventually, it's a lot of hardware, things do go wrong, but you just can't see them. 

How does Comcast know this is working? How do they measure that this is having the desired impact? 

David Niles: That's a really great question, because Brian Roberts was constantly analyzing and he's very analytic, and even when we were proposing the ideas, we had the meetings in Comcast where he invited 50 people that worked in the building to come up and I made a miniature model of a lobby where we projected story worlds, started animatics and things and scenarios that we were developing and we actually had focus groups come in and vote on paper and tell us what they liked and didn't like, what they thought and even before we actually started shooting, we were having results in 97% off the Richter scale. 

When it finally opened, one of the first things that began to show, other than people that loved the original Comcast experience, was the holiday show. Brian wanted desperately to have, aside from what the wall does every day, during the holiday seasons to run a special holiday show, and the first year that we did the holiday show, within several days of this thing opening, it went viral and the holiday show is a 15 minute or 18 minutes show that ran every hour, 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock, 12 o'clock, eight or nine times a day in the lobby of this office building. And within several days after opening, every show was jam-packed. You could not get into the lobby of the building. The lobby would hold on a couple of thousand people. It was an enormous success and you have to imagine, this is a building lobby, there are no chairs in it, there's no place to sit down. All you can do is stand on this couch on this granite floor and people from all over would come running in on the hour to see this spectacle, and now the holiday show is in its 12th year and because they eventually put in counters and analytics to see how many people came in when they come in, we've had millions, that's plural, millions of visitors. The hardest thing in the world in show business is a free attraction. That's the hardest thing to actually promote, ‘cause I've done, Broadway shows, et cetera. Once people have bought a ticket, they're bought halfway into something, but when you do something for nothing, when it's free, when it’s open to the public, it's the most discerning audience. It's the hardest audience and the success has been phenomenal.

And even though it's part of the design of the wall, we don't do any advertising for Comcast on it. There's almost no branding whatsoever, but this idea of doing a gift to the city, the public relations response to this wall has been extraordinary. And people don't like cable companies, even if you go online and you look up Comcast, you'll see, blogs opened up a little bit of the, we hate Comcast, we don't like the bandwidth, it's screwed me out of this, but that thing that's in the lobby, it's genius. 

Now I don't want to paint you as a one-trick pony because I know you've done other work. What are some of the other projects that your team has worked on lately? 

David Niles: Another one also for Stern, who is the architect of Comcast, we, of course, did the George W. Bush library, which is an interesting 360-degree video experience. It's in the central part of the library complex called Freedom Hall, which is this very tall, huge square room where people gather, after they pass security to go into the library, they gather in this room before they're actually admitted into the library section and as they gather in this room, they're basically looking at what's a drawn level, which is doors and paneling and stuff. But, at about 12 feet high, it turns into what looks like a hand-painted mural that goes 360 degrees around them up to a skylight area. And as they're standing in there, this hand-painted mural, when enough people gather, all of a sudden it starts to come to life. Images of sand dunes and tumbleweeds and a desert landscape, Texas landscape looks hand-painted, and all of a sudden it starts to come to life. Tumbleweeds start to move around. Surround sound, original orchestra track begins to play and this goes into an eight-minute presentation about the office of the presidency, what the office of the presidency actually means. and it's about the fact that our presidents come from the people of the land, to become president and it's done in a way where we're looking at again, it's a very big challenge to shoot these time-lapse images of the American landscape, the textures of the American landscape in 360 degrees, photorealistic above your head and it's a very inspiring thing. People, all of a sudden start pointing, looking. The end of that experience is that the screen explodes into thousands of images, in what looks like, almost passport photos of all kinds of Americans, young, old Americans from a hundred years ago, colors, all races, all this and that. And it turns into this enormous mosaic of these pictures of Americans and some of these pictures are larger than others. And those pictures that are larger than others are actually what looked like passport photos of everybody that's standing in that audience and somebody will notice it and they start pointing and it's like popcorn going off in a popcorn pot. They all start and it's basically, they're incorporated basically thousands of pictures and the pictures begin to dissolve off leaving. Today it would be 40-44 pictures that are up there that are left up there that are 44 presidents, so it's a very inspiring thing. It's about the office of the presidency. It's not necessarily about a particular president. 

But that's a big one. In Washington, DC, we have the Media Arch at the City Center, which is an Archway. There are no two of my installations that are identical. There are similarities to Comcast in so much as it's got rotating entertainment, it's ever-changing, it draws quite a large crowd. 

Other installations we've done pretty much all over America and in Europe and in China, they're all different, but they're very large installations and also some very small ones. What we love to do is challenge ourselves. We constantly deal with clients that are saying, “This is what we want to accomplish. How do we accomplish it?” And what I mean by accomplish is, like in the Comcast experience, Brian Roberts wanted to have his employees feel connected to this building and inspired. At the same time, Liberty Property Trust wanted to create a destination. We love a challenge. The Bush library was another challenge. It was, not to make something specific that is, for Bush, the president, ‘cause that's where the library is here for, this was an overture to the idea of the office of the presidency. In California and in other places, it's people telling us specific goals that they have to see what we can come up with to create something that fills those particularly, sometimes commercial, sometimes not commercial and we love that idea of the challenge.

And again, we've done dozens of tiny lobbies. We have one that we're about to install in New York City, which is a ceiling in a very important office building, but it's very small. The lobby is only 18 feet wide and it's about 80 feet long and we're putting a ceiling in there. The lobby's beautifully been re-redesigned, and here we're creating a virtual ceiling that is an experience that works from the front door you walk into, down this 60-foot lobby that has a reward to it being there without interfering with the architectural design of the lobby, it's complementary. It blends in, it doesn't look like, “Oh, let's put a screen up there and we'll put a lava lamp on it or something. 

All right, David, this was terrific. We could talk for hours. I want to thank you for spending some time with me. It was really interesting. 

David Niles: Thank you so much for the questions, they are really good.

Tomer Mann, 22 Miles

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED - DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

The Silicon Valley firm 22Miles tends to be thought of in digital signage circles as a company focused on wayfinding, but that's only part of the story.

It does indeed do a full set of features that help people navigate their way around malls, medical centers and corporate campuses, but 22Miles has evolved through the years into a rich, API-driven digital signage CMS platform that does a lot more than floor maps.

In this podcast, I caught up with Tomer Mann, a senior executive with 22Miles, and in most respects, the face of the company.

We get into what they're up to, the pivots made to deal with 2020, and how its COVID-19 counter-measure technology has been future-proofed to have a life AFTER this pandemic ends.

We also solve the mystery of the company name. Think horses.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

Tomer, thank you for joining me. I know 22Miles, I'm sure lots of other people do too, but can you give me the rundown on the company for those who are not familiar with your firm? 

Tomer Mann: No problem, Dave. Thanks, so 22Miles was founded in 2007. Our head engineer is actually the founder, so we're very much a Silicon Valley, the cultural mindset of a full CMS platform. He founded the company, primarily as a multi-touch way-finding solution and we've evolved to an immersive digital signage, visual communication platform and we continued to just innovate and add daily features to the system because him being the Silicon Valley mentality, he's got 50% of the company being developers behind him and that's our differentiator that we love to brag about is that we're this full CMS solution that never stops innovating. 

Is it a public or private company?

Tomer Mann:  We're privately owned. 

Okay, and how big? Thirty people, hundred people, three thousand people? 

Tomer Mann: We are 50 to 60 people on average. 

Okay, cool. Silicon Valley is an expensive place to have software developers and engineers. Is the whole headcount there or do you have them dispersed? 

Tomer Mann: We have them dispersed, but we're actually, especially now with everything and there was that California lockdown for a while, we are slowly merging things to our Atlanta or Duluth office. And I think I'm going to be more in Duluth now than anything else. So we're dispersed. We have people in Indiana, Rochester, I'm remote, Sacramento. So we're a little bit everywhere. 

Yeah, these days in particular, but even normally for a software development company, there's not one hell of a lot of need to have everybody under the same roof.

Tomer Mann: No and I think we're learning that more and more that remote does work. As long as you've got good employees that can be accountable for themselves and want to have the company thrive and which means they thrive, I think that remote is going to work and I think remote will be something that a lot of people will shift for as a normal, going forward into this new world.

I don't want to say new normal because everyone says that so I'm going to say new world instead. So I think that it's worked for us for a bunch of years and we were able to not have to worry about remote because we were already doing it. So now it just emphasizes that it is something that makes sense to continue our path forward in. 

What's the story with the name? I don't tend to get fixated on names, but when I type in 22Miles, your company comes up and I think with it a Donnie Wahlberg action movie. 

Tomer Mann: Yeah, that Mark Walberg guy, that Miles 22 movie. It was a good movie. He actually might have helped us if anything else. But yeah, so the head founder being an engineer, wanted a name that made sense around the wayfinding platform that he created and so he dug in, and with 22 miles what he found was that in the olden horse and carriage days, no one would travel in any given direction. So radius directional, more than 22 miles, someone randomly told me that horses can't travel on any given day more than 22 miles so that kind of all makes sense. So for any service from your home, no more than 22 miles. 

Okay. Mystery solved. You started in wayfinding and, as you said, you've evolved. Was that an evolution that was driven by customer asks or, your founder and the head engineer just saw where this could go? 

Tomer Mann: Actually without sounding cocky, it was actually all me. When I joined the company, it was me that said, “This is an amazing platform, but it's not enough and we have to make this a full digital signage platform.” Because we're wayfinding, sure. It could be 2-5 units in a building, but with digital signage it can be hundreds or thousands of units within an organization, especially in hospitality, especially in healthcare, and especially in education and then obviously agile workplace corporations. 

So I put that seed and within a couple of weeks of ideas going back and forth, we were able to redesign a whole new version of the software and a whole new CMS, to really create this immersive platform. 

Now because you'd already had the foundation, the building blocks for this in many ways, you just had to change the UX to some degree. 

Tomer Mann: That's exactly it. 

So is most of the business still derived from wayfinding or do you have people coming to you who don't even do wayfinding? 

Tomer Mann: The majority of the business is actually digital signage now, funny enough, but we are still typecast in the industry for wayfinding.

I think our SEO also is still the strongest for wayfinding and it's great because it is a differentiator, I think, from our 3d wayfinding that we designed and released, we're probably the strongest globally for this 3d editing tool for math module map, design, smart pathway algorithm. So people come to us for that when they see our videos, when they see our marketing and then we open their eyes and we open their minds and sometimes their pocket/books to see, wow, we can do so much more with you as a one-stop-shop, and it's great to see how we can change people's perspective and make them excited that now they've got a cross-platform that they can scale with, and not have to look for other solutions anymore.

Is the 3d side of things important as a user experience or is it as much just like the visual “wow” of it? 

Tomer Mann: It's a little bit of both, honestly. It was a novelty in the beginning, it was just something cool that we can do. Funny enough, Joey, the founder, has an open forum for all of his developers and if they have a great idea, if they come up with something like, “We can develop this within the source code. Can we do it?” He's just yeah, do it rock and roll. And so one of the developers is like, “I know how we can use an SVG file to just create our 3d dimensions within our existing module” and that's how the 3d solution developed. 

So it was at first, really a design scenario, that we added, but through that we leveraged our smart pathway algorithm to create more of a positioning system based on your current kiosk or screen. So actually the screen's position is the 3d experience, leveraging our 3d engine, as a 360 so it spins you a certain way. So it actually creates a better orientation for where to go, whether you go North or you go South or you go East, or you go West versus the 2d maps or the flat maps that you're just like, “There's your arrow” and you’re like, “Wait, do I need to go forwards or backward? I'm not sure.” 

So we can orient that now so it’s more about the physical experience that this 3d wayfinding does. 

How do you counteract the arguments that I'm sure to come up here and they're saying, “why do we need a big screen wayfinding application when everybody's walking around with a smartphone and they can just scan a QR code or whatever, and do it off of their phone?”

Tomer Mann: I'm not gonna argue with that. We do mobile solutions on our platform. So if you want mobile, we're still your solution to go to, so I don't care if you want a kiosk or a mobile application. I bet some of my systems integration partners might hate me for that comment, but our platform supports full mobile native and HTML capabilities and design. We can also do an SDK plugin. I actually tell every one of my clients and partners that they should be leveraging mobile and they should consider adding that to the scope. 

Now, a lot of the time, yes, because we work with so many AV integrators, they obviously come to us for a kiosk solution but we always tell them and their clients or end-users to add our mobile application, what we call a carry-to-mobile and the reason it's carry to mobile is that it's actually starting from the kiosk. So there's no reason not to have a kiosk as your point A, whereas your reference points or app nowadays as access control or check-in solution that incorporates the hoteling. So you visually have this as you walk into the building. 

Now we've added voice control. So now you voice your name or we add an active directory, single sign-on. So it knows where you are at with an exchange integration and shows you visibly how to get there. And then you just scan from the kiosk or QR code and you carry that entire experience on your phone and you go off, on the path. 

So we definitely suggest both. We don't suggest one or other when we really think both work harmoniously together. 

And it makes sense because for the people who are arguing that a phone is good enough, that UX, that visual experience still has to be developed anyway. 

Tomer Mann: Exactly.

I don't want to get fixated on wayfinding because I heard what you said that a lot of the business is just core digital signage. 

Why are they coming your way? I mean there are a lot of digital signage options out there so what attracts them to 22Miles, your end-users?

Tomer Mann: Yeah, there is a lot and I think that's the problem, it's almost a saturated market with a lot of solutions that are niche that have certain feature sets and that's really it. They're stuck in this little bubble. People come to us because they want an all-in-one platform, not just the digital signage software component and so we are that platform better than any other solution in the world because we continuously evolve this product and add more and more features and enhance those features, enhance the workflow and customizations of those property settings and those visual filters, and those API integrations.

So people come to us because we've got so much to offer, the building blocks are there for scalability and whether you just want a digital menu board, or you're starting with the digital menu board, and now you want an interactive video wall, or you want a mobile component to talk to the video, they're not going to find that in a lot of other software solutions. We are that total package deal and that's why I think people get really excited when they realize that ‘cause a lot of times they do come for one solution and their eyes open up to everything they can do with our cross-platform application.

So I think that's a big thing is that we've got this total solution, an immersive application ecosystem for digital technology, digital media. Even design firms come to us because it's a drag and drop WYSIWYG and they don't have to develop stuff anymore from scratch, they really just still have their design methodology there, their UI/UX, and they'll still get the exact experience without having to do full development anymore because it's just a blank canvas and all of the properties, all of the settings, all of the widgets are right there for them to assemble their vision. 

So from a novice to a graphic designer, our platform meets the needs of almost everyone and I really don't know anyone else that has that story to tell. 

So what you're saying is you could have a large technology company that's full of coders and pushes content out to mobile, pushes it out to social channels, pushes it out to the web and they could using your APIs, also push it into a digital signage network without having to do the whole nine yards of your UX and everything, they can just plug into it? 

Tomer Mann: Yep and we've actually enhanced a lot, looking at some of the market, where it's leaning towards more of a web-based, designers and portals and we were historically more of a Windows desktop designer and management system.

So since then, we've evolved to have both options. And our web portal has become night and day, especially our new version 6 release, where we have certain features on there.that what we call “quick edit settings” that can be done by someone with zero training to what we call “pro edit”, where someone can now design from scratch and it piggybacks from the web to the desktop version so seamlessly to any kind of player, a BrightSign player, the Samsung Tiezen, the LG Web OS, Android and Windows. I think the only thing we don't support is Linux, but people definitely see the advantage in simplicity to just make quick edits, quick changes on the fly, and anywhere they're at.

And so I think the more we're adding into the web, and taking a lot of the desktop features into the web, the more, again, we're going to stand apart from everyone else that's the HTML solution in the world. 

Yeah, I'd been making the argument lately. I just did a presentation the other day, talking about how a lot of the entry-level generalist digital signage CMS platforms are at severe risk of being completely disintermediated because there are platforms out there that are just API rich and don't require you to even use their front-end or anything. You just work with it the way you work with other things and that's where I see things going. Is that your sense?

Tomer Mann: Yeah. I think people want things to be autonomous. They want things to auto-sync, they don't want to have to make changes on a daily basis. So the more a solution can integrate with their existing feeds, their APIs, their management software, their Tableaus vs. their Office 365 vs. their Salesforce vs. Facebook, Instagram. If all of those things can marry very easily together with just  a data source and a token or whatever, and they can be completely hands-off, they're very happy about that and that's something that we've always had, this API's strengths really works with anything and people can just be hands-off. The system is going to dynamically update because we've added this automation and people love that and so most of the time people are just letting those data sources do a lot of the work for them and then at certain contributor level, cause we got a whole approval workflow scenario, you can you just do like a media zone where they're changing an image or a slideshow or an MP4 and that's it, and they're done in 30 seconds. 

And if a solution doesn't have those integrations, if they don't have that simple drag and drop then they're going to be left behind really quickly.

Yeah, it's okay for the muffler shops and nail salons and everything, but you're not going to get very many large clients unless you can do all that. 

Tomer Mann: And we work with Fortune 100 companies, and Fortune 500. We have multi-tenant solutions that have 200 sites worldwide, or 225 offices worldwide with thousands of mixed solutions from video walls, touchscreen video walls, room bookings, mobile wayfinding, the wayfinding, digital communication, or infotainment displays and it's just a mosh-posh of all these digital components in there.

 They've got some central control and then each office has its own localized control as well so yeah, I don't think a mom and pop shop can deal with that kind of level. 

No, we'll get into the COVID countermeasure stuff that you guys have developed, but, pre-COVID and now, do you have a sense of what verticals were quite active in 2019 and how things have changed in 2020?

Tomer Mann: Sure. Hospitality very active, 2018-2019 for obvious reasons, no go in 2020. We're getting here and there. Actually, some of them are coming back in the last couple months, but not a fraction of where they were. Healthcare for obvious reasons has had other focuses in 2020. Education has wanted to do things, but they have no idea when they're coming back online. Some are trying to reopen, some are like “Nope, we are spiking again, we got to close”. So they haven't done that well. Those three were really good for us in 2019.

Corporate sas really picked up in the last couple of months, especially since we wrote out that white paper recently about the technology IN the new workplace design from the lobby, you'd leveraging our temperature sensors or temp defense system to now adding the wayfinding and hoteling, so you know where your room is and following a one-way pathway using our modeling rules to hot desking so finding which cubicle you should or can sit at while maintenance and sanitizing and other ones. 

We're doing voice control or virtual receptionist so you're able to talk to someone, and then get further information or the delivery service man leaves a package, having the mobile application and now also the desktop notification. So even working from home, we have a solution for them, for an organization or a department to send to their team, either a screensaver or widget information. And I call it the virtual water cooler experience or gossip experience at home. So we've literally touched a little of everything in this white paper, did a good job to talk about that and a lot of our partners share that with their corporations and we've been really fortunate to have a good uptick in corporate, continuing that Transportation's down, Shopping malls are obviously down. So I think really Corporate has been like the major bread and butter of 2020, but there are still some amazing projects there. 

Yeah and you would think, with offices clearing out because of COVID restrictions and everything that Corporate would be problematic, but as you note, it will come back and is coming back to some degree and while.

Offices may never quite look the same way as they did, even those people who work from home may be coming in two days a week or whatever and maybe as you say, work at a hot desk instead of a full-time desk and that sort of thing. 

Tomer Mann: Yeah, I think a lot of the property management, the CBREs, the JLLs, the Cushman's, they created a whole new design around hoteling and hot desking and that experience, and a lot of that is to sanitize certain desks over other ones, to social distance people from each other, so all of that needs a visual experience, not only for the users but also for maintenance, for the admins, and also for security so they're all aware of what's happening and it helps with trace tracking and all of that stuff. And then they're adding sensors into the experience as well. They're adding occupancy and density control solutions. So all of that's going to be the technology of the future, I think and it makes sense and it keeps people safe, and is kind of still agile at the same time. 

Right, so tell me about temp defense and protection as a service, in the context of thermal sensing and all that, what distinguishes what you have from the way too many thermal sensor gadgets that drop into my inbox every morning?

Tomer Mann: Did you happen to read the IPVM article by the way recently? They had all of the tests they just did on all of those temperature sensor solutions. They had huge callouts on the Glory Stars, the BMSs, and the Good View and all of those, I'm not going to name some of the names that they made a big list, but let's just say our name wasn't on that list. 

The reason for that is all of the solutions out in the marketplace are just basically putting a facelift on a Chinese software application with some sensors. 

Yeah. And it's just hygiene theaters they say, right? 

Tomer Mann: Yup. There's no proof in the accuracy. There's no support, because who are you calling? And a lot of them are just kiosk solutions that literally, they didn't test the application and just decided to roll this out quickly and some of my system integrators, even partners did the same and I still make fun of them about that.

We saw that experience already in March, cause we were getting hit by Chinese vendors trying to say, why don't you use our sensors? And I'm like, this is ridiculous. So I immediately said we need to develop our own. So we wanted to have a made in America experience, especially with GDPR and privacy and all of that. We knew that this would happen and we had the foresight to that and we basically pivoted in March by April, we had a working system leveraging FLIR sensors. So a US-based solution. We knew that this company had the best and most accurate sensors for us to work with. We didn't need a black body for it as well and we just created an algorithm for better accuracies and literally every deployment, we had to go on the fly sometimes and we just continued to enhance the software to make accuracy better, to make the experience better, to add face mask detections that we needed, badge integrations, we needed printing capabilities.

Then we created our own video call server. So we have our own virtual receptionist capability. We wanted voice command into it. So we have the voice commands. You're not touching the screen with the CDC questionnaires. And then we did a mobile CDC questionnaire that you scan on the sensors. So we continue adding more and more of these features, that I don't think anyone can say they have that, because they're relying on a different provider where we are the one-stop-shop.

And so we continue to add more of these features, continue to improve the AI and machine learning and algorithm for our accuracy and I think that's what's going to put us apart from everyone else and then ELO has teamed up with us. We're working with some others, Peerless and Kiosk.com and a lot of display manufacturers, we're working with Microsoft Surface, to Lenovo, to ELO, to Aida, to MIMO, there’s AOPEN, they've all teamed up with us knowing who we are and what we can provide. And so we've created a really powerful solution to benefit from safety and agility for business continuity without having to worry about who am I calling or is this real or is it just a fake?

And I think that's the story and the value add that we want everyone to know. And we're happy about that and the extra benefits and this is how you and I started in the first place. I'm like, “I need to talk to Dave” because you made a comment about a lot of these solutions are probably just gonna be put in the closet cause they're not going to be needed anymore. And I was like, no, not 22Miles, because again, you're buying 22Miles software when you're buying temp defense and so you can repurpose this application for another solution if you feel like you don't need sensor temperature-sensing anymore. So if now you want to do interactive wayfinding or an interactive check-in or a voice-based questionnaire, or virtual receptionist, now you've got the ELO or whatever display that you can repurpose with our software and you have this CMS to edit your layout, your UI/UX and I think that's another really powerful value add with us versus anyone else in the marketplace. 

Yeah, I think future-proofing is really important right now because there's not a whole bunch of drunk sailors spending out there. You really have to think through what you're going to cut a PO for.

Tomer Mann: Yeah, I think the drunk sailor buying was already done, worked with a few different distributors and stuff like that, and they had a huge influx, like millions of units right away sold, and all of those people are annoyed, some are pissed and now the savvier, more future thinkers are coming to us because they need those extras. Those controls, those badge integrations, the virtual receptionist component is really huge for us. So we're getting more of that tech-savvy, big picture people coming to us now for those differentiators. 

What's protection as a service?

Tomer Mann: So TempDefend was where we started and then we realized there was more to the story, there's more to what we can do and like the virtual receptionist, the voice command, so we decided let's separate that from TempDefend and make those their own features and their own components.

And so virtual receptionists, where we had team and teams integration, WebEx integration, now we have our own system. The voice command, I think just makes sense for every interactive video wall, so we have that as an extra feature and a plugin or a widget now in our software, that anyone can leverage and then we decided we wanted to do something more so we created what's called secure mobile control, which is a way to operate a touchscreen or a video wall without having to touch anymore. So we created this remote app for your phone. So you've got a touchpad on an on-screen keyboard, and it basically operates as a mouse cursor on any screen, and it's called secure mobile control and we decided to just give that away for free so this is a feature we developed to just benefit everyone, and it's just a free software application. So again, all of these things are protective feature sets to avoid or COVID proof or virus-proof your digital signage experience. 

From there we decided our wayfinding with hoteling and one way or scheduled or controlled pathways made perfect sense for social distancing, where you can have data analytics for maintenance or sanitation to know what to sanitize. So now you're protecting people from cubicles or an office perspective. So with all of this digital technology, we figured out a way to leverage what we had, pivoted with some new features and create this suite of applications moving forward and that's where protection as a service came from. 

And the “as a service” suggest that it's something that you basically subscribe to, right? 

Tomer Mann: Yes, a lot of them are going into our SAS model option, or you can add as a service some of these extra features other than secure mobile control, which is free.

Okay. All right. thank you, Tomer. That was great and very interesting. 

Tomer Mann: No, thank you, David. Really appreciate it and always great to connect.

 

AVIXA Digital Signage Power Hour – October 2020 Roundtable On QSR & Drive-Thru

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED - DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

The QSR industry has been dramatically impacted by COVID-19, and some operators have fared much better than others for the simple reason that they had drive-thru lanes.

If the business relied on walk-in and dine-in traffic, they were in trouble. But if they had drive-thru lanes with pre-sell and menu displays, they tended to make out OK. What might have been 70% of their business went up past 90%.

Last week I moderated a roundtable panel on digital signage and the QSR business, chatting for  almost an hour with top people from companies active in the space - both vendors and end-users.

The Digital Signage Power Hour was hosted by AVIXA and sponsored by STRATACACHE. I led a discussion with Dan Williams from Stratacache, who worked with McDonald's on its massive digital deployment, Sara Grofscik of Samsung, who runs the QSR business there, Dave Petricig of PingHD, and Todd Hoffman, the digital lead for Krispy Kreme, and the subject of a recent 16:9 podcast.

The session starts with me rattling through some observations, and then we dive in.

AVIXA's Marcella Walsh can be heard at the back-end, answering some listener questions.

You can also watch the webinar online here ...

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

No transcript on this one. Too many competing voices!

Joe King, Philips

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED - DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

Philips has really come on in recent years in the digital signage ecosystem, taking on more and more presence at trade shows and releasing smart display products that my industry contacts have consistently said great things about.

You probably have a consumer product like a shaver or electric toothbrush made by Philips, and assume that the commercial display products come out of that Dutch company. They do … and don’t, and I get into that in a chat with Joe King, a Senior Director with the company, who drives North American sales.

Joe and I talk about where its smart display lineup is at, and its use of Android. We also talk about its own CMS software, which he stresses is NOT intended to compete with commercial software products. It’s meant to service the very basic needs of small businesses.

We talk about market conditions, and how the professional display company has kind of skated through all of this COVID mess … because the desktop monitor side of the business has exploded with Work From Home demands.

We explore the company’s camera-driven access control offer for retail, and who’s buying direct view LED these days.

And finally, we get into what to look for from Philips in the next 12-18 months.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

Joe King, thanks for joining me. We've met in the past. I know Phillips well, and I think generally a lot of people know Phillips. One of the things that sometimes when I'm introduced to Phillips people, they kind of explained to me the background of the display side of the company. They may have Phillips toothbrushes on all kinds of things at home, but Phillips’s professional display is, as I understand it, the trading name for some other large companies. 

Joe: Yeah. Dave, thank you. Good to be with you by the way, and thank you for having me. Yeah, so we operate as Phillips. We operate under a license from Phillips. We're actually a global company called TPV. It's based out of Taiwan and we operate with a commercial license globally for digital signage, as well as a professional TV. So signage TV, hotel TV, we operate that pretty much around the world.

There are a couple of little pockets that are exceptions, but for the most part, we operate that around the world. So we have the power of TPV behind it and the manufacturing power of TPV behind it, which we're quite happy about. I think most of the industry probably doesn't know the name, but we're the world's largest manufacturer of desktop monitors. We're the world's third-largest manufacturer of televisions. And we like having THEM behind us because it gives us a lot of product development power, and also a lot of manufacturing power when we need it. So, happy you bring that up and thank you for the question. really 

There are some big companies in Taiwan. I've been there two or three times. I was there about a year ago. And, man, I was off to see AUO, but we went right by the TSMC, they're the biggest semiconductor maker in the world and this place was the size of a Ford plant. 

Joe: Yeah. It's nice having that manufacturing power behind us.

Where do you guys sit in terms of market share in North America and in Europe as well? I think in terms of Samsung and LG being top of the pile in North America, but you guys have really come on in the last two or three years. 

Joe: We have and even with COVID, Dave, we've been able to increase our share a little bit. So I think it depends on the day of the week, we are #4-#5. We tend to swap back and forth with another brand there at that level. But certainly, we don't have the market power of a Samsung or even an LG, but, as you say, we're growing certainly in North America and North America is a focus for us now.

We're the number three digital signage player in Europe. Again, behind the two large brands that you mentioned, but there's a real focus with us on North America because we feel like we're now getting our act together, so to speak. We've improved the product line. We've put world-class service in place, something that I think we can differentiate ourselves with, but yeah, we see North America as a real focal point for us. 

You joined or the company joined, what many of the display manufacturers have done in terms of adding systems-on-chip displays to their lineup? And one of the things that I've I've known about Philips is that a lot of the software companies that kind of try the different smart display platforms out there have tended to say that the Phillips’ one is really good, it's very modern Android, powerful, runs like a top and everything else. 

How much of your product line is built around a system-on-chip now? Like the commercial display product line. 

Joe: A lot. In terms of just sheer models, if we were just looking at a percentage of the models, we're probably getting close to 75%. We'll try to offer a model that doesn't have it if we're just trying to hit a price point. But for the most part, especially as you get into the higher ends of the line, almost everything has an Android operating system in it, and we see the business going that way.

I'm a firm believer and I've been in the hardware business, a long long time. I'll age myself if I say how long, but I really do think that software is going to be the driver of this business going forward, and I think that our Android platform, as you say, it performs very well. We see it in large deployments, where it's accessible. It is an open platform, which we like, and we certainly see our business heading that way. 

Something that you hear from the software companies, as well as integrators and end-users that they like that it's open. And, you know, some of the other guys have their own proprietary operating system working with it, whereas I've heard others say we really like that we can work on just Android and do what we need to do without learning or tweaking something. 

Joe: Right. Well, there's a level of consistency, I guess, would probably be the best way to say that. But yes, we get that feedback a lot and I think one of the things that we've done that might be a little different is we tend to try to stabilize On an Android version. So if we see something that we like, that's very stable, you know, we had Android 4.4.4 in the market for quite a long time. And even though there were a lot of updated versions, we kept saying to the marketplace, “This is stable, why do you want to even think about upgrading firmware and trying to mess things up?”

So we tend to draw a line in the sand, if you will, that a particular Android version and we've been very consistent in that. And I think our software partners like that approach actually. 

And where are you now? I think you're at 7. 

Joe: We actually have some displays with 8. We have two different, I think it's 7.1 in the marketplace as well as an 8 today.

Are there any objections still from end users saying, well, you know, it's a system-on-chip? What if something happens with the panel? I gotta replace the whole panel or it's not as powerful enough or anything like that. 

Joe: Certainly I think we tend to get those questions. I think we've proven with some of the demonstrations and stuff that we've done that certainly, the platform is powerful enough.

I think honestly, Dave, the way to answer that is that we've put a service organization in place that we think is second to none in the industry. So if somebody does need a fast replacement, we have the ability to do that. We offer people a 24-hour turnaround. We certainly understand that if it's a menu board in a quick-serve restaurant and it goes out, it can't be their black for a very long time at all.

So we certainly offer the marketplace, those opportunities for quick replacement and that's one of the reasons we do it. We have a very reliable product. I would put it up against anybody else in the industry, which is why we talk about that quick turnaround service, because we know we're not going to need it very much. 

Have you ever run into a smart display where the smarts have died and the panel had to be pulled down? Cause I ask this question a lot and I've never heard anybody say that's actually happened. 

Joe: No, I haven't. And it's a good question. I think again, we try to separate those two. So, the Android operating system is separate, literally a separate board, if you will, from the display itself so those aren't tied together. Now certainly, if a display goes black, it's going to go black regardless, but I haven't seen them tied together that way and it may be just because of the design of our product. 

Right, but I mean that the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that gets someone out there around system-on-chip displays is if there is a problem with the CPU, which you know, is a separate component from the display components and so on, you can't just open a trap door and snap on out and pop a new one. You got to take the whole thing down. But I've never actually heard anybody say this has happened. 

Joe: I haven't either. I haven't seen it. You could always make the argument, you know, indifference to my friends at BrightSign that you could see the same thing with a player and I think we just like this approach. We think the improved service or the improved performance of the Android operating system is worth the investment. And we don't see a risk. We really don't, and as I said, I think some of the installations we have would certainly support that.

What happens on the install side itself? I have heard some solutions providers say that field servicing drops like a boulder because we don't have all these connectors. 

Joe: Yeah. I think you're right. I think, you know, even from our standpoint, we offer our software partners the opportunity for us to preload the software, you know, we have a high touch warehouse facility where we can do that and make the installation process even easier.

So I think that's one of the things that we offer that may be unique to a system-on-chip product. I will oversimplify, it's not as easy as just hanging it and going, but it certainly can make the installation much easier to do with some of the pre-loading capability that we have.

And from what I've heard is because there aren't any HDMI cables and other cables associated with them, there's nothing to wiggle loose and, cause a truck roll. 

Joe: Yeah, well, I'll share it with you. We review service metrics every month and we know that on average, about 65% of the calls we get into our call center are exactly that, it's what I would call operator error. So, things like the cable has come loose, a power cord has come loose and typically we see, it'll be a little higher, some months, a little lower some months, but typically about 65% of the calls we get, we resolve over the phone and it is cable related. And so I think that's just another argument for having a totally contained system.

Yeah. Remove the points of failure. 

Joe: You got it. Exactly. 

So what is CMND, I assume it’s an acronym for Command? 

Joe: Exactly. So it is our “create and maintain” product, so it is a product that we let people create their own content. And I will say to everybody, we do it at a very elementary level. We don't pretend to be able to do some of the things that some of the other software companies out there can do. This is a way for, if you're an individual restaurant owner, and you own a deli and you want to put something up on a screen, this is a way to make PowerPoint and get it onto a screen fairly easily. It's a way for a school, as an example, if they need to broadcast an emergency message, this is an easy way to have that happen, and then it also gives you controls. 

So it can, again, I'll use those schools as an example if there's an emergency message that needed to be broadcast, it can be done from a central location and get to every product. We also utilize it, just like some of the other manufacturers, in very large installations. You can turn them all on with a button click, you can turn them all off with a button click. So just creating software and being able to control the systems as well. And, that's why we call it Command. 

So you're not trying to sell against your software partners or anything?

Joe: No way, as I said, we don't pretend to be that good. We're not in the software business. We're a hardware company, but as I said earlier, I think the software is the key going forward. So we want to make our product as seamless as it possibly can be for our software partners.

We're not trying to take their place. 

What I've seen with some of the display guys is a move to create a kind of foundational software that's a device management and control as you describe it that you could then port a web application onto, and maybe if you've got a special purpose thing where you really don't need all of the bells and whistles and capabilities of the CMS, you can just use command or CMND as the kind of the baseline platform.

Is that accurate? 

Joe: Yeah, I think that's a fair portrayal. As I said, it’s meant to be kind of elementary. And, look, there are people out there that do the software side really really well. And even the control functionality they do, better than we do. So, this is meant to be a very basic product.

You know, the great thing about it is, it's free. We don't charge for it. That's a little bit different than some of our competitors. But again, we're not charging for it because it is a very basic system. 

And these are end-users, buyers who are otherwise just not gonna get a CMS anyways unless they get something free or one of the freemium ones out there? 

Joe: Exactly. 

So, I think two or three years ago, I went to a lot of trade shows. That's more accurately say I used to go to a lot of trade shows and I can recall, let's say about three years ago, going to ISE and seeing a direct-view LED in the Phillips booth for the first time. 

So you guys have gotten into that. How do you differentiate your product in a very crowded field? 

Joe: Yeah, great question. The last time you and I actually spoke to each other and recorded anything was Infocom a year ago about LED and so, of course, COVID has impacted it. We have sold some units, I'm happy to say, and some of them are going on now, but I think that the big differentiator for us, as I talked a year ago, is kits. So we tend to put LED together and a pre-configured kit, you know, we've been very successful with video walls doing the same thing, so it comes together with the display, it comes together with a mouse and it comes together with all the processing equipment you need, the cables. And so we tend to believe in these kits and that's where our success has been in North America. A similar thing in Europe, we've seen, people are going to want custom screens and we'll certainly give them the opportunity to do that. But for us, the success really is those kits. I think the first three installations where you've done or in the process of doing in the US have all been kits versus custom.

I've heard that a lot and the prevailing opinion seems to be that you have specialty LED companies who understand everything about very large installations, big canvases, weird shapes, and everything else, but you've got this whole big second tier of integrators and solutions writers who don't work with LED very often and they don't necessarily understand it or get it, and don't have the cycles to just become experts on this, so a kit is something they can wrap their heads around. 

Joe: Yeah, I think so. And I think that where we're looking at selling this and where we've been successful is mostly in the corporate market. and also some of the consumer markets. We have a couple of partners that are really quite strong in the consumer market and some of these LED kits that we have worked really well are home theaters and that's where we've had some of our success. 

And on the corporate side, is it primarily conference rooms and control rooms, that kind of thing? 

Joe: Not conference rooms, more lobbies. In fact, the first installation we did was a corporate lobby, even in COVID, it's still something that proceeded and was installed. So, yeah, we are seeing more lobbies than conference rooms. 

Yeah. More broadly with digital signage in general, what are those vertical markets that seem to be working right now, even amidst all of this nuttiness? 

Joe: I think we've all been really surprised. I think we all expected that retail would get impacted and retail has been impacted, but I think we've all certainly been surprised at how well, certainly quick-serve restaurants, pizza, you know, the brick and mortar, home improvement, you know, large chain stores have done.

We're seeing a lot of activity in drug stores as an example. So it's really surprised me how well that retail itself has maintained. Certainly, we've seen a huge increase in education. I think a lot of those early dollars went to Chromebooks and laptops and everything else for students, but we're really seeing now an increase in some of the displays that are used for education, as kids do end up back in the classroom. 

Well, you know, all those places have a lot of change going on and, it's not, “This is what we're doing for the next three months, It can change in an hour.” 

Joe: Yeah, exactly, and I think we've seen some of that and certainly if you look at corporate as an example, I think in the US there's really a tendency to step back, about going back to work if you will, where I think in some other parts of the world, we've seen people go back to work a little more quickly.

Certainly, we've seen that in Europe. We've seen people go back into offices a little more quickly, you know, just a personal observation, I think we need to do that here. I think people need to get back into some kind of a normal routine and I think the office can be part of that. And I certainly hope that we're doing that as we get into 2021.

Yeah, I do wonder about this whole shift to work from home, how that will play out. I think it works very well for some people. I've been doing it forever, so I'm used to it, but I think there's a whole bunch of people who do their best work when they're in a collaborative environment and they can share.

Joe: Yeah. I'll share just a quick side note, I mean, I'm like you. I've worked from home for forever, I have a great setup. I can do it, but there are people in my group who, once we made the announcement that we would open the office back up, they couldn't wait to get back there, you know, social distancing and everything else that we planned for.

They still just felt that they were more productive in the office. And we have some that aren't and that's perfectly fine. We've given them that opportunity, but to your point, some of those people, whether they be supply chain-related or product development related, who just feel like they're a whole lot more productive in the office where they have the tools they need and I think a lot of companies are going to see that same thing. 

I certainly think that technology is going to have to help there and hopefully, digital signage can be part of that, whether it's collaborative displays, being able to Zoom effectively if you will but I think technology can help there. And I think that's part of why we're seeing corporate, maybe not as respond as quickly, is because they're still trying to figure that out. 

Going back to retail, Philips introduced something called “People Count” like two-three months ago or maybe more. Can you explain what that is? 

Joe: Sure. So it's a product that we in collaboration with a camera manufacturer, and then there's some software that we actually developed that works with our Android product. But it's basically a way to count people as they come into a retail establishment and then it's up to that retail establishment to tell the system how many people it can allow. So it counts them going in and it counts them going out so that if you can only have a hundred people in your store at one time, it will literally put the red light up, and tell people to wait and that it's not safe to enter yet. And then when somebody does exit, it'll give them a green light, and depending on how large that display is, it gives them a chance to tell people, a mask is required. You can't come in without a mask. It gives them a chance to tell them some of the things they're doing to keep their area clean.

And so it was very well received. I think it's been more well-received in Europe. I think in the US it's been almost on a state by state basis, as to how locked down those States still are. Certainly in California, it's been a very effective product. You know, in some other parts of the country, it's been really effective.

And then frankly, and honestly we've seen some areas of the country that just say, well, we're not going to worry about monitoring people coming. To be honest, it's been kind of hit and miss depending on where you are in the country. 

Yeah, I think I have heard it more broadly that in Europe, the idea of retail access controls as more demand and more take-up because there are pretty stiff fines associated with having too many people in the store. And I guess city bylaw enforcement officers in different jurisdictions who are pretty happy to write tickets on that. Cause they're incentive based on what they do, whereas as you say, it's state by state in the US. 

I live in a part of Canada where we've seen very few cases, but I've seen none of this stuff and it's still, teenagers acting as bouncers, you know, to get into a home Depot or something like that. So I think it kind of depends on where you are. 

Joe: Exactly. Where I live locally and I live in Tennessee, when it first started, there were people standing in front of the grocery store chain.

I go to counting people as they went in and counting people as they went out and they're all using walkie talkies, and now there's none of that going on, you know? And so I think they've just made a corporate decision that we don't need to spend that money, to try to monitor who's coming in and out whether they have a mask on or not.

And where again, I think there are some areas of the country where they're really still trying to do that and that's where we've seen success with that product. 

Have you had to work with some of these resellers and buyers who say, “guys, this isn't a product just for the moment. You can sweat this asset post-COVID”, presumably there is a post-COVID, have you had to do that? 

Joe: It's been one of the selling points we've had to make to everybody that's purchased it. I think that's been the capital outlay. We had one large retailer that bought it for right at a hundred locations and one of their biggest questions was what do I do with it when I no longer have to count people? And so I think that was where we came back and said to them, well, here's what you can do with it. We put them in touch with another software partner. Thankfully, this particular client is a digital signage user anyway, but I think that we've had that question from almost everybody: what do I do after, and is this investment that I'm making now going to be something I can recoup even down the line? And so, yeah, we've linked them up with software companies to try to maximize that.

I think there's a little bit of gateway drug stuff going on there where this is something that can get a retailer or another kind of a business that takes a lot of public foot traffic in, and get them understanding what you can do with digital signage and kind of migrate out from there.

You could imagine once you start using cameras and sensors and things like that, you can start to understand how the store works and where people go and how that changes by time of day, all that stuff. 

Joe: Right. Exactly. 

So there's a lot of talk in the cheap seats where I spent a lot of my time, that LCD is a product that's going to go away and we're all going to shift to direct-view LED and to micro-LED. Is that something that Phillips largely sees is happening or is there always a role for LCD because I kind of think there is when I really think about it. 

Joe: I think we've been talking about the demise of LCD for years, right? And I just don't see it. I think there are two totally different products, and I think that there's always going to be an application for LCDs. 

Do I think that eventually some of the video wall applications that we do today with LCD will end up being direct-view LED? I think, yeah, that's a possibility, but I still think even as fast as the cost is coming down, I still think there's going to be an opportunity. There are just things that we can do with LCD that you struggle to do with direct-view LED and a lot of that is just based on the economics and how much money people have to spend. 

You know, Dave, I don't see a school system putting in direct-view LEDs, at least before I end up retiring. I think that's a number of years away before that becomes a cost-effective solution for them and that's where some of the large screen stuff that we have and our competitors have, you know, really works in some of those verticals. You know, will you see it in transportation more quickly? Probably. When you're looking at what belt is my luggage on, does that turn into direct-view? Yeah, I think that probably is some of the first things that will happen to replace a traditional video wall. But yeah, I don't see it being that quick. 

Yeah. I mean, the minute you get into utilizing what's possible with a 4K display, uou just can't do that even on a micro-LED display, you know, to have fine characters and fine detail and all that. It's just not the same thing.

Joe: Well, and you also just look at the content. I think a lot of it is content dependable, you know?

So if you look at moving video, I think it lends itself to either format. But if you're looking at static content, think about a menu board in a quick-serve restaurant, I don't think that that is really going to be a direct-view LED Canada for the foreseeable future, just because I think it works just fine on LCD and it's much more affordable. 

So the last question: in this weird world that we live in, I wonder how this has had an impact on things like roadmaps and product releases and all that. What should we be expecting to see from Phillips over the next 12 to 18 months? 

Joe: Yeah. I guess we're fortunate because Dave, we are part of a large global company that is kind of diversified if you will. Our desktop monitor business has been off the charts as you can imagine. And I think in a lot of ways that's enabled it to support some of the development and some of the things we're doing in digital signage where some of the other companies may have had to look at scaling back a little bit.

So we're proceeding. We're going to produce in the fourth quarter of this year. Sometimes people look at us and say, what the heck are you doing? But we're going to introduce collaborative displays for corporate offices. We're going to introduce touch displays for education that are upgraded with some great systems behind them. We're going to introduce professional signage TV. We see that as an expanding market for us and others. It's basically a very cost-effective digital signage product that also has a TV tuner in it. So it's really made for use in a corporate environment. You know, we talked about conference rooms earlier. This is a really perfect product for that conference room, because it is a TV which also has Chromecast built into it. It gives you that seamless connectivity. And then it also gives you that CMND software, and the ability to control. If you've got multiple screens in a facility, it gives you a chance to control that as well, but it really is a cost-effective product. And we liked the fact, I think the big differentiator there is Chromecast and the ability to connect things, similarly, our education product will give you the ability to connect up 64 devices to it. So if you're a teacher and you have students with Chromebooks, Think about the ability to have, one of your students throw something up on the display instead of the teacher always having to control that and being the one doing that. So we like the flexibility that it gives us. 

That would terrify me if I taught a bunch of 17-year-old boys. (Laughter)

Joe: Yeah, it probably would, but, to get back to the premise of your question to your question. I was on a call this morning and we were talking about 2022 and we're in full planning mode. We were firm believers going in and my Marketing Manager would back me up on this, that we haven't really slowed down because we feel like if you start cutting and slashing, it's going to be a little more difficult to respond and maintain. Thank goodness, we haven't had to furlough anybody.

We haven't laid anybody off. We've maintained everybody, even in a market that we all know is down. And I think part of that will give us success, whether it's Q1 or Q2, whenever we see ourselves coming out of this. I think that puts us in a position and our company's a firm believer in this, that it puts us in a position where we can have more success coming out of this.

All right. That was terrific. I enjoyed our chat. 

Joe: Yeah, David's good to talk to you again. 

Rod Roberson, Wallboard

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED - DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

In the before times, when we did nutty things like fly on planes and walk around in crowds, I went to ISE in Amsterdam, and made a point of stopping by the small stand of a company called Wallboard.

An industry friend had suggested I check them out, so I popped by and had what turned into a lengthy demo. I walked away impressed and amused, thinking, "These guys are mad scientists."

Wallboard is a digital signage content management system like countless other systems on the market. What distinguishes them is a focus on IOT devices and data integration. The demo I had, thinking way back, involved a weigh scale and booze, as part of an access control system for factories.

Booze on your breath, you get pulled off to the side. If you weigh more than you did leaving than when you entered, the system and a screen flags that ... and then security people look in your pockets for stuff they think you might be taking home without permission.

It all speaks to where this whole idea of dynamic digital signage is going.

I spoke with Rod Roberson, the co-CEO of the company, which has a sales and marketing office in Dallas. Most of Wallboard's 40 or so people - the developers and mad scientists - work in an office outside of Budapest, Hungary.

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TRANSCRIPT

Rod, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a background on Wallboard? 

I know you guys, I've seen you at at least one trade show, but I wonder how many people in the general ecosystem know much about you. 

Rod Roberson: Yeah. Sure, thanks for having me, Dave. So Wallboard is a Digital Signage CMS software platform. I would say that the platform does most things you would expect from a traditional CMS, managed screens, managed content, but what we really focus on is building a platform that allows our users to really build some advanced content through the use of our content editing tools, our integrations with live data and IOT sensors, and our ability to easily integrate with third party systems so that we can interact with some of the business process workflows that are inherent within those systems.

Company is in Dallas, but there's a big component of it in Hungary, right? 

Rod Roberson: That's correct. So the company was actually started in 2012 by my partner, Robert Simon. He's based near Budapest, Hungary. He started the company back then, spent about three or four years building up the platform, building the development team, and took it to market, in Europe, basically in 2016.

And then we met in 2017. I, at the time, was running the AV division of a family owned company and we were looking to build out a digital signage as a service product offering. And we were really struggling to find the right software partner for that. So met Robert, a lot of the boxes checked and we actually just started as a reseller. Then one thing led to another, he was looking for an investment partner and he hooked up with a few venture capital firms in Europe but I was able to convince them that we would be a better investment partner for him because we were strategic, we were talking to end users on a day to day basis.

And so we formalized that partnership, in 2018 and then that led to him saying, “Hey, I really need a day to day business partner to help me with sales and marketing”, so I joined him full time in 2019, and so sales and marketing really run out of the Dallas office. And then, he's running the tech team outside of Budapest. 

So how much of the company is in Budapest versus Dallas? 

Rod Roberson: I would say we've got probably close to 40 full-time employees. We've got 7 here in the States, so the majority of our company is really full-time developers. We've got 25-27, somewhere in that range of full time developers, that sit there in Hungary. 

What is that, about an eight hours difference? 

Rod Roberson: It's seven hours. 

Okay. So you've got to juggle your days quite a bit. 

Rod Roberson: I do, and it's been an interesting experience in terms of what my days look like now. I'm typically up pretty early and at least part of the internal work day is almost over at about 10 o'clock. But, yeah, it's a different work-life balance than I was used to before. 

Now, what was it that attracted you to this platform versus the 5,000 other ones that are out there?

Rod Roberson: One of the things we were looking for was just the flexibility to own our own backend, and one of the interesting things about Wallboard is that it's a distributed server infrastructure. We've got 40-45 global partners out there. And I would say the majority of them run their own servers so they really control that back end, which was an important piece to us. 

In addition to that, I just really love the flexibility of the system and the ability to do some more advanced things. I do think that, you're right, it's a crowded space when it comes to just traditional digital media playback applications but I think when you start to talk about more advanced things like data integrations, IOT sensor integrations, and the ability to start to create more dynamic content, content that reacts to the environment or reacts to something else that's happening versus just “here's a playlist I'm playing”, that's when I think, the space gets a little less crowded, and you know that originally, what excited me about the Wallboard. 

So when you say a distributed server setup, does that mean if there’s a reseller up here in Canada, you’ll  basically enable them to white label your platform?

Rod Roberson: That's correct. They can white label it and we have got a mix, we've got partners or resellers that completely white label the system, and that's very important to them, so they can do that. We also have ones that say, “Hey, I want to leverage your marketing. I want to leverage the Wallboard knowledge base.” And so they still want to be Wallboard, but they still want control of that server environment. We allow them to do that. And then that allows them to do a lot of administrative things on their end, in terms of customizing the settings, they can customize the security aspects of the system and they can create some custom programming that is very unique to their specific server. 

So if you're doing it that way, are you then selling a site license to these partners, or can you still get Wallboard as a service directly from you or your partners and pay a monthly license per node?

Rod Roberson: Yeah, so to the end-user, it looks about the same. And then most of our partners are selling the same way, which is an end-user license per node like you said. 

From a reseller's perspective, we have partners that say, we don't want to do that, we don't want to manage our own infrastructure. So we have servers in the US and in Europe, where partners, certainly new partners, can come on, test our system, but a few licenses on the system. but I would say our more serious partners end up gravitating toward their server environment.

Would these be your customer base? Would they be a little bit different from the standard customer base of a lot of CMS platforms that go after a small to medium business or they chase a particular vertical but it's a general offer? You're talking a lot about IoT and it sounds like increasingly specific and “complicated applications”.

Rod Roberson: Yeah, I think that it's an interesting question. I think that we've got a little bit of a mix of both, we've got the resellers that are very much more traditional AV integrators, they're interested in selling to those small and medium enterprises, they're selling meeting rooms and conference room technology and all that other AV stuff. And they're just bolting on digital signage as an additional offering, but as we get more advanced, we've got different kinds of partners that are into retail technology, and so they are very interested in IoT sensors. Some of our partners are just selling into the corporate environment, not so much. 

The same thing goes for data integration. The partners that we have that are really into the contact center space, they are very focused on that particular part of our platform, so it really runs the gamut in terms of, what is the partner, what's their customer base look like? And that kind of drives, what they're interested in from a platform perspective. 

So let's say five years ago, you pretty much had to go to a somewhat specialized CMS platform that had data modules built-in and had already written connectors. It was its own thing, but data has got fairly accessible now, and being able to take different data feeds from different systems isn't that technically hard in certain respects, but I assume it gets a lot harder when you get into specialized IoT sensors that maybe don't have a whole platform and API behind them.

Rod Roberson: Yeah. So you know, what we've done is, we partnered with a company called Five Stack, and they've got a microcontroller that's a nice little piece of equipment that you can connect to a bunch of different types of sensors into that little microcontroller computer. So digital analog, sensors with various different other communication protocols. So we've written firmware on that microcontroller that can talk to our CMS. 

So at that point, I can take basically any sensor integrated into that microcontroller. And that is that it acts as almost the glue between the sensor itself and our CMS that's triggering content.

If I think back all the way to the before times when you go out and meet people and all that, I went to ISE and got a demo from Robert and walked away from that after 20-25 minutes, kinda amused thinking, “these guys are mad scientists” because they were showing me all these crazy sensor integrations.

Could you describe some of the business applications that you're doing? 

Rod Roberson: Yeah. I think it's early, we're still looking into various different use cases, but I think that one of the demos that you probably saw there in Amsterdam, we've got a partner that doesn't really have a digital signage background at all, he's a security consultant. And he recognized a need in these large factories, in his case, Eastern Europe, but there are large factories where these workers that go in and out of these things and there's a lot of different things that need to occur for them to get through the entry Gates.

So they've got questions that need to be answered, they need to specifically ID themselves, they want to make sure that they're not stealing products and services. And so there needs to be something there in terms of a live security person to check what they want to check, alcohol content, and I don't think it was not in the demo back then, but certainly now we've added a temperature check. Previously there was a need for like seven or eight of these security guards, because you've got 25,000 workers coming in at three different shifts, and we were able to essentially build a complete business process with our software, utilizing all these sensors. You essentially walk up to a kiosk. You step on a scale, you insert your RFID badge into it, you answer a few questions, your blow on the alcohol breathalyzer, you get your temperature taken, and if you're good to go, you're off into the space.

If you're not, there is an alert that gets triggered and now we've got two security guards versus seven. So there's a serious ROI in terms of reducing the labor force needed to get through this process. And then on the back end of that, they weigh you again, such that if you're 10 pounds heavier, they know that something's up.

So I think that's an interesting application. We've got a couple of others, and we're doing some proof of concepts here on the East coast. We've got a major retailer where they've got a 6X1 display. and then, and they are displaying all sorts of various different types of content. The original idea was to have buttons underneath the displays and a physical display so that the visitors could go and say, “I want to look at the Michelin tires”, or “I want to look at the AT&T services that you're offering”, and they would have to touch these buttons. Well, COVID hits, and all of a sudden they're saying, “what can we do to make this more contactless?” So instead of having a physical button there, we placed an IR sensor and we basically tuned that IR sensor, so that it only gets triggered if your finger gets within, two-three centimeters from the sensor itself. So we're able to mimic that button experience with an IR sensor to actually trigger the content. 

So you know, things like that, I think the retail space is really interesting for this IoT sensor application. I think there were some other ones with meeting room signs in the corporate environment that we were tinkering with. So again it’s early, but we're really excited about the things we can do and it's opening up a lot of conversations, you know what I mean? 

There are conversations where people say, can you do this, or this is my business need, what can you do? And that's where the mad scientist comes in and Robert goes back into his work area and comes out with some crazy ideas.

I assume that some of what you described, like the access control and weighing and testing for whether they have alcohol in their breath. Those are systems that if you went to a big multinational company, can't name one, but I can think of a few, they would say, “Sure, we can do that for you”, and it would probably cost $75,000 a unit or more. As you were describing with that company, you can buy sensors for, like they don't cost much at all, do they? 

Rod Roberson: No. It's certainly like buttons, sensors, those things, you're talking dollars, so again, there's some costs in terms of some of that customization, but we were able to dramatically reduce the amount of customer customization we have to do because it's all built on our core platform and we're reducing a lot of the custom coding that has to happen because we built these interfaces so that we can, graphically say, “when this happens, trigger this content or when this happens, trigger that.”

So that's a lot of if/then type stuff isn't in our interface as opposed to actually having to hard code that in a program. 

Yeah, I'm a huge believer in data-driven signage as opposed to scheduling a predetermined long and advanced signage that’s just rolling through stuff. But I assume that it's still a challenge to get, not only partners but particular end-users over the line in terms of understanding that this is possible and it's not crazily complicated and that they could manage it and maintain it on a fairly easy basis? 

Rod Roberson: Yeah, I think you're right. That is a challenge and that's part of our sales process to show these things and show specific use cases. One of the things that we've done post-COVID was, we built this desktop broadcast app so you can, essentially, have some digital signage on your desktop itself, and everyone starts to really get excited about KPI's and all this other stuff. Now we have to get to the data because there's some way for us to get to whatever it is they want to display, but showing how easy it is to manage that data either, I mean, we could do it in a simple Google sheet, it doesn't have to be some massive complex database or Salesforce connector. We can do that too but even starting with baby steps starts to get people to understand what is possible and then that really gets the ball rolling in terms of, “Hey, this would be really cool and would be valuable to communicating this specific type of information, especially to a remote workforce”.

So with the pandemic, one of the things that have come along is using technologies and processes like queue management and trying to enable access control to limit the number of people coming into a facility or an establishment, a bar, whatever it may be. And it seems like all of this kind of really elevates the idea of using sensor-driven, IoT-driven signage. Are you guys seeing an opportunity there? 

Rod Roberson: Yeah, absolutely, especially in Europe, there is a very big demand for people counting type solutions where they've got limited capacities and pretty strict rules with respect to how many people can be in a specific physical space, in retail and in restaurants and bars. So, definitely seeing that. 

We've got a couple of different conversations going with that respect, we've got some retail analytics companies that are already in some of these retail spaces with their retail analytics, and they've got the ability to do that “people counting” and so from that perspective, it's just data integration. So they send us the data and we can post how many people are in and count the people coming in and out. We're working on some other different types of technology, not camera related, but utilizing IR sensors to do that person counting function because it's a significantly cheaper option. So yeah, we're working on various different things, definitely seeing a demand for that. 

The other thing we're seeing is a demand for some ability to track and trace, especially in the UK right now, there's some sort of mandate to do that. I think there's a lot of these pubs and restaurants that are doing this by hand where you're walking into a pub or a restaurant and the bouncer’s writing down who the people are coming in. We've developed a really quick and easy solution where they could hit a QR code that takes them into our system on their phone. They submit their information. That then submits it back to the restaurant we were at, and we're not housing any of that data. That's data for the restaurant, but it allows them to conform to the government regulations in an easy way and it's not paper-driven, which seems like a 20 year old technology to me. 

Yeah, I would think, there's going to be some privacy pushback with that, but that's not really our problem, that's up to the government and the venue operators to sort out. You're just enabling it, right? 

Rod Roberson: Correct. 

So one of the interesting things that I saw about your company was an integration you did with HP. Can you describe what that's all about? 

Rod Roberson: Yeah, our investment partner, ImageNet, that their core business is selling printers and copiers, and they've got a super-strong relationship with HP. So HP has developed this platform called HP Workpath, and it's essentially a platform that sits in their interface and it allows app developers to develop apps, primarily for printing, scanning, and copying, but we went to their developer conference last year in Barcelona and because that user interface is running on an Android tablet and we've got such deep integration with Android already, we were able to relatively easily port over our code, so that we can run on that HP Workpath and in that base and path environment. 

That tablet right now is a fairly weak piece of hardware, we've actually had to dumb down our platform a little bit, so there are no performance issues because there are all these things that these resellers are thinking to do with terms of data integration and the ability to send messages back to the service company that the printer has an issue with. 

A lot of that stuff is coming, but at this point, it's really more of a screensaver, so when the printer is not in use, it's scrolling through corporate communications type messaging and that sort of thing, and then it just almost acts like a kiosk. So when you touch the screen, our application goes into the background. They're using the printer for whatever they're going to use it for, and then after the 32nd or 62nd timeframe, it goes back to that screensaver mode. 

What are the kinds of things that you'd want to put there? I'm sure it goes beyond “Happy birthday, Becky” and “It's taco Tuesday”.

Rod Roberson: Yeah. I think that some of it is kinda like a reminder to do some of the things that they want to be done, for example, “clean the screen” is a reminder type of a message that we're having, more generic COVID-type messages in terms of just office space, protocol, but then also more like how-tos, right? Certainly, I'm probably going to know how to scan a document that, but maybe there's something more unique in terms of what I want us to want to do, and if I'm able to put a lot of that information in almost like a kiosk type of environment on the screen itself.

Right now we can't do video, but ultimately we can push videos to that so that if I don't know how to do a particular thing or there's a trick, or if there’s an issue with the printer, I can quickly get to that from an informational perspective. 

So because it's an Android tablet device, in some cases, pretty small display, but on other ones, decent Samsung galaxy size displays, the challenge is that the processor doesn't have the horsepower or the version of Android is too old?

Rod Roberson: That's correct. I don't even know what version of Android they’re using, but I think they’re on version 4, and we're up to 11 now, and they've got a new generation that's supposed to be coming soon, I think it was supposed to be coming out this fall but I'm sure that got delayed, so we're thinking sometime in 2021, and it's still early for us on the sales side. With HP, I have weekly meetings with them and it's been surprising to me how excited they are about this because I think it's something unique for them, I think it's something that they can go tell, and if they're in a competitive deal with another manufacturer and with these copiers, it's hard to sometimes differentiate what one can do versus the other you need, if I can do this, it's an icing on the top type of a thing that I can go as a value add to win a deal.

You also see it for your company as a bit of a door opener in that meeting room signs lead to more kinds of digital signage around an office space. This might lead to, “could you also do meeting room science because you also do that directory or other stuff”. 

Rod Roberson: Absolutely. And the benefit there is that it's all in one ecosystem, right?

So it's in one system where they can have their signage, their meeting room signs, communication on their printers, directories. It's not five or six different software vendors and systems that they're managing. You can all do that, in a single instance of Wallboard. 

With manufacturing and production facilities, do you see an opportunity with no end of different kinds of equipment that makes stuff for packaged stuff, or whatever that there's an opportunity to apply sensors to those things to show the state of equipment? 

I've been in auto manufacturing plants where there are big bulletin boards filled with printouts of spreadsheets that show the state of different systems and thought, “this is goofy, this is like 1985”, but that's the way they were. And you would think that being able to jack into a piece of equipment that spits out some basic readings on how it's doing, that being able to translate that kind of a sign or apply a sensor to, it would make a world of difference?

Rod Roberson: Absolutely. And then making the content more dynamic so it doesn't just go into a Power BI massive dashboard where you've got 8 million pieces of data on one screen, and it's just hard to read. You're pushing the most relevant content to the screen based on whatever it is. So if System ABC is down, that's what's coming onto the screen and it's not one tiny data point, to try to find amongst a million. 

Is it challenging in current environments, because you can't travel really very much at all, except locally, to get the word out about what you guys are all about?

Rod Roberson: Yeah, I think certainly it's been somewhat challenging. Obviously, we were excited about exhibiting at DSE and all that sort of stuff. We made some real headway at ISE and DSE last year. So certainly from that perspective and just being able to get out and about, it is more challenging, but, with what we do in demoing software, that part, we can do virtually and, a certain part of our day in day out is more partner acquisition, and not always just in use, selling to the end-user. And that certainly has been staying fairly active over the last six months because, there's a cycle to that, people get to get in the system and learn it and test it and that's not always their first priority. And we've been able to make a lot of headway with respect to a lot of different types of partnerships. And not necessarily having to slow down so much, due to COVID, but no question, on the end-user side, and we still need screens to be deployed and turned on for licenses to be ordered and that certainly has been slower. 

Although, we see the activity picking up. We see a lot of people saying, “we want to start these projects early 2021”. So you know, that's good in terms of that activity. It's always going to be, what happens here with COVID is, obviously I can't predict that, but I'm hopeful that, we're in a stronger position or the world is, going into 2021, which will make all these conversations that we're having now come to fruition.

Are there partners who are better suited to what you do? I mean local and regional digital signage solutions providers who've been around digital signage forever, but I'm thinking because of your technical strength in the IoT side of things, that there are maybe integration partners who don't wake up in the morning, thinking purely about digital signage, they’re thinking about other elements, all the way to access control systems and things like that. 

Rod Roberson: Yeah, I think that's absolutely right and that's been a struggle for us, finding who is our ideal partner. We can talk to a lot of more traditional AV integration firms, and if digital signage is the fourth or fifth thing that they sell and they're really more focused on, all those other things, Crestron/Extron blah, blah, blah, that's going to be tougher.

I mean, they always love the software, but it's hard for them to focus on, even building a digital signage recurring revenue business, that's just not what they do. They're more transactional in nature and so they're not waking up thinking about that, but there are other partners that are more boutique digital signage, this is what they do. And those are the partners that really understand our systems, understand the value of the time savings related to being able to do some things without having to custom code, and another system and bandaid all that stuff together. Those are the partners, I think they're naturally faster at getting it and starting to scale in terms of ordering licenses. 

Do you see much of an opportunity for just playing plain vanilla digital signage wherein you create some content, find a playlist, you schedule it, send it out and you're done? It strikes me as that's the sort of thing that's so easy these days to do that. I don't know that it's still going to have much relevance. 

Rod Roberson: I agree. I mean that's just going to be a price war at that point. I can argue that our system is elegant and it's an easy way to do that, and we still have customers, that's all they want to do. But it's very difficult to differentiate yourself in that sort of world. 

You mentioned Android, is that the primary platform you're working on for the hardware that you're using? 

Rod Roberson: No. I think that's really driven by our partners. I think we've got a really strong relationship with BrightSign. We're seeing a lot of new partners that are BrightSign-only partners and like our software and like to be able to do that in the BrightSign ecosystem. We've got some use cases that need Windows, but there are also the partners that say, “Hey, I want a cheaper box and, and I'm comfortable with Android and I'm selling to small businesses that don't have the security agitation that sometimes comes with Android.” So it fits for their business model. 

Now BrightSign is a special purpose box, PCs, or they seem to be turning into specialty applications in signage, just because of their costs and everything and the market seems to be moving into dedicated boxes and to systems on chips, where do you see things going?

Rod Roberson: That's a good question. When we built out our system on chip integrations with Samsung and LG, I thought that that's just where the market would go and take off, and we're seeing some of that, but we're still seeing a lot of people still stick to these dedicated boxes. 

I'm not as focused on the hardware. What we want to do is allow our partners and our end users to say, it doesn't matter, choose your hardware, whatever fits your budget and your use case, but run our software on it, and so we're focused on being able to perform on all those various different operating systems and hardware components. 

Rod, thank you very much for spending some time with me. 

Rod Roberson: Thank you so much, Dave. I really appreciate it. It was a fun conversation.

AVIXA Digital Signage Power Hour - Roundtable on LED & MicroLED

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED - DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

The trade association AVIXA has been running a series of Digital Signage Power Hours for the last few months, bringing together industry experts in a roundtable format to talk about a specific topic each time.

The most recent one was about LED, and I was once again the moderator and referee.

The panel had Chris Riegel of STRATACACHE, who among a bazillion things is spinning up a microLED manufacturing facility in Oregon. We also had on the panel Reece Kurtenbach, the CEO of Daktronics, one of the oldest and largest direct view LED firms out there. We had Johanna Ocampo from D3, Rich Ventura from Sony, which introduced the world to large format microLED. Sam Phenix, who runs her own display consulting firm and is deeply involved with AVIXA and SID. And Florian Rotberg, of Munich-based consultancy Invidis.

The session has two parts:

First, there's a brief presentation by Riegel that focuses on microLED and how disruptive it will be in this market.

Then we go into the roundtable, followed by some questions.

If you are involved in or looking at LED, this is well worth the listen.

There is another DS Power Hour coming up on Oct. 20 about QSR. Details here ...

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